A Frenchman has been allowed to keep the gold treasure he found in his garden / © AFP
From a coffee that claims to be worth its weight in gold to Hollywood's new upright trend... Your weekly roundup of offbeat stories from around the world.
- Now he can splash -
A Frenchman has upended the adage that a swimming pool is a hole in the ground that you throw money into.
He discovered $800,000 worth of buried gold bars and coins while digging a pool in the garden of his home in Neuville-sur-Saone, just north of Lyon.
And he has been allowed to keep the treasure, which may have been buried in plastic bags by a previous owner of the house.
- The $1,000 cuppa -
Serkan Sagsoz prepares the world's most expensive coffee / © AFP
The world's most expensive coffee that sells for nearly $1,000 a cup -- and that's without milk -- has left a bitter taste in the mouth in Dubai.
Serkan Sagsoz, who owns the Julith coffee shop, insists his eye-wateringly expensive brew made from Panamanian beans has "white floral notes like jasmine, citrus flavours like orange and bergamot and a hint of apricot and peach".
Some locals, however, picked up an unmistakable note of hubris. "It's shocking but at the same time it's Dubai," one resident of the glitzy Gulf emirate told AFP. "It's just another experience" rich people "can boast about", added another named Maeva.
- Verticals' horizontal obsession -
Ukraine-born actor Zachary Shadrin, second from left, gets a final makeup check before a bedroom scene in the vertical drama 'Love Through All Seasons' / © AFP
They bill themselves as "soap operas on cocaine", and the vertical dramas now being shot by the dozen in Hollywood claim to be just as addictive.
The kitschy 60-second episodes about werewolves and billionaires' sex lives are shot for smartphones, with the camera flipped sideways so they can be easily consumed on TikTok and YouTube shorts.
"In 30 days we can get a show together. Hollywood takes two years," boasted producer Vincent Wang.
But the micro-drama format, which already has millions of fans in China, is not exactly pushing the creative envelope.
Verticals tend to be obsessed with the horizontal bedroom antics of their protagonists.
With titles like "Dominated by My Dad's Boss" and "Mated to My Savage Alpha", the genre is infamous for its fixation with abusive relationships and violent male heroes.
So much so that even one of the actors AFP talked to on set admitted that "I personally think it's toxic".
"We all chuckle at some of the lines that are absolutely ridiculous," said another actor, Nicholas McDonald, who hopes the scripts will get better as the genre develops in Tinseltown.
- Happy to harp on -
Noel Anderson, a former teacher, began making harps after he retired / © AFP
Noel Anderson is one of the last Irish harp makers. And the age-old craft has given the 89-year-old a very different concept of time.
"To make a big harp, I've got to drink at least 800 cups," the man from Srabane, who has no intention of retiring, told AFP.
"The wee lap harps are different. But still a lot of tea, five to six hundred brews anyway," he laughed, to complete one of Ireland's cultural symbols.
