Australian motor show heads for Olympic venue
So it's goodbye Darling Harbour and hello Olympic Park as the Australian International Motor Show packs up and moves to a new venue.
Car shows have been held at Sydney's marvellous waterside convention and exhibition centre for years and years, but it's closing for redevelopment and the car show has to move to Sydney Showground at the Olympic Park.
Olympic Park will be home for the 2014 and 2016 shows, which alternate between Sydney and Melbourne.
Torn from pages of an old DC comic
Wow, what a coup, getting the Dark Knight to lend the original Batmobile coupe for display at the Australian International Motor Show.
What's that? Oh, it's not actually from the Bat Museum at all, but a one-off retro-concept from the well-known Australian coachbuilders, Woods & Woods.
"We've always wanted to build our own vehicle based upon early European and American designs, but in a way that no-one else has done before," explained craftsman Jayson Woods. "Whilst it's taken only 12 months to build, I actually first thought this car up when I was at school, so it's really been decades in the making," explained craftsman Jayson Woods.
The company's goal is to create a limited run of vehicles based on the show car.
Ultimate delivery vehicle keeps pizzas hot and drinks cold
A Slovenian entry has won a worldwide contest by pizza chain Domino's and Local Motors to design the ultimate delivery vehicle. Local Motors is a web-based open source community of car designers and builders.
Anej Kostrevc called his entry the Domino's Pack; it's almost 3m long, about 1.5m wide and 2m tall with maximum interior space for pizzas and drinks.
A cooled rear drawer chills up to nine two-litre bottles. Other drawers and trays store hot pizzas.
The name game
Honda Life Dunk
We can see Honda calling one of its cars the Life. But Life Dunk? The Life name has been used since 1971 on various kei cars, those buzzy little urban runabouts favoured in Japanese cities. The Life Dunk was an upgraded version and some years ago Forbes magazine listed it as one of the weirdest car names ever - with a tall-wagon spin-off of the same car, the That's.
We are the world
*A Swiss researcher plans to make 30 violins out of wood treated with fungi that, in music-appreciation tests, made a lesser-grade violin sound like a Stradivarius. Good Oil reckons that back in the day the same effect could have been achieved by passing a few joints around the audience.
*An Iranian cleric was hospitalised after allegedly being roughed up by a woman. According to Iran's Mehr news agency, the cleric was warning a woman he considered immodestly dressed to cover up. She suggested, instead, that he should "cover [his] eyes", then pushed and kicked him.
*Brazil seems to have few controls on what candidates for election may call themselves. The New York Times notes that among those running recently for office were: Ladi Gaga, Christ of Jerusalem, a Macgyver, five Batmans, two James Bonds, and 16 people whose name contains Obama. "It's a marketing strategy," explained city council candidate Geraldo Custodio, who was running as Geraldo Wolverine.
*Yak herders in Tibet and farmers in the Indian Himalayas are making good money by harvesting rare caterpillar fungi. In Tibet, "yartsa gunbu" supposedly cures ailments ranging from back pain to HIV and often sells in local markets for twice its weight in gold. In India, "kira jari" is believed to be an aphrodisiac, but the government is trying to control the market because insufficient new larvae means the land might be picked clean.
