Eatery cooks up a new gut-busting burger

Brian Tracey • Profile

Talk about supersize: After creating a hamburger that weighed over 100 pounds last year, a Pennsylvania restaurant decided its customers were hungry for few pounds more.

The giant beef sandwich unveiled last week at Dennys Beer Barrel Pub in Clearfield weighed in at a whopping 123 pounds. The restaurant planned to submit paperwork to the Guinness World Records.

They're calling it the Beer Barrel Main Event Charity Burger, and the 120,000-calorie entree features an 80-pound ground beef patty. It also has a pound each of lettuce, ketchup, relish, mustard and mayonnaise, 160 slices of cheese, up to five onions and 12 tomatoes.

Oh, and there's also a couple pounds of banana peppers wrapped in a 30-pound bun and garnished with 33 pickles.

Gargantuan gluttons can purchase the mammoth sandwich for only $379.

At that price, it should come with a free health-club membership.

Not-so-bad ideas

• Some people will do anything to get their picture in the newspaper. But few have the audacity of a Swiss man, who conned one of the country's biggest media companies into publishing a two-page ad he created of himself posing semi-naked beside a bottle of Gucci perfume.

The man, who claimed to represent the Italian fashion giant, called up the weekly SonntagsZeitung last week to book the expensive color spread in Sunday's edition, said Christoph Zimmer, a spokesman for the publication.

Zimmer said that the man asked for the $50,000 bill to be sent to Gucci.

"We've spoken to Gucci and apologized for the mistake," Zimmer said. "We're going to try and get the money back from this guy, but we don't [like] our chances."

The Milan, Italy-based Gucci could not be reached for comment.

Zimmer said the paper fell for the scam because the call arrived too late for the advertising department to find out whether it was genuine.

• Have you got some explaining to do? An Chinese Internet site is selling excuses.

According to the Ananova Web portal, the online shop, called Tuofu — Chinese for "bring fortune to people" — charges different prices depending on the type of excuse needed.

Everyday excuses cost the equivalent of $1.60 while an excuse for breaking off a relationship is $16.50.

The most expensive "excuse" is the marriage proposal which costs almost $200.

The shop's advertising says customers can get a discount if they buy more than one excuse at a time.

A Tuofu spokesman told a reporter from the Beijing Times: "Our break-up excuses can minimize suffering, and we can even make up excuses for people who want to date in secret without arousing the suspicions of their mates."

How can that excuse cost less than the marriage proposal?

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