A chicken from the slightly-glowing town of Paks in central Hungary recently laid an egg weighing 200 grams and 24 centimeters in circumference. Géza Somogyi, the owner, has sent the egg's measurements to the Hungarian office of Guinness in the hopes that it sets a new record. According to Guiness, national records aren't kept, but the current record holder is an egg laid in Britain with a circumference of 22.8 cm and a length of 31 (?) cm. Somogyi said that his chickens only feed on wheat, corn and sunflower seeds, underscoring that their diet is all natural. We suspect the chicken might have received a little assist, however, from the reactor down the road. [index.hu]

52-year old László Fölkl spent 104 hours watching cartoons in an attempt to break a world record, the organizers of Budapest's Animania Movie Marathon revealed. As part of the record-breaking attempt Fölkl watched nearly 300 cartoons over the time period, eventually coming up twenty hours short of the world record, but still setting a Hungarian record in the process, good enough to land him a new laptop, and, it would seem, a minor mention in the press. [est.hu]

BKV vehicles are not just for stag parties anymore, apparently. Two metro drivers recently caught the metro to their wedding, except that this time it was a special train on which only they and the wedding party sat. A special train decked out in festive decorations waited for the pair at the Határ út station (where there's a third track) and took them to Nagyvarád tér for their wedding. According to velvet.hu, everyone involved volunteered their time, with the only contribution on the part of the BKV being the free use of the metro train. Considering this was the first time the cash-strapped public transport provider allowed the use of one of their metro trains for a use like this, we can't rule out if any Nokia boxes exchanged hands. We just hope that the company actually bothered to clean the car for the special occasion.

Should any of our readers not plagued by a conscience find themselves being offered a Nokia box while here in Hungary, may we suggest you wholeheartedly accept it. Following the revelation of the method by which former Budapest deputy mayor Miklós Hagyó allegedly received his graft stipend, "nokia box" has entered the Hungarian vernacular as a vessel by which to deliver bribes, to the point that a blog dedicated to what can fit into one of these boxes has been launched, as well as an instructional video by index.hu. One of these boxes can hold up to Ft 15 million (€56,000) and best of all, instead of just throwing the boxes away as people did in the old days, they'll now be reused, proving that embezzlement can also be environmentally friendly.

Like the Volt Festival before it, the annual Balaton Sound Festival has announced its headliners for this year: The Chemical Brothers, Jamiroquai and Paul van Dyk. The Chemical Brothers put on a good show at the Sziget Festival in 2007 and van Dyk stopped by Budapest last year, but honestly, we didn’t even know Jamiroquai was still around. Still, with the festival taking place on the shores of Lake Balaton at Zamárdi, it should be a fun (if a bit dated) with or without buying any vowels. [sziget.hu]

As the always-exciting March 15th holiday approaches, many of Hungary's resident foreigners will probably be planning to get out of town, both to take advantage of a three-day weekend, and also to get away from the inevitable crowds of foreigner-hating nationalists that flock to the streets each year. But this year may be different, because the same dirty külföldiek the Hungaristas love to hate may now be the only thing saving the country from demographic oblivion. Really! According to some new data from the Central Statistics Office (KSH), Hungary's population is expected to dip below 10 million sometime in June, after being clocked at only 10.013 million on January 1 of this year. Until the 1980s, the country's population was growing, then it started dropping fast, and, as tabloid Blikk explains, the only thing that has kept us in the eight-digit population club is all the foreigners who inexplicably keep moving here. And in other foreigner news: A foreign student was fined by national railways MÁV for traveling with a student ticket on December 25. A Hungarian passenger who helped out the perplexed student by paying their fine wrote to consumer blog Homár says that the woman's foreign student ID had been accepted by the MÁV cashier who sold her a student ticket, but then the ticket inspector said her IDs did not give her a right to buy a student ticket in Hungary and issued her a fine anyway. The Hungarian Samaritan also noted that his own Hungarian student ID had previously been accepted in nearly every countries where he has traveled. [homar.blog.hu] A Romanian man attacked a ticket inspector with a chainsaw on a train traveling on the Budapest-Szombathely route last Monday. The Romanian had been traveling without a ticket, and when the inspector told him he had to buy one, the man got angry, started the chainsaw he was carrying and threatened the inspector with it. The police was called, and the man was removed from the train and taken into custody in Székesfehérvár. [rtlhirek.hu] That same day, several foreign students were apprehended by the Pécs police after they were accused of shooting at some local cats with an air gun. A downtown resident had alerted the authorities, saying "someone was firing shots at a bus stop." The suspects said they were only trying to scare the animal away; there was no ammunition in the gun when it was seized. [hvg.hu/velvet.hu]

Oooooh look what happened when one of us recently used the "email to a friend" function on Hungarian health portal hazipatika.com. At best their choice of verification keyword (dugott) could be translated as "screwed," though "fucked" would probably be more accurate. Either way, we'd say the prognosis is negative.

How's this for pathetic: Some as-yet-unidentified thieves have made off with a statue that is the symbol of the Heves County of Tenk. Unlike many of the statues of grim-faced politicos and writers previously pilfered in Hungary, this one depicts a young woman carrying water, and was a popular spot for locals to get married. Or we should say depicted, because by now the thing has probably already been melted down for scrap. Sad! [index.hu/tenk.hu]

A couple of weeks ago our sister site Caboodle.hu had a cheery feature about how the mayor of Budapest's District V was boasting that work on the so-called "new main street" of the district was about to be wrapped up ahead of schedule. Which leads to the question, what the fuck was the schedule? Really! We snapped the shot up top of a section of Petőfi Sándor utca in July of last year, because by then the work seemed to have being gone on long enough that we wanted to get a photographic record of how long it would take. Below that is one from last week taken from roughly the same angle. But not exactly from the same angle, because if we tried to do that we would have fallen into the giant gaping hole that is still there (bottom). Honestly, it's like these politicians have no shame.

We've always loved the fact that Hungarians call blue jeans farmer, and that the Hungarian word for shirt (ing) can be confusingly added to a style of shirt to make a compound word that sounds alarmingly like a gerund in English. But to see them together is just too beautiful.

As we revealed a few weeks back, longtime contributor Sean Jordan had made plans to leave Hungary overland, in part because of his problems getting out of here by air. Well, he did finally join the ranks of Budapest ex-expats, but not before filing one final report (via SMS) about something he saw Saturday night at the meeting point of civilization/germ vector that is Budapest Keleti train station. His first dispatch came in at 23:30: Just witnessed a 20kg pot bust on some Asian kid at Keleti! It was incredibly well done by the zsaru. About 10 [undercover, mostly under-30 agents suddenly came] out of the woodwork. Handshakes and backslapping all around. (A cop confirmed the kg estimate.) And the second at 23:44: All I know is, the train and all those people spilled off was from Bucharest. What was weird was how good-natured this kid was about it. The cops cuffed him and started picking papers out of his pockets and he was all awkward smiles. Also strange: how the cops opened all his shit and yanked out 4 or 5 very large bags of weed onto the pavement, for all the world to see. As people were hustling to their trains, barely a few feet away from the contraband. Strange indeed, especially given that there was no mention of the bust in any of the local media. As for how far this incident goes to demonstrate the professionalism of our boys in blue, we'd give them more credit if our correspondent hadn't been prevented from sending us a pick due to the fact that his camera had only days earlier been heisted by pickpockets.

The Hungarian Tourist Board and Budapest Gyórgyfürdői és Hévizei Zrt. (the company overseeing Budapest's thermal spas) are seeking damages from Life.com after it included the Széchenyi Baths in its list of "The World's 'Germiest' Attractions". Following loads of negative comments, many of them from non-Hungarians, the site removed the baths from its list, but not before our good friend Google Cache stored it.

Hungarian-American pop singer Linda Király recently appeared in Budapest again, and the singer had enough time in her schedule to exchange a few sentences with news portal stop.hu, before once again returning to the oblivion where she apparently spends most of her time these days. According to the portal, Király compared herself to the big pop divas when she announced, "I will not say that sexy photos of me will never appear, but none of the really famous singers have posed for lad mags." Too true, and with that, check out the pictures in Linda's FHM spread from 2002.

Perhaps because Hungary is too small of a market or because the Hungarians have grown wise/tired of his questionably effective products, Norbert Schobert is expanding his fitness empire abroad, via this so-bad-its-good video, which calls exercise "eternal torturous penitence for being overweight.." Funny, we thought that was putting up with Norbi.

The District XI council raised the yearly rents for popular outdoor clubs Zöld Pardon and Café del Rió by 400%, from Ft 9 million to Ft 38 million (€34,000 to €142,5000), apparently without warning. Both rent contracts were set to expire in December of this year, and the district notary proposed that they be extended, with the rents remaining unchanged. The majority of the local assembly, however, voted on February 17 to support a proposal by a Fidesz representative who argued the clubs should be required to pay four times their current rent. Zöld Pardon and Rió have used public space illegally at the Buda end of Petőfi Bridge for years, occupying roughly four times the area they signed contracts for, in what has been rumored to be some backdoor deal with District XI mayor Gyula Molnár. When the local government discovered that the clubs were using four times the area they were paying for, they came to a mostly Fidesz-passed decision that the clubs should pay a fine of Ft 1 billion (€3.7 million), but this plan has mostly petered out over the past few months over disagreements within the local council. If plans go through to raise rents, we suspect the Rio just might have to rethink their not-so-multicultural door policy. [index.hu]

Via the AllHungary inbox we received notice of an über fantastisch promo offered by Ryanair about great deals to Ireland this month, with special rates of Ft 4199 (€15) from Hungary to Ireland. Sounds great, doesn't it? The email even claimed Ryanair is "the world's favourite airline", although last time we checked even the kids over at wizzairsucks.com hated Ryanair more than their website's namesake. Once I went to ryanair.com I was unable to find any fares even approaching this price range until mid-late April (admittedly the email arrived about a week ago). Once you figure in the mandatory booking fee, online check-in fee, additional fee for a 15kg checked bag and a return ticket (unless you plan on hooking up with some travelers while over there), the final price was over Ft 30,000 (€110), or about three times what the cheery little email in our inbox claimed. Still cheap when compared to the other airlines, but not even close to what the email claimed. Nice try though.

The organizers of the annual Volt Festival have announced that the top two international acts playing this year will be trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack and solo-dancer Billy Idol, who last had a hit when the Soviet Army still had units in Hungary. Admittedly, the choice of Massive Attack for the rock-oriented Volt Festival is a bit odd too. The other performers are your standard assortment of Hungarian acts. Performers have not been announced for the Sziget Festival, but ticket prices have. This year, early purchase week tickets are Ft 38,000 (€140), regular week tickets are Ft 46,000 (€170) and day prices are Ft 12,000 (€45). By contrast, in 2007 the early purchase week tickets were Ft 25,000 and a day pass was Ft 8,000, or a 50% increase over three years with two less days of drunken festivities. And that's not even taking into consideration that they screw you over if you try to buy your tickets from abroad. [sziget.hu]

Despite valiant attempts by several Hungarian police and firefighters, the most flaming thing in Hungary over the weekend was the meteor that shot across Hungarian skies late Sunday evening. Although initial speculation was that it was the testing of a new rocket or less plausibly alien spacecraft, it was later determined to be a meteor, but don't be surprised if the Justice Ministry weighs in that it was actually domestic terrorism. [index.hu, mno.hu]

Most societies and clubs have "initiation rites", with some being as mundane as reciting a pledge, while others involve masturbating in a coffin while covered in your own excrement (Skull and Bones members may wish to correct us if we're wrong about the fecal part). For the Budapest Fire Department, it apparently involves being pinned down by your colleagues while one of them goes roto-rootering up your ass, Blikk reports. The "anal drilling expedition" (their words, not ours) resulted in the victim being transferred to another district. All of this remained hush-hush, however, until last week one drunk Sándor S. (pictured, kinda blurred) stuck his hand down the front of another firefighter's pants, who wasn't quite as receptive as he had hoped. All of this came out (no pun intended, seriously) after the second firefighter wouldn't let his incident or the previous one go unreported. Disciplinary action is now pending, although if he'd only gone into the police department, Sándor S. would probably be making captain soon.

Perhaps because they were unable to get an interview with television presenter Nóra Szekeres despite her agreeing to one, the folks behind velvet.hu asked the question all Hungarians are dying to know (well, at least those of the horny male variety): are Nóra's golden globes real, or could she participate in next year's Miss Plastic Hungary pageant? Readers to the portal seem divided over the question, except that they all agree they're nice. After throwing this all important question around the office, one of our editors said that he walked by Szekeres and her husband at Margit island last year, and based off the fact that she was so skinny he could see the bones in her chest, his medical opinion (informed by extensive viewing of "ER" and "House" episodes) was that there's no way in hell a woman that skinny can have breasts that size, but yes, her plastic surgeon is a very talented individual. Glad that's been settled.