In January 2011 someone put a grand piano on a sandbar in Miami’s Biscayne Bay, about 200 yards from the condominiums along the shore. The piano, weighing at least 650 pounds, was placed on the sandbar’s highest point and thus doesn’t get wet during high tide. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said that it wasn’t responsible for moving the piano and the Coast Guard won’t move it unless it becomes a navigational hazard. It seems that the piano was left for the seagulls. After all, a piano on a sandbar is “for the birds”.
Inmates at Moscow’s Butyrskaya Prison – a centuries-old prison notorious for its primitive conditions - will be spending some of their spare time in tanning beds. The beds are being installed as part of the 2011 observance of the prison’s 240th anniversary and are meant to compensate for inadequate sunlight in the cells. However, the federal prison service wants to be compensated for the use of the tanning beds at a rate of 10 rubles (33 cents) per minute. Considering the average monthly salary in Russia is less than $1,000, the fee is “tan-tamount” to cruel and unusual punishment.
Paul Janssen, a 42-year-old state researcher from Ohio, used some of his spare time to build an 8’ by 6’ replica of Ohio State’s football stadium using only Lego bricks. The challenging horseshoe-shaped stadium can hold 6,000 Lego people and even the decorated archway and scoreboard are made with the special bricks. The project required about 1 million pieces – some bought, some traded for and some improvised. For example, the restroom pipes are made with chrome parts from a Lego truck. Janssen spent 1,000 hours over a 2-year period making the stadium – in spite of doubters thinking that he didn’t have “a Lego to stand on”.
And then there’s Laura Bell, a home health aid from Michigan. She spent 1,000 hours creating a 14’ by 4’ reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper using dryer lint. She bought towels that were the colors she wanted and washed them to get the right shades of lint. She needed 800 hours of laundry time to accumulate enough lint and 200 hours to recreate the mural. Bell had hoped to win $250,000 in an art contest. Unfortunately, she came in second. However, the lint mural is now in the collection of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not – because Ripley believed.
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