Looking at the detailed sculptures in the photos below, You’d be tempted to think they are made of wax, but believe it or not, they’re actually gourds! Enterprising Chinese farmers are able to grow these veggies into any shape they want. The most popular one is Chairman Mao, but there are many others as well – Buddha, Jesus, Santa Claus, babies, old men, monks, dragons, and pretty much anything else that attracts people’s attention.

You might think there’s some complex bioengineering or agricultural science going on behind these gourd-sculptures, but in reality, they’re just grown in simple plastic molds. It all started when a man named Xie Lyu Zhi visited the Thousand Year Temple in Sichuan Province. He claims that during the visit, a Buddhist monk told him about a dream he had about a gourd shaped like a deity.

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58-year-old oil investor Richard Gibson has one of the weirdest collections in the world. For the past 36 years, he has been religiously saving all his toenail clippings in a glass jar.

Collecting toenails is a strange hobby, but Richard says that he didn’t exactly plan for it – it sort of happened as a result of his curiosity, and he just never stopped. He happened to be clipping his nails one day in February, 1978, and instead of throwing them out, he just put them in a manicure box. He then started doing it repeatedly, just to see how long it would take to fill up the box. That didn’t take too long – only two years – and by then he was pretty much hooked. So he moved his collection to a large glass jar, which is what now uses to put the clippings in.

“I have no idea how many nails are in the jar,” Gibson admitted. “It’s well into the thousands.”

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Lillian Weber, from Iowa, is almost 100 years old, but she doesn’t let her age stand in the way of her life’s mission – helping those in need. She spends every single day making a dress from scratch, so that a child in need will have something to wear. She started the unique project in 2011, and she’s made over 840 dresses so far. Her goal is to  make 1,000.

Lillian, who was nominated for WQAD-TV’s ‘Pay It Forward’ award, gets started on a new dress every morning, takes a break at midday, and is finished by the afternoon. “It is just what I like to do,” she said. The dresses she makes are donated to Little Dresses for Africa, an organisation that distributes clothes to impoverished young girls in Africa and beyond.

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While most people prefer their ice-cream frozen, Baghdad-based artist Othman Toma likes it melted. He uses multi-colored melting treats as a medium for his art, instead of normal paint. And it works incredibly well. In fact, to the untrained eye, his artworks seem painted with regular watercolors.

Toma paints all sorts of stuff using ice cream – lions, tigers, women’s faces, popular monuments, and more. It’s  just marvelous how he manages to get such a wide array of colors with very few shades of the cold dessert. All he needs to do is reach out into his freezer, and he’s ready to paint!

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It’s hard to find a partner with similar interests, especially if you’re into weird things. That’s why I’d say Dan MacIntyre and Dunya Kalantery are quite lucky they found each other. The two lovebirds share an extremely rare and gross hobby – looking at ‘fatbergs’.

If you have no idea what a fatberg is, well, you’re not the only one. The relatively unknown term is used in the UK to describe a great lump of fat, sanitary items and other stuff that doesn’t break down when it goes down the toilet. These deposits are found underground in city sewer systems, and are known to cause problematic clogs.

Fatbergs are exactly as gross as they sound, so it’s really surprising that Dan and his girlfriend Dunya discovered a common interest in them when they got together last year. Well, as they say, birds of a feather… “Like wet wipes and congealed cooking oil, we are inseparable,” Dan wrote to Dunya in what they consider to be a ‘romantic email’.

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I’ve seen plenty of dog lovers displaying their affection in rather questionable ways, but this is a first – a woman in China loves her so much that she loves eating its hair! Wang Jing, 27, is a self-proclaimed canine lover from Heilongjiang province – she actually gave up her regular job to become a dog tailor. Two years into the role, she claims that she has swallowed over 1,000 hairballs.

It all started when Wang adopted a cute little poodle called ‘Kuku’, four years ago, just after she graduated from college. She soon became obsessed with the furry brown pup, feeding it imported dog food, pig liver-mixed rice, ice cream and dried fruit. Still, things were pretty much normal until she began to feel enormous amounts of stress from her job as a graphics designer.

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While most makeup artists tend to follow the conventional rules of of the trade, 25-year-old Laura Jenkinson prefers to do her own thing. For the past year, she has been using all her colorful cosmetics and makeup brushes to recreate popular cartoon characters on her mouth and chin. She paints them in such a way that her mouth becomes their mouth as well, making the characters instantly come alive.

London-based Laura has so far painted a host of characters on her mouth, including The Cookie Monster, Shrek, Taz the Tasmanian Devil and several others from Disney movies, Looney Tunes, Pixar, and South Park. Last week, she did Robin Williams’ genie from Aladdin as a tribute to the actor. She does the paintings so accurately that every time her lips move, it appears as though the character is talking.

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Brendan Walsh is a professional sewage diver who, believe it or not, actually loves his job. He’s covered in poop for a large part of the day, every day, but that doesn’t seem to bother him at all. He runs a commercial diving business in Melbourne and he has been doing the job for over 25 years. “My company will do any job that involves wetness,” he proudly declares. “As long as there’s a fluid of some kind, we’ll attack it.”

But what in the world would anyone need to dive into a sewer for? Well, as it turns out, there are plenty of reasons. “Mostly we do general maintenance at the sewage farms but it could be rebuilding pumps or clearing blockages,” Brendan explained. “We found lots of false teeth but mainly male and female hygiene products. When we come back out we often have condoms hanging off you. People also don’t chew their corn,” he joked. Australia’s sewage farms need divers because they use bacteria to break down their waste, and not chemicals.

“It’s definitely not a job for the faint-hearted,” Brendan admitted. “It’s more thick than normal diving and you can’t see anything no matter what. It’s more like walking than swimming when you get down there.” Despite that, he says that working with sewage is like working with ‘brown-gold’. “I love my job and always have. I’m a passionate diver from way back, and I’m a mechanic. I’ve never worked a day in my life because I combine my passions. You can’t do a job well unless you love it,” he said.

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Men can be real jerks sometimes, but this guy has got to be the worst of the lot – he actually faked his own death to get out of his wedding. 23-year-old Tucker Blandford, from Connecticut, didn’t have the guts to tell his fiancee the truth – that he wasn’t ready for marriage – so he just led her to believe that he had died. When bride-to-be Alex Lanchester found out the truth, she was livid and heartbroken.

“He has shattered my trust and I’m not sure I’ll ever be in a relationship again,” said Alex, also 23. “All I ever did was love him. I’m so sick of being messed around and I’m glad to be rid of him. Looking back, maybe I was naive. But I really loved him and never thought he would go to such extreme measures to dump me. I’ve cried until I felt numb but now I’m just really angry.”

So how exactly does one go about faking their own death? Well, conveniently for Tucker, Alex lives in another country, so he probably thought she wouldn’t be able to verify his story. He simply called her one day, a week before he was due to visit her, and pretended to be his own dad. “I picked up my phone and there was a man saying he was Tucker’s dad,” said Alex.

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Kong Keng, a 2-year-old kid from Khnor village in Cambodia, is being hailed as a miracle baby with special healing powers. Thousands of people are traveling from as far as Laos and Vietnam, believing that even a glimpse of Kong will help cure them of their ailments. He appears to be the last ray of hope in a nation that doesn’t exactly have the world’s best healthcare system.

Hundreds of people throng outside Kong’s single-room wooden home every single day. It’s a motley crowd of handicapped people in wheelchairs, and ailing, dying patients on stretchers. Phat Soen, Kong’s 21-year-old mother, brings the boy out and places a row of eucalyptus balm bottles in front of him. She then guides his hand over each bottle – his touch is believed to transfer healing powers to the balm.

The toddler’s healing powers were discovered by an accidental healing ‘miracle’ that occurred a few months ago. “The miracle happened to my brother,” said Sung Bahn, Kong’s uncle. “He was paralyzed from the waist down after a motorcycle accident. Doctors couldn’t cure him and neither could the Kru Khmers (traditional Cambodian healers).”

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In a bid to get people to take climate change more seriously, Italian adventurer Alex Bellini is going to live on an iceberg until it melts. He plans to take on the challenge in the spring of 2015, on an iceberg in Greenland. He expects that he’ll have to live there alone for at least eight to twelve months.

Alex, who is now based in the UK, plans to live inside a survival capsule while on the iceberg. “Survival capsules are sort of floating Kevlar saucers, four meters in diameter, which are used as lifeboats on oil platforms,” he explained. “I will live in the capsule on the iceberg until it melts – which generally happens within eight months – or up to a maximum of one year.”

“Then, I’ll go adrift in the Atlantic Ocean, inside my capsule again, until I wash ashore.” He plans to carry 300 kilos of dehydrated food and electronic equipment along with him. Although he is yet to pick the perfect iceberg to live on, he said it would most probably be broad and flat, about 60 by 20 meters.

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A Belarusian family from the village of Zacherevye, 250 kilometers north of Minsk, is raising an entire family of wolves as pets. It’s been five years since the Selekhs took in a group of young wild wolves, and they’ve got the beasts completely domesticated now. In fact, the pet wolves’ behavior is quite opposite to what people normally expect from them.

Wolves are supposed to be instinctively wild, and follow a strict code of hierarchy within the pack – they are led by an alpha couple. But the Selekh wolves display none of these characteristics. They are quite a joyful lot instead, playing games and entertaining 10-year-old Alisa Selekh. They even take turns giving the girl piggyback rides through the Selekhs’ front garden.

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Mark Bustos is a New York hair stylist with a heart of gold. He spends his Sundays – his only day off from work at an upscale salon – giving free haircuts and shaves to the homeless. His heartwarming story has gone viral on Instagram, where he posts photographs of his unusual weekend escapades.

Every Sunday, Mark sets out through the city in search of anyone who might need a trim or a shave. Once he spots someone who fits the description, he approaches them with a simple phrase: “I want to do something nice for you today.” He then proceeds with the haircut and repeats the process for up to six different people.

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If you want to stay in shape, but don’t have the time to go to the gym, the Mobile Gym is the solution you’ve been looking for. It’s basically a large bus filled with the latest fitness equipment, hardwood floors and air conditioners. You can find everything you need for a complete workout, and here’s the best part – you don’t need to go to the gym, the gym comes to you!

The idea for the Mobile Gym was thought up by Adam Zickerman, founder of InForm Fitnes, a popular chain of gyms across the United States. When his customers requested a place to workout in the Hamptons, he realized that building a new gym over there wasn’t feasible. But inspiration hit him and he was able to solve the problem when he ordered lunch from a food truck one afternoon.

“I realized I could solve the problem by putting a gym on a truck!” said Zickerman, who is also the author of the New York Times bestseller ‘Power of 10’. “We know that people are busy and that is why we are offering this service.”

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Nigerian faith healer TB Joshua, who also happens to be a millionaire, is claiming that his patented holy water can cure people suffering from the deadly Ebola virus. He reportedly sent 4,000 bottles of the special water as a part of an aid package to Sierra Leone, via a private jet that cost $50,000. He is believed to have sent a cash donation of the same size, along with the water.

The news of Joshua’s holy water comes at a time when doctors and health workers are already trying to convince people in the rural areas that science could help them more than prayers or witchcraft. Nonetheless, the cash donation is certainly the need of the hour to stem the outbreak of Ebola in the West African nation.

The donation was confirmed by the office of Sierra Leone president Ernest Bai Koroma – the statement revealed that the cash was meant to ‘feed those affected by the Ebola outbreak’. The office, however, made no mention of the controversial holy water.

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