Award-winning Australian performance artist Stelarc is doing something utterly bizarre in the name of art – he’s growing a third ear, on his arm!

Is that even possible, you ask? Well, turns out that it can be done through a complicated surgery. The ear itself was constructed using a frame made of biocompatible material commonly used in plastic surgery. It was transplanted into his arm, under his skin, and within six months, his tissue and blood vessels managed to morph with the material. The ear can’t hear yet, but it definitely is a feeling, functional part of his body.

“I guess I’ve always got something up my sleeve, but often my sleeve is rolled down,” Stelarc joked. “The ear is pretty much now a part of my arm, it’s fixed to my arm and it has its own blood supply. People’s reactions range from bemusement to bewilderment to curiosity, but you don’t really expect people to understand the art component of all of this.” Read More »

For the past 60 years, this Florida couple have been celebrating their anniversary by eating a piece out of their wedding cake – not a replica, the original one!

Ann and Ken Fredericks were married on 19 August, 1955 and Ann’s grandmother had baked a three-layer fruitcake for the occasion. The top layer of that cake, baked six decades ago, still exists in a metal Maxwell Coffee House can. “Every year, we unwrap it, pour brandy over it – because you need to moisten it – and we break off a piece,” Ann said.

“Everybody just looks at us with amazed looks when they hear about it,” she added. “Our children are appalled that we would be eating something that’s 60 years old. But believe me, it’s quite tasty, as long as it’s got enough brandy on it. And it’s never made us sick.”

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In a bid to gain insights into the life of pop-icon David Bowie, a London-based professor is spending a year living like the British star.

Will Brooker, who teaches film and cultural studies at Kingston University, came up with the idea for the unusual project in order to experience specific moments of Bowie’s super-successful career. He will be adopting the same eating habits, reading the same books, and visiting the same places as Bowie did.

“The idea is to inhabit Bowie’s headspace in points of his life and career to understand his work from an original angle, while retaining a critical and objective perspective at the same time,” the professor explained. “A kind of split persona, perhaps. No one could be Bowie again, and I’m thinking that no one would want to go through everything he went through, not really. But I want to get some taste of it.”

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When high school teacher Jessica Hayes decided to get married, she settled for no less than the son of God himself. The 38-year-old from Fort Wayne, Indiana, tied the knot with Jesus Christ in an elaborate church ceremony last weekend. The groom, of course, was not present.

Hayes, a theology teacher at Bishop Dwenger High School, said that she made the decision to marry Christ after years of prayer and soul-searching. She is now part of an elite group of ‘consecrated virgins’ – women who lead chaste lives, but are not required to live in convents or obliged to work for the Catholic Church. Hayes plans to continue her normal life at home, but she will not be able to marry or have sex with anyone for the rest of her life.

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A leading Russian geologist recently made the bizarre claim that the mysterious groove like markings found in the Phrygian Valley of central Turkey were made by giant, pre-historic cars, millions of years ago.

Dr Alexander Koltypin, director of the Natural Science Scientific Research Centre at Moscow’s International Independent University of Ecology and Politology, made his statement after returning from a field trip to the site along with three of his colleagues. He revealed that the fields were completely covered in ruts that are millions of years old. “As a geologist, I can certainly tell you that unknown antediluvian all-terrain vehicles drove around Central Turkey some 12-to-14 million years ago,” he said.

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Believe it or not, there’s actually an association in China that believes in the miraculous healing power of urine. So much so that members meet up every day for pee-drinking sessions!

The meetings take place at the China Urine Therapy Association office, where members first visit the bathroom to collect their urine. Then they make their way to the roof terrace – with warm urine laden plastic cups – and toast to each others’ health before gulping it all down.

The association, which was set up in Hong Kong in 2008, isn’t officially recognised by China’s Ministry of Health, which makes sense given that the medical consensus about urine therapy is pretty much that it stinks! But that hasn’t stopped about 1,000 people from joining the association. They apparently believe that drinking urine prolongs life, improves health, and can even cure cancer. Read More »

Potato Parcel has got to be the most ridiculous business idea since the Pet Rock. It’s so silly that when entrepreneur Alex Craig told his girlfriend about the idea, she laughed right in his face. But Craig went right ahead with his plan, and now he’s the one laughing all the way to the bank.

The business model is rather simple – anonymous messages sent via potatoes. Users go online to order a potato, add a custom message and send it to whomever they like, anonymously. 24-year-old Craig said that he came up with the idea for the service while having dinner with his girlfriend earlier this year. “She said, ‘You will not sell a single potato. This is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.’”

Yet, to everyone’s surprise, Craig’s idea caught on. “On our second day that we were live, and we started promoting it on Reddit, and we got $2,000 in orders, I just knew this was it,” he said. He’s sold over 2,000 potatoes so far and he’s been making a neat profit of $10,000 per month since May.

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Thomas Thwaites, a conceptual designer from England, is passionate about how humans could use technology to fulfill desires. So in September 2014, he spent six days at a farm in the Swiss Alps, using technology to realise his dream of living like a goat!

Thwaites designed special prosthetic limbs that allowed him to move on all fours, and even had a fake stomach fitted so he could graze on the open meadows. “My goal was to take a holiday from the pain and worry of being a self-conscious being, able to regret the past and worry about the future,” he said. He wanted to experience being a “nonhuman animal,” which he believed would be a lot “calmer and simpler” without the “existential terror” of everyday life.

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There’s something quite special about dads doing their daughters’ hair – celebrating the fact is Denver salon owner Calli Huebl-Bodilis. She regularly hosts a hairdressing workshop called ‘Beer and Braids’ for dads and their little girls at her salon, Envogue.

The workshop – priced at $55 – provides one-on-one training to six dads on ponytail, braid, and bun basics. They get hands-on practice on their own daughters’ hair, after which the little girls put on a fashion show that is judged by stylists. The winning dad gets a six-pack of beer, while all the girls are gifted goody bags with hair products.

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A new adaptation of the Shakespeare classic King Lear features a bizarre cast – one human and nine sheep! 24-year-old Alasdair Saksena plays the human, a director who tries to persuade his cast of sheep to perform the tragedy. ‘King Lear with Sheep’ is, needless to say, every bit as absurd and hilarious as it sounds.

The play is the brainchild of actor Saksena, writer Missouri Williams, and producer Lucie Elven – all in their early 20s. The idea came about after Missouri, having worked on a tour of King Lear with a human cast, got sick of them. “There’s little references to sheep within the text that I think planted the idea in Missouri’s head,” Saksena said. “And so she decided to do King Lear with sheep and me. And I thought, you can’t really say no to that, can you?”

According to Saksena, the reason why this adaptation works is the thin line between tragedy and comedy. “Lear is so tragic and sheep are so untragic that it just sort of works – it comes together and is either desperately sad or desperately funny depending on what mood is catching at that particular point of time,” he explained. Read More »

Phoenix-based heavy-metal outfit ‘Okilly Dokilly’ call themselves the world’s first ‘Nedal’ (Ned+metal) band – a tribute to the well-meaning, yet super-annoying Simpsons character Ned Flanders.

The members of Arizona’s most ‘neighborly’ rock band are bespectacled, mustachioed, and always dressed in Flanders’ signature costume – pink shirt, grey trousers, and green sweater. They even have creative names for themselves – Head Ned – vocals; Red Ned – synth; Thread Ned – bass; Stead Ned – guitar; and Bled Ned – drums. Most of their songs feature ‘direct Ned quotes’.

Lead singer Head Ned revealed that the idea for the band came about when he was shopping for groceries one day. “Myself and our drummer were in line at a grocery store, entertaining ourselves by coming up with really cutesy names for really hardcore, brutal bands,” he said, speaking to Australian magazine Rip It Up. “The name Okilly Dokilly came up and was very funny to us.”

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Courtney Homes, a barber at Dubuque’s Spark Family Hair Salon, recently came up with unique way of charging children for haircuts – he asked for stories instead of money! He’s passionate about supporting kids reading, so he had his little clients read out loud to him as he worked on their hair.

“The kids would come in, and I would say, “Go to the table and get a book you might like, and if you can’t read it, I’ll help you understand and we can read it together,” Holmes told reporters. “To be honest, I was amazed, the line started with four kids, and next thing I knew it was like 20 kids, all waiting for a haircut and eager to read.”

Homes conducted the unique initiative during the second annual Back to School Bash at the city’s Comiskey Park. Lots of kids showed up to get free haircuts and read to Homes in return.

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An Alabama church has shocked the nation by converting an unused patch of land on the church grounds into a gun range for parishioners. It appears that the members of Rocky Mount United Methodist Church, in Jemison, unanimously voted to mix religion and guns, “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

“We have had this large hole in the back of our property at the church for quite some time, and we thought it would be neat to start a gun range,” said Pastor Phil Guin. “The hole was primarily filled with kudzu, and had been used at one time to get fill dirt for the new facility that was built on the end of our church building.”

“We started working on the gun range about a year ago with some of the members of our church helping to clean out the hole,” the pastor added. “Not only did we think it would be a good outlet for members of our church to be able to learn more about gun safety, but it would be a good outreach for the community.” According to pastor Guin, a lot of the church’s female members owned or carried firearms but didn’t know how to use them.

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In a real-life story that seems taken out of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, a New York lawyer accused of fraud is actually asking for a trial by combat to settle a legal dispute.

Richard Luthmann says his bizarre request may sound ludicrous to most people, but it certainly isn’t against the law. He pointed out that the right to Trial by Combat was technically never outlawed in the state of New York, or anywhere else in America. “The common law of Britain was in effect in New York in 1776,” he told reporters “And the Ninth Amendment of the Constitution recognises the penumbra of those rights. It’s still on the books.” Historically, trial by combat was indeed a little-used but accepted aspect of English common law.

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Last year, an eccentric Welshman celebrated his 60th birthday by having 60 baked beans tattooed on his bald head! It sounds strange, but it was for a good cause.

Barry Kirk has loved baked beans all his life. So much so that in 1986, he spent 100 hours in a bathtub filled with beans, and earned a world record for it. Since then, Kirk has always associated himself with baked beans, earning himself the nickname ‘Captain Beany’. “Having the bean tattoos is just another step in my lifelong love of the baked bean,” Kirk said with a smile. “Now everywhere I go, people can see that I am full of beans – with the tattoos on my head.”

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