Friday Snippets and Soundbites

Happy Friday, all! And let's get things started off right with some of the—well—"stranger" news stories of the week.

And, as always, if today's silly news isn't enough for you, check out page 38 in this month (and every month's) issue of ec. You won't be sorry! (At least we hope not. . . .)

Lost and Found
This week, customs agents at the Los Angeles/Long Beach seaport opened a shipping container (albeit it a big one!) to find a VW van that had been missing since 1974. The van was stolen from a upholstery shop in Spokane, Washington, during the 1974 World's Fair, which Spokane hosted. When the officials found the van earlier this month, they ran its VIN number and discovered it was listed as stolen all those years ago. Apparently, at some point, the van had come into the possession of a vehicle restoration shop in Arizona. The owners there refurbished the 1965 van to pristine condition and planned to sell it overseas, hence shipping it from Los Angeles to the Netherlands (which is where the van was headed before customs agents opened the shipping container). Legally, the van now belongs to the insurance company that paid off the initial theft claim back in the 1970s. To learn more, go here. To learn more about the World's Fair, go here.

If at first you don't succeed. . . .
One woman from South Korea took that saying seriously as she tried to pass the written test to get her driver's license. Now—wait for it—it took the woman 950 tries to pass the written test. She's taken the test nearly every day since April 2005 and finally passed the written portion this week. She had to obtain a score of 60 (out of 100) to pass the written test and get her chance behind the wheel of a car for the driving portion of the test. The woman spent more than $4000 in her test-taking frenzy. The woman still has to pass the driving portion of the test to obtain her license, and we really hope that test goes better for her. To learn more about this story, go


A mega meatball
And finally, a New Hampshire restaurant has set a world record. . . for the world's largest meatball. A 222.5-pound meatball made by the staff at Noni's Italian Eatery in Concord, N.H., was authenticated as the world's largest after being weighed by state weights and measures officials and Guinness Book of World Records officials. The old record of 198.6 pounds was set just over a month ago after talk show host Jimmy Kimmel vowed to beat a record set in Mexico. That record — 109 pounds—was set in August. To learn more, go here.