There are horror stories and films about mannequins in store windows that come alive supernaturally. Of course these aren’t true, but what if you accidentally waved at a mannequin and it waved right back? Man, that would be just too creepy. If you happen to be in Tokyo this time of the year, however, you might just witness this happening in the store window of the Takashimaya mall in Shinjuku. No, it’s not a ghost-mannequin on display, but the Geminoid-F, an android capable of displaying human expressions and actions.

The android sits casually in the window, as though waiting for a friend. Basic emotions and behavior have been programmed into it, which is the basis of all its expressions in response to whatever is happening around it. So you will be able to see it twitch its eyebrows, smile, frown and occasionally even wave at passersby. Not like a robot though, but like a real human being.

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‘Eggs for Soldiers’ is a family event held every year at the Clapham Common in London to raise money for Help for Heroes. It’s basically about the sale of khaki green boxes of eggs, with 15 pence from the sale of each box going to the charity that helps wounded servicemen returning from war. This year’s event on the 4^th of March will have two great things to look forward to – a national egg and spoon race, and a life-size tank made of no less than 5,016 egg cartons.

The tank, a replica of The Challenger 2, was created by British sculptor Stuart Murdoch. Along with the 5,000 odd egg cartons, he also made use of over 10,000 nails, 26 liters of glue, 15 liters of paint, 80 sq. meters of steel and 5,013 staples in the creation of this epic tank. I can’t believe someone actually counted the number of staples. What’s more, the whole project took Mr. Murdoch and his assistants only 3 weeks to complete. That included 3 sleepless nights as well. The tank will be on display for the general public on 4^th March at Clapham Common, so if you happen to be in London, don’t miss it!

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Kiviaq – the name sounds exotic, but wait till you hear how it is prepared. I guarantee you’ll lose your appetite completely. Imagine a dish so pungent and smelly that people eat it outside the house, so it doesn’t stink up the place for weeks. Before I actually get down to telling you what it is, I must warn those of you with a rather delicate disposition – Kiviaq is NOT for you.

The dish is a winter specialty and has been consumed by Inuits in the far north of Greenland for centuries. The preparation of Kiviaq actually involves an ingenious method of food storage that came into being due to the severe shortage of food in the cold months. As clever and important as the practice is, a dish made from fermented sea birds is pretty hard to stomach for those who aren’t used to it. Yes, you read right, fermented sea birds are pretty much the essence of the dish. And get this – they’re eaten raw. Kind of like cheese, but not quite. The preparation goes something like this: a seal is skinned,removing all the meat until only a thick layer of fat remains on the skin. It is then sewn into the shape of a bag and stuffed to the brim with about 300 to 500 small auk birds. When the bag is completely filled, it is sewn shut, and fat is again smeared all over the seams to keep the flies away. The bird-filled seal skin bag is then left to ferment under a pile of rocks for a minimum of 3 months, and sometimes, even as long as 18 months.

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Wouldn’t it be great to have a car-companion that simply radiates warmth on a cold, cold winter’s day? Well, Pascal Prokop has just that, except his companion isn’t human. While most people complain about the cold, this guy from Switzerland actually decided to do something about it by putting a stove in his car – a real, wood-burning stove, complete with a chimney and everything.

The sight of Prokop driving his 1990 Volvo 240 station wagon around the streets of Mettmenstetten, a town 25km south of Zurich, is a strange and funny one. With the chimney sticking up about 2m above the roof, the car looks like it’s smoking, and the effect produced is kind of cartoonish. To Prokop however, this doesn’t matter one bit, since he’s warm and happy. Temperatures across Europe have been declining steadily, especially in the past couple of weeks. So Prokop came up with the ultimate heating solution. He simply removed the passenger seat in the Volvo and replaced it with an oven, the perfect passenger. He feeds the oven occasionally with wood sticks and in turn it keeps him nice and warm all the time. Prokop likes it so much inside his car that he sometimes ends up spending the night too, mostly when he’s tired or has had too much to drink.

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The holiday season is a truly magical time around the world. New Year’s Eve, especially, is seen as a time of hope and new beginnings, a time to forget the old and embrace the new. Most people are in high spirits, celebrating the coming of the new year with much pomp and gusto. But what if you got to celebrate it every single night of the year? Would it still be as much fun? Apparently it would, going by the success of ‘Purga’ – a nightclub in St. Petersburg, Russia, where every night is New Year’s Eve.

Everything that’s needed for a typical Russian New Year’s Eve celebration is available at the club. The Russian national anthem, the new year’s speech of Vladimir Putin on TV, fun costumes, decorations, contests, dancing and singing. Professional actors work at the club as ‘bunnies’, who are basically there to entertain people and make sure they forget all their worries. Ever since Purga was started way back in 2002, it has been popular in town, with table reservations being made at least a week in advance.

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Whether painted or sculpted, I’ve always found hyper-realist artworks fascinating, but Bruno Walpoth’s masterpieces are particularly impressive simply because they are carved from large pieces of wood.

I’m not saying working with other materials to create realistic shapes is easy, but turning something as rigid as wood into works of art that seem almost alive takes something truly special. Bruno Walpoth uses simple carving tools to turn pieces of wood (lime and walnut) into human sculptures with detailed features that seen from afar look incredibly life-like. Only on closer inspection does one notice the carving marks on their skin, left intentionally as quiet reminders that these mind-blowing figures are not human. “Contrary to Geppetto, who constructed himself a child (Pinocchio) out of a piece of wood to banish his loneliness, Bruno Walpoth attempts, perhaps out of awareness of life’s transience, to immortalize the volatile spark of youthfulness he catches in the eyes of his models – sometimes his own children – into a wooden sculpture,” Absolute Art Gallery‘s Diana Gadaldi says about Walpoth’s work.

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Intense, competitive, trash talk – are the three terms used by the founders of Spikeball to describe the game. After watching a short video of how the sport is played on their website, I’m finding it very hard to disagree. It’s really quite exciting just to watch, so playing it should guarantee an absolute whale of a time.

Spikeball is probably best described as volleyball’s distant cousin, but there’s a lot more to it than just that. The net used for Spikeball is small and circular – probably the size of a Hula Hoop, and it sits on the ground at ankle level. The ball is pretty small too, just about palm-size. Two teams play against each other with only two players on each team. The objective of the game is to smack the ball across to your opponents, just like in volleyball. However, with spikeball, you need to bounce the ball on the net first, so it ricochets upwards at an opposing player. They in turn have to be able to bounce it back to your team, within three hits, or you score. You score points every time they miss, and a score of 21 is needed to win the game.

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A funeral is something people generally make time for out of their busy schedules – to mourn and also to offer their condolences. So when I first heard of drive-through funerals, I was quite surprised. I mean, do people not have time to even grieve anymore? I wondered if the concept was even appropriate, so I decided to find out more.

The drive-through service is currently being offered at the Robert L. Adams Mortuary funeral home, located in Compton, California. True to its name, the service allows the casket containing the body of the deceased to be placed behind a display window, while visitors simply drive by, signing a book of condolences as they leave. Mourners are free to leave their cars and come in if they would like to, but it’s not required. It’s quite interesting to note how drive-through funerals came into existence. According to owner Peggy Scott Adams, in the 1980s there was a sudden spike in cemetery shootouts. So gang members preferred this kind of a service, since they were protected by the drive-through corridor made of bullet proof glass. Read More »

10 Incredible Airplane Graveyards (Environmental Graffiti)

Eagle Dad Makes 10-Year-Old Boy Run through Snow Naked (CNN)

Judge Sentences Man to Date with His Wife (MSN)

Identical Twins Are Totally Different (The Sun)

Dad Shoots Daughter’s Laptop to Teach Her a Lesson (Bit Rebels)

Sewage Plant Offers Valentine’s Day Tours (Huffington Post)

Teenagers Rob Hotel to Buy Girlfriends iPhones (China Hush)

House-Sized Optimus Prime Snow Sculpture (Geekologie)

Fractal Patterns of Landscapes Damaged by Drought (Environmental Graffiti)

Three Indian Sisters Cursed with Werewolf Syndrome (Mirror)

It’s difficult to imagine someone living, eating, sleeping and even washing clothes on a bicycle for over a year. But that’s exactly what French artist and copyeditor Guillaume Blanchet from Montreal has done. He even cooked his own food and flirted with women, while perched on the narrow bicycle seat. And that’s not all.

A three-minute film depicting Blanchet’s life on the bicycle, starts off with a dedication to his 64-year-old father who rode his bike for over 120,000 km. Going by the film, Blanchet does everything on the go, and he never stops pedaling. As he rides hands-free, he is occupied with the various mundane activities of life. Numerous items make an appearance, such as frying pans, shaving kits, laptops, telephones, Rubik cubes, and even musical instruments. It’s pretty amazing how he’s able to handle all these things with ease, as though he were sitting on a couch.

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What could be more natural than having a barbecue party on a volcano? Apart from the obvious health and safety hazards, that is. But such things are not a concern at the El Diablo restaurant, where chefs actually cook food over the heat produced by an active volcano.

Located on a Spanish island called Lanzarote, northwest of Morocco, El Diablo is a unique restaurant where the chefs have access to a volcano of their own. Of course, it isn’t like a lava-spewing mountain, because if that were the case there would be no question of leisurely eating. No, this volcano is more like a hole in the ground, through which volcanic heat erupts from the deeps of the Earth.

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Couples on romantic weekend getaways tend to make a spur-of-the-moment decision to get married. And it is for this reason that several hotels, especially in places like Vegas, provide wedding chapel services. If getting married could be that easy, then why the long-drawn out process for a divorce? Well apparently, not anymore. It is now possible to get divorced over a weekend getaway too, thanks to the Divorce Hotel.

The concept of Divorce Hotel was developed by entrepreneur Jim Halfens, in the Netherlands. In a country where the average divorce settlement could be very heavy on the pocket and take months to complete, Halfens spotted a great business opportunity that could make things easier for parting couples. So all they need to do is check in at the Divorce Hotel over a weekend and all the necessary legal documentation to end their marriage is arranged for them. The service includes a mediator and a series of lawyers who help the couple split assets, arrange visitation rights and agree on alimony payments, all at a fixed fee.

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Jim Dingilian is one of those rare artists who stretch the limits of creativity with their amazing creations. He uses candle smoke to paint picture-perfect images on the inside of empty bottles.

“The miniature scenes I depict are of locations on the edge of suburbia which seem mysterious or even slightly menacing despite their commonplace nature. The bottles add to the implied narratives of transgression. When found by the sides of roads or in the weeds near the edges of parking lots, empty liquor bottles are artifacts of consumption, delight, or dread. As art objects, they become hourglasses of sorts, their drained interiors now inhabited by dim memories” Jim Dingilian says bout his art.  How he manages to create such detailed images inside the bottle remains a mystery, but I’m thinking he uses some sort of slim tool to scratch at the candle smoke. Still, how he manages to keep a steady hand and work through that narrow bottle hand is beyond me.

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When I was a kid, scratch-and-sniff stickers were the rage. We had all kinds of flavors and odors back then. While I have no idea if kids these days are still into such things, it does seem the in-thing for grown men, not with stickers, but jeans! Last week, a Canadian company launched a brand new line of scratch-and-sniff jeans.

Naked & Famous Denim, a company based in Montreal, has introduced the jeans at a price of $150. What’s special about them is that they smell like raspberry candy, when scratched. Unfortunately, the smell does fade over time, and you’ll be left with just a regular pair of denim pants. According to designer and company founder Brandon Svarc, the scent will last through at least five washings. But he says it shouldn’t be much of a problem since many of their male customers don’t wash their jeans very often, and some never wash them at all.

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People making their own coffin isn’t new to us here at OC. But the story of Fred Guentert sure is. Because he’s been building himself a coffin that’s fit for an Egyptian pharaoh – for the past 25 years.

Guentert, who is now 89 years old, has kept himself occupied for about a quarter of a century with his unusual hobby. And he sure does have something to show for it. The coffin he is to be buried in someday is 7 feet long and weighs 300 pounds. It is made of cedar and hand-painted in royal colors like gold, red, green and black. A hand-carved image of the Egyptian god Osiris adorns the lid. Near the base, you can see a colorful image of Isis. The interior has been decorated with a full-size painting of Nut – the sky goddess. On one side of the box is the Eye of Horus, looking on intently.

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