This is perhaps one of the most innovative methods ever employed to keep a city clean. The authorities in New Taipei City, northern Taiwan, promised the citizens a  free lottery ticket, in exchange for each bag of dog poop they collect from the street and hand over.

It has become a common sight in the city now, several citizens cleaning up the streets. The competition was started in early August, and so far 14,000 bags of dog waste have been handed in. In fact, the response to the campaign has been beyond the expectations of the city’s environment protection bureau, according to one official. The top prize of the lottery draw was gold worth T$ 60,000 (US $2000). The second and third prize were T$18,000 and T$12,000 respectively.

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7 Great Inventors Killed by Their Own Inventions (Environmental Graffiti)

LEGO Tourist Travels the World (Orange News)

Chinese Rapunzel Has World’s Longest Hair (Sina)

10 Incredibly Bizarre Art Installations (Oddee)

Stuntman Balances on His Head, on a Spike (Daily Mail)

Man Fakes Mother’s Obituary to Get Time Off (Huufington Post)

World’s 7 Creepiest Abandoned Zoos (Environmental Graffiti)

Totally Awesome Diablo 3 Body Costume (YouTube)

Japan’s Regal Dancing Monkeys (MyModernMet)

Taekwondo Finger Guy Is a handy Martial Arts Expert (Laughing Squid)

36-Year-Old Ashleigh Kirby is obsessed with her new-born baby, Finlay. Only, Finlay isn’t a real boy. In a story that strongly reminds us of Pinocchio, Ashleigh is emotionally attached to a realistic, life-size baby doll, even more than with her own daughter when she was born.

Ashleigh lives with her 12-year-old daughter Becky in Andover, Hampshire. She separated from her partner when Becky was just five. After trying several years, she lost hope that she would ever find a suitable man and have babies again. Describing herself as strongly maternal, she wanted to have a baby in the house at any cost. When Ashleigh came across the ‘reborn’ dolls online, she immediately placed an order for one, priced at £250. She has since spent hundreds of pounds on the doll, on clothing, nappies and more. She takes the doll out to the park for a walk in a stroller, cuddles with it and even takes it shopping, treating it just like a real baby. Sometimes other women come over to her to see the baby, mistaking it for a real one. Ashleigh says she just plays along.

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A Twitter user has taken on the identity of Joseph of Nazareth, to give us a perspective of what he might have been going through during the birth of Jesus Christ.

The work of an anonymous tweeter from Germany has attracted thousands of followers on social networking site Twitter. He goes by the pseudonym Joseph Von Nazareth. His profile page, joseph_von_naza, is aimed at re-inventing the nativity. He writes “We have heard the story a thousand times, but nobody has ever thought about how Joseph felt about the whole thing.” The tweets began on Dec 1 and are written in German. The tweeter intends to continue until Christmas, narrating the nativity in 140-character messages right until then. For now, his tweets are focused on his girlfriend Mary and her pregnancy. He has been in a state of turmoil ever since he found out about it.

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We’ve seen polygamy, same-sex marriages and even threesomes. But what about the polyamorous? Defined as the practice of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved, Jaiya Ma’s relationships are a perfect example of this.

This is the bizarre story of Jaiya, aged 34, and her two lovers – Jon Hanauer, 49, and Ian Ferguson, 44, along with – get this – the baby she’s had with Ian. Confused? Let’s start from the beginning. Jaiya and Jon met in 2000 and lived together for six years, when Jon suggested that she take a new lover… Incidentally, they had met at a Tantric Yoga class and fell in love when they were training to be teachers. At the time, Jaiya was engaged to another man, Tony, who wasn’t comfortable in an open relationship and called it quits. She then lived with Jon in an open relationship the whole time.

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The latest in bizarre dresses has arrived. After paper napkins, newspapers, and even condoms, we now have a dress made of tea bags. This one was made by a 16-year-old from Kuala Lumpur, and she used a whopping 4,000 tea bags to create her masterpiece. She won the top prize at the Green Awards 2011 held in Kuala Lumpur in October.

Suraya Mohd Zairin is a science student from SMK Bukit Jelutong, Shah Alam. She says that she chose to make a dress out of tea bags because they were easily available to her. With the help of her friends, she was able to collect the 4,000 bags and then it took her three months to complete the dress. The theme followed by the budding designer was ‘flowers’, because their shapes have always mesmerized her.

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China is notorious for making cheap copies of almost every item in the world. And now, they seem to have moved on from man-made objects to replicating nature itself. The latest in the long list of fake Chinese items is a fake pregnancy belly. Put it on, and you can deceive anyone.

These artificial copies of pregnant women’s abdomens are made of silica gel, and are being sold on the internet. The silica gel makes them take on a very natural quality, close to human skin texture. Some online shop owners have said that the fake bellies are highly comfortable and have a flesh color. If you’re wondering what use anyone could possibly get out of fake pregnancy bellies, we have some answers for you. For now, the people who buy it are actors, purchasing them for performances. Others have bought it as a joke, and also to get an idea of how it feels to be pregnant. Apparently, the product is a hot seller online.

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It sounds like the title of a horror flick, but it’s actually a short video documenting artist Molly Crabapple‘s project, for which she locked herself in a hotel room covered the walls with doodles.

Molly started contemplating “what happens when an artist leaves their studio, their cliches, and their comfort zone and draws beyond the limits of their endurance” and she also wanted “to see what tarts and squidbeasts look like frollicking on a massive scale”. So she decided to spend her 28th birthday locked in an East Village room, covering the walls with art. She began by launching a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to help cover the cost of her daring project, including the photographic talents of Steve Prue. In September 2011 she did just what she promised, and spent five days locked in a room making art. Luckily, she wasn’t alone, as she brought along Keith Jenson from Brainwomb to document the experience, and also had a “cast of muses, musicians and miscreants” to keep her company.

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It might look like just an old typewriter, but Washington-based artist Tyree Callahan has actually converted this antique 1937 Underwood Standard typewriter into an art instrument that makes beautiful paintings.

Callahan replaced the ink pads of the typewriter with colored paint pads and the letters with color markers, to create a painting machine he calls a Chromatic Typewriter. So instead of creating paintings with brushes, he types them with his unique typewriter. While it would take a while getting used to, and although it will probably never yield the detailed results of a brush, I have no doubt this thing could produce some pretty awesome artworks. After all, artists like Keira Rathbone use conventional typewriters to create exceptional works of art using just letters and symbols. I know it sounds strange, but lets face it, artists have used stranger things to unleash their painting talent (vomit, remote-controlled cars or their lips, just to name a few).

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Pat Vaillancourt is the current record holder for the most web addresses tattooed on his body, with over 10,000 URL’s inked on his back and shoulders. That sounds like a lot, but he’s not stopping until his body is covered by 100,000 website addresses.

In 2010, 30-year-old Vaillancourt, from Quebec, Canada, decided he wanted to set a world record of his own, and because he wasn’t an athlete and he couldn’t do extreme stunts, he chose tattooing as the way to leave his mark on the world. “I want to break a Guinness World Record, but more importantly, I want to help others. And this is my way of doing so,” he said back then. People and businesses can pay $35 to have their URL tattooed on Pat’s body and listed on his website, Back2thelight.com, with half the proceeds being donated to help the people of Haiti and Somalia. Vaillancourt says the other half is used to pay for his tattoos and promote the project. If my calculations are correct, he hopes to ultimately raise $3.5 million, including expenses.

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Ricky Lenart, an artist and resident of Uptown New Orleans, has an entire holiday home dedicated to his collection of teddy bears. Every room of his three-story house at Duffossat Street is filled with the soft toys, a total of 10,000 in number.

Lenart’s unusual hobby did not come cheap. He says that it would have actually been cheaper to give people $10,000 each. This year alone, he spent a total of $40,000 to $50,000 on decorations for his home. He says he has had a lifelong fascination of teddy bears, which prompted him to start his collection. Before he knew it, the bears were everywhere. The Teddy Bear House, as it is called, hosts guided tours for visitors in the holiday season. All the bears are put on display in various rooms, and are otherwise put in storage between seasons. The guided tour sessions are an hour-long and proceeds from ticket sales are donated to nonprofit organizations.

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Alexa Fisher, from Texas, looks and talks like any other 8-year old girl. However, she has a skill that is most unusual for girls her age. She can play poker fabulously well. In fact, Alexa is so good at poker that she can take on card sharks seven times her age. She was introduced to playing cards at the age of three by her father Justin, a 35 year old poker enthusiast. He says he taught her the game to help improve her Math skills.

Justin began by having ESPN and other poker game shows on TV playing in the background all the time. He also used playing cards as a way to teach her to count and learn math skills before she began school. And his efforts payed off. Alexa slowly began to understand which cards were higher and recognized poker terminology, like a flush, a pair and three of a kind. He then went on to get her poker chips. By the age of four, when other kids are barely able to hold an entire pack of cards in their tiny hands, Alexa was could shuffle, deal and also knew the basic strategies of bluffing. When she reached five, she could play No-Limit Texas Holde’m like a pro. She slowly began to learn more games like Badugi, Double Flop Hold’em, and many other WSOP (World Series of Poker Tournaments) games.

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People have been photocopying their body parts for a while now, and even though it’s still pretty funny, it’s not that impressive at it once was. But what about a portrait of a photocopied face recreated with over 3 million dots, is that impressive enough for ya?

Artist Miguel Endara started out with a portrait  of his father’s photocopied face, and somewhere along the way he decided to recreate it with millions of dots made with a variety of Micron pens. he took a piece of paper, drew an outline of his dad’s face with a pencil and started adding dots. As you can imagine, this kind of painstaking work takes a lot of patience, and luckily Miguel managed to keep it together for all the 210 hours it took him to finish his masterpiece. He even made a cool video documenting his amazing effort and posted a high resolution image of the portrait on his website, so you can actually see all of the 3.2 millions of dots he had to use.

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I’ve always thought that the best thing in the world would be getting paid to just eat and sleep. Well, Miru Kim, a Korean-American performance artist found a way to do just that. Except, she calls it a form of art. Influenced by Buddhist teachings that all livings beings are connected in a circular manner through life force, Kim wanted to mingle with animals and feel her existence more than ever.

She therefore decided to eat and sleep with pigs, naked, for four straight days. Starting last Friday, she ended up spending 104 consecutive hours in a makeshift pen right in front of her gallery, in the company of pigs. Her project “I Like Pigs and Pigs and Pigs Like Me,” for Art Basel in Miami, is in fact a small scale version of what she had done earlier, when she curled up naked next to pigs in hog farms.

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90’s Boy-Band, Hanson, to Launch Their Own Beer, Called “MMMHop” (Contact Music)

Pee-Powered Video Games Hit London Pub (The Sun)

Man Has 120 Kg Alligator Pet, Says He’s a Gentle Giant (Daily Mail)

Exploring the Decaying Chambers of an Abandoned Slaughterhouse (Environmental Graffiti)

Ugandan Space Chief Builds Test Craft in Mother’s Muddy Backyard (MSN Photoblog)

China Sets Record for World’s Longest Christmas Cake (NDTV)

Woman Reveals Cement Cheek Implants Done by Fake Doctor (Huffington Post)

600,000 LEGO Bricks Christmas Tree Built in London (Brothers Brick)

12 Incredible Visions of Earth (Environmental Graffiti)

Mom Says World of Warcraft Turned Son into Raging Hunchback (Geekologie)