26-year-old Sandra Holmbom is one heck of a talented makeup artist. Her work is so mind-blowing that it’s hard to believe she has had no professional training whatsoever. She admits that she really loves special effects makeup – a fact that’s pretty obvious from her pictures. It appears that she’s mostly her own model, creating the most horrifying looks like decaying, festering wounds, ripped-skin eye masks, ripped off eyebrows, skeleton masks, wrinkled faces and more.

I am completely in awe of what the self-taught Swedish artist has managed to achieve, especially because I cannot put on simple eyeliner without messing up. Sandra’s makeup is nothing short of perfection. She tries out various ideas for fun and posts tutorials on YouTube. Photographs of her finished ‘looks’ go up on her blog, ‘psychosandra’. “I get really nice feedback on my makeup,” she said. “It’s so fun to read all the comments from all the people out there. Sometimes it may be some who do not like or understand it. But if you’re looking to do weird things, you should take it as a compliment.” Read More »

Wu Deqi is the proud owner of a brand new swanky BMW. Nothing special so far, I know, but that’s because you don’t yet know how he got it. Instead of money, he had to pay for it with a lot of pain. In a promotional contest held last Sunday in the Shapingba District of Southwest China, Wu stood on one leg with one hand touching the coveted car alongside 20 other participants. After a grueling 7 hours and 26 minutes, Wu was the last man standing – automatically winning possession of the 300,000 yuan BMW X1.

Of course, Wu’s feat is nowhere near the Guinness World Record for standing on one leg. That distinction belongs to Suresh Joachim, who balanced himself on one foot for a whopping 76 hours and 40 minutes. But you have to hand it to Wu for his extraordinary effort. I mean, I couldn’t do it for over 5 minutes even if they offered me two BMWs.

The actual event began on 1 March and attracted hundreds of participants. About 140 people entered into three elimination rounds, and 20 shortlisted candidates made it to the final competition on Sunday. This last round was the toughest; some of the contestants actually dropped to the ground in agony. The competition began at 9:30 am and by 1:30 pm, the going got really tough. That’s when the organizers asked participants to stand on tip of their support foot. Flour was spread under each person’s foot to make sure they didn’t cheat and rest their heels.

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Gareth Morgan, a philanthropist from Wellington, New Zealand, has come up with a unique initiative to get rid of the city’s rats. He’s offering university students a free beer for every rat they manage to catch and kill. He’s even giving away rap traps. According to Morgan, rats are a common urban pest that are ruining the native ecology of the country. In fact, he’s so passionate about preserving New Zealand’s wildlife that he’s willing to personally sponsor all the free beers. “We’re trying to make an offer that students just can’t refuse, and we’re trying to get them to be our army,” he said.

Morgan is currently running the campaign in association with Victoria University’s Science Society. According to the Science Society president Jonathan Musther, “There are obviously people who get behind it for the drinks, but then there are a lot of ecology students who are very passionate about trapping and very passionate about New Zealand native flora and fauna.”

“The lure of freebies usually gets people along,” said one student. “But when they find out what they have to do they might be a bit deterred.”

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The Punjab Youth Festival that took place last month in Lahore, Pakistan, featured a lot of bizarre events, including one that had human nut cracker Mohammad Rashid break a whopping 155 walnuts in just one minute. He didn’t even use any special tools, only his forehead.

The walnuts were placed on a long table in two neat rows. At the word ‘go’, Rashid went off like a raging bull, banging his head repeatedly against the table and breaking as many nuts as he could. Bits of shattered walnut were flying everywhere, but the young man didn’t lose focus until he was asked to stop. He emerged from the table with a small cut on his forehead and a victorious smile – he broke the previous record of 44 walnuts in a minute.

According to festival organizers, over 100 world records were challenged by Pakistani youth this year. They did manage to break one other record – a group of 30,000 attendees made the world’s largest human national flag at the National Hockey Stadium. Guinness World Record officials are currently collecting and analyzing the evidence before they declare that both records have indeed been broken.

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It’s the perfect irony: an upstate New York church is giving new meaning to the biblical passage ‘My peace I give unto you’, by giving away a piece. The Grace Baptist Church in Troy, a few hours north of Manhattan, will be gifting an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle later this month during an event honoring hunters and gun owners. ‘Win a Free AR-15’ is the actual slogan being displayed on the church website, followed by the line from the New Testament.

A raffle will be conducted on the church premises on March 23, and the winning ticket will receive the AR-15 modified for sale in New York State. The special service on that day will be dedicated to ‘hunters and gun owners who have been so viciously attacked by the antichristian socialist media and antichristian socialist politicians the last few years’. New York Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin is scheduled to speak at the service. He confirmed to the media that the event did comply with the state’s gun laws. He even said that many New York pastors upstate carry guns, but they are law-abiding, church-going citizens.

The church pastor, John Koletas, defended the event in a letter to his congregation: “Our country was built with the King James Bible and the gun,” he wrote. “Does the Bible need to defend my right to keep and bear arms?” Pastor Michael Collins of Brunswick Baptist Church in Troy also defended the event. “It is not something that we would do, but we have plenty of gun owners in the church, and it is our constitutional right to do so,” he said. “It is not uncommon for churches to host outdoorsman events and give away guns.”

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Performance artists Ward Shelley and Alex Schweder are currently roommates – not in an apartment, but in a large hamster wheel. Alex, who is afraid of heights, lives on the inside of the wheel, at the bottom. Ward, who has no such reservations, stays put at the very top, on the outside (180 degrees from Alex). They came into this unique living arrangement last Friday and plan to continue until March 9th.

Ward and Alex are actually in the middle of an art project that they like to call ‘In Orbit’. They are on display at The Boiler, a performance space at a New York’s Pierogi gallery. It took them four weeks to construct the 30-foot tall, 60-foot in circumference hamster wheel themselves, with a little help from engineer friends. The gigantic structure is suspended from the ceiling and has furniture fastened to it on the inside and the outside. Ward and Alex each have a bed, a desk, a kitchen-bathroom combo, a chair, lamps and a dresser to use.

Every piece of furniture is aligned to its counterpart, so both inhabitants of the wheel have to use the bathroom at the same time, work at the same time and go to sleep at the same time. To change the furniture setting, they simply walk on the wheel in opposite directions, moving it until the next station arrives. For safety reasons, they walk very, very slowly.

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In one of the most sensational courtroom dramas in recent American history, a teenage cheerleader tried to sue her parents for refusing to pay her college tuition. Unfortunately for her, a New Jersey family court judge ruled on Tuesday that the parents are not obligated to do anything of the sort. In fact, all of 18-year-old Rachel Canning’s requests were denied – weekly allowance, high school and college tuition, living expenses and her attorney’s fee.

It isn’t for lack of money – Rachel’s parents, Sean and Elizabeth, have put aside a college fund for her. But they’ve taken the extreme step of withholding those funds because of her bad behavior. “We’re heartbroken, but what do you do when a child says, ‘I don’t want your rules but I want everything under the sun and you to pay for it?’” said Sean Canning.

According to the parents, Rachel has always been a troublesome child. She routinely gets into trouble and refuses to follow simple rules like doing chores and keeping a curfew. She also bullies her sister and has been suspended from school twice so far. But when she refused to stop seeing her boyfriend, who they think is a bad influence on her, it was the last straw. They gave her only two options – either dump him or get out. Rachel chose the latter.

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For the likes of Mohammed Khurshid Hussain, from Hyderabad, India, having just one Guinness World Record isn’t good enough. The 23-year-old already held the title of fastest typist of the English alphabet on a keyboard – just 3.43 seconds –  but that was set using his fingers. Now he’s gone and done it with his nose.

Mr. Hussain set out to break the world record for nose-typing last Thursday. His mission: to type the sentence ‘Guinness World Records have challenged me to type this sentence using my nose in the fastest time’. The previous record holder was another Indian, Neeta, who finished the task way back in 2008, in 1 minute and 33 seconds.

That seems like a tough record to beat, but Mr. Hussain did it with a lot of time to spare. He typed the sentence in just 48.62 seconds, way ahead of Neeta. “If you want to set a record, every millisecond counts,” he said. “This time I typed with one eye closed, as it is difficult otherwise to locate the keys. This is my second attempt to break the record. Earlier last month, I typed the sentence with my nose in 53.44 seconds, for which I am yet to receive the certificate.”

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The John Lawson House, located in the vicinity of the New Hamburg train station in New York, is a mystery in its own right. You couldn’t really say it’s haunted, but it has its own share of secrets that no one has managed to reveal. Yet.

Every day, the porch at the John Lawson House is occupied by life-sized female mannequins dressed in clothes from the last century. Their number, position and theme varies from day to day. But no one knows how they get there. No living person has ever been spotted at the house, which is one of six properties at Main Street Historic District.

Some believe that the dolls have a message to convey. They think the dolls are trying to gesture and point towards an unsolved riddle. Others say that the dolls’ mystery lies in the history of the house. In 1871, during a two-week cold wave, a train crashed just 200 feet from the house, instantly killing 22 people. It is believed that the dolls are always pointing towards that crash site.

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Tennessee-based breeders have created a new breed of cat with a touch of the supernatural. The ‘Lykoi’ has the looks of a werewolf, but apparently behaves more like a dog. Due to a genetic mutation in a domestic shorthair cat, the Lykoi has no hair around its eyes, nose, ears and muzzle, giving it a werewolfish appearance.

The name ‘Lykoi’ loosely translates as ‘wolf cat’ in Greek. It has patchy hair on the rest of its body and a ‘hound dog personality’. According to the official website for the breed, “They like to hunt around the house for whatever they can find. They show caution to strangers but warm up quickly and become very friendly.”

“There was no human intervention to create the cat,” said breeder Johnny Gobble. “The gene is a natural mutation that appeared in the domestic cat population. We are simply using the genetics of natural processes.”

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It looks like the Chinese aren’t happy with their plain old boring supercars. So they’ve decided to cover them up in the latest trendy accessory – TRON-like reflective trimmings. Several websites have reported sightings of such cars on China’s streets, despite numerous police warnings.

According to Zeng Chaoyi, a car decorator, the trend is very popular among young drivers because of its futuristic and modern appeal. The decoration is believed to be made of 3M reflective vinyl tape. The accents are applied all over the car, including the wheels.

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After the insanely popular Cronuts (Croissants + Donuts), the latest trend in food mashups is all set to hit the market. A new restaurant in California is combining two of the world’s most favorite foods – chocolate and fried chicken.

‘ChocoChicken’ is the brainchild of Adam Fleischman, founder and CEO of the patty chain Umami Burger. In his latest invention, he plunges pieces of chicken into chocolate-infused batter before frying them in hot oil.

I cannot quite imagine what this might taste like. Savory? Sweet? Somewhere in between, perhaps? According to Fleischman, it tastes like nothing you’ve eaten before. “ChocoChicken is completely different than anything else out there,” he said. “This isn’t traditional fried chicken, or even chicken just dipped in chocolate. It is a whole new style of fried chicken that you just have to taste to believe.”

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Most people forget their New Year resolutions within a few weeks, some can’t even make it a day. But a Melbourne couple in their 60s have completed what they set out to do, every day of last year. For the whole of 2013, Janette Murray-Wakelin, 64, and Alan Murray, 68, ran marathons every single day across Australia. They completed their 366^th marathon on January 1, running 44 kilometers down the Yarra Trail to their home at Warrandyte. The couple ran a total of 15,000 kilometers last year.

The Murrays wanted to set a positive example of being responsible for one’s own health. “We wanted to share as much, with as many people, for as long as we could, a really positive message of hope and just to show people anything is possible if you put your mind to it and set a goal to achieve,” said Janette.

Janette and Alan followed a strictly vegan diet for the whole year, to help them achieve their goal. At 4 a.m., they would eat 10 bananas, a grapefruit and a date smoothie, before hitting the road. At 8 a.m. they had 10 more bananas, and a green smoothie at 9 a.m. Once they hit 31 kilometers, they would stop to snack on a fruit salad. At the 37-kilometer mark they would have three oranges. They would finish running by 4 p.m. and settle down to a scrumptious dinner of an avocado, vegetable juice and salad.

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25-year-old New Zealander, Reese McKee, started a social media campaign that fired the imagination of thousands of romantics on the internet. His plea for help in locating the whereabouts of his soul-mate went viral within hours. In fact, he had to delete the campaign because it all started to spiral out of control.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Reese – sweet romantic dude, or crazy internet stalker. Maybe I’ll let you be the judge of that. Here’s his story:

In his original campaign, Reese said that he met a girl on New Year’s Eve, 2012, in Hong Kong. He spotted her crying alone on the side of a road; she was lost and couldn’t find her friends. “I just cheered her up,” Reese said. “I sort of have this undeniably bad sense of humor that no one can resist laughing at.” The two spent the night partying, dancing and talking, before the girl caught up with her friends again. As they parted, she told Reese that her name was ‘Katie’ and she was from DC. She let him take a picture of her, and left with these final words: “Find Me.”

The next morning, as Reese looked at Katie’s photograph on his phone, a flood of great memories came back to him and he was determined to find her. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember the e-mail address she’d given him, so he decided to turn to Facebook for help.

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The world’s largest gingerbread house has been erected on Texas A&M Traditions Club grounds, in Bryan, Texas. The 39,201.8 cubic-foot house set a Guinness World Record this year, and is helping raise funds for a local trauma center. It measures 60 feet by 42 feet and its tallest point rises 20.11 feet.

The idea for the house first came to Bill Horton, managing director of the Traditions Club, in September 2012. He was watching a Food Network special on gingerbread houses at the time. At first he thought he could get the house done by November, but soon realized that it would take a lot more work. That’s when the project got postponed to this year.

“Everybody got excited that we were trying to do this,” he said. Ninety percent of all the raw materials were donated – from lumber to electrical supplies to ingredients. Lots of people volunteered too. Club members, bakers and locals joined hands to create the home.

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