Etc.

Well, so much for that idea

Here's one to file under Don't Believe Everything You See on the Internet. In the town of Komin, Croatia, one day late last month, 395 men, women, and even small children dressed in royal blue sweaters, painted their faces to match, donned pointy white stocking caps, and massed on a bank of the Neretva River. They did this for 15 minutes of fame ... because organizers had read on a website that the Guinness Book of World Records put the largest number of people – in this case, Americans – dressed as Smurfs in one place at one time at 290.

(Smurfs, if you didn't know, are small, blue, animated TV characters who live in a forest in houses shaped like mushrooms.) So the Croatians posed for a group picture and sent word to the Guinness organization that they wanted recognition as the new record-holders. And were told, "Sorry, you're too late and, by the way, far too few." Alas, what the organizers hadn't realized is that last July students at the University of Warwick, near Coventry, England, assembled 451 Smurfs, thus earning the new listing that the Croatians thought would be theirs.

So, while the latter may have had some fun, they essentially wasted their time. Sighed one of the organizers on receiving the bad news, "We could easily have got more [people]. But we thought that over 100 more than the American record would be enough."