DAVID ADAMS writes about the odder side of life…
Toss their clocks away? Sommaroy residents are petition to do away with time during their endless summer. PICTURE: Jon Tyson/Unsplash
• The 350 residents of the Norwegian island of Sommaroy want to do away with time. The sun doesn’t set for residents on the island in the country’s far north-west for 69 days over summer – from 18th May to 26th July, and the locals apparently act accordingly with one resident telling CNN that, in what would typically be the middle of the night elsewhere, people can be seen painting their houses and mowing their lawns while children play soccer and teenagers swim. Residents recently signed a petition to declare the island the world’s first time-free zone over the period which was then handed over to a local MP. Not before time!
• It’s not quite the colour you’d want a tank to be – lemon-lime green. But that’s the colour a team recently painted a Korean War-era tank owned by the West Virginia National Guard. Jerry Conner, who’s been looking after the tank the past 20 years, told the The Bluefield Daily Telegraph how he’d taken a colour sample to a local paint shop so they could obtain paint matching the more traditional olive drab colour. While they were a bit perturbed when they opened the cans and saw the bright yellowish paint, the painters figured it would turn into the more usual colour once the paint had dried. Apparently not. Thankfully, plans are now underway to restore the tank to a more historically accurate colour.
• And, finally, we couldn’t go past this record. Arizona man Cory Nielsen, known on YouTube as the “Penny Building Fool”, took three years to build a pyramid from more than a million pennies (1,030,315 to be exact). The 1.13 metre high pyramid is composed pf 93,665 stacks of 11 pennies. Nielsen, who was being visited by officials from Guinness World Records to verify his feat this week, has said he used no glue or adhesives in the construction. Only about $300 worth of the coins was donated – the rest Nielsen sourced himself.
