Unemployed Irish artist, Frank Buckley, has built an entire apartment from the shredded remains of 1.4 billion euros he borrowed from the national mint. He says the Billion Euro Home is a monument to the madness the single currency brought to Ireland.

In 2002, when Ireland adopted the euro, a wave of cheap credit flooded the country, fueling a huge property bubble that eventually led to the country’s economic downfall. People were spending billions of euros on buildings, but when the bubble burst in 2007, the country plunged into the deepest recession of the industrialized world, and those buildings quickly lost their value. Frank Buckley was one of the many Irish who was given a 100% mortgage by the bank, to buy a home with an estimated cost of €365,000, despite the fact he had no steady income. Now his house on the far reaches of Dublin’s commuter belt has lost a third of its value, and the artist is stuck with the credit.

Read More »

This is one of the grossest world records I have ever covered, but it’s just so unusual I couldn’t resist sharing it with you guys. A man has kept the around 95,200 pieces of nicotine gum he has chewed over the last six years and put them all together in what is considered the world’s largest gumball.

50-year-old Barry Chappell, from California’s Palos Verdes Estates, has been busy over the last few years, building a 175-pound chewy monstrosity with a diameter of 62 inches, out of the tens of thousands of nicotine gum pieces he’s chewed. Barry is completely aware of the fact that most people who hear about his hobby are more or less disgusted, but that doesn’t make him less proud of his achievement. After all he did stick to the task for six long years, using every one of the approximately 95,200 pieces of nicotine gum he has used to help him stay away from cigarettes. Now his efforts are about to be rewarded, as Ripley’s Believe It or Not decided to acquire his giant gumball and present it as the largest medicated gumball in the world.

Read More »

If you ever doubted real X-Men were among us, check out the neat super-power of Nong Youhui, a young Chinese boy who can see in total darkness.

Riddick, the cool antihero played by Vin Diesel in Pitch Black and The Chronicles of Riddick is one of my all-time favorite  sci-fi  movie characters, but I never dreamed of someday reading about somebody who could actually see in the dark. The first news about a little Chinese child with cat-like eyes who could see in the dark as well as normal people see in clear daylight, first broke out in 2009. Doctors who examined little Nong Youhui said he was born with a rare condition known as luekodermia, which leaves his eyes exposed to sunlight damage, but also allow him to see clearly in the dark.

Read More »

A video showing Chinese soldiers in a circle passing an explosive satchel from one man to another, until one of them decides to throw it in a hole just before it explodes, has been making the rounds online, leaving everyone flabbergasted.

Photos of South Korea’s special forces troops training in all kinds of extreme conditions have been showing up on the Internet for a few years now, but nothing those guys go through compares to the shocking drill the Chinese devised. During an exhibition drill in Hong Kong, last month, an elite garrison of 6,000 PLA troops staged a series of impressive exercises for the visit of the island’s chief executive, Sir Donald Tsang. Snipers shot tiny glasses, soldiers carried heavy logs and jumped through rings of fire, but nothing as incredible as a group of men playing a game of pass-the-bomb.

Read More »

Have you been dying to tell someone that their nose hairs gross you out? Do you find yourself facing them every day, unable to voice out your disgust? If your answer to these two questions is “yes” , Chololi is just the service for you. It allows anyone to email people anonymously, telling them that their pesky nostril hairs need to be trimmed soon.

Originally launched in Japanese, the web service is now available for the English-speaking as well. To use it, all you need to do is go to their website and fill out a form. Provide the person’s name, e-mail address, the nostril through which the hair is visible, the number of hairs and you’re done! The message will be conveyed in secrecy. Just for kicks, you can even choose the tone with which the message is delivered. There’s mild, strong, commanding, and the nastiest of them all, scornful.

Read More »

Ever looked at a baby and wondered if it was a boy or a girl? I’ve been there. It’s a dicey situation because most parents take offence if you blurt out the wrong gender. Beck Laxton and Keiran Cooper are exceptions, though. They raised their kid for five years without revealing the gender to anyone, until recently. Only when things were getting difficult at school did they tell the world that their baby is actually a boy.

This might sound real crazy to a lot of people out there, and Laxton is quite aware of that too. The 46-year-old mom does admit that several people had branded the couple as “loony” and they had to suffer some amount of ostracisation due to their choices. “I discovered that I’d been described as ‘that loony woman who doesn’t know whether her baby is a boy or a girl’. And I could never persuade anyone in the group to come around for coffee. They just thought I was mental,” she says.

Read More »

If you’ve been wanting to get into shape but haven’t had the time to exercise, Aerobic House Cleaning might just be the thing for you. The fitness program was devised by Steve Markovich, who has been following it for the past 16 years.

The 57-year-old from Crescent Springs, Ky., has managed to make a heart-pumping workout out of ordinary chores such as vacuuming and washing windows. According to Markovich, the vacuum cleaner is the most versatile exercise machine ever. He’s found a way to combine squats, lunges and hip twists while he’s getting the floors clean. He says that he burns so many calories through house chores that he can afford to allow himself a few treats once in a while. A vanilla ice cream topped with peanut butter, for instance. He seems pretty fit for his age, although he does sport a tiny little paunch.

Read More »

Nature has always been about the ‘survival of the fittest’, but sometimes even the fittest cannot survive its harsh conditions. What happened with David Austin is a classic example of how merciless the outdoors can truly be. He had embarked upon a year-long survival challenge in the Scottish wilderness, but was found dead within a month.

The 29-year-old from Derby was on a mission inspired by English adventurer Bear Grylls. Sadly however, his body was discovered on December 31st by a track worker in a remote mountain hut located in Corrour, Highland Perthshire. The condition in which the body was found suggests that it had been lying there for several weeks, unnoticed. According to post mortem reports, the most plausible cause for death was hypothermia.

Read More »

Celebrity TV Gardner David Domoney has made a startling revelation. The drug that has helped so many men spruce up their love-life apparently works wonders for flowers as well. And only 1/50^th of a regular sized pill of Viagra is all that’s required.

Cut flowers that are placed in a vase end up wilting in no time at all. But now with Viagra, the life and freshness of flowers can actually be doubled. Although men might not find this piece of information very amusing, I’m sure there are plenty of women out there who would love to try out this simple, yet excellent tip. According to Domoney, “you only need a tiny amount of Viagra to stiffen things up nicely.” By ‘things’, I’m assuming he means the flowers.

Read More »

If you can pay someone to help you get a date, then who says you can’t do the same when you want to dump them? Meet Jonathan Kiekbusch from Brighton, U.K., the 21-year-old who has managed to make a living out of breaking-up for others. Not surprisingly, he’s single himself.

Jonathan doesn’t charge the sun and moon for his services. You can avail them at a flat fee of £5 ($8) plus expenses. If he puts in more time, it’s at £20 an hour. Not so bad when you consider the prospect of facing your girlfriend/boyfriend, having to tell them you’re not so in to them anymore. Again, not surprisingly, most of Jonathan’s clients are male.

Of course, this isn’t his only job. Marketing executive by day, and relationship-breaker by night, Jonathan got into the profession when he realized his potential by helping a few friends. His first time was with a friend called Stuart, who was always fighting with his girlfriend. One night he spoke to the two of them during a fight, making them see that they weren’t really suited for each other. The couple parted ways on amiable terms. After a few more of such incidents, Jonathan had to break up with his own girlfriend, and it ended pretty badly. He wished he could have had someone else intervene and make things easier, and that’s when he realized the opportunity that lay before him. He instantly grabbed it.

Read More »

This one is definitely going in the file as one of the most bizarre church stories ever. I mean, we’ve seen ministers rapping the nativity story and also starting tattoo parlors at church. But putting a bed on the roof of a church to encourage couples to have sex? That’s just taking it a bit too far.

Ed Young is a Baptist minister at the Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas. He recently co-authored a book with his wife Lisa, called ‘Sexperiment – 7 days to lasting intimacy with your spouse’. Through the book, the minister and his wife encourage couples to go on a 7-day sex challenge. They say that this is what is needed to put the zing back into marriages. The Reverend even conducted the experiment among members of his congregation and says that the couples came back with some highly positive results.

Read More »

Chaiten – The Chilean Town Engulfed by Volcanic Mudflow (Environmental Graffiti)

World of Warcraft Addicts Pee in Bottles to Stay Glued to Computers (The Register)

1,000-Pound Butter Sculpture to Power Farm for Three Days (Huffington Post)

Impressive Boat Made from Thousands of Donated Items (Daily Mail)

Real-Life Milka Purple Calf Born in Croatia (You Kidding Me!?)

The World’s Most Expensive Quad Bike (BBC)

Man Lost in Blizzard Burns Money to Survive (The Star)

The Beautiful Geometry of Suburbia from Above (Environmental Graffiti)

16-Year-Old Sails Around the World (The Guardian)

Man Shoots Nail in Brain, Doesn’t Notice (Chicago Tribune)

ArLynn Presser is a 51-year-old woman who lives in Winnetka, Illinois. It’s normal for ArLynn to stay indoors all the time. In fact, for most of her adult life, she hardly ever left the confines of her home, and most certainly did not venture out of her home town. Her career as a writer ensured that she could spend her life indoors and still get things done. If this sounds strange to you, you must know that ArLynn suffers from agoraphobia – the fear of crowded places or enclosed public spaces.

Like most introverts, ArLynn interacts with people online and she has 325 friends she chats with on Facebook. Last year, she went and did something that no one could have ever expected. On 31^st of Dec, 2010, she made a resolution to meet all 325 of her Facebook friends in person, the following year. She wrote a blog post about it and then set about achieving her goal. She called her project “Face to Facebook”. For a person who was terrified of flying and could never get on a plane before, this was certainly a daunting task. In the end, she did a great job, traveling over 13 countries and taking over 39 flights. By the end of 2011, she had met 292 friends, about 90% of what she had intended to. ArLynn had been to Taiwan, Korea, Philippines, Dubai, Italy, Malaysia, Ireland, England, Germany and four other countries.

Read More »

A 58-year-old Singaporean woman lived on the toilet for over two years, before she was forced to undergo treatment. She felt that someone was holding her down and preventing her from leaving the toilet.

Quite understandably, she had been suffering from depression for a long time. According to her 64-year-old husband, Ong Kean On, the woman hadn’t left the toilet since the 25^th of May, 2009. She ate, drank and slept on the toilet since then. Her complaint was that there was someone throwing stones at her, and water was dripping on her from somewhere. A few days ago, Ong was successfully able to get his wife out of the toilet with the help of ambulance staff and the police. She was then sent to the Institute of Mental Health to receive treatment, after which she has returned home. Her condition is now reported to be stable and she hasn’t returned to the toilet ever since she came back.

Read More »

The world’s largest copy of the Qur’an was recently unveiled in Kabul, Afghanistan. It was created painstakingly by calligrapher Mohammed Sabir Khedri and his 9 assistants, over five long years. The massive project was undertaken by Khedri in an attempt to prove that the rich traditions and heritage of the nation have certainly not been destroyed by war.

The giant Qur’an is made with beautiful gold scripting that also combines millions of tiny colorful dots to create symbolic decorations around the pages. Khedri said he wanted to use as many tasteful colors as possible to make the holy book look beautiful. Interestingly, he had actually completed the project in 2009, and kept it a secret for two whole years. This was because the binding and the room to house the book weren’t ready yet. Khedri’s masterpiece is now stored in a cultural center in Kabul that was founded in the 1980s. The final copy consists of 218 pages and measures 2.28 x 1.55 m. It weighs a whopping 500kg and the skin of 21 goats was used to create the cover. It’s estimated cost is around £300,000 ($465,000).

Read More »