Napoleon, a four-year-old Dutch Friesian stallion, has developed a talent for painting after working with artist Sergio Caballero and his worked are now on display at the Mutt art gallery, in Barcelona.

The Dutch Friesian horse breed is famous for being very responsive to dressage, but I doubt too many people thought a horse could be taught how to paint. One of those who did was Catalan artist Sergio Caballero, who one day got the idea of working with animal painters. he asked his friend, a horse owner, if he could teach a horse to paint, and that’s when he met the beautiful black stallion, Napoleon.

The two started working together; Sergio prepared the canvases and put the brush into Napoleon’s mouth and the horse would shake his head and make bold strokes of acrylic color. It doesn’t sound very complicated, but Caballero calls it abstract expressionism, and three private collectors have already bought Napoleon’s works for between €3,300 and €6,000.

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If you have money to burn, this $164,000 gold-plated barbecue-grill made by BeefEater Barbecues should be at the the top of your spending list.

Sure, this hand-made Signature Series 6 Burner SL400 looks good has some nice built-in features like a wok burner, warming rack and roasting hood, but will it make your steaks taste better? Probably enough, and the creators of the grill themselves say they made it for people ‘want to make a statement with their barbecue and have the money to burn’. ‘Why would anyone want to make a statement with their barbecue?’, you ask? Maybe because they just got bored of gold phones, gold-plated cars, have eaten enough gold-plated food and need something new to attract attention.

The one-of-a-kind barbecues is covered with 24 carat gold, except for the actual grilling surface, and was created for the 2008 Sydney Home Show, for an estimated $60,000. Now, the price has gone up to $164,000. Somebody better buy it soon, before the gold price rises even more.

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This is something you don’t see every day – Portuguese beer maker Sagres has recently released a chocolate flavored beer and decided to celebrate by creating a launch website entirely out of chocolate (and I don’t mean the flash kind).

Sagres is Portugal’s no. 1 beer brand, so when they launched the new Sagres Preta Chocolate, a stout beer with chocolate flavor, they really went all out. With the help of a web design company and master chocolatier Victor Nunes, renown in Portugal for his amazing chocolate sculptures, they managed to create the world’s most awesome interactive website made entirely from chocolate. I really can’t think of a better way to launch a chocolate product online.

As you can see in the ‘baking of’ video at the bottom, every element of the Sagres Preta Chocolate site, except the actual beer bottle, was first crafted from chocolate, then photographed and put together into a functional, delicious-looking website. When they were done, they offered their first online visitors pieces of the real chocolate site, and sent them directly to their homes together with a six-pack of chocolate beer. How awesome is that?

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Wat Prommanee, a Buddhist temple, 66 miles northeast of Bangkok, offers believers the chance to lay in a coffin for a few moments, then rise up and feel reborn…

I for one find coffins to be really creepy and I wouldn’t dream of lying down in one if someone paid me all the money in the world, but at Wat Prommanee people actually wait in line and pay a fee for a chance to do just that. It’s one of the strangest ceremonies in the world, but one that has been rising in popularity ever since the temple started practicing it, over six years ago. Nine colorful coffins dominate the main hall of Wat Prommanee Temple, and hundreds of people lie down in them every day, playing dead for about a minute and a half, listening to religious chants, and rise up at command feeling cleansed and relaxed.

Wat Prommanee basically offers a daily resurrection service that many Thais believe washes away bad luck and helps prolong their life. It makes sense that people wish for a second chance in life, especially when confronted with serious issues, but lying down in a decorated coffin hardly seems like a solution. I mean, what if it doesn’t change anything, right? Well, they just go back and do it again. The ceremony apparently relaxes them and gives them positive thoughts, so many people come back to Wat Prommanee Temple for the chance to be reborn several times over a few years. All they have to do is pay a small fee. Read More »

A one-of-a-kind Cadillac CTS Coupe covered with 350,000 Swarovski crystals was unveiled last weekend, during the Qingdao International Auto Show.

I don’t know what it is about Swarovski bling and cars, but tuners and designers seems to think they make a good team. Just last week, I posted about an Audi A5 covered with 450,000 Swarovski crystals, presented at a Moscow exhibition, by Russian tuner Shampar, and now the Chinese show off their own blinged-out ride. Their Swarovski-studded Cadillac is 100,000 crystals short of the Russian A5, but it doesn’t look at all less glamorous.

A you can imagine, the so-called ‘Diamond Cadillac‘ stole the show in Qingdao, attracting the eyes of everyone attending and giving new meaning to the phrase ‘diamond finish’. According to brand representatives, this unique CTS Coupe took nine workers a whole week to finish, with each Swarovski crystal mounted to the body of the car with a special fixer. To whom it may concern, they added that the stones “are guaranteed to stay on even in a car wash”.

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I’ve written about pampered pooches before, but border terrier Smike is the only canine I know of who wears a Rolex luxury watch.

Karen Denney, a shop assistant from Crawford, a village close to St. Helens, England, wanted to buy her dog Smike something really special for his seventh birthday, and when she saw a designer collar that included a Rolex watch, she just couldn’t help herself. “Over the years I’ve seen a lot of accessories for cats and dogs but I wanted something a bit different. I wouldn’t usually go for something this flashy but when I saw this design I just had to have one,” Karen said, adding that her beloved Smike has become a local celebrity.

I’m not exactly sure if Smike’s Rolex is genuine, though…According to The Sun it costs £2,500 ($4,130), but MidDay.com reports it’s actually a £200 Rolex replica. Whatever the case, Smike’s ultimate accessory has become an instant hit and Karen gets asked where she got it whenever she takes her border terrier out for a stroll. It was the work of local designer Alisone Jones, who specializes in luxury accessories for pets.

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For the last five years, conceptual artist Cherry Tree has been experimenting with turning her urine into perfume. Her fragrances aren’t on the market yet, but if someone could sell perfume made from poop, why wouldn’t urine be a success, as well?

Cherry Tree, born Charity Blansit, says she’s very passionate about recycling, and since urine is something that gets eliminated, she thought it should be recycled. The idea for a urine-based perfume came to her the morning after a full moon, when she decided to collect her urine in a perfume bottle. At first, the full extent of her project was to collect urine after each full moon. She was fascinated about how the smell of it changed depending on what she ate. For example, she says urine smells very good when you eat honey, and terrible if you’ve had chicken.

The artist took her project to the next level when she decided to ad a little sugar to her urine and turn it into “a real eau de toilette”. Her brother, Jim Blansit, runs a distillery, so after learning how he made vodka and whiskey, he applied the techniques to her urine concoction. Although it had a nice chocolaty smell, probably because she was drinking a lot of coffee at the time, Cherry Tree had to throw away her first batch  because she didn’t add enough sugar for it to ferment.

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I suppose it could be worse, but 47-year-old David Harding has become the first man in Britain (and probably the world) who has undergone therapy to cure his addiction to sausages.

David has had at least one sausage a day ever since he was five years old – either in sandwiches, as fry-ups or main meals – and often eats as many as 13 of them. He spends around $1,150 on sausages every year, and has even bought a deep chest fridge just so he could store his favorite treats – McWhinney’s Irish pork sausages.

Last year, David realized he could be a sausage addict, when his wife Susan decided to cook something different for dinner, and he didn’t get his usual fix. He acted a little crazy in that particular situation which made him realize something was wrong, so he decided to seek professional help. So far, Harding has forked out $3,100 on four sessions with a professional therapist and two with a therapist, buts says he’s as far from curing his strange addiction as he was when he first started counseling.

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To commemorate the death of his friend, Canadian artist and designer, Tobias Wong, Frederick McSwain has created a giant portrait of him, from 13,138 dice.

The artist says:

The idea of a die itself was appropriate—the randomness of life. It felt like [a medium] he would use. Because [Tobias] was a very street-level force, I thought it was appropriate [to install] the portrait on the floor. Its not something I wanted to suspend on the wall; I wanted it to be right there on the floor where you almost interact with it.

The idea of every decision you make and everything you’ve done in your life, defines who you are. All of those days symbolically makes up the image of Tobi.

Tobias Wong was 35-years-old when he passed away, more accurately 13,138 days old, so McSwain used a die for every day he lived…

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Can pornography be art? That’s the question artist Tom Gallant is trying to answer through his series of beautiful paper cutouts made from archived adult magazines.

Brussels-based Tom Gallant describes his unique art as a visual language “dealing with a private matter in a very public way”. Using a very sharp scalpel, he cuts into the hardcore imagery, layering extremely delicate cutouts to create a whole new image that almost completely blurs your vision. If you look closely, you can see some flesh, hair, eyes, lips, sometimes even genitalia, but it’s the newly created shapes that first stand out.

“I use pornography as a representation of our visual culture, the underlying ideas are used to connect the motifs and concepts, whether it is the idolotry of youth, flesh, sex or the exploitation of the female and feminine.  Pornography is the medium but not the message,” Gallant says about his art.

I’ve posted some of the more “innocent” of Tom Gallant’s cutouts, but you can check out some of his more revealing creations on his official website. Read More »

Jon Ryder, a Ferrari fan from Sheffield, England, has converted his garage into part of the living room, just so he could look at his yellow Ferrari F355 as he relaxes on the sofa.

The passion Ferrari owners have for their exotic cars has no limit, and 28-year-old Jon Ryder is the perfect example. He bought his yellow road-beast three years ago, but says he’s still thrilled every time he looks at it. It was built in 1996, but the young steel worker says it’s his “favorite piece of Italian art” and that’s precisely why he wanted to find a place to put it on display right in his house.

When Jon and his wife Catherine decided to move to a new house last year, he immediately saw the potential of the garage, and began converting it into a lounge where he could just chill and stare at his Italian beauty. The conversion took him a whole month, working in his spare time, and he had to sacrifice the top half of his living room to make enough room for his garage/lounge, but says he has no regrets. The garage door is masked by a stylish curtain. He tried to keep expenses to a minimum, especially since his wife kept telling him it was just a garage, so he managed to spend just $1,450.

Word of Jon’s efforts reached Ferarri headquarters, and a spokesperson praised his passion for his Ferarri F355.

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Probably not, but Nino Selimaj, owner of Nino’s Bellissima Pizza, in New York, seems to think there are many food lovers who would fork out $1,000 for a slice of heaven.

Selimaj himself came up with the idea for this expensive pizza, in 2007, after spending a whole year just researching the ingredients. In the end, he settled on a creme fraiche base,  four types of caviar, sliced lobster tail, salmon roe and some wasabi. Each $250 slice contains a different kind of caviar and while Selimaj admits his gourmet creation isn’t for everyone, he says there are plenty of people who can afford it.

In 2010, during a CNN Money report on pizza in New York, Selimaj said the financial crisis hit his $1,000 pizza as well, and while he used to sell between 2 and 10 pies a week before the crisis, sales were down to one every two weeks, even one a month. I don’t know if he’s doing any better now, but I think he’ll keep it on the menu just for the pride of selling the most expensive pizza in the world.

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UK-based artist Inge Jacobsen has found an ingenious way of turning commercial images like the covers of Vogue Magazine into unique works of art.

In an interview with Global Grind, the 24-year-old artist explains why she chose Vogue for her latest embroidery project:

I’ve always had a thing for Vogue ever since I was a teenager. Every new issue I bought I would try and immerse myself into that world of beautiful images, of beautiful people and material objects. I’d love to live in a Vogue magazine. I tried to think of ways to experience the magazine other than just reading it or looking at it, I wanted to get under its skin. The stitching has allowed me to do that, it’s been my way of intervening in the exclusive world of high fashion magazines, partly by giving it a very touchable surface. More importantly, the cross stitching has allowed me to make my issues of mass produced magazines completely unique. You can’t buy mine at your local newsagent.

She apparently spent around 50 hours hand-stitching right over the original Vogue covers, which allows some of the image to show through as background coloring.

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57-year-old Don Gorske ate his first Big Mac 39 years ago, to celebrate buying a new car. He was hooked and on that same day he went back and ate eight more before the McDonalds restaurant closed. On May 17 2011, he ate his 25,000th Big Mac.

The retired prison guard planned to eat his 25,000 Big Mac in the same restaurant, in the same day and at the xact same hour he ate his first heart-stopping burger. The McDonald’s in his home town of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, celebrated the event by organizing a ceremony for their most loyal customer, and posted a sign beneath the logo’s golden arches that said “Congrats Don Gorske 25000 Big Macs.” Before biting into the burger, he said “It’s been seven years since 20,000. Same thing goes this year folks. You can’t have the carton and it probably still takes 16 bites for me to finish a Big Mac.”

Gorske fell in love with the Big Mac in 1972, when he walked into the local McDonald’s and bought three burgers to celebrate buying a car. He loved them so much that he came back to the restaurant twice that day, and ate a total of nine before it closed down. “I plan on eating Big Macs until I die,” he said. “I have no intentions of changing. It’s still my favorite food. Nothing has changed in 39 years. I look forward to it every day.” Throughout the nearly four decades since he started eating Big Macs, he’s only gone eight days without his favorite meal. One of the reasons he skipped a day was to grant his mother a dying wish, and the last day without a Big Mac was on Thanksgiving 2000, when he forgot to stock up and McDonald’s was closed for the holiday.

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Detailed artworks take a lot of time to complete, but American artist Joe Fenton took it to a whole new level when he decided to dedicate 10 months of his life to a single drawing.

Solitude is indeed one of the most intricate drawings I have ever seen, and knowing it’s all been done with an 0.5 mechanical pen makes it that much more impressive. Maybe you’re under the impression the artist just worked on it a few times a week, throughout the 10 months it took to complete, but in reality Joe Fenton drew on the 5 meter high and 8 foot across piece of paper for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. Most people would have probably given up after only a few days, but Joe showed enough confidence and patience to see it through. “It took courage to start it as I had never done anything that size before,” he told My Modern Met. “As you can imagine, you have to invest a lot of your time to complete something like this. I just had to believe in my process and have faith that it would work out!”

For Solitude, Joe Fenton created all the elements on a smaller scale than pieced it all together like a giant puzzle by tracing all the drawings on a large piece of paper. Although he isn’t a religious person, for this project he wanted to include various religious references like a “Ganesh-like character, a grinning Buddha, or a faint crucifix adorning a rooftop in the far distance.” After 10 months of work, he finished it all off with acrylic and paint.

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