Jay Hoff, an American school teacher from Florida, has spent six months of his life building a large-scale LEGO model of a scene from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. The first time Jay encountered LEGO was in 1973, when he found a biplane in a Burger King lunchbox, and he’s been fascinated with the little plastic bricks since then. He’s also a is fan of Star Wars and has collected a lot of the Star Wars LEGO kits that started coming out in the early 90s, but his personal creation is cooler than any standard kit ever launched. This geeky teacher wanted to do something special for the kids at Berkeley Preparatory School in Tampa, so he pieced together a six-by-six Star Wars-themed LEGO model for Science Discovery Day. Apart from other activities, children were invited to bring their own LEGO creation to be put on display, and Jay joined in by showing off his awe-inspiring masterpiece. Read More »

Artist Karen Eland paints all kinds of portraits and paintings using nothing but beer. The first time we featured Karen Eland on Oddity Central was when she took the art world by storm with her beautiful coffee paintings. She started her artistic career doing portraits with water color and colored pencils, but quickly moved on to painting with coffee, which really helped her make a name for herself. Now, after 14 years of creating art with the world’s favorite breakfast drink, Karen realized there are a lot of other drinks and foods she could experiment with, so she tried tea, beer, liquor, and lots of other stuff, but beer eventually proved the most successful. Read More »

Karla Flores, a 32-year-old street vendor from Culiacán, Mexico can consider herself after she survived being shot in the face with a live grenade. On August 6, 2011 Mexico’s “Miracle Woman”, as she’s come to be known, was selling seafood on the street when all of a sudden she heard an explosion. As she turned around to see what had happened, the woman was hit in the face by an object, and the powerful impact caused her to fall on the sidewalk. She felt a burning sensation in her face and when she touched the point of impact with her hand there was a lot of blood. Karla passed out after that, but luckily for her an anonymous passerby took her in his car and drove her to the nearest hospital. There she woke up and when the doctors asked her about the wound Flores told them she thought a stone hit her. But their investigations would reveal it was something a lot deadlier than a stone. From the x-ray and tomography, doctors could tell some sort of projectile was stuck between her superior and inferior jawbones, and military experts called on the scene identified it as the live explosive head of a fragmentation grenade. It had been fired with a grenade launcher, causing the bang Karla heard, but it didn’t detonate when it hit her face. Still, the grenade was extremely dangerous, just one wrong move and it could go off killing everyone in a 10-meter radius. The hospital’s patients and staff were evacuated, and something had to be done to help Karla, who could barely breath with the projectile locked in the side of her face. Read More »

Ian Baron, a nuclear plant mechanic from Bowmanville, Canada, has spent the last five years building life-size replicas of old fighter planes from various kinds of junk. Ian started making his planes five years ago, after visiting the Ford Automotive Museum in Michigan where he saw what can be accomplished by bending metal. He had experience building dune buggies and restoring Model A Fords, and he truly believed he could create a fighter replica with stuff he already had around the house. The few things he didn’t have, like sheet metal from above-ground pools he scavenged from scrapyards and neighbors. He also became a regular at stores like Princess Auto and Home Depot, but all his hard work and expenditures paid off nine months after starting the project, when he finally completed his  1916 Sopwith Carnel, a replica of Snoopy’s plane, the one that shot down the infamous Red Baron. It had bar stools as bulkheads, farm gates as wings and metal pool walls as the skin.

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A counter-top restaurant in Lima, Peru has been selling fresh frog juice for the last 15 years, and some locals drink it every day because they say it gives them strength. There’s nothing like a glass of fresh juice in the morning, right? Peruvian restaurant owner Carmen Gonzales would agree with this 100%, only she has a different kind of juice in mind – frog juice, For the last 15 years she and various other juice stand owners have been serving her Jugo de Rana to locals and tourists brave enough to try it, and business is better than ever. She sells about 80 frog-based drinks every day, and some of her clients have them as breakfast drinks, early in the morning, because it gives them energy for the entire day.

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I’m not a very big fan of Ford’s new Explorer SUV, but I have to say I’m impressed with the life-size LEGO model created by workers at Legoland Florida. You’re probably thinking a Mustang or a Ford GT would have looked a lot cooler than a LEGO Explorer, and you’d be right, but you have to agree commissioning a LEGO model of a family car and displaying at a family attraction like Legoland Florida makes a lot more sense, from a marketing point of view. So the American auto-maker asked Legoland workers to make a realistic model of their new Ford Explorer exclusively out of LEGO, and really got its money’s worth. 22 people worked 2,500 hours piecing together this incredibly detailed replica. In total, they used 382, 858 bricks. The LEGO Ford Explorer weighs an impressive 2,654 pounds, more than half of the original car’s weight (4,503 pounds). It will be exhibited at the Legoland Florida theme-park where it will hopefully boost sales of the original model. Read More »

Created by artist Stephen Huneck as a place where people of all religions could celebrate the spiritual connection they have with their dogs, the famous Dog Chapel of Vermont is now in danger of being closed down due to unpaid property taxes. Stephen Huneck loved dogs for as far as he could remember, but growing up in a family with seven children, he couldn’t afford to get one of his own. That all changed when he became an adult, and the special bond between him and his dogs was never stronger than when he came out of the hospital, following a two-month coma caused by a serious fall, 14 years ago. His four legged friends stood by his side as he learned to walk again. They would go into the forests to walk on trails and the dogs walked two feet in front of him and always looked after him and waited for him to catch up. The dog’s behaviour during this time really moved him and he felt like he was in the hands of God’s helpers…Stephen truly believed “dogs make us better people” and that “they can teach us more about love than most relationships we enter into”.

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Cayce Zavaglia is an embroidery artist from St. Louis, Missouri whose embroidered portraits look more like paintings than needle and thread artworks. Over the past 16 years, Cayce has created portraits of her family, friends and fellow artists, but while her passion for the expressions of the human face has remained constant, paint has slowly been replaced with a less toxic material – thread. She remembers her initial works were painted so thickly they looked a lot like cake frosting; she moved on to works on panel that required only medium-laden oil paint and eventually only used paint for the background of her amazing embroidered portraits. They still look like paintings from afar, but a closer look reveals their true nature and the amount of work that went into creating them. Read More »

A dental salon in Tokyo’s Ginza district has become very popular with girls after it advertised a cosmetic procedure that lengthens and sharpens canines to enhance a feature Japanese call “yaeba”. Crooked teeth are seen as imperfections in many western countries, and particularly in America, where braces are practically a God-given gift to man, but in Japan, a country where almost everything is different, they are considered cute, even adorable. Yaeba means double tooth in Japanese, but it doesn’t describe major dental deformities, but rather the vampire-like look obtained when the two molars crowd the canines pushing them forward to create a fang effect. According to some sources, yaeba gives girls a feline look which is apparently makes them even more attractive, while others say it’s this little imperfection that makes pretty girls look more approachable as opposed to the flawless magazine cover models of the western world. There are many Japanese celebrities with yaeba, but instead of having it fixed with braces, they just show it off to the camera, and that only makes them more popular. Read More »

Thousands of people gathered on the banks of the Odet River, in Quimper, western France, to see seven chocolate boats competing in the sweetest regatta ever. Georges Larnicol first made headlines last year, when he managed to sail in a 1.2-tonne-heavy chocolate boat, in Concarneau port. Now the 56-year-old master chocolatier, who owns a dozen shops throughout western France, has taken his passion to a whole new level by creating seven functional chocolate boats and showing them off to the world during a race. All of the boats were made of melted unsold chocolate, measured two-meters-long and weighed around 450 kilograms, each. The boats only had room for one sailor, who had to use chocolate oars to steer it to the finish line. Read More »

To celebrate British Cheese Week, artist Faye Halliday has created a series of creamy celebrity portraits made with cheese spread. The young artist created her series of cheese portraits using only cheese spread on a black canvas. Halliday was commissioned by English brand Primula to test the versatility of their cheese spreads in a really ingenious way. “We’ve always known how versatile Primula Cheese spreads are, which is why our products are much loved by consumers across the country. This gave us some food for thought, so we decided to really put its versatility to the test and have a bit of fun with our Primula celeb portraits,” The unique exhibition that took place at  the N1 Shopping Centre in Islington, London included portraits of London mayor Boris Johnson, US President Barack Obama, Justin Bieber and cheesy English duo Jedward. British Cheese Week started last Saturday and ends on Sunday, October 2nd. Read More »

Fashion designer Rachel Freire has recently been called “sick” by animal rights activists, after she presented a series of creations made from 3,000 yak nipples, at London Fashion Week. And you thought no one could top Lady Gaga’s famous meat dress, right? Well, yak nipples seem a lot more bizarre than some sewn pieces of red meat. 32-year-old Freire, who has previously worked with celebrities like Christina Aguilera and Courtney Love, had her models parading on the catwalk wearing two dresses and bras made from thousands of yak nipples given to her by a tannery. The show caused quite the scandal and several animal activists as well as members of Parliament used words such as “sickening”, “grotesque”, “repulsive” and “disturbing” to describe the Liverpool-based designer’s creations. Justin Kerswell of animal rights organisaton Viva said: “Isn’t the way we treat farmed animals bad enough without turning their dead bodies into a runway freakshow?” Read More »

Drainage Tube Hotel: Next Generation Recycled Living (Bit Rebels)

Designer Transforms Wonderbras into Handbags (Metro)

Guy Attempts to Survive on Only His Wife’s Breast Milk (Geekosystem)

12 Most Poisonous Frogs on Earth (Environmental Graffiti)

10 Bizarre Divorce Products (Oddee)

The Angola Prison Rodeo (Atlas Obscura)

Meet Medus – The World’s Longest Snake (Daily Mail)

Cage Fighting Kids Create Storm of Controversy (Youtube)

Tree-Climbing Goats Threaten Oil Supply (Discovery News)

Giant Snails Slowly Invade Miami (Huffington Post)

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Urban Tails Dubai, the world’s first seven-star resort for pets, was inaugurated this summer and owners say it was such a big hit they’ve been full all season. Just think of this place like an equivalent of Burj al Arab for cats and dogs. It was created by Irish ex-pat Aideen O’Mara who moved to the UAE in 2004, where she worked at an international school before opening her luxury pet resort. She speculated the fact that dogs aren’t allowed on Dubai’s public beaches or in parks and decided to create an environment where cats and dogs could “socialize in luxury surroundings”, while their European masters went home during the hottest time of the month. This way, the poor animals didn’t have to be confined inside for five months, due to unbearable heat. ”I have always had pets and I feel that animals are given a bit of a raw deal in the UAE in terms of pet services on offer and they do not have much freedom in comparison to dogs in Europe.” Aideen says. Read More »

American artist Amelia Harnas creates original portraits by spilling wine on white cotton or paper canvases and embroidering certain details to emphasize features. It’s amazing what some artists can achieve with the most unusual of mediums. Take wine for example, I’ve seen it used as a weapon during the Haro Wine Battle, and as a relaxing spa attraction, but I never imagined someone could use it to create artistic portraits. But that’s exactly what Amelia Harnas does, she uses wine stains to make works of art. From the artist’s website:

These portraits are created either by using a wax resist (much like batiks) and repeated wine stains with embroidery as a reinforcing drawing over the original design or wine on paper with machine sewing. These are my first experiments using wine, and I am excited to continue expanding upon these first results.

It’s amazing how she’s able to control the wine to create just the right effects, and I’m sure her works are just going to get better as she gains more experience. Read More »