Cocoa

…as per this year’s Edinburgh Fringe!

1. Dan Antopolski – “Hedgehogs – why can’t they just share the hedge?”

2. Paddy Lennox – “I was watching the London Marathon and saw one runner dressed as a chicken and another runner dressed as an egg. I thought: ‘This could be interesting’.”

3. Sarah Millican – “I had my boobs measured and bought a new bra. Now I call them Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes because they’re up where they belong.”

4. Zoe Lyons – “I went on a girls’ night out recently. The invitation said ‘dress to kill’. I went as Rose West.”

5. Jack Whitehall – “I’m sure wherever my dad is; he’s looking down on us. He’s not dead, just very condescending.”

6. Adam Hills – “Going to Starbucks for coffee is like going to prison for sex. You know you’re going to get it, but it’s going to be rough.”

7. Marcus Brigstocke – “To the people who’ve got iPhones: you just bought one, you didn’t invent it!”

8. Rhod Gilbert – “A spa hotel? It’s like a normal hotel, only in reception there’s a picture of a pebble.”

9. Dan Antopolski – “I’ve been reading the news about there being a civil war in Madagascar. Well, I’ve seen it six times and there isn’t.”

10. Simon Brodkin (as Lee Nelson) – “I started so many fights at my school – I had that attention-deficit disorder. So I didn’t finish a lot of them.”

~ BBC News

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Russia’s government has issued a tender for luxury furniture, including a gilded bed, triggering an outcry Wednesday in a country where the economy shrank 10.9 percent in the last quarter.

The interior ministry said it wanted a cherry wood bed and that the “the decorative elements of the head and footboards must be covered with a thin layer of 24 carat gold.”

The total value of the furniture tender was 24.4 million roubles ($755,900), according to the procurement agency’s site zakupki.gov.ru

“I cannot imagine the need to purchase expensive items during such a difficult financial situation for the country,” wrote blogger here shortly after the details became public.

The tender announcement said the bed should be sent to the ministry headquarters. Other items must be delivered to an address in an exclusive dacha district on Moscow’s outskirts.

According to Russian newspaper Vedomosti, this is where several senior officials in the interior ministry reside in state-owned homes.

~ Reuters

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Visitors to London always have to be on the look out for pickpockets, but now there’s another, more positive phenomenon on the loose — putpockets.

Aware that people are suffering in the economic crisis, 20 former pickpockets have turned over a new leaf and are now trawling London’s tourist sites slipping money back into unsuspecting pockets.

Anything from 5 pounds ($8) to 20 pound notes is being surreptitiously deposited in unguarded pockets or open handbags in Trafalgar Square, Covent Garden and other busy spots.

The initiative, which runs until the end of August in London before being rolled out countrywide, is being funded by a broadbrand provider, which says it wants to brighten up people’s lives in unusual ways.

~ Reuters

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A rodent-eating snake and a hamster have developed an unusual bond at a zoo in the Japanese capital, Tokyo.

Their relationship began in October last year, when zookeepers presented the hamster to the snake as a meal.

The rat snake, however, refused to eat the rodent. The two now share a cage, and the hamster sometimes falls asleep sitting on top of his natural foe.

“I have never seen anything like it,” a zookeeper at the Mutsugoro Okoku zoo told the Associated Press News agency.

The hamster was initially offered to Aochan, the two-year-old rat snake, because it was refusing to eat frozen mice.

As a joke, the zookeeper said they named the hamster Gohan – the Japanese word for meal.

~ BBC News

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