SKIRMISHER

While anyone else would have done something “girly” when scorned, like kick a kitten, one Egyptian did the ultimate in manliness, for love: slice his own penis.
After unsuccessfully petitioning his father for two years to marry the girl, the man heated up a knife and sliced off his reproductive organ, a police official said.
The young [...]

With the impending swine flu epidemic upon us, here’s a timely look at some post-apocalyptic survival instructions for mankind.

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four [...]

Paul Grayhek, 52, listed the rock formation he dubbed the “Hand of God Rock Wall” on the online auction Web site eBay. The highest bid was $250 early Sunday, with three days left to go in the auction.
The hand-like formation, approximately 9 feet tall and 4 feet wide, appeared in Grayhek’s backyard after a rockfall [...]

A stainless steel soap is a piece of stainless steel, usually in the shape of a soap bar. Its purpose is to neutralize or reduce strong odours from the hands, present from handling odorous ingredients such as garlic, onion or fish.[1] The shape of a soap bar is purely decorative and any piece of stainless [...]

If you have about 720 SCSI hard drives lying around (hey, who doesn’t?!), why not turn them all into a neat, hardcore-ly geeky Christmas tree?
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The Baigong Pipes are a series of pipes found on or near Mt. Baigong in China, which all seem like someone’s trying to channel water to or from the nearby salt water lake, or whatever. The balls-churning thing about it is these iron pipes are located in a place so inhospitable to humans, nobody’s actually [...]

Somebody assembled an entire wall consisting of 500 clocks, and every 12 hours, the clocks form a phrase that’s actually readable. That is, if you’re French.
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More than 130,000 inflatable breasts have been lost at sea en route to Australia.
Men’s magazine Ralph was planning to include the boobs as a free gift with its January issue.
The cargo is worth about $200,000, which is another blow for publisher ACP’s parent company PBL, which is already in $4.3 billion of debt.
A spokeswoman for [...]

Chinese dentist gathered 28,000 decaying human teeth from his patients to build this 8-foot, four-inch-tall “teeth tower.” And he loves it so much sometimes, at night, he licks the entire length of it. Or whatevs.

Ismet Dural, professional circumciser. And this is his business card. Imagine what they’d do for the OB-Gyne.
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Opto-Isolator (2007: Golan Levin with Greg Baltus) inverts the condition of spectatorship by exploring the questions: “What if artworks could know how we were looking at them? And, given this knowledge, how might they respond to us?” The sculpture presents a solitary mechatronic blinking eye, at human scale, which responds to the gaze of visitors [...]

Presenter above explains excitedly how this boarded-up shop in Lancashire is in the same state as it was in the 1960s, frozen in time, like magic.
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One of the most spectacular, if fearsome looking, Roman medical instruments is the vaginal dilator or speculum (dioptra). It comprises a priapiscus with 2 (or sometimes 3 or 4) dovetailing valves which are opened and closed by a handle with a screw mechanism, an arrangement that was still to be found in the specula of [...]

The Swedish physician Gustav Zander’s institute in Stockholm, founded in the late nineteenth century and stocked with twenty-seven of his custom-built machines, was the first “gym” in the sense that we know the word today. His mechanical horse was an early version of the Stairmaster, a contraption for cardiovascular fitness designed to imitate a “natural” [...]

As spotted on Google Maps.

Algordanza, a small company based in the mountainous southeast of Switzerland, uses the ashes of dead people to make diamonds as a permanent memento for their nearest and dearest.And with prices starting at less than 5,000 euros ($7,488), the jewels are not solely the preserve of the jetset.
“Some people find it helpful to go to [...]

The late German artist Martin Kippenberger’s crucified green frog — otherwise adorable — has been pissing off Pope Benedict XVI because, hey, what the fuck the frog’s doing on the cross? Doesn’t it know the Pope has kick-ass invisible friends?
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