Swimming through the grass

Not a monument like I originally thought, but cool nontheless

Commissioned and unveiled last year by the Discovery Channel to promote one of its reality shows, London Ink, this giant swimmer swims his way through the grass on the South Bank of the river Thames, near Tower Bridge. first time I saw this work of art I thought it was meant to symbolize something like the British ambition or competitive spirit, not a lousy advertisement scheme. Oh well, at least it looks cool.

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Fooling gravity

That’s what I’d say this man is doing through his performances.

Johan Lorbeer is a German performing artist that became famous in his home country through his Still Life street shows. Through a very ingenious optical illusion, Lorbeer makes it seem like he is defying gravity just by leaning off buildings. Try to guess how he pulls this stunt off and learn if you guessed right by looking at the last photo.

Although he is clearly a brilliant artist and has been performing for quite some time, Johan Lorbeer is still semi-unknown on an international level. Here’s a link to his personal page.

Uno – The Segway Motorcycle

It’s Segway meets motorcycle and it’s beautiful.

Believe it or not, this little beauty was built by 18 year-old Ben J.Poss Gulak who used Google StretchUp to draw up the plans, since he couldn’t afford professional software. Even though he had some help from motorcycle modders and robotics experts, he deserves to be congratulated.

Unveiled for the first time at the Toronto National Motorbike Show, Uno has two wheels but not one in front of the other, but right next to each other. It’s an electric vehicle with two micro-gyro engines, much like the Segway, one for forward and back and the other for turning. It only has one control, the on/off switch, everything else is done by leaning.

Ben came up with the idea of an eco-friendly vehicle when he was in China where “the smog was so thick, we never saw the sun.”

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Whale massacre in Europe

Don’t look at the photos and video if you’re a big animal lover, it’s “a little” hard to take in…

This “bay of blood” set somewhere in the Faroe Islands is where hundreds, sometimes thousands of pilot whales are literally butchered alive by hungry locals. The hunt known as Grindadrap is centuries old and it hasn’t changed much since then, except for the power-boats, radios and echo-sounders which make life a lot easier for the butchers. They round the poor whales into the shore with the power-boats and when they get really close, the locals plunge into the waves and start hooking them to death in a horrific manner. Then they drag the carcasses to shore and start skinning them and splitting the meat and blubber between all the islands’ inhabitants.

The Faroes economy relies only on economic fishing, but that doesn’t give them the right to slaughter 544 Atlantic white sided dolphins in a single day, like they did in 1988.

recently, studies have shown that the meat and blubber of pilot whales contain high amounts of mercury, PCBs, DDT and dieldrin. For what they do every year these animals deserve to get much more than mercury poisoning. Read More »

Pizza-tossing championship

That’s right folks there’s such a thing as a World Pizza Championship.

It’s hosted in Salsomaggiore Terme, Italy and it gathers tens of professional pizza makers from allover the world. The most impressive challenge of the entire contest is the pizza tossing, an acrobatic event involving the pizza dough. As you can see from the pics, these guys are true masters tossing giant pies into the air or spinning them on their fingers like basketballs and there are even synchronized-dancers performing with pizza dough. Must really cool to watch these guys go all out to take the title of best pizza maker in the world. So, if you’re ever in Italy…

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Biggest Mentos fountain ever

You know what happens if you drop a sweet mint into a bottle of coke right? What if 1500 people did it at the same time?

That’s what 1500 students from a University in Belgium tried to find out and also set a new world record for the world’s biggest Mentos fountain. It wasn’t the most important experiment in the lives of the young chemistry students, but I can bet it was the funniest one.

You can see the result of the experiment in the photos below, too bad I couldn’t find any more.

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The Hitler action-figure

Apparently there are those who think the Fuhrer was a hero.

Some of these people live in the Ukraine, where an Adolf Hitler action-figure has gone on sale. The $200 doll is compared to Barbie by sales-women in Kiev and, just like the famous blond, it comes complete with accessories and several changes of clothes. Although any form of Nazism or fascism is prohibited in the Ukraine, the dolls are already on sale and will be mas-produced starting this summer. This is a result of growing extreme right political sentiment and increasing xenophobia and racism.

It looks like some Ukrainians, especially the young ones, have forgotten that Hitler killed 3 million of them during WWII, including 1.5 million Jews. He wanted to turn the country into slave populated buffer zone with Russia, now they think he was a hero…that’s sad.

The doll comes with a spare head that gives Hitler a kinder face…because he was such a kind person?!?

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Easter Eggs-building models

An unusual building-models exhibition took place in Kiev recently, with famous national landmarks being built out of Easter eggs. It took almost 17.000 eggs to recreate Saint Sophia Cathedral and a city of castles Kamenets-Podolsky. The roof of the cathedral has been painted gold. The eggs of this Ukrainian egg-map will be given as souvenirs after the gallery closes.

Dambe – Traditional Nigerian Boxing

I never knew traditional Nigerian Boxing is one of the deadliest sports in the world.

Practiced by traveling young African men, Dambe is one of the few ways they can become famous in a country like Nigeria. The winner of a Dambe tournament gets around $100, a TV-set and the honor of being a champion, not much for what he has to go through.

All a fighter has to do to win a fight is knock down his opponent only once in three rounds, but if the two are evenly matched, a fight can go on for hours. As you can see in the photos, fighters wear a flax cord rapped around one of their fists. They wet the string and sprinkle sand on it to make his punches more painful. The other hand is used to taunt and trick the opponent into letting his guard down. Many have been seriously injured and even died practising this blood sport, but as many fighters complain, there isn’t much an unemployed Nigerian can do to find fame.

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Naked in Barcelona

Well this guy has a pair of undershorts tattooed on his body so technically he isn’t naked.

If you’re ever in Barcelona, you might get “lucky” and run into “the old naked guy“. No one knows his name but everybody knows him, he’s kind of a local mascot, walking around in the nude with his huge penis hanging down halfway to his knees. Tourists either avoid him or just stop and stare at him, but he doesn’t seem to mind. The police have tried to reason with him and he has even been institutionalized a few times but he always came back.

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Dinner in the sky

And I don’t mean in heaven, just 50 meters above the ground.

If you really want to surprise your friends or business partners and want to throw a dinner that they’ll never forget, you might consider a Dinner in the Sky. All you have to do is contact the guys at Diner in the Sky.com,tell them how you’d like them to customize the table and they’ll come with their giant crane in any place on earth as long as there is a 500 square meters surface that can be secured. You can invite up to 22 people to this unbelievable dinner in the sky for a period of 8 hours. You’ll only be accompanied by a chef, waiter and an entertainer, so you’ll have the whole sky to yourself.

Quite an original service these guys are providing, I’m sure business must be good.

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Shooting fish in a barrel

That’s one big barrel but the saying applies perfectly.

And I don’t mean it in a figurative sense, that dumb-ass is literally shooting tuna-fish with a kind of shotgun. Now I’m not in the fishing business, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the standard way of putting fish to sleep. And by the looks of that last photo, these guys are doing all this for business AND PLEASURE. Some people never cease to amaze me with their cruelty, some shoot fish in a barrel, others smash helpless baby seals’ skulls in, where does it all end?

I hope someone who can actually do something about it sees this atrocity.

Largest cigarette butt in the world

No one actually smoked this cigarette, it was created as a statement.

A 9-meter cigarette butt was dropped in the middle of Trafalgar Square, London, at the beginning of this month as a protest against the city’s burning littering problem. Ever since smoking in indoor public places was banned, Londoners have been smoking outdoors and throwing the stubs on the streets, with no concern for the environment. The Keep Britain Tidy campaign installed the giant structure to remind people that cigarette butts litter 78% of streets in all of Great Britain.

Maybe somebody should start advertising the e-cigarette more, it would solve the littering problem and keep smokers happy.

BASE jumping – incredible photos

Building Antena Span Earth

That’s what the acronym B.A.S.E stands for. This incredible sport is derived out of sky-diving and it looks a lot harder too. BASE jumpers have to make use of their wingsuits and be very careful at their body-attitude so they don’t start tumbling. The parachute is only opened at the last second which makes the adrenalin rush even more powerful.

Valeri Rozov, one of the world’s most talented BASE jumpers made a jump from the Alps “Grandes Jorasses“, a place experts had deemed impossible for a free-fall, but he proved anything is possible.

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Hello Kitty Assault Rifle

It might look cute and cuddly but it’s as deadly as any other weapon.

As a form of protest against assault weapons bans in the US, a dude from California decided to “alleviate the fears of (his) fellow citizens and gun-banning legislators” and created a legal AR-15 rifle for his wife. He painted all the parts in harmless pink, added a twisted logo of Hello Kitty holding a rifle and some flowers. This was back in 2006 and it created a lot of controversy, with some people blaming its creator of trying to portray deadly weapons as harmless and others asking where they could buy one.

As somebody who hates guns and thinks they should be banned for all civilians, I can’t say I like this “toy” and I have to say I never thought men in the US give guns as presents to their better-halves.

You can read more about the Hell Kitty Ar-15 assault Rifle on its creator’s website, Riflegear.com

The gun is another, more recent example of evil black or silver turned cuddly pink.