Offbeat: Dress up dad and a self burial

An embarrassing father, a woman who paints cabbages and a man who can dip his hands in boiling water.


June 16, 2011

The dress up dad

With Father’s Day just around the corner we bring to you the story of the world’s most embarrassing yet funny dad!

Dale Price wears a different fancy dress costume every term day as he waves off his son, Rain, on the school bus to embarrass him. Price, from American Fork, near Salt Lake City, waved his son off in costume every morning of the 180-day Utah school year. It started when Price and wife Rochelle thought it would be fun embarrassing their 15-year-old son, Rain by waving to him as he boarded the bus on the first day of the year. When Price overheard Rain saying: “Mum, don’t let dad go out there again”, he took it as a challenge and decided to up the ante. The next day he appeared in a San Diego Chargers American football kit.

For the next 179 school days, one-legged Price waved goodbye to his son dressed as characters including Elvis Presley, Batgirl, the Little Mermaid, Princess Leia, Little Red Riding Hood and the list continues. Sometimes, he even used props — most notably a porcelain toilet he once hauled onto his porch to use as a throne while reading his local paper.

Rain said that while he initially found the daily routine “really embarrassing,” he eventually got used to his dad’s antics. “The last couple of months it has turned into more entertainment,” he said. “Sometimes the driver says ‘enjoy the show’,” Rain added. “We all laugh. Everybody else on the bus learned to like it a lot sooner than I did. It wasn’t their dad dressing up like a fool.”

Price said it took a lot of effort to keep up, but he did it to have fun and show his son he really cared about him. “I hope this lives with him for the rest of his life,” the father said. “He can use it against his kids and tell them, “If you think you are embarrassed by me, you should have seen your grandfather.”

However, the world’s most embarrassing father is no more. Despite all the fun, Price said he doesn’t plan on doing it again next year — at least for now. “I will sleep like a baby the first day of school,” he said.

SOURCES: METRO.CO.UK, WEB.ORANGE.CO.UK, THESUN.CO.UK & WAVEATTHEBUS.BLOGSPOT.COM

The cabbage women

Who would’ve thought that the good old cabbage could become something worthy of an art gallery? A Chinese woman, Ju Duoqi stocks up on cabbages in the Beijing vegetable market and then transforms the humble vegetables into works of art depicting beautiful women — that sometimes leave very little to the imagination.

The 38-year-old said she started using cabbages in her work five years ago when she was looking for a way to bring her art together with everyday life. “Cabbages come in different sizes and colours. Under different light and in different contexts, I can make cabbages into various forms and take photos of them that produce different moods,” Duoqi said. She often spends hours in the market picking out cabbages that reflect the curves of a woman’s body, or that can be cut to make limbs or other accessories, using a combination of round cabbage and longer, slim “celery” cabbage.

Back in her studio on Beijing’s outskirts, Duoqi uses toothpicks and knives to reshape the cabbage leaves to represent different parts of the body — carving tiny hands, say, or using individual leaves for effect. She then uses a combination of whole cabbages and leaves to form sculptures. Different stages of decomposition — fresh, rotten or dry — create different effects. Once done, she photographs the cabbage woman as she reclines on her worktable and then reconstructs her, piece by piece, using editing software. Sometimes a piece takes weeks, at other times only days.

Duoqi’s cabbage beauties series has been shown in Beijing, London, Paris, Los Angeles and Miami.

SOURCE: EMIRATES247.COM

Self burial

A Russian man who buried himself alive in a coffin for a night for ‘good luck’ was found dead the next morning. After digging a hole in a garden in the eastern city of Blagoveshchensk, the 35-year-old climbed into the coffin — which had holes for air pipes — and got a friend to cover it with soil to a depth of around eight inches.

Taking a blanket, a mobile phone and a bottle of water with him, he called his pal when he was under to say he was okay. The friend then left, returning the following morning to find him dead. The 35-year-old victim believed that burying himself alive for a night would bring him luck the rest of his life, apparently.

“According to his friend, the man wanted to test his endurance and insistently asked his friend to help him spend the night buried,” said Alexei Lubinsky, an aide to the area’s chief investigator. It’s thought that heavy rainfall throughout the night may have blocked the victim’s breathing tubes.

Last summer, another man in Russia underwent a supervised self-burial to conquer his fear of death, and an hour-and-a-half later, he was found dead after being crushed by the weight of the earth on top of him.

SOURCE: METRO.CO.UK

Sweeping sensation

A road sweeper has become a local celebrity in China for her habit of using her broom as an exercise prop to keep in shape. Zhang Xiufang, from Beijing, said, “I got this job when my husband became very ill and was unable to work. Our daughter is in primary school and we needed to pay our bills. Before I got the job I used to do Taichi — both using my body and with a sword, and I missed them because with this job I start at 5am and finish at 4pm, but then one day I was swinging the broom and it reminded me of my old hobby — and then I started practicing again at work.”

The martial arts broom master was spotted by a local man in Beijing’s Chaoyang district who made a short video with his phone and uploaded it on YouTube. The video was such a hit that Zhang was invited to the capital top star in a TV programme in Nanjing, capital city of Jiangsu province. She said, “I have even been asked by other street sweepers to show them some tricks — it’s a great way to relax and stay fit in what is a very demanding job, so why not?”

SOURCE: WEB.ORANGE.CO.UK

‘Superhand’ chef

Kann Trichan, aThai chef can dip his hands into a pot of boiling hot cooking oil and escape without harm every time. Trichan from Chiang Mai in Thailand is a deep fried chicken specialist with a hands on approach that in no way conforms to health and safety regulations.

Nonetheless, 50-year-old Trichan, who regularly forgets his cooking utensils, can dip his hands into a boiling hot wok of oil and bizarrely suffer no blisters or burning whatsoever. It’s a party trick that has even earned him a Guinness World Record for pulling 20 pieces of chicken out of 480 degree oil in a minute. Trichan discovered his talent seven years ago when he was splashed with searing hot oil after a feasting squirrel knocked a mango into his frying wok. “The fat flew everywhere, all over my head, arms, hands. It should have seriously hurt me,” he said about the initial oil bath. “I remember looking in the mirror, expecting to see blisters and red blotches, but there was nothing. Now I can fry rice, chicken, and many things with just my bare hands. When I put my hands into the oil it feels hot but it doesn’t burn or blister my skin.”

Scooping his deep fried delicacies out from the wok has earned Trinchan worldwide acclaim and people travel far and wide to visit his food stall in Bangkok. “The people loved it. They’ve never seen anything like it before,” he said. “People were coming from all over just to buy my chicken and watch me spoon it out with hands. It’s crazy, but my stall gets busier and busier every day with tourists and customers wanting to see me.”

SOURCE: METRO.CO.UK

‘Sweet 16’ party turns sour

Better check your Facebook settings before posting a party invitation online. A teenage girl in Germany who forgot to mark her birthday invitation as private on Facebook fled her own party when more than 1,500 guests showed up.

The girl, named only as Thessa, hid as the huge crowd — followed by 100 police officers — converged at her house in Hamburg. Partygoers held signs asking, “Where is Thessa?”, chanted, “Thessa, celebrating a birthday is not a crime”, and brought birthday presents and homemade cupcakes. But Thessa was nowhere to be seen and police confirmed she “was not at home”. She is believed to have celebrated quietly at her grandparents’ house. Thessa had only wanted to ask a handful of friends over to her home but mistakenly put the event to ‘open’ and 15,000 people confirmed they would attend. When her parents found out, they made her cancel the party, told the authorities what had happened and hired a private security firm to protect their home. Despite public announcements across the city that the party had been cancelled, 1,500 teens and young adults still turned up on the street in front of Thessa’s home. Police spokesman Mirko Streiber said, “We had cordoned off the house, some 100 police were on the ground, four of them on horses — but that did not keep the kids from celebrating.”

Thessa says she feels “terrible” about what happened, and now is reluctant “to go outside because I feel so ashamed and worried.” The teen says she has abandoned Facebook.

SOURCE: WEB.ORANGE.CO.UK

Big ambitions with tiny figures

A US artist is making a big name for himself by creating everyday scenes from miniature figures and food. Christopher Boffoli’s work portrays tiny people going about their business — on top of items such as spilt milk, chocolate cake or a cup of coffee.

His ‘Disparity’ series depicts scenes ranging from bicyclists on a banana to a man using a lawnmower on a broccoli. Boffoli meticulously plans the pieces before painstakingly placing the hand-painted plastic figures. He began working on the project in 2007 after being influenced by Gulliver’s Travels and films such as The Incredible Shrinking Woman. The Seattle-based artist explained, “I have always been interested in size disparity and a juxtaposition of scales between people and things. Most of the process is enjoyable, from getting the idea, or seeing something that’s freshly in season at the farmer’s market that would make a good backdrop, to actually setting it up in my studio and shooting it while I’m rocking out to music.”

Boffoli further added, “In terms of this series, food was a natural choice as a backdrop because it is the most common subject for most people, readily accessible to them. Not to mention, food can be beautiful with wonderful textures and colours. The set-ups can be tricky. Getting the figures arranged without being obvious to the camera can take a surprising amount of time. But with all that said, it can be really interesting to hear how people react to the images.”

SOURCE: WEB.ORANGE.CO.UK



Published in The Express Tribune, June 11th, 2011.

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