Rolf Buchholz, from Dortmund, Germany has a total of 453 studs and rings all over his body, and has recently been acknowledged by Guinness as the most pierced man in the world.

The 52-year-old computer expert discovered the world of piercing 11 years ago, and loved it so much that he has since then had 453 piercings in various parts of his body. Looking at him, you’d probably think most of them are  on his head and face, but you’d be wrong. Rolf has 94 piercings in and around his lips, 25 in his eyebrows, 8 in his nose, and a whopping 278 in his genital area. I don’t need to see it to believe it, but I wonder how he managed to fit that many in such a small area. Apart from his passion for piercings, Bucholz also has a thing for tattoos, and sports a full body suit that covers his entire torso and limbs. Read More »

Despite never acting in a big Hollywood movie, Dennis Woodruff is a living legend in Los Angeles, known for driving around town in his crazy art cars and advertising his acting services. But it appears the long-time wannabe actor is turning over a new leaf and making a fortune in the process.

For around 20 years he has been known as the guy driving along Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards in ridiculous art cars covered in hand-painted signs, portfolio photos and phone numbers, trying to land a movie part. Like Angelyne, he became a local celebrity that everybody seemed to recognize, but his dream was to star in movies and he wasn’t going to give up on it. Dennis visited over 200 casting agencies only to face rejection after rejection, but he was hellbent on leaving his mark on Hollywood, and recently decided the only way he could do that was t make his own movies.

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I hope you’re seating down LEGO and Star Wars fans, because there’s a chance you might pass out from the awesomeness of this Venator Class Star Destroyer model made from 43,000 LEGO parts.

Now LEGO has been one of my favorite topics to write about on Oddity Central, and we’ve featured some pretty cool-looking creations, from the record-breaking LEGO Warship Yamato, to the mind-blowing LEGO Middle Earth, or the incredible LEGO sculptures of Nathan Sawaya. Well, it’s time to add another brick masterpiece to our collection – Sylvain Ballivet’s model of the Venator Class Star Destroyer featured in Star Wars, made from 43,000 parts. Sylvain, also known as iomedes in the world of LEGO enthusiasts, has created a lot of amazing sculptures, which you can check out on his blog, but the giant Venator is definitely the highlight of his career as a LEGO master.

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German model maker Robert Gülpen has built the most expensive car model in the world – a 1:8 scale replica of the Lamborghini Aventador made from carbon, platinum gold and decorated with precious stones.

52-year-old Gülpen, who describes his creation as a “high-tech work of art” said he wanted to create something unique that has never been done before. A former mechanical engineer, Gülpen started making miniature car models from precious metals in the late 1990s and eventually became a renown miniature car model maker. He decided the cutting edge Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 would be the perfect choice for his greatest masterpiece.  The body of the car is made from carbon, just like the original, and features around €2 million-worth of precious metals and stones. Metal was used for the detailed rims and diamonds were inserted into the seats, steering wheel and headlights.

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Sticking hundreds of small denomination coins into tree trunks is apparently a popular way of getting rid of illnesses.

At least that’s what the staff at a holiday attraction in Gwynedd discovered after investigating the story behind several coin-covered tree trunks in the vicinity of Italianate village Portmeirion. The first tree was cut down four years ago, in order to widen the path to the picturesque settlement founded in 1925, and within only a few months it was covered with 2p coins. Now there are seven such tree trunks in the area, so estate manager Meurig Jones started an investigation to uncover the origins of this unusual habit.

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Michael Carmichael, from Alexandria, Indiana has created the world’s largest ball of paint by covering a regulations baseball with tens of thousands of coats of colored paint, for more than 30 years.

The story of Michael’s unusual hobby began one day in the mid 1960s, when he was playing baseball for the Knox County Children’s Home. A baseball accidentally landed in some paint, and Michael was so intrigued by it that he decided to hold on to it as a keepsake. During the two years after that, he kept on dipping it in paint and painting it by hand, until it reached the size of a football. He donated his colorful creation to the Indiana Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Children’s Home Museum, where it’s still on display today. Later he tried to get it back so he could continue painting it, but they wouldn’t give it to him.

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One of the wackiest competitions in the world, the annual World Egg Throwing Championships held in Swaton, England feature a variety of events, all having to do with smashed eggs.

According to the World Egg Throwing Federation website, egg throwing is a local tradition inspired by historic events that occurred in the 14th century. It’s believed the ancient village of Swaton has stood on theses very grounds since before Roman times, but it wasn’t until 1322 that it became forever linked to egg throwing. The newly appointed Abbot was assigned to the Parish of Swaton  by royal decree, and found a rather ingenious way of increasing church attendance. As the only person in the settlement to own chickens, he provided one egg for each attendee to his sermons. But when the waters of the River Eau flooded, cutting off the church from the village, monks started throwing the eggs to the waiting locals. Legend has it when the gap became even wider, the monks used small trebuchets to make sure the eggs traveled the required distance.

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The Most Beautiful Sand Dunes on Earth (Environmental Graffiti)

Dog Has World’s Longest Ears (Orange News)

Real Starship Troopers Powered Suit Is as Badass as It Sounds (Dvice)

Fat Cat Photoshopped into Artistic Masterpieces (Geekosystem)

The Sick Collector and His 1,000 Pairs of Shoes (Asia Obscura)

10 Most Extreme Acrobatic Gymnastics (Oddee)

“Beauty Class” Chinese TV Show Teaches Women How to Be Perfect (China Smack)

The Abandones Cold War Listening Station Built on the Ruins of Nazi Berlin (Environmental Graffiti)

Pionen Data Center – The Internet as Provided by a James Bond Villain (Atlas Obscura)

Ben & Jerry’s unveils Schweddy Balls Ice-Cream (Topix)

Now here’s something you don’t see every day – a skilled Taiwanese chef uses leftover lobster shells to create intriguing miniature motorcycles.

We’ve seen amazing miniature motorcycles made from computer parts, used wristwatches, and wood, but the ones crafted by chef Huang Mingbo are definitely something you don’t see everyday. Apparently he’s not a fan of throwing away lobster shells after preparing a delicious dinner, so he came up with an ingenious way of repurposing them. The food carving expert showcased his lobster shell motorcycles during a cooking art seminar in Fuzhou, southeast China, leaving attendants baffled.

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This is what you’d expect to see in the lavish Palace of Versailles built by Louis the XIVth, but it’s actually the inside of a pharmaceutical company in Harbin, northeast China.

Citizens of Harbin were outraged to see what the state-controlled Harbin Pharmaceutical Group spent their funding on rather than solving more pressing issues, like the factory’s sewage problems, but representatives of the company said the recently emerged photos are part of a smear campaign. They claim the photos show the museum, which takes up three floors in the same building as the factory, where the company showcases local art. Now I’m not an expert on Chinese art, but those gold-tinted walls and lavish chandeliers look pretty European, and some of those rooms look an awful lot like conference halls…In fact, photos of the museum on the company’s website showed white-painted walls, brown wooden floors and none of the opulence in the photos.

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We all have our small hobbies and passions, but for Heather Hems sewing has been a huge part of her life for the last 17 years. She has dedicated at least 10 -12 hours to sewing every day and has created a collection of embroidered artworks twice the size of the Bayeux Tapestry.

The 69-year-old pensioner claims she has dedicated over 70,000 hours to sewing, over the last 17 years, time in which she also managed to hold down a job as a typesetter, raise three children and do house chores. But how did she find time to do it all, you ask? Mrs. Hems says she worked all day, then took care of her kids, and finally sat down and sewed 10 to 12 hours every night. She only slept for two hours before doing it all over again. This amazing lady says she owes her ambitious mentality to her father who used to challenge her to do things as a child, and race to see who could collect various stuff faster.

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In Yaopu village, Shanxi Province, Li Yanping is known as a one-person orphanages who has taken care of 80 abandoned children over a period of 22 years.

49-year-old Li Yanping lives in a modest 40-square-meter country house and barely survives on a meager income, but that hasn’t stopped her from taking care of dozens of abandoned children, most of them mentally or psychically handicapped.  Born in 1964, in Mu village, Li married at the young age of 21 and soon had her first baby. Her story as a modern-day Mother Theresa began in 1989, shortly after her natural child was born, when her husband found a toddler abandoned on their doorstep. After examining it more carefully, the two realized the child suffered from deformities, but they took it in, fed it and took care of it, despite their financial shortcomings. But they could only take care of two babies for a while, and when milk shortages and lack of money became too much too handle, they made a desperate decision to give their own healthy son up for adoption. They figured someone would adopt a healthy baby, whereas the disabled child had almost no chance of survival.

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A group of doctors at the Memorial Hospital in Instanbul, Turkey, have started using traditional Islamic music as complementary treatment for various illnesses.

Using music as therapy might sound strange in an age where medicine is relying more and more on science and technology, but the benefits of musical treatments have been known for almost 1,000 years. The makam, a musical mode unique to traditional Arabic and Turkish music, was used in Islamic medicine as early as the 9th century, when philosopher al-Farabi cataloged the effects of different musical modes on the human body and mind. Makam defines the pitches, patterns and development of a certain musical piece and the different tone scales must be largely played by ear.

Doctors at Istanbul’s Memorial Hospital are convinced different makams have positive  psychological and physiological effects on their patients. Dr. Eroll Can discovered musical therapy while working at a hospital in Sofia, Bulgaria, where they used a tape recorder and headphones, but after he immigrated to Turkey in 1996, he started using live instruments and noticed the effects were even more significant. Now he, along with professor Bingur Sonmez and Mehmet Susam are masters of traditional instruments like the ney (Turkish flute), yayli tan bur (Ottoman violin) and the guitar.

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New York artist Henry Hargreaves makes portraits of modern icons using dozens of pieces of toast. You have to admit, burnt toast never looked this good.

With his series of toast portraits entitled “Toasted”, Henry Hargreaves joins the ranks of established artists who chose toast as their art medium, the likes of Maurice “Toastman” Bennett, Laura Hadland or Adam Sheldon. Using dozens of pieces of toast, some barely toasted, other burned to a crisp, Hargreaves managed to create a series of mosaic portraits that includes The Beatles, Che Guevarra, Jim Morrison and Marylin Monroe. I gotta say they all look good good enough to eat.

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Most people would prefer to stay out of a coffin for as long as possible, but for devotees at the Looi Im Si temple, in Penang, Malaysia, sleeping in a coffin is the best thing that could happen to them.

The Taoist temple located in Jelutong worships deities linked to the afterlife, like Xiao Xian Bo, one of the two guards responsible for bringing the dead to the other side. Chu Soon Lock, the temple’s secretary, claims his grandmother founded the temple after receiving instructions in a dream, from hell deity Di Fu Bao Zhang. As the years went by the temple started worshiping various other deities like Ji Gong, Si Da Jin Gang and Mile Buddha. The weirdest part of the story of Looi Im Si temple started in 2007, when the spirit of Xiao Xian Bo arrived at the holy place and began addressing his devotees through the body of Chu Soon Lock’s brother.

Chu Soon Chye says he doesn’t know a word of Teochew, yet he speaks the dialect fluently each time he is possessed by Xiao Xian Bo. Back in 2008, when he was in a trance, Soon Chye instructed temple devotees to place five coffins within the temple, and only allow people with serious problems caused by bad luck to sleep in them. Only one of the five coffins is used, because the other four are apparently too small to fit into.

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