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These are the shownotes for Season 7, Ep 14 first published April 3, 2026. (Our Easter Special!)
Do folks in Papua New Guinea really hide smokes at Easter?! https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13256711/The-strangest-Easter-traditions-world-whipping-people-giant-omelettes-large-feed-2-000-people-hiding-cigarettes-near-churches.html
Norway's Easter crime drama and crime novel tradition. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13256711/The-strangest-Easter-traditions-world-whipping-people-giant-omelettes-large-feed-2-000-people-hiding-cigarettes-near-churches.html
Marshmallow decorating kits. https://people.com/jet-puffed-marshmallow-dyeing-kit-offers-cheaper-alternative-this-easter-amid-high-egg-prices-11715031
Matt Stonie once ate 255 Peeps in five minutes. *Professional eater/ Do not attempt! https://majorleagueeating.com/contests/732 and video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tbJ2ccROkY
- most Instagram likes of an egg also see HERE and HERE
- Largest Chocolate Rabbit: A team in Brazil created the largest chocolate rabbit in 2017. It weighed 4,245.5 kg (9,359.7 lbs) and stood 4.52 meters (almost 15 feet) high! (https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-rabbit-made-of-chocolate). pin: (https://pin.it/45Ot2SCuJ)
- most people to pass an egg around (390+ people did this, I think with spoons but hard to find more info)
- Most eggs eaten while watching Egg Scene from Cool Hand Luke... it's 49 eggs you guys *personal fave
- "The most boiled eggs to be peeled and eaten in a minute is 6"
- Easter Trivia... the Easter Bilby from Australia...
In 1991, Rabbit-Free Australia launched a campaign to replace the Easter bunny with the Easter bilby, or rabbit-eared bandicoot. Why the switch? In Australia, rabbits are widely considered pests for destroying crops and land. Companies now make chocolate bilbies for Easter, pic.twitter.com/oVBXmhpY7N
— Helena Ereditsh Dr (@ereditsh) April 13, 2022
🐤 2017... World Peeps-eating champion... Matt Stonie of California won the second annual World Peeps Eating Championship in 2017 when he ate 255 peeps in five minutes!
🐤 What is the best-selling Peep? Yellow chicks are the original Peeps and still the people’s choice.
🐤 Peeps are the Best-selling non-chocolate Easter candy... around 700 million Peeps are eaten each Easter season!
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Hi friends, I'm Scott, and this is What a Weird Week, a show about weird news, and interesting things that happen this week, usually. But our show is dropping on a holiday here in Canada, Good Friday 2026, so we're doing an Easter special. If you do not celebrate the holiday, you might want to skip this one, but you also might be fascinated by the weird reports of giant things and people trying to eat the most candy of anyone in the world. All of that coming up for our April 3rd, 2026 edition of What a Weird Week. You can get everything we talk about in more detail on the show notes page, which is shownotes.page. Alright, let's get started with the fireworks war that happens at Easter time in Greece. There are churches in this community in Greece, the churches on the hilltop, and they're nearby one another. And so to celebrate Midnight Mass at Easter time, they have fireworks, but they aim at each other's bell tower, and then they count how many direct hits, and somebody is crowned the winner of the annual fireworks battle. Okay, now we have a tradition of a giant omelet being prepared on Easter Monday. This is a village in France. 1,000 people live in this village, and every Easter Monday, they get a fire going outside. They put a giant 10-foot pan on the fire, and they start cracking eggs, 5,000 eggs, over 100 pounds of bacon, bunch of other ingredients. They make one omelet big enough to serve everyone in the village, 1,000 people. Zut alors. That sounds delightful. And they say the tradition stems from the story about when Napoleon came through the village and demanded a giant egg dish for his troops. His men needed eggs, and that's where this comes from. This one, I almost didn't do it. I feel like it may be controversial, and I tried to do fact-checking. The rest of the staff has the long weekend off. I linked to the article in the Daily Mail. You can read this thing. It's a tradition out of Papua, New Guinea, where the Daily Mail says chocolate would melt. So at Easter time, cartons of cigarettes are hidden in trees, and that's the treasure hunt at Easter time. Is that a real thing in New Guinea? This one's a shorty. I didn't know that the butter lamb existed. I remember doing a report on the butter cow one time at a state fair where they made an entire cow, sculpted it out of butter. And a similar tradition on a smaller scale in some parts of the world, a lamb is carved out of butter, and it's given dried clove eyes. And the photo that we linked to, I mean, you'd have to tell me it was a lamb. It definitely looks like you tried to do something on a butter, but anyway, let's stop there on that one. The butter lamb. This next one, a tradition maybe you've heard of. Maybe if you haven't, you might want to adopt it. In Norway, the tradition of reading crime novels and watching crime TV shows at Easter time. The article we linked to says it all goes back to the 1920s. There was an advertising campaign for a book, trying to sell a crime book, and it was, I guess, so successful that every year that was a time to sell your crime novel, and now, more recently, your crime TV show. Now, if we're wrong, let me say again, the fact-checkers have gone home for the long weekend. So if you're in Norway and you're like, nope, nope, you got this wrong, let us know. Reach out through shownotes.page. Also, that's where you can get our show notes, and that's where we link to the article that talks about this crime novel Easter tradition. How could this not catch on, though? A good book and a long weekend where you got a house full of chocolate? That's a pretty good weekend. I think we first reported on this one last year. You know, where the price of eggs kept getting more and more bonkers. The folks at Jet Puffed Marshmallows came out with kits where you could decorate a marshmallow instead of an egg. More cost-effective, Easter marshmallows, and delicious. Maybe that's something you haven't heard of before. You can probably figure out how to decorate a marshmallow on your own, but I'll put a link in the shownotes, shownotes.page. And now this message from carrots. Carrots, they're orange. Next up is the world record for eating marshmallow peeps. Delicious peeps, or maybe you're not a peep fan, and you're like, peeps are for freaks. That's a pretty good slogan. Write that one down, somebody. So, this world record has stood the test of time. Matt Stonie, a professional eater. Please do not attempt unless you're a professional. With 255 peeps. Yeah, Matt! 59! Matt Stonie!
In five minutes, Matt Stonie ate 255 peeps. That is the record. If you want to see that, perhaps you're in a situation where you eat too many peeps. Watch Matt Stonie eat these peeps, and then maybe you won't have an appetite for peeps for a while. We'll link to the video in the shownotes. Now, some additional world records that we like to share at Easter time. The first one is the most Instagram likes of an egg. This was an egg that got posted on social media. At the time it got posted, the caption was, Let's set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram, beating the current world record held by Kylie Jenner. We got this! Well, they did got this. Get this. They beat the world record, and for a while it was the most liked post on Instagram. It's not anymore, but it is the most liked egg. We link to their account. You can have a look at the egg, but it, you know, looks like an egg. It is actually a stock photo of an egg, but if you want to check that out, you can click the shownotes. Maybe you got a great looking egg, and you're ready to beat that record this weekend. A few other ones here. The biggest batch of scrambled eggs, more than 6,800 pounds, if you wanted to get that going this weekend. Most people to pass an egg around. I believe this is the spoon, the old pass the egg on the spoon. It's hard to find a lot more info on this, but the Guinness World Record is 390 plus people passing the egg. So that's a record maybe you want to set if you're going to a place with a good crowd on. Most eggs eaten while watching the egg scene from Cool Hand Luke. 49 eggs. That is, in case you're unfamiliar, that is a famous scene from a classic movie, Cool Hand Luke, where the character is trying to eat 50 eggs, hard-boiled eggs, and while people were watching that scene unfold, they ate 49 eggs. The most boiled eggs to be peeled and eaten in one minute, six. That sounds like something you could do maybe. If you get the right eggs, sometimes those things are hard to peel. How about now we hit you with some Peeps facts, where Peeps are the best-selling non-chocolate Easter candy. Over half a billion Peeps are eaten each Easter season. The best-selling Peep, the yellow Peep. The yellow chick. Maybe you like the purple bunny or something else. Well, you're a weirdo. No judgment here. I'm just, you know, science has spoken on that. The company that makes Peeps in the 1950s used to make them by hand. Took 27 hours, almost 27 hours to make a Peep. Then they went automation. Six minutes. The six-minute Peep. I forgot all about this one. We reported on this last year and I guess it's an annual thing and it's kind of famous in certain circles. The Peeps research that first began at Emory University. It sounds like they were testing the theory that Peeps are indestructible. Which, wouldn't that be wonderful? You could make a suit out of Peeps and be safe. Walk around safely in your Peep suit. They tested Peeps under certain conditions. They are remarkably resilient Peeps. According to the write-up, Peeps resist dissolving in sulfuric acid. Even when they found things that would kind of go to work on the Peeps, like phenol or phenol, I don't know how you pronounce. That seemed to work on Peeps after about an hour. But not the eyes. The eyes were still there. The Peep eyes were still peeping. The Peeps peepers were peeping. So a big shout out to Emory University and to the world of science as they continue to experiment on Peeps. A couple other quick ones here. The largest decorated Easter egg in the world unveiled in 2023 in Brazil. 16 meters tall. 54 feet. Where I live, that's like a telephone pole. Almost two telephone poles. Pretty tall egg. The largest chocolate rabbit in the world. Also Brazil. In 2017, they made a chocolate rabbit that was 9,000 and some pounds. 4,200 and something kilograms. For that one, they had a contest and whoever won got to burrow their way into the giant chocolate statue and live inside it. No, they did not. That part not true, but wouldn't that be great? Yes, it would. Another one here. The largest real rabbit. It's not an Easter bunny, but 52 pounds. Darius. Darius weighs 52 pounds and is over 4 feet long. I think the actual record is for the longest rabbit. 4 feet tall, this rabbit. If you want to see what Darius looks like, I will link to a photo and to that entry in the Guinness World Records. All right, that is that and thank you for tuning in to our Easter special. I hope you have a wonderful. ... looks like. I will link to a photo and to that entry in the Guinness World Records. All right, that is that, and thank you for tuning in to our Easter special. I hope you have a wonderful Easter if you're celebrating. If you're not, I hope you have just wonderful... I hope life is wonderful. If you want to check our show notes, the show notes page is shownotes.page. Coming back next Friday with the usual format. Thanks for telling a friend or an enemy about our program. And to those of you who have taken the time to rate and review the show, thanks for that too. (Easter Robot Uprising Song follows)