When Jeff Bridges starred as ‘The Dude’ in the 1998 film The Big Lebowski, I bet he didn’t know that his character would one day inspire a whole new religion. Seven years after the film’s release, Oliver Benjamin was watching it with a large group of people in Thailand, when he says he was ‘transformed’. Soon, the Church of the Latter-Day Dude was born in the hip resort town of Pai; a modern-day hippie-style religion, where it’s okay to do pretty much as you please. Today, Dudeism has over 100,000 ordained Dudeist priests all over the world, and Benjamin is the Dudely Lama. It’s interesting to note that over 75 percent of the followers are male.

One look at the religion’s official website, and you’re bound to think it’s a joke. But it isn’t, the Dudeists are actually pretty serious about being ‘cool’. Dudeism also borrows some of its philosophy from Chinese Taoism, and their idea is pretty simple: Just take it easy, man. Life is short and complicated, they say, and nobody knows what to do about it. So, don’t. Sounds pretty good, but I do wonder if it’s really that easy to be chilled out all the time. I suppose it’s for people like me that they even have a ‘Take it Easy Manifesto’ written by Arch Dudeship Rev. Dwayne Eutsey.

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Viganella is a small village in Italy located right at the bottom of a deep valley, and surrounded by high mountains on all sides. This means that naturally, every year from mid-November to early February, the region has absolutely no sunlight. The return of the sun’s rays on the 2^nd of February was celebrated with joy every single year for several centuries. That is, until December of 2006, when the problem was fixed forever.

Thanks to the brilliance of Giacomo Bonzani, an architect and sundial designer, there now resides on the slopes of a mountainside above Viganella, a giant mirror that reflects sunlight into the town square. A place that had not seen the sun’s rays during the winter since the beginning of time, was now suddenly bathed in its glorious light and warmth. The mirror is 40 square meters in size, 8 meters wide by 5 meters high and is located about 870 meters above the village. What’s more, it is actually controlled by a computer software that tracks the sun and tilts and turns the panels of the mirror so that the rays are always reflected downwards. It has actually become a tourist attraction of sorts, since its installation over 5 years ago.

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It’s hard enough being dumped, but not even knowing why could be pretty brutal. Especially if your ex happened to just vanish without a trace. I suppose it’s pure torture to deal with not just the loss of a partner, without breaking your head over what could have possibly gone wrong. But this doesn’t have to be the case anymore, not if you make use of this new Australian website, WotWentWrong.com.

Founder Audrey Melnik describes the website in simple terms, “WotWentWrong is the breakup app for couples who never really broke up.” Since confronting a person who simply faded away from your life could be difficult, the website provides you with an opportunity to do so without having to face them. WotWentWrong actually allows you to get in touch with your ex and ask them for detailed feedback about what went wrong that made them leave you. This helps to give jilted lovers closure, and also a few handy tips about what they could do better the next time around. As part of the feedback, there are questions about kissing skills, attractiveness, dressing and more. Survey ratings are also provided along with various reasons for the silent treatment to be selected from.

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“You are hereby sentenced to death by rollercoaster.” Sounds strange for a death sentence, I know, but it could very well be a reality. That is, if Lithuanian engineer Julijonas Urbonas’ invention – the Euthanasia Coaster – is ever created. For now, he only has a prototype of the amusement ride with the ultimate thrill, death itself.

Yes, you ride it, you die. That’s pretty much the concept of the Euthanasia Coaster. What could be scarier than this – a ride that lasts 3 minutes, the first two of which are spent slowly climbing a very steep slope. Once at the top, you still have a chance to make the ultimate decision of your life, to live or to die. Choose the latter, and you will be dropped at a high speed and then made to travel through a quick succession of loops. The spinning motion would create a centrifugal force that makes all the blood rush away from the brain, and insufficient oxygen would ultimately lead to death.

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Janio Nunez is a talented Cuban artist who has the gift of making incredible sculptures exclusively from tobacco leaves. He creates works of art both tiny and life-size that prove there are better things to do with tobacco than smoking it.

Janio’s fascination with tobacco began as a little boy, watching his grandparents roll cigars at the factory. He started copying them and ended up becoming a tobacco leaf roller himself. He worked at the factory, but after passing evaluations, he was sent to Varadero, Cuba’s largest resort in Cuba, to roll cigars for tourists. Everything was normal until one day when something really strange happened. He began seeing his co-workers like they were made entirely of tobacco leaves. He would get scared and close his eyes, and when he opened them they were normal again, dressed in their regular clothes. Then would turn around and see another colleague sitting down, all made of tobacco (clothes, face, skin, etc.). This happened sporadically for about four months, and his friends even took him to see a doctor about his “problem”. That didn’t help very much, and realizing something was wrong with him, he decided to do somehow fix things himself.

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Her eyes looked dazed, her expression blank. And yet, her hands worked in perfect coordination, shooting a basketball through the hoop with practiced precision. This is the story of 18-year-old Maggie Meier who was able to shoot hoops while comatose, at age 14.

In 2008, Maggie started to complain of headaches and suffered nonstop seizures. At the time, she was a freshman and star athelete at Blue Valley High School in Overland Park, Kansas. When she was taken in to the hospital, she was diagnosed with a rare brain infection called mycoplasma meningoencephalitis that causes swelling in the brain. Maggie soon slipped into a coma, and remained in a vegetative state for nearly three months. During that time, her family made sure she was moved every two hours so her limbs didn’t stiffen up. And so that she wouldn’t forget her identity, a basketball was put in her hands as she sat upright on a wheelchair. It was then that her dormant memory kicked in and she could shoot hoops for a while, before slipping back into a coma.

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Using various everyday objects and back light, Azerbaijani artist Rashad Alakbarov creates mind-blowing shadow paintings.

It always amazes me what some people can achieve by using the simplest materials and their imagination. Rashad Alakbarov is definitely one of these incredible individuals; using common items like empty plastic bottles, metal pipes or simple pieces of plastic and back light, he creates amazing works of art. Either by hanging these items from the ceiling, or carefully positioning them on a table, Alakbarov manages to produce incredible shadow paintings.

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Hiring people to strip at a bachelor’s party has been a long-standing and extremely popular tradition. That’s why this South-African company wants to take it one step, or rather several steps further. Natural Cleaning Co. is “the world’s only all-naked service company.” With a description like that, I’m pretty darn sure they’re never going out of business.

The 1-month-old companywas founded by Jean-Paul Reid, who couldn’t find a decent job as an accountant. Their website is quite interesting, with pictures of the ‘Gorgeous Staff’ and ‘Tempting Services’ that include semi-naked and naked cleaners, lawyers, accountants, computer geeks and handy men. They even let clients customize their own nude service where they can provide their own entertainment request for an hour. The only thing the company does not condone is prostitution, which is a point stressed by Reid. The aim of Natural Cleaning Co. is purely to provide entertainment, he says.

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“Turning eight is the new 18” – I seriously wonder how and where people get such ideas. But, apparently they do, and 51-year-old Sarah Burge is one of them. She thinks it’s perfectly normal to gift her 7-year-old daughter plastic surgery gift vouchers worth £8,000 ($12,700).

The vouchers are meant to be a present for the occasion of Poppy Burge’s 8^th birthday. At an age when most girls expect to be given dolls or a new bike, a plastic surgery gift is absolutely bizarre. More so, since Poppy is so young that even her front two teeth are yet to come in. It’s no surprise that Sarah herself is a plastic surgery addict, having spent over £250,000 ($400,000) on altering her own appearance. So according to her, all she’s doing is giving her daughter a chance to be happy with her looks and grow up with confidence. “I’m investing in my child’s future. I’m giving Poppy the freedom to do what she wants,” says Sarah. “That’s what Poppy wants for her birthday.”

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If I told you of a place where babies are repeatedly flipped, spun, swung and dunked underwater, you’d waste no time it telling me it was baby-hell. Or at least some kind of baby-torture camp. But it’s neither. It’s really just a session of Baby Dynamics.

People who are not familiar with the routines involved in baby dynamics are usually, and quite understandably, horrified. Especially when the babies being subjected to the movements are obviously uncomfortable, crying and even vomiting. But the practitioner Lena Fokina simply smiles and asserts that it’s all good for the babies. The 51-year-old Russian has been practicing the techniques of baby dynamics for over 30 years and guarantees that no harm has ever been done to a baby she has handled. “It’s very good for babies and not dangerous at all,” she says. “Some babies cry at first, but then they begin to enjoy it.”

Considering how careful people are to just lift babies into their arms, it is rather shocking the way Lena simply holds one by the ankle or wrist and twists and turns the little one with ease. Again, she insists that this is nothing but normal. “Most people think young babies can only lie in bed, eat and cry. But babies are born with natural reflexes, which we can use to help them develop physically and intellectually.” So baby dynamics is actually meant to help babies with skeletal or muscular problems, and is also suitable for healthy children. It’s an age-old practice that originated with ancient African tribes. Dr Igor Charkovsky, a Russian midwife, adapted the techniques to suit modern times and was later joined by Lena. Baby dynamics is offered to children up to two years old and workshops are held to teach parents how to practice it at home.

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Festival games are really fun to watch, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be in one like the Atherstone Ball Game. I’ve always followed the Spanish La Tomatina with interest, so when I heard about the Atherstone Ball Game, I had to find out more. Considered to be one of the oldest traditions of England, it is played in Atherstone, Warwickshire, as a part of Mardi Gras celebrations each year. For over 800 years, hundreds of men have gathered on the streets of the town to fight for a giant ball. The man who emerges in possession of the ball at the end of two hours of pushing, shoving and punching, is the winner.

The various traditions followed as a part of the festive day are quite interesting. The preparations for the game start early in the morning, with shop owners boarding up windows for protection. At 2.30pm, children start gathering under Barclays Bank. Pennies and sweets are showered on them from the balcony. Later, at around 3pm, the men start to assemble in anticipation of the ball game. A selected dignitary finally throws the ball into the crowd from a window above, and then all hell breaks loose.

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“For sale – a willing and able permanent or temporary employee’ – reads the eBay ad. It’s quite unusual for the e-commerce website where merchants are more interested in selling goods. But 38-year-old Deborah Bowen had no other choice but to try and sell herself on eBay, having had no proper employment for over 2 years. She went from a £33,000 per year role in sales, to looking for jobs where she’s willing to do almost ‘anything’ for a living.

In the last couple of years, Bowen has been sending out her resume to hundreds of recruiters and prospective employers. She didn’t even leave out local plumber’s merchants in the hope of receiving some sort of permanent employment. But all she could find was part-time work, sometimes paying as low as £6.6 per hour. Bowen and her partner have been struggling to make mortgage repayments and are facing eviction from their home in Gloucester. With the next payment due in March, she is desperate to try anything and hence decided to try out eBay.

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17 Spectacular Pictures of Siberia’s Altai Mountains (Environmental Graffiti)

Couple Makes Lovely Art Out of Beach’s Plastic Trash (Laughing Squid)

Write a Bike – Conceptual Bikes Made Incorporate Names (Behance Network)

Wold’s Shortest Man Measures 55cm (Metro.co.uk)

Slovaks to Name Bridge After Chuck Norris, making It Indestructible (AFP)

Supermanning Is the New Planking (YouTube)

White English Teacher Quits School to Become a Rapper (Orange)

Pregnant Woman Has a Taste for Her Local Newspaper (The Sun)

BASE Jumping from the Top of Shanghai’s Jin Mao Tower (Environmental Graffiti)

Chinese Make iPhone Branded Tabletop Stoves (Geekologie)

You’ve probably sculptures made from bicycle chains, but I bet they’re nothing like the ones created by South Korean artist, Seo Young Deok.

The incredible ‘works of Seo Young Deok are clearly inspired by the shapes of the human body, but artists have been sculpting masterpieces based on our natural curves for hundreds of years. What makes this Korean designer special is the material he uses for his unique creations – bicycle chains. Miles of metal chains, to be exact, welded in such a way that they recreate the human body to the finest details. Deok says he finds inspiration for his art in crowded markets, and metro or bus stations, but also in Buddhist sculptures and paintings, which he has alway admired. “I like Asia Beauty” he says, “so most features of my work seem to take an Asiatic pose”.

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Drew Barrymore’s character has a weird memory condition that makes her relieve the same day every time she wakes up. This pretty much the basis of the romantic comedy 50 First Dates. It’s a pretty interesting concept for a film, but in real life it would be considered a nightmare. Unfortunately, 19-year-old Jess Lydon has to go through something similar to this every day.

Instead of returning to the past, Jess is actually trapped in the present. She has been affected by a rare condition known as Susac Syndrome that only allows her to remember what happened in the past 24 hours. Needless to say, this is highly upsetting to Jess and her family. It gets so bad sometimes that she cannot remember what she had for dinner the previous night, or what she did on Christmas and for her birthday. Looking at family pictures confuses her, as she can’t recollect any of the events that took place. The worst part is that although she split up with her boyfriend almost 2 years ago, she wakes up thinking they’re together every morning. Imagine having to relive a heartbreak every single day of your life.

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