The Craziest Ways to own gold

9 crazy ways to own gold

The shiny metal's price has soared, but owning it on paper or storing it in bars isn't a lot of fun. From bathroom fixtures to a gold iPad, here are 9 unusual ways to buy gold.

Going for the gold

Gold has been a superstar of the investment world in the last few years. As the economy turned sour, investors rushed to the precious metal as a safe alternative to the rocky stock market.

Gold bugs piled on, the price of the metal soared and pretty soon everyone wanted a piece of the action.

The price briefly topped $1,800 an ounce, though it has pulled back recently.

The problem, though, is how exactly you should own gold. Gold stocks and funds like SPDR Gold Shares, GLD aren't all that much fun. Gold bars can be a hassle, too, since you have to pay to store and insure them.

Are there other ways to jump into the gold frenzy? Oh, yes. From a solid gold toilet to a pencil-sized pistol, there are dozens of "investments" made of gold that are a lot more intriguing than a boring pile of bricks.

Following are nine of the oddest ways to own gold:

Solid gold toilet

Gold is hugely popular in China (where does it rank in world gold production?), and busloads of tourists come to see this solid gold toilet in one of the country's major cities (where?).

Bling details. The 24-carat (is this considered pure gold?) lavatory was created to attract shoppers to a jeweler's "Hall of Gold," (see photo of its gold bathroom) which also features a golden palace and statues, Agence France-Presse reports.

What's it worth?

Trivia: Did you know the U.S. government owns one of the world's most expensive toilets? Find out who bought it and the mind-boggling purchase price.

Gold pencil-pistol

A gold-plated pistol that looks like a pencil? Sounds like something James Bond (who will play the villain in the next Bond flick?) would carry in his pocket.

Bling details. The pencil-pistol was made in 1948 by the late Maharaja of Jodhpur (see pics of his royal palace, now a luxury hotel) as a present for the last Viceroy of India, Technabob reports. The pencil's tip comes off, revealing a 2 3/4-inch barrel. 

What's it worth?

Trivia: Remember the most expensive pistol ever sold? Get the price.

A gold-plated bathtub

If a gold toilet isn't enough, how about a golden bathtub? Luxury company Inax is selling a bathtub covered in white gold (what is this, exactly?). 

Bling details. The bathtub, which debuted in Tokyo last year, is covered with 10-millimeter tiles of 24-carat white gold. Inax also makes a gold-plated toilet with a unique feature (what is it?).

What's it worth?

The Kim Kardashian coin

The marriage that will not go away -- no matter how much you want it to -- has received its own commemorative coin.

Bling details. The company GoldCoin.net created a 24-karat gold coin to celebrate the over-the-top wedding (see her in one of three Vera Wang gowns) of reality-TV star Kim Kardashian and basketball star Kris Humphries. The best part? The coin has the following inscription: "Together forever . . . Only time will tell."

What's it worth?

Trivia: By comparison, what was the price for the royal wedding coin for Prince William (now the Duke of Cambridge) and Kate Middleton (the Duchess)?

A gold sports car

China brings us yet another golden head-scratcher. A jewelry store in Nanjing displayed a gold-plated (what is this?) Infiniti sports car (see all Infiniti's non-gold-plated models) earlier this year.

Bling details. It took five people more than four months to plate the G37 coupe with gold, the Xinhua News Agency reported. While the crowds loved the sparkly vehicle, it was reportedly blocking traffic and was parked on the street with no license plates, so police had it towed.

What's it worth? There wasn't a price tag on the gold-plated Infiniti, but check out the cost of this gold-plated luxury vehicle.

Trivia: Check out the massive record price paid for a vintage Bugatti coupe.

A gold iPad

Leave it to British designer Stuart Hughes (known by this cheeky nickname) to come up with a solid gold iPad (what other products has he blinged out?).

Bling details. Hughes used 53 diamonds to create the Apple logo, and made the casing and screen frame from a single piece of 22-carat gold. Hughes made only 10 versions of this iPad.

What's it worth?

See a photo of Hughes' blinged out iPhone case

A gold photocopier

Want to impress your co-workers? Haul in the gold-plated Canon copier from designer Yogi Proctor (see photo of the artist). Find out if it can make copies.

Bling details. It's about the size of a real copier and has parts made of aluminum, glass and plastic.

What's it worth? We don't know the designer's price, but we can say it is an inconvenient way to own gold.

A gold bra

Move over, Victoria's Secret (who will model $2.5 million bra?). In April, a Chinese jewelry store displayed two solid-gold bras that took five designers and four workers nearly six months to make, according to Jing Daily. 

Bling details. Engraved with phoenixes and dragons, each bra weighed about 2 pounds.

What's it worth?

Trivia: The world's most expensive panty-and-bra set is a Victoria's Secret product encrusted with precious jewels and worth millions. How much? See photos of supermodel Gisele modeling the set.

A gold beer mug

Beer enthusiasts swear that the mug makes all the difference. So could a solid gold mug make Bud Light taste like nectar of the gods? You probably wouldn't be drinking Bud Light from this luxurious mug anyway.

Bling details: Japanese gold company Ginza Tanaka unveiled the 850-gram (how many pounds?) mug as part of its "summer cool" collection. Ginza Tanaka (read about its diamond handbag) also offers golden sake and wine glasses at $30 a gram, in case you want to avoid that golden beer belly.

What's it worth?

Trivia: Need a pricey beer to fill that extravagant mug? The world's most expensive beer will set you back a lot more than Bud Light. How much?

Quoted from MSN Money

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The Worst foods to eat while driving

Having a meal behind the wheel is always a bad idea. But if you insist on taking the risk, at least avoid the most distracting and dangerous delights.

Food is a road hazard

Remember when your car was new and you wouldn't dare allow one kernel of popcorn or a drop of soda within 100 yards of its interior?

Experts say drivers should maintain that way of thinking regardless of how many miles are on their odometers.

SmartDrive Systems, a leader in fleet safety training and research, compiled data from more than 34 million risky-driving incidents. The study ranks food and beverages consumed while driving as a bigger distraction than talking on a cell phone.

"Eating while driving is dangerous and can be deadly," says Carnegie Mellon University professor Marcel Just, a leading neuroscientist and an expert on multitasking. "Concentrating on eating can be just as distracting as texting while driving. Drivers need to keep not only their hands on the wheel; they also have to keep their brains on the road."

Any food can get you into trouble, but experts say these take the cake as the most dangerous things to consume behind the wheel.

French fries

It's hard to dunk french fries in ketchup while keeping your eyes on the road. Then there's all the salt that will preoccupy your thoughts with guzzling a soda instead of staying focused on the light that's quickly changing from green to red. Add in the grease that will have you fumbling around your front seat for a napkin, and french fries are the fifth-most-dangerous food to eat while driving.

"This is a loaded gun of distraction because all those things overload your brain. You're thinking about thirst, getting the fry into the ketchup and not on your lap, and keeping the grease and salt off your wheel," driving instructor Schwartz says.

Who can think of driving with all that going on?

Popcorn

The salt in popcorn will have you looking for a drink or napkin instead of at oncoming traffic, the grease can make it tricky to hang on to the wheel, and a kernel or two can threaten your life.

This triple threat earns the movie snack favorite top honors and the distinction of most dangerous.

Dr. Paul Bryson, a specialist at Cleveland Clinic's Head and Neck Institute, says eating popcorn while driving poses a significant choking risk because it's tough to concentrate on properly chewing all the kernels while keeping your road wits about you.

"Incompletely chewed pieces of popcorn can cause choking or leave distracting particulates in the throat that can cause coughing or become a distraction to the driver while you try to remove the piece of popcorn from your mouth or throat," Bryson says.

Pizza

Pizza's ability to injure and jeopardize safety propels it to the second-most-dangerous spot.

"It takes just a second of contact with hot, greasy cheese dripping down your face to cause a first- or second-degree burn on the face," says Dr. Debra Jaliman, an assistant professor of dermatology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Dermatology.

The most common place to be burned is a corner of your mouth, where your skin is more delicate and thinner than on the rest of your face.

Looking for a napkin or something cool to calm that burn means you might not be paying attention to the road.

"Even if you're not burned, a slice of pizza often requires two hands to eat, so you can't safely steer your car (while) stuffing your face with a slice," says Stephanie Schwartz, a driving instructor and the owner of Roadrunner Traffic School in Phoenix.

Pizza is also greasy, which makes hanging on to the wheel a challenge.

Philly cheese steak

Sure, they're gooey and good, but they're greasy and messy, too. And you need two hands to get more into your mouth than into your lap. They can also be hot, which means there's the chance you'll end lunch with a burn -- and an accident.

The mess, distraction and burn potential earn this lunchtime favorite the No. 3 spot.

"An alert driver needs 1.5 seconds to react to something that happens while they are driving. A distracted driver who is splitting attention between eating and driving needs three seconds -- twice that much time to react," driving instructor Schwartz says.

By the time you put down your sandwich and get even one hand firmly on the wheel, it could be too late.

"You will have hit the child who darted out in the road or the car who cut you off," she says

Drinks without straws

It's often hard to unscrew a bottle cap with one hand. It's even harder to do so without taking your eyes off the road to look at the bottle. And while a can takes both hands only to open, it can be much trickier to grip and pop while steering.

Sure, you can stuff the bottle or can between your legs to keep one hand on the wheel, but then you're going to have to look down longer to make sure you don't spill it, thus taking your eyes off the road. That makes this a dangerous behind-the-wheel beverage no matter how you look at it, Schwartz says.

And if you do get the beverage open, hopefully you don't have to stop fast in midchug, or you'll be wearing your drink and could choke if a sip goes "down the wrong pipe.”

Sub sandwiches

This two-handed food has a tendency to fall apart, littering your lap and front seat with lettuce, sauce, condiments and crumbs. Not only are these things tough to manage while trying to watch the road, depending on the size of the sub, it could get caught up in the steering wheel. And that could make it tougher to swerve out of the way if an unexpected object (like a child or dog) appears in the road.

Bob Surrusco, the general manager of the Safe America Foundation and the SAF Teen Driving Institute in Marietta, Ga., says anything that can easily fall apart like a sub is dangerous in the car.

"When something spills, the driver's first instinct is to quickly clean it up," he says. "That can take the driver's attention away from the road, which increases the odds of getting into a car accident."

Hot dogs

Biting into one end of a hot dog inevitably sends contents squirting out the other.

"Focusing on keeping ketchup off your tie or onions from falling in between your seat and the console is very distracting," says Ann Furber, the director of Knight Driving School in Berwick, Maine.

So is thinking about how you're going to maneuver both the dog and steering wheel -- and to grab a few fries in between bites.

The result: You're a mess, and you have a bashed-in bumper.

"Looking at where those condiments and crumbs tumbled to, even for a second, takes your eyes off the road," Furber says. And since hot dogs are rarely served plain (unless you're under age 5), their mess factor earns them the distinction of being seventh on the most-dangerous list.

Cereal

Ever tried keeping cereal from sloshing out of the bowl while stopping quickly or making a left turn? It's not easy and requires a great deal of concentration.

And, Furber says, all that concentrating on keeping the bowl level and the spoon from not slipping doesn't leave time to think about the rules of the road.

"There are so many things to worry about, like not showing up to work with cereal dangling from your chin, milk stains on your shirt and spilled milk souring causing a horrible stink in your car, that there's hardly time to focus on rush hour traffic," she says.

Ice cream cones

Ice cream drips all over your hands, clothes, car seat and steering wheel.

So even though you can gobble a cone with one hand, you're going to be diverting a lot of attention away from traffic to make sure you don't miss a rogue dribble.

And don't think plopping a scoop in a cup is any better than juggling a cone. Even though a cup may eliminate the drip factor, "that requires two hands to eat," Schwartz says. "So you're trading a distraction for the unsafe move of steering with your knees, elbows or anything other than the safest way, with both hands."

Juicy fruits

Rounding out the list of dangerous road foods are ripe pears, oranges, strawberries -- just about any juicy fruit that creates a distracting dribble that could end up on your clothes. These fruits also leave your fingers tacky, so it's hard to grip the wheel comfortably.

Even bananas can be distracting, because you're worrying about how to break into one without rendering it too mushy to eat, or you're afraid that pieces will fall off and roll under your seat.

The mess and distraction are why fruit rounds out the list.

"If you're eating fruit, you have to focus on not choking on the seeds, where to store the rind, stem, peel or pit and not dropping a tiny bite or (a) grape," Furber says.

Quoted from MSN Money

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Tiny Penguins Saved by Little Sweaters

A good yarn: Knitters make sweaters for penguins after oil spill

A little blue penguin from Papamoa Beach
was covered in oil after a Liberian cargo ship hit a reef on Oct. 7 in Tauranga, New Zealand.

It's a sad story with a happy twist. Blue penguins in New Zealand have been soaked with oil after a container ship ran aground near the east coast of the country's North Island earlier this month. New Zealand’s Environment Minister Nick Smith has described the oil spill as the nation’s “most significant maritime environmental disaster.”

In their oil-soaked state, the birds shouldn’t preen themselves because their feathers are contaminated. They also need help staying warm before and after rescue workers do what they can to clean them up.

So Skeinz, a knitting shop in Napier, New Zealand, put out a call for knitters to make little sweaters for penguins in need. And boy, have knitters around the world responded. One blog post from the folks at Skeinz.com ran under the headline “It’s raining jumpers.”  Another ran with the headline “We have Critical Mass” — but Skeinz is still encouraging determined knitters to send their handiwork along to “keep stocks available for the Wildlife Rescue Team to draw from if required.”

This isn't the first time that penguins have been outfitted with sweet little sweaters. Let's take a waddle down penguin lane to see some other penguins in sweaters — because you can never have enough photos of that!

Back in 2005 in Australia, tiny fairy penguins Toby and Percina modeled sweaters
that were being sent for the rehabilitation of penguins involved in oil spills.

In 2000, a group of penguins were rescued off the coast of South Africa
after getting caught in an oil spill from a sunken carrier ship.
Sweaters helped them stay warm while they recovered.

Want to make an adorable sweater for a penguin in a pinch? You can find specifications — (for instance, they must be made of 100 percent wool yarn, and they must be just the right size) — as well as an address to send your creations, here.

After a spill near Tasmania in 2000, a penguin was clad in a knitted sweater in an attempt to prevent it from ingesting oil.

Quoted from AnimalTracks

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Turkey sends 10,000 elite forces after Kurdish militants

Offensive on border of Iraq follows insurgents' deadliest one-day attacks against Turkish military since mid-1990s

Students protest against recent attacks
on Turkish military in Istanbul

ANKARA, Turkey — About 10,000 elite Turkish soldiers were taking part in a ground offensive against Kurdish rebels in southeastern Turkey and across the border in Iraq on Thursday, making it the nation's largest attack on the insurgents in more than three years, the military said.

The offensive began Wednesday after Kurdish rebels carried out raids near the Turkey-Iraq border that killed 24 Turkish soldiers and wounded 18, the insurgents' deadliest one-day attacks against the military since the mid-1990s.

The military said in a statement Thursday that 22 battalions, or about 10,000 soldiers, were taking part in the offensive in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq, but it did not say how many were in each country.

NTV television said most of the troops were believed to be in Iraq.

It was Turkey's largest such offensive since February 2008, when thousands of ground forces staged a weeklong offensive into Iraq on snow-covered mountains.

Story: Turkey in 'hot pursuit' after deadly attacks

The military said the soldiers in the current operation are commandos, special forces and paramilitary special forces — making it an elite force trained in guerrilla warfare. They are being reinforced by F-16 and F-4 warplanes, Super Cobra helicopter gunships and surveillance drones.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused to share details of the military's offensive. The military only said the offensive was concentrated in five separate areas it did not identify.

"Our goal is to achieve results with this operation," Erdogan told a nationally televised news conference. "The military is determinedly carrying out this (operation), both from the air and the ground."

The military said the offensive was launched because the rebels had staged Wednesday's deadly simultaneous attacks on eight separate targets, including military and police outposts.

Iraq expresses support 

In its first comment since those attacks and the start of Turkey's offensive, Iraq's government on Thursday condemned the rebel attacks and promised to stop them from using Iraqi territory for future attacks against Turkey.

"The Iraqi government stresses again that Iraq will not be a haven or a shelter to any foreign armed and terrorist group," the Iraqi Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its website, adding that both Baghdad and the regional Kurdish government in northern Iraq "are committed to secure the borders" to prevent the repetition of such attacks.

Story: Turkish warplanes hit Kurdish rebels in Iraq

A senior Iraqi Kurdish official, Nechirvan Barzani, was in Ankara and expected to be received by Erdogan shortly.

The Kurdish rebel attack outraged many Turks and fueled nationalist sentiment. Thousands of high school students, carrying Turkish flags, marched in the streets of the Turkish capital on Thursday.

"Tooth for tooth, blood for blood, vengeance!" students chanted in support of the military as they marched through the affluent Tunali Hilmi district. At one point, the students stopped traffic to sing the national anthem as some shopkeepers joined them and passers-by stood still in respect.

The Kurdish provinces of northern Iraq are mostly stable and prosperous. But to Turkey, which has a large Kurdish minority, they also are an inspiration and a support base for the Kurdish rebels.

Turkey's Kurdish rebel conflict has killed tens of thousands of people since the insurgents took up arms for autonomy in the country's Kurdish-dominated southeast in 1984.

Quoted from MSN

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