Oddity Central |
- New York Surgeon Offers $10,000 Charity Donation for Introduction to Woman of His Dreams
- Banana Tattooist Turns Fruits into Awesome Artworks
- Elves, Trolls and Hidden Beings – Iceland’s Love of the Supernatural
| New York Surgeon Offers $10,000 Charity Donation for Introduction to Woman of His Dreams Posted: 21 May 2012 03:26 AM PDT
Dr Emil Chynn, a successful New York surgeon, has tired of traditional dating methods, so he’s offering tens of thousands of dollars to whoever helps him find the woman of his dreams. So what does a person do in order to “outsource” the work of finding a suitable life partner? Well, the latest thing Dr. Chynn did was post an eye-catching personal ad in Columbia University's alumni magazine. The advert in the Spring 2012 issue of the magazine reads: "LASEK SURGEON: Featured in NY Times/Wall Street Journal. Dartmouth, Columbia, Harvard, Emory, NYU degrees. Seeks smart, sweet, skinny SWF, 30, for marriage. $10,000 donation to your charity for intro!” The young surgeon says he chose that number because it's what a good matchmaker in New York City charges, so he the money to charity, instead. Photo: Facebook But Chynn is no stranger to matchmakers and dating sites. In the past, he has spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to find that perfect someone to start a family with. "I paid this one matchmaker $10,000, and I dated a girl he set me up with for a bit, but it didn't end up working out," the 45-year-old doctor told ABC News. "And that matchmaker was kind of a jerk. So I figured, instead of paying some random guy that money, I'll narrow my pool and then give the money to charity." Over the years, he has used six high-end matchmaking services and paid $10,000 several times over, but it didn’t do him much good. Photo: Facebook The search for the perfect woman started in 2004, when he was an MBA student at NYU. He began spreading the word that he was ready to mingle, and, “in true business school fashion”, his classmates started asking the good doctor what was in it for them if they found him a suitable date. Ha greed to make the search worth while for his colleagues, and began offering $100 per date for the first ten dates, $10,000 for an engagement and another $10,000 for a wedding. The two larger fees were offered by Emil’s parents, who are desperate to see him married. But this arrangement didn’t work out the way he had planned, so two years ago he placed an ad for an assistant and offered a $10,000 bonus if the person who got the job also managed to find him a wife. he has also paid a woman $100 to write his Match.com profile, and paid a man $100 per woman to correspond with his matches until he got their phone numbers, at which point Dr. Chynn took over. None of these methods worked, but he’s hoping this latest one will. Photo: Facebook But what makes Emil Chynn’s dream woman so hard to find? "I have parameters and I can't be sure I'll find someone who meets them by going to a bar," he says. These parameters include: non-smoker, intellectually curious, wants children but doesn't have any yet, around 30, pretty, skinny and white. It’s precisely these last two that he believes are making the search so difficult. Also, as head of a surgical practice in New York, he doesn’t have the time to go out and look for that perfect someone himself. "I'm busy. I don't have time to go out to a bar," Chynn says. About his latest attempt to find The One, Emil Chynn says "The responses I've gotten so far have been so positive, I think I'm going to put the ad in the alumni papers of the four other schools I went to!" Despite all the money he’s spent over the years on these unusual dating methods, Chynn says he’s just a normal guy looking for love in the big city… New York Surgeon Offers $10,000 Charity Donation for Introduction to Woman of His Dreams was originally posted at OddityCentral.com  |
| Banana Tattooist Turns Fruits into Awesome Artworks Posted: 21 May 2012 02:38 AM PDT
Multimedia artist Phil Hansen uses a technique similar to pointillism to turn ripe bananas into organic canvases, recreating some of history’s most famous artworks. If this offbeat art doesn’t make you go bananas, I don’t know what will. Hansen’s works are just so detailed it’s hard to believe all he uses to create them is a common pushpin and the banana’s natural oxidation process. The talented artist just punctures the peel repeatedly with the pushpin and the banana, and as the the banana browns, his intricate designs are revealed. Phil Hansen is currently promoting his book, Tattoo a Banana: And Other Ways to Turn Anything and Everything into Art, due next month. In it, he explains how to create art from anything at hand - - like a piece of toast, your own fingerprints, or a stack of marshmallows – using offbeat techniques. Edgar Degas’ dancers Phil Hansen isn’t the first to use the banana’s oxidation process into an artistic technique. Last year, we featured Australian artist Jun Gil Park, who uses a toothpick to carve his designs into the banana peel. The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo Birth of Venus by Andro Botticelli Skull with Burning Cigarette by Vincent van Gogh via Flavorwire Banana Tattooist Turns Fruits into Awesome Artworks was originally posted at OddityCentral.com  |
| Elves, Trolls and Hidden Beings – Iceland’s Love of the Supernatural Posted: 21 May 2012 01:57 AM PDT
You probably think anyone who takes elves and other fantasy beings seriously is either childish or just plain mad. According to polls, most Icelanders believe in, or at least refuse to deny the existence of elves, and most of them seem pretty sane to me. Welcome to Iceland, the small island country where technological advancement goes hand in hand with a belief in the supernatural. Located just below the Arctic Circle, Europe’s most remote nation is also probably one of the world’s most bizarre. Civilized, and certainly no strangers to technology, the majority of 320,000 Icelanders also firmly believe in the existence of spirit beings like elves, gnomes or fairies. Of course, there are fantasy-enthusiasts who believe in these creatures all over the world, only in Iceland this matter really is taken very seriously. Annoying the mystical creatures living all over the island is thought to carry a heavy price, so human inhabitants will do almost anything to avoid getting on their bad side. Photo: Travelfox In America, people will call upon feng shui experts to help turn their homes into springs of positive energy, but in Iceland it’s elf spotters who decide how a human settlement develops in order not to disturb the country’s supernatural inhabitants. It might sound funny, but engineers will often reroute roads, pipelines and cable, at a steep cost, only to avoid the dwellings of elves and other hidden beings. All around the island, one can hear tales of fishermen lost at sea because they ignored warning from the elves not to leave port, or of people suffering mysterious illnesses or their houses burning down after provoking the wrath of invisible beings. Photo: Grapevine In 2004, construction crews building a golf course on the outskirts of Reykjavik moved a rock believed to be the dwelling of elves. Bulldozers started failing and workers became victims of strange injuries, and so the chief engineer eventually issued a grovelling apology to the elves and vowed not to trouble them again. The event was made public by present media reporters, but the accidents stopped occurring and the golf course was completed on schedule. Not all Icelanders are convinced these fairy-tale being exist, but even those who say they don’t believe in them prefer to behave as if they did, just to make sure nothing bad happens.
But where does this strong belief in the supernatural come from? The most logical answer would be Iceland’s isolation from the rest of the world. Just over a century ago, its inhabitants were inhabiting turf homes, and making a living as fishermen or sheep farmers. Experts believe Enlightenment, which put science ahead of superstition, arrived too late in Iceland. Also, to better cope with the dark cold winters, Icelanders developed a rich storytelling tradition, full of heroes, supernatural beings and other folk elements. Throughout the years, the lines between these old tails and reality seem to have blurred, and people started to actually believe in fantasy. ”Stories about elves and hidden people are part of our heritage, but I also like to think some of them are true. It’s fun to believe in something you can’t explain, and anyway, it’s hard to be 100 percent scientific in a country as weird as ours,” says an university student. And it’s also the look of the land that makes people people believe in the supernatural. A jagged coastline full of bays and fjords, impressive geysers, beautiful waterfalls and springs and threatening volcanoes are all part of this fairy-tale land that would almost have anyone believe they’re in a Tolkienesque world.
Elves, trolls and fairies are common conversational topics in Iceland. Locals tell you stories about jinxed buildings in Reykjavik, or ghosts living in their homes and factories, and even the media often reports encounters with spirit beings. And just so you know, whenever a wallet is lost, trolls are to blame. Iceland’s love of the supernatural is so great, it has given birth to the world’s first Elf School, right in the country’s capital. Believe it or not, thousands of people, most of them foreigners, pay a $60 fee for a one-day course on elves and other hidden beings. Magnus Skarphedinsson, the historian who runs Iceland’s elf school, believes the country is home to over 20,000 supernatural creatures. ”Perhaps these beings are more visible in Iceland because we are more open-minded,” he says. ”We also live very close to nature, which is their home.” According to Icelandic lore, hidden beings inhabit a parallel world that is invisible to human eyes, and can only be spotted by physics and little children, unless they willingly decide to reveal themselves to people. Skarphedinsson, who has never seen a spirit-being himself, claims three humans have actually married hidden people and vanished into their world. Sources: American Way, NY Times Elves, Trolls and Hidden Beings – Iceland’s Love of the Supernatural was originally posted at OddityCentral.com  |
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