“There’s no place like home!”, I believe the saying goes, and this modest migrant family from China proves it applies even when home is an abandoned public toilet in the city of Shenyang.

Zeng Lingjun was born in a small village, in the Jilin Province of Northeastern China. As a boy, he dreamed of one day attending college, but because his family was too poor he had to abandon his dream and settle for becoming a cobbler and repair shoes for a living. But just because he couldn’t afford to go to college, didn’t mean he was willing to spend the rest of his life in his village. He had bigger plans for himself, so one day, with just 50 yuan ($8) in his pocket, he left for Shenyang, the biggest city in northeast China. Being a hard worker and a skilled cobbler helped Zeng make a living in the big city, and he was soon earning around 2,000 yuan (315) per month. But this wasn’t enough for him to get his own place.

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Looks like the dead have left behind Ouija boards and upgraded to e-mail communication. That is, if the story of Jack Froese is to be believed. The 32-year-old from Dunmore, PA, died last June from a heart arrhythmia. But last November, a couple of people received e-mail messages from him containing personal information that only he could know.

For instance, Tim Hart, his childhood buddy got this message: “Did you hear me? I’m at your house. Clean your f-cking attic!!!” The subject line read, “I’m watching.” Now, according to Tim, only Jack could have sent a message like this, because they had had a conversation about what to do with the attic space shortly before Jack’s death. Jack’s cousin, Jimmy McGraw, also received a similar e-mail, warning him about an ankle injury that he’d suffered after Jack’s death. “I knew you were going to break your ankle, tried to warn you, gotta be careful.” Mc Graw believes the message to be a sign that Jack is trying to connect with him, telling him to move along and feel better.

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The path to gaining eternal happiness has long since eluded man, but apparently it can be achieved through something as simple as a hip surgery. Meet Huug Bosse, a Dutch man who had hip surgery a couple of years ago, and hasn’t stopped laughing since. His wife finds it annoying, his brother and daughter have become exasperated, but all Mr. Bosse can do in response is slap his knee and laugh uncontrollably.

His laughter is infectious, I myself started to giggle aloud after watching the video about him. But it does get a little silly after a while. And imagine having to live with a person laughing in the house all the time. It must be impossible to hold serious conversations with the man, and that must be quite taxing for his family. The cause for his condition isn’t exactly clear, but it’s probably due to the anesthesia he was placed under, during the operation. In spite of all the mirth, there still is one thing that can move Mr. Bosse to tears. He calls it the most beautiful song – the Dutch national anthem. Perhaps they should have it playing in the background whenever they want to get a serious word out of the man.

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According to the law of cartoons, eating a Glow Worm would instantly cause your tummy to start glowing too. Now you can go test this theory in real life with glow in the dark sushi, although, the only thing that’s likely to glow are the bits of food stuck between your teeth.

It’s the latest food craze all over the US, but in case you haven’t heard of it already, Glofish is a brand of genetically modified fish designed to glow in the dark. These fluorescent fish are available for purchase in pet shops. But I suppose people weren’t content with just watching the glofish swim about, so they decided to try them out in recipes. And that’s how glow in the dark sushi was invented. Videos demonstrating the recipe have become a huge hit on the internet.

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Artist Peter Root spent three weeks carving 80 kilograms of potatoes into office buildings, homes and various other structures, using only a knife and a bicycle repair kit. His unique potato city model is called Plot.

Although Plot was created in Istanbul, 33-year-old Peter Root says his creation wasn’t modeled on the Turkish city, but rather influenced my various aspects of the historical city. The artist, who eats potatoes at least once a week, says he chose the popular vegetables because they are available in abundance and are “amazing to work with”. They can be carved, sliced, chopped, drawn into, balanced and dried, Root said. Lucky for him, the artist didn’t have to peel all 80 kg of potatoes, as he decided to leave some of the skin intact, to encourage the growing of shoots.

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The Near Annihilation of the American Buffalo (Environmental Graffiti)

Chefs Create Menu for Space Tourists (Techeye)

Sheep-Shearing Course Helps Businessmen Relieve Stress (Youtube)

Homeless Man Poses as Woman for 13 Years for Free Medical Care (Fox News)

GPS System Leads Japanese Students into Oyster Point Bay (Bayside Bulletin)

Awesome Photos from Inside Musical Instruments (Behance)

12 Amazing Recycled Dragons (Environmental Graffiti)

Camping Tents That Look Like Real Food (Laughing Squid)

The Man-Made Clouds of Berndnaut Smilds (Designboom)

20 Amazing Look-Alikes (Oddee)

When something as natural and inevitable as death is banned, it does seem a tad illogical. You would be surprised to know that there actually are quite a few places on Earth where death has been forbidden, and deemed illegal. In fact, it seems that this is actually an age-old practice; the earliest known instance of the prohibition of death was in the 5^th century BC,  when dying wasn’t allowed on religious grounds at the Greek island of Delos. Each place has a reason of its own, varying from religious beliefs to environmental factors.

We’ll take a look at four places where death is forbidden in today’s world:

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If you’ve ever been curious about life in prison, but your record is too clean, now you have a chance to actually buy your way in. Not into a real prison, of course, but the Hotel Alcatraz in London. It’s a four-room hotel that’s been modeled on the lines of the (in)famous Alcatraz of San Francisco Bay, the one that closed down in 1963. The hotel is only open for a week to promote the new TV series of the same name. Bookings are available until Saturday, 17^th of March.

Once you’re checked in at Hotel Alcatraz, you can forget about being treated like a premium guest. At best, you’ll only be served the good food that prisoners in the 1950s were served, as prison officials believed that the best quality food would prevent violence amongst inmates. Everything else about the hotel is designed to give you a good understanding of the real deal. They’ve even roped in George Devincenzi, former USP Alcatraz Correction Officer, to oversee and authenticate the experience. So after check-in at exactly 18:30 hours, the prisoner-guests are handed uniforms and have their mugshots taken. They are then showed to their 5×9 foot cells, where they will be spending the night. The cells are sparsely furnished, with a sleeping cot and mattress (no sheets), prison-style toilet, sink and two shelves. The metal cups and serving trays have been specially sourced from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy in San Francisco, to maintain authenticity. Guests will also be expected to carry out a number of tasks such as physical exercise, tailoring and model making. Sounds like the experience of a lifetime. If you don’t plan on committing any real crimes, that is.

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Child labor is arguably one of the most painful experiences in the world, and women who endure a few days of it are considered heroes. Going by this, a woman who went through 75 days of labor has got to be nothing short of super-human. I guess it goes to show how just much pain a woman would be willing to withstand, to save her babies.

31-year-old Joanna Krzysztonek was pregnant with triplets when she went into labor at just 21 weeks. When the first baby came out prematurely, it was too weak to survive. In a bid to save the other two babies, doctors at the neo-natal clinic in Wroclaw, Poland, decided to act fast – they stopped the contractions with medications and got Joanna to lie down on a tilted bed at a 30 degree angle, to avoid them starting up again. The umbilical cord was tied up and placed back in the uterus. What followed for Joanna were probably the toughest two-and-a-half months of her life. She had to remain upside down 24×7 with no break whatsoever, not even to use the bathroom. She wasn’t allowed to move one bit, and the hospital staff made sure she was bathed and fed everyday. “I had to be very disciplined as I was not allowed to move out of the bed for the whole 75 days,” she says. “This was very uncomfortable, but the staff kept me going.”

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Korean artist Kim Dong Yoo creates amazing portraits of various icons like Audrey Hepburn or Michael Jackson, made up of hundreds of smaller painted portraits that either support or contradict the main subject of the artwork.

Over the years, we’ve featured some truly interesting celebrity portraits on Oddity Central, like Jason Mecier’s pill portraits, or Jason Kronenwald’s chewing gum creations, but we’ve never seen anything like Kim Dong Yoo’s works. This incredibly talented artist painstakingly paints hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of miniature portraits by hand, using them as smaller piece of a much bigger, unbelievably detailed portrait. His portraits look a lot like the stamp paintings of Peter R. Mason, only instead of using recycled stamps to recreate the faces of many historical and Hollywood icons, the Korean painter actually paints every one of the little images that make up the big portraits.

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Batman is in the news again, this time from Slovakia. Unlike his Brazilian counterpart, the Slovak Batman hasn’t been hired by the police, he’s self-appointed. 26-year-old Zoltan Kohari, from the southern Slovak town of Dunajska Streda, has donned a leather Batman suit that he’s stitched together himself, in an attempt to help the people of the town. He goes around cleaning the streets, helping the old, and calling the police when he spots something suspicious.

Incidentally, Kohari was a petty criminal prior to his superhero-avatar; he had spent eight months in jail last year and also attempted suicide just after his release. This was before he realized that he had a larger mission – to make life in his community better. “I have decided to do good for the people. I take care of order and help clean up the environment so we can keep living on this planet,” he says. Since Kohari doesn’t really have a full time job, he’s moved into an abandoned apartment in a dilapidated building on the edge of town. He has no electricity or water supply, but the place serves the purpose of a Batcave perfectly, to conduct his town patrols from.

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If you thought that zombies were only a figment of the imagination of storytellers, well, prepare to have your mind blown. If the rituals of the villagers of Toraja, Indonesia, are to be believed, almost every person who dies can turn into a zombie. Apparently, certain people of the village had and still have the ability to make dead people walk. And I don’t mean that metaphorically.

Reading about the funeral rituals of Toraja, I’ve come to realize that there are two separate theories on how the ‘walking dead’ evolved. According to one, in the ancient past, it was believed that a dead man must be buried in his village of origin, and not at the place of his death. Since villages then were far apart and extremely isolated, it was difficult for family members to carry the corpse through long distances. The help of people who could make the dead walk was sought, and the dead man would be able to walk back to the village where he was born. Kind of like a mobile service for the dead, I suppose. So in those days, it was not uncommon to find a stiff, expressionless corpse, walking straight ahead. And it is said that if anyone addressed the corpse directly, it would simply collapse, unable to continue the journey. Imagine the horror! Read More »

So men have started to wear pantyhose now.They’re called Mantyhose, and there’s even a whole website, e-mancipate, dedicated to them. There might be people who find this odd, but when you come to think of it, there’s nothing particularly feminine about pantyhose, is there? They’re just tights made of a diaphanous material. And men have been wearing them for centuries too, especially in Europe, like medieval court jesters, Henry VII and even Robin Hood.

While several men in the UK and other parts of Europe have already started wearing the garment, the trend is now catching up in the US. Most men prefer to wear them as an extra layer under pants, but the more courageous tend to pair them up with shorts too. Who can deny the benefits of sporting tights? After all they do provide that smooth look to the legs, hiding any bumps and scars. They’re pretty comfortable too. Chan Kramer, the founder of e-mancipate, writes, “We believe that pantyhose for men can be an everyday clothing item, and that it can be fashionable as well.” And Francesco Cavallini, the vice-president of luxe hosiery company Emilio Cavallini, agrees, “The mantyhose are extremely elastic and stretchable and can fit men comfortably at the top. If it’s fine for Italian guys, it’s fine for the world.”

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55-year-old Everard Cunion, from Dorset, UK couldn’t seem to be able to get a real woman, so at one point in his life he decided to get an artificial one. He had always been fond of shop mannequins, but since they’re as hard as rock, he decided to go for something that looked as good as that, but was more flexible. He now lives with nine realistic dolls…

Everard bought Rebecca, his first artificial woman, in 2000. It wasn’t until 2004 that he decided to get his second doll, not because he had been trying to stay faithful to his first, but he simply couldn’t afford to buy another one until then. In fact, the man admits that when he first saw the price tags on these things he almost fell off his chair, but he goes on to say that this kind of dolls are the best things that you can buy, for any amount of money. Still, the £5,000 he paid for his first dolls was a little steep. But what’s important is he didn’t let a trivial thing as money come between him and his third doll, Louis, which he bought in 2005.

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A creepy show capturing the last moments of criminals on death row – that might sound like the worst kind of reality TV, but “Interviews Before Execution” has been hugely popular in China, where it was first aired on Henan Legal Channel on 18^th November, 2006. After over 5 years, the show ended last Friday.

As a part of the reality show, journalist Ding Yu would interview a person on death row every week in almost cruel detail. So yes, every person featured on the show was a hardened criminal, whose fate had already been sealed – in death. Sometimes, the criminals were recorded speaking just minutes before their execution, many describing the details of their crimes, displaying remorse and even begging for forgiveness at times. It sure does sound like an unnecessary exploitation of people who are about to die, but the creators of the show have a different perspective. Lu Pejin, the director of the Legal Channel says that the purpose of the show was to warn audiences. “If they are warned, tragedies might be averted. That is good for society.”

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