The Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling is an annual event held on the Spring Bank Holiday at Cooper’s Hill, near Gloucester in the Cotswolds region of England. It is traditionally by and for the people who live in Brockworth, but now people from all over the world take part. The event takes its name from the hill on which it occurs.

The first to reach the cheese will win the race but there’s a catch. The hill is so extremely steep, the cheese goes very fast, and there’s simply no way a person running down the steep hill can win the race and stay on their feet, so everybody in the race starts to tumble. In fact, the hill is so steep that you can’t help but tumble if you are running down it. So within seconds, everybody is tumbling!

Monkey Buffet Festival (Thailand)

Every year on the last Sunday of November, all of the province’s approximately 600 monkeys are invited to eat fruits and vegetables during an annual feast held in honor of Rama, a hero of the Ramayana, who, it is said, rewarded his friend and ally, Hanuman the Monkey King, with the fiefdom of what is now Lopburi.

Organizers of the annual monkey buffet use more than 3,000 kg of fruits and vegetables for the festival.

Onbashira Festival (Japan)

The Onbashira festival (can be literally translated as “the honored pillars”) is reputed to have continued, uninterrupted, for 1200 years. The festival is held once every six years, however the locals may say “once in seven years,” because of the traditional Japanese custom of including the current year when counting a length of time.

It looks scary and dangerous but it is still practiced in certain parts of China. Thousands of people come to witness this sport as it is not practiced anywhere else in the world in this scale.

Redneck Games (USA)

The Redneck Games are held in East Dublin, Georgia annually. What started off in 1996 as a goofy way to raise money for charity has evolved into a nationwide phenomenon. Back in 1996, Atlanta was going to host the Olympics and a lot of jokes were being made about a bunch of rednecks hosting the Olympics.

The games themselves are down-and-dirty events like bobbing for pig’s feet, seed spitting, dumpster diving, hubcap hurling, bug zapping by spitball, an armpit serenade and a big-hair contest.

The Battle of the Oranges (Ivrea, Italy)

Every year at the end of February, the small northern Italian town of Ivrea comes under fruit attack during the Battle of the Oranges. Thousands come from far and wide to take part in the annual Carnevale di Ivrea, and it’s safe to say that no one leaves untouched by pulp.

Participants are divided into teams in carriages, who ride through the town and represent the emperor’s men, and teams on foot, which stay on the ground and represent the commoners. All, of course, are in full costume and armed with arance.

Wife Carrying Competition (Finland)

Wife carrying is a sport in which male competitors race while each carrying a female teammate. The objective is for the male to carry the female through a special obstacle track in the fastest time. Several types of carry may be practised: piggyback, fireman’s carry (over the shoulder), or Estonian-style (the wife hangs upside-down with her legs around the husband’s shoulders, holding onto his waist).

The original track in the rough terrain with fences, rocks and brooks has been altered to suit modern conditions. Rules to the championship include having fun and the wife being older than 17 years of age, with a minimum weight of 49kg.

Lipton was inspired by the religious paintings of the Flemish School. She tried to teach herself how to paint in the style of the 16th century Dutch Masters and failed. When traveling around Europe as a student, she began developing her very own peculiar drawing technique building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting. “It’s an insane way to draw”, she says, “but the resulting detail and luminosity is worth the amount of effort. My drawings take longer to create than a painting of equal size and detail.”

“It was all abstract and conceptual art when I attended university. My teachers told me that figurative art went ‘out’ in the Middle Ages and that I should express myself using form and shapes, but splashes on canvas and rocks on the floor bored me. I knew what I wanted: I wanted to create something no one had ever seen before, something that was brewing in the back of my brain. I used to sit for hours in the library copying Durer, Memling,Van Eyck, Goya and Rembrandt. The photographer, Diane Arbus, was another of my inspirations. Her use of black and white hit me at the core of my Being. Black and white is the color of ancient photographs and old TV shows… it is the color of ghosts, longing, time passing, memory, and madness. Black and white ached. I realized that it was perfect for the imagery in my work.”