oddly enough

Showoff and tell: The second-grade class of teacher Cindy Johnson at a school in Malibu, California, was most impressed with one child's contribution to their "Show-and-Tell" session last week. "Most kids just bring in rocks or shells," said seven-year-old David Carradine, but his classmate Dalton Hamilton brought along an Oscar. It was one of three won by his stepfather, James Cameron, director of the film Titanic.

Worrying statistics: Most British teenagers aged 14-16 spend between one and three hours a day worrying, according to survey carried out for Collins Educational and published this week. The greatest cause of worry is exams, troubling 86 per cent of worriers, followed by unemployment (75 per cent), illness and death (71), homelessness (71), poverty (57), the environment (54) and war (53). Friends of the opposite sex, at 46 per cent, are slightly more worrying than spots (45 per cent).

Prize-winning inefficiency: A team from the University of Texas at Austin has won the National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest for the second year in a row. The contest is organised in memory of the cartoonist Rube Goldberg, who drew pictures of wonderfully complex machines that performed simple tasks. This year's task for the competition was to press the snooze button of an alarm clock. The winning entry involved 40 steps, including a bubbling water-tower that pushed a float up to trip a lever, and a giant mousetrap that hit a whirling weight. And it worked.

False arrest: Fifty black high school students were arrested in Vryburg, South Africa, for holding an illegal march outside their school, which has been troubled by racial tension recently. But they walked away from detention while policemen argued over who was going to charge them. "The white policemen said they wanted to charge the black pupils but the black policemen said `Let us do it' - and while they were arguing the students walked out of the police station," police captain Sam Sesing said.