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Weird Bulgarian Muslim Bride's Make-up


Doesn't look like a zombie?
Bulgarian Muslim bride Kadrie Chumova, 20, stands with special make-up during her wedding ceremony in the village of Ribnovo, in the Rhodope Mountains, some 250km (155 miles) south from the Bulgarian capital Sofia November 19, 2006 . Every winter season the residents of the alpine village participate in unique wedding ceremonies. The ancient tradition includes special colourful make-up for the bride called 'ghelina'.

Python Bursts After Swallowing A Crocodile

An unusual clash between a 6-foot (1.8m) alligator and a 13-foot (3.9m) python has left two of the deadliest predators dead in Florida's swamps.

The Burmese python tried to swallow its fearsome rival whole but then exploded.

The remains of the two giant reptiles were found by astonished rangers in the Everglades National Park.

The python's remains with the victim's tail protruding from its burst midsection were found last week. The head of the python was missing.
Previously, a python swallowed a pregnant ewe.

Living St.Petersburg Movement

'Living St.Petersburg' Movement Activists
Wearing the unique costumes imitating historical buildings of the city, the demonstraters get ready for a protest against plans that Russian state-controlled gas monopoly Gazprom want to construct its headquarters in St. Petersburg.
BTW, I don't like the masks that they demonstrators were wearing. They look very Ugly!

Henan Hen Lays Mini Egg

Cute!
A hen lays a mini egg on November 20 at Mr. Chen's home in Zhoukou, Central China's Henan Province. The red-shell egg is just 1.3 centimetres long and 1 centimetre wide.

Men in A Moscow Male Restroom

Found on English Russia. Click to enlarge the picture.

Mahjong Chocolates

Mahjong [wiki] is liked by the majority of Chinese in the mainland of China. Sure the new mahjong chocolates being sold in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province will set to be the favorite by consumers there.

Suffering Rheumatism? Using Bee Venom To Treat

bee venom treatmentBut one gotta endure the pain caused when Bee stings to inject the venom to the body. Seen here is a patient receives such treatment at a clinic in Beijing November 17, 2006. Link

Missing Medieval Masterpieces Worth over £1 Million Found in Spare Room

convent of St Marco in Florence by Fra Angelico.jpgTwo piece of paintings discovered from her store room after a 77-years-old British pensioner's death turned out be missing medieval masterpieces--Fra Angelico's Convent of St Marco. Its value was estimated to be worth more than £1 million. link

Google Women's T-shirt

It is not sold in Google Fashion house, but Google Store at a price of just $11.95.
The Venus symbol makes its way onto the Google logo, as it should. We originally designed this shirt for our efforts in recruiting women engineers. Now you too can tap into female energy in this authentic American Apparel 100% ringspun combed cotton t-shirt. It's pre-shrunk with binding on the neck, sleeves and bottom hem. In black, with the silkscreened Google logo imprinted on the front. Offered in women's T-shirt style, naturally.
via Google Blogoscoped & LVB

Video: Indian Girl Born With 8 Limbs Worshiped as Incarnation of Goddess

Villagers in Diuri in Gaya district in Bihar [India] are flocking to offer prayers to a congenitally disordered child - with eight limbs, four hands and four legs.

Wrapped in a red cloth with fresh flowers and money being showered on her, the child is unaware of her condition though her parents are worried about her future.
Link to the video report. via Uniquedaily

Chinese Mermaid Baby Born Without Ass and Reproductive Organ

Chinese Mermaid BabyProbably, some still remember a Peruvian girl named Milagros Cerron quite well, yes the girl suffered the mermaid syndrome and later was performed a very successful split surgery. Recently, a sirenomelia [wiki] baby was born in Changsha, Hunan Province of China. What the worst is that the latter has no ass and reproductive organ and was abandoned by its parents already in a local children's hospital. The news report hinted that the infant could have been aborted should the mother have done a check-up during her pregnancy. :-(

Link to Xinhua (in Chinese)

Update: Doctors at Changsha Children's hospital are preparing to make operations to separate its legs. 23/11/06
Chinese Mermaid BabyThe ill-fortunate baby died at the hostipal. 17/12/06Chinese Mermaid Baby

F-117 Stealth Fifhter Shaped Moth

It's a butterfly? It's a F-117 Stealth Fighter jet? It's a moth!
The body of the moth consists of the colours grey, black, olive green and brown while the wing is approximately 6 centimeters wide when it opens. This moth called Deilephila Hypotnous (Cramer) can usually be found in the low lying mountainous regions in [the south] China, Taiwan, India and Burma. They feed on tree leafs and when present in large numbers, will make significant damages to leafs of trees in the area where they reside.
Link to Guangzhou Daily (in Chinese) & Spluch

Why China's One Child, One Family Policy Matters

A security guard tries to maintain order when customers rush into a shopping mall after it opened in Hangzhou, east China Zhejiang province November 16, 2006. It was reported that the shopping centre was offering a special discount -- spending 800 yuan [1USD around 8 Yuan] and getting 320 yuan back.

Wedding Photo Without A Bridegroom

She is beautiful!
Xu Xingwen, a leukemia patient who doctors say has only two months to live, saw her wish of having photoes in wedding gowns come true, the Modern Express reported Wednesday [15/11/06].

The twenty-two-year-old woman from Nanjing, east China's Jiangsu Province, has also decided to donate her organs to others in need upon her death.

'I feel relaxed. I have nothing to worry about now,' Xu said lying in bed after filling in the organ donation forms. 'I'm happy to help others in need when I die.'

Her mother Sun Xiaochun started to cry when she saw the organ donation certificate. Xu tried to comfort her, telling her that "Cremation only creates ashes. It's better to leave something useful in the world."

Video: Dwarf Fight

Hahahaaaa...
Two little guys fight each other on Jerry Springer [wiki] show

via Uniquedaily

The World's Most Dangerous Road

world's dangerous roadA 5,000m-above- sea-level road built by Paraguayan prisoners during 1930s' war on Andes mountains connecting Bolivia's main city, La Paz, to the Yungas region was dubbed as the world's most dangerous road. E
Every year it is estimated 200 to 300 people die on a stretch of road less than 50 miles long. In one year alone, 25 vehicles plunged off the road and into the ravine. That is one every two weeks.

The bird's eye view is on the left, on the front seat passenger's side, where the Earth itself seems to open up.

A gigantic vertical crack appears. Way below, more than half a mile beneath your passenger window, you can see - cradled between canyon walls - a thin silver thread: the Coroico River rushing to join the Amazon.

On the driver's side there is a sheer rock wall rising to the heavens. There is no margin of error. The road itself is barely three metres wide. That is if you can call it a road.

After the initial stretch to the top of the mountain it is just dirt track. And yet - incredibly - it is a major route for trucks and buses.
Link to BBC report & the photo gallery via Neatorama

Zoo Makes Money From Giant Pandas' Dung

The animal's otherwise useless excrement now turns gold!
A Thai zoo has discovered a way to utilise unwanted dung from a couple of pandas by using it to make paper for souvenirs, the country's panda project manager said on Tuesday.

The zoo had improvised a traditional way of making paper from mulberry trees in the northern city of Chiang Mai by using bamboo pulp that the pair of pandas could not digest", Prasertsak Buntrakoonpoontawee said.

The pandas, who are fed chopped bamboo, excrete about 23 kg (50 lb) of the pulp a day, he said.

"We know that any kind of pulp can be used to make paper, so we have applied the 2,000-year techniques of making paper from mulberry tree in this rural neighborhood to bamboo pulp from panda dung," Prasertsak said. The zoo had earned 300,000 baht (4,309 pounds) a year from selling fans, greeting cards, key chains, book marks -- all with panda faces and made from panda excrement paper -- and dried panda dung, enough to fund the project", he said.

Rare Juvenile Keichosaur Fossil Found in China

(Xinhua/Yang Junjiang)

Archaeologists excavated an extreme rare juvenile keichosaur (Keichousaurus hui) fossil at a local hillside in Xingyi, Guizhou Province of China on Novermber 7. The fossil length measures only 92.3 millimeters, comparable to the size of a 1-Yuan coin. The significance of the discovery may provide some proof to the theory that the keichosaur was Ovoviviparous.

A brief introduction to keichosaur from Fossilmall.com:
Keichousaurus hui, 胡氏贵州龙 in Chinese, is a semi-aquatic reptile dinosaur living in the Triasssic of China. The Keichosaurs were members of the Pachypleurisauridae, and as such were related to their contemporaries the Nothosaurs (indeed, at one point they were referred to the Nothosauridae). The genus derives its name from the 1957 location in Keichow Province where they were first discovered. The Keichousaurs were thought to be able to make their way on land by virtue of their strong limbs (note the robust ulna). Some believe they lived in a marshy environment. The Pachypleurosaurs are believed to have evolved in China, making their way to Europe via the northern border of the Tethys Sea. None of the later European members of the family had the massive limb bones seen in Keichousaurus.
A more detailed Chinese introduction is available here.

Link to People Daily (in Chinese)

0^0 = 1?


Mudd Math Fun Fact gives arguments to show that the answer to Zero to the Zero Power "should" be 1.
  • The alternating sum of binomial coefficients from the n-th row of Pascal's triangle is what you obtain by expanding (1-1)n using the binomial theorem, i.e., 0n. But the alternating sum of the entries of every row except the top row is 0, since 0k=0 for all k greater than 1. But the top row of Pascal's triangle contains a single 1, so its alternating sum is 1, which supports the notion that (1-1)0=00 if it were defined, should be 1.
  • The limit of xx as x tends to zero (from the right) is 1. In other words, if we want the xx function to be right continuous at 0, we should define it to be 1.
  • The expression mn is the product of m with itself n times. Thus m0, the "empty product", should be 1 (no matter what m is).
  • Another way to view the expression mn is as the number of ways to map an n-element set to an m-element set. For instance, there are 9 ways to map a 2-element set to a 3-element set. There are NO ways to map a 2-element set to the empty set (hence 02=0). However, there is exactly one way to map the empty set to itself: use the identity map! Hence 00=1.
  • Here's an aesthetic reason. A power series is often compactly expressed as
    SUMn=0 to INFINITY an (x-c)n.
    We desire this expression to evaluate to a0 when x=c, but the n=0 term in the above expression is problematic at x=c. This can be fixed by separating the a0 term (not as nice) or by defining 00=1.
Link to Google 0^0 search via Gseeker & Digg

Heaviest Ox In The World

A three-ton ox rests in an enclosure in Weishanzhuang, Daxin District, Beijing November 11, 2006. The ox is able to have over 100-kg (110 pound) fodder, twice fold that of others in the same enclosure. The feeder has tried to apply for a Guinness World Record after he learned that the heaviest ox in the world is 2,500 kg (2.5 ton), but his attempts failed, media reports said.

A Zambia Baby Girl with Congenital Malformation

It is pleasant to know that she has recently been discharged from the teaching hospital of Zambia University in the country's capital city Lusaka, where doctors successfully excised the freaking part growing on her bottom during an operation this September.

Can't understand why some babies nowadays could be born with an extreme dwarfism, multiple fingers and toes, an extra hand or even two heads. Among them, I am concerning Indonesia's two-headed baby Syafitri the most, just don't know how the doctors to remove one of her heads if they both function properly?

See also Girl Born With 4 hands and 4 legs, Mermaid Baby Born Without Ass and Reproductive Organ

Mid-term Election Cost Florida Voter's Half Million Dollars

A Florida voter may have unwittingly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars by using an extremely rare stamp [worthy at least 500,000USD] to mail an absentee ballot in Tuesday's congressional election. The 1918 Inverted Jenny stamp [wiki], which takes its name from an image of a biplane accidentally printed upside-down, turned up Tuesday night in Fort Lauderdale, where election officials were inspecting ballots from parts of south Florida.
Links: Xinhua (in Chinese) | Yahoo News via Spluch

Elvis: the Penguin Wearing Blue Shoes

In September, this male penguin named Elvis together with the 16 other companions was moved to the Penguin Encounter display at the International Antarctic Centre in Christchurch, New Zealand. Possibly it can't get used to the new environment, and developed sore feet. To release their agonies, a pair of blue shoes specially were designed by wildlife experts to protect his ailing feet. Cool!

Video: Sunrise on Himalayas

A splendid sunrise on the snow-covered Himalayas is seen from Tiger Hills near Darjeeling [wiki], India. Can't be any beautiful!

Elderly Chinese Woman Saved by Her Cats From Cobra

An elderly Nan'ao [an island in Guangdong province] woman owes her life to eight cats which fought off a giant cobra trying to climb into her bed, the Yangcheng Evening News reported.

With the help of his eight cats, woodsman Lin beat the poisonous snake to death, saving his mother.

The 170 centimetre-long snake slithered into Lin's home, a single-storey house in the woods, one morning, trying to climb into his mother's bed.

But as it made its way across the floor Lin's cats surrounded the deadly snake, bravely attacking it. After the mother cat trampled the cobra's head, her seven children rushed in to bite its body, dragging it out of the house. With the cats pinning it to the ground, Lin finally managed to beat the snake to death.
Previously, Crows Attack Python To Rescue Companion on RC.

Rat, The Other "White Meat"





A serial of pictures received from the cycled email (if not mistakenly, a similar email was seen around two years ago) shows how a Chinese restaurant (Yes, Chinese Restaurant! The characters reads as Liquefied Petroleum Gas on the cylinder in the second picture testifies) turns mice to the white "chicken meat". Have you been terrified?

Book-shaped Building

House of Free Creativity
Turkmenistan's Journalists must feel very gracious as the central-Asia country's government dedicated this unique "House of Free Creativity" building in the capital city Ashgabat to media workers.

Too Good To Democrats

A dead woman, whose name was on the ballot paper in a local US election, has won the poll in a small town in South Dakota.

Marie Steichen, who died of cancer in September, beat a Republican rival by 100 votes to 64 and became a county commissioner posthumously.

The election list closed on 1 August, but Ms Steichen's name was kept on the list for Tuesday's election.

Ms Steichen, a Democrat from Woonsocket, defeated incumbent Republican Merlin Feistner, also from Woonsocket in Jerauld County.

Now You Can Have Two Babies

China's One Child, One Family policy is scorned , yet its contribution to the global population control is undeniable. There would otherwise have 400 million more people if the family planning policy ordering most couples to have just one child had not been put in place. However it seems now China is loosing this birth control policy as only-children parents in the country now are urged to have two kids. Still too bad for myselft is my wife not also from a one-child family.

Crows Attack Python To Rescue Companion

Finally they were doomed to fail.
SINGAPORE: A 2.4 metre python which slithered its way into the roof of a three-storey shophouse in Jalan Besar found itself attacked by a flock of angry crows.

Eyewitness Liang Fucai(58) said the Saturday incident (Oct 29) happened at around 5.15 pm, on the roof of the paint store where he worked.

The crows on the roof had suddenly started kicking up a fuss and when the ruckus did not after some time, Liang and a colleague decided to investigate the noise.

"We saw a python wrapped around a pipe on the roof. Five or six crows circled the python, and occasionally one of the birds would dive at the snake."

"The python seemed unfazed by the attacks. It slowly moved its head as if it were swallowing something. When we took a closer look, we realised that it had a crow in its mouth," said Liang.

Apparently, the snake was hungry and fancied crow for dinner. The crows, obviously unhappy about being placed on the menu, had decided to fight back.

Ignoring the noisy crows, the python continued to swallowed the crow it had caught and ate it in less than 10 minutes.

After that, it slithered into a pipe and hid itself.

Ms. 22 Married to Mr. 105

LOVE knows no bounds, they say. So 22-year-old Ely Yurianti Rahman and 105-year-old Sudar Marto certainly lived up to the maxim, Harian Metro reported.

The two from Indonesia tied the knot recently at Kampung Permatang Duyong in Malacca after getting approval from the Syariah High Court.

Sudar, a permanent resident and Class B contractor, met Ely Yurianti in Jakarta a year ago. Initially, the young woman felt sorry for Sudar because he had to take care of his ailing 69-year-old wife, despite his own advanced age.

However, love blossomed and they decided to get married.

Sudar's first wife Fatemah Mat said she allowed her husband to take a wife young enough to be his great-grandchild only because she was unwell most of the time and was, therefore, unable to carry out her responsibilities as a wife.

“I hope Ely Yurianti will take care of both of us, and so I gave my blessing to their marriage,’’ she said, adding that if she was healthy she would never have allowed the marriage to take place.

Rickshaw Delivery

A rickshaw loaded with monitors and printers makes way for a delivery in the city of Vinh in central Vietnam. The WTO is set to admit communist Vietnam as its 150th member on Tuesday [7 Nov.], opening the dynamic economy to a new era of greater international trade and investment.

4-Year-Old Mollie Murphy Sufferring Depression

It is said because the girl from Sunderland, Engalnd cannot attend the same primary school as her nursery friends. How poor!
Sunderland Council said Mollie missed out on a place at East Herrington school because of a late application.

Her GP, Kevin Weaver, wrote to the local authority asking for a change of school, citing stress and depression.

Mollie's mother, Victoria Anderson, said: "I thought how can a little girl suffer from that? It's an adult's problem and Mollie's only four. But he told me it does happen.
Link via Uniquedaily

Car Train

:D! Can't like such novel train any more! Link via Uniquedaily

Bulb Lamp


Undeniable, this Sergio Silva' s design (via Hi-Blog!) is great, but if you really wanna get one for the possible electricity blackout, you'd better take GTW's words seriously
but it seems more vulnerable than a petrol bomb! What if this thing rolls off a table on to your carpet? Makes sense not to have stuff made from toxic materials in your house! This thing's thin glass, round bottom without a stand and oil is just asking for trouble...

Olympic Wedding

It is always curious for me a native Chinese guy to see those foreigners in traditional Chinese weddings
James Linday and Zeng Ping got married on November 5 [in Xi'an, China], and a special Olympic wedding ceremony was held. The newly-weds put on traditional clothes, and lit a torch to commemorate the joy of both their wedding and the 2008 Olympics.The five-ring will become a good memoir, too.

Old Russian Way to Prevent Inmates from Escaping

Some time ago in Russia they had chained prisoners to wheelbarrows they were working with, so that to make it hard for the to run away. If such a person decided to run he had to take the wheelbarrow with himself.

Oaxaca Day of the Dead Puppet


A puppet for the "Day of the Dead" celebrations is displayed through the streets of Oaxaca City November 1, 2006. An annual festival of graveyard vigils, dancing ghouls and candy skulls to mark dead ancestors in Mexico's Oaxaca city has a new slant as activists trying to oust a governor mourn friends killed in unrest.

Bee Orchid Looks Like A Puppet

Bee OrchidA great shot by the Flickr user sorby rock.

Why is Fecal Matter Brown?

Bet not everyone knows.
Feces are fascinating. Flush down your initial grade-school scatological silliness and you'll discover a world of energy efficiency and unparalleled waste management. If machines, industries and nations ran as well as your stomach, intestines and colon, we could say goodbye to a lot of landfills.

The complex digestion process ensures that almost no useful energy goes unused. The average bowel movement is three parts water to one part solid matter. Bacteria make up 30 percent of the solid stuff. The same goes for indigestible foods like cellulose and extra fiber. The remaining 40 percent contains various inorganic wastes, fats and used-up body substances like red blood cells, which are released from the liver in an orange-brown compound called bilirubin.

Unofficial Google Stores

Google textile store in Istanbul, Turkey.Google internet cafe in Cairo, Egypt.
Google Fashion in Shaoxin, Zhejiang Province, ChinaGoogle FashionGoogle Fashion in somewhere in Turkey.
Google FashionPictures were found on Gseeker (3) & Googlified (1, 2, 4)

Previously, Random Citations posted a Google Fashion house also in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China.