If you plan to be in the New York City area in the next few weeks head over to the Toys “R” Us store in Times Square. That’s where you’ll catch a glimpse of a 7-foot-tall roller coaster valued at $10,000.
Ten thousand dollars is not the asking price. In fact, the toy coaster is not for sale at all. Ten grand is how much a 10-year-old aspiring engineer from Olympia, Washington won for designing the complicated maze of parts that runs through the body of a dragon.
Ian Culhane took home the grand prize-—a $10,000 savings bond—a few days ago when it was announced that he had won the K’NEX Brands building contest.
Culhane’s winning design was made exclusively from K’NEX parts—6,000 plastic building pieces to be exact. You’d think packing up the parts and shipping them off to the contest’s headquarters would have put a major dent in the boy’s collection, but you’d be wrong. Culhane, who first started playing with building sets when he was 4, reportedly has some 20,000 K’NEX pieces.
According to a K’NEX spokesperson, Culhane was one of thousands of children ages 6 to 12 who entered the annual contest.
One final note, the fifth grader revealed that while he was disappointed he couldn’t spend any of the prize money, he did persuade his father to give him $100… to buy more K’NEX plastic parts.
For a few hundred dollars more Culhane could have been the proud owner of one of this year’s most unique Christmas gifts.
Rhino poop.
I kid you not. The International Rhino Foundation has listed four separate pieces of dung from the endangered species on eBay and will use the proceeds to fund conservation efforts.
Each piece is dried, mounted in a clear plastic case and marked with the type of rhino that produced it: white, black, Indian and Sumatran. The foundation had wanted to get a sample from the Javan rhino, but the animal is so rare, a piece of dung could not be collected.
The auction ends tonight and it appears most bidders are interested in the Sumatran rhino poop, which has a current offer of $600. Black rhino poop was listed for $255, Indian was at $250 and white was at $122.50.
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