Wanted! A dishwasher for the Queen

Working for the Royals in Buckingham Palace is a dream come true. Now that opening has come your way!. Just browse the Royal website.

The designation is General Catering Assistant (wash up) and will earn 14,200 a year for a 40 hour work.

What you have to do is wash the dishes in the Royal households. The successful applicant will be based at Buckingham Palace but must accompany the Royals on trips to Windsor, Sandringham, Balmoral and Holyrood House.

According to details in the advertisement the candidates must be punctual, reliable, able to work well in a team and have flexible and willing attitude. It also says he or she, must be willing to work away from London for up to three months of the year.

According to a Buckingham spokesman it is a very small, tight team and they must retain that small team atmosphere when they move around.

When the court moves to Balmoral of elsewhere, so does the team. The job is an official position paid from the Civil List. So what are you waiting for?

The elephant beauty

It was a bizarre beauty contest sans sashes, tiaras, swim wear and hair styles. It was so as the beauties were elephants.

Ninety elephants and their mahouts took part in this beauty pageant held in Chitwan National Park, Nepal.

Contestants had multi-coloured decorations on their bodies including head dresses and painted toenails.

The panel comprising five judges selected Chitwan Kali as the winner praising her decorations and cleanliness. Shri Ram of the elephant management committee said the decorations on Chitwan Kali was very beautiful and that it was able to obey the command of the mahout. And later a football match was played and an elephant named Pela emerged as the star of the day.

Nothing happened! Don't fret, another apocalypse on the way...

" We were expecting some drastic occurrence, but our expectations were completely destroyed as nothing happened on this day."

This what many people who were hoping that something would happen on the 21st of December. Media went to town with this expected apocalypse prediction, but now a disappointed lot.

But relax - there are plenty of other doomsday scenarios to cling to, even if you feel let down this time.

Scientists reckon we have between half a billion years (due to falling levels of carbon dioxide) to a billion years (due to expansion of the sun) left before Earth is uninhabitable, and a mere 22 billion years before the universe explodes as it cannot expand any further.

Can't wait that long? Then the good news is there is an apocalypse planned for much, much sooner.

Egyptian biochemist Rashad Khalifa predicted in 1968 that the world would end in 2240. He came to that conclusion after claiming to have cracked the Quaran Code - a series of hidden messages in the holy book of Islam. The good news? The Quran Code apparently also shows that all believers will be saved, regardless of their religion.Sunni Muslim scholar Said Nursî was a bit more pessimistic.

The theologian dubbed The Wonder Of The Age by his followers translated many of Muhammad's sayings and found that one implied the world would end in 2129.

According to the Quran, that will come as a result of a one-eyed beat of the earth, possibly in human form, doing battle with the Messiah while the ancient people of Gog and Magog descend from the heavens to scourge the Earth American psychic Jeane Dixon's prediction is even more concerning. Before her death in 1997, the one-time adviser to First Lady Nancy Reagan claimed Armageddon would come in 2020. Dixon was famous for predicting the assassination of President Kennedy, and became a favourite of President Nixon's at a result - but she also predicted that Nixon would win the 1960 election, that World War III would begin in 1958 and that the Russians would put the first man in the moon. Oh, and Dixon once also claimed that the world would end in 1962.

Bleakest of all is the conviction of Dr. F. Kenton Beshore that the world could end in 2018. Beshore, founder of the World Bible Society, is described by the apocalypse-friendly Rapture Ready website as "extraordinary, humble, fun-loving, yet serious" and draws his inspiration from the works of evangelist Hal Lindsey, who claimed that the world would end in 1998.

Beshore claimed Lindsey had got his maths - based on the length of a Biblical generation - wrong and that we'd all be toast between 2018-2028.

Let's hope the prophets of doom go the same way as the proponents of the Mayans...

Father Christmas was an elephant

It was a grand surprise for the little children at a school in Thailand they were looking forward to meet Father Christmas hoping for a bonanza of presents.

But when they saw who appeared as Father Christmas they were really happy and loved it.

The unlikely Father Christmas was an elephant who had dressed up in red and white and gave toys to these kids at Ayutthaya Institute in the town of Jirasartwitthaya in Thailand.