You can find a great many things in Mexico’s Mercado República de San Luis Potosí market, but perhaps the most exotic of all is an old food stall known for selling rat meat.

For many of us, rat meat ranks pretty highly on the list of things we wouldn’t be caught dead eating, but in the region of San Luis Potosí, it has long been valued for its exotic flavor and alleged medicinal properties. However, in recent years, stalls selling rat meat and dishes containing it have all but disappeared from local markets. All except one in Mercado República de San Luis Potosí, which still sells both raw rats and rodent broth cooked with an assortment of vegetables and spices. Each bowl of rat broth contains a whole field rat and sells for 100 pesos ($5.80).

Read More »

A dragster-style custom car designed as a casket on wheels was recently auctioned off for $28,750 and went viral because of its unconventional look.

Inspired by the Drag-U-La coffin car featured in a 1965 episode of the television series The Munsters, this unusual vehicle features a custom box-frame chassis and an 8’ fiberglass casket as bodywork. It’s not actually a functional casket, as it was modified to house a driver’s seat behind the rear axle, but it certainly looks like one. Complete with wide rear wheels wrapped in racing slicks, organ-style vertical exhaust pipes, and lantern-style lighting, this coffin car looks more like a movie prop than an actual road-worthy vehicle, but it is in fact registered in New York as a 1928 Ford and has a valid license plate.

Read More »

Wang Deshun is an 88-year-old actol and fashion model who rose to fame in 2015 when he walked the runway topless at the China Fashion Week in Beijing during his first modeling gig ever.

In 2017, when we first featured Wang Deshun on Oddity Central, he was just two years into his modeling career, even though he was already 81 years old. His iconic walkout at the China Fashion Week was still in everyone’s minds, and he was getting all sorts of deals from some of the largest fashion houses in the world. People loved his story, and for good reason. Born in 1936 into a modest family, he was the second-oldest of ten children. His parents encouraged him to follow his dreams and he did just that, becoming an actor, then pivoting to pantomime and performance art before trying his luck at fashion modeling with incredible success. But that wasn’t enough for China’s hottest gandpa, as Wang has come to be known. He has since obtained a plane pilot license and learned how to ride a motorcycle and a horse.

Read More »

An Argentinian man became an overnight sensation in South America after reportedly barricading himself inside a car dealership and refusing to leave without the truck he had made an advance payment for.

Abelardo Usandivaras, aka the “gaucho of Salta’, has been making international news headlines for over two weeks and has become somewhat of a living symbol of the common man’s struggle against the shady practices of car dealerships. The middle-aged man from Metán, in Salta, arrived in Buenos Aires with his family at the beginning of April, and went straight to the dealership that was supposed to deliver his new much-needed truck. After failing to get the answers he needed and finding himself unable to get in touch with the owner, Usandivaras barricaded himself inside the dealership, refusing to leave without the truck he was promised, or at least the downpayment he had made for it. His story quickly went viral, and Abelardo’s struggle became a hot topic in all of Latin America.

Usandivaras, a horse breeder and advisor from Metán, decided to buy a new truck last year, and after getting in touch with a dealership in Buenos Aires, he decided to sell his old truck and make a downpayment for a new one. Everything went smoothly up to that point, but after paying the advance, he never heard back from the dealership. They had a 120-day delivery deadline, but he never got so much as an update, and whenever he got in touch, they just referred him to another department.

Read More »

Roughly the size of a studio apartment, the world’s largest passenger elevator weighs a whopping 16 tons, is supported by 9 steel cables, and can accommodate up to 235 people at a time.

In 2022, Finnish elevator company KONE installed the world’s largest passenger elevator inside the Jio World Center building in Mumbai, India. Designed to cater to large groups of people attending weddings or exhibitions at the state-of-the-art convention center, this marvel of design and engineering measures 25.78 square meters and offers all-round scenic views of the complex and its beautiful gardens. Due to its enormous size, the world’s largest passenger elevator relies on an innovative pulley beam system that consists of 18 large pulleys, 9 steel cables, and rails fixed over steel columns.

Read More »

Arshia Goswami, a 9-year-old girl from India’s Haryana state, has been dubbed the female version of Hercules after deadlifting a whopping 165 pounds (75 kg).

Arshia first started attracting attention a couple of years ago when she set a national record as India’s youngest deadlifter, with a personal best of 45 kilograms. She has been training ever since, though, and she recently went viral once again by deadlifting 75 kilograms, more than two times her own body weight. The impressive feat was captured on video and shared on the young weightlifter’s Instagram page, where it went viral. But although most of the feedback was positive, with people praising her strength and form, some comments also expressed concern for her wellbeing, claiming that lifting such heavy weights at her age could have serious health consequences.

Read More »

A Kentucky man is facing several years behind bars for illegally accessing the online death registry system and faking his own death to avoid having to pay over $100,000 in child support to his ex-partner.

39-year-old Jesse Kipf admitted to accessing the death registry system in Hawaii using login details he had stolen from a doctor in the same state in January of last year. According to investigators, he created and assigned a file to himself in the system and impersonated the doctor to certify that he had died. Court documents show that Kipf also admitted to illegally accessing various websites run by the States of Arizona and Vermont, along with GuestTek Interactive Entertainment and Milestone, Inc., which led to him being listed as dead in several government databases. In a plea agreement, the defendant claimed that he committed these crimes, in part, to avoid paying outstanding child support to his former wife.

Read More »

Lily Rain is a popular AI-created digital model that earns her creators around $20,000 a month on platforms like Fanvue simply by appearing in stunning travel photos.

It’s no secret that AI models are killing it online these days. Fitness model Aitana Lopez has over 300,000 followers on Instagram and she’s not even a real person, Emilly Pelegrini, another digital influencer, has been dubbed the world’s hottest model, and “perfect girlfriend” Lexi Love earns over $30,000 a month by acting as a romantic interest for lonely people. Now, another virtual influencer is making news headlines because of her popularity as a travel model. Lily Rain’s profile on subscription-based social platform Fanvue shows the attractive young woman in various eye-catching locations around the world, but the fact that these photos are entirely the work of artificial intelligence doesn’t seem to bother her legions of fans.

Read More »

A Chinese woman is being accused of trying to terminate a co-worker’s pregnancy by poisoning her water to prevent her from taking maternity leave and thus avoiding a higher workload.

In one of the most shocking cases of work-related incidents reported in China, a worker at a government-affiliated institution in Hubei Province allegedly tried to terminate a co-worker’s pregnancy by repeatedly poisoning her water in order to avoid the higher workload caused by her maternity leave. The nefarious plan reportedly came to light when the victim noticed that her water kept tasting strange, regardless of its source. At first, she was convinced that it was the office’s water supply, but the taste persisted even after she switched to bottled water. That’s when she decided to investigate further.

Read More »

32 Degrees North is an innovative pair of adaptive glasses created by Deep Optics that uses pixelated liquid crystal (LC) lenses and works as both protective eyewear and adaptive reading glasses.

Liquid eyeglass lenses have been around since 2017, but it was only recently that a company used the revolutionary invention to create a truly intriguing pair of eyeglasses that could theoretically become the only pair of glasses a person would need. That’s because the adaptive concept of the glasses allows the wearer to adjust their purpose with a single swipe of the frame. For stylish sunglasses, simply swipe backward on the right frame, and to put them into vision correction mode, you just swipe backward. Additionally, the lens power can be changed from 0 to 2.5 diopters, and the lightweight built-in battery offers up to 48 hours of power.

  Read More »

Made with rare Nacional cacao harvested from just 14 farms in Ecuador’s Piedra de Plata valley, To’ak chocolate is undoubtedly the world’s most valuable chocolate.

From truffle-infused ice cream to gold-plated sandwiches, the world is full of expensive sweets and treats. But while most of them are gimmicky creations designed to attract attention, a few do more than simply add outrageously expensive ingredients that hardly affect the experience of eating them. Ecuadorian chocolate brand To’ak claims that its products are among these few, although judging whether the price of its most expensive offerings is actually justified is ultimately up to the consumer. To’ak is most often referred to as ‘the most expensive chocolate in the world’, which is technically true, as its small chocolate bars can sell for up to $490 per 50-gram bar, but the company believes that simply referring to its product simply as expensive doesn’t really tell the whole story of To’ak.

Read More »

Alba Renai, an attractive digital influencer powered by artificial intelligence, recently announced that she will be hosting a special segment on Spain’s version of popular reality show ‘Survivor’.

Created in the fall of last year by Be a Lion, a subsidiary of television giant Mediaset Spain, Alba Renai quickly became an Instagram celebrity, attracting over 10,000 fans on Instagram. She is a beautiful young woman, only she is not actually real, but the result of AI-powered image generation based on the results of a focus group of 350 young adults who were asked about the physical and personality attributes they find most important, and the team at Be a Lion used this data to create an avatar that would appeal to as many people as possible. But what really catapulted Alba Renai into the public eye was the news that she would be hosting a special segment on Spain’s version of ‘Survivor.

Read More »

For 50 Years, the Rogan Megane Hakubutsukan or Spectacles Museum in Ikeburo, was the most iconic place to go shopping for eyeglasses and sunglasses in all of Japan, probably the world.

Located on the Higashi-dori shopping street in Minami-Ikebukuro, Tokyo, the Spectacles Museum was one of the most Instagram-worthy places in the Japanese capital. Although this was once a simple warehouse, under the guidance of founder and longtime owner Yutaka Takei, it became a giant advertisement for the products being sold inside. What really put the Spectacles Museum on the map was its unique facade, which consisted of thousands of pairs of colorful sunglasses attached to a giant metal frame. It was meant to attract attention, and that’s exactly what it did, in time becoming one of Ikebukuro’s main tourist attractions.

Read More »

Three boys, ages 11, 12 and 16, and dubbed the “Little Rascals,” were recently arrested after being turned in by their parents for robbing a Houston bank.

Most kids spend their spring break from school playing video games, watching TV, or hanging on with their friends, but three Houston juveniles decided to put their free time to better use by robbing a local bank. Police claim that the three boys walked into a Wells Fargo bank in the Greenspoint area of north Houston on March 14, passed a threatening note to a teller, and managed to get away on foot with an undisclosed amount of money. When police arrived and checked the surveillance footage, they were shocked to see that the bank robbers were incredibly young.

Read More »

French fashion brand Coperni recently unveiled a unique version of its iconic Swipe bag made from the lightest solid material on Earth, aerogel. Named ‘Air Swipe’, the accessory weighs only 37 grams.

Every year, Coperni recreates its popular Swipe bag in a unique, thought-provoking way. Last year, they created a limited-edition “meteorite’ handbag hand-carved from a meteorite that fell on Earth thousands of years ago. That sounds pretty tough to beat, but this year’s project was even more ambitious. The French brand partnered with Greek researcher and visual artist Ioannis Michaloudis to create the lightest handbag in the world out of a revolutionary material called aerogel. This ultra-light material allowed Michaloudis to create a 27 by 16 by 6 centimeters handbag that weighs only 37 grams.

Read More »