Time does take its toll, and in the recent years, we’ve seen a lot of good people go. Yesterday, it was Jimmy Dean’s turn. The country singer cum sausage king passed away on Sunday at the age of 81.

In his early years, he grew up in Plainview, Texas. His childhood years were not kind to him, but he got his break in the 1950s as a country singer. He is best known for his song Big Bad John, which became a hit in 1961. Now considered a classic, the song is about a coal miner who acted heroically by saving his fellow miners during a mining accident. The song got so big that Jimmy Dean got a Grammy for it.

Later on, the country singer expanded his horizons and founded Jimmy Dean Meat Co., which earned him a different kind of reputation. The sausages produced by the company basically became a household fixture for countless Americans. Aside from these activities, Jimmy Dean was also involved in other projects, one of which was as a host of The Morning Show (a CBS program).

The iconic entertainer and businessman had been suffering a variety of health problems, according to his wife. However, they were not that grave for them to think that the end was near for Jimmy. On Sunday, though, as he was sitting down in front of the television while eating, he quietly passed away.

He may have left this world, but let us not forget Jimmy Dean, one of the greatest entertainers of our time.

No one in his right mind would do this, right? Well, think again! This guy from Lansing, Michigan wanted his 15 minutes of fame, so he stuffed these icky creatures into his mouth.

Sean Murphy, a pet store employee, decided to make a go for a Guinness World Record and put not one, but 16, cockroaches in his mouth. Mind you, they weren’t any ordinary roaches. In fact, they were Madagascar hissing cockroaches. According to Wikipedia, the Madagascar hissing cockroach is:

“also known as the hissing roach or simply hisser, is one of the largest species of cockroach, reaching 2–3 inches (5-8cm) at maturity. They are from the island of Madagascar off the African coast, where they can be found in rotting logs.

Unlike most cockroaches, they are wingless. They are excellent climbers and can scale smooth glass.”

So Sean Murphy got 16 of some of the biggest roaches in the world! He said that each of the roaches were at the very least, 2 ½ inches long. He initially tried for 12 roaches, but he just kept adding one more until he got all 16 in. While the feat has been documented, Guinness says that they still have to verify Murphy’s stunt. Until that has been done, amazing (and disgusting) as it may be, he is not a world record holder yet. He remains undaunted, though, and says that next year, he will be going for 20 roaches in his mouth – alive, hissing, and all!

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

The average person has dreams of one day waking up and finding himself a rich heiress or a long lost member of a royal family. For most people, this remains but a dream, but for an embassy worker in Washington, it actually has come true. Peggielene Bartels has been working at Ghana’s embassy since the 1970s.

A little more than a year ago, Bartels got a call at 4 a.m. She learned that the king of Otuam, a town in Ghana about an hour from the capital. As things turn out, the former king was the uncle of Bartel, and after a traditional ritual of determining the next in line, Peggielene became the new “Nana.”

“Nana” is actually the honorific that the people of Ghana bestow upon people of stature. They use it to refer to people like kings as well as grandparents. Now, Bartel is royalty. The decision to take on the responsibility was not that easy for her. In fact, she struggled with it for three months, before she realized that she could not run away from her destiny.

So what is the life of the new king like? After traveling to Ghana for her coronation, Peggielene went back to Washington and resumed her post as a secretary. She does her own laundry, drivers herself around in a 1992 Honda, and answers to her boss. She serves as a “commuting king,” dividing her time between her being a king and being a secretary. She says that when she retires in five or six years, she plans on moving to Ghana and serving as their full time king.

Fairy tales do happen in real life, don’t they?

I believe him. I really do. And I think that anyone who has been under so much stress for a long time would probably understand this outstanding citizen turned bank robber. I don’t know if I would actually go and rob a bank but who knows?

In any case, this guy from Detroit has been sentenced to two years in prison for robbing banks. Jimmie Lee Fortune started robbing banks in April of 2008. His reason, as he told the judge, was that he needed money to pay for his mother’s plumbing bills. He also needed money to get his driver’s license reinstated. Without money, he wouldn’t have been able to do these things. As such, he decided to go ahead and rob a bank.

After the first successful attempt, he just kept going. Fortune’s MO was quite simple. He would enter a bank and demand money. His threats ran along the lines of “Large bills or I start shooting!” The funny thing is, he was not even armed when he did this.

Then the inevitable happened – he got caught. U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman was the one assigned to hear Fortune’s case. He said that he received 17 letters of support for Fortune, who asserts that he was very depressed and stressed at that time. He said that he was having difficulty separating reality from fiction. Prior to his bank robbing spree, he was an outstanding citizen. This is what saved him from a worse fate – more years in prison.

Hotdog eating contests are not out of the ordinary. Indeed, people take off their hats to the amazing men and women who can chow down almost a hundred hotdogs in one go. But have you ever heard of an inter-species hotdog bun eating contest?

Now I don’t know what possessed the people behind the event but they organized a hotdog bun eating contest between three elephants and three humans at Coney Island in Brooklyn. The elephants, named Bunny, Susie, and Minnie ate a total of 505 buns in a mere six minutes. On the other hand, the three humans, Eric “Badlands” Cooper, Juliet Lee, and Tim “Gravy” Brown, downed a mere 143 buns in the same span of time.

All the elephants are in the 40s. The humans are all well known in the world of eating contests. Cooper is a subway conductor from New York City and is the world champion in corned beef hash eating. Lee is the world cranberry sauce eating champion, and Brown holds the distinction of eating 8.47 pounds of blueberry pie in 8 minutes. Oh, and he did it hands free, by the way.

I doubt that the elephants knew the reputations of the people they were up against. Even if they did, they probably wouldn’t have been fazed. They probably wouldn’t even care. With a collective weight of about 9 tons, the elephants definitely had the advantage over the humans who weighed a total of about 500 pounds.

So who cares, right? I mean, despite the fact that he is the leader of the arguably greatest nation on Earth, he still is a private individual to a certain extent. Yes, he has made the lives of tobacco and cigarette companies hell lately, but he admits to smoking every now and then.

Barack Obama has never made it a secret that he is struggling with his smoking habit. Perhaps just like very other smoker who has been wanting to quit, the president is finding it quite hard to totally kick the habit. He says that he is about 95% cured but he finds himself slipping a lot. He goes on to say, however, that he does not do it in front of the children – just like many smoker parents that I know.

So why is this significant? I don’t think it is really – except for the President perhaps. He wants to quit smoking but is finding it hard – big deal! Of course, critics are quick to point fingers and highlight the fact that he is putting a lot of pressure on the tobacco industry while at the same time, patronizing their goods.

What does the President have to say about this?

“Once you go down this path it’s something you continually struggle with, which is precisely why the legislation we signed is so important because what we don’t want is kids going down that path in the first place.”

Yeah, I have to agree with him a hundred percent on this one. And yes, I am trying to kick the habit myself.

…and gets 56 stars for it. The story is that Kimberley Vlaeminck, an 18-year-old Belgian, went to a tattoo parlor to get stars on her face. According to her, she asked the tattoo artist, Rouslan Toumaniantz, to put three stars near her eyes. As the procedure progressed, she said that she fell asleep. She only woke up when she felt a pain in her nose as the tattoo artist started adding stars there. BBC quotes her as saying: “I woke up when he was starting to tattoo my nose… I counted 56 stars, it is frightening.”

However, according to the tattoo artist, she knew exactly what was going on. He said that she ordered stars – and lots of them, it seems – all over her face and that she got exactly what she asked for. He also disputes the teenager’s claim that he probably misunderstood her instructions. Toumaniantz says ‘She was awake and looked in the mirror several times as the procedure was being done. She agreed, but when her father saw it, the trouble started.”

The question is, who is telling the truth and who is lying? Two totally contradicting stories – one of them is surely lying. My thoughts on this piece of news…it is one thing to fall asleep while getting a massage or while at the spa, but I don’t really think it’s possible to fall asleep while getting a tattoo. And to fall asleep through 56 stars? I don’t know. What do you think?

Everyone dreams of winning the Powerball. I even know some people who actually believe that they WILL win the Powerball one day, but I haven’t met a single person who has actually won. But check this out, a 23-year-old rancher from Todd County in South Dakota has won the most recent Powerball draw; and his winnings? A mere $232 million. He will be taking home a whopping $88.5 million (after taxes) as a lump sum.

Neal Wanless’s story is something like a modern day fairy tale. He is 23-years-old, a young rancher trying to make a decent living. His father has been buying and selling scrap metal in the recent years in order to survive. Neal bought $15 worth of lottery tickets at a town called Winner, and guess what? He became one himself! Big time.

What’s he going to do with the money? In an interview Neal said that he would expand their 320-acre ranch, repay the townspeople who have shown him and his family kindness over the years, and not squander his money.

That sounds really good. It cannot be denied, however, that lottery winners have encountered problems when dealing with their newfound wealth. While I am not saying that Neal will burn his money away like many other lottery winners, I really am hoping that this young man and his parents, with whom he lives, will be able to handle the rollercoaster ride that is life after winning the lottery.

It looks as if he has a level head on his shoulders, though, doesn’t he?

It was not long ago that we heard of the “best job in the world.” Sandy beaches –among the best in the world – free housing, blogging, fish feeding, and the works; these are the things that the winner will have to face for six months. No wonder that the server of the organizers got swamped and crashed in the days following the announcement!

This time, they have a different sort of announcement: the winner of the contest!

Ben Southall, 34, is the lucky guy who won. He is a British charity fundraiser who was part of the 16 finalists who entered video clips to get the chance to live in paradise for half a year. And how does the winner feel about this? He is quoted as saying:

To go away now as the island caretaker for Tourism Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef is an extreme honor. I hope I can fill the boots as much as everybody is expecting, my swimming hopefully is up to standard and I look forward to all of the new roles and the responsibilities that the task involves.

Starting July 1, Southall would have the chance to “fill the boots.” He will not be alone in the island, however, as his Canadian girlfriend has been allowed to join him. All I can say is that these two are perhaps the luckiest people in the world right now.

As for the tourism department of Queensland? They are hoping that this stunt will result in dollars – lots of it – spent in tourism in the area.

Well, she has not been bitten literally, but boy oh boy, has she been burned in all its figurative sense! When Vice President Joe Biden bought a puppy from Linda Brown in December, she was ecstatic. And why not? It is not everyday that you get to have the Vice President of your country as your customer, right? As Brown said “I thought when Joe Biden bought a puppy from me, what an honor. Out of millions of breeders in the country, in the world, he picked me.”

So what went wrong here? When the word got out about the Bidens buying a puppy from a breeder instead of getting one from a shelter, Brown became the target of pet lovers and animal rights activists. And when we say animal rights, PETA is sure to be close behind. The well known group has grabbed the chance to point fingers at animal breeders; they are saying now that animal shelters have been killed because of animal breeders.

This is only the beginning of Brown’s nightmare. Her kennel has been visited countless times by dog wardens, giving her various citations for things as petty as a piece of kibble on the floor and 5 strands of dog hair. These citations didn’t wash, although Brown has had to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees. According to Brown, both her and the Bidens have received death threats from some animal activists.

Is it just me or is someone overreacting here?