Catia Lattouf de Arída has been using her apartment in Mexico City as a hospital and sanctuary for injured and abandoned hummingbirds for the last 11 years.

As pollinating agents, hummingbirds are a very important part of Mexico’s ecosystem, but because of the ever-expanding urban landscape, they face all sorts of serious threats. That’s where 73-year-old Catia Lattouf de Arída comes in. As a self-taught hummingbird caretaker, she dedicates most of her free time and resources to nursing the tiny birds back to health or at least providing the necessary palliative care to ensure an easy, dignified passing. She has been doing it for over a decade and her home in Mexico City has become known as a hummingbird hospital.

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Nguyen Thi Thu is one of the few remaining artists practicing and constantly enhancing the traditional Vietnamese art of sculpting realistic-looking flowers out of papaya fruits.

Thu became enamored with carving various flowers from papaya fruits at the age of 15, when, like many other parents during the 1980s, her family registered her for an exclusive class on the art of sculpting the tropical fruit. She was fascinated by the traditional art form, but then she had to move to Russia for 15 years, where, because she was too busy working and had no access to green papayas, she couldn’t practice her favorite art form. She tried it with all sorts of other fruits and vegetables, including watermelons, but nothing was quite like the papaya she knew. When she went back to Hanoi in 2009, she immediately got back into papaya sculpting, and she has been practicing the craft ever since.

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A Chinese farmer who had recently relocated from his rural home to an urban apartment building in Sichuan Province shocked his new neighbors when he started raising seven calves on his balcony.

Imagine living on the upper floors of an urban residential complex and waking up one morning to the mooing of bovines and the smell of manure. That was the shocking experience of hundreds of people in Sichuan Province who were shocked to find that a new neighbor had started raising cattle on his small 5th-floor apartment balcony. The man had recently relocated from a village and had brought seven bovine calves, weighing between 10 and 20 kilograms, with him to raise as pets. Annoyed by the constant mooing and foul smell of the young bovines, many of the residents called the authorities, and the animals were forcefully removed on the first day in their new home.

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German artist Werner Härtl has carved out a truly unique niche for himself – he is currently the only known artist who uses diluted cow dung to create sepia-style paintings.

Here at Oddity Central, we’ve featured some funky art mediums in the past, from the artist’s own blood as paint, to dead cockroaches as canvases for tiny paintings, but in terms of weirdness, few things come close to Werner Härtl’s chosen medium. The German artist started experimenting with cow dung in 2012, during a stint as an agricultural worker. He packed some manure into a canister and used water to dilute it in order to obtain different sepia tones. These days, he prefers to get the ‘paint’ directly from the source, placing the canister just under the cow’s rectum as it poops. He claims that harvesting just two bovine bowel movements provides him with enough material for at least half a year.

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The Regent International apartment building in Hangzhou, China, is famous for having a number of inhabitants comparable to a small town, around 20,000 people.

Located in Qianjiang Century City, Hangzhou’s central business district, the S-shaped Regent International was originally designed as a luxury hotel, but was subsequently converted into a colossal apartment building, with the rooms turned into thousands of high-end residential apartments. The impressive building is 206 m tall and has 36 to 39 floors, depending on what you’re side of it you’re on, and as any self-contained community, features a variety of amenities and businesses, like a giant food court for its tens of thousands of inhabitants, as well as swimming pools, barber shops, nail salons, medium-sized supermarkets, and internet cafes. You can find anything you need in the building, so technically you don’t even need to go outside.

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Fran Mariano, an Argentinian fan of Latino superstar Ricky Martin, has undergone dozens of different cosmetic procedures in an attempt to copy the look of his idol.

Ricky Martin is one of the biggest names in the entertainment industry. He is a global icon with millions of fans all over the world, but few as obsessed as Fran Mariano, an Argentinian man who has been trying to become a ‘clone’ of Ricky Marin ever since the Puerto Rican singer was named one of the sexiest 100 men one the world. He has been trying all kinds of ways to transform himself into Ricky Martin, including having motor oil injected into his eyebrows, as well as dozens of other procedures that have left him with serious physical and psychological sequelae.

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A German tattoo artist has been criticized for charging a client hundreds of dollars for a back tattoo that many have compared to a childish doodle.

Mykhailo, a 21-year old tattoo artist from Berlin, Germany, recently posted a TikTok video of one of his latest projects, an abstract, scribble-like design that his client allegedly paid 900 euros ($960) for. The short clip quickly went viral, with nearly 2 million views at the time of this writing and hundreds of comments about the quality of the artwork. The tattoo consists of two shapes resembling hurriedly doodled flowers stemming out of a scribbled section surrounded by dozens of seemingly disconnected lines. While some people described the tattoo as a piece of art, others said that they wouldn’t have it inked on their bodies even if someone paid them $10,000.

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‘Number 28 on Yongxing Jie’ is an unusual attraction in Guangzhou, China which consists of an eight-storey apartment building surrounded by a busy overpass.

The story of ‘Number 28 on Yongxing Jie’ can be traced back to the year 2008, when a number of buildings in the Haizhu District of Guangzhou were scheduled for demolition in order to make room for a new road. While most of the residents reached an agreement with developers and decided to sell their homes and relocate, three residents of a now-famous yellow apartment building drove a harder bargain, refusing to abandon their homes unless their demands were met. In the end, developers decided to abandon negotiations and instead build an overpass around the building. Today, the story of the ‘encircled’ building is known as Guangzhou’s most tenacious holdout against infrastructure developers.

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A Russian woman has been accused of hiring a contract killer to have her own daughter murdered in order to get her hands on the woman’s apartment.

A 67-year-old woman from Krasnoyarsk, Russia, is being accused of ordering the murder of her 48-year-old daughter so she could inherit her apartment. According to investigators, the pensioner shared her ominous intentions with a local acquaintance who told her that they knew someone who could pull it off, for a fee. On April 19, 2023, the acquaintance set up a meeting between the woman and the would-be perpetrator of the murder in a park on Odesskaya Street, in the city of Krasnoyarsk, during which they discussed the details and method of committing the crime. The woman allegedly promised to pay the contract killer 80,000 rubles ($1,040) once he produced evidence of her daughter’s murder.

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A Swedish electric vehicle manufacturer hopes to become the IKEA of small EVs by shipping its cars as individual parts that can be assembled at their final destination.

Luvly, a Swedish start-up specializing in small and affordable electric vehicles, has announced plans to ship its tiny cars as flat packs to be assembled at their final destination. The company claims that this unusual model will allow it to fit 20 of its cars into a container that would otherwise only have room for 4 assembled vehicles, thus lowering transportation costs considerably. However, the Swedish manufacturer clarified that, unlike IKEA furniture, its electric vehicles are not meant for home assembly. Instead, the flat packs will end up at micro-factories where they will be quickly put together by specialized staff to ensure complete safety.

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The Tokyo Shimbun newspaper recently sparked controversy in Japan with an article on consuming raw crow meat, a practice that experts say could cause serious health problems, even death.

Last month, the Tokyo Shimbun, one of the most-read newspapers in Japan, published an article on the consumption of so-called ‘crow sashimi’ (raw crow meat marinated in various sauces). The journalist basically described their experience eating crow meat both cooked and raw at a gathering of crow meat lovers in Ibaraki Prefecture, claiming that the crow sashimi was both refreshing and easy to chew, compared to the grilled meat which was extremely tough and dry. The article caused a lot of confusion online, and the Japanese Health Ministry ultimately posted a message on its official Twitter account warning people not to indulge in raw crow meat, as it could cost them their lives.

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A Kenyan man recently made international news headlines after being caught taking part in a women’s chess tournament using a full burka as a disguise.

In what is considered a first for the Kenyan Chess Federation, a disciplinary committee is currently debating the proper punishment for a male player who disguised himself as a Muslim woman in an attempt to win a women’s chess tournament. 25-year-old Stanley Omondi was reportedly facing financial woes when he decided to try and get his hands on the £2,400 ($3,000) grand prize of a women’s chess tournament. To pull it off without attracting too much suspicion, the male chess player put on a black burka which only left his eyes and feet visible, and registered under the false name ‘Millicent Awour’. At first, organizers were none the wiser to the player’s gender, but it was his prowess at the game of chess that first drew their attention…

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Isolated on an island in the middle of the southeastern Pacific Ocean, the bees of Easter Island are free of all the pathogens and pesticides ravaging the global bee population, and therefore produce the purest honey on the planet.

The beekeepers of Chile’s Easter Island are fully aware that their bees may one day become the salvation of the world’s most important polinator. With bee colonies all over the world struggling to survive serious threats like pesticide poisoning, new diseases and climate change, the bees of Easter Island are probably the only ones in the world yet to be affected by such problems. And their owners hope to keep it that way. They have managed to convince the local government to ban the importation of bees, because of the significant risk of contamination.

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On March 24, 2022, the whole of Switzerland was shocked by the unexplainable act of a family of five from the town of Montreux who jumped from the balcony of their seventh-floor apartment.

A year ago, in the span of about five minutes, Nasrine Feraoun, 41, her twin sister Narjisse, her husband Eric David, 40, and their two children – an 8-year-old girl and a 15-year-old son – all jumped from the balcony of their 7th-floor apartment on Rue du Casino street, in the town of Montreux. Only the 15-year-old son survived, but after spending months in a coma, he has no recollection of the tragic events of March 24, 2022. After investigating this bizarre case for a year, Swiss authorities recently revealed that the family had planned and even rehearsed their jumps beforehand, which explains how they could jump one after the other without making so much as a sound.

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Covering an area as big as five football fields and selling over 100,000 products in 25 different departments, Gekås Ullared is not only the largest department store in the world, but Sweden’s most popular tourist attraction by a large margin.

Ullared, a small, unassuming town in the south of Sweden is home to about 800 people, according to the country’s most recent census. It’s really not the most beautiful place to visit in the Scandinavian country, and yet thousands of people from all over the world flock to Ullared every single day. It’s all because of Gekås Ullared the world-famous department store founded in 1963 by entrepreneur Göran Karlsson, which currently holds the record for the largest department store in the world. It has a total of 2,000 employees and can accommodate up to 5,500 shoppers at the same time.

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