Kathy Libraty, an antique doll collector from Brooklyn, New York, has spent the last 25 years searching for antique dolls, and now has an impressive collection of over 1,000 items that’s worth around $2 million.

Believe it or not, Kathy’s fascination with dolls didn’t start when she was a little girl. In fact she remembers she was more of a tomboy and had no real interest in dolls or any girly stuff. Born in France, she and her parents immigrated to the US when she was only 4. After graduating from Brooklyn College with a BA in Art, her passion for photography took her to Europe and the Middle East, where she took a real interest in history and old art. When she and her husband, Frank, bought an old Victorian house, Kathy decided to pursue her love for antiques and started attending country auctions. She was intrigued that people sometimes paid large amounts of money for wigless doll heads, broken limbs and crooked-eye dolls, but not enough to start spending money on them, herself.

It wasn’t until one day, 25 years ago, that Kathy Libraty really became addicted to collecting antique dolls. She and Frank were driving around the neighborhood when they saw a man emptying boxes of antiques into a dumpster. She saw a doll’s leg sticking out and told Frank to stop the car. They went up to the man and asked him if he was going to throw all those things away, and he just replied “Yeah, it’s all dirty old junk”, so they offered to take it off his hands. When they got home and looked through the “junk” they found a rare 24″ George Borgfeldt doll, several composition mama dolls, and a broken bisque Cuno and Otto Dressel Shoulder head doll. She often wondered what other treasures that man had thrown away in the dumpster that day, but the wonders she managed to get her hands on inspired her to go out into the world and discover her own priceless treasures.

In her quest to find more an more antique dolls, Kathy Libraty traveled more than 100,000 miles between America and Europe, where she found most of the items in her collection. Her dolls range from only 2 inches to over 3 feet in size, and cost from one meager dollar to $50,000. Husband Frank and daughter Elisa are also passionate about antique dolls, and help Kathy recondition them. Some of the dolls are restored and sold to other collectors, but some of them she just can’t bare part with.

Although she has over 1,000 rare antique dolls that take up most of the space in her Brooklyn house, and has reached a point where she has to sneak new arrivals past her husband, Kathy just can’t stop collecting dolls. And it turns out her addiction is financially beneficial, as the price of her antique dolls has already reached $2 million and can only go higher.

This shopping centre had some decidedly under-dressed shoppers at the weekend... as hordes of underwear-clad women competed to win £100 gift vouchers.

Lakeside Shopping Centre in Essex gave the prizes to the first 100 women to turn up on Sunday morning in nothing but their bra, panties and high heels.

After getting the gift card the girls who had dared to bare were then encouraged to hit the shops and buy themselves a new outfit.

However, while women had already got a pair of hight heels on, a surprisingly high number of them headed straight for the shoe shops… which must have made their walk home interesting.

Kylie Minor, from Lakeside Shopping Centre said: "We loved seeing all our luscious ladies looking gorgeous in their underwear and heels and I’m sure they all enjoyed choosing an outfit from our wide range of new spring fashion in the stores afterwards."

She is genius 11 years old and enjoys swimming and playing the recorder. But while Victoria Cowie insists she is just like any other girl her age, in one respect she is very different.

The schoolgirl has just been admitted to Mensa after scoring 162 in an IQ test – better than the 160 thought to have been achieved by Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates.

The result puts her in the top 1 per cent of the British population in terms of intelligence.

Victoria, who has been offered scholarships to four prestigious fee-paying schools, said: ‘When I got the results, I was really surprised.

‘It’s quite daunting to be compared to great minds, but it feels good also to be thought of as that clever.

‘I really enjoy puzzles and working things out and I think I’ll go on to study sciences, especially biology, when I’m older.’

Victoria took the adult admission tests for Mensa, the society for people with a high IQ.

As well as surpassing brilliant scientists and Microsoft founder Mr Gates, her score gives her a higher IQ than Sigmund Freud, who is thought to have had an IQ of 156, Napoleon Bonaparte, with 145, and Hillary Clinton, with 140.

Only those with an IQ of 148 and above – the top 2 per cent of the population – qualify for Mensa. The average IQ is 100.

Victoria, an only child, said she hadn’t yet told her friends about her astonishing results.

She said: ‘I really enjoy science and doing experiments, but I also love acting and dancing and playing musical instruments.

‘I do theatre workshops and loads of sports like swimming and I really enjoy creative subjects.

‘But my favourite subject is biology and I want to be a vet when I’m older because I love animals and I don’t mind blood and things like that.’ Victoria’s parents, who live in Claverley, near Wolverhampton, and run a health and safety consultancy, said they had always known their daughter was bright, but had not quite realised she was at genius level.

Her mother Alison, 44, said she was proud of her daughter. ‘When she was at nursery she had the reading ability of a child twice her age and she won science awards at school,’ Mrs Cowie added.

‘We always knew she was clever – she was always in the top sets and her teachers always praised her – but we never quite thought she’d be in Mensa.

‘She’s just a normal child to us. She likes acting, dancing and singing and she’s not the kind to always have her head stuck in a book.’

Victoria, who plays the piano, cello and saxophone as well as the recorder, hopes eventually to do a veterinary science degree.

But her parents aren’t quite sure where she gets her intelligence from.

Her father David, 42, said: ‘We think she was just born this way. Although myself and my wife are both clever, neither of us are in Mensa.

‘So when we got the results through, we were quite surprised but incredibly proud.’

Mrs Cowie added: ‘We’ve never pushed her or put pressure on her – we’re definitely not pushy parents.

‘Victoria does what she wants to do and we just give her the option. I just wish she’d tidy her room more.’

Wizard Oberon Zell-Ravenheart decided the real world needed its own Hogwarts school of magic, so he established the Grey School of Wizardry – the world’s first registered magic academy.

the 68-year-old master from Catoti, California, has dedicated his life to studying the dark arts, and decided to create a recognized academic establishment where he could share his knowledge with anyone willing to learn (and pay the admission fee). Just like the famous Hogwarts imagined by author J.K. Rowling, the Grey School of Wizardry teaches 16 different magic disciplines, including spell-casting, beastmastery, alchemy, wand-making and horse whispering. Students are split into four ancient houses – Winds, Undines, Gnomes and Salamanders and just like Harry Potter and his friends, they must all learn to defend themselves against the Dark Arts.

While Oberon admits people call him “the real Dumbledore” and that he loves Harry Potter because it increased interest in wizardry (and the numbers of paying students of his school, of course), the popular saga didn’t inspire him to become a wizard. In fact, he was practicing magic long before J.K. Rowling wrote her successful novels. The former teacher and counselor first rose to fame during the 1980s, when he claimed he and his wife – a witch named Morning Glory – had created the world’s first unicorn. Remarkably enough, they actually had managed to create a single-horned creature by performing minor surgery on a goat. It caused quite a stir and ended up touring America with a famous circus.



Oberon and Morning Glory live in a house just north of San Francisco, from which they run their special academy. That’s also where he writes his textbooks on magic, many of which are regarded as “bibles of wizardry” by the wizard community.



Head wizard Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, often referred to as Merlin or Gandalf, claims that other wizard schools you might encounter are rip-offs, but his Grey School of Wizardry offers a “serious qualification”. We teach advanced ‘Mathemagicks’, Quantum entanglement, Cosmology & Metaphysics, Lore, Wortcunning [herbal medicine] and all the ancient sciences,” he says about his online school. Yes, for the time being at least, Grey School of Wizardry is an online learning institution that holds regular summer camps where young wizards can learn new practical things and show off their skills.



It might sound like one big joke to us muggies, but the Grey School of Wizardry currently has 735 students, 100 of which are under 18 years old. They all pay an annual tuition of $30, which really isn’t very much considering we’re talking real wizardry…And to think they can graduate with a journeyman degree in Wizardry, after just seven years of study.

Zhang Yujian performs a stunt of eating a light bulb in Mudanjiang City, northeast China's Heilongjiang Province, Nov. 22, 2010. Zhang ate two bulbs during his performance Monday. His best record is said to eat three bulbs in 120 seconds.






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67-year-old Nick Le Souef Australian Spider Man to Spend Three Weeks with Poisonous Spiders Imagine living in a confined space for three weeks with more than 300 spiders, including fatally venomous red backs and hairy huntsman.

Nick Le Souef, an Australian businessman from Melbourne, will do exactly that to raise 50,000 dollars for a children's charity.

Passersby will be able to see him in a shop window everyday surrounded by his eight-legged friends.

Souef, a former opal miner, says he will take just one precaution in his mission, he will be spider-free at night.

"The spiders can be roaming around me during the day. They won't have the opportunity to be crawling into my swag (camp bed) at night and sort of saying a quick hello - I mean I'm fairly silly doing this but I'm not stupid," he said.

To begin with, there were about 400 spiders until a 'massacre' happened when the creatures started eating one another.

So now, a few crickets and cockroaches will be thrown into the shop window each day to keep the remaining 300 satisfied.

Souef, who holds the Australian records for three-week stints in a snake pit and a shark tank, originally wanted to do the stunt with snakes, but licensing issues put a stop to that.

Though he does not care much for the spiders, Souef says he will put up with the creepy crawlies for charity and use this time to write his memoirs.









Source : NDTV
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A Couple renews vows at zombie wedding proved romance really is dead – by renewing their vows at a zombie wedding.

Andy Monaghan and corpse bride Tracey shuffled down the aisle, before promising to care for each other ‘as we decay together’.

Tracey said: 'I promised to take my awful rotting husband and to love and care for you as we decay together so that your rotting, bloated corpse may live for eternity beside me, or until someone removes your head.'

The gruesome groom, 36, was then told: ‘You may eat the bride.’

Guests wore creepy costumes for the ceremony in Worcester, which included the couples' six-year-old son William, who was dressed up as a zombie best man.

Mrs Monaghan, 29, said: ‘I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but it’s our fairytale wedding.’

Cambodians ride a bamboo train, known locally as a lorry, at new village train station in Pusat province 200 km (124 miles) northwest of Phnom Penh October 19, 2010. Cambodia has reopened a stretch of railway destroyed during the country's war and officials described it as a step towards boosting regional trade through rail links with neighbours. The Asian Development Bank is contributing $84 million to a $141 million project to repair 650 km (400 miles) of railway linking Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, to its borders with Thailand and Vietnam by 2013. The first section officially opened on Friday runs 120 km (75 miles) southwest from Phnom Penh to Touk Meas in Kampot province, near the border with Vietnam. Picture taken October 19, 2010.

A Chinese man says he has become addicted to eating live scorpions and reckons he's swallowed at least 10,000 over the last 30 years.

Li Liuqun, 58, says he got hooked when he was walking in mountains close to his home in Hunan province, central China, and was stung by a huge scorpion.

"I was so angry I picked it up and bit its head off. It tasted sweet and nutty and I never looked back. To me, they're delicious - like fried beans," he explained.

Now Li will eat 20 or 30 of the live beasts in a single sitting and seems to be immune to their venom, which can paralyse and kill humans in large enough doses.

"I still get stung but they have no effect on me," he said.

Medics say Li has probably become addicted to the venom, which is used in small doses in traditional Chinese medicine to relieve the pain of rheumatism.

Common Cents One Hundred Million Pennies are 100,000,000 in digits or $1 million in dollars. Non-profit organization called Common Cents placed all this money at the Penny Harvest at Rockefeller Center.

national educational, not-for-profit organization, which specializes in creating and managing service-learning programs for young people between the ages of four and 14. Common Cent's most popular and best known program is The Penny Harvest, the largest child philanthropy program in the United States

The organization's co-founder and Executive Director is Teddy Gross. Common Cents receives major funding from several major foundations and the government including: The Ford Foundation, Foundation for Jewish Community, JPMorgan Chase, The New York City Council, The New York City Department of Education.

True Love Stories Disabled Couple - She has no legs, he has no arms. But they are happy together and live a usual life of people who love each other. The man does everything around the house using his legs.