Borscht, Bears, and Birthday Surprises

In this week's Odder News, another Guinness record, tropical fish in Russia, and Philipp Kirkorov throws the best birthday parties.

• Russia loves itself some Guinness World Records. A Kuban chef (that's Kuban, not Cuban) cooked up 1,101 liters of borscht using a secret recipe to submit to the records giant. Check out the photo of Vladimir Zemlyanov with his record-breaking soupchik. It is a wholly Kuban creation with all locally-sourced ingredients. After the record was, um, recorded, the entire Kuban had lunch.
• A rare tropical mirror-looking fish was discovered off the coast of Sakhalin Island. Some Sakhalin residents suggested that it was a piranha, conjuring images of the budget horror film series that keeps showing up inexplicably on Russian nighttime TV, Piranha (Piranha I, Piranha II: The Spawning, Piranha I again, Piranha 3D, and Piranha 3DD). It turns out that it was a Pampus echinogaster. As with a lot of invasive species these days, scientists suspect that climate change is pushing tropical fish into northerly Sakhalin.
• You won't find bears on Russian city streets too often, but you will find them on Sakhalin (like the piranhas). A man sleeping in his car survived a Jurassic Park-like bear attack on his car and person. Like a T-Rex, the bear broke through the man's car and pulled him out. The bear ran away when the man shot at it, but it is unknown whether or not the bear was wounded. Social media users suspect that there were fish in the car that drew the unusually aggressive bear.
• Former presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak gifted her husband a person for his birthday. Celebrity singer Philipp Kirkorov met the couple on a rooftop terrace overlooking St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Sobchak's hometown, where her father was mayor. Her husband, Konstantin Bogomolov, is a theatre director and director of the Onassis Foundation. Kirkorov seems to be an essential part of the best Russian birthday parties.