Chinese bachelors (with enough cash in their bank accounts) who wanted to find a nice hot girlfriend, had a chance to pick from 60 beautiful women parading in swimsuits, during a rich-only matchmaking event, in Wuhan.

Beautiful girls dressed in sexy swimsuits parading on a small stage set up on a beach – that sounds a lot like a beauty pageant or a fashion show, except for the audience made-up almost exclusively of men who couldn’t take their eyes off the beautiful contestants. It was actually a special matchmaking event addressed to China’s rich bachelors. The 60 girls who paraded in front of their potential boyfriends had qualified from a previous round, and tried their best to prove they made suitable arm-candy.

In order to gain admittance to the event, the men had to pay a 99,999 ($15,425) fee and provide proof they owned assets of over 30 million yuan ($4,627,000) or had an annual income of at least 1 million yuan ($154,237). So the next time you’re in China and you see a hot  chick, check your pockets before making your move, you may have to qualify for a date.

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Fed-up with his dream car’s reoccurring engine problems,  a Porsche 911 owner decided to donate it to a local gun club, to be shot with 10,000 bullets.

What do you do when having to repeatedly fix an expensive car gets too frustrating? Well,we’ve seen a Lamborghini owner who had it destroyed with jackhammers,  a man who had his Range Rover pulled to the dealership by donkeys, and now a man who preferred to donate his beautiful Porsche 911 for target practice, rather than pay over $20,000 in repairs.

When the members of Comm2A, an organisation dedicated to protecting US gun rights, from Massachusetts, first heard they would get the chance of emptying their magazines in the expensive German sports car, they probably thought it was a joke, but after he took the first shot himself, they knew he was serious. 140 gun-wielding men, women and children shot more than 10,000 bullets at the poor Porsche putting its sturdy body to the ultimate test. Although it was ultimately reduced to a pierced pile of junk, members of Comm2A were surprised about how well it held up against the rain of led. There was little damage done to the passenger side of the Porsche, where bullets seemed unable to penetrate the gas tank. Only the larger, high-velocity rounds managed to pierce both sides of the car.

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The car you’re about to see started off as just a design, but seeing other cars with custom theme paint jobs, Sherod Grayer decided to make his Nintendo-mobile a reality.

The 25-year-old Nintendo fan, from Warner Robins, Georgia, played around with the idea of a Nintendo-themed car, five years ago, but inspired by other theme paint jobs, he decided to turn his virtual design into a real car. So he started working on his 1991 Chevy Caprice, turning it from an old, outdated ride, into a cool ride any Nintendo fan would be happy to own. Everything you see in the photos below, both on the inside and the outside, was designed by Sherod himself.

Seen from the outside, Sherod’s Nintendo-themed Caprice doesn’t look that impressive, since it doesn’t have any distinctive features apart from the spray-painted NES controllers, but the interior is a whole other matter. The colors alone scream Nintendo, and the custom-made seats and headrests featuring Mario, Luigi and the Nintendo logo let everyone know they’re about to set foot in a geeky shrine on wheels. I’m not to crazy about the 22-inch rims, but I guess that’s how they roll down in Georgia.

Overall great job Sherod, and thanks a lot for the photos!

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Kathy Libraty, an antique doll collector from Brooklyn, New York, has spent the last 25 years searching for antique dolls, and now has an impressive collection of over 1,000 items that’s worth around $2 million.

Believe it or not, Kathy’s fascination with dolls didn’t start when she was a little girl. In fact she remembers she was more of a tomboy and had no real interest in dolls or any girly stuff. Born in France, she and her parents immigrated to the US when she was only 4. After graduating from Brooklyn College with a BA in Art, her passion for photography took her to Europe and the Middle East, where she took a real interest in history and old art. When she and her husband, Frank, bought an old Victorian house, Kathy decided to pursue her love for antiques and started attending country auctions. She was intrigued that people sometimes paid large amounts of money for wigless doll heads, broken limbs and crooked-eye dolls, but not enough to start spending money on them, herself.

It wasn’t until one day, 25 years ago, that Kathy Libraty really became addicted to collecting antique dolls. She and Frank were driving around the neighborhood when they saw a man emptying boxes of antiques into a dumpster. She saw a doll’s leg sticking out and told Frank to stop the car. They went up to the man and asked him if he was going to throw all those things away, and he just replied “Yeah, it’s all dirty old junk”, so they offered to take it off his hands.  When they got home and looked through the “junk” they found a rare 24″ George Borgfeldt doll, several composition mama dolls, and a broken bisque Cuno and Otto Dressel Shoulder head doll. She often wondered what other treasures that man had thrown away in the dumpster that day, but the wonders she managed to get her hands on inspired her to go out into the world and discover her own priceless treasures.

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It was definitely not a piece of cake, but Cake Boss star, Buddy Valastro, managed to create an incredibly realistic cake shaped like the Chevrolet Camaro-shifting Autobot, Bumblebee.

With Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Moon scheduled for a July 1st release, the people at General Motors though this was a good pretext to gain some exposure for their gorgeous Chevrolet Camaro, so they asked Buddy Valastro to create a detailed cake shaped both as a yellow Camaro and as Transformers star, Bumblebee. Many asked if he could deliver something impressive enough, but when the rolled in at the 2011 New York Auto Show, no one had any more doubts.

The event was featured on TLC’s Cake Boss, in an episode that aired June 20, and viewers got to see one of the biggest, most incredible-cakes ever made. The Camaro-Bumblebee cake weighed 1,500 pounds, and was made of yellow sponge cake, Rice Crispy Treats, buttercream frosting, and yellow and black frosting for the Transformers figure. The unique cake had moving wings, lights and pyrotechnics.

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Believe it or not, the streets of New York really are paved with gold, but you have to get down and dirty to get your hands on it. For urban prospector Raffi Stephanian this isn’t an issue, just a great way to pay the bills.

Using only a Styrofoam cup, a butter knife and tweezers, 43-year-old Raffi scours the streets of New York’s Diamond District searching for gold, diamonds and other precious jewels. You’ve probably walked on 47th Street countless times and didn’t realize the riches that were right there in front of you, but don’t beat yourself up about it, Raffi was probably the only one who ever thought there was something valuable on the sidewalk. And that only because he worked as a stone setter, years ago, when he found gold scraps on the floor of a diamond exchange. He realized if he could find gold inside, then people must have carried it outside, as well.

The gold and precious stones industry is a hectic one, and you can see people running from one shop to the other, from a diamond supplier to a diamond dealer, and so on, and in the process, they drop tiny valuables without even realizing it. Most of the fragments found by Raffi Stephanian were carried into the streets by diamond merchants who accidentally picked them up on their clothes or on the soles of their shoes. He also finds platinum chips, loops from broken necklaces, watches or bracelets, all of which were dropped by mistake.

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Devon-based artist Rupert McKelvie has used thousands of discarded puzzle pieces to create a stylish table complete with a lamp.

If you’re wondering what inspired the 27-year-old artist to create pieces of furniture from a weird medium like broken puzzles, it was the frustration of spending hours of patient labor assembling a puzzle, only to see them wasted because of a missing piece. Apparently, charity shops get a lot of puzzles handed in these days, only most of them are missing at least one piece, so he decided to use these incomplete artworks to create something new and complete.

McKelvie has put in hundreds of hours painstakingly assembling around 4,800 puzzle pieces into what looks like a functional and stable table, from popular jigsaw puzzles featuring the Taj Mahal, the Arc de Triomphe and Winnie the Pooh. It must have been a pretty tedious process, but it beats searching everywhere for that one missing puzzle, only to find it under the couch, years later.

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Tennis legend, Roger Federer, has set yet another world record, after he (well, a giant portrait of him) got the world’s biggest shave, on a field near London.

Anyone seeing Gillette employees sprinkling weird paint on a green field near London, the other day, would have probably thought the company switched from shaving to landscaping, but it was only a big publicity stunt to promote its new Fusion ProGlide razors. With the help of Gillette’s Facebook community and laser-guided robots, workers covered the green field with environmentally-friendly paint to create a big portrait of the Swiss champion.

Then they used cannons to cover his face with bio-degradable foam, which they then removed with lawn mowers. To finish the job, they brought in these giant Fusion ProGlide razors to show how smooth a shave can be when you use them. Kind of a wacky idea, but they did a great job with the portrait.

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Every little boy who has ever owned a Hot Wheels miniature car remembers how fun those things were to play with, whether you owned a circuit track or not. Artist Chris Burden has spent the last four years working on Metropolis II, an awe-inspiring miniature car circuit that will spark the interest of even the most mature grownup.

It’s called Metropolis II because Chris built another cool Hot Wheels circuit back in 2004, but compared to his first one, this latest project is superior in every way. It really lives up to its name, measuring an impressive 10-feet-tall by 28-feet-long and featuring 13 toy tracks and a gigantic car circuit with 18 lanes, winding around in a loop, around 30-40 skyscrapers. There are a total of 1,100 modified cars moving around Metropolis II, at any given time. Chris and his team inserted a small magnet on the underside of each car, so when they reach one of the circuit’s three conveyor belts, which also have magnets placed underneath, they get picked up and transported to a high point from where they are released and flow away.

According to Chris Burden, Metropolis II is ten times bigger than the original Metropolis and was conceived as a miniature representation of Los Angeles. Just recently completed, Metropolis II has already been sold for millions of dollars, but Burden says is also cost millions to complete and refine. Over the next few months it will be taken apart and properly packed in steel cages, where the parts shouldn’t move more than a 32nd of an inch, in order to keep everything running smoothly.

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James Charles is not the first artist to use currency as inspiration for his original art, but his works are the geekiest I’ve seen in a while.

While some items of the “American Iconomics“series might have ou think that Charles simply manipulated the faces on genuine dollar bills, it’s just an illusion. The artist kept the original outline of the bills, but replaced the faces of former American presidents with those of famous pop icons like Jimi Hendrix, Master Yoda, Mr. Spock, Sarah Palin, and many others. In sone cases he simply drew over the faces of the presidents to give them a whole new look, but every one of his pop-culture dollars comes with a sarcastic and funny line of text.

The “American Iconomics” collection is currently on display at San Francisco’s Shooting Gallery, where pop-art fans can purchase their favorite artworks for anywhere between $600 and $1,000.

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A rabbinical court in Jerusalem recently sentenced a wandering dog to death by stoning, after they decided he was the reincarnation of a lawyer who offended the judges 20 years ago.

A few weeks ago, a large dog entered the Monetary Affairs Court, near the ultra orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim, scaring away visitors and refusing to leave, even after people tried to drive him away. One of the court’s judges remembered something that occurred 20 years ago – a secular lawyer who had offended the judges was cursed by them to reincarnate in the body of a dog (considered an impure animal by Halacha).

The lawyer in question passed away years ago, but one of the still-offended judges sentenced the poor dog to death by stoning, and ordered the task be carried out by the neighborhood’s children. Either the dog sensed the imminent danger and fled, or it was rescued by an animal lover, what’s important is he managed to escape before the sentence could be carried out.

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the work of Italian artist Dario Tironi is evident proof. While most people look at discarded objects and see only trash, he sees precious materials for his beautiful sculptures.

Old toys, discarded computer components, broken calculators, even plastic bottles, they’re all part of Tironi’s recycled universe. Similar to Robert Bradford, who uses old toys for his sculptures, and Leo Sewell,  the young Italian artist manages to glue together various junk items and create detailed sculptures of people and animals, and gives everyone who sees his art a whole new perspective on the concept of recycling.

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Although relatively new, book carving has become on of the most popular art forms of our time, with masterpieces of acclaimed artist like Brian Dettmer or Long Bin-Chen exhibited in galleries around the world. Kylie Stillman cuts new life into old, outdated books, by sculpting them as slabs of stone and turning them and giving them a second chance as veritable works of art.

Using a scalpel, Stillman cuts right into the stack of books, creating beautiful inverted reliefs of trees and the birds that once inhabited them. Her works remind us where the paper for the books came from, by turning the thousands of pages into versions of their original tree form.

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To tell you the truth I often wondered why no one bothered to create a portrait of the Black Eyed Peas using black eyed peas, before. We’ve seen all kinds of weird portraits, like those made of toast, broken vinyl or bottle caps, so a black eyed peas portrait of the Black Eyed Peas seemed almost logical.

English artist Lee Mericks finally rose up to the challenge and created an 85 cm by 60 cm portrait of BEP singer will.i.am using nothing but thousands of black eyed peas. The artwork was commissioned by Alton Towers, to celebrate the Black Eyed Peas’ forthcoming concert at the Staffordshire resort, and took 24 hours, over a four-day period, to complete.

According to Lee Merricks, the black eyed peas portrait of will.i.am contains approximately 5 kilograms of black eyed peace, each of which were painstakingly placed by hand. If you’re curious to know the exact number of peas used, feel free to count them yourself.

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The global food crisis is a very serious issue, but professor Ikeda thinks his latest invention, an artificial meat based on protein from human excrement, could be of great help.

The Japanese researcher from the Okayama laboratory says its country has more sewage mud than they can handle, so Tokyo Sewarage asked him to explore its possible use. Knowing the wacky nature of many Japanese scientists, it’s no surprise he came up with a turd burger. During his research, he discovered sewage mud contains a great deal of protein so he began developing a process of extracting that valuable protein and turning it into a viable meat substitute.

Sewage mud is high in protein, because it’s full of bacteria, most of which comes from human feces. However, these microorganisms are harmless, because they are killer by heat during the manufacturing process. According to initial tests, the artificial meat even tastes like beef, thanks to added soy protein, and Ikeda added some red food coloring to give it a more natural look. In terms of nutritive values, the turd burger doesn’t sound bad at all: it’s 63% protein, 25% carbohydrates, 3% lipids and 9% minerals. Read More »