The weekly weird

Published October 5, 2019

Guinness record for identifying Taylor Swift songs

A British radio host became a Guinness World Record holder when he was able to identify 27 Taylor Swift songs from their first lyric in the span of one minute.

Dan Simpson, who hosts the afternoon show on Fun Kids Radio, took on the “Taylor Swift Guinness World Records lyric challenge,” which featured a third party reading the pop singer’s lyrics aloud while Simpson quickly blurted out the song titles.

A Guinness adjudicator witnessed the challenge and presented Simpson with a world record certificate for the most Taylor Swift songs identified by the first lyric in one minute.


Thousand-year-old coins found

A British auctioneer is preparing to sell off a cache of 99 coins that were minted about 1,000 years ago and were recently discovered by a man with a metal detector.

Don Crawley said he was using his metal detector on a farmer’s land in Suffolk, England, when he found a stash of 92 buried coins.

“The Finds Liaison Officer was called in and they investigated the site which turned out to be a long-forgotten Saxon church. Excavating around they uncovered the remains of human bones and I found another coins,” Crawley told.

The 99 coins — 81 Anglo Saxon silver pennies and 18 cut halfpennies — are due to be auctioned by Dix Noonan Webb in December. The auction house said the coins are expected to sell for $37,000 to $62,000.


World’s largest artichoke salad assembled in Peru

San Ignacio de Loyola University, a university in Peru set a Guinness World Record when it assembled an artichoke salad weighing 1,729.59 pounds by gathering 200 volunteers in the Plaza de Armas de Trujillo to assemble the artichoke salad on a tray measuring 16 feet long and five feet wide.

Guinness World Records confirmed the 1,729.59-pound result was a new record for the world’s largest artichoke salad.

The salad was divvied up into portions after the weighing and distributed to members of the public who attended the record attempt. Organisers said the goal of the event was to promote artichoke consumption in Peru.


Rare four-yolker egg

Many of us have seen two yolks in one egg, but have you ever witnessed four yolks in one egg? Well, one woman managed this incredible feat.

Diane Olver, cracked open an egg to find four separate yolks inside, beating odds of billions to one. Diane was ‘absolutely flabbergasted’ at the half-inch yolks, commenting: “Each of them was smaller than my thumbnail.”

As you can imagine, she decided not to use the eggs and kept them in the fridge to show her son to share the excitement of such a rare find.

Published in Dawn, Young World, October 5th, 2019

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