Dancing digger

What started as a trick at a school fete has turned into a festival favourite for farmer Wilf Bown and his dancing JCB digger, as he manoeouvres it at gravity-defying angles to a soaring rock n'roll soundtrack.

"I've driven tractors and diggers for some 40 years and at the weekends I do this for a hobby because I enjoy going to shows, talking to lots of different people and giving people pleasure."

It all started about twenty years ago when Wilf took his JCB along to a summer fete at the school attended by his three young children.
"I pinned a balloon to the floor and the kids tried to burst it using the back bucket" he said.
"Then I tipped it over a bit and lifted it up a bit and they all loved it". A few local shows followed but then in 2004 Wilf was invited to the popular Elvaston Steam Rally in Derby.

Unlucky 13

Friday the 13th is often thought of as an unlucky day - and it lived up to its reputation for one youngster. 

At precisely 13:13, a boy aged 13 was seen by the St John Ambulance team at Lowestoft Seafront Air Festival in Suffolk, England, after he was struck by lightning, a spokesman said.

The boy suffered a minor burn and was taken to James Paget Hospital, where he is expected to make a full recovery.
Jason Gillingham, county ambulance officer and on scene at the show, said: ''This was a very minor burn to the boy's shoulder, but he was conveyed to hospital and is recovering well."
A second teenager and a woman were also struck by lightning but did not need hospital treatment.

 

The Bible, Sumarized

A devout Christian has pledged to spread the word of the Lord - by telling every chapter of the Bible on Twitter.Chris Juby, 30, plans to condense one chapter a day into less than 140 characters - the maximum allowed for a single entry on the website. 

Mr Juby, director of worship at King's Church, Durham City, began with the first chapter of Genesis on Sunday and intends to work his way through all 1,189 chapters. 
His task of truly Biblical proportions will take more than three years to complete, with the last entry due on November 8, 2013. He is working on the twitter account biblesummary
His first entry on Twitter read: "God created the heavens, the earth and everything that lives. He made humankind in his image, and gave them charge over the earth."
Mr Juby said: "It is my normal habit to read a chapter of the Bible each morning and I always read through from Genesis to Revelation.
"As I was coming to the end last time, I thought I needed a way of focussing my mind a little bit more on what I was reading. I thought a summary would be a good way of doing this. I already use Twitter, so I thought I'd share my summaries."
Mr Juby's Twitter Bible follows the publication of versions such as the 100 minute Bible, the SMS text message Bible and the Geordie Bible.

Garden of Poison Arrows

A tropical hallucinogenic plant used to make poisonous Amazonian arrowheads has been found in an English garden. 
Sharon Nowell, 36, thought the green shoots appearing in her parents' garden were the beginnings of a marrow or possibly a common weed at first.

But after a bit of research she soon discovered that the plant – which has grown by four feet in a month – was something far more exotic.
Internet searches showed that the plant was actually a rare datura stramonium – commonly known as the Devil's Trumpet for its distinctive horn-shaped flowers.
The green plant, which resembles a large rhubarb, is more commonly found in hotter climates and has been used by American Indians for centuries in traditional ceremonies.
Despite being highly toxic and potentially lethal if ingested, the seeds in the plant's pods are often used as a mind-bending drug sold as jimson weed on-line for as little as £6.
Experts believe its appearance in the garden in Coventry, West Midlands, originated from the droppings of migrating birds flying from the Atlantic.

 

Wine from Water

Divers have found bottles of champagne some 230 years old on the bottom of the Baltic which a wine expert described on Saturday as tasting “fabulous”.

Thought to be premium brand Veuve Clicquot, the 30 bottles discovered perfectly preserved at a depth of 180 feet could have been in a consignment sent by France’s King Louis XVI to the Russian Imperial Court.

If confirmed, it would be by far the oldest champagne still drinkable in the world, thanks to the ideal conditions of cold and darkness. “We have contacted (makers) Moet & Chandon and they are 98 per cent certain it is Veuve Clicquot,” Christian Ekstroem, the head of the div

ing team, told AFP. "There is an anchor on the cork and they told me they are the only ones to have used this sign," he added.

The group of seven Swedish divers made their find on July 6 off the Finnish Aaland island, mid-way between Sweden and Finland, near the remains of a sailing vessel.

"Visibility was very bad, hardly a metre," Ekstroem said. "We couldn't find the name of the ship, or the bell, so I brought a bottle up to try to date it." The hand-made bottle bore no label, while the cork was marked Juclar, from its origin in Andorra.

According to records, Veuve Clicquot was first produced in 1772, but the first bottles were laid down for ten years. "So it can't be before 1782, and it can't be after 1788-89, when the French Revolution disrupted production," Ekstroem said.

The 230-year-old bottles of Veuve Clicquot (seen here in modern form) could fetch an auction price of "several million" dollars if proven to be King Louis XVI's wine.