The auction was held at the 7 star Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi.

This record sale surpassed the $6.8 million paid for a license plate with the number 5 on it.

25 year old Saeed Abdul Ghafour Khour, a member of a wealthy Abu Dabi family, bought the vanity license plate saying, “I bought it because I want to be the best in the world.”

The Khouri family made their fortune in real estate and its unknown exactly how many automobiles they own or which will use the single digit plate.

According to Bloomberg.com:

Khouri won the auction in Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace hotel amid chaotic scenes in the auditorium, which was packed with more than 700 people. The Abu Dhabi businessman had to push through photographers, cameramen and spectators to the front of the room to be seen by the auctioneer before thrusting his number into the air for the final time, his mobile phone at his ear throughout the bidding.

The sum of money was “normal” for his family, Hamdan Khouri said after the auction. “I was prepared to spend as much as 100 million dirhams.”

100 million dirhams is about $27 million dollars.

The oil rich cities of the Persian Gulf are driven by car culture, with relatively few pedestrian areas or public transport options.

Vanity plates are considered a matter of personal pride.

Persian Gulf license plates and most vanity plates include both Arabic and western numerals and script. The special vanity license plates auctioned off only contain a western numeral with no letters.

The actual value of a license plate depends on a mix of math and emotional appeal.

“From 1 to 10, these are the most expensive numbers,” said Abdulla al Mannaie, managing director of Emirates Auctions. “Ten to 99 are the second category. On the other side, you look to numbers which is like 11, 22, 33 they are expensive because it carry repeating digits.

A total of 90 license plates, including numbers 100, 1111, 2001 and 31313, were auctioned off raising a total of 89 million dirhams ($24 million dollars) for a rehabilitation center for victims of traffic accidents.

Links: KATU, CNN, ABCNews, Bloomberg

Have you heard of Pimp that snack? They take Snacks to their limit, and show what they’re capable of with a little ingenuity, a little cash, and a lot of imagination.

I’m not sure how sane they are as they describe themselves as, “A custom, banging, A1 Tip Top, jamming club fare. It’s a sandwich of fun on ecstacy bread wrapped up in a big bag like disco fudge. It doesn’t get any better than this.”

I love the latest creation the Big Kit Kat and the Party Ring (video below).

Check out the site’s simple recipes and videos.

Link: Pimp that snack

Think of the childre… penguins!

Aliens are landing in Troll Station, Antarctica. Seeds, spores, mites, lichens and mosses alien to the continent have been brought unwittingly by scientists and tourists, and could disrupt life in the icy wilderness.

Antarctica is best known for penguins as well as seals and whales, but scientists are finding a host of other tiny organisms from springtails closely related to insects to mosses. And they fear global warming may create conditions suitable for outside marauders such as rats or mice in Antarctica, where the biggest land creature is now a tiny flightless midge.

Among plants a type of European grass — agrostis stolonifera — may be among threats if the icy climate thaws.”It’s a species that gets everywhere, it’s already on most of the Antarctic islands,” said Dana Bergstrom of the Australian Antarctic Division, who leads an international research project entitled “Aliens in Antarctica.”“It would just create lawns,” she said.

Invasive species have long disrupted life on earth, from rabbits brought to Australia by European settlers to zebra mussels from Russia clogging pipes and piers in North America’s Great Lakes, and now Antarctica is a target.

Link: Reuters.com

The picture below hints at just some of the serious and sometimes silly secrets people have shared.

PostSecret began as an art installation for Artomatic 2004 in Washington, D.C by Frank Warren.The simple concept of the project was that completely anonymous people decorate a postcard and portray a secret that they had never previously revealed.

No restrictions were (or are) made on the content of the secret; only that it must be completely truthful and must never have been spoken before.

Since Frank Warren created the website on January 1, 2005, PostSecret has collected and displayed upwards of 2,500 original pieces of art from people across the United States and around the world as well as published in 4 books (see links below).

The site, which started as an experimental Blogspot and is updated every Sunday with approximately 20 new pieces, has a relatively constant style, giving all “artists” who participate some guidelines on how their secrets should be represented.

TIME.com listed the Postsecret blog as one of the “50 Coolest Websites of 2005″, “A fascinating public airing of private thoughts. . . The range of efforts (meticulous, sloppy, artful, ponderous) will astound you.”

I believe each of us can learn something about others as well as our selves by reading one of the Post Secret books or visiting the blog.

If you get a little to close to some of the secrets and want to know more you can always check if the submitter recorded a voice message here.

Link:Postsecret.blogspot.com

Have you read a Post secret book or visited the blog? Let us know post a comment with your favorite secrets.

I woke up with the surprise of snow so I took a few pictures and picked one of the better ones to be a wallpaper. Please feel free to download a copy and share if you like it. Here is a little bit of information as to what is going on in the Pacific NW snow storm 08. *Rolls Eyes*

The pacific NW was put on a snow advisory and it continues into Monday as snow covers parts of Oregon and Washington. Fortunately for the morning commute, the incoming cold front does not carry as much moisture as the outgoing air mass. Snow level are expected to rise to 1,000ft causing most of the lower areas to return to rain this afternoon.

Crashes closed parts of highway 97 and I-5 for a time Sunday afternoon. The Columbia River Gorge received high winds and blizzard conditions, especially in its eastern reaches. Mountain road conditions are currently snowy, icy and hazardous.

If your in this area please check traffic before heading out, for the rest of the country please stop laughing because its only a few inches of snow.

Link: Local news channel 6 weather alert , Traffic.com & Weather.com

Do you like our wallpaper? Have something to say about this weather? Let us know by leaving a comment.

45yr old Leo Aiyak, A Paupa New Guinea prisoner serving a double life sentence for murder and rape escaped from jail, then broke back in and set the building on fire.He has spent the past 17 years in various jails for various crimes including several murders, escaped from the Bihute jail in central PNG’s East Highlands Province on Thursday.

In the early hours of Saturday Aiyak returned to the jail, cut a hole in the prison’s perimeter, entered a storeroom then torched the reception building.Police caught Aiyak hiding along the banks of a nearby river at 10am on Saturday.

A Bihute jail official said Aiayk had committed a similar escape and return when previously held at the West New Britain Province’s Lakiemata jail in PNG’ west.”He has done this before, he escaped then returned to set another jail on fire,” he said.”After this, we think he will now spend the rest of his life in jail.”

There was no clear motive, the official said.”We believe it may have been sparked after Bihute guards discovering him carrying 200 kina (about $A80),” he said.

In a separate incident nine serious offenders have escaped from Lakiemata jail in the past week.

Source:  News.com.au

Ever have the urge to attach a letter to a balloon and let it go just to see who would receive it? One school in Kawasaki Japan did just that and received a suprise responce 15 years later, from a fisherman. He found the still legible piece of paper sitting on a sticky flatfish in his catch on Thursday, along with a torn-off string and the fragment of a red balloon.

He opened the folded paper, discovering it was a handwritten letter from a six-year-old girl at an elementary school in Kawasaki, 150 kilometres (93 miles) away from where the fish was caught off Choshi port.

The sender, Natsumi Shirahige, and her friends released letters as part of events to mark the school’s 120th anniversary, which was in 1993.

“Our school is 120 years old… If you pick up this letter, please write to me,” the letter reads, listing the school’s address.

The 52-year-old fisherman said the letter was a nice surprise.

“I’ve been in fishing for a long time but this is unbelievable,” the smiling man told the Asahi television network.

Shirahige, now a 21-year-old university student, said: “I can’t get over the wonder of how the letter survived 15 years. I never expected I’d get a reply this way.”

Link: Yahoo.com

What do you think about this crazy outcome? Let us know by commenting below.