It takes a great deal of skill and patience to create even the simplest matchstick model, but a detailed structure like the famous Taj Mahal seems almost impossible to recreate using the tiny sticks of wood. But Indian artist Shaikh Salimbhai challenged himself to create an almost identical model of the iconic structure using only wooden matchsticks, and although it took him a year and 19 days to finish it, he accomplished his goal. The wooden model was made from 75,000 matchsticks and will certainly become an inspiration for matchstick artists around the world.  The awe-inspiring matchstick Taj Mahal was unveiled on October 9, in the Indian city of Ahmedabad.

If you happen to be a fan of matchstick models, you might want to check out the awesome works of artists we featured on Oddity Central in the past, like Patrick Anton, Phillip Warren or Tofic Daher.

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Brooklyn performance artist Marni Kotak plans to have her baby in an art gallery, before an audience, during a performance she hopes will convince people “that human life itself is the most profound work of art, and that therefore giving birth, the greatest expression of life, is the highest form of art.”

Entitled “The Birth of Baby X” Marni’s performance will be the craziest thing that happened in the art world since Marion Laval Jeantet injected herself with horse blood. She is due sometime in the next five weeks, and visitors entering the Bushwick’s Microscope Gallery are warned the baby could arrive at any time. The artist has chosen the place as a “birthing room” and will spend every day there until she has her baby. “I have decided to do this because I want to show people that, as in my previous performances, real life is the best performance art,” she said.

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Japanese artist Seikou Yamaoka uses a $2.99 application called ArtStudio, and his fingertips to create incredible-looking portraits on his iPod Touch and iPad. And he does it all during a long train commute.

It’s amazing what some people can do with their hands, but Seikou Yamaoka’s work is even more impressive considering he only uses his fingertips. By tapping and sliding his fingertip over the 3.5-inch screen of an iPod Touch, he creates beautiful portraits that look a lot like they’ve been painted with watercolor. That’s actually the talented artist’s goal – to produce  images that look more like watercolour paintings than digital artworks. He uses ArtStudio, a cheap application available on the Apple App Store to create complex colorful images over several hours, during a train commute to work. He starts with a blank canvas, draws an outline of the face he’s about to reproduce and carefully adds strokes of color until it looks like a real painting. Apart from his unusual talent of using Apple’s gadgets to create portraits, Yamaoka likes to paint the old fashioned way, using watercolor or oil-based paint.

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At 2.5 meters wide and with just 53 square meters of floor space, the Eh Häusel (Wedding House) in Amberg, Germany is the world’s smallest hotel, and a five-star one at that.

From the outside, the Eh Häusel looks like it’s been pushed into the narrow space between two neighboring buildings, but it’s the interior that’s supposed to impress its guests. The hotel is set up on 6 staggered floors and has all the features you’re used to finding in a luxury hotel, including a very comfortable bed, fireplace, fine furniture, flat screen TV and spa bathroom. Guests from as far as China or Mexico pay 240 euros to spend a night at the world’s smallest hotel, and believe it or not the Eh Häusel is fully booked many months in advance. Of course that’s partly due to the fact that’s it’s so small it can only be occupied by one couple at a time.

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Seven Skateboarding Animals (Environmental Graffiti)

Obama Fried Chicken Restaurant Opens in China (China Digital Times)

Pizza Vending Machine to Be Released in New York (Youtube)

100-Year-Old Pensioner Requests Male Stripper for Her Birthday (Mirror.co.uk)

Dog Is Afraid of Julia Roberts (Youtube)

Daredevils Enjoy Jacuzzi from 500ft High Bridge (SWNS)

10 Tallest Sand Dunes on Earth (Environmental Graffiti)

London’s Stunning Leaf Carpet (Daily Mail)

Mysterious Beached Whale Lands Half a Mile Inland (Telegraph)

Water Caligraphy Bike Paints the Streets of Beijing (Designboom)

Le Van, the man who made headlines two years ago after it was discovered he had been sleeping with his dead wife for five years, has confirmed he is still sleeping with his beloved, and authorities can’t do anything to stop him.

The story about Le Van’s bizarre sleeping habit broke out at the end of 2009. Vietnamese papers posted photos of a man sleeping with a human-shaped gypsum statue that contained the body of his dead wife. we covered the story and you can read about it here, but long story short, the man couldn’t cope with the loss of his soul mate so he dug up her remains, put them inside the statue and continued sharing a bed with her. It was one of the strangest news of 2009, but I was sure that once word got out, local authorities would somehow convince Le Van to bury the remains of his beloved wife. I was wrong. Read More »

If you’re sick of picking splinters from between your teeth after chewing dozens of pencils, you’re going to love Cecilia Felli’s newest invention – a licorice pencil called Matitizia.

Inspired by people’s habit of chewing on wooden pencils, Italian designer Cecilia Felli has created a truly revolutionary tool that’s not designed to stop them from munching, just improve the experience. Either because they’re stressed or simply bored, people love to chew on their pencils. They don’t taste particularly good and there’s a risk of lead poisoning, but people don’t seem to mind much, but Cecilia Felli thought she could help by allowing people to bite on their pencils without worrying about the consequences. The Matitizia is a pencil made of delicious licorice with the lead-containing core going only half way up, so the chewer doesn’t have to worry about his health. Whether you’re stressed by your job, crave a cigarette one day after quitting (again), or feel incredibly bored, Matitizia will leave a nice taste in your mouth.

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Eating hot curry is definitely not as fun as watching other people eat it, and two eating contest participants found that out the hard way after they were rushed to the hospital trying to eat as much Killer Kismot curry as possible.

The Kismot Restaurant in Edinburgh, Scotland organizes its world’s hottest chilli eating contest every year, daring competitors to down as much  as they can of the establishment’s signature Killer Kismot curry. The fund raising event gathered twenty brave souls ready to risk their throats in order to raise money for charity, but only 10 of them ended up tasting the mouth-burning delicacy. 21-year-old Curie Kim, who’s name is ironically pronounced “curry”, had to be taken to the hospital twice in just a few hours, after suffering severe stomach pains, vomiting and indigestion. She only had a few tablespoons of curry but said they caused her pain like she never endured before. On the bright side, the young student finished second and took comfort in the fact that at least she suffered for a good cause.

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Herbert Chavez, a Superman fan from the Philippines, is so obsessed with the Man of Steel that he underwent several plastic surgery procedures just to look like his favorite superhero.

According to a video report by Bandila News’ Marie Lozano, 35-year-old Herbert Chavez has dramatically altered his appearance to look more like Superman. Unfortunately, the report is in Filipino and I’m not very good at that, but the guys at Real Self Blog translated some of it and managed to uncover that Chavez first went under the knife in 1995 and he’s had several other procedures since then. He had a chin augmentation to get Superman’s cleft, rhinoplasty to get Christopher Reeves nose, silicone injections for more plump lips and even thigh implants for a more muscular look. Examining the before and after photos, they speculate he may also have had eye surgery, cheek augmentation and jaw augmentation.

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Although his is the only standing building in what used to be an old neighborhood of Roubaix, in Northern France, Salah Oudjani refuses to sell the coffee house he has worked in for the last 46 years.

The title doesn’t sound like anything special, after all, many people refuse to have their property demolished, at least in the beginning, until they get a good price or they notice everyone else is selling except them. But for the 71-year-old business owner neither of the above reasons were good enough. The two-story triangular building once located at the intersection of two streets appears to be the only survivor of a serious air raid. Everything around it has been turned to rubble and taken to local landfills, brick by brick, and Oudjani’s place looks like it’s the only sign of life in a wasteland. Like all the other residents, the café owner has received numerous proposals for his property, but he never even considered selling it. “I will not sell! I worked for it, this coffee house. They will not make me go, I’m used to pressure” Oudjani says, and everyone knows he means it.

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Have you ever wondered what a giant Toffifee candy would look like? Well, now you don’t have to, because sweet-loving Laura Parry and her brother David have already made one, as well as several other giant versions of popular English sweets.

23-year-old Laura and her brother David, 20, spend one day each week cooped up in the kitchen creating giant calorie bombs shaped like popular English snacks. The two university students came up with the idea on a day off from their summer jobs say neither of them are culinary geniuses, but they just thought they’d give it a go. And considering so far they’ve created impressive super-sized versions of treats like the Bourbon biscuit, Cadbury Fudge, Angel Slice and Jammy Dodger, I’d say their idea was brilliant. The Toffifee looks especially tasty to me, which had to cut with a saw to get a cross-section photo.

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Botaoshi is a wacky Japanese sport played by cadets at Japan’s Military Defense Academy, where opposing teams literally fight each other over a wooden pole.

Now I’ve seen my share of bizarre sports and games since I started Oddity Central, but Botaoshi (poll-pull-down) definitely takes the cake, and guess what, it’s Japanese. The game, which involves two teams of 75 members each and a wooden pole, is pretty straight forward. Members of a team gather around and on the wooden poll and try to defend it against the attacking team, which tries to take it down by any means necessary. And I do mean ANY means…Players push, punch, kick and grab their opponents as they try to fulfill their mission.

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Mosaic artist Doug Powell uses thousands of puzzle pieces to assemble mosaic portraits that capture facial features right down to the finest features.

We’ve featured some of Doug’s work on OC a while ago, when he created a space shuttle mosaic exclusively out of keyboard keys. But he is actually most famous for his unique skill of putting puzzle pieces together as detailed mosaics, which he calls Duzzle Art. If you’re wondering what that means, he just replaced the “P” in puzzle with a “D” from Douglas to personalize his art.

Doug Powell started experimenting with random jigsaw puzzle pieces in 2001, but it wasn’t until 2007 that he began assembling them into portraits. Throughout the years he has developed and refined his technique to the point where he can now reproduce detailed features like lips or eyelashes. The artist never paints any of the puzzle pieces he uses in his mosaics, he only cuts and shapes some of the pieces to make his works even more realistic. Each of the Duzzle Art masterpieces numbers thousands of individual puzzle pieces, and Doug claims he has an inventory of over one million pieces, enough to fill an average size above-ground pool.

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The Superbus looks more like a very long Lamborghini than a regular bus, but it’s able to transport 23 people over long distances at speeds of up to 250 km/h.

The world’s first superbus was developed at the Delft University of Technology, in Holland, under the supervision of professor Wobbo Ockels, who in 1985 became the first Dutch astronaut to travel in outer space. He thought trains were too slow for present day needs and also have the disadvantage of traveling only between stations, so he set out to build a super vehicle that could travel at lightning speeds and be eco-friendly at the same time. He and his team spent three years working on the Superbus, and the result is nothing short of impressive.

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Camel racing is a really popular sport throughout the Arab world, and owning a heard of specially-bred fast camels is apparently considered a symbol of wealth and power. But it’s not the animals we should be talking about, it’s their weird-looking robot jockeys.

Obviously, robot jockeys aren’t exactly an integral part of the old camel racing tradition. In the old days, children and light young men were used to whip the camels to victory, but in recent years things had  really gotten out of hand, and crackdowns on the black market revealed around 40,000 kids from South Asia had been kidnapped or sold by their families to become, among other things, camel jockeys. Welfare organizations started reuniting the children with their families, offering them shelter and food until they could return home, but a solution to camel jockey trafficking had to be found urgently. The United Arab Emirates banned children under the age of 16 from competing in camel races, and a Swiss company called K-team realized the business opportunity and began creating light robot jockeys known as “Kamal”, in 2003.

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