UNCONVENTIONAL WORLD RECORDS

The world’s most vandalised yuletide symbol could very well be the Gavle goat of Sweden, so called because it’s located in the town square of Gavle, north of capital Stockholm.

The 13-meter (43-feet) high goat made of straw is the traditional Scandinavian symbol of Christmas.

It is burned down almost every year, sometimes a mere few hours after being put up.

It was first built in 1966 and has been destroyed by flames 24 times since. At this rate the organisers would probably be forced to source for building materials during Black Friday to save costs.

Other than fire, it has, over the years, been run over by a car, have had its legs taken off and been smashed.

In all those years, only 10 has been incident-free.

In the latest episode, it was burned to the ground a few days before Christmas 2009.

List of major events:
1966: 1st goat burned down – hence setting the tone
1970: Burned down 6 hours after put up
1971: Smashed to smithereens
1976: Destroyed by a car crashing into it
1979: Burned down even before completion
1987: Burned down even after being fire-proofed
2001: Burned by a 51-year-old tourist from USA
2005: Burned by 2 guys, one of them dressed as Santa Claus.

Source
The BBC, 23 Dec 2009

Popularity: 1% [?]

The first time Jon Bon Jovi was professionally recorded singing was a song called “R2-D2, We Wish You A Merry Christmas” and included in an album called Christmas In The Stars, produced 1980. Yup, everybody was Stars Wars crazy that time.

He recorded it under his birth name, Jon Bongiovi.

If you are familiar with his brand of music, listening to this is hilarious.

He was 18 at that time, and the group Bon Jovi would only be formed 3 years later.

But how did he end up on the record? Well, apparently his cousin Tony Bongiovi was the co-producer of the album and was in charge of the recording studio at which the album was recorded. Conveniently, Mr Bongiovi was working there at the same time, as a floor sweeper, and probably reading weight loss supplement reviews in his spare time.

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Back in 2007, the irreverently funny Jeff Dunham and his Sidekick Achmed The Dead Terrorist did their own hilarious version of “Jingle Bells”, or rather “Jingle Bombs”.

I think after this he will find it rather difficult to get cheap insurance on his life!

The song starts about 2 minutes into the following video, but the wait is worth it, as there are wisecracks about “Silence Night” and the guitarist doing drugs backstage, amongst other things:

Lyrics:

Dashing through the sand
with a bomb strapped to my back.
I have a nasty plan
for Christmas in Iraq.
I got through checkpoint A,
but not through checkpoint B.
That’s when I got shot in the ass
by the US Military…

[it's not funny!]

Oooh, jingle bombs, jingle bombs
Mine blew up you see.
Where are all the virgins
that Bin Laden promised me?
Oooh, jingle bombs, jingle bombs
U.S. soldiers shot me dead.
The only thing that I have left
is this towel up on my head.

I used to be a man,
but every time I cough,
thanks to Uncle Sam,
my nuts keep falling off.
My bombing days are done.
I need to find some work.
Perhaps it would be much safer
as a convenient store night clerk.

Oooh, jingle bombs, jingle bombs
I think I got screwed.
Don’t laugh at me because I’m dead
or I’ll kill you…

I KILL YOU!!!

Merry Christmas everyone!

Popularity: 1% [?]

Probably it’s impossible to answer that question precisely as the number increases even as I write.

An online university of note is Western Governors University (WGU), a private and non-profit variety.

Based in Salt Lake City, it gets its operational funds from many large corporations and foundations including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

It was established in 1997 and now has more than 15,000 students.

class, classes, instructor, instructors, easy

In summary:

- only open to students based in the US and some part of Canada, with special exceptions to members of the US military
- offers competency-based degree programs
- all courses are online but exams will have to be taken on-campus
- up to Master’s degrees in IT, business, teacher education and health professions.

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It was reported in the Daily Telegraph on 15th December 2008 that Greig Howe, 35 of Bournemouth, UK bought a 35-feet tall Christmas tree, cut it into 3 sections, then positioned them on different floors of his house: the living room, bedroom and the roof.

Hence, to onlookers outside the house it would seem that the whole tree has shot through the entire house!

It cost him GBP250 and has 160 big baubles and 2,000 LED lights, of course with a star at the top. I guess installing metal tiles would make the lights seem that much brighter.

In his own words:

I had it in mind because that corner of the house is perfect for it and I really wanted to give the kids a Christmas they wouldn’t forget. From the outside it is a bit of an optical illusion because it appears to be one huge tree that has shot up through the ceilings and floorboards and out through the roof. People keep stopping and laughing at it and my 11-year-old son Harry absolutely loves it.

Source
Daily Telegraph (UK), 15th Dec 2008

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The following Christmas traditions are stranger than celebrating that special day at Outer banks foreclosures – so strange they might never get accepted anywhere except their source:

Krampus Night, celebrated 5th December in Austria.

Krampus is the antithesis of Santa Claus, his evil twin if you will. If Santa Claus encourages good behaviour by handing out presents, Krampus is more like your cane-wielding discipline teacher. On that evening, people would dress up as Krampus, then walk the streets holding a stick as if to beat them up.

The Caganer

I don’t think you will ever find this statue in nativity scenes anywhere else other than Andorra and parts of Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Usual nativity scenes only show what’s around the manger, but in Catalan culture it’s the whole town of Bethlehem, and the Caganer is in it, but far from the manger of course, because he is depicted as pooping, or in more polite language, defecating, or passing motion. The practice is tolerated by the local Catholic church.

Source
Mental Floss

Popularity: 2% [?]

Roberto Carlos Magalhaes, of Bahia in northeast Brazil, in an apparent black magic ritual to “get back at his wife”, inserted FORTY needles into his 2-year-old son, including the neck, torso, legs and at least one had penetrated a lung.

He and his wife had only been married 6 months.

After being arrested, he broke down and claimed he was provoked to do so by his mistress.

Some of the needles are 2 inches (5cm) long.

Some of the needles could be removed, but those inside organs would have to remain there.

The boy is now in intensive care after vomiting and complaining of pain in the stomach.

Source
The BBC, 17 Dec 2009

Popularity: 2% [?]

Apparently this guy has been videoing himself lighting his acts of breaking wind for 15 years, some probably taken from places like cheap hotels new orleans.

Then from his library of sounds and sights, he patched them together to create the world’s most unbelieveable version of “Jingle Bells.”

It starts with a drum beat, then on to the holiday spirit:

What do you think – not really something to amuse the family with on Christmas Day, or is it?

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Celtic Woman, an all-female musical ensemble from Ireland, performed sometime 2007 a stirring rendition of “O Come All Ye Faithful” in The Helix Theatre, Dublin, Ireland:

I don’t know about you, but I have not seen or heard a better performance of that classic carol, ever. Of course I needn’t add that the ladies look fabulous, either using the best under eye cream or not. And that was on youtube, it must be many times better live!

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Veteran US heavy metal group Twisted Sister, perhaps most famous for their 1984 hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It” released A Twisted Christmas in 2006, featuring classic Christmas songs performed in heavy metal style.

IMHO the best song off the album must be “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” of which music videos were released. My favourite is the one which follows the same style as their music videos for “We’re Not Gonna Take It” and “I Wanna Rock”: a married couple celebrates Christmas, then when the wife discovers that her husband’s gift to her is a CD of A Twisted Christmas, she loses her temper, then Dee Snider, the band’s lead singer, who looks like he’s due for a trip to an NJ Cosmetic dentist suddenly appears, followed by other members of the band, then the song starts:

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For about 4 months starting September 2003, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) was composed from the Hubble Space Telescope, the deepest image of the universe ever taken, looking back about 13 billion years.

Some have described it in superlatives eg:

- the most important image humanity has ever taken
- the image of a millennium
- a humbling image: shows exactly how insignificantly small we are and how big the universe actually is
- anyone who understands what this image represents is forever changed by it

The telescope was pointed at a point in the sky equivalent to less than a 1mm x 1mm blob held 1 metre away; that is a tenth the diameter of the full moon as seen from Earth or one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky.

The point in the sky was selected due to its relative emptiness – eg, no stars visible, so that nothing from our galaxy, the Milky Way, blocks the view, so to speak.

The following is a photo with the region of sky selected i.e. the L-shaped outline:

The resulting image was astounding, for it demonstrated that “by looking at a patch of sky that appears to have nothing in it, and you stare at it long enough, you see an image full of galaxies.”

10,000 visible galaxies, in fact. Every single point of light in the picture was sure to be a galaxy:

Full resolution photo (18MB).

The following video drives the point home:

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The United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 from 7th to 18th December 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark has been described as the most important conference ever held.

It is held because most of the world’s governments believe that climate change is a threat to human society and also the natural world.

It aims to strike a deal on major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

Major discussion topics:

- Targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions, especially so by developed countries
- Financial support to achieve this by developing countries
- A “carbon trading scheme” which is hoped to end the destruction of the world’s forests by 2030.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen described it as an “opportunity the world cannot afford to miss”.

There are delegates from 192 countries, with about world 100 leaders expected to attend, including US President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

An unprecedented number of countries have pledged emissions cuts.

Any agreement there is intended to supplant the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, due to expire in 2012.

56 newspapers in 45 countries published the same report on the opening day of the conference, in 20 languages.

Source
The BBC, 7 Dec 2009

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In August 2006, Ian Young, 27, a perfectly straight man from Derby (United Kingdom) walked into Starbucks at the Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC), and found the only seat available was next to what seemed to be a beautiful 33-year old woman.

That woman turned out to be a man with a very masculine name: Mohammed Fazdil Min Bahari, who prefers to be called Fatine, a make-up artist who had been disowned by her own mother.

To be more precise, he’s a “pre-op transsexual“, which can be defined as:

… a woman in living in the body of a man; and has breasts (through taking female hormones and/or breast implants), and male genitalia. In most cases, he lives full time as a woman.

Note: in Fatine’s case, she’d been taking hormones since the age of 17, yet isn’t considering gender reassignment surgery due to the risks involved. Well I guess anything can happen on one of those power exam tables.

Ian and Fatine got married in a civil partnership ceremony in the UK in May 2009.

Now she is Malaysia’s most infamous trans woman, transgender, tranny, TS or shemale, because due to immigration complications she could be deported to her home country and prosecuted because homosexuality is illegal there.

To Ian, a property maintenance company owner, Fatine is, for all intents and purposes a real woman:

I know it is hard for people to understand but I love Fatine. I feel lucky to have met such a caring, wonderful person. It doesn’t matter to me that she is a transsexual – it’s the person she is inside that I care about and love. I can’t contemplate the idea of us not being together. I look at her and see a beautiful woman.

He described how Fatine was upfront about her sexuality the first time they met:

We started talking … when she got up to leave I asked for her number. That’s when she said she might not be what I was looking for and that she was actually a transsexual. I just said, ‘Oh’ and blushed with embarrassment. But for some reason I wasn’t put off. I’d never met a transsexual before and my instinct was that I liked Fatine. Even if it was just as friends, I wanted to meet her again. It just felt right. My first impression in the coffee shop was that Fatine was a woman. If she happened to have male sex organs then that was some sort of birth defect. I never thought of her as a man.

2 days after the first meeting, they met again and kissed. They then met two more times before deciding they were in love with each other.

In October 2007, they commenced a “physical relationship.”

In December 2008, Fatine traveled to the UK on a tourist visa, which turned into a long-term stay. However, Fatine’s Leave To Remain Visa was rejected in September 2009 because of an “incorrect passport photo.” A second application was also not approved because Fatine’s tourist visa had expired – and she was told to return to Malaysia.

His MP tried to help, but to no avail, as a UK immigration spokesman said:

This applicant entered the UK as a visitor. The rules are clear that a visitor must leave the UK within six months but may reapply for a new visa from their country of origin.

But now that this case has been making news around the world: if Fatine returned to Malaysia, what would happen?

Malaysia’s Immigration Department Director-General Abdul Rahman Othman was glaringly ominous:

The penalty imposed on Fatine may be more severe than the two-year passport issuance deferment as he has brought great shame upon us.

As for Fatine, she was quoted to have said:

I have received a lot of negative e-mails and comments from people, some even accusing me of insulting the Malaysian government. I feel frustrated that people did not understand that I went to the UK only because I wanted to be with the man I love. I cannot do that in Malaysia. I am so frightened to go back. I am worried for my safety. The portrayal of our our love story by a Malay tabloid is inaccurate – it was never our intention to insult the Malay community. The tabloid also put my father’s name in the article, which was unnecessary and my mother is now afraid to leave the house. I don’t know what to do – my family has already disowned me. I’ve spent hours on the phone asking for forgiveness. I love them but I can’t change what has happened. I understand that Malays are very traditional and that people like me aren’t acceptable, but I hope things would cool down eventually.

Source
The Sun (UK), 27 Nov 2009

Popularity: 13% [?]

Rob Van Winkle (born 1967), more popularly known as Vanilla Ice, released “Ice Ice Baby” in 1990, which he wrote in 1983.

It is the very first hip hop single to top the US Hot 100 (Billboard) charts. It helped to introduce hip hop to a mainstream white audience.

It went platinum in the US and UK.

The album, To the Extreme reportedly sold 40 million copies worldwide.

But what happened next? His next album reportedly sold only 45,000 copies in the US and he attempted suicide by drug overdose in 1994.

Then MTV viewers voted the “Ice Ice Baby” music video the worst of all time in 1999.

He was then invited to a show in which he was supposed to good-naturedly smash the “master tape” with a baseball bat, but ended up not only destroying the tape but the soundstage too:

Truly a one hit wonder.

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