Friday Snippets and Soundbites

It's Friday! And we're excited!

So we're kicking the weekend off in our usual fashion—with all the strange news you can handle! If today's edition of the news of the weird isn't enough for you, be sure to check out page 38 of this month's (and every month's) issue of ec!

It's a gnome thing. 

Yes, we love the Traveling Gnome for Travelocity as much as the next guy, but it seems that the Helena, Mont., police force has a little bit of a gnome mystery on their hands. Monday evening hikers found 10 garden gnomes resting alongside a popular hiking trail on the south side of the city. The gnomes didn't belong there and were presumed to have been stolen. The problem? No one has reported any kidnapped garden gnomes missing from their yard. Officers are contacting residents who have recently reported yard ornaments being stolen, but so far there have been no matches. Poor little homeless gnomes! To read all about it, go here.

Mmm, chocolate.

The ec team loves us some chocolate. . . and we're a little jealous we won't get to visit Armenia next month when the world's largest chocolate bar will be sampled in the main square of Yerevan, the country's capital, next month. The bar, which weighs in at 9,702 pounds, was certified this week by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest chocolate bar. It's made entirely of natural ingredients and is 224 inches long, 110 inches wide, and 10 inches thick. The Grand Candy factory made the chocolate bar to celebrate the company's 10th anniversary. They'll be dividing up the massive bar of chocolate on October 16 and sharing the tasty goodness to the people of Armenia. Read all about it (but sadly you can't taste it) here.

Go west, young man!
It appears people are still following Horace Greeley's advice to go west—it's just a different kind of people. We bet you didn't know that the Amish population is growing in the U.S., and they're moving further west. While people in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana might be used to the simple lifestyle and traditional beliefs of the Amish, it appears more and more Amish families are moving to western states like Colorado, South Dakota, and Montana. Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania tracks the Amish and recently released its annual survey. In the past year, the North American Amish population has grown by 5 percent and there are now Amish communities in 28 states.The highest rates of growth over the past year were recorded in New York (19%), Minnesota (9%), Missouri (8%), Wisconsin (7%) and Illinois (7%). To learn more about the survey, go here. To learn more about the Amish, click here.