Brian Lai, a brilliant Malaysian artist, has invented his own technique of drawing called ‘Invert Art’. Using the technique, he is able to make rough sketches materialize into full-fledged realistic drawings, when the colors are inverted using a Photoshop filter.

Lai has created a time-lapse video to demonstrate exactly how he creates these drawings. He first sketches and shades ‘normally’. Then, he completes the drawing by shading it inversely. After this, he takes a photograph of the drawing (he’s in some of the pictures too), and inverts the colors in Photoshop. The details appear, almost magically.

Some of the pictures on the internet of Lai’s work show how he’s successfully used his technique to make a drawing of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. At first, I thought he was holding up a real poster of the movie. Only when I read about his technique, did I realize it was a drawing.

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A man from Calgary, Canada, who won the jackpot of $40 million in a lottery, has decided to give away all his winnings. After keeping the news secret from his children for several months, he finally decided to break his silence. Thankfully, his kids are supportive of his decision.

Tom Crist, a widower of two years, won the Lotto Max jackpot this year in May. He retired in September, and he says he had always known what he was going to do with the money. “I was fortunate enough in my career to set myself up and my kids anyway,” he said. “There was no doubt in my mind where that money was going to go.”

Crist’s lost his wife, Jan, to lung cancer in 2012. “She was fairly young and stuff,” he said. “She beat it for six years before it finally caught up to her.” Jan was 57 years old when she died. So Crist is definitely going to give a part of his winnings to the Tom Baker Cancer Center, because they had treated his wife. But he is still undecided about where the rest of the money will go.

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If you love cars, this post is going to be eye-candy for you. We have a bunch of pictures taken by a student at a parking lot of the American University of Dubai. Reddit user Squirrelnelius, real name Meeka Nasser, put up pictures of amazing cars owned by students attending the learning institution in the Middle East.

I know Dubai is chock-full of rich folk, but just seeing all these cars parked in one place is pretty unbelievable. You can spot a Rolls-Royce, a Ferrari, a Bentley Continental GT, a chrome red Mercedes among hundreds of other luxury vehicles. In fact, you can see a poor Maserati left around a corner without a parking spot. Nasser said that because Cayennes and Range Rovers are a dime-a-dozen, he only included a few of them in the album.

Nasser is a student at the American University. His aim was to show the world the array of models on display at his school. “The cars that the students drive here are just ludicrous,” he said. “If I was back home in Canada, my car would be considered nice, but here nobody looks twice at it.”

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Remember those ugly sweaters your mom or aunt would buy you for Christmas? If you still have them hiding at the back of your closet, it’s time to get them out because they’re in style! That’s right, ugly Christmas sweaters are all the rage in the U.S. and Canada. Stores all over North America are stocking up on the most hideous novelty sweaters this holiday season.

F as in Frank, a vintage store in British Columbia, is one of the places selling the tacky woolen garments. Co-owner Drew Heifetz says that he has sold over 30,000 sweaters this year alone. “We’re trying to breathe new life into them and everyone is really coming together creating a culture around these sweaters and it’s been an amazing resurgence,” he said. “Really, it’s about having a good time, getting wild wearing the craziest sweater you can.”

Photographs on the internet show people wearing the most hideous sweaters conceivable. Some of them have Christmas tree ornaments hanging off them, others light up and some even have Santa with a furry beard. These sweaters were in fashion last year too, with the sweater industry reporting record sales during Christmas. But it looks like this year’s sales will break all records.

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25-year-old New Zealander, Reese McKee, started a social media campaign that fired the imagination of thousands of romantics on the internet. His plea for help in locating the whereabouts of his soul-mate went viral within hours. In fact, he had to delete the campaign because it all started to spiral out of control.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Reese – sweet romantic dude, or crazy internet stalker. Maybe I’ll let you be the judge of that. Here’s his story:

In his original campaign, Reese said that he met a girl on New Year’s Eve, 2012, in Hong Kong. He spotted her crying alone on the side of a road; she was lost and couldn’t find her friends. “I just cheered her up,” Reese said. “I sort of have this undeniably bad sense of humor that no one can resist laughing at.” The two spent the night partying, dancing and talking, before the girl caught up with her friends again. As they parted, she told Reese that her name was ‘Katie’ and she was from DC. She let him take a picture of her, and left with these final words: “Find Me.”

The next morning, as Reese looked at Katie’s photograph on his phone, a flood of great memories came back to him and he was determined to find her. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember the e-mail address she’d given him, so he decided to turn to Facebook for help.

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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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Yukiko Morita, a 27-year-old corporate employee from Kyoto, has a unique hobby. She combines her love for bread and her love for art into a special product: Pampshades.“‘Pan (Japanese for bread)’ + ‘lamp shade’ = Pampshades,” Morita explains on her website. These lighting fixtures made from real bread and can light up a room, filling it with the warm tones of a fresh loaf.

“I think loaves are really cute,” says Morita. “I love their round curves. I wanted a bread display in my room so I could admire it all the time. That’s how I came up with this shape.” The idea for pampshades first came to Morita when she was a student at the Kyoto City University of Arts. She was working on a project in a studio one day, playing around with a French baguette. She pulled out and nibbled on the soft parts, leaving the hollow outer shell intact. When she held it up towards the sunlight and let it stream in, that was her ‘aha!’ moment.

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71-year-old Rosemary Jacobs has had silver-colored skin for the past 60 years. At age 11, she developed a rare condition called argyria – caused by exposure to chemical forms of the element silver that makes the skin turn blue or bluish-grey. For Rosemary, the exposure occurred from nasal drops containing colloidal silver.

Rosemary’s story is unbelievable;  Whoever heard of a real person turning silver after using silver nasal drops? You only get to see skin color changing in cartoons,  but apparently the condition is real, and Rosemary has had to live a life of stigma because of it. Of course, her skin didn’t change color overnight. In fact, she was diagnosed with argyria four years after she began using the medication.

Rosemary, a retired Spanish teacher from Vermont, U.S., said: “When I was 11 years old, my mother mentioned to an ENT specialist that I always had a cold. He told me that it had to be allergies and prescribed nose drops that contained silver, recommending that I take them ‘as needed’.” She did as she was told, using the drops every time she had a stuffy nose.

At first, no could notice any difference in Rosemary’s skin, not even her parents. “The change in my color was so slow, I didn’t notice. My family and friends didn’t notice either because they saw me every day,” she said.

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The French aren’t exactly world-famous for being polite, which is why I was quite surprised when I read about this. A French Café is actually charging customers extra for being rude to its staff, and offering discounts to those who are nice.

The Petite Syrah Café, located in the French Riviera city of Nice, has the new pricing scheme on display. If you walk in and simply ask for “A coffee,” you will be charged €7 ($9.5). For “A coffee please,” the price is much lower – €4.25 ($6). And if you decide to go the distance and say, “Hello, a coffee please,” that will make the folks at the Petite Syrah so happy they’ll only charge you €1.40 ($2).

The concept is so awesome – I think it’s a win-win. I’m sure the patrons love $2 coffees; they’d keep coming back for more and be polite each time. It’s great for business and makes a nice work environment, so the staff at the café must be happy too.

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‘E’ is the most commonly used letter in the alphabet. That’s why it’s so hard to believe that a whole novel exists without a single use of the letter ‘e’.

The book in question was originally written in French in 1969, by author Georges Perec. La Disparition (The Disappearance) is a 300-page lipogrammatic novel – a kind of book that consists of constrained writing or a word game.

There is absolutely no mention of ‘e’ throughout all 300 pages, except the author’s name of course. Even the most common word of the French language, ‘le’ (which means the), makes no appearance at all. La Disparition was later translated into English by Gilbert Adair, with the title A Void.

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Anna Salandar, from Båstad, Sweden, is an amazing 11-year-old with an unsual hobby. At an age when kids prefer to play video games, Anna is learning to jump hurdles like a horse – on all fours.

Anna’s unique hobby is her own choice; she wanted to be able to run and jump using all four limbs. When she was younger, she wanted to resemble her grandmother’s dog, Peggy. When she got older, she thought it would be more fun to be like a horse.

Pretending to be like a horse might sound like fun, but it involves a lot of hard work for Anna. She began her training without hurdles; she first had to perfect the art of galloping. It was important to get her arms and wrists strong. Once she got a hang of galloping, she started with low barriers, about 30 to 40 centimeters high. Over time, she has managed to increase the height to 110 centimeters. The biggest challenge for Anna now, is to jump several consecutive obstacles. “It is very hard, so I get tired in the arms and need to rest,” says Anna. Despite this, she practices every single day.

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Chen Guangbiao, a high-profile Chinese millionaire and philanthropist, made headlines once again this week, after he sprayed liquid from a fire extinguisher into his mouth to show everyone that it’s non-toxic and completely safe. I’m pretty sure there’s a valuable PR lesson in there somewhere.

Chen Guangbiao, who you might now as the guy who sold canned fresh air last year, is no stranger to shocking PR stunts, but no one present  at his training center for disaster relief, in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, on Wednesday, expected him to go as far as spray fire extinguisher liquid into his mouth. Chen was there to promote some new equipment for disaster relief, when, in an attempt to show the advantages of his “green” fire extinguisher, he swallowed a hot curry and sprayed the small canister directly into his mouth to quell its burning effect. “Ok, it’s not the sort of thing fire extinguishers are made for, but it proves the point – that it is non-toxic and harmless,” Chen told reporters present on the scene.

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Where most people see useless pieces of junk, Edouard Martinet sees perfect parts for his incredibly detailed metal menagerie. The French artist uses everything from old bicycle chains to cutlery and clock parts to piece together his creation without any soldering.

We first featured Martinet’s work on Oddity Central three years ago, and it appears he’s been keeping busy, creating more of his marvelous metal creatures. Edouard’s artistic process doesn’t involve any welding or soldering. Instead, he chooses to pierce the components and screw them together by hand. As you can imagine, just figuring out how to best attach every piece can take a long time, so it’s not very surprising that the artist can spend anywhere from a month to several years on a single one of his works. But looking at how awesome every one of them looks, I’d say the effort is well worth it.

In order to allow viewers to identify all the different parts that make up his junk sculptures, Edouard Martinet accompanies every one of them with a list of components.

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There are two things Croatian artist Tomislav Horvat loves in this world – the Godfather series and matchstick modeling. Recently, he decided to combine his two greatest passions, and created a unique sculpture of Al Pacino as Don Michael Corleone.

24-year-old Tomislav Horvat has to be one of the calmest, most patient people in the world. It took him 19 months to complete a sculpture of Al Pacino as Don Corleone sitting in his iconic armchair, during which time he spent between 8 and 10 hours gluing matchsticks. How many people do you know who would be capable of doing this day in and day out without going mad, because I can’t think of a single one.

The whole sculpture is made out of 117,000 matchsticks, but most of them were used to create the armchair (68,000). Tomislav says he learned the basics of matchstick modelling in school, where he studied technical drawing and design, and before he knew it, he was creating all kinds of cool things out of thousands of tiny wooden sticks. Before the Al Pacino sculpture, Horvat had built a bridge from 7,500 matchsticks, a castle from 4,500 matchsticks and a windmill out of 3,000 matchsticks, among others.

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A jilted fiancée from Georgia has finally had her revenge. At the end of a relationship that lasted over 10 years, a state appeals court has ordered that Melissa Cooper be paid $50,000 towards compensation. Her ex-partner, IT employee Christopher Ned Kelley, was accused of breach of promise to marry.

Kelley and Cooper had been living together since 2000, with their child and Cooper’s child from a previous relationship. In December 2004, he had proposed marriage with a $10,000 ring, and the couple moved into a new home. The relationship was great for a while. Cooper even left her job at Kelly’s request to care for the children. But things started going wrong when she spotted signs of infidelity.

Cooper found out that Kelly had been in a relationship with another woman for two years before he had proposed. She confronted him, and he begged for her forgiveness. Eventually, she agreed to continue their relationship, “because of his pledges not to see the other woman again and his promises to marry her soon.” But things got worse in April 2011, when Cooper figured out that Kelly was up to no good again. He had started to see another woman. This time around, Kelly was clear about what he wanted – he asked Cooper to move out with the children so he could live with his new love.

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