When is a potato not a potato?
When it is a tuber of a gourd, Guinness World Records said.
A New Zealand couple who believed they had dug up the world’s largest potato in the garden of their small farm near Hamilton have had their dreams turned to mash after Guinness wrote to say that scientific testing had found it was not a potato after all.
Photo: AP
Colin Craig-Brown, who first hit the tuber with a hoe in August last year when gardening with his wife said it sure looked and tasted like a potato.
Mind you, he added, he has never tasted a gourd tuber.
“What can you say?” he said. “We can’t say we don’t believe you, because we gave them the DNA stuff.”
After months of submitting photographs and paperwork, the couple got the bad news from Guinness in an e-mail last week.
“Dear Colin,” the e-mail begins, going on to say “sadly the specimen is not a potato and is in fact the tuber of a type of gourd. For this reason we do unfortunately have to disqualify the application.”
The couple had named their find Doug, which they took to spelling Dug, after the way it was unearthed. The tuber became something of a local celebrity, after the couple began posting photographs of it on Facebook with a hat on and even built a cart to tow it around.
An official weigh-in at a local farming store put Doug at 7.8kg, equal to a couple of sacks of regular potatoes, or one small dog.
The existing Guinness record stands — a 2011 monster from Britain that weighed in at just under 5kg.
Craig-Brown remains a believer in Doug, who still sits in their freezer.
“I say ‘gidday’ to him every time I pull out some sausages. He’s a cool character,” he said. “Whenever the grandchildren come round, they say: ‘Can we see Doug?’”
“Doug is the destroyer from Down Under,” Craig-Brown said. “He is the world’s biggest not-a-potato.”
Craig-Brown said he is not done yet with chasing the potato record. Dug was self-sown, but Craig-Brown said that with all his subsequent research into giant potatoes, he is ready to try and deliberately grow a record-breaking monster next season.
And this time, it will definitely be a potato.
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
DENIAL: Musk said that the ‘New York Times was lying their ass off,’ after it reported he used so much drugs that he developed bladder problems Elon Musk on Saturday denied a report that he used ketamine and other drugs extensively last year on the US presidential campaign trail. The New York Times on Friday reported that the billionaire adviser to US President Donald Trump used so much ketamine, a powerful anesthetic, that he developed bladder problems. The newspaper said the world’s richest person also took ecstasy and mushrooms, and traveled with a pill box last year, adding that it was not known whether Musk also took drugs while heading the so-called US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) after Trump took power in January. In a
It turns out that looming collision between our Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies might not happen after all. Astronomers on Monday said that the probability of the two spiral galaxies colliding is less than previously thought, with a 50-50 chance within the next 10 billion years. That is essentially a coin flip, but still better odds than previous estimates and farther out in time. “As it stands, proclamations of the impending demise of our galaxy seem greatly exaggerated,” the Finnish-led team wrote in a study appearing in Nature Astronomy. While good news for the Milky Way galaxy, the latest forecast might be moot
RSS