Toying With Becoming a Celebrity? It’s Child’s Play

--When she was a child, actress Vanessa Redgrave cuddled a teddy bear; and Helen Gurley Brown, before running Cosmopolitan magazine, liked to dress up a hot water bottle like a doll. Fisher-Price Toys surveyed celebrities about their favorite childhood toys as part of a campaign to help parents understand the role of play in a child’s development. “We wanted celebrities to share with us how they created imaginative and enjoyable playtime experiences,” Fisher-Price’s Kathleen Alfano said. The survey showed tenor Robert Merrill liked wind-up music toys, Vanity Fair Editor Tina Brown was partial to Otto the Octopus, a black rubber toy, and Soupy Sales’ favorite was a wind-up Popeye doll. “While someone like Baron de Rothschild delighted in a rocking horse that encourages physical activity, chances are that the baron’s grandchildren have a nursery filled with toys that challenge their imagination and intellect as well,” Alfano said.

--The seven common-law wives of Tek Kor have agreed that enough is enough and he can undergo a vasectomy after having fathered 22 children. The prolific Tek Kor lives with all of his wives and children under one roof in Nakhon Pathom, 35 miles east of Bangkok, Thailand, where he is a successful meatball vendor. Tek Kor was quoted by the Bangkok Post as saying the large family is straining his budget and it would be difficult to rear more children. However, not having more children does not necessarily mean his family won’t grow. “A palmist told me that I would have 12 wives, so I will look for more wives until I have this number,” Tek Kor said. “I will only stop having children.”

--Hundreds of children lined a mall corridor in Boca Raton, Fla., carefully stretching and tugging ribbons of pasta to set a record for the world’s longest noodle at 400 feet. About 400 children from Verde Elementary School pulled pasta for three hours, beating the old noodle record by 40 feet. The event was sponsored by the former record holder, Phil Appleton and his Pasta Pallazzo restaurant, who made it into the Guinness Book of World Records three years ago with a 360-foot noodle. Once the giant pasta was measured and photographed, it was unceremoniously dumped into a trash can. Sanitary reasons.