The weekly weird

Published August 8, 2020

Family find hole in bathroom wall

Recently, a family was shocked to discover a hole in their bathroom wall that they’d never noticed, but had been there for at least 40 years. Even more curious is that the hole over time had filled up with a number of items.

The story is shared by Peter Brown, who explained that the hole was at his in-law’s house and for years products had been falling out of the cabinet and into the wall. A ‘strange treasure’ of items accumulated over the last 40 years, with one bottle of body lotion from the 1980s, when the couple first moved into the property.

Brown’s post about the find went viral, garnering over 127,000 views and thousands of up votes. He went on to explain that his father-in-law had lost something in the bathroom during lockdown and that was what prompted him to investigate further. So he cut open a bigger hole in the wall to see what was inside.


Amber Titanic sculpture earns Guinness record

A Polish sculptor captured a Guinness World Record when he created a five-foot-long sculpture of the RMS Titanic from amber.

Tomasz Oldziejewski of Sztutowo said he worked for 12-14 hours a day for about a month to create the amber sculpture of the ship that famously sank in 1912 on its maiden voyage from Belfast, Northern Ireland, to the United States.

The resulting sculpture has now been recognised by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest amber sculpture. The replica ship is on display alongside some of Oldziejewski’s other works at the Municipal Cultural Centre in Stegna, Poland.


Incredible sculpture made from one-dollar coin

The ancient art of the hobo nickel has been around since the 18th century, but Russian artist Roman Booteen keeps the craft alive with his extraordinary coin carving designs. He’s meticulously modified a US dollar coin (from 1921) to feature a 3D glove and sword with a secret mechanism.

Hand-cut and engraved from the centre of the coin, Booteen’s incredibly intricate design features a metal armour glove with decorative, hand-engraved details. The glove is holding onto a sword that seems to be plunged into the side of the coin. Once the hidden button on the outer edge of the coin is pressed, the metal components come to life. An integrated spring allows the fingers of the glove to move, as if it’s gasping the sword’s handle.


Panda escapes confinement in zoo

Humans are not the only ones getting tired of confinement during the coronavirus pandemic — a panda escaped from his enclosure at Copenhagen Zoo very recently.

Xing Er, a six-year-old male panda, was spotted on a surveillance video ‘leaving his enclosure, slipping under an electric fence’, zoo spokesman Jacob Munkholm Hoeck told. The animal wandered around the zoo until an employee noticed it and called a security team.

“The veterinarian of the zoo anaesthetised the panda and he was brought back to the enclosure,” Hoeck said. “There he was given an antidote and woke up a couple of minutes later.”

Xing Er and his female mate Mao Sun, who did not take part in his escape, arrived in Denmark in April 2019, on loan from the Chinese city of Chengdu.

They are a part of the ‘panda diplomacy’ programme set up by China which consists of lending pandas in order to foster relations with trading partners.

Published in Dawn, Young World, August 8th, 2020

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