If you’re sick of picking splinters from between your teeth after chewing dozens of pencils, you’re going to love Cecilia Felli’s newest invention – a licorice pencil called Matitizia.

Inspired by people’s habit of chewing on wooden pencils, Italian designer Cecilia Felli has created a truly revolutionary tool that’s not designed to stop them from munching, just improve the experience. Either because they’re stressed or simply bored, people love to chew on their pencils. They don’t taste particularly good and there’s a risk of lead poisoning, but people don’t seem to mind much, but Cecilia Felli thought she could help by allowing people to bite on their pencils without worrying about the consequences. The Matitizia is a pencil made of delicious licorice with the lead-containing core going only half way up, so the chewer doesn’t have to worry about his health. Whether you’re stressed by your job, crave a cigarette one day after quitting (again), or feel incredibly bored, Matitizia will leave a nice taste in your mouth.

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Eating hot curry is definitely not as fun as watching other people eat it, and two eating contest participants found that out the hard way after they were rushed to the hospital trying to eat as much Killer Kismot curry as possible.

The Kismot Restaurant in Edinburgh, Scotland organizes its world’s hottest chilli eating contest every year, daring competitors to down as much  as they can of the establishment’s signature Killer Kismot curry. The fund raising event gathered twenty brave souls ready to risk their throats in order to raise money for charity, but only 10 of them ended up tasting the mouth-burning delicacy. 21-year-old Curie Kim, who’s name is ironically pronounced “curry”, had to be taken to the hospital twice in just a few hours, after suffering severe stomach pains, vomiting and indigestion. She only had a few tablespoons of curry but said they caused her pain like she never endured before. On the bright side, the young student finished second and took comfort in the fact that at least she suffered for a good cause.

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Herbert Chavez, a Superman fan from the Philippines, is so obsessed with the Man of Steel that he underwent several plastic surgery procedures just to look like his favorite superhero.

According to a video report by Bandila News’ Marie Lozano, 35-year-old Herbert Chavez has dramatically altered his appearance to look more like Superman. Unfortunately, the report is in Filipino and I’m not very good at that, but the guys at Real Self Blog translated some of it and managed to uncover that Chavez first went under the knife in 1995 and he’s had several other procedures since then. He had a chin augmentation to get Superman’s cleft, rhinoplasty to get Christopher Reeves nose, silicone injections for more plump lips and even thigh implants for a more muscular look. Examining the before and after photos, they speculate he may also have had eye surgery, cheek augmentation and jaw augmentation.

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Although his is the only standing building in what used to be an old neighborhood of Roubaix, in Northern France, Salah Oudjani refuses to sell the coffee house he has worked in for the last 46 years.

The title doesn’t sound like anything special, after all, many people refuse to have their property demolished, at least in the beginning, until they get a good price or they notice everyone else is selling except them. But for the 71-year-old business owner neither of the above reasons were good enough. The two-story triangular building once located at the intersection of two streets appears to be the only survivor of a serious air raid. Everything around it has been turned to rubble and taken to local landfills, brick by brick, and Oudjani’s place looks like it’s the only sign of life in a wasteland. Like all the other residents, the café owner has received numerous proposals for his property, but he never even considered selling it. “I will not sell! I worked for it, this coffee house. They will not make me go, I’m used to pressure” Oudjani says, and everyone knows he means it.

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Have you ever wondered what a giant Toffifee candy would look like? Well, now you don’t have to, because sweet-loving Laura Parry and her brother David have already made one, as well as several other giant versions of popular English sweets.

23-year-old Laura and her brother David, 20, spend one day each week cooped up in the kitchen creating giant calorie bombs shaped like popular English snacks. The two university students came up with the idea on a day off from their summer jobs say neither of them are culinary geniuses, but they just thought they’d give it a go. And considering so far they’ve created impressive super-sized versions of treats like the Bourbon biscuit, Cadbury Fudge, Angel Slice and Jammy Dodger, I’d say their idea was brilliant. The Toffifee looks especially tasty to me, which had to cut with a saw to get a cross-section photo.

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Botaoshi is a wacky Japanese sport played by cadets at Japan’s Military Defense Academy, where opposing teams literally fight each other over a wooden pole.

Now I’ve seen my share of bizarre sports and games since I started Oddity Central, but Botaoshi (poll-pull-down) definitely takes the cake, and guess what, it’s Japanese. The game, which involves two teams of 75 members each and a wooden pole, is pretty straight forward. Members of a team gather around and on the wooden poll and try to defend it against the attacking team, which tries to take it down by any means necessary. And I do mean ANY means…Players push, punch, kick and grab their opponents as they try to fulfill their mission.

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Mosaic artist Doug Powell uses thousands of puzzle pieces to assemble mosaic portraits that capture facial features right down to the finest features.

We’ve featured some of Doug’s work on OC a while ago, when he created a space shuttle mosaic exclusively out of keyboard keys. But he is actually most famous for his unique skill of putting puzzle pieces together as detailed mosaics, which he calls Duzzle Art. If you’re wondering what that means, he just replaced the “P” in puzzle with a “D” from Douglas to personalize his art.

Doug Powell started experimenting with random jigsaw puzzle pieces in 2001, but it wasn’t until 2007 that he began assembling them into portraits. Throughout the years he has developed and refined his technique to the point where he can now reproduce detailed features like lips or eyelashes. The artist never paints any of the puzzle pieces he uses in his mosaics, he only cuts and shapes some of the pieces to make his works even more realistic. Each of the Duzzle Art masterpieces numbers thousands of individual puzzle pieces, and Doug claims he has an inventory of over one million pieces, enough to fill an average size above-ground pool.

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The Superbus looks more like a very long Lamborghini than a regular bus, but it’s able to transport 23 people over long distances at speeds of up to 250 km/h.

The world’s first superbus was developed at the Delft University of Technology, in Holland, under the supervision of professor Wobbo Ockels, who in 1985 became the first Dutch astronaut to travel in outer space. He thought trains were too slow for present day needs and also have the disadvantage of traveling only between stations, so he set out to build a super vehicle that could travel at lightning speeds and be eco-friendly at the same time. He and his team spent three years working on the Superbus, and the result is nothing short of impressive.

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Camel racing is a really popular sport throughout the Arab world, and owning a heard of specially-bred fast camels is apparently considered a symbol of wealth and power. But it’s not the animals we should be talking about, it’s their weird-looking robot jockeys.

Obviously, robot jockeys aren’t exactly an integral part of the old camel racing tradition. In the old days, children and light young men were used to whip the camels to victory, but in recent years things had  really gotten out of hand, and crackdowns on the black market revealed around 40,000 kids from South Asia had been kidnapped or sold by their families to become, among other things, camel jockeys. Welfare organizations started reuniting the children with their families, offering them shelter and food until they could return home, but a solution to camel jockey trafficking had to be found urgently. The United Arab Emirates banned children under the age of 16 from competing in camel races, and a Swiss company called K-team realized the business opportunity and began creating light robot jockeys known as “Kamal”, in 2003.

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Rajacenna is an 18-year-old self-taught artist from the Netherlands who draws the most realistic portraits I have ever seen, using only pencils.

I’m a big fan of realistic drawings, and I’ve previously featured amazing works like the pencil drawings of Paul Lung, the ballpoint pen portraits of Juan Francisco Casas, or Cristina Penescu’s detailed scratchboard masterpieces, but at only 18 years of age Rajacenna is in a league of her own. Born in 1993, she started modelling for various Dutch companies when she was only 4, and at 5 years old she made her first appearance on television. She starred in films, soap-operas and tv-series and at 12 she became the host of Kinderjournaal, the first Dutch web-tv for kids.

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This whole economic boom is just making China weirder with each passing day. Just last week I read they inaugurated their first gold-dispensing machine and now the country’s big bosses are paying millions of dollars for sheep.

Dolan sheep, to be exact, a rare breed which according to breeders has very special features that make it the latest collector’s item for China’s rich businessmen. They have a distinctive curved nose, long floppy ears and twin tails, but the thing that really makes them special is there are just around 1,000 of them left in the world. Dolan were originally bred from sheep in Kashgar, north-west China, to grow more quickly and yield more meat, the priced breed has since become purely ornamental. It reaches maturity and weighs over 200 lbs at just six months, but no one is thinking about sacrificing them for meat anymore.

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Alexander Karpenko, a 35-year-old English teacher from Nizhny Novgrod, Russia shaves with all kinds of sharp objects, including a shovel, hatchet or scissors, but not with razors.

Impressed by the war stories his grandfather, a WW2 veteran, told him about men who used anything sharp to shave on the battlefield, Alexander first experimented shaving with scissors when he was 16 years old. He realized razors were a luxury and decided to teach himself to use other more helpful sharp objects for his morning grooming. For the past 20 years, Karpenko has used all kinds of stuff like shovels, chisels or sharp knives to remove facial hair and claims he has never once used a common razor.

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Artist Ian Davey has found a natural and sustainable canvas to paint his masterpieces on – swan feathers. Now his light works sell for thousands of dollars.

Each individual piece can take up to a week to complete, but Ian Davey’s delicate feather paintings really are something special to look at. The 46-year-old artist, who lives in a converted farmhouse in Snowdonia National Park, Wales, paints on swan feathers collected from a nearby swannery. He only uses feathers that naturally fall on the ground during the birds’ annual shedding period and starts the artistic process by cleaning and individually straightening them with tweezers. He always draws a sketch of what he means to paint on the feather, because he only has a one-foot-long, three-inches-wide canvas to work with so he has to know exactly what goes where. He applies a primer and works with a special acrylic paint that protects the feather. To nail the most detailed parts, Ian uses a specialized 000-size brush.

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The Toilet Bike Neo is a toilet-bike hybrid that runs entirely on biogas (human poop). It was created by TOTO, Japan’s biggest toilet manufacturer as part of a campaign to reduce CO2 emissions in toilets by 50% until 2017.

Believe it or not, we may have been looking for alternatives to fossil fuels in all the wrong places. Making biodiesel, harnessing the power of the sun, even using electrical batteries sounds way to complicated when apparently all we need to do to power our vehicles is answer the call of nature. Japanese toilet company TOTO has been working on a poop-powered tricycle called Toilet Bike Neo that actually has a toilet for a seat and runs only on human feces. The technology used to convert waste into fuel for the bike hasn’t yet been made public, but details are slowly emerging on the company’s blog.

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Pages from an Amazing Chinese Revolutionary Textbook Written in English (Asia Obscura)

NYC Comedian Gives Out Free Cab Rides to New Yorkers for 14 Hours (Mark Malkoff)

Stag Beetles Locked in Mortal Combat (Environmental Graffiti)

China Inaugurates Gold Dispensing Machine (Reuters)

World’s Youngest Professional Mountain Climber (Huffington Post)

Devoted Piranha Parents Attack Beachgoers in Brazil (Discovery)

Thif Is Caught Trying to Smuggle Hummingbirds in His Pants (Ripley’s)

Pyrographs: Painting with Fiery Molten Glass (Visual News)

Flureboxing Teen (The Awesomer)

How Water Bottles Create Cheap Lighting in the Philippines (BBC)