KEY POINTS:
Stamps released in China to celebrate the Year of the Pig taste of sweet and sour pork. When you scratch the front of the stamp, it smells of the popular Chinese dish; when the back of the stamp is licked it tastes of the dish. The stamps are on sale in China ahead of their New Year on February 18, reports Metro. Royal Mail launched Britain's first scratch'n'sniff stamps in 2001 - they gave off eucalyptus aromas. (Source: Ananova.com)
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A frequent flyer writes: "Silly me expecting a movie featuring a plane crash to get through the 'in-flight editing process' unscathed, but the Air NZ version of the film Flight Of The Phoenix I saw a year or so ago was particularly savage. Crowd of characters are on a plane, heading into rough weather. Clouds loom ... the plane shakes. Then the film cuts immediately to crashed plane on the ground, half the characters injured and dazed, the other half gone. Apparently sucked out or killed somehow in the last 20 minutes of impressive plane crash special effects that have been kindly excised from the film."
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Sandy Myhre was at the Indianapolis 500 in May last year when a woman in the media cafeteria asked her and a photographer where they were from. "New Zealand," they replied enthusiastically. "Do you have, like, night and day?" she inquired. "Or is it dark all the time?" "Ah," they said, "you're getting us mixed up with Australia. It's dark all the time there." "Oh, that's right," she replied.
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My third-generation NZer mother was tracked down by distant relatives in Britain doing a family tree," says a reader. "After some correspondence on genealogy she sent the two elderly women a Christmas card. Not sure what might interest them she stuck to the 'safe' subject of gardening, describing her latest efforts. 'I have just planted out the garden with some natives,' she wrote. They replied: 'You are so lucky to have natives. We can't get any decent home help over here."'
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A former highly regarded Texas drug agent has announced he will begin selling his video, "Never Get Busted Again", instructing drug users on how to conceal their stashes, calling the "war on drugs" counterproductive. And a former New York City parking court judge published "Beat That Parking Ticket", in which he advises that harried judges look for the slightest defect in a ticket, because it's the easiest way to move quickly through a court list.
(Source: News of the Weird)
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The man caught on camera stealing a urinal from a pub (Sideswipe, Tuesday) has given himself - and the urinal - up. The 42-year-old at the centre of the incident, reported in Sideswipe and in India, China and Australia, approached police after saturation global coverage of the prank. He told police he took the urinal as a "souvenir". Detectives decided to let him off with an "official caution".