Andrey Poletaev is a master of the ballpoint pen, wielding the common writing tool to create stunning works of art that sometimes rival photographs in terms of realism.

Ukrainian-born artist Andrey Poletaev is considered one of the world’s premier ballpoint pen artist, and looking at his exquisite works of art, it’s easy to see why. Although he doesn’t like to be categorized as a hyperrealist artist, his expertly drawn city landscapes and portraits are incredibly realistic to the point where they often get mistaken for photographs. To achieve this amazing level of realism in his ballpoint pen artworks, Poletaev applies up to twenty layers of pen ink on the canvas, and spends hundreds of hours on a single art piece.

Read More »

When it comes to promoting a book on mushrooms, I think it’s safe to say that no one will top biologist Merlin Sheldrake’s marketing campaign anytime soon.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Future is an intriguing book on the fascinating life of various fungi, written by biologist Merlin Sheldrake. But at the end of the day, it’s still just a book on mushrooms, and most people just aren’t drawn to that sort of literature. But Sheldrake came up with an ingenious PR campaign to promote his book that drew the attention of the art world and the general public, not just of fungi enthusiasts. He let his book on mushrooms be devoured by pleurotus mushrooms and then ate those mushrooms himself.

Read More »

In what can easily be regarded as a top contender for the 2020 Darwin Awards, Alabama students are allegedly throwing “Covid-19 parties” as part of a stupid game to intentionally infect each other with a disease that has so far killed hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone.

Tuscaloosa City Councilor Sonya McKinstry was the first to blow the whistle on this potentially deadly game that students in Alabama have been playing. She claims that organizers of so-called Covid-19 parties are intentionally inviting people infected with the disease to see who catches it from them first. As crazy and unfathomable as that sounds, this shocking behavior has been confirmed by the Chief of the Tuscaloosa Fire Department, who told the City Council that such parties had been held for weeks.

Read More »

Redefined Meat, an Israeli startup specializing in alternative meat, recently unveiled what it calls the world’s first 3D-printed plant-based steak called Alt-Steak.

Using its own patent-pending 3D-printing technology, Redefine Meat has allegedly been able to create a meatless steak that features the appearance, texture, and, most importantly, the taste of the real thing. The company was apparently to achieve all this by working with expert butchers, chefs, food technologists and Swiss flavor company Givaudan. The revolutionary Alt-Steak is created by mixing Redefined Meat’s Alt-Muscle, Alt-Fat, and Alt-Blood plant-based formulations in several layers. The end result is a sustainable, high-protein, cholesterol-free steak that looks, cooks and tastes like real meat.

Read More »

Brazilian artist Sheila R. Giovanni specializes in incredibly detailed, hand-drawn portraits of celebrities, some of which cannot be told apart from high-resolution photographs.

Over the last twelve years, we’ve featured some talented portrait artists on Oddity Central, but Sheila R. Giovanni is definitely one of the best. Using only colored pencils, she is able to create photo-quality masterpieces perfect to the tiniest of details. Looking at some her best works, it’s no surprise that Sheila can spend up to 100 hours on a single project, as her attention to detail is pretty obvious. From expertly-placed shading and glows, to strands of hair and even the reflections in her subjects’ eyes, Giovanni’s artworks really are almost as life-like as photographs.

Read More »

A couple from Istinka, a small village located 12 kilometres outside St Petersburg, Russia, have built a concrete replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza right in their own backyard.

Measuring 9 meters above ground and 9 meters deep, and consisting of about 400 tonnes of concrete blocks, the pyramid of Istinka is 19 times smaller than the structure that inspired it – the Great Pyramid of Giza, in Egypt. But, according to its owners, Andrey Vakhrushev and his wife Victoria, apart from the size difference, the two imposing structured are actually quite similar. The couple claim that attention to detail was crucial for this project, adding that they spent years studying the design of the Pyramid of Cheops and visited it many times just to get everything right.

Read More »

Moo, a 7-month-old Dachshund from Florida, has a head that doesn’t quite match the rest of his body. He has the black and brown head of a Dachshund, but below the neck he is all Dalmatian.

One look at Moo and it’s easy to see why many people assume that he is wearing some sort of costume or pajamas the first time they see him. His unique look is not the consequence of some mysterious condition, he was just born like that, and he’s actually a healthy and happy little dog. With over 21,000 followers on Instagram alone, Moo is also on his way to becoming an Instagram influencer.

Read More »

Armed with a simply can of spray paint, French artist SCAF uses his imagination and mountains of talent to turn abandoned urban spaces into three-dimensional graffiti masterpieces.

Looking at SCAF’s expertly spray-painted trompe l’oeil graffiti artworks, it’s hard to believe that he is a completely self-taught street artist. He never studied art and started experimenting with graffiti in abandoned factories 18 years ago, after being inspired by a colleague at school. He has come a long way since his early days, as you can plainly see, but he continues to practice his skill in abandoned places, like factories, houses and manors, because he feels like his art adds value to such derelict edifices.

Read More »

A rare phenomenon commonly described as a ‘rainbow cloud’ was recently spotted above Tokyo and pictures of it went viral on social media.

On June 26th, reports of an iridescent cloud visible above Tokyo started being shared on Twitter, and soon, photos of the intriguing phenomenon made their way to the popular social media platform as well. It was as the rumors described, a multicolored cloud that oddly resembled a rainbow, only in reality this optical phenomenon was closer to an ice halo than a rainbow.

Read More »

An-18-year-old girl from Illinois has been getting a lot of attention on social media lately for her one-of-a-kind prom dress which she single-handedly created out of dozens of rolls of duct-tape.

When Peyton Manker decided to enter this year’s Stuck at Prom contest this January, she never thought it would turn her into an overnight internet sensation. The long-running competition challenges high-school graduates to make their own prom attire using as much Duck-brand duct tape as possible, for a chance to win a $10,000 scholarship. Peyton had set out to create her prom dress around a Leonardo Da Vinci heme, but then the Covid-19 pandemic happened and she decided to build her dress around that instead.

Read More »

Manusia Silver, or “Silver Men” is a special type of beggar that has become a common sight on the streets of several Indonesian cities.

Beggars have been around for as long as anyone can remember, and Indonesia is no exception, but the South-East Asian country has recently seen the rise of a new type of beggar, the so-called Silver Men. Inspired by the street performers who used metallic paint to transform themselves into living statues and wow passers-by with their doll-like movements, the Silver Men or Manusia Silver, as they are called in Indonesian, simply adapted the look of these performers to their own skill – begging.

Read More »

Think of a toy store, only instead of toys you have every Covid-19 accessory imaginable, from hand sanitizers to no-touch door openers. That’s the COVID-19 Essentials pop-up store in a nutshell.

Located on the second floor of Miami’s Aventura shopping mall, COVID-19 Essentials is described as a one-stop shop for all your Covid-19 needs. From a plethora of hand sanitizers and disinfectants to really niche gadgets like portable UV light sterilizers and shoe cover dispensers, this specialized store really has it all. According to the entrepreneurs behind Miami’s currently most talked about business, the demand was there and all they had to do was give the people what they wanted, but the shop has been getting some criticism online, with people calling it an opportunistic cash-grab.

Read More »

Photos of an unusually-tall cactus growing on the side of a three-storey building in Tokyo, Japan, have been doing the rounds on social media, raising the question: ‘is this the world’s tallest cactus?’

Last Wednesday, Japanese Twitter user =Yang= (@0okome0) posted a bunch of intriguing photos of a building he had spotted in Takinogawa, Tokyo Metropolitan Area. It wasn’t the building that drew people’s attention, but a green pole on the side of it. =Yang= himself admitted that at first he thought it was simply a green-painted utility pole, but the deformed top, which stretched onto the roof of the building, told him otherwise. As he approached the strange sight, he realized that it was actually a thick cactus stretching from the bottom all the way to the roof of the three-storey residential building. He snapped some pics and posted them on Twitter, where they quickly went viral.

Read More »

An 84-year-old retired farmer from Melbourne, Australia, has been trying to get his own daughter evicted from his apartment for eight years, but despite spending a small fortune on legal fees, he has been unsuccessful.

Peter Grundy, a retired wheat farmer from the Australian state of Victoria, has been trying to sell his apartment so he can move into a retirement home. He isn’t entitled to a pension, so in order to secure his place there he needs to pay up front, but in order to do that he has to sell the apartment. The only problem is Peter has been trying to do just that for the last eight years, only his 49-year-old daughter, Katrina, has been doing everything in her power to stop him. Despite his best efforts to get her evicted from his property, including taking her to court, Katrina hasn’t budged and legal experts say the pensioner has exhausted all legal options.

Read More »

A Taiwanese pensioner who once made international headlines for strapping almost a dozen smartphones to his bicycle so he could catch multiple Pokemon in Pokemon GO! faster has now taken his passion for the mobile game to new heights, with a whopping 64 phones attached to his bike.

We originally featured Chen Sanyuan in August of 2018, shortly after photos of him taken by passers-by in Taipei City had gone viral. It was easy to see why photos of the then 70-year-old were getting so much attention – here was this old man riding his bicycle around town with multiple smartphones hooked on to the handlebars. After  reaching the front page of Reddit, Chen was approached by Taiwanese gaming website EXP.GG and he explained that he had come up with the bizarre setup so he could operate multiple Pokemon GO accounts at the same time. He had fallen in love with Niantic’s hit game after being introduced to it by his grandson, and now couldn’t get enough.

Read More »