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ead this to learn how you can become a billionaire, guaranteed! The lowest value coins on the planet are now in Asia, a BBC survey reported last week. If you exchanged 850 Burmese pya for US currency, you’d get just one American cent.

More microscopic still is the tiyin from Uzbekistan, Central Asia. If your dream is to own a US one-cent coin, you’d need to save up 2,000 tiyins. (And remember not to spend your one-cent coin all at once.)

When I told this to a colleague, he wanted to visit Uzbekistan just to fill in a few online dating forms from there. You see, anyone in that country with a net worth of US$5,000 can truthfully write: “By the way, I am an honest-to-god billionaire.”

He pictured thousands of beautiful women throwing themselves at him before they learn (too late) that a billionaire in Uzbekistan has less money than a church mouse, a Hong Kong beggar or a Greek tycoon.

Talking of online dating sites, I was shocked to read that rich men in China are using them to find paid mistresses. The Global Times reported that a typical example was a man named Hoan who posted the usual sort of dating-site details about the woman he was looking for (must be 160 to 170 cm tall, etc), but then added that he the right female “applicant” will get a salary equal to $1,500 a month plus a car.

When I told my friend Lucy about this, she said: “That is totally disgusting. So, what type of car is it?”

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A couple who got married have been instructed to “live like brother and sister”, the Times of India reported. The order sent to kissing cousins Jyoti Parkash and Priyanka Rani came from community leaders in their town in the Haryana district. Hey, guys, they got married. What you want them to do happens automatically.

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Nissin, the Japanese company that makes instant noodles, is to start selling special “survivalist” packages of cup noodles for the equivalent of $8.36 a portion. You can store them in your bomb-proof bunker and they won’t go off “for three years”, the press release says. I didn’t know normal cup noodles went off! I must have eaten prehistoric cup noodles loads of times. The ones in my local supermarket are covered in dust and are probably brontosaurus flavor.

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A Taiwanese firm called Polytron is working on the prototype of a transparent mobile phone, a tech website revealed last week. It looks like you are holding a piece of glass to your head. If you thought losing your mobile phone was a big problem before, wait till you get one of these.

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I was going to make a joke about the horsemeat found in meatballs at IKEA but then I thought: Naaaay.

But in truth, my daughter always wanted a pony. So I’m going to buy her a packet of IKEA meatballs. I’ll tell her: “It’s an IKEA pony. Self-assembly.”

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Tip of the day: Next time your boss asks you to do something unethical, just put on a crisp, superhero voice, and say: “No. My powers can only be used for good.”

The writer is a columnist and journalist.