Quick Takes

Splish splash

Never underestimate the heart of a champion. Or, in the case of Canada's National Cannonball Championships, never underestimate the power of a hefty waistline and outrageous costume when you're trying to make a splash. Brian Utley of Calgary knows the principle well. The 350-pound high-school teacher pulled in yet another extreme water sports championship by donning a pink tutu and a red Afro wig and creating a splash so big that he easily picked up the event's grand prize, worth about $1,850. "Mental preparation is very important in this sport because you have to be prepared when you hit that water," said Utley, who also holds world bellyflop titles. "It hurts every single time." Judges, however, said it was the 54-year-old's cannonball tuck that eventually set him apart in the jump from a 5-meter tower.

A penny smelted is a penny earned

While most little pennies go to the market, others may soon be headed to the smelter. Due to rising prices of raw zinc, it costs the U.S. Mint nearly 2 cents to make every penny. The soaring cost of zinc means it may be more profitable to haul socks full of the maligned coin to be melted down-though a U.S. Mint regulation from late 2006 makes the practice illegal. Considering that the government mints about 8 billion pennies every year, taxpayers are paying close to $160 million in costs for $80 million worth of coins. Some lawmakers in Congress have lobbied to replace the costly zinc in the penny with a less expensive metal like steel.

Greased out

There was one slip-up in the plans of two teens who attempted to steal a cashbox from a french fry concession during an August firemen's carnival in Wyalusing, Pa. The thieves hadn't accounted for retired English teacher and stand owner Marvin Meteer. When the robbery attempt went down, Meteer was too far from the thief with the cashbox to make a grab for him. Instead, the retired teacher hurled a basket full of greasy fries at the 17-year-old perpetrator. "When he came up on the other side of the counter is when the fries rained down on him," Meteer told the Star-Gazette. "He hit those fries and they were just greasy enough that he started to slip and slide, and that gave me enough time to get around the end of the counter and a couple of guys who were there began wrestling him to the ground."

Bubba watch

Bubba Waring has 100 friend requests on the social networking website Facebook, but he isn't a computer-savvy teenager. Bubba is the unborn child of Luke Waring and Claire Gillis, an Australian couple who created the profile to keep friends and family up to date with the child's progress through the third trimester. The parents say they don't know the child's gender or official name yet, but that hasn't stopped the tentatively named Bubba from gaining a reputation as "the world's most famous fetus," according to Gillis.

Christmas in May

Neighbors of Briton Brian Turner hope they've heard "Last Christmas" for the last time. On May 15, Turner blared "Last Christmas," the seasonal Wham! hit song, from 1 a.m. until 4 a.m. through a stereo while visiting friends in a suburb near Newcastle, England. Neighbors phoned authorities, who eventually seized the stereo and levied a fine against him this month, making his the first noise nuisance prosecution by the Newcastle City Council's Night Watch team. Perhaps once bitten and twice shy, Turner will save the holiday song for sometime special, like the holidays.

King's entrance

Australian bookstore owner Bev Ellis was understandably upset when a customer reported that some strange man had defaced a number of her store's Stephen King books by writing in them. By the time she left her office to confront the stranger, he was gone. What she soon learned: The strange man writing in King's books was the American author himself, who popped into the small bookstore in the desert town of Alice Springs. And he wasn't defacing the books. He was autographing them. Ellis caught up with King in a nearby Woolworths. "I told him that if I knew he was coming I would have baked him a cake," she told The Age.