They say you can’t put a price on love, but a mysterious Chinese millionaire is trying to prove everyone wrong by spending a matchmaking service 5 million yuan( $788,000) to find him a suitable wife.

On May 20th, the Garden Hotel, in China’s Guangzhou City, hosted a special event entitled “Multi-Millionaire Seeking Spouses in Ten Cities Show”. The ‘show’ was basically a competition between 320 female candidates battling for the heart of a mystery billionaire looking to settle down. According to China Smack, the anonymous businessman contacted a local matchmaking service and offered them 5 million yuan to look for the women of his dreams, in 10 cities nationwide. Just like other important bachelors we’ve featured on OC, he’s probably too busy to look for love himself.

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Footbrawl is a controversial team sport invented during the late 1980s, in Australia, as a training aid for martial arts students. Despite violence concerns, footbrawl has been growing in popularity and may soon become an internationally played sport.

New Martial Arts Football, or Footbrawl, is a full contact sport in which participants have to fight to score and survive the game in one piece. As in many other sports around the world, the main goal of footbrawl is to get the ball into the net and score more points than the opposing team, only that’s not as easy as you might think. Combining elements of mixed martial arts, football, rugby and even ice hockey, footbrawl is a unique game that gives “footbrawlers the chance to let off some steam without any serious injuries, and offers spectators an unforgettable spectacle of non-stop thrilling action.

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I love splash photography, but this is the first time I’ve seen an artist using this technique to create unique flowers, some with their own liquid flower pots. The patient man behind this amazing art is Jack Long, a talented photographer who spends months planning and experimenting to create these stunning pieces.

Armed with superhuman patience, a high-speed camera and lots of paint, Jack Long set out to create a series of beautiful images called ‘Vessels and Blooms’ in which he tried to create liquid flowers out of colored paint droplets captured in mid-air. The skilled photographer spent several months planning and testing different techniques in order to achieve the best results possible, and judging by his photos, I’d say his work paid off in the end.

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If a 7.8 earthquake happened during lunch time, most of us would forget about food and run for our lives, but at the Disaster Café, in Lloret de Mar, Spain, quakes happen all the time, and all you can do is try to keep your balance and hope drinks don’t get spilled.

Normally, people are terrified of earthquakes, but at the Disaster Café, people actually pay to experience a simulated 7.8 quake while they enjoy a tasty meal. I’ve never been, but according to online customer reviews, the place is so popular you actually need to make reservations in advance, in order to be get a table. I guess people’s appetite for disaster is stronger than I thought.

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Making the impossible possible is just a matter of time, according to Dmitry Itskov and the people involved in his project, called Russia 2045. It’s by that time they hope to recreate a whole new civilization with the help of android avatars into which to transfer humans’ personalities after their bodies die.

It sounds a bit far-fetched, I know, but Russia 2045 is a real project, with a team of real scientists working on a way to make us all immortal. It was founded by Dmitry Itskov, a man who’s been doing media projects, especially on the Internet, for the last 12 years. At one point he became interested in the prolongation of life and the idea of immortality through cybernetic technology. Neither a scientist nor a philosopher, he had no idea how to expand on these ideas to attain the ultimate goal of attaining immortality,  but he used his skills to create a social movement with the goal of connecting scientists, philosophers,visionaries and public figures to work on this common goal. They’ve already started working on androids, or human avatars, that will soon replace us physically, but carry on our spiritual and intellectual legacy.

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Finger wrestling, or “fingerhakeln”, used to be the way the men of Bavaria settled disputes back in the 17th century, but now it’s just an obscure sport that draws hundreds of strong men to the German region, for the annual Finger Wrestling Championship.

Now, I knew about thumb wrestling and toe wrestling, but I was totally oblivious to finger wrestling. That’s probably because it never caught on outside Bavaria, but the men there take it so seriously they even have a championship to determine which one has the strongest middle finger. The 35th edition of the annual Finger Wrestling Championship was held in Schnaitsee, Chiemgau, right in the heart of Bavaria, and brought together 156 competitors ready to snap their fingers for the title of champion.

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This is one of the most unbelievable stories I have come across in a while, and had my doubts about its authenticity at first, but after reading about it on some reputed websites, my worries were put to rest.

The story was recently made public by Reddit user ‘Naruhodo‘, who linked to a bunch of photos of a Mad-Max-style motorcycle apparently built out of the parts of a broken-down Citroen 2CV, by a man stranded in the Sahara Desert. Pretty unbelievable stuff, only it turned out to be absolutely 100% true. It all happened back in 1993, when Frenchman Emile Leray was on a solo trip in Northern Africa, driving his specially prepared Citroen 2CV. His car broke down in the middle of the desert, tens of kilometers from the nearest settlement. To survive, the French MacGyver created a motorcycle out of parts of his broken down car.

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Basis is a bring-your-own-food bar that recently opened in Amsterdam, in response to the crisis currently affecting the Dutch capital. Over the last two years, 10% of Amsterdam’s cafés have closed down, but its cool concept actually makes Basis Bar a profitable business.

The Netherlands appeared to be handling the economic crisis quite well, when it first descended over Europe, but now, after the old government collapsed due to disagreements over budget cuts, there are increasing signs of an economic downturn. A group of young entrepreneurs anticipated the precarious financial situation of their country, and came up with a great concept that allows people to still afford to eat out, without having to break the bank. The Basis Bar allows its customers to bring their own food, either cooked at home or ordered from cheaper eateries, like pizzerias. The bar provides everything from dishes, cutlery and napkins, to microwave ovens where people can heat up their food. All they have to pay for is the drinks they order.

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Jeff Ivanhoe has been using aluminum cans to create his incredible artworks since 1981. They’re called ‘alumosaics‘, and as you’ve probably already guessed, they are colorful mosaics made of aluminum.

Aluminum has been around for over 100 years years, and during that time it has proven to be one of the world’s most versatile and easily recyclable materials. We use it to make light construction and car parts, as electronics casings, and even to make unique Christmas trees. But Jeff Ivanhoe has found yet another use for aluminum. He uses recycled soda and beer cans to create his famous alumosaics, a delightful art form he and his wife Barbara invented by pure chance.

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This title might seem a bit shocking, but considering China’s total population, 30 million really isn’t very much. Still, millions of people living in caves in this modern era is kind of strange, wouldn’t you say?

According to a report by The Los Angeles Times, millions of Chinese people have gone underground, to live in caves. So I guess calling someone a caveman in China really shouldn’t be taken as an insult, especially if you consider many of these burrowed dwellings have all the facilities of modern homes. Because they take advantage of the existing landscape, China’s cave houses don’t require too many other building materials, and since the hills and mountains they are dug into act as natural insulation all year round, they are more energy efficient than most conventional family homes.

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Dr Emil Chynn, a successful New York surgeon, has tired of traditional dating methods, so he’s offering tens of thousands of dollars to whoever helps him find the woman of his dreams.

So what does a person do in order to “outsource” the work of finding a suitable life partner? Well, the latest thing Dr. Chynn did was post an eye-catching personal ad in Columbia University’s alumni magazine. The advert in the Spring 2012 issue of the magazine reads: “LASEK SURGEON: Featured in NY Times/Wall Street Journal. Dartmouth, Columbia, Harvard, Emory, NYU degrees. Seeks smart, sweet, skinny SWF, 30, for marriage. $10,000 donation to your charity for intro!” The young surgeon says he chose that number because it’s what a good matchmaker in New York City charges, so he the money to charity, instead.

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Multimedia artist Phil Hansen uses a technique similar to pointillism to turn ripe bananas into organic canvases, recreating some of history’s most famous artworks.

If this offbeat art doesn’t make you go bananas, I don’t know what will. Hansen’s works are just so detailed it’s hard to believe all he uses to create them is a common pushpin and the banana’s natural oxidation process. The talented artist just punctures the peel repeatedly with the pushpin and the banana, and as the the banana browns, his intricate designs are revealed. Phil Hansen is currently promoting his book, Tattoo a Banana: And Other Ways to Turn Anything and Everything into Art, due next month. In it, he explains how to create art from anything at hand – – like a piece of toast, your own fingerprints, or a stack of marshmallows – using offbeat techniques.

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You probably think anyone who takes elves and other fantasy beings seriously is either childish or just plain mad. According to polls, most Icelanders believe in, or at least refuse to deny the existence of elves, and most of them seem pretty sane to me.  Welcome to Iceland, the small island country where technological advancement goes hand in hand with a belief in the supernatural.

Located just below the Arctic Circle, Europe’s most remote nation is also probably one of the world’s most bizarre. Civilized, and certainly no strangers to technology, the majority of 320,000 Icelanders also firmly believe in the existence of spirit beings like elves, gnomes or fairies. Of course, there are fantasy-enthusiasts who believe in these creatures all over the world, only in Iceland this matter really is taken very seriously. Annoying the mystical creatures living all over the island is thought to carry a heavy price, so human inhabitants will do almost anything to avoid getting on their bad side.

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London Gallery Hosts Invisible Art Exhibition (NEWS)

The Man Who Ate His Own Brain (Yahoo)

Weird Concepts: Camel-Powered Desert Ambulance (Environmental Graffiti)

Off the Grid – Americans Living Outside Mainstream Society (Laughing Squid)

73-Year-Old Woman Climbs Mount Everest (HuffPost)

Man Runs Half-Marathon Inside Hot Air Balloon (Digital Journal)

Concept Artist’s Photos Spark Interpol Murder Hunt (Orange)

Star Trek Fan to Build Real-Life Version of the Enterprise (MNN)

The Giant Salt City 1200ft Beneath Detroit (Environmental Graffiti)

Guy Drinks 42 Cups of Coffee, Live to Tell the Story (Buzzfeed)

Steve Wheen realized nobody likes to hit potholes on their way to work, so if authorities weren’t going to fill them, he would. Steve became a guerrilla gardener, traveling around the world and turning ugly potholes into charming miniature gardens.

“Guerrilla Gardening has been around for a long time, in fact one of the earliest examples I know about is when wives of servicemen used to go out planting flowers along the train tracks during WW1 so their husbands would have a pretty journey home,” Steve Wheen says, but he’s taken it to a level where it’s perceived as an art form. The London-based artist started pothole gardening during his university years, partly to make art, partly as a hobby, and mostly to highlight how crappy East London’s streets were. Since then, he’s traveled to other big cities, like Milan, to turn potholes into tiny gardens featuring all kinds of small props.

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