Last week was ...

a Good Week for Erubisu Puresuri, as three Japanese Elvis Presley impersonators celebrated the 20th anniversary of the king's death by performing at a Tokyo nightclub in front of a large audience dressed in 1950s fashions. The Tokyo branch of the Elvis Presley fan club has around 10,000 members. Meanwhile, in England, Ted Harrison, the author of a book on Elvis, has suggested that his name may be evidence of Viking ancestry. "Elvis is Viking for `all wise'," he says, pointing out that there is a bay called Elvis Voe in the Shetlands and an Elvister in Scotland.

a Bad Week for fossicking, as a 58-year-old homeless man was treated in hospital in Melbourne, Australia, after spending four hours digging himself out of a pile of garbage that had been dumped on him while he was fossicking in a Melbourne rubbish dump. "He was quite smelly [and] had a certain aroma about him that suggested he could have been in a rubbish heap," an ambulance officer said. (Fossick: verb intransitive, Australian slang: to rummage around, to hunt for gold.)

a Good and Bad Week for hot-dogs: The 500 residents of Gasseldorf, in northeast Bavaria, have erected a statue to the village's most famous resident, the butcher, Johann Georg Lahner, inventor of the frankfurter sausage. Lahner was born 225 years ago and opened his first butcher's shop in Vienna in 1804. The new statue has a bronze plaque with a history of the hot dog engraved on it. On the same day that the atatue was unveiled, however, health officials in Tbilisi, Georgia, warned residents that illegal factories were producing fake hot dogs in which the meat included rats, mice and chopped up newspapers, disguised with food colouring.