Reward for decoding ‘mystery’ rock inscription

In the village of Plougastel-Daoulas, France, a rock has been discovered with a very strange inscription on it. No one can figure out what it means and village officials are now offering a reward to anyone who deciphers it.

The inscription on the rock, first noticed a few years ago, is written mainly in capital letters but also features pictures, including one of a sailing boat. There are two dates inscribed on the rock as well, 1786 and 1787.

“There are people who tell us that it’s Basque and others who say it’s old Breton,” the mayor of Plougastel-Daoulas, Dominique Cap, told.

The reward for cracking the code is €2,000 (roughly $2,250) and anyone is welcome to try. A jury will then meet to choose the deciphered text which they find to be the most plausible, and the prize will be awarded to that decoder.

Woman receives birthday card mailed in 2015

A birthday card, mailed to an Ohio woman by her mother in 2015 finally arrived this month — two years after the older woman’s death.

Katrina Jones, of Youngstown, said, “The return address is from my mother. Then I looked at the handwriting and I said that’s my mother’s handwriting. My mother passed away in 2018.”

Jones said the envelope was postmarked June 20, 2015. It contained a birthday card from her mother.

Sentence spelled out by balloons breaks Guinness record

A party balloon company broke a Guinness World Record in Florida by using 7,236 balloons to spell out the 53-letter phrase: “Success has nothing to do with luck, it is a matter of consistency.”

Decoraciones Globos, a Venezuelan balloon company founded by sisters Genesis and Iravid Nieves, recently opened its first US branch in Miami and decided to celebrate by breaking a Guinness record for the world’s largest balloon sentence. Guinness verified the resulting sentence was the largest balloon sentence in the world.

Iravid Nieves said the sentence was appropriate for the record, “This world record is the living example of this phrase.”

Craftsmen build Transformers with used car parts

A group of post-80’s young men in Baoding, North China’s Hebei Province, recently amazed Chinese netizens with their craftsmanship by making replicas of Transformers out of used car parts. Their largest model, an Optimus Prime, is over 12 metres in height.

In a video circulating online, a replica of Bumblebee changes forms as smoothly as it did in the Transformers fiction series.

To make the replica, they used worn parts of real cars, together with some plates made according to the films and animations, and then cut and welded them together, said Quan Likun, a member of the team.

“It may seem easy, but the difficult part is the continuity and overall control,” Quan said. He has been making the replicas for more than ten years.

Published in Dawn, Young World, December 26th, 2020