World’s largest dragon boat built in Cambodia

A Cambodian team broke a Guinness World Record by building a dragon boat that’s nearly as long as the Statue of Liberty is tall.

Guinness said the Union of Youth Federations of Cambodia, Prey Veng and Prey Veng Provincial Administration in Cambodia teamed up to use traditional methods to build a dragon boat measuring 286 feet, five inches long.

T he team used six straight logs and some stumps from Koki msoav trees to construct the boat. The builders needed clearance from the Ministry of Environment, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries to cut down the more than 50-year-old trees.

The International Dragon Boat Federation, which sets the international standard for dragon boats, inspected the finished vessel to confirm it qualified for the record.

The boat was constructed to celebrate the Cambodian Water Festival, one of the country’s largest traditional celebrations.

Am I your biggest fan?

Daniel Morris, has the largest collection of glass, shrink-wrapped Coca-Cola bottles in the world.

The father and e-commerce manager, started collecting the vessels over 18 years ago and now commands an international following for his impressive haul. According to Daniel, “I had my bedroom decorated and it was a last minute decision to put up a Coke border around the edge of the room with the logo. I started buying pieces of memorabilia to make a theme.

“My speciality focuses on the shrink wrap bottles and I’ll buy whatever I can get my hands on and fill the holes in my collection wherever possible. If it’s a glass shrink wrap bottle, I want it.

“I’ve been known to spend four to five hundred pounds on a bottle. I’ve got bottles that cost anything from £5 to £500. If I totalled it all up I would probably be very scared. [The collection is worth] tens of thousands of pounds. It’s one of the largest collections in the world. They are an investment. Coca-Cola will always exist as a brand, so people will always know it and they do go up in value, so if I need to sell them they’d be sold.

“I’m offered lots of money at times, but it’s never been about that. It is my collection and I’ve never been interested in selling it.”

Heart-shaped meteorite up for auction

A British auction house is offering a 22-pound meteorite shaped like a heart.

The auction house, Christie’s, said “The Heart of Space” meteorite was part of an iron mass that split from the asteroid belt 320 million years ago and fell to earth February 12, 1947.

The nine-inch-long heart piece was one of several meteorites that split from a larger meteorite that landed in Siberia’s Sikhote-Alin Mountains and caused sonic booms that reverberated up to 200 miles away.

“The shock waves from the low altitude explosion of the main mass collapsed chimneys, shattered windows and uprooted trees,” Christie’s said.

The auctioneer said the piece is “one of the finest meteorites in private hands.”

Sarah Crowther, from the University of Manchester’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, told the meteorite is a “fairly rare” type known as IIAB. While Christie’s said the meteorite is expected to fetch a high bid of $300,000-$500,000.

Published in Dawn, Young World, February 16th, 2019