Ever since 1961, the German town of Langenbruck has hosted the Big Nose World Championship, a competition where “nosy” people from around the world compete for the title of world’s biggest nose.

The history of this wacky contest dates back 40 years, when a group of hops growers and the town minister sat down at the Lagenbruck pub and started making fun of each other’s big noses. “We could actually create a big nose club and you with your nose, could make the board” one of them said, while another replied “If I should be on the board then you would have to be nose king!” It was all in the spirit of fun, but Max Reichart and Wilhelm Höfler actually began thinking about establishing an “Association of Big Noses”, and a few weeks later they had actually done.

Everyone could join, as long as their nose was at least 60-mm-long or 40-mm-wide, and it numbered 40 members in the first hour since sits official inauguration. The Big Nose Club currently has 330 registered members and uses a modern nose gauge to measure the nose size of contestants during the Big Nose World Championship, held every five years. The judges measure the length and width of the noses, and contestants are allowed to frown or make faces in order to enlarge their noses, but they aren’t allowed to use any illegal substances.

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Garry Weddle, a 50-year-old science teacher from Washington has finally been able to shave the beard he vowed to let grow until Osama bin Laden was captured or killed.

Nearly 10 years ago, during the terrorist attack of “9/11”, Gary remembers he couldn’t take his eyes off the television coverage. “When the twin towers came down, I was horrified and I was glued to that television set for several days,” he said in an interview with KOMO News, back in 2003. He soon realized he not only wasn’t taking showers, but he wasn’t shaving either, so he vowed not to touch his beard with a razor until bin Laden was captured or reported dead, so the people around him would remember the tragedy of September 2001 every time they looked at him.

When President Obama made the announcement that the Al Qaeda leader was finally dead, Gary cried for about five minutes and couldn’t wait to shave off the beard he had been growing for the last 10 years. By the time the commander-in-chief said “I can report to the American people and to the world, that the US has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden”., he had already cut off most of the beard and was shaving the stubble. It was the first time in 3,454 days that Gary Weddle shaved.

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Doctors recommend women remove their make-up every night before they go to sleep, in order to prevent damage to their skin, but a young South-Korean girl chose to wear her make-up mask full-time, for the last two years.

20-year-old Bae Dal-mi first discovered make-up when she was just 14. You could say it was love at first brush, and ever since then, the young Koream developed her make-up talents to the point where she became so dependent on it that she didn’t want to remove it anymore. As she kept applying ever-thicker layers of make-up on her face, the mirror became the most important item in Bae’s life and she declares “I wanted to look perfect at all time, I even slept with the make-up on.” Shae wasn’t satisfied with her appearance, and said she wanted to have plastic surgery in 10 different places.

For the last two years, the young girl never used make-up removers, so her mother, exasperated by Bae’s behaviour, contacted a TV station and told them Bae’s incredible story. During a variety show, dermatologists managed to convince Bae Dal-mi to finally remove the layers of make-up, and after a specialized check-up they found her skin was two times older than her actual age. All because of an obsession with beauty…

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Someone decided to give fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld 10 tons of chocolate so he could create a chocolate hotel room complete with a chocolate model eating a chocolate ice-cream.

The photos speak for themselves, but if you need some context, here goes: Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld has apparently designed a chocolate hotel room, as part of a deal with Magnum ice-cream. Its creation required around 10 tons of Belgian chocolate, and the chocolate guy on the bed eating an ice-cream was apparently inspired by Baptiste Giabiconi, the designer’s favorite male model and muse. The edible chocolate room is currently housed by an unnamed Paris Hotel.

Chocolate living spaces seem to be very popular these days, I remember a Lithuanian shopping mall created a similar chocolate room for Valentine’s Day.

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41-year-old Huang Guofu, from Chongqing, China, has learned to master the paintbrush with his mouth and right foot, after he lost both his hands in a childhood accident.

Huang Guofu lost his arms in terrible electric shock accident, at the tender age of four, but that didn’t stop him from following his dreams, and at age 12 he began painting with his feet. The talented artist remembers that in the beginning, his artworks didn’t look at all like what he intended to paint, but as the years went by his skills improved considerably. Huang quit his studies when he was 18, as his father was very ill and he needed to make money for his treatments. He started travelling to other Chinese cities, creating beautiful paintings on the side of streets and selling them to passers-by.

It was during his art travels that he began using his mouth to paint, after hearing some comments that painting with one’s leg isn’t very elegant. He put a brush in his mouth and started painting. During a trip to a city in China’s Sichuan Province, Huang Guofu met Hu Guoui, a woman who quickly fell in love with his strong will and artistic talents, and the two got married in 2000. Since then, she has become his assistant, carrying his canvas and tools, whenever he needs to paint a scene on location.

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The Monastery of Saint Nicholas of the Cats is regarded as a sacred cat haven in Cyprus, as it’s name has been linked to felines for almost 2,000 years.

The original monastery was built in 327 AD, by Kalokeros, the first Byzantine governor of Cyprus, and patronised by Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great. At that time, a terrible drought affected the whole of Cypus, and the entire island was overrun with poisonous snakes which made building the monastery a dangerous affair. Many of the inhabitants left their homes and moved off the island, for fear of the snakes, but Saint Helena came up with a solution to the plague – she ordered 1,000 cats to be shipped in from Egypt and Palestine to fight the reptiles.

In the following years, the cats did their duty, hunting and killing most of the snakes in the Akrotiri Peninsula, which soon came to be known as the “Cat Peninsula”. The monks would use a bell to call the cats to the monastery at meal time, and then the felines were dispatched to their snake-hunting duties. Pilgrims from all around Europe traveled to the Holy Monastery of Saint Nicholas to see its feline guardians, and the discovered documents of a Venetian monk describe them as scarred, missing various body parts, some completely blind as a result of their relentless battle against the snakes.

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Showcased during an abacus-themed exhibition held in the Chinese city of Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, this large pavilion model is made from 668 different-size abacuses. Used as a calculating tool centuries before the adoption of the written numeral system, the abacus is a big part of Asian culture, and is still widely use by merchants and clerks around Asia and Africa. Apart from the impressive abacus pavilion, visitors at the exhibition could admire over 100 abacuses, from the simplest to more complex versions.

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A gym in Spain’s Basque region has begun offering naked workouts, in order to beat the economic recession.

When Merche Laseca, owner of the Easy Gym, in Arrigorriaga, noticed fewer people were attending his gym because of the crisis, he knew he had to come up with something new to keep his business afloat. He did some research and discovered the area was a popular destination for naturists. In fact, two local swimming pools were already offering popular monthly nude swimming sessions, and since he discovered there are at least 12 nudist beached in the Basque region, and a mass naked run organized yearly in the nearby town of Sopelana, he figured a naturist gym wasn’t a bad idea.

“We’re always interested in new activities” and “doing sports without clothes is natural and much more comfy” argues Maite Vicuna, president of the Basque Naturist Association, but there are skeptics who are less than thrilled with the idea of a nudist gym. They claim clothes are important when working out, as they retain most of the sweat, whereas doing it naked means the swat goes on the machines, the floor and even on the people around you. Read More »

The Chinese department of industry and commerce has recently discovered a “beef extract” additive used by small restaurants around Hefei to turn pork into beef.

A lot of knock-offs have come out of China over the years, in fact they’ve probably made replicas of every successful product ever made. That’s not to say the Chinese don’t make original stuff as well, but their talent of replicating pretty much anything is legendary. That being said, I had never heard of Chinese food replicas until a few months ago, when I watched a news report about a guy making completely artificial eggs, using chemicals, right in his own home-made laboratory. Today, as I was surfing the interwebs, I came across and even stranger article about a “beef extract” additive that turns pork into beef, in just one and a half hours.

This “magical” product has apparently become very popular in small Chinese restaurants in Hefei, Fujian, Jianxi and other places around the country, especially since beef is twice as expensive as pork. A pound of beef is sold for around 20 yuan, whereas pork costs just 10 yuan, so some restaurant owners are inclined to buy a liter of beef extract for 45 yuan and use it to maximize profits.

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Sadhu Amar Bharati is an Indian holy man who claims he has kept his right hand raised in the air since 1973. Now, 38 years later, his hand is just a useless piece of skin and bone, but has become a symbol for Shiva worshipers around India.

Until 1970, Amar Bharati was an average middle-class man who lived a normal life. He had a job, a home, a wife and three children, but none of that mattered when he woke up one morning and decided to leave everything behind and dedicate his life to serving the Hindu god Shiva. He began wandering the roads of India dressed in his simple Sadhu clothes and carrying only his trusty Trishula (a metal trident). After three years, in 1973, Amar realized he was still too connected to the fading luxury and pleasures of mortal life, and decided to separate himself from them by raising his right arm and keeping it raised. 38 years later, his arm is still up and he couldn’t use it, even if he wanted to.

Other sources claim Amar Bharati felt disillusioned by all the fighting going on in the world, and decided to raise his right arm for peace. A respected Sadhu at the Kumbh Mela, in Haridwar, Amar has inspired other Sadhus to raise their arms for peace and harmony, and some of them have kept them raised for the last seven, thirteen, even 25 years. But doing something like this doesn’t just mean giving up the functionality of an important body part, it also implies dealing with a lot of pain. Bharati himself says he went through excruciating pain for a long time, but not anymore. That’s because his arm is completely atrophied and stuck in a bizarre, semi-vertical position, a useless bony structure ending in thick, twisted nails that he never clips.

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High-school senior Tara Frey, from Wisconsin, won’t have to worry about having the same prom dress as other girls, as her mother has made her a unique outfit from thousands of Starburst candy wrappers.

Tara and her mother Kerrin worked on the dress for the last six years, trying to collect as many wrappers as possible before the big event. Kerrin Frey told local news station KARE-TV that she got the idea for the wacky project after seeing another mother weaving gum wrappers during a hockey game. The two started collecting Starburst wrappers, but had to go the extra mile in order to complete the outfit in time for the prom. They tried calling Starburst to ask them if they could only buy the wrappers from them, but they weren’t too keen on the idea, so they had to buy up to 9 kg of candy at a time. They handed them to neighbors and friends, but asked them to keep the wrappers and try not ot tear them.

In order to be used for the sweet prom dress, every candy wrapper had to be folded eight times, and pressed with tweezers to achieve a tight weave. Not the easiest of tasks, considering there were a lot of wrappers to prepare, so Kerrin asked for help from her friends. She doesn’t know exactly how many Starburst wrappers were used on Tara’s gown, but she does remember it took five failed attempts before the two of them agreed on the design.

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Do you like American Football but wish kicking was allowed in the game? Are you a martial arts student who wishes classes weren’t so darn boring? If this is you, comBATON will be your favorite sport.

ComBATON was invented back in 1998, by Steve Blanton, but the first practice game didn’t take place until November 2004. You see, although Blanton had a vision, he needed someone to develop the game into a playable version, and that person was David Turnbull, president of the Florida A.A.U. Tae Kwon Do Association. He had more than a few black belt students more than willing to play in a game of comBATON, and when he saw how naturally they acted as a team, on the field, he knew he had struck gold.

The word comBATON is derived from combat and baton, and“the object of the game is for the offense to move the baton down field and score on their opponent’s goal pole. The defense must stop the offense and end the attack by kicking the baton carrier.” The goals are more like poles from which the opponent’s baton hangs, and a member of the attacking team carrying their baton has to kick the opponent’s baton to score. Sounds a little confusing with all these batons lying around, but martial arts enthusiasts seem to love it.

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Tomasz Urynowicz, a 37-year-old art lover from Nowa Huta, Poland, has fallen in love with a young brown-haired girl hanging laundry in one of his paintings.

Urynowicz first saw the artwork painted by Antoni Maria Kwiek in 2001, in a art gallery and was fascinated by the beauty of the girl it portrayed. He bought it on the spot and spent the last decade searching for the girl. He hoped his neighbors might know who she was or where the artist who painted her in 1955 was located. “I just wanted to meet her, sit down and have coffee and a chat – to see who she is and what her life has been like,” he explains, but says he would have been happy enough to just track down Kwiek.

After years of failure tracking down the girl who “has brown hair that shimmers in the sun”, Tomasz is now looking for a priest who will agree to marry him with the painted version of the girl of his dreams. “I don’t know what the laws on this sort of thing are in Poland. But if I can’t do it here I’ll go somewhere else and do it,” he says, and 10 years of searching tell me he means it. If he actually goes through with this unusual wedding, I’m pretty sure he’ll be the first man in the world to marry a painting.

UPDATE: After receiving a comment saying this article “ruined this man’s life”, I found a Polish article where Mr. Urynowicz claims he never said any of the words he was quoted for, and that he is already happily married and even has a son named Adam. He also has no intention of finding a priest to marry him to the laundry girl in the painting.

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A souvenir shop in the city of Siena, Italy, sold toys and decorative items assembled with real bullets that could be used by anyone with basic knowledge of guns.

The 25,000 AK-47 bullets were discovered during a control operation by the Siena Financial Guard. Most of them were used to assemble children’s toys like tanks, guns and attack planes, which were sold for €10 each. Further investigation revealed the Chinese owner of the shop got his lethal merchandise from a warehouse in Florence, which was also owned by a Chinese citizen. It’s suspected the raw material for the so-called toys was shipped over from mainland China, where it was probably obtained at no cost at all, from military deposits.

Upon inspecting this hidden arsenal, Italian authorities discovered it was live ammunition that could easily have been used by practically anyone familiar with guns. Even more disturbing is that the Kalshnikov cartridges had steel bullets, which made them a lot more dangerous than the lead ones used by Italian armed forces. Just think what could have happened if a child accidentally dropped or slammed one of these bullet toys on a hard surface.

Apart from toys assembled from live ammo, the shop also sold real Ak-47 rifles, Chinese military caps, and even bullet-pierced metal helmets.

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Living on a prayer gets a whole new meaning when 16 vicars jump on all kinds of thrill-rides and compete for the title of “Extreme Vicar“.

A roller-coaster is probably one of the last place you’d expect to see a robe wearing vicar, but 16 of them actually spent last weekend braving a number of grueling rides and Alton Towers and Thorpe Park, during an audition for a special religious service entitled “Extreme Easter”. Some of them asked the Lord to give them courage by clasping their hands,  raising them towards the Heavens and even reading from the Bible during the rides.

Extreme Easter will address the problem of dwindling church goers in Britain, by offering people the chance to worship at two of the most popular attractions in the UK. Sounds a little odd, but you know what they say, the Lord works in mysterious ways…

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