UNCONVENTIONAL WORLD RECORDS

Apparently it’s taboo for a female to practise mask-changing, or bian lian, the 300-year old Chinese dramatic art, but Candy Chong, 19 of Cheras (above) is unperturbed. She’s probably the only female in Malaysia, or even perhaps the world, who’s a master at it and performing as a pro. To date, she has performed more than 50 times.

But what is bian lian? Performers of bian lian are able to change masks in quickly, in the blink of an eye in fact, right before their audiences.

Check this video of Singaporean magician Alex performing bian lian (after the jump):
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Lionel Messi (Messi-ah / Messidona) is better than Diego Maradona? Has he scored a goal better than the Goal of the Century on 18th April 2007? Can even Cristiano Ronaldo or Ronaldinho at their very best do this?

On 18th April 2007, Barcelona’s Lionel Messi scored 2 goals during a Copa del Rey semifinal against Getafe CF. The first goal was very similar to Diego Maradona’s goal against England at the Quarterfinals of the 1986 World Cup, also known as the Goal of the Century. Messi ran about the same distance (60 metres), beat the same number of players (6, including the goalkeeper), scored from a very similar position, and ran towards the corner flag just as Maradona did in Mexico 21 years before.

Maradona’s feat was so monumental that a statue of him immortalizing the moment was erected outside the stadium. England striker at the 1986 World Cup, Gary Lineker, who scored the English goal of that match said “[it was] probably the one and only time in my whole career I felt like applauding the opposition scoring a goal.”

Of course the speed of the game has progressed: Messi dribbled much faster than Maradona did.

If Maradona’s goal is Goal of the Century, what then should Messi’s goal be called?

And the video below is spot-on: Maradona’s goal played side-by-side with Messi’s (after the jump):
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The Star reported on 21st April 2007 that a 73-year old man living alone at a double storey link house in Taman Cempaka, Ipoh developed a strange hobby in 2003 - collecting old and presumably modern furniture, clothes, broken flower and cooking pots, plastic ware, bicycles, newspapers, rotten fruit, rusting refrigerators and other junk and storing them in and around his house.

4 years later, 40 Ipoh City Council workers came to his house with a 3-ton lorry. In one hour, they filled it with rubbish from the driveway and garden. 3-ton lorry filled to the brim, and they have not even entered the house yet!

The house itself was locked, but piles of smelly, rotting garbage can be seen.

The man had been staying in the house for the past 10 years, and apparently his wife and son moved out 3 years back.

On another note, where golf galaxy is the single best place to look for golf equipment, it is also undoubtedly the best place to buy basketball as well as baseball equipment. All the baseball buffs can relax now.

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As followup to my previous post on the same subject.

The Star reported on 20th April 2007 that Ta Sam, 67, is a highly sexed Cambodian in Svay Rieng province whose previous 2 wives divorced him due to his insatiable appetite in bed.

10 days after his latest divorce, he could contain himself no longer. In middle of the night, he picked out one of his young cows in the shed near his house. Stripping down to his birthday suit, he mounted her, only to receive fatal kicks from the heifer to his head and genital area. His grandson heard the commotion, checked it out and discovered his grandad naked and dead on the shed floor.

Ta Sam has now earned the dubious title of the world’s only cow rapist who died when his intended victim fought back.

Police decided not take any action against the bovine because after all, it acted in self defence.

The term “school shooting” is a term popularised in the US and refers to mass killing sprees and encompasses all educational institutions, including primary, secondary/high school and tertiary/college/university levels of education. This post is concerned with acts done by either student(s) or member(s) of staff.

Possibly the world’s worst school shooting ever happened at Bath Consolidated School, a primary school in Michigan, USA on 18th May 1927. It claimed 45 lives and injured 58.

The perpetrator was school board member Andrew Kehoe.

He was angry because he had to pay tax to fund construction of the school building, which caused him financial problems which he expected to cause the closure of his farm. The anger was white-hot, for he killed his wife first then set his farm buildings on fire. He then set off explosives which destroyed part of the school buildings and killed many people inside it. For his final act, he drove to the school, stopped the car, then exploded a bomb inside his shrapnel-filled vehicle. That killed himself, the school superintendent, and some others.
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It’s the Zimmers. The what? Yes, it’s true. While the combined age of the Rolling Stones’ members is only 240+, this 40 member band have a combined age of more than 3,000 years.

According to their website, they were formed earlier this year. Their average age is 78. They are not only the oldest and unlikeliest active rock band in the world i.e. performing in concerts, but are also surely one of the most celebrated, for they have recorded their debut album at none other than the Abbey Road Studios, under U2 producer Michael Hedges.

Their first single, an appropriately selected cover of The Who’s “My generation” is slated for released this 14th May (video link below). Other songs in the album would include The Prodigy’s “Firestarter”, The Beatles “When I’m (one hundred and)64″ and what else but Jermain Stewart’s “We Don’t have to take our clothes off (to have a good time)”.

Some pics of the band:

And what good is it recording at Abbey Road if you don’t take a pic like this:
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Several newsreports (see source) reported in April 2006 that a 45-year old Singaporean man was found guilty of raping 5 of his underage daughters, aged 12 to 15, resulting in 2 of them becoming pregnant, and was sentenced to 32 years jail and 24 strokes of the rotan. In fact, he pleaded guilty to a total of 39 charges of rape and attempted aggravated rape.

In at least one case, he terminated the pregnancies to avoid being the father of his own grandchild.

What makes the case outstanding is that he already has 10 wives (6 via “nikah muta’ah”) and 64 children (some newsreports say 66).

What can be worse than that? Well, High Court Judge Tay Wong Kwang added that “the mothers of the girls had somehow been persuaded by the accused that what he was doing was right“. That means that the girls also lost the one and only possible escape route in the house.

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With the slogan “Keep your head. Remove theirs,” The Zombie Preparedness Initiative website describes itself as a “knowledge base provided by a community of citizens concerned about the impending zombie invasion and the iminant (sic) disaster that is sure to follow. We are not claiming to be experts on anything, we are merely doing what we can to gather knowledge and share the aquired information with the public. By doing this, we hope to help people prepare for the very real threat that we shall face when zombies show up and governments have not taken the time to prepare. We are working to do what we can to help people find others in their area that are interested in fighting against the zombies so that when the time comes there can be safe locations all around the world.”

It even has a DIY section on how to make weapons to battle it out against zombies. One weapon is called the Trash Kannon, with very detailed instructions on how to construct it. According to the site, the Trash Kannon is “a weapon designed to be powerful against undead and living foes to varying degrees whilst being easily created from materials scavenged from around the typical human city. Under perfect conditions, it can fire through a line of approximately 10-11 undead bodies, or 5-6 living bodies, due to differing activity (I do not advise attempting to find an accurate number prior to the actual dystopia). It can be used as a trap, by creating a simple firing mechanism keyed to activate under certain conditions, which will vary depending on the situation and location.”

Simply amazing.

www.zombieinitiative.org

The Archive of Misheard Lyrics’s domain is named after what probably is the world’s most commonly misheard lyric, “kiss this guy” instead of the actual “kiss the sky” in Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”

Each lyric there has a Funny / Not Funny voting option, meaning the least funny ones will eventually get kicked off while the funniest ones rise to the top.

At the time of writing this post, the funniest misheard lyric is Smash Mouth’s “all star”, where “She was looking kinda dumb with her finger and her thumb in the shape of an “L” on her forehead.” was misheard as “She was looking kinda dumb with her finger in her bum and the shape of a elf on her forehead.”

Looking through the list, I think my favourite is Bryan Adams’ “summer of 69″, where “Got my first real six string, bought it at the five-and-dime. Played it till my fingers bled. It was the summer of 69.” was misheard as “Got my first real sex dream, I was 5 at the time. Played it till my fingers bled. It was the summer of 69. ”

www.kissthisguy.com

Yang Lijuan with Andy Lau

Most fathers want the best for the children and would do whatever is in their capacity to please their kids, but a 68-year-old man from Lanzhou, China has upped the ante so radically.

Yang Lijuan, 28 is his daughter. She is obsessed with Hong Kong pop star Andy Lau.

Now, most fathers would dismiss that as a youthful fad and at most, would probably bring her to his concerts.

But, she’s been obsessed with him for 13 years. So obsessed that she dropped out of school and didn’t do any work except being a “full time obsessor”.

And this man is no ordinary father.
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The origami figure is of Jedi Master Yoda, designed by Fumiaki Kawahata.

Very detailed step-by-step pdf instructions can be found at linein.org.

ESPN reported in January 2007 that American football star Michael Strahan, 36 was ordered to pay his ex-wife USD15.3 million - more than half his net worth - in keeping with the couple’s prenuptial agreement. They were married in 1999 and divorced in 2005.

The 6′5″, 255 pound giant has to pay Jean Strahan 50 percent of their joint marital assets and 20 percent of his yearly income from each year they were married.

In addition to the USD15.3 million, Jean Strahan was awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in child support.

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Someone tries to sell Windows XP licenses on eBay but somehow shows it in the picture:

As of the time of writing, the pictures are still available on ebay.

Full screen capture of auction:

Someone commented:

…actually, this is not so uncommon. Browse for laptops on e-bay. Many people post high-res pictures of them at the auction. What they don’t realize is that most laptops have the OS license key right on the cover. You can collect about 10 windows keys a week that way. Not just the basic XP, but also media edition and sometimes a tablet edition. Check it out yourself. People are dumb!

In fact, you don’t even need to go to ebay. A plain google search can turn out many such keys.

… Perhaps he’s in too deep about selling hardware like a laptop memory module…

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How would you like lightning captured in a glass block as a paperweight?

But what is it? According to wikipedia:

Lichtenberg Figures are branching electric discharges that sometimes appear on the surface or the interior of insulating materials. They are named after the German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who originally discovered and studied them. When they were first discovered, it was thought that their characteristic shapes might help to reveal the nature of positive and negative electric “fluids”. In 1777, Lichtenberg built a large Electrophorus in order to generate high voltage static electricity through induction. By discharging a high voltage point to the surface of an insulator, he was able to record the resulting radial patterns in fixed dust. By then pressing blank sheets of paper onto these pattens, Lichtenberg was able to transfer and record these images, thereby discovering the basic principle of modern Xerography. This discovery was also the forerunner of modern day Plasma Physics. Although Lichtenberg only studied 2-dimensional (2D) figures, modern high voltage researchers study 2D and 3D figures (electrical trees) on, and within, insulating materials. Lichtenberg figures are now known to be examples of fractals.

The specimen in the picture above was created via double irradiation:

This specimen was irradiated on the left side, rotated 180 degrees, and irradiated again on the right side, creating two independent internal charge layers. The right side was then manually discharged, causing a 3-D “lightning storm” inside the rightmost layer, which then spread into another series of discharges between layers. The specimen is lit from below by blue LED’s. Unlike low detail laser crystal art, each Lichtenberg specimen has a unique and incredibly detailed fractal discharge pattern. As they branch, the discharge channels become increasingly finer, becoming hairlike as they finally disappear. The smallest discharges may ultimately go to the molecular level.

Here’s a video of a Lichtenberg Figure being created, where:

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Michael Phelps, 22 is the undoubted star of the 2007 World Aquatics Championships held in Australia.

He is probably the most complete swimmer since Mark Spitz, and by the looks of it, will surely overtake Spitz as the greatest swimmer ever, come the Beijing Olympics next year. Ian Thorpe is nowhere near since he’s basically a freestyle swimmer, but Phelps is good at all strokes, so good that he is beating world champions and breaking world records at more strokes than Thorpe ever did, including that hallowed 6-year old record, Thorpe’s 200m freestyle record that was obliterated on 27th March.

Phelps is gunning for an unprecedented 8 gold medals at this year’s World Aquatics Championships. At the time of writing, he’s already at no.6, equalling Thorpe’s record set at the 2001 world championships.

Gold no.1 - 200m freestyle - 27th March

Not only did he better his personal best by 1.34 seconds, he also beat Thorpe’s record by 0.2 seconds. Thorpe’s “untouchable” milestone of 1:44.06 was swept aside by the new record: 1:43:86. In the process, he blew away 2000 Olympic champion and arch-nemesis, the great Pieter van den Hoogenband, in the last 100 metres, who finished more than 2 seconds behind. South Korea’s Park Tae-hwan, the 400m freestyle winner (and in the process broke the world record too) was third. For the record, van den Hoogenband finished a disappointing seventh in the 100m freestyle, in which he’s the world record holder, although the winning time is more than half a second outside his record.

At the 2004 Athens Olympics, swimming’s “race of the century” was in this event, which featured swimming megastars Thorpe, Phelps and Van den Hoogenband. Thorpe prevailed at that race.

Already the most successful swimmer in world championships history before this event, Phelps has now built the foundation of a championships that could yield eight gold medals.

With that, it can be concluded that Van Den Hoogenband is the Frankie Fredericks of swimming - world-class, but only for silver.

Gold no.2 - 200m butterfly - 28th March

Phelps broke his own world record en route to winning the gold: 1:52.09. This performance can even be considered greater than his 200m freestyle world record 24 hours earlier. He took 1.71 seconds off the record he set last year. Such was his dominance that even at the halfway stage, he was already 1.65 seconds under world record pace and nearly two bodylengths clear of the rest of the field. Silver medalist, and Asian number one Peng Wu of China was a distant 3.04 seconds behind.

Gold no.3 - 4×100 freestyle relay - 28th March

Incredibly, Phelps did not lose his focus at all: in no time he was back into the water. Phelps swum first leg. The US won in a championship record of 3:12.72, 0.26 outside their 7-month old world record. Italy finished second, more than 1 second behind. Traditional powerhouses Australia finished a disappointing fifth, more than 3 seconds behind the Americans.

Gold no.4 - 200m individual medley - 29th March

Simply phenomenal. Phelps made it three world records in three separate disciplines in as many nights. He completely dominated this event, winning in 1:55.84. It was 0.86 of a second quicker than his own world record set last year. Compatriot Ryan Lochte tried his best, but faded in the final stages to take silver and 1.21 seconds behind.

Gold no.5 - 4×200m freestyle - 30th March

In the process, the US smashed Australia’s world record. Phelps swum the first leg. From the moment he left the blocks, two things were apparent: the Americans were going to win gold, and the world mark of 7:04.66 was in serious danger. In the end, Phelps, Ryan Lochte, Klete Keller and Peter Vanderkaay beat the old mark by 1.42 seconds, clocking in at 7:03.24. The Australians finished second, a distant 7 seconds behind at 7:10.05. Phelps swum his 200m of 1:45.36, 0.75 under world record pace.

Gold no. 6 - 100m butterfly - 31st March

This was no doubt his hardest-fought gold, because he had to face defending world champion and world record holder Ian Crocker. Phelps won only in the final stroke - he was 3rd, 0.43 seconds behind Crocker with just 50m to go. But those giant arms powered on, and in a thrilling finish, he executed the perfect touch, to win by 0.05 second. He only caught up with Crocker in the last 15 metres. This time, it wasn’t a world record though: 50.77 seconds, as compared to Crocker’s world record of 50.44. However, that easily eclipsed his previous personal best of 51.10 set when he won silver behind Crocker in Barcelona in the 2003 world championships. Phelps looked exhausted as he turned to look at the scoreboard, his eyes were bloodshot and he could barely manage a victory smile. Well, for a man trying to win 8 golds and having broken several world records earlier, that is to be expected isn’t it? Crocker led most of the race, but man who holds 7 of the top 10 times in history for the event, just could not match the finish of Phelps. Venezuelan Albert Altes Subirates, who got bronze was a distant 1 second behind Crocker.

Attempt at gold no.7 - 4×100m medley relay - 1st April

Failed, although it’s none of his fault. The US team was disqualified during the heats due to a fluffed exchange, while Phelps was being rested. The Americans won their heat but slow motion replays showed that 100m butterfly silver medallist Ian Crocker broke. Australia went on to win the event.

Gold no.7 - 400m individual medley - 1st April

An unprecedented 7th gold, and 5th world record. His time of 4:06.22 left second placed Ryan Lochte trailing more than 3 seconds behind.