Have you ever been so angry that you just wanted to hurl that laptop right across the room, but restrained yourself in the interest of ‘proper conduct’? I know I have. Anger is a common emotion experienced by everybody at some point. Some manage it, some don’t. But it gets the better of even the best of us at times. However, an emotional outburst is never appreciated by the people around you, even if you had a very valid reason for it.

That’s why, now there’s the Anger Room. It’s a place where it’s absolutely okay to be angry and break things. They even give you the tools and set it up so that you can vent out all the anger from years and years of holding it all in. The founder of the room is a Dallas businesswoman, Donna Alexander. The smash sessions at the Anger Room can last for 5, 15 or 25 minutes and the place can be set up according to your liking. It could be an office, a kitchen or a living room. Cheap furniture, TV sets, balloons, inflatable punching bags and headless mannequins are provided, along with a golf club to break it all. For protection, participants are allowed a hard hat, gardening gloves, goggles and a face mask. They also require you to break things in the direction of the graffiti-filled wall, for the safety of the camera crew on the opposite side.

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It’s the stuff that ancient legends are made of, but I guess you could call the story of Aba Defar a modern-day miracle. How else would you explain an old man carving four churches on a mountain side of the Ethiopian highlands, all on his own?

Aba Defar is a man driven by his faith in religion. At one point in life he was a family man and a weaver by profession. But all that changed with a simple dream he had in 1959. The Holy Spirit appeared in his dream, showing him a mountain church carved out of sheer rock. The dream kept repeating itself over the next 30 years, but he never knew what to make of it. It was when he had a vision that he finally understood that his life’s mission was awaiting him.

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A while ago we did a story about a boy who turned orange after eating carrots. Now that I’ve come to know about carrot-obsessed Zizi Howell, I think she’d do anything to trade places with the boy. Unfortunately, she can’t really change skin colors, but she’s settled for tattooing carrots all over her body. She has 35 carrot tattoos in all, including a 24-carrot arm band (no, it’s not made of Gold), four on her other arm, 6 on her back and a huge one on her stomach. Her only mission in life is to have “the most carrots in the world.”

But it’s not just the tattoos, carrots flood almost every part of her life. Every item in the Californian woman’s house is modeled after the root vegetable. Fridge magnets, tea-pots, storage boxes, dressers, soft toys, they’re all themed after carrots. She even has carrot paper-towel-holders and carrot slippers. Her home has over 1000 pieces of carrot memorabilia, and she spends five hours a day organizing them. And at night, she’d rather use carrots as curlers for her hair. The only music Zizi listens to is by Carrot Top, a punk metal musician. At concerts, she wears belts that strap about 600 carrots to her chest.

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Lizards creep me out big-time. That’s why it’s a little hard for me to understand what 25-year-old Lizzie Griffiths, a lizard-loving school teacher from London did for her little dragon. She loves her pet lizard George so much that she wakes up at 5.30 am every day to snuggle with him for a while. She’s even postponed her wedding to be able to afford his treatment.

Lizzie and George first met at a rescue center a year ago. One look at the bearded dragon lizard, and she was in love with the way he burrowed into her neck. She took him home and cared for him, even nursing him back to health from a chest infection. Soon, the scaly creature developed a tumor on his face that wouldn’t go away after two surgeries. Fearing the loss of her favorite pet, Lizzie decided to empty her entire savings on George’s treatment. Chemotherapy for animals is a pioneering treatment and she spent over £3,000 on it at the Animal Health Trust in Suffolk. The chemo was apparently successful.

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If you’ve always wondered it must be like to actually experience a zombie apocalypse, then Zombie Shopping Mall is just the thing for you. You’ll be briefed and armed by a special police unit and pitted against a horde of zombies in a creepy condemned mall. Sounds awesome, yes?

Remember the Zombie Boot Camp we featured a while ago? It was a very popular event organized by the guys at Wish.co.uk, an English website offering people the chance to fulfill their wildest dreams. The unusual training course allowed zombie fans to acquire all the necessary skills to survive a living-dead epidemic and test them in a specially designed environment, located in Droitwich, Britain. Following the success of the Zombie Boot Camp, the people at Wish have taken things one step further and created the Zombie Shopping Mall, a bone-chilling experience that takes place in a condemned mall filled with brain-eating zombies. Read More »

Li Wei – The Flying Buddhist Monk (News.com.au)

Romanian Fashion House Makes World’s Longest Bridal Train (Yahoo Shine)

Brazil Real-Life Rapunzel (The Sun)

Awesome Fences Made of Recycled Sporting Goods (Environmental Graffiti)

Steampunk Corkscrew is Incredibly Cool (YouTube)

World’s Biggest “My Little Pony” Fan (Daily Mail)

Poo-Powered Rickshaw Is First of Its Kind (Huff Post)

Real-Life Invisible Man Liu Bolin Is Lost in Art (My Modern Met)

The Large-Scale Beach Paintings of Andres Amador (This Is Colossal)

American School Bans Hugging Among Students (Inquisitor)

Also known as China’s most explosive artist, Cai Guo Qiang uses gun powder to create some truly unique works of art. His technique of igniting gun powder on a paper canvas is considered a new medium of contemporary artistic expression.

Fire and explosion seems to be a very popular art theme these days. We’ve recently covered the works of Radya Timofey, a 23-year-old artist who paints with Molotov cocktails, and Rob Tarbell, who guides the smoke of open flames to create detailed artworks, so Cai Guo Qiang fits right in. The famous Chinese artist started using gun powder as an art medium in 1989, when he used fuse lines to create explosions that lasted between 1 and 15 seconds, for public audiences. But his works has evolved a great deal since then, and he now uses modern technology to create much more detailed works, and even aerial explosions supervised by experienced pyrotechnicians.

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No offence to 64-year-old Sibusiso Mthembu, but hearing his story just made me laugh out loud. Of course, the South African from KwaZulu-Natal tells it in all seriousness. And who knows, he may even be telling the truth about having visited heaven four times, so far. The first time was in 1998, and subsequent visits were made in 2004, 2006 and 2008. It all started in 1993, when a white man (an angel, apparently) paid him a visit and told him he was needed in heaven. And now, after several visits, he’s drawing a map to make sure the rest of us ‘unlucky’ ones get what he’s talking about.

But it’s not the fact that he took a few vacations to heaven or even that he’s drawing a map that amuses me. It’s more to do with the stuff he says he’s seen and done there. According to Mthembu, there are 11 heavens in all, and he was taken to the fifth one, Crista, first. It was there, in a city called Sharmoy, that he claims to have met Jesus. The main heaven is Salem, he says, where God’s temple is located. God is apparently in his youth, and of a Grayish complexion. Jesus is white. He saw God for the first time during his second trip, on a planet called Jadalem that’s mostly covered in water and ice.

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Who knew that an old childhood pastime could actually help adults lose weight. And I’m talking massive weight here. 31-year-old Jen Moore simply hula-hooped her way from a huge 288lbs to a trim 145lbs. Now she’s a fitness trainer with the very same company that helped her shed it all. Sure does sound like a dream come true.

Jen couldn’t hula hoop when she first got started. Not surprising really, looking at her before pictures. But what’s admirable is that she stuck to it, and within two weeks she was able to keep the hoop spinning around her waist. There’s been no looking back since then. Within just three months of learning the skill, she ended up losing 40lbs of body fat. Take a look at Jen’s ‘after’ pictures and you would never believe she was once obese. “I would go to my local YMCA and stake out a little corner on the court while the guys played basketball and snickered,” she says. “From day one, I felt a tremendous difference in my core strength, confidence and energy just from the workout involved in dropping, bending over and picking up the hoop.”

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If there’s one thing I’ve learned writing for OC, it’s that the truly talented are able to create breathtaking art out of literally anything, even ordinary stuff like packing tape or sprinkles. So when I read about wine art, I decided to look up the artists who work with the drinkable medium. After doing a little snooping around, we discovered these five amazing artists, who create the most beautiful wine paintings.

Christina LoCascio

What would a person with a Fine Arts degree and a career in the wine industry do? Why, paint with wine, of course! And that’s exactly what Christina LoCascio has been doing since 2002. She is credited with the development of a new technique using wine as her palette, making use of different grape varieties. Several paintings in Christina’s portfolio reflect a wine narrative – there are vineyards, grapes and wine bottle portraits. She also uses subjects to portray the emotional experience of enjoying a glass of wine. Her art has a very classy, elegant feel to it.

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Hikikomori (Japanese for “pull in”) is a term that refers to reclusive adolescents and young adults who choose to isolate themselves from social life. With about a million people in Japan suffering from Hikikomori, I suppose you could call it an epidemic of sorts. Except, the condition is not spread through physical means, it’s purely psychological. It is a phenomenon of social withdrawal that’s pretty much swept the nation in the past few years. About 80% of hikikomori are male, in their teens or twenties, and do not leave the confines of their rooms. They don’t go to school or to work, spending their days in the homes of their parents, reading, watching TV or surfing the internet, consuming meals left for them at the door.

A good example of a typical hikikomori is this boy I’ve been reading about. His mother supposedly refused to reveal his name, fearing social retribution for the boy. The 17-year-old was a normal child, but began to hate school about three years ago. This was after he became a victim to bullying and anonymous hate letters. One day, he suddenly returned home and locked himself in the kitchen. He’s been in there ever since, refusing to come out or let anyone in. The family’s response to this most unusual condition is even more strange. They have simply ‘moved on’, accepting the boy’s behavior as something he will eventually grow out of. They’ve built a new kitchen in the house, and his mother takes meals to his door three times a day. In fact, this is the manner in which most Japanese respond to hikikomori – with utmost tolerance.

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The title is a little misleading, so to make things clear, we’re talking about the face of Iron Man made of real urine, in a toilet bowl. This unusual artwork was actually considered better than 600 other entries in a popular art competition.

You don’t often get the chance to associate Iron Man with urine, but this is one of those rare occasions, and we only have a geeky Taiwanese guy to thank for it. But how does one get the crazy idea to paint a portrait of one of Marvel’s most popular superheroes with urine. Well, this particular art school graduate was taking care of business one day, in the bathroom, when he noticed blood in his urine. Now, most everyone else would have panicked and ran straight to the doctor, but not this fellow. Looking at the colors in his pee, he immediately thought of the colors of Iron Man’s suit, and felt inspired to create a portrait of the popular crime-fighter using his very own urine. Read More »

If a man came at you with a meat cleaver, your first instinct would obviously be to run for your life. But  not for the people of Hsinchu, in northern Taiwan. Because for them, being tapped with the sharp end of a cleaver is actually a form of therapy that is known to cure many ailments. They line up in large numbers to meet the therapist, who prepares by sharpening the instrument on a wet stone and rubbing iodine all over the blade.

The Chinese knife massage is probably a treatment you’d only expect in hell, but in reality it’s said to increase blood flow, release the body’s stored energy and wash away harmful toxins. The treatment itself is pretty simple: all the therapist does is hold a couple of cleavers and strike the patient repeatedly with the sharp edge. No, don’t be horrified, there’s no blood involved. The trick is to bring down the cleaver with just the right amount of force, and then to not push or pull it once it touches skin. The up-and-down movement of the cleaver is said to release static energy, which leads to self- cure. “Chop, chop, chop, and the pain will go away,” is the motto that the knife therapists use to convince clients. Read More »

Alexander Esguerra,  a New York-based artist, has invented the perfect recipe for love and art to go hand in hand. The couples who participate in his sessions not only get to make love, they also get to take a great souvenir home – a piece of art born from their sensual ‘act’.

Esguerra invites couples to cover themselves in non-toxic, water based paint and then ‘do as they please’ on a canvas on the floor. At the end of the love-making session, what results is a wonderful painting for the world to admire. It’s just like making babies I guess, equally messy, but without any diapers to be changed later. The concept has caught on pretty well, and is turning out to be quite popular. So much, that he’s actually converted it to a business called ‘Love and Paint’. The art packages are provided at luxury hotels, starting at $2,500. There have been fifty couple participants so far.

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“There’s no place like home!”, I believe the saying goes, and this modest migrant family from China proves it applies even when home is an abandoned public toilet in the city of Shenyang.

Zeng Lingjun was born in a small village, in the Jilin Province of Northeastern China. As a boy, he dreamed of one day attending college, but because his family was too poor he had to abandon his dream and settle for becoming a cobbler and repair shoes for a living. But just because he couldn’t afford to go to college, didn’t mean he was willing to spend the rest of his life in his village. He had bigger plans for himself, so one day, with just 50 yuan ($8) in his pocket, he left for Shenyang, the biggest city in northeast China. Being a hard worker and a skilled cobbler helped Zeng make a living in the big city, and he was soon earning around 2,000 yuan (315) per month. But this wasn’t enough for him to get his own place.

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