When 37-year-old Kristy Mazins realised how much people hate confrontation, she developed an entire business plan around it. The former nurse from Melbourne started a service called ‘Sorry It’s Over’ that helps people avoid the uncomfortable task of breaking up with someone. For a fee of AUS $5.50 (US $4.44) or more, Mazins will do the dirty work via text, email, handwritten letter, or even a phone call.

Mazins only needs her customers to provide her with a brief outline of what they want to say, and she will convert it into a heartfelt message designed to ease the pain. Additional services like sending flowers, a box of tissues, a sympathy basket, or a message delivered in person are also available.

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A University of California – San Diego (USCD) professor is making waves for requiring his students to strip naked during their visual art final exam. The drama intensified after a student’s mother got a whiff of what was going on. Speaking to the media, she lashed out at the professor’s unorthodox teaching methods.

“It bothers me, I’m not sending her to school for this,” the woman told 10News . “To blatantly say you must be naked in order to pass my class… it makes me sick to my stomach. It’s just wrong. This is a memory that my daughter is going to carry with her for the rest of her life.” The woman, who chose to remain anonymous, broke down in tears during the phone conversation.

Professor Ricardo Dominguez, who has been teaching Visual Arts 104A: Performing the Self  at UCSD for the past 11 years, confirmed that his students do have to be in the nude during the final exam. “The class focuses on the history of body art and performance art in relation to the question of the self or subjectivity,” he explained. “At the very end of the class, we’ve done several gestures, they have to nude gesture. The prompt is to speak about or do a gesture or create an installation that says, ‘what is more you than you are.”

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Meet Shinri Tezuka, a highly skilled artisan candy maker whose masterpieces make animal crackers look crude. Using a 500-year-old Japanese art-form called ‘amezaiku’, Tezuka creates detailed animal-shaped lollipops that look incredibly lifelike.

Tezuka, 26, owns a small shop in Tokyo’s Asakusa district called ‘Ameshin’ – one of Japan’s only two stores specializing in amezaiku. The self-taught artist works in front of his customers, crafting exquisite pieces of glass-like candy. “There are no schools, I had to learn it myself,” he told Japanese TV show Moshimoshi Nippon. “It’s a small market, so it’s easier to innovate. There is no limit to this craft.” He got into the unique art form right after high school, fascinated by the amazing pieces of candy he could create.

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Teacher and part time artist Meghan Maconochie uses colored pencils to create art, but not in the conventional sense. Instead of coloring with the pencils, she sharpens them and layers the shavings to on a white background to create all kinds of cool things, ranging from animals, to food and portraits of pop icons.

Meghan’s love affair with pencil shavings began when she participated in a color competition called ‘Nifty250’ last year. “I was sharpening a pencil when I decided to create the Nifty250 logo using the shavings from the pencil,” she said. She did just that, and her work was declared the winner. Soon, she began making more and more pieces using pencil shavings.

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Italian artist Marco Grassi paints portraits of women that are so perfect, down to the fine hair lines, pores and freckles on the skin that people often mistake them for photographs.

However, Grassi differentiates himself from other hyper-realist painters by giving his artworks a surreal twist. In one painting, for example, his subject’s back is adorned with a tribal motif that seems carved into her back revealing a hollow interior. Other of his ‘surreal hyper-realistic” include a woman with spectacular glowing tattoos that seem to emerge from her skin, or another with a futuristic glass necklace around her neck. Although his human subjects appear photographed, it’s these little impossible details that give them away as paintings.

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When this young Canadian couple got the chance to make a few extra dollars by renting out their three-bedroom home on Airbnb, they took it immediately. Little did they know that two days later, they would find their beautiful home wrecked beyond imagination.

Mark and Star King bought their house in 2010, in Calgary’s fashionable Sage Hill, for a little over US $300,000 and lived in it with their two sons – five-year-old Vincent and one-year-old Oliver. When a local man offered them about $650 to have the house for a weekend, the Kings, being mortgage-payers, couldn’t refuse. The man told the Kings that he needed the house to accommodate four of his relatives who were in town for a wedding. He was well-dressed, well-mannered, and told them, “You have a beautiful home. God bless you.”

“We use Airbnb when we travel, we love it, it’s a great website, vacation rental by owner type website and my parents are out of town so we were going to go and stay at their house and we get an offer to rent out our house for three days for a family coming for a wedding, it’s going to be four older adults, go through the house rules, they shook my hand,” Mark said.

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A Chinese man made the news last week for building an incredible model of his hometown, using nothing but coins! He spent an entire month painstakingly stacking up ancient and modern coins from 11 different countries to create the model, complete with roads, bridges and skyscrapers. Believe it or not, he didn’t use any glue!

He Peiqi revealed that he used his contacts in the coin trading industry to collect tens of thousands of coins for his masterpiece. Once the coins were ready, he got to work on the floor of his apartment, kneeling for two long hours each day. He carefully stacked the coins to resemble the general layout of Chongqing City.

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Believe it or not, the kindergarten scene in Hong Kong is so fiercely competitive that tiny toddlers are expected to take special classes to get prepped for nursery interviews!

You might wonder what the big deal is about nursery school – kids just play and take naps, right? But parents in Hong Kong actually view it as an important phase that could determine their child’s future. They strongly believe in the cascading effect – admission to the best kindergartens will lead to the best primary schools, best secondary schools, and eventually, the best universities.

“It’s the only topic that comes up when you go out for lunch, which school your kid got into, which school are you applying for and how are you preparing your child for it?” one mother revealed. “My friends have sent me spreadsheets with a detailed timetable of when schools are available for applications and how to apply.”

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When a young couple from Zhuangxi village in China’s Shanxi province found an abandoned baby in 1989, they they decided to take the poor child in and raise it as their own. Since then, Chen Tianwen and his wife Guo Gairan have always been on the lookout for abandoned children.

Over time, the local Civil Affairs Bureau kept sending abandoned children to the couple for adoption, because there were no other welfare institutions back then. And Chen and Guo never refused. The couple, now in their 60s, have taken care of over forty disabled orphans in the past 26 years, along with their own three children.

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While most people look forward to a quiet retirement, 70-year-old Allan Law seems unstoppable. The former teacher from Minneapolis has spent the past 15 years tirelessly delivering food and other supplies to people on the streets. He distributed a whopping 520,000 sandwiches to the homeless last year, and over 1 million since 1999, earning himself the nickname ‘Sandwich Man’.

A typical day for Allan starts with collecting sandwiches made by volunteers, and donations from various groups to his organisation ‘Minneapolis Recreation Development Inc’. He then begins his delivery rounds at 9pm, driving his van through the streets of inner city Minneapolis, handing out sandwiches. He drives on relentlessly, ending his shift only at 10am. As a backup, Allan has 17 freezers in his apartment in Edina, packed with thousands of sandwiches. “Most of these are going to be turkey, bologna and cheese,” he explained during a video news report.

Allan, himself a patient of arthritis and a cancer survivor, continues to remain committed to his work, despite his ill health. “People say, ‘You’re crazy,’ and I say, ‘No. If I was homeless, or if I had a couple of little kids that needed food or something, I would appreciate someone coming, giving a helping hand,’” he said.

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A Chinese man was recently in the news for not only winning millions of yuan in a lottery, but also for the bizarre costume he wore while collecting his prize. The man, believed to be about 40 years old, was so worried about revealing his identity that he actually turned up dressed as the popular Disney character Baymax!

Speaking to reporters, the man revealed that he had won 170 million yuan (approximately $27 million) even though he rarely buys lottery tickets.  As for the strange costume, the man revealed that his wife forced him into wearing it, fearing that old friends and long-lost relatives might suddenly show up expecting a small share of the prize. But no costume can actually help him evade the mandatory 20 percent tax on lottery winnings, which means he will have to cough up about 34 million yuan to give back to the state.

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When a team of Swedish athletes trekking through the Ecuadorian rainforest last year sat down for a meal of canned meat, they were joined by the most unusual dinner guest – a scruffy old stray dog. They felt sorry for the poor creature and gave him some of their food, but little did they expect that the small gesture of kindness would earn them a friend for life. From that moment on the dog never left their side, following them through the rough terrain for the entire duration of the trek!

The group of four trekkers happened to be navigating the final two stages of the 430-mile Adventure Racing World Championship, during the time that the dog – whom they later named Arthur – befriended them. “I had just opened a food pack when I saw a scruffy miserable dog in the corner of my eye,” said team member Mikaels Lindord. “I thought he was hungry and gave him a meatball. Then I thought no more of it.”

But the act certainly made an impression on Arthur, who refused to leave his new master’s side. Despite his ill health, he kept up with the team through every gruelling task. He swam alongside them while they kayaked down rivers, dragged himself up treacherous hills as they hiked, and even managed to pull himself through knee-deep mud during treks.

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Colombian-American artist and opera singer Mateo Blanco was in the news late last year for creating three celebrity portraits out of the most unusual material – dog hair! Blanco revealed that he was listening to Lennon when inspiration struck, and he decided to honor the three late singers with dog hair purchased from a local groomer.

The portraits – of musicians John Lennon, Michael Jackson, and Jimi Hendrix – were purchased by Orlando-based Ripley Entertainment and unveiled at Ripley’s Odditorium on December 12. The Michael Jackson portrait is still on display in Orlando, while John Lennon is currently at Ripley’s Mexico City, and Jimi Hendrix at Ripley’s Key West Odditorium.

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Artist Helen Ahpornsiri uses pressed ferns leaves and stems to create intricately beautiful illustrations of birds, insects and other creatures. Each delicate piece consists of hundreds of pieces of pressed fern, assembled to form shapes that are sometimes no bigger than a coin or a pencil stub. The completed illustrations are so colorful that they look more like embroidered patterns on fabric.

Helen studied illustration at Falmouth University, and went on to work on several projects – greeting cards for Marks and Spencer, paper flowers for Harrods Knightsbridge, and bespoke menus for Coach. However, her love of paper cutting and collage inspired her to take on the fern project.

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Chinese social media is abuzz with the story of Guo Gantang, 45, who has spent the last 18 years on the road in search of his missing son.

Guo’s ordeal began on September 21, 1997, when his two-year-old boy, Guo Zhen, was abducted from the front gate of his home in Liaocheng, Shandong Province. According to a little girl he was playing with at the time, Zhen was snatched by a middle-aged woman. Since then, the heartbroken father has dedicated his life to finding the boy. Guo has traveled over 400,000 kilometers to all of China’s provinces, except Xinjiang in Tibet, wearing out 10 motorcycles in the process.

In the hopes that someone might recognize the boy and give him some useful information, Guo always has two flags with an old photo of him strapped to his motorcycle.

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