Timaru District Council is offering a $1000 reward in a bid to catch the culprit who vandalised a statue of Scottish bard Robbie Burns at the weekend.

It should be obvious that Bart Simpson did it.

Competitive-eating champ Takeru Kobayashi conquered Philadelphia’s annual gustatory gorge-fest by eating 337 chicken wings in a half-hour before a crowd of nearly 20,000 at Wing Bowl XX. …

Kobayashi claimed a US$20,000 (NZ$23,922) cash prize for his victory. It was the six-time Nathan’s Hot Dog eating contest champ’s first time competing at Wing Bowl, though he consumed a cheesesteak in 24 seconds as part of an eating exhibition last year.

That is a truly incredible amount of wings in half an hour. Not even so much for the amount of chicken he would have eaten, which I estimate to be around 9.5 kgs, but also for the time it takes to get most of the chicken off the wing.

Sex parties are attracting regular noise complaints from neighbours.

Auckland Council environmental control team manager Mervyn Chetty told the Herald on Sunday his officers were being called to noisy swinger parties by neighbours unaware of what was going on inside.

“They just hear loud music coming in from there but when the [noise control officers] get there and the door opens, it’s some weird swingers’ party. It’s happening a couple of times a month.”

Generally if I’m hosting a party that could be quite noisy, I’ll invite the neighbours to attend, as if they are at it, they won’t be trying to sleep complaining about it.

So that seems the obvious solution to those hosting sex and swinger parties – invite the neighbours along.

But all other things are not equal.

I have been a long-term fan of the Magician series of books by Raymond E. Feist. I’m even lucky enough to be on a mailing list with the author, where you can discuss his works with him.

His 29th and penultimate book in what will be a 30 book collection (in 10 series) has just been published. It is not yet available in NZ bookstores. To be fair, we do often get it in our bookstores ahead of even the US bookstores.

As a hardcover, it will probably cost NZ45 or so when it is released here.

I could order the book off Amazon to be home delivered. But the book is not available for delivery until 13 March 2012.  Cost with delivery would be around US$28.

But I managed to buy a Kindle version for US$10 last week, and am already halfway through it.

I love having a physical book collection, but I can see more and more of my future purchases being for my Kindle (technically Kindle on iPad).

Match.com gave The Daily Beast an exclusive first look at the results of its second annual Singles in America survey—a dive into the values, attitudes, and sexual patterns of 6,000 American singles. …

They all look so happy and contented together!

Stuff reports:

A hopeful groom-to-be suffered the most public of rejections when his proposal at a basketball game was blocked in front of hundreds of fans.

The young man got down on one knee at the UCLA game in California and pulled out a ring live on the stadium’s “mistletoe cam” just before Christmas.

“I knew I was going to do this the first day I met you, so I know this is going to sound corny but … will you marry me?” he said.

But rather than a happy yes, the young woman shook her head.

Her boyfriend could only watch in horror as she grabbed her bag and left the area to jeers from the crowd.

In politics there is a saying, that you should never ask a question that you do not already know the answer to.

I think the same maxim should apply to marriage proposals – or at least public marriage proposals.

A successful public marriage proposal can be sweet and endearing and a memory to last a lifetime. But you should not be doing it unless you are absolutely sure what the answer will be.

This video from overseas is even better. Watch the lion literally try and get its mouth around the little toddler, but stopped by the glass. The toddler is quite sanguine about the lion trying to eat him.

For fans of the great re-imaged series.

A heavily intoxicated Blenheim man slept between railway tracks as a train rumbled over him in Blenheim early on Saturday, police say.

The train driver telephoned police and told them he might have run over somebody on the railway tracks at the Dillons Pt Rd crossing in Blenheim about 5am.

“The driver wasn’t sure if it was clothing he had gone over or not,” Constable Michelle Stagg of Blenheim police said.

“When police arrived, sure enough there he was, asleep between the tracks.”

Police woke the man, who they said was very drunk, and found his only injuries were some minor cuts to his forehead. He had been lying on his back between the tracks as the southbound freight train passed over him.

“He was very lucky to have only a few minor cuts on him. It’s amazing really,” Stagg said.

Very very lucky to be alive. At first I wondered how drunk do you have to be, to fall asleep on a railway track?

But perhaps the more incredible aspect is that even after a train passed over him by a few inches, he still remained asleep!!

I’m guessing an alarm clock would be wasted on this guy.