The world’s most expensive incarnation of the Monopoly board game is headed to Wall Street.

An 18-karat gold version of the famous Parker Brothers board game will be on display beginning Friday at the Museum of American Finance. The gold and jewel-encrusted Monopoly is estimated to be worth roughly $2 million.

The set of dice alone is valued at $10,000, with 42 full-cut diamonds for the number dots. All of the properties that make up the game board are also set in gems, with some 165 gemstones in total. The “Chance” and “Community Chest” cards are photo-etched.

The notion of creating a blinged-out version of the board game came about in 1988, when San Francisco jeweler Sidney Mobell heard about a Monopoly tournament taking place in London. He called Parker Brothers (now part of Hasbro Inc.) for permission and then set to work creating the golden game, working every day for a year straight.

An ounce of gold cost between $360 and $460 when Mobell started working on the game set. Now the price of gold has topped $1,300 an ounce.

When Mobell brought the finished board to London, he was closely followed by guards, he says. “I felt like the king of England.” That was the only time the prized set was played on: a showdown between him and Britain’s former Prime Minster Edward Heath, he says.

Mobell, 84, has staked out a career as an unconventional crafter of decadence. He’s made diamond-encrusted yo-yos and mousetraps, as well as solid gold sardine cans, cellphones and eyeballs. Not to mention a gold toilet seat and garbage cans, long before John Thain’s $35,000 commode made headlines. And Monopoly is not his only contribution to the rarefied world of lavish board games: Mobell has also made bejeweled backgammon, dominos and chess sets.

The Monopoly board will be on display at the Museum of American Finance for two years, on loan from the Smithsonian. It is one of 19 works donated by Mobell in January 2003 in honor of his late wife .

Monopoly’s rich history continues to draw avid followers, competitors and discussion, even a century after it was introduced. A tournament for younger players will take place at the museum this Friday as well.

Mobell relishes the notion that such a decadent symbol of capitalism as a game is heading to the heart of the financial crisis. “The timing is fantastic,” he says. But if any financiers are thinking of blowing their bonuses on the Monopoly board, they should be warned: “The set is not for sale.”

Source : WSJ Blogs

Happy Pills Store in Barcelona, Spain Review

Best happy camper pills Ah those crazy Spaniards and their drug legislation. These pictures where – unbelievably – you can buy your (so called) happy pills by simply walking in off the Avinguda del Portal de l'Angel and helping yourself.

Of course you’ll need to travel to Barcelona, Spain in order to get one but I hear they work every time.

This has to be one of the most ingenious ideas I have ever heard, we all know sweets make everyone feel better so why not use them as actual anti-depressives? That’s exactly what the Happy Pills shop in Barcelona is doing, it raps all kinds of tasty, gummy sweets in plastic bottles, labeled with pink crosses and prescriptions like: “against Mondays” or “against the intolerable lightness of being”. The shop is like a long hallway and you can get a bottle and a spoon and serve yourself from the various medicines.

I have to remember this place for when i visit Barcelona…hope depression Pills Will Be Come soon!

A siesta is a short nap taken in the early afternoon, often after the midday meal. Such a period of sleep is a common tradition in some countries, particularly those where the weather is warm. The word siesta is Spanish, from the Latin hora sexta – "the sixth hour" (counting from dawn, therefore noon, hence "midday rest").

A doctor checks as people sleep a siesta during the first Siesta Championship in Madrid. The participants of the siesta contest win points for the first person to fall asleep, the loudest snorer, best original sleeping position and best dressed sleeper

The competitors started off by lying down. On blue sofas. Some in pajamas. Most fast asleep and a few on the verge of snoring.

What is billed as Spain's first national siesta championship is underway in Madrid.

It's something of a wake-up call for a country that's become so fast-paced that many say the traditional siesta is at risk.

"The modern life is a danger that we feel is against the siesta. When you sleep la siesta everyone has the image that your life is calm, you have a good life. And then, the modern life is a direct attack," said Daniel Blanco, president of the National Association of Friends of the Siesta.

His group, which includes about 50 of his friends across Spain, persuaded a shopping center, Islazul, to host and pay prize money for the siesta competition.

Nursing assistant Sara Ruz, 22, was one who stepped up to defend the siesta.

She gobbled down a quick lunch of fried chicken from a shopping center stand, not mentioning that it's just that kind of rushing which is blamed for hurting the siesta.

Ruz then went to the competition area. A doctor attached a pulse meter to her chest so the judge, sitting in a lifeguard-type chair overlooking the five sofas, could tell whether she's really asleep.

In this competition, the siesta is limited to 20 minutes, a duration which the organizers and some doctors say is optimal; a quick nap after lunch to get refreshed, without entering a deep sleep cycle.

But the traditional siesta in Spain often lasts an hour or more.

Hundreds of contestants are expected in the siesta championship which began October 14 and continues through October 23.

The intricate rules award points to contestants depending on how long they sleep during the 20-minute competition time, any unusual positions they sleep in, eye-catching pajamas they might be wearing, and yes, a lot of extra points for snoring.

The bustling shopping center where the siesta championship is being held is a prime example of the changing times in Spain. The stores don't close at lunchtime -- which is what used to happen with Spanish shops -- so instead of sleeping the siesta, people are working or shopping.

Siesta lovers complain that Spain's frenetic push to compete in the global economy means longer, more pressure-package workdays, even if some Spanish workers still get a two-hour lunch break.

But Ashraf Laidi, chief market strategist for CMC Markets of London, said on a visit to Madrid, "The Spanish are basically trying to have their cake and eat it too. They're trying to be very Europeanized and at least in part keep some of the traditions."

"This is 2010," Laidi continued. "We're talking about the potential of a collapsing euro. We're talking about surging debt, and people are still wanting to preserve the tradition of sleeping while the rest of the world is working?"

Spain's 20 percent unemployed might reluctantly have more time for siesta right now.

But not Fermin Lominchar, a construction masonry worker who rarely takes a siesta, although he won the first round in the siesta competition.

"The Spanish siesta is in danger. Because you have to work a lot to earn money here."

Back at the couches, the doctor woke up Sara Ruz from her siesta. She said she did finally fall asleep, despite the shopping center noise and onlookers, because she's accustomed to siesta time.

A grand siesta champ will be chosen by October 23 by the public, including internet voting.

The first cash prize is €1,000, about $1,400, in credit to purchase goods at the shopping center. Spanish media have given a lot of attention to the championship.

But will it be enough to save the Spanish tradition of the siesta ?



Source And Video : CNN

A Chocolate Train made of chocolate bars and teatime biscuits hurtling along tracks of Kit Kats.

This is the Chocolate Express, a 1.8m (6ft) sculpture being unveiled today at St Pancras International by artist Carl Warner to launch his book, Carl Warner’s Food Landscapes (Abrams, £15.99).

The 47-year-old, based in London, took ten days to build the train, which also involved chocolate rolls, Crunchies, Dime Bars and Wagon Wheels.

An ocular prosthesis or artificial eye (a type of Craniofacial prosthesis) replaces an absent natural eye following an Enucleation, evisceration, or orbital exenteration. The prosthetic eye fits over an orbital implant and under the eyelids. Typically known as a glass eye, the ocular prosthesis roughly takes the shape of a convex shell and is made of medical grade plastic acrylic. A few ocular prosthetics today are made of cryolite glass. A variant of the ocular prosthesis is a very thin hard shell known as a scleral shell which can be worn over a damaged eye. Makers of ocular prosthetics are known as ocularists. An ocular prosthetic does not provide vision; this would be a visual prosthetic. Someone with an ocular prosthetic is totally blind on the affected side and has monocular (one sided) vision which affects depth perception.

The earliest known evidence of the use of ocular prosthesis is that of a woman found in Shahr-I Sokhta, Iran dating back to 2900-2800 BCE. It has a hemispherical form and a diameter of just over 2.5 cm (1 inch). It consists of very light material, probably bitumen paste. The surface of the artificial eye is covered with a thin layer of gold, engraved with a central circle (representing the iris) and gold lines patterned like sun rays. On both sides of the eye are drilled tiny holes, through which a golden thread could hold the eyeball in place. Since microscopic research has shown that the eye socket showed clear imprints of the golden thread, the eyeball must have been worn during her lifetime. In addition to this, an early Hebrew text references a woman who wore an artificial eye made of gold (Yer. Ned. 41c; comp. Yer. Sanh. 13c). Roman and Egyptian priests are known to have produced artificial eyes as early as the fifth century BCE constructed from painted clay attached to cloth and worn outside the socket.

The first in-socket artificial eyes were made of gold with colored enamel, later evolving into the use of glass by the Venetians in the later part of the sixteenth century. These were crude, uncomfortable, and fragile and the production methodology remained known only to Venetians until the end of the 18th century, when Paris took over as the center for artificial eye-making. But again shifted to Germany with their superior glass blowing techniques. Shortly following the introduction of the art of glass eye-making to the United States, German goods became unavailable because of WWII. As a result, the US instead made artificial eyes from acrylic plastic.

Currently, modern ocular prosthetics has expanded from simply using glass into many different types of materials.

Cryopreservation was once the domain of sci-fi novels and B-rate movies. (Think Encino Man.) But it’s increasingly real, as the recent birth of a healthy boy from a frozen embryo created 20 years earlier shows.

The birth, which is reported in a study in the online edition of the journal Fertility and Sterility, sets a record. Until now, no embryo frozen for this long has resulted in a live birth.

The 42-year-old mother of the boy, who is not named in the study, began trying to get pregnant using IVF ten years ago. At the time, she and her husband received embryos from a heterosexual couple who had themselves undergone IVF.

That couple had anonymously donated their leftover embryos after the woman successfully gave birth. Thing was, they did so in 1990 – meaning that the boy just born to the woman in the study has a sibling out there somewhere who was conceived at the same time but is 20 years younger.

Frozen embryos are something of a new ethical frontier in IVF -- one that was not foreseen back in 1978, when Nobel Prize in Physiology recipient Robert Edwards and colleague Patrick Steptoe announced the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby. Because of improved fertility drugs and lab techniques, the average IVF cycle now yields more embryos than it once did. Many of those end up in the freezer, where they keep remarkably well.

But the ethical and practical implications of keeping potential humans on ice are now becoming abundantly clear. Increasingly, divorced couples fight over frozen embryos. And the preservation of genetic material – embryos, eggs, and sperm -- created by biological parents who may be well beyond their reproductive years gives others pause. In 2007, a mother froze eggs for use by her daughter, then seven years old, who was born with a condition that could make her infertile. If the daughter someday uses the embryos, she will give birth to her half-brother or half-sister.

And then there is the time lapse between conception and birth in this latest news item. Previously, the record-holder for longest time in the freezer was a baby born from an embryo that had been frozen for 13 years.

Source : Neatorama

Camel racing is a popular Race sport in India, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, United Arab Emirates (Dubai), Oman, Australia, and Mongolia. Professional camel racing, like horse racing, is an event for betting and tourist attraction. Camels can run at speeds up to 65 km/h (18 m/s; 40 mph) in short sprints and they can maintain a speed of 40km/h (11 m/s; 25 mph) for an hour.

Camels are often controlled by child jockeys, but allegations of human rights abuses have led to nationwide bans on underage labor in the UAE and Qatar. This led to smaller jockeys become more widely used. One such Jockey was Grant Owens, who turned his hand to Camel Racing on the back of a highly successful stint as a Pig Racer. Recent controversy over the enslavement of children has led to increased use of robot-controlled camels. A major camel race in Australia is the Camel Cup held at Alice Springs. It is held annually and includes not only the camel races themselves, but also a collection of market stalls and other entertainment.

The biggest prize money camel race in Australia is the "Sheikh Zayed International camel endurance race" held in Hughenden in Queensland.It has a prize purse of AUD$50,000. Queensland also has the second biggest prize purse camel race "The Boulia desert Sands" with a AUD$25,000

A five-star-toilet, which is located in Bishan County in Chongqing Municipal City, opened to the public and attracted many near-by residents and passers-by to pay a visit.

The toilet is not only equipped with a stereo system, inductive water flushing equipment and green dish gardens, but also has a central air conditioner that runs 24 hours.

Since it opened, many residents have praised it, but there are also some who question whether it is necessary for a public toilet to be so luxurious.

Naaman Amer World's youngest Twenty-month-old Palestinian boy enjoys eating hot pepper at his home in the West Bank city of Nablus, on October 11, 2010. Amer started eating pepper in all meals when he was in his fourteenth month as he is considered the youngest hot pepper-eater in the world.