I’m not sure why, but some of the strangest trends seem to emerge from South Korea. The latest one is dinner porn – people watching other people stuffing themselves with food. The Korean term for it is ‘mok-bang’, which roughly translates as ‘dinner broadcast’.

The dinner porn stars of South Korea film themselves eating copious amounts of food. They also provide moaning noises and a running commentary of their meals. The entire event is live-streamed and the protagonists end up making serious money.

Mok-bang isn’t about people eating a plate or two of food. We’re talking about humongous portions here. Like this one ‘broadcast jockey’ who calls herself The Diva. Consultant by day and food-porn star by night, this beautiful glutton wolfs down two medium pizzas, or 30 fried eggs and a box of crab legs, or five packets of instant noodles in one go. One night, she ate 12 beef patties, 12 fried eggs, three servings of spicy pork kimchi soup and a salad.

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Snow King, an ice cream shop located in Taipei, capital city of Taiwan, serves more than 70 flavors of fresh, homemade ice cream. There’s nothing unusual about that, I agree. But wait till you hear what these flavors include.

The shop, in business since 1947, boasts of carrying the most unusual of ice cream flavors. Over here, you can get a lick of Sesame Oil Chicken, a dollop of Pig Knuckle, and even a scoop or two of Taiwan Beer. The family-owned business is now being run by the third generation – 33-year-old Kao Ching-feng. “At Snow King, you get the tastes that Taiwanese know,” said Kao. According to him, customers keep coming back for the local flavors and old-fashioned style. They like visiting in large groups, so they can sample a scoop each of all the flavors.

The most famous specialties at Snow King are Red Bean and Watermelon, preferred by the locals. Tourists from Japan like to try exotic flavors like Lychee and Peach, while customers from Hong Kong want Curry and Wasabi. All these unusual ice cream recipes are the brainchild of Kao’s 87-year-old grandfather. He had founded the business out of his savings from selling ice cream on the streets of Taipei. Kao says that his grandfather liked to challenge himself and spent years tweaking flavors to his satisfaction. Some of his best flavors came from trying to accommodate his older, diabetic customers. That’s how he invented with Snow King’s range of savory ice creams.

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Dentists have always warned us that too much candy will cause cavities. But all that could be a thing of the past, thanks to a new experiment by scientists from the Berlin biotechnology firm, OrganoBalance.

It turns out that candy doesn’t cause cavities at all. The bad guys are actually the bacteria that remain on our teeth after we eat sugary treats. So the scientists’ logic was simple – reduce the amount of ‘bad’ bacteria in candy, and the chances of cavities should naturally decrease.

After you eat a normal piece of candy, the bacteria on your teeth slowly release an acid that eats into tooth enamel. When the enamel wears down, it causes cavities to develop. One of the most common strains of bacteria responsible for cavities is mutans streptococci. When you chew candy, this bacteria is released into the saliva. If you swallow or spit, some of the bacteria is removed, but the remaining sits on your teeth and causes them to rot.

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19-year-old Delfina Cedeno has been suffering from a rare disorder for the past four years – she has been crying and sweating blood. Occasionally, blood also seeps out of her fingernails, belly button and nostrils.

Doctors at Delfina’s home town of Vernon, in the Dominican Republic, were baffled for a long time. Even after hundreds of tests, they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her. In fact, no one believed Delfina until they actually saw her bleeding.

“At first, no one could help me and they looked at me like a crazy person when I told them what was going on,” the teenager said. “It was only when I started bleeding in front of a doctor one day that they began to take me seriously.” Things got totally out of hand when she bled for up to 15 days and was in such a critical condition that she needed a blood transfusion.

Delfina herself was scared to death and extremely stressed out with her horrifying condition. “When this started happening, I didn’t know what to think. I was terrified and in complete shock.” She also felt ashamed to leave home. Read More »

A small, self-service restaurant in China’s Fujian province runs on a unique concept – no bills! The owner expects diners to pay whatever they think is the true price of the meal. Predictably, many people don’t pay anything at all.

The restaurant, called Five Loaves and Two Fish, opened this August in downtown Fuzhou. It is named after the story of Jesus feeding 5,000 people by multiplying fish and bread. Patrons are required to wash their own plates and bowls after eating, and place money in a drop-box before leaving.

50-year-old interior designer Liu Pengfei, the majority investor, said he got the idea for the restaurant after heard about the ‘suspended meals’ projects in some countries. These projects allow people to pay in advance for a beverage or meal, for someone who really needs it. “Hearing about it, I was deeply moved,” Liu said. “I felt a heartwarming sense of trust because of it.” And that’s the concept Five Loaves is based on – trust.

While the concept sounds really amazing, things aren’t exactly going as expected for Liu and his team. According to Peng Yong, chef and co-investor, around 20 percent of diners walk out without paying anything. The restaurant has been running losses – 250,000 yuan ($41,170) – even though it is packed every day. Just maintaining the place, which is located in a central location, costs 60,000 yuan a month.

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Erik Weihenmayer became blind at age 13, but he has never let this life-altering event limit him in any way. He is one of those rare individuals who have not just managed to overcome a disability, but live like it never happened. He is also the only blind person in the world to have scaled Mount Everest, among other achievements.

At age 44, Erik is the world’s most accomplished blind adventurer. To be honest, his accomplishments are on par with any other exceptional normal person. He is a role model even for people with normal vision. He has managed to completely disregard his blindness; it’s like he’s been everywhere and done everything. Mountaineering, wrestling, cycling, skiing, kayaking, paragliding, skydiving – the list of Erik’s activities are seemingly endless.

When he was younger, Erik focused on just one sport – wrestling – and he was brilliant at it. He represented his state in the US National Freestyle Wrestling Championships. He graduated college in 1993 with a Master’s degree and soon became a school teacher. This was when he took up rock climbing and trekking on the side. He was amazing at that too – he summited Mount McKinley (the tallest peak in the US) and then Kilimanjaro (tallest in Africa).

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At a time when housing rates are hitting the roof, an English farmer has gone and built a house for almost nothing. 59-year-old Michael Buck spent a measly £150( $250) to construct a small, yet cozy house in the garden of his Oxfordshire home.

The former art teacher drew plans for the house on the back of an envelope. He didn’t need any special planning permissions since it was classified as a summer home. Buck spent two years gathering natural and reclaimed materials for construction. It took him an additional eight months to construct it with his bare hands; he didn’t use any power tools at all.

To make the base, he learned the ancient technique of cob from a book. The technique comes from prehistoric times and involves a mixture of sand, clay, water and earth. Clay based subsoil is mixed with sand, straw and water and then ladled onto a stone foundation. Workers and oxen then trample upon the mixture – a process known as cobbing. The layers of cob gradually build up and harden over time.

For the 300 sq. ft. floor space, Buck rescued the floorboards from a neighbor’s unused skip. He retrieved the windscreen of an old lorry and converted the glass into windows. The walls are painted with a mixture of chalk and plant resin. The roof is a simple wooden frame thatched with straw from nearby fields.

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57-year-old Chen Yan used to be an average, run-of-the-mill homemaker. The only noticeable thing about her: her striking resemblance to Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong. Chen was teased mercilessly for this as a child, reducing her to tears. But in 2006 she made a decision that would completely change her life –  to embrace herself and her appearance. Chen is now a full time Mao impersonator, an extremely popular one.

Impersonating Chairman Mao isn’t exactly a piece of cake. It’s a demanding and controversial job, because female impersonators of Mao aren’t very common in China. To look the part, Chen has to touch up her face, wear a Zhongshan suit and arrange her hair like Mao’s trademark style. She has to walk on specially made 26cm stilts, camouflaged to look like a larger shoe size. A typical performance is about 40 minutes long – Chen waves to the crowds, smokes and stares solemnly into the distance. I must say, she does a damn good job of it. It’s almost impossible to tell there’s a woman behind the costume.

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Lucy Luckayanko is perhaps the only New Yorker to have an eye-stud. She spent $3,000 on a one-minute procedure to have a heart-shaped piece of platinum inserted into the white of her right eyeball.

Harvard and NYU-trained Dr. Chynn performed the procedure. Interestingly, he has been featured here on OC before. He made news last August as a love-crazed doctor desperate to find his soul-mate. He spent thousands of dollars on high-end matchmaking services and charity donations in exchange for dates. When nothing worked out, he began to offer free cosmetic procedures to anyone who would introduce him to the girl of his dreams. Going by this, we don’t know if Lucy has had to pay for her treatment or got it free in exchange for setting up Dr. Chynn on a date. In any case, she went ahead with it and now she looks like she has a piece of dirt stuck in her eye forever.

It seems doctors have done this procedure several times in Europe and Los Angeles, but this was New York’s first. To perform it, Dr. Chynn first injected an anesthetic into Lucy’s eye. Then he made a tiny incision to “try to divide a pocket in between the sclera (the white part) and the conjunctiva (the clear part)” of her eye. Using forceps, he placed the 3.5mm platinum stud in a drop of water on Lucy’s eye membrane. Since the stud is so small, it had to be floated into position. It was all over in a matter of minutes and Lucy went home with her new bejeweled eye soon after.

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Harry and Ron hated their divination lessons. Hermione stormed out of one, never to return again. Professor Trelawney was a real nut-job. I could feel the pain of these characters as I read the Harry Potter books; divination always seemed like such a farce. But now I think that maybe they didn’t have it so bad after all. I mean, all they had to do was make up a bunch of dreams and detect patterns in tea-leaves. It’s not like they had to do what S.S. Singh does in real life to predict the future – analyze human poop.

Believe it or not, poop-analysis is a real branch of divination study. It even has a name – Scatomancy. Singh is one of the few practitioners of this long-lost art and he is being featured in a documentary called ‘Journey to Planet Sanity’, releasing Dec 6^th. I just watched a video clip of Singh analyzing some poop and… oh well, what can I say? It’s as disgusting as it sounds.

“It’s a lost art,” says Singh. “You’d be surprised how accurate it actually is.” What really surprise me are the events in the video clip. This is what happens: In the film, skeptic Blake Freeman is travelling around the United States with his friend, Leroy Tessina. Leroy is paranoid about aliens and paranormal activity, and has spent his life savings on protecting himself from such things. Freeman needs to convince Leroy to go on this trip with him, and so he takes Leroy to see Singh.

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Jian Yang, a 33-year-old man from Singapore, has enough dolls to open a museum or at least a super awesome girls’ playhouse. The “toy nerd”, as Yang describes himself, has no less than 9,ooo dolls: 6000 of them are Barbie dolls, and the 0ther 3,000 are other types of girly dolls, such as Bratz Girls and Monster High. His huge collection is valued at about $500,000.

Yang’s passion for dolls began in his childhood days, when he wanted a doll but wasn’t allowed to have one. As he recalls, “before I knew anything about social norms, I was a boy that watched this on TV, liked it and wasn’t allowed to have one. As I grew older, got my own allowance, that’s where I started getting the freedom to buy whatever I wanted”. Step by step, a simple wish became a “crazy obsession”. His friends support him, his family have understood and learned to accept his passion, but his love life is affected, since his girlfriends see the the doll collection as the competition. As Yang confesses, “I’ve also got the ex-girlfriends who get insecure about this kind of stuff … They look at dolls and go ‘OK, that’s the competition’, which is quite troubling but it’s a reality”.

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A 23-year-old struggling actress from Canada is trying to prove you don’t have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth to enjoy the finest cuisine Toronto restaurants have to offer. With a predestined name like Erin Wotherspoon, this Canadian foodie is on a mission to date any rich men who can afford to satisfy her appetite for gourmet food.

Burgers and fries? That’s not this girl’s idea of a fine meal, and to make sure she gets the best food money can buy, she goes out on fancy dinner dates with unsuspecting men and then ditches them. She wines and dines every night of the week with different gents and then spills the beans on her blog where she writes snippets of her usually-bad but sometimes-good dates. “I’ve got a pretty face and a pretty extensive Urban Spoon wish list. We all know that getting what you want in life can be tough. Which is why I’ve decided to let someone else finance my dreams. My dream? To eat in pretty restaurants without costing me a penny,” the introductory message on her site reads. Erin likes to chew and tell, and confirms that there is no such thing as a free meal, suggesting that readers should “follow me to learn who I screw over, bang and love as I navigate Toronto’s diners, drive-ins and dives.”

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Vanessa Sky Ellis has dedicated her entire life to taking photos of herself with famous people. She spends up to 12 hours a day hunting for celebrities around her hometown of New York and has so far collected a whopping 10,000 photographs with stars like Lady Gaga, Johnny Depp and Cher.

The 26-year-old barmaid says her hobby of photographing herself with A-list celebrities is “the most important thing in her life” and spends hours on end stalking stars around the city just to take their picture. Among her many “victims” are famous actors and singers such as Jonny Depp, Brad Pitt, Sharon Osbourne, Lady Gaga, Mariah Carrey, Al Pacino, Denzel Washingon. Her favorite picture is of “Pirates of the Caribbean” actor Johnny Depp who she finds very attractive. “Johnny Depp is the most handsome man ever – he might be 50 but he’s beautiful,” she confesses. “I’ve never considered cheating on my boyfriend with a celebrity, but if you had the chance with Johnny Depp what girl wouldn’t?” Vanessa also likes Lady Gaga, as the “Bad Romance” singer is always nice enough to stop to chat and take pictures with her little monsters. Celebs like Bruce Willis, who never stops for the pleading admirers, are her least favorite.

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Halloween is more than just a candy quest for children dressed in spooky costumes. Over the years, it has become a competition for adults who want to attract attention with their scaring techniques and frightening house decorations. However, a discount store from Norway, pushed the envelope when they stocked their meat freezers with fake severed human limbs and other body parts, scaring children to death and making their parents’ blood boil.

The Europris discount shop thought putting realistic plastic human body parts in their freezers would help their customers get into the Halloween spirit. However, they were rather surprised to discover that parents who came in with their kids were furious after, among witches and monster costumes, they found severed human body parts wrapped in plastic and packed just like ordinary meat products. The bloody limbs, which came from a made-up butcher called “Chop Shop”, not only looked incredibly realistic, they also came with nutritional information stickers, which only added to the gruesomeness of the whole thing. Safe to say, most shoppers were not amused. Read More »

Some artists are willing to do anything for their masterpieces, including risking their freedom. American Duke Riley is one such artist. He walks the fine line between legal and illegal in his new project called “Trading with the Enemy” which involves smuggling cigars from Cuba to Key West using pigeons specially trained for this shady task.

For “Trading with the Enemy,” Riley, who makes a living as a tattoo artist, started off by training 50 birds. Some were taught to carry cigars from Cuba to their destination – which, if you don’t already know by now, is illegal, and some were given special cameras to document their trip back and forth over the boarder. The spying equipment was engineered by Riley himself who worked for several years to make them as light as possible so the pigeon’s wouldn’t even notice them. According to the New York Times, the artist’s concept was a commentary on “the long history of pirating on the southern border.” Riley also wanted to dismiss the government’s very expensive high-tech spying gear by using homing pigeons instead of drones. “I wanted to subvert this billions-of-dollars high-tech system with things that were being used in ancient Sumeria. A lot of the work I do seeks to create some sense of possibility or empowerment, in a humorous and romanticized way, using the simplest means possible,” Riley says.

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