Herman Divers, also known as the master of pull-tab engineering, is known for creating impressive sculptures exclusively out of aluminum pull tabs.

Environmentalists have always preached about the need to recycle metals like aluminum, and Topeka based Herman Divers is one of the few people who listened and decided to do something about it. Using old-fashioned pull tabs that were found on beer and soda cans in the 1970s, he created impressive artworks that are now on display at the Grassroot Art Center, in Kansas.

A retired hospital handyman, Divers developed a unique affinity for pull tabs in the early 1980s, when he asked the hospital’s  snack bar attendant to save them for him. “I told her I was going to make a beadspread and she thought I was crazy” Divers remembers about his early days as a pull-tab artist. But he was on to something, because unlike the modern pull tab, the old-fashioned one had a extension that could be wrapped/bent to secure it to another one. Using this process and without any glue or steel reinforcement, Herman Divers spent many of his nights working on some of the most incredible pull-tab artworks I have ever seen.

His unique collection of pull-tab sculptures include replicas of a Harley Davidson motorcycle (made from 179, 200 pull-tabs) and a classic automobile, a set of costumes for him and his wife, as well as pieces of pull-tab furniture. When old pull-tabs became obsolete, Divers started working with bottle caps and buttons creating more beautiful creations, but his aluminum wonders remained his signature works.

And to think it all began with his simple credo “I just figure you can’t get into too much trouble when you’re working”.

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Small Mexican brewery Minerva has just launched two very special brands of ale, Salamandra and Purple Hand, aimed at the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual) market.

Beer is the most popular alcoholic drink in Mexico, but 95% of the market is already controlled by the two largest breweries in the country, Modelo Group and Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma, which makes it almost impossible for smaller companies to compete. But it seems Jalisco-based brewery Minerva has just found an untapped niche that has so far proved very profitable – it has created two brands of “Artisan Honey-Ales” made with organic honey and malt, a mix that infuses the drink with an orange flavor that appeals to gay communities.

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Wander Martich, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, spent three months working on a giant penny sculpture made of 84,000 common pennies.

The story of how an average woman managed to create this unique artwork began in 2006, when Martich and her family were going through a really tough time. She had just got divorced, lost her house to foreclosure and was an unemployed mother of two daughters, aged 6 and 9. She was literally saving every penny and her girls pitched in the contents of their piggy bank, to help out in these troubled times. The pennies ended up in a plastic water jug, and even after Wander finally found a job, she took $20 from every paycheck, changed them into pennies and kept filling up the water jug.

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Chichi the rocking piano was designed by Sarah Davenport as a way of strengthening the relationship between the pianist and piano, and is unique in the world. Apparently, the rocking motion creates a perfect harmony that allows the piano player to completely get lost in the music, ignoring the world around. At least that’s how Sarah says it makes her feel, and she’s been playing piano since she was just three years old, so I guess we can take her word for it. At some events, pianists have been known to get so immersed in the music and the rocking that they kept playing for hours on end.

Chichi has been around for three years now, and after being featured in prestigious venues like the London Design Festival and The Nottingham Contemporay Art Gallery, Sarah decided it’s time to find it a proper home. She auctioned it off, at the end of January, and I’m sure it sold for a pretty hefty sum.

Ms. Davenport has already been approached by some of the biggest names in the music industry, to create more rocking pianos, each of which will be custom made, but she says there will never be another Chichi.

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Throughout the years I’ve been writing on Oddity Central, I’ve seen some pretty amazing car models built out of the most unusual materials, and edible cars have definitely been among the most impressive. I’ve featured some of them on this blog, and today I thought I’d make a list of the coolest life-size cars made of things you love to eat.

Chococar

This tasty looking thing was created exclusively out of chocolate, and was exhibited in SIngapore’s Royal Plaza on Scotts, back in 2008. The 4.7 meters-long, 2 meters-wide Formula 1 car weighed around 90 kilograms and was made with white, dark and milk chocolate. The design alone took 44 days to complete, and a team of eight chocolatiers worked 7 days and nights on it.

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Tempestt Henderson, a 19-year-old girl from Florida, has a rather peculiar addiction – she can’t help eating soap bars and washing powder. There are worst things to be addicted to, but this has to be one of the strangest.

The young girl remembers she loved the smell of washing powder on her mother’s cardigan and on her bed sheets, and so do many other people, but that doesn’t make them want to stuff their face with the toxic substance. But that’s exactly what Tempestt felt when she first dipped her fingers in washing powder and licked it off. ‘I dabbed the powder onto my tongue and it tasted so sweet, and salty…it just felt so right. I was hooked straight away.’ says the young nursing student.

She new that stuff was hazardous to her health, but she loved it so much she couldn’t stay away from it. From the moment she woke up, she would give in to her washing powder craving, ignoring the warning labels. Before she knew it, Tempestt began licking off the soap bubbles of her skin in the shower, and popping tiny chunks of soap in her mouth and suck on them. Eating soap felt much cleaner than just washing with it, and the young girl claims that at one point she would go through five bars of soap in a week.

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“People don’t ask me if I’m crazy – they tell me I’m crazy” says Erik Bendl, also known as “World Guy“, a man who has spent most of the last few years trekking across the US rolling a giant globe.

Walking around 2,200 miles across 23 states is quite a challenge for any 48-year-old, but Mr Bendl decided to make it even tougher by rolling a 36-kg-heavy inflatable globe, everywhere he goes. It may sound useless and stupid, but it’s actually for a good cause – raising awareness about diabetes and the complications it causes.

World Guy lost his 54-year-old mother to diabetes, in 1987,and always wanted to do something memorable in her honor. In the late 1990s, he took the giant canvas globe he and his son used to play with and embarked on a 160-miles-long journey across Kentucky, for the American Diabetes Association, and also began walking in parades around the state. In 2007, after he and his wife got divorced, Erik Bendl set out on his first major trek across America, a 430-mile walk from Louisville to Pittsburgh.

Now, he’s halfway through his fifth long walk, talking to people he encounters and posting their stories on his blog, via the Blackberry smartphone hanging around his neck. He is accompanied by his dog, Nice, who loyally follows him on his daily 10-mile walks. When he completes his daily trek, he returns to his van, drives it to the spot he ended his walk, sleeps and does it all again the next day.

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When people are to scared to walk their pets around the city streets because of feral chickens, you know you have a serious problem on your hands. Welcome to Lakeland, Polk County, a city terrorized by chicken.

Now we’re not talking about a small group of rogue chickens causing mayhem around the city, authorities say there are around 600 chickens free running around the streets of northwest Lakeland. You’re probably thinking the only harm they’re capable of is defecating in public places, but it seems some of the locals have actually complained about the birds attacking their children and household pets, forcing local authorities to take desperate measures.

They’ve hired a company called Squeal Deal Animal Control to help catch these feathered villains and are paying them a fee for every bird they bring in. Representatives of the company say the task is a lot harder than it sounds, because the chickens are fast and quick to hide in their surroundings. This is their woods,they go underneath houses and cars and in trees. They know where to escape from you.” ” chicken chaser Clayton Keene said.

Nobody knows exactly how the chickens got on the streets in the first place, but according to urban legends, some locals who raised chickens in the city released them from their cages, allowing them multiply at an alarming rate.

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John Looser, a skillful carpenter from Toronto, Canada, builds regular wood mansions for birds.

The 46-year-old carpenter used to work on human houses, but he had to retire after 20 years, due to to a serious car accident that left him with a terrible condition – fibromyalgia. The pain associated with it has no boundaries and most people describe it as deep muscular aching, throbbing, shooting, stabbing and intense burning. The stiffness and pain are worst in the morning and in muscle groups that are used repetitively. Although he had to retire as a house builder for humans, John Looser kept working in residential construction, only his new clients were birds.

“Building birdhouses helps keep my mind busy so that I don’t notice my pain so much,” says John. “As long as I can stay busy, I don’t feel like my muscles are going to seize up and stop moving.” says John, who also suffers from sleeplessness, getting up at 6 am and  working for 8 – 10 hours a day. The small size of his beautiful birdhouses, in comparison with human buildings, allows him to exercise his passion for building houses.

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60-year-old Pamela Cole has spent most of her life putting together an impressive collection of over 2,000 ceramic cats, and doesn’t plan to stop anytime soon.

When Ms. Cole says she’s crazy about cats, you best believe she means it – her house in Hollywood, Birmingham is practically full of ceramic cats, from a common replicas of cartoon characters like Top Cat, to 7th century BC Egyptian statuettes.

This unusual obsession with ceramic cats can be traced back to Pamela Cole’s childhood years, in the 1940s, when her mother bought her a cat to stop her feeling lonely. It was a simple pottery cat from a gift store in Corporation Street, but it kick-started her passion for collecting, and from then on she spent her days scouring shops and craft fairs in search of cat china.

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Rising105 meters into the sky, the Sanctuary of Truth is a one-of-a-kind gigantic structure that pays homage to the ‘Ancient Vision of Earth’, ‘Ancient Knowledge’ and ‘Eastern Philosophy’. It looks like a Thai temple or a palace, but it’s actually neither of them, so many people just look at it at as a monument to Thai craftsmanship.

Covering thirty two acres of land, on a rocky hilltop overlooking the ocean, the Sanctuary of Truth is the most magnificent sight in North Pattaya, and one of the most popular tourist attractions in Thailand. It is entirely carved out of teak wood and features the most beautiful and elaborate wood carvings I have ever seen, inspired by the four major artistic and philosophical influences in Thailand (Chinese, Thai, Khmer and Hindu). Buddha heads, sacred animals and all kinds of  religious and philosophical themes are depicted in the thousands of wooden sculptures and carvings adorning both the interior and outside walls of the sanctuary.

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I’ve read and written about a some pretty unusual hotels, in the past, but this is the first chicken hotel I’ve ever heard of.

The Chicken Hotel created by 31-year-old David Roberts, from Boskenwyn, Helston, is almost just like any other hotel out there, with one big difference – instead of people, it offers accommodations for chicken. I know it sounds like a joke, but this  place is for real, and apparently  it’s also very successful.

“With more people looking to escape the rat race and move out in the country with a little bit of land, keeping chickens is becoming more and more popular. But what do you do if you go away on holiday? Who looks after the chicken?” asks Mr. Roberts, who opened his unusual establishment to encourage people to raise their own chicken. A former cabinet-maker, David Roberts built the chicken coops himself and now rents them for 2 pounds each, plus 75 pence per chicken.

Each coop in the Chicken Hotel holds up to eight chicken and the current offer includes buffet breakfast, lunch and dinner of local produce, served in open-air. Guests are allowed to roam around the hotel grounds all day, before being gathered to roost at night. According to Mr. Roberts, the hotel was fully booked over Christmas time, and he hopes half term and Easter will be just as successful.

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The people of Jingdezhen City, China have found an original way to celebrate the Chinese Year of the Rabbit – they’ve built a giant statue of a rabbit from 30,000 porcelain plates.

Ever since the Song dynasty, 1,700 years ago, Jingdezhen has been known as the “porcelain city” because of its porcelain-making history, so it made perfect sense the locals used centuries-old skills for the celebration. Just like that porcelain dragon from Yangzhou that I posted about last week, this giant rabbit sculpture features a metal frame covered with thousands of porcelain plates.

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Sofa_XXXX is the creation of German designer Yuya Ushida, is a unique expandable sofa made from 8,000 wooden chopsticks.

Showcased during the Designers Fair at the IMM Cologne 2011 exhibition, Sofa_XXXX attracted a lot of attention because of the unusual medium Ushida used, and its ingenious folding mechanism. The expandable and retractable sofa was created from 8,000 wooden chopsticks, individually cut to four different lengths and sanded to just the right angle, connected with metal rings and plastic joints. German-based designer Yuya Ushida spent three months working on the Sofa_XXXX project, but the stunning end result was definitely worth the effort.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this one-of-a-kind chopstick sofa is that it can actually support up to three 70-kg-heavy people at any one time.

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An 11-meters-high, 21-ton heavy statue of Autobots leader Optimus Prime has recently been unveiled in one of the squares of Shenyang City, China. According to Chinese sources, this is the biggest Transformers replica ever created, beating the previous record (also set by China) by only one meter. Just like all the other Optimus Prime statues I’ve featured on Oddity Central in the past, this latest one was assembled from various old car parts, taken from 20 automobiles.

The world’s tallest Optimus Prime model was completed yesterday and can now be admired outside the “Guangzhou Street” metro station, in Shenyang. I didn’t know Asia was so big on the Transformers franchise, seeing it has its own giant robot creations, like Gundam or Tetsujin, but the most impressive Transformers statues so far were created in mainland China and Taiwan.

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