The weekly weird

Published February 7, 2015

Man buys £5000 car using just coins

KEEPING and saving coins to buy something is a normal thing for most of us but there are people who take this hobby to the limits!

A man in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China, decided to pay for his new 51,800 yuan (£5,552) car using just coins.

According to the salesman, the customer warned him about the currency he intended to use before placing the order, so he can’t really be annoyed.

“He said he’ll pay in petty cash. I thought it was old and small notes, but never expected they are all in small denomination coins,” he said.

The 51,800 yuan, the man used was made up of 0.1 yuan, 0.5 yuan, and 1 yuan coins, with the 20,000 yuan deposit alone filling four nylon bags that weighed 150kg.

The auto shop had to organise eight sales people to spend the whole afternoon counting the money.


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‘Old boy’ returns a school book

65 years late!

A FORMER pupil returned a school book 65 years late — and had to pay a £1,500 ‘fine’!

The 82 year-old, Sir Jay Tidmarsh, who was Lord Lieutenant of Bristol between 1996 and 2007, opened the cover of Ashenden by W. Somerset Maughan and spotted the stamp of his old school inside.

He had taken it out in 1950 when he was a pupil at posh Taunton School in Somerset and forgotten to return it. So he decided to do the decent thing by sending it back — together with a £1,500 donation to the school library. But, despite his generous donation, Sir Jay may have short changed the school — with the fine totalling around £2,847 for the 65 years.

Sir Jay and his wife Lady Virginia made a special trip back to the £33,000-a-year school with the book where they were given a lunch in their honour hosted by Chair of Governors Jane Barrie. n


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Earth-like planets outside our solar system

RECENTLY, astronomers at Nasa announced that they have discovered three or four more planets that are about the same size and composition as Earth, located in their comfortable “not-too-hot” or “not-too-cold” Goldilock zones that give them the possibility of bearing water essential for life.

According to data from Nasa’s Keplet telescope, these Earth-like planets get about the same amount of heat from their parent stars as we do from the sun.

These planets may host hospitable environments, but the two are about 500 and 1,100 light years away (a light year is about six trillion miles in earthly terms). Based on our current spaceship technology, it may take tens of thousands of years before we can reach the surface of these planets.


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Blind fish given two glass eyes

YOU will be amazed to know that this rockfish in the picture had been given artificial eyes by veterinarians after it lost its eyesight to cataracts.

Vancouver aquarium’s head veterinarian, Dr Martin Haulena, told about their rockfish patient, “Fish were picking at it.

Its fins were tattered, and it was really getting banged up.”

With prosthetic eyes, the blind fish will not be targeted by others for having such an obvious sign of weakness, according to Dr Haulena.

As a result of the above operation, this particular rockfish stopped hiding behind rocks and in crannies to avoid tank mates and started acting like a ‘normal fish’.

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