Wizard Oberon Zell-Ravenheart decided the real world needed its own Hogwarts school of magic, so he established the Grey School of Wizardry – the world’s first registered magic academy.

the 68-year-old master from Catoti, California, has dedicated his life to studying the dark arts, and decided to create a recognized academic establishment where he could share his knowledge with anyone willing to learn (and pay the admission fee). Just like the famous Hogwarts imagined by author J.K. Rowling, the Grey School of Wizardry teaches 16 different magic disciplines, including spell-casting, beastmastery, alchemy, wand-making and horse whispering. Students are split into four ancient houses – Winds, Undines, Gnomes and Salamanders and just like Harry Potter and his friends, they must all learn to defend themselves against the Dark Arts.

While Oberon admits people call him “the real Dumbledore” and that he loves Harry Potter because it increased interest in wizardry (and the numbers of paying students of his school, of course), the popular saga didn’t inspire him to become a wizard. In fact, he was practicing magic long before J.K. Rowling wrote her successful novels. The former teacher and counselor first rose to fame during the 1980s, when he claimed he and his wife – a witch named Morning Glory – had created the world’s first unicorn. Remarkably enough, they actually had managed to create a single-horned creature by performing minor surgery on a goat. It caused quite a stir and ended up touring America with a famous circus.

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A certain psychologist who goes by the name of Doctor He has shocked Chinese netizens after he showed up on the streets of Shenzen City, China, with a woman in her underwear, who helped him advertise his services.

I know it’s not the most common way to look for employers, but you have to understand this guy is a psychologist; he knows how the human brain works so I guess he decided a shocking approach was the easiest way to grab the attention he needed. So He hired a girl to stand beside him on the street, dressed only in underwear and holding a sign that said ““National treasure, Mental Illness Specialist, 10 million yearly salary, searching for buyer.” Meanwhile he just sat quietly in his chair, waiting for the media and watching as passers-by gathered to take photos with their cellphones.

Very straightforward marketing strategy I must say, but I bet the girl hated every minute of her performance. While she may be comfortable getting paid for showing up in her underwear, doing so on a winter day must not have been easy. As a matter of fact, witnesses say her skin quickly turned red from the cold, and she put her clothes back on after about 20 minutes. But that was more than enough for the doctor to reach his goal.

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Kelly Coxhead, 32, got engaged 10 years ago and has since then been trying to convince her fiancee to set a wedding date. Now, she’s closer than ever to tying the knot, all she needs is 1 million Facebook friends.

Fiancee Paul Mappelthorpe, a mechanic who lives with Kelly in Swindon, England, has now become arguably the most unromantic man in Britain after refusing to marry his partner until she gets one million Facebook users to join a group. While other women would have probably left him after hearing such a ridiculous claim, Ms. Coaxhead actually set up a group called ‘I NEED 1 MILLION PEOPLE TO JOIN FOR PAUL TO MARRY ME C’MON GUYS HELP ME lol’, and began asking family and friends to join.

”It just came out of nowhere. I thought ‘a million’ that sounds good.” Paul says, ”When you think there’s 67 billion people in the world it’s less than 0.1 per cent. I just like a challenge and I like the idea of setting a challenge for her. It’ll give her something to look at on Facebook.”

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Yuri Babin, a retired military officer from the Russian city of Novosibirsk, has spent the last 13 year collecting a fortune of about 5 million kopek coins.

The kopek is 1/100th of a Ruble, the Russian equivalent of a cent. Babin began collecting them in 1998, following wide scale Russian bank defaults that caused the kopek to become practically worthless. Instead of trying to get rid of them, this Russian version of Mr. Scrooge decided to put together a huge collection of coins. He would pick them off the street and ask vendors to change his currency in coins of the lowest denomination.

The “kopek millionaire”, as locals know Yuri Babin, now has a fortune of around five million coins, which weighs over 7.5 tonnes, but is worth just 50,000 rubles ($1,500). But it was never about the value for Mr. Babin, he just loves bathing in his impressive fortune, and has even used a few kopeks to make his wardrobe shine.

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It comes in an unremarkable-looking bottle, but the “Tezhi Sanbian Jiu” rice wine is a Valentine’s Day gift your loved one will always remember, especially after you tell them it translates as “Three-Penis Liquor“.

I know what you’re thinking, many drinks have strange names like this to attract attention of customers, but in this case, the label is very accurate – this particular rice wine has various types of animal penis brewed in it to grant vitality to the drinker. The label on the back of the bottle says it contains seal penis, deer penis and Cantonese dog penis, all of them popular ingredients in Chinese traditional medicine, said to increase male potency and virility.

So if you’re looking for a special Valentine’s Day gift for your partner, look no further than Three-Penis Liquor; it’s cheap and it’s something they won’t soon forget. You can pick-up a bottle at supermarkets around Shanghai, just remember to make them have a sip before you reveal the secret ingredients. Read More »

Cycle Ball is a niche sport that combines football and cycling in a unique way. It’s been around for over a century, but it’s still regarded as an unusual sport, especially in America.

Also known as “radball”, Cycle Ball was invented in 1893, by a German-American named Nicholas Edward Kaufmann, and steadily gained popularity around Europe. The first Cycle Ball championship was held in 1929, and the sport even reached far lands like Japan, but it never really caught on in the US. You’d think Yanks don’t fancy weird sports played on a bike, but how do you explain the increasing popularity of Bike Polo, or Unicycle Basketball?

Cycle Ball is played by two teams made up of two players riding around a basketball field and trying to shoot a ball through their opponents’ goal, using their heads, or the front wheels of the bikes. It may sound strange, but it’s a pretty simple and fun game to play. A match consists of two seven-minute halves, in which players must keep their feet off the ground to avoid a free-kick, and try to score more goals than their adversaries. While defending the goal, one of the players is allowed to use hands, but you’d be surprised how hard the ball is usually struck in one of these games, so using hands doesn’t help much if the ball is well directed.

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When people are to scared to walk their pets around the city streets because of feral chickens, you know you have a serious problem on your hands. Welcome to Lakeland, Polk County, a city terrorized by chicken.

Now we’re not talking about a small group of rogue chickens causing mayhem around the city, authorities say there are around 600 chickens free running around the streets of northwest Lakeland. You’re probably thinking the only harm they’re capable of is defecating in public places, but it seems some of the locals have actually complained about the birds attacking their children and household pets, forcing local authorities to take desperate measures.

They’ve hired a company called Squeal Deal Animal Control to help catch these feathered villains and are paying them a fee for every bird they bring in. Representatives of the company say the task is a lot harder than it sounds, because the chickens are fast and quick to hide in their surroundings. This is their woods,they go underneath houses and cars and in trees. They know where to escape from you.” ” chicken chaser Clayton Keene said.

Nobody knows exactly how the chickens got on the streets in the first place, but according to urban legends, some locals who raised chickens in the city released them from their cages, allowing them multiply at an alarming rate.

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60-year-old Pamela Cole has spent most of her life putting together an impressive collection of over 2,000 ceramic cats, and doesn’t plan to stop anytime soon.

When Ms. Cole says she’s crazy about cats, you best believe she means it – her house in Hollywood, Birmingham is practically full of ceramic cats, from a common replicas of cartoon characters like Top Cat, to 7th century BC Egyptian statuettes.

This unusual obsession with ceramic cats can be traced back to Pamela Cole’s childhood years, in the 1940s, when her mother bought her a cat to stop her feeling lonely. It was a simple pottery cat from a gift store in Corporation Street, but it kick-started her passion for collecting, and from then on she spent her days scouring shops and craft fairs in search of cat china.

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I’ve read and written about a some pretty unusual hotels, in the past, but this is the first chicken hotel I’ve ever heard of.

The Chicken Hotel created by 31-year-old David Roberts, from Boskenwyn, Helston, is almost just like any other hotel out there, with one big difference – instead of people, it offers accommodations for chicken. I know it sounds like a joke, but this  place is for real, and apparently  it’s also very successful.

“With more people looking to escape the rat race and move out in the country with a little bit of land, keeping chickens is becoming more and more popular. But what do you do if you go away on holiday? Who looks after the chicken?” asks Mr. Roberts, who opened his unusual establishment to encourage people to raise their own chicken. A former cabinet-maker, David Roberts built the chicken coops himself and now rents them for 2 pounds each, plus 75 pence per chicken.

Each coop in the Chicken Hotel holds up to eight chicken and the current offer includes buffet breakfast, lunch and dinner of local produce, served in open-air. Guests are allowed to roam around the hotel grounds all day, before being gathered to roost at night. According to Mr. Roberts, the hotel was fully booked over Christmas time, and he hopes half term and Easter will be just as successful.

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The unusual event took place last Saturday, when Sergei Kaunov and his fiancee Irina Kuzmenko got married in the ice-cold waters of the Enisei River, in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, at a temperature of -30 degrees Celsius.

Sergei, also known as “The Walrus”, is a member of the local ice-swimming club, always dreamed of getting married in such extreme conditions, but his fiancee was never a big fan of winter and low temperatures. Still, her love for The Walrus was so great that she agreed to go through this heart-stopping challenge. So after taking a nice bath to warm up, Irina followed her beloved into the frozen waters, where their friends were already waiting. They formed a half circle around the happy couple, and since no priest was brave enough to marry them at -30 degrees, Sergei simply put a ring on Irina’s finger, while the crowd cheered.

Luckily, friends and family of the happy couple who were to cold to stand by them during the offbeat ceremony, got to join the festivities in a nice warm wooden cabin, where they danced the night away.

I tell ya’, nothing says “I love you” like getting married at -30 degrees, because that’s what your fiancee wanted. I wish my wife had been so understanding and agreed to have the wedding at a strip club…

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Let’s hear it for Genghis Khan everyone, his bloody conquests just earned him the title of greenest invader in the history of man.

‘It’s a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era. Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth’s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture.” said Julia Pongratz, who headed Carnegie Institution’s study that measured carbon impact of a number of historical events that involved a large number of deaths.

Apparently, the armies of Genghis Khan killed so many people that huge cultivated areas  were once again covered with thick forests that absorbed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. According to historical data, during the rule of this famous leader, the Mongol Empire was responsible for the deaths of over 40 million people, which in turn helped remove around 700 million tons of carbon dioxide from the Earth’s atmosphere.

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Dr. Marie Catherine Klarkowski, a dentist from Munchen, Germany, has found the perfect way to open her patient’s mouths as soon as they enter her practice – she and her staff wear low-cut dirndl dresses.

Doctor Klarkowski says she came up with this unusual idea when she noticed how men looked at the waitresses wearing this kind of traditional gowns, at the annual Oktoberfest. The most important thing for us is to take away the patients’ fear. The sight of cleavages gets patients narcotised and distracted from the pain rather quickly.” says this witty dentist, who ordered 10 dresses for herself and her staff.

Believe it or not, this unusual investment paid off  as doctor Klarkowski says she receives a third more patients since the change, all male. “Competition doesn’t sleep – I know colleagues who have decorated their whole practice with Mickey Mouse and one even in Star Trek style.” the good doctor said. She also changed her 250 square meter practice into an “Alpine Lounge”, complete with an open fireplace, wooden benches and deer antlers on the walls.

“Some patients’ mouths are already wide open on entering the practice – and that is just what a dentist wants.” dr. Marie Catherine Klarkowski concluded.

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Josh Le, a student at the University of Alberta, wore a pair of skin-tight jeans from September 2009 to December 2010, without washing them, just to see how much bacteria would build-up on them

The pair of jeans in question was actually made of raw denim, which isn’t treated with any chemicals, so Le thought they would make a perfect home for bacteria, in the course of 15 months. He declared he wore them almost every day, which is pretty amazing, considering that apart from a few wear marks, they looked pretty clean.

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33-year-old Paul Luke, a retired milkman from Essex, England, was forced to build a mini museum for his impressive collection of over 10,000 milk bottles.

Paul collected his first milk bottle in 1987, when he was just nine years old, but as times went by, his passion got out of hand, and he is now the proud owner of 10,000 milk bottles, with the oldest ones dating back to the 1890s. His parents encouraged him to pursue his hobby, because they thought it kept him busy and out of trouble, and he actually started his collection on his parents’ window sill.

In the meantime, he has had to build a miniature museum in his back garden, because his house simply wasn’t big enough for his collection, anymore. All of his milk bottles are either embossed or pyroglazed by a milk company and some of them are the only ones left in existence, which makes Paul Luke think of his collection as a record of the milk industry.

The unique bottles in Paul’s collection, from companies that went out of business decades ago, certainly have financial value, but the dedicated milkman never thought about its monetary value. He is still actively collecting milk bottles.

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Played on a table four times the size of a regular pool table, Knokkers is a new sport that combines elements from both billiards and bowling.

Back in 1985, Steve Wienecke, from Fredericktown, Missouri, was playing in a local pool league, and one day he got it in his head that it would be great to actually play on the table. The former semi-pro football player and cage fighter, currently working as a parole and probation assistant is also an inventor in his spare time, so once the idea was born in his head, it was bound to become reality. His other inventions were deemed unoriginal, but he knew no one had ever built a giant pool table like the one he had in mind.

The idea for his Knokkers table lingered in his head for quite a while, but Steve finally started working on it in 2008. His wife originally thought he was crazy, but seeing his idea take shape, she began encouraging him to realize his dream. Local businesses provided the materials our inventor needed (38 railroad ties, five truckloads of gravel, and 4. 1/4 yards of concrete) and after 200 hours of hard labor, his Knokkers table was complete. “It’s exactly like a regulations pool table, only everything is scaled up four times.Even the dimensions of the pockets are the same, just a lot bigger.” said Steve Wienecke.

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