British Lawnmower races
This year's race was dubbed 'The Weapons of Grass Destruction' and 35 teams battled overnight from 8 p.m. on Saturday (July 31) to 8 a.m. on Sunday (August 1) to claim top honours in the most prestigious race of the Lawnmowerracing season.
Three different classes of lawnmowers race: traditional with seat; buggy; and mini-tractors. The overall winner is the team completing the most laps.
It takes months of work to prepare the finely-tuned machines. For safety reasons, all the blades are removed. Each team has three drivers who swap periodically and there is a pit lane where teams refuel and carry out the inevitable repairs.
Hot and dry conditions made the race a real endurance test and the 0.8 mile (13 km) track was fast and bumpy. All the mowers passed scrutineering to ensure they were race worthy and met the strict safety and modification rules.At 8 p.m. the race was started in typical Le Mans style.
As dusk turned to night the mowers continued to race around the circuit, which became increasingly hard and bumpy. Periodically the track was watered to try to keep the dust down. The pit lane became a hive of activity as mowers came in for refuelling and driver changeover. After a painful 12 hours team No. 1 — named Cupid Stunts Racing — took the Chequered flag, having completed 286 miles (457 kms).
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China to hold Miss Plastic Surgery pageant
BEIJING (Reuters)- China is giving the beauty pageant a surgical makeover with plans to anoint its first Miss Plastic Surgery this October, state media say.
Open to women from any country, the only requirement in the made-to-order competition is proof of inauthenticity — in the form of a doctor's certificate of cosmetic surgery, the China Daily said.
The idea for the pageant came after one woman was barred from a traditional beauty contest because she had spent more than 110,000 yuan (7,138 pounds) on plastic surgery that gave her a whole new face, it said.
The recent rise of China's “man-made beauties” has been attributed to a common sentiment that better-looking women find better jobs and marry wealthier men, it said.
Chinese people spend about 20 billion yuan a year altering their looks, the newspaper said.
Communist China, which once considered make-up and beauty contests as bourgeois, has increasingly latched on to pageants and played for the first time to the Miss World competition in 2003.
Last month, China announced plans for a beauty pageant for the elderly, with contestants aged 55 and over competing in the Zhen'ap Cup National Contest of the Beauty of the Gray-Head Group.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=856&ncid=856&e=1&u=/nm/20040803/od_uk_nm/oukoe_china_pageant