Our weekly round-up of outlandish and interesting information collected from the corners of the charity sector.

Raising cash? It’s child’s play

Every so often Diary is depressed by how much easier the world is when you’re ridiculously rich and famous and good-looking. This is one of those times.

On this particular occasion, Diary has been wound up by the fact that Shakira, the Latin American superstar who is arguably most famous for announcing that her breasts are “small and humble, so you don’t confuse them with mountains” in the song Wherever Whenever, has thrown a baby shower, along with her husband, the footballer Gerard Pique, and by doing so, has raised £100,000 for Unicef.

Anyone who’s ever plodded round 26 miles of London knows that raising even so much as a grand for charity is bleeding hard work, and she just has a kid and says it would be nice for everyone to give presents, and bing, there you go, six figures. Diary is suffering from a fit of, well, Pique.

Obviously it’s very nice of her, and well done to the Piques for doing it. On an incidental note, though, how is it that a couple with that much moolah can’t afford to give their kid a decent hair cut? Honestly, it looks like they’ve just put a bowl on his head and cut round it.

It’s a solid joke…

So what was the most popular thing on social media in Australia last week? Apparently the fact that a bloke called Hugh G Rection made a $32.38 donation to a televised appeal for the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne.

A prankster decided to spunk a bit of cash on the joke, and succeeded in getting the name up on screen during the coverage. And within minutes, Hugh G Rection erupted all over Twitter. As it were.

Why was the joke so popular, though? It’s hard to get a grip on it.

The long farm of the law

Some real crap gets donated to charity from time to time. But it was a synthetic replacement that made its way to Welsh charity Action to Combat Hardship recently, after police found themselves with several bags of fertiliser to get rid of.

The donation came after the fuzz raided a cannabis farm and came away with not just a bunch of suspicious-looking plants, but an enormous pile of compost and fertiliser.

Several tonnes of compost are now being donated to the poverty relief charity, and will now be used to help grow food for hard-up families.