Guinness Rishi of India has covered his body with tattoos of 220 flags. It took him three years and cost him about £12,500:
Rishi already has six of the tattoos done, on his face - the flags of India, the United Kingdom, the USA, Canada, Cyprus, and the Indian Congress Party. He says that his face is being reserved for the most important flags - he thinks he can fit around 60 1-inch flags on his head..
As well as the flags of the 201 recognised states in the world, he'll also have flags of nations like Scotland and Wales, and various others (hence the Indian Congress Party flag, and the shout out to oddity-collectors Ripley's Believe It Or Not.)
A man named Kenny Strasser or Kenny Strassburg has, in recent weeks, convinced five television stations in the Wisconsin area to put him on the air as a yo-yo master promoting charitable causes. But before they put him on the air, they didn't bother to verify that these charities existed or that he knew to use a yo-yo:
His latest appearance occurred Thursday morning on KQTV's "Hometown This Morning," in St. Joseph, Mo.
"He got us," said Bridget Blevins, the station's news director. "I hate that we got duped."
And how good was he with the yo-yo, a skill Strasser has said made him a champion? "He did some really lame things. He hit himself in the face and the groin with his yo-yo," Blevins said. [...]
Guehrke wrote in one e-mail to a TV station that Strasser was a dynamic talk-show guest who comes "equipped with a roster of amazing yo-yo tricks, juggling and fun tips about how kids and adults alike can take small steps to make the world a greener place."
The e-mail solicitation stated that Strasser was a runner-up for Rookie of the Year in 1995, grand champion at the Pensacola Regional and was nominated for the Walt Greenberg Award in 2000.
There is no Walt Greenberg Award in yo-yo, and there is no evidence Pensacola ever hosted a yo-yo tournament or that Strasser won a rookie of the year award.
But the solicitation was good enough for the bookers on the TV stations.
Sky Arts, a British television channel, recreated the iconic logo from the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon in real life last October. The piece of art used lights, lasers, and smoke and was set up on Primrose Hill in London.
Blair Neal turned an overhead projector into a musical instrument. As he scrolls the transparency, a camera reads the placement and color of marks as musical notes. The project is called "Color a Sound."
Indie filmmakers on Long Island were filming a scene consisting of a convenience store robbery. Someone passing by the store spotted an actor pointing a gun at anther actor, and called the police:
"The first officer arrives, looks in the window and he sees a gentleman with a gun pointed at the counter," Garcia said.
"So he enters the store and confronts the individual, and says, 'Police, drop the gun,'" Garcia said. "The individual puts his hands up in the air and says, 'It's a movie! It's a movie!'"
He said the officer repeated his order to drop the gun several times before using force to disarm the actor of his fake pistol.
Oddity Central reports that the Sensoji Temple in Tokyo, Japan, has held an annual festival for the past four hundred years that encourages babies to cry in order to improve their health:
Amateur sumo wrestlers hold the babies high in the air, and try to scare them into crying, while a sumo referee judges the match. The toddler who cries longest and loudest is considered the winner.
Japanese parents bring the babies to the contest, of their own free will, and truly believe the sumo induced crying keeps their children in good health, and wards off evil spirits. This year, 80 babies, all under one year old, participated in Naki Sumo. As you might have guessed, the whiniest contender won.
YouTube user 43287633 made a tiny functional cannon. It fires a little steel ball. The cannon is pretty effective, demolishing light bulbs, glasses, and punching holes through soda cans.
The Donner Party...the Shackleton expedition...those soccer players in the Andes -- We've all heard stories of people who have survived hardship under impossible odds, but brace yourself for the tale of Alexa von Tobel. She pushed herself to the limits to find out if she could go one entire day without spending any money in the untamed wilderness of New York City:
On Tuesday night I had just returned home after a long day of work and I decided to order in from my favorite restaurant. Forty minutes later, the deliveryman arrived with my pasta primavera and a Greek salad and I handed him $32.50, including tip. Pretty steep for a dinner for one, I thought. I returned to my kitchen counter, brown bag in hand, and it was then that I had a moment: I reviewed my spending for the day and I realized that I had spent well over $80 over the course of the day on menial expenses. I hadn't gone shopping, I hadn't dined out at Cafeteria for lunch, and I hadn't joined my friends for drinks. It dawned on me that the taxicab rides, stops at CVS, the Starbucks lattes, the mid-morning or mid-afternoon snacks, my take-out from the fabulous Italian restaurant, and other trivial expenses really added up; realizing the total cost of it all was a painful but eye-opening experience.
That night, I decided to go on a mission to live a full 24-hour day without spending a penny.
Content warning from this point on. Sometimes the things that a person does to survive aren't pretty.
Jason Dietz makes what he calls UFO Abduction Lamps. They look like flying saucers projecting eerie lights onto the ground below. Here's how they're made:
They stand 5-feet 5-inches tall and are made out of recycled glass tubes, light diffusers, and acrylic rings. They hold approximately 10 gallons of water each. They use a series of different lights that include CFLs, LEDs, and halogens. They each have a 110-volt 20-gallon air pump that produces the bubbles from the bottom. The theme is a cow being abducted out of a grassy pasture -- look carefully to see the cow in the giant plasma tube.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller are best known for directing the movie Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. In 1998, they made this fake commercial for action figures modeled after the Brontë sisters -- a trio of 19th Century English authors.
Research conducted by scholars at the University of Wroclaw in Poland suggests that tattoos and piercings add to a person's bodily symmetry and denote risk-taking behavior. This may increase the likelihood that a person so decorated will mate and pass on his or her genes:
Among the research subjects, men with bodily decorations exhibited greater symmetry than those without, whereas no differences emerged in women. Because people who are less symmetric did not opt more often for tattoos and piercings, researchers rejected one widely held hypothesis that suggested people use physical graffiti to hide or distract from imperfections in their appearance.
The results jibe with a different theory—getting stuck with needles can endanger one’s health via infections, so the study supports the evolutionary “handicap” theory that only those with high biological quality can afford such risky behavior. The impulse to get inked may be a risk-taking behavior inherited from ancestors who were strong enough to endure injuries and survive—as opposed to those whose ancestors survived by avoiding risk and injury. Therefore, at least in men, body art could serve as an “honest” signal of fitness in the Darwinian sense. So maybe that’s why pierced, tattooed rock stars do so well with the ladies.
Fake Science is a tumblr blog of amusingly misleading scientific factoids and infographics. It's a good source of information "when the facts are too confusing."
Scientists have named a previously undiscovered type of jellyfish found in a Tasmanian river. The Csiromedusa medeopolis (Greek for "city of gonads") wears its sex organs like a crown on top of its body. It's quite different from any other jellyfish ever cataloged:
Launceston jellyfish expert Lisa-Ann Gershwin says it is an astounding discovery.
"It's absolutely different from every other jellyfish that's ever been known," Dr Gershwin said.
"So we not only put it into its own new species and its own new genus, but it's actually a brand new family."
A Swedish start-up company called Minestro is developing a system for harvesting energy from ocean currents. "Deep Green" consists of kites and turbines anchored to the ocean floor:
When operational, the turbine is expected to generate 500 kilowatts of power.
One of the big advantages of their technology, Minesto executives say, is its small size -- 12 meters for the wingspan and one meter for the turbine -- relative to other tidal-energy designs. [...]
The company hope to begin trials of a scale model in 2011 at Strangford Lough, in County Down, Northern Ireland -- which is already home to a commercial tidal power device operated by UK renewable energy company, SeaGen.
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov is the President of Kalmykia, a constituent republic of the Russian Federation. He claims to have been visited by aliens. Now a member of parliament is asking the Russian government to investigate the incident and discover if Ilyumzhinov revealed any state secrets to the aliens:
he head of the republic said that the humanoid figures wore yellow spacesuits and gave him a tour of their craft, which he described as a “semi-transparent half-tube”. They had brought him home in the morning, just as his worried driver and two advisers were about to call a citywide search after finding his apartment empty.
“I am often asked which language I used to talk to them. Perhaps it was on a level of the exchange of ideas,” Mr Ilyumzhinov, who is also president of the international chess federation FIDE, told the Vladimir Pozner programme on Russia’s main First Channel.
This is not the first time that he has spoken of the alien encounter but yesterday his claims prompted Andrei Lebedev, an MP from the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, to ask Mr Medvedev to order an official inquiry into the alleged alien agents to establish whether Mr Ilyumzhinov disclosed secret information.
