An American architect has broken his own Guinness World Record by building the largest house of free-standing playing cards.

Bryan Berg used 218,792 cards to create a replica of the Venetian Macau, which is on display in its namesake luxury hotel and casino.

Berg took 44 days and 4,051 decks of cards to complete his model inside the Venetian, which sits at the heart of Macau’s Cotai Strip, the China-ruled city’s version of Las Vegas’ neon alley.

Since Macau’s casino sector liberalised in 2002, a spate of Las Vegas style gaming giants have transformed the once sleepy former Portuguese colony into the world’s biggest gaming hub.

Weighing 44 stone and measuring 33 feet by just under 10 feet, the model which consisted of cards stacked without glue or tape, nearly collapsed several times.

‘This has been the most ambitious project I have undertaken to date,’ Berg said.

‘It’s really like a real construction project because you have to engineer every single adjacency and every support that’s supporting everything above,’ he added.

‘I was inspired to stack cards by my card-playing grandfather; maybe I can inspire some visitors at The Venetian Macao to try their hand at building their own structures.

‘There couldn’t be a more fitting place to build the world’s largest house of cards than at the world’s largest resort hotel,” he added. (Daily Mail)

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A group of masked women caused controversy in China by dancing in the street in their underwear in a bid to find husbands.

The eight young women said they were coming under intense pressure from their families to settle down before “it was too late”.

They braved the weather to strip down to their bras and pants outside a subway station in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, and danced for passers-by.

The girls handed out sheets of paper with their personal details and the kind of men they hoped to marry.

And they held boards with slogans such as: ‘Brother, marry me!’, ‘My mom is pushing me for marriage!’, and ‘Time flies, let’s date!’.

Calling themselves the ‘Crazy Beauties’, the women said they had deliberately timed the event to coincide with International Women’s Day.

Organiser Xing Zi said: “We planned this to stand as a declaration. This is to prove we have enough confidence and determination.”

One participant, Xiao Xuan, explained: “We think we are beauties, but we can’t find our Mr Rights. Our age is close to 30, so we have to do something.”

Another dancer, with the nickname Ali Nerd, said her mother was driving her crazy: “She calls me all day long, nagging me to get married,” she said.

The show attracted hundreds of people with many onlookers applauding the women and taking their pictures with mobile phones. (Guangzhou Daily)

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A cow has given birth to triplets despite the odds of doing so being 100,000 to one.

Caesar gave birth to calves Laura, Ben and Tom last week at North Park Farm in Landrake, Cornwall.

Her multiple delivery has been described as a miracle by Gary Bridgman, the farmer, although he disclosed that Caesar’s mother gave birth to twins last year.

Mr Bridgman said: “You don’t expect triplets. We had Caesar scanned but you never ask how many, so it’s a bit of a miracle to me.”

Cows do not normally have litters of calves and the chances of having triplets are 105,000 to one, with the odds of having same sex triplets are around 700,000 to one.

Experts from the Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine have previously said a cow giving birth to triplets is a ’statistical miracle.’

The average gestation period is about nine months – like humans – and a newborn calf will weigh between 40 to 50kg, but within a year they are usually the same size as their parents. (Telegraph)

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Sticking out of the crowd like a sore thumb, this rare black penguin is causing quite a stir among bird experts.

The bird, which was spotted in Fortuna Bay, on the island of South Georgia, has been described as having a ‘one in a zillion mutation’ by ornithologist Dr Allan Baker.

Dr Baker, of the University of Toronto, said the bird had turned black because he has lost control of his pigmentation patterns.

He added: ‘That is astonishing. I’ve never ever seen that before…Presumably it’s some kind of mutation.’ (Daily Mail)

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Two bottled “ghosts” have sold for more than £1300 in an online auction in New Zealand.

The ghosts, supposedly trapped inside two glass vials, were put up for bidding by Avie Woodbury in Christchurch.

She said they were captured in her house during an exorcism, reports the Daily Telegraph.

The spirits were trapped inside the vials with stoppers and then dipped in holy water, which she says “dulls the spirits’ energy”.

She said they were the spirits of an old man who lived in the house during the 1920s, and a powerful, disruptive little girl who turned up after an Ouija board session.

Since an exorcism at the property last July led to their capture, there has been no further spooky activity in the house, she said.

The auction attracted more than 214,000 page views and dozens of questions before the winning bid, Trademe auction site spokesman Paul Ford said. The name of the winning bidder was not released.

Woodbury said that once an “exorcist’s fee” has been deducted, the proceeds of the spirit sale will go to the animal welfare group the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

The auction drew derision from some quarters, with one posting on the site declaring: “I have two spirits in bottles at home.

“I think they are called Jim Beam and the other is Johnny Walker.” (Ananova/Telegraph)

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Are you worried about your pet dog having too much sex? Then you’ll be delighted to know that someone has invented a chastity belt for dogs.

The ‘Pet Anti-Breeding System’, or PABS, is marketed as an alternative to the more common approaches of a) removing parts of the dog’s reproductive system, or b) letting the dog have lots of sex and preparing to deal with the inevitable puppy deluge.

Describing itself as the ‘Ultimate Solution to unwanted and accidental breedings’, the PABS is a stylish and practical genital defence outfit that incorporates a collar, a sort of harness thing, and a washable mesh pad.

Created by an American company named Highly Favored Creations, the doggy chastity belt comes in sizes ranging from Small to XXL. The company even has a motto: ‘Stop it, block it, lock it.’

So now you know. (Metro)

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True love can take many forms. In this case, it has taken the form of a Korean man falling in love with, and eventually marrying, a large pillow with a picture of a woman on it.

Lee Jin-gyu fell for his ‘dakimakura’ – a kind of large, huggable pillow from Japan, often with a picture of a popular anime character printed on the side.

In Lee’s case, his beloved pillow has an image of Fate Testarossa, from the ‘magical girl’ anime series Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha.

Now the 28-year-old otaku (a Japanese term that roughly translates to somewhere between ‘obsessive’ and ‘nerd’) has wed the pillow in a special ceremony, after fitting it out with a wedding dress for the service in front of a local priest. Their nuptials were eagerly chronicled by the local media.

‘He is completely obsessed with this pillow and takes it everywhere,’ said one friend.

‘They go out to the park or the funfair where it will go on all the rides with him. Then when he goes out to eat he takes it with him and it gets its own seat and its own meal,’ they added.

The pillow marriage is not the first similarly-themed unusual marriage in recent times – it comes after a Japanese otaku married his virtual girlfriend Nene Anegasaki, a character who only exists in the Nintendo DS game Love Plus, last November. (roundup)

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An elderly Chinese woman has stunned her family and fellow villagers by growing from her forehead a horn that resembles a goat’s.

Grandmother Zhang Ruifang, 101, of Linlou village, Henan province, began developing the mysterious protrusion last year.

Since then it has grown 2.4in in length and another now appears to emerging on the other side of the mother of seven’s forehead.

The condition has left her family baffled and worried.

Her youngest of six sons, Zhang Guozheng, 60, said when a patch of rough skin formed on her forehead last year ‘we didn’t pay too much attention to it’.

‘But as time went on a horn grew out of her head and it is now 6cm long,’ added Mr Zhang, whose eldest brother and sibling is 82 years old.

‘Now something is also growing on the right side of her forehead. It’s quite possible that it’s another horn.’

Although, it is unknown what the protrusion is on Mrs Zhang’s head, it resembles a cutaneous horn.

This is a funnel-shaped growth and although most are only a few millimetres in length, some can extend a number of inches from the skin.

It is made up of compacted keratin, which is the same protein we have in our nails.

It usually develops in fair-skinned elderly adults who have a history of significant sun exposure.

The growth can sometimes be cancerous but more than half of cases are benign.

Unfortunately, the cause of cutaneous horns is still unknown.

They can be removed surgically but this does not treat whatever is the underlying condition. (Daily Mail)

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Surgeons in China have operated to remove a five inch tail from a four-month-old baby girl.

The little girl, called Hong Hong, was born with the tail but it had since doubled in size.

Her father, Hou, of Lixing town in eastern China’s Anhui province, said he had been “shocked” to see the tail at birth.

“I wanted to cut it off when she was born, but doctors suggested we wait some time, as a newborn is too weak to take such a surgery,” he said.

He checked the tail each day, hoping it would get smaller but instead it just “grew bigger and bigger”, he added.

Doctors at the Anhui Provincial Children’s Hospital said they too had been surprised by the case.

“It’s very rare, about one in a million. We have never seen anything like this before,” said Dr Sun Jun.

X-rays had shown that the tail was connected to a fatty tumor within the spinal column.

Dr Sun said the surgery had been successful, but it was still too early to say whether further treatment would be necessary. (Anhui Market Daily)

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A car crash in Florida is being blamed on the fact that the driver was attempting to shave her pubic hair while at the wheel.

According to reports, Trooper Gary Dunick says that the two-vehicle smash was caused by the fact that the woman was attempting to shave her bikini area, while her former husband held the wheel.

Her car then crashed into the back of a pickup truck.

‘She said she was meeting her boyfriend in Key West and wanted to be ready for the visit,’ Dunick told the Key West Citizen. ‘If I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t have believed it. About 10 years ago I stopped a guy in the exact same spot … who had three or four syringes sticking out of his arm. It was just surreal and I thought, “Nothing will ever beat this.” Well, this takes it.’

Two female passengers in the pickup truck were treated for minor injuries following the crash in Cudjoe Key last Tuesday.

The woman, identified as Megan Mariah Barnes, had had her driving license revoked for five years the day before the crash, according to the newspaper, after being convicted of driving under the influence.

She now faces charges of driving with a revoked license, reckless driving, driving with no insurance, and of leaving the scene of a wreck with injuries – after she continued driving for a further half mile following the smash. (Metro)

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