Lee Wei Chen, an MA student from the Kingston University, London, has designed an “amusement washing machine” that combines arcade gaming with doing laundry.

Lee Wei, who is originally feom Taiwan, came up with the idea for his wacky invention while thinking of a productive use for the “wasted but enjoyable time” he spent playing video games. The 27-year-old says he realized the skills he had in the virtual world were completely useless in the real world and he decided to find a way to make them useful. That’s how he came up with the amusement washing machine, a contraption that looks like an arcade gaming station with an incorporated washing machine in the lower half. Chen linked the circuitry of the two devices, making the washing cycle dependent on the user’s gaming skills. If the gamer sucks at video games he or she will have to insert more coins in order to complete the cycle.

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Nguyen Thi Phuong is only 26, but judging by her wrinkled and saggy skin, you could easily mistake her for a 70-year-old.

The young woman from Vietnam suffered an allergic reaction in 2008, and after taking some prescribed medication  the skin her face, hands and body started to wrinkle and become saggy, giving her the appearance of an old lady. It all started after Thi Phuong ate some seafood. It gave her such a bad rash that she used to scratch even in her sleep, so to alleviate the symptoms, her husband, Nguyen Thanh Tuyen, bought her some medication. It didn’t work, so she visited a local doctor who prescribed pills for dermatitis, which only made things worse, causing her face to swell up and hives to erupt all over her skin. She stopped taking them after a week and put her hopes in some Chinese practitioners in her town, in the Giong Trom district of Vietnam’s Ben Tre province. They cured her itching and hives, but her skin was becoming saggy.

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A Harry Potter fan from Houston, Texas asked a local woodworker to build her a 9-foot-tall cat house inspired by The Burrow, the Weasley family’s famous home.

Laura Marshall is a big fan of Harry Potter and three months ago she got this crazy idea of building a a real-life Burrow for her cats, right in the backyard. Since she didn’t have the skill and experience to pull off such a tricky job herself, she asked Wil Whitehouse of Whitehouse Wood Works to make it for her. She brought him a series of photos from the Internet for reference and the skillful wodworker got to work. Although in a normal construction setting he would cut all his studs the same size and try to keep everything level, he tried to give this model of The Burrow that out of square and out of level look by cutting pieces at different lengths. He got the fact that the house in the movie was held up by magic and waterd to capture that feel.

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With a little help from her friends and a lot of recycled cardboard, singer-songwriter Hilary Grist has created an 8-foot-long, 5-foot-wide cardboard piano topped by a miniature cardboard city.

‘This is one craziest things I’ve ever done and my most ambitious arts and crafts project to date!” Hilary said about the project that should have spanned over two or three days, but eventually took over two months to complete. ‘It seemed like a fairly simple task in the beginning but let me tell you, once you start building a cardboard city – you just can’t stop!’ says Hilary, who built the recycled work of art in her 600 square foot studio apartment. ‘The piano city combines art and green awareness in a really fun way, I hope that it can be on display to show people what can be done with re-using in a creative way.’ the artist says about her recycled masterpiece.

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Kate Askegaard of Dixon, Illinois has spent 1,500 hours of her life recreating a classic masterpiece using only dots the size of a pin tip, for the annual ArtPrize Contest. This what is called a labor of love.

Looking at Kate’s masterpiece from afar, you’d think it’s just another well-done recreation of Michelangelo’s “Pieta”, but after a close inspection you realize it’s actually made of millions of tiny dots. Entitled “True Love” this unique piece was created for the 2011 ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It started out with Askegaard’s wish to prove to herself that she was a good artist, and she got it into her head that if she could capture what Michelangelo did with his Pieta, and the public would respond, than she could call herself a good artist. Kate referenced a 12in x 12in photo of the classic artwork, which she gridded out into over 10,000 squares. She used 9 sheets of paper, each 19in x 24in, glued them on a 5ft x 5ft canvas and finally painted black around the image.

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Chef Marc Guibert at Lindeth Howe Country House Hotel in Windermere, Cumbria has created the world’s most expensive dessert– a pudding worth an astonishing $34,000.

I have a sweet tooth and I rarely find the power to resist a good dessert, but I’m really not the kind of guy who splurges thousands of dollars on a few bites. But as history has taught us, there are people out there willing to do just that, and chef Marc Guibert is catering to their needs with his extravagant chocolate pudding decorated with gold leaf and diamonds, worth over $34,000. Layered with champagne jelly and biscuit joconde, the expensive pudding is covered with dark chocolate, glazed with edible gold leaf and topped with a 2-carat diamond.

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It takes a great deal of skill and patience to create even the simplest matchstick model, but a detailed structure like the famous Taj Mahal seems almost impossible to recreate using the tiny sticks of wood. But Indian artist Shaikh Salimbhai challenged himself to create an almost identical model of the iconic structure using only wooden matchsticks, and although it took him a year and 19 days to finish it, he accomplished his goal. The wooden model was made from 75,000 matchsticks and will certainly become an inspiration for matchstick artists around the world.  The awe-inspiring matchstick Taj Mahal was unveiled on October 9, in the Indian city of Ahmedabad.

If you happen to be a fan of matchstick models, you might want to check out the awesome works of artists we featured on Oddity Central in the past, like Patrick Anton, Phillip Warren or Tofic Daher.

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Brooklyn performance artist Marni Kotak plans to have her baby in an art gallery, before an audience, during a performance she hopes will convince people “that human life itself is the most profound work of art, and that therefore giving birth, the greatest expression of life, is the highest form of art.”

Entitled “The Birth of Baby X” Marni’s performance will be the craziest thing that happened in the art world since Marion Laval Jeantet injected herself with horse blood. She is due sometime in the next five weeks, and visitors entering the Bushwick’s Microscope Gallery are warned the baby could arrive at any time. The artist has chosen the place as a “birthing room” and will spend every day there until she has her baby. “I have decided to do this because I want to show people that, as in my previous performances, real life is the best performance art,” she said.

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Le Van, the man who made headlines two years ago after it was discovered he had been sleeping with his dead wife for five years, has confirmed he is still sleeping with his beloved, and authorities can’t do anything to stop him.

The story about Le Van’s bizarre sleeping habit broke out at the end of 2009. Vietnamese papers posted photos of a man sleeping with a human-shaped gypsum statue that contained the body of his dead wife. we covered the story and you can read about it here, but long story short, the man couldn’t cope with the loss of his soul mate so he dug up her remains, put them inside the statue and continued sharing a bed with her. It was one of the strangest news of 2009, but I was sure that once word got out, local authorities would somehow convince Le Van to bury the remains of his beloved wife. I was wrong. Read More »

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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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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