No mountain high enough

Believe it or not, but an Indian villager, 53-year-old Ramchandra Das, spent 14 years to carve a tunnel through a rocky mountain so he could park his truck in front of his house. And all he had were a hammer and chisel.

He was quoted as saying to Reuters that he did that so he could park his truck in front of his house. 

"I could not park my truck near my house since the mountain blocked my path."

Das from the Gaya district in eastern Bihar said fear of thieves stealing his truck prompted him to work on the tunnel all by himself after authorities refused help. 

"I had to leave my truck miles away, so I decided to do something about it myself," Das said by telephone. 


Local villagers, who had to trek for miles to get around the mountain are using the 14 feet wide tunnel to reach their farms, and praising Das for his work.

"We rarely come across a man who can work so hard to achieve his goal," Prabhat Kumar Jha, a local government official said.

A green Legoland for Malayaia

Move over, Universal Studios. Here comes Malaysia’s Legoland at Iskandar Malaysia in Johor which promises to be environmentally friendly, green and fun.

Scheduled to open in April 2012 at a cost of RM700 million (US$207 million) the 26-hectare theme park will be the first such attraction in Asia. It will be the centrepiece of the Medini North, a lifestyle development that will have a retail mall, themed and business hotels, and office and residential spaces.

According to Legoland Development general manager, John Ussher, the theme park would be very green, and the natural hills would be retained. 

"We have already placed orders for saplings, so when the park is ready, the saplings will have grown into full trees."

Legoland will feature more than 40 interactive rides, shows and attractions, a “Miniland” featuring miniature Lego replicas of famous buildings and structures across Asia, including the Petronas Twin Towers, the tallest twin buildings in the world.

On the competition from Universal Studios at the Resorts World integrated Resort on Sentosa Island in Singapore, due for an early 2010 opening, Iskandar Investment Bhd (IIB)* president and chief executive officer Arlida Ariff said the two theme parks offer a different experience. Universal Studios is for young adults while Legoland will be mainly for families with young children aged 2 to 12.



“It will be complementary rather than competitive and would give tourists more reason to extend their stay in the region as they would want to visit both theme parks," she said.

Legoland Malaysia is managed by Merlin Entertainments, which operates well-known attractions such as the London Eye observation wheel in England and Madame Tussauds museums.

* IIB is an investment holding company linked to the 17.7 billion ringgit Iskandar Development Region (IDR), a major infrastructure project in Johor.

Twitter is “Top Word” of 2009

There may still be a couple of weeks of to the end of the year but Microsoft has already crowned “Twitter” as the top word of the year as it was among the top searches of 2009 on its new search engine Bing.

Microsoft said “Michael Jackson”, "Twitter” and “Swine Flu” were the top three search topics of the year on Bing.

Others making the list of top 10 Bing searches were “Stock Market”, "Farrah Fawcett”, the actress who died in June, “Patrick Swayze”, the actor who died in September, and '”Jaycee Dugard”, the California girl kidnapped at the age of 11 who turned up alive 18 years later.

Microsoft said it had analysed billions of search queries to come up with the list.

Global Language Monitor (GLM), a Texas-based company which analyses and tracks language trends, said meanwhile that 'Twitter' was the “Top Word of 2009”.

“In a year dominated by world-shaking political events, a pandemic, the after effects of a financial tsunami and the death of a revered pop icon, the word Twitter stands above all the other words,” said GLM president Paul Payack.

Other top words on the GLM list included “Obama”, "Stimulus”, "Vampire” and “Deficit”. GLM said it uses a “proprietary algorithm that tracks words and phrases in the media and on the Internet” to compile its rankings. It said words are tracked in relation to “frequency, contextual usage and appearance in global media outlets, factoring in long-term trends, short-term changes, momentum and velocity” – AFP