THE WEEK: Eat, drink & travel

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Modern-day explorer

Gunnar Garfors is taking claim to his 15-minutes of fame thanks in part to a huge spread about his travels – with photos the size of my head - in the UK's Daily Mail. The newspaper reports that Gunnar traveled to all 198 officially recognized countries in the world, did it while keeping his full time job, and at 38 became the youngest person to do so. The paper even goes as far as referring to him as an explorer, but Netizens in the travel world are having just a few problems with Gunnar's grand achievement. After all, can you really claim to have visited a place if you spent 5 minutes at its border? And how much quality visiting have can you do when you've traveled to 19 countries in one day? That's like me running through your front door and immediately out the backdoor then sending you a note “Thanks for the nice visit”.

Singled out

Now, when I first heard there was a new cookbook on the market, I thought cool, a cookbook for single guys trying to impress the ladies with their culinary skills. But not. According to the author, that's what the book began as, but he shifted course and made the book instead for single guys who just want to cook for themselves. Seriously? Not going to fly with any single men I know. Most of them are content with beer and pizza at the end of the day. At the end of a long day, we single guys want things easy. That's why when the day comes that we can pump alcohol into the air in our man caves, it will be the age of total bliss. For the moment, we can breathe in alcohol at certain bars, most recently in the UK. All of Britain is abuzz about it, but it's nothing new. Breathable booze has been around in the US since 1998.

Bars use a humidifier to pump your favorite booze into an enclosed area and customers absorb it from the cloud in the air, by breathing and soaking it through the skin and eyes. Crazy, but effective.

Beer bellies

Calling all beer bellies! You've heard of a beer mug. But a beer basin? It involves more than 100 people who took part in a beer-drinking contest in Wuhan, Hubei province. But this was no ordinary beer-drinking contest, it was one unlike no other. The contestants had to drink four bottles of beer from a basin. The participants split up into two teams and had to drink as much beer as possible within 5 minutes. One guy drank drank a whole basin of beer in just two minutes. Men and women took part in the contest, with one team winning by just one basin of beer.

（中國日報網英語點津 Helen 編輯）