World's Wackiest Festivals

El Colacho: the Baby-Jumping Festival (Spain)

In celebration of the Catholic festival of Corpus Christi, grown men leap over newborns, with full parental consent. Donning scary, vaguely Elvis-like costumes and wielding whips and truncheons, the men attempt to "cleanse" the babies of evil. Evidently, recklessly leaping over them is the best way to achieve this. The town has observed the strange practice (called El Colacho) since 1620, and any onlookers who seem to be in need of a quick exorcism are pulled into the event, as well -- so look normal, by God! And leave your babies with the sitter.

Hadakamatsuri: The Naked Festival (Japan)

A hadakamatsuri --naked festival-- is a type of Japanese festival where participants wear a minimum amount of clothing; usually just a Japanese loincloth (called fundoshi), sometimes with a short happi coat, and very rarely completely naked. Whatever the clothing, it is considered to be above vulgar, or everyday, undergarments, and on the level of holy Japanese shrine attire. Naked festivals are held in dozens of places throughout Japan every year, usually in the summer or winter. Hidden somewhere in the midst of all these men in loincloths is one fully naked man. Touching him is believed to bring good luck and happiness.

Up Helly-Aa: the Fire Festival (Shetland Islands)

A tribute to the islands' Viking Past, Up Helly-Aa ("End of the Holy Days"), the fire festivals are held in Shetland annually in the middle of winter to mark the end of the yule season. The festival involves a procession of up to a thousand guizers, and culminates with the burning of a 32-ft. replica of a Viking longship. Due to the often-flamboyant costumes and the large quantity of males dressing up as females, it has earned the joke name 'Transvestite Tuesday'.

The Monkey Buffet Festival (Thailand)

Every year, 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.

Holi: the Festival of Colors (India)

Holi, also called the Festival of Colours, is a popular Hindu spring festival observed in India, Guyana, and Nepal. On the second day, known as Dhulhendi, people spend the day throwing colored powder and water at each other. The spring season, during which the weather changes, is believed to cause viral fever and cold. Thus, the playful throwing of the colored powders has a medicinal significance: the colors are traditionally made of Neem, Kumkum, Haldi, Bilva, and other medicinal herbs prescribed by Ayurvedic doctors.

Cheese Rolling Festival (England)

Though it sounds benign (and kind of goofy), cheese-rolling is very dangerous. Running full-tilt down a very steep hill behind a madly spinning 7-pound wheel of cheese can be well-nigh lethal. In fact, police have attempted to ban the event, but participants have refused to observe the ban. Men and their cheese wheels can not be separated easily, evidently. So what happens during a cheese roll? Simple: the cheese is set to rolling, and racers zoom down the hill after the cheese. However, as the cheese can reach speeds of up to 70 mph, it rarely happens that someone catches the cheese. First to the bottom wins the cheese. Glorious.

Maslenitsa: free-for-all boxing match (Russia)

In Orthodox countries, the week before Lent is marked with a series of celebrations, including a free-for-all boxing match in which there are no rules. In centuries past, the fight ended only when the participates were covered with blood and bereft of clothes.

Tunarama: the Tuna Tossing Festival (Australia)

The Tunarama festival is held in Port Lincoln, on the tip of Eyre Peninsula, over the Australia Day (26 January) long weekend. When the festival began in 1962, it was intended to promote the emerging tuna fishing industry in Port Lincoln. Tuna fishing is now one of the town's biggest industries and Australia's largest tuna cannery is located there. The highlight of the festival is the tuna tossing competition. Ex-Olympic hammer thrower, Sean Carlin, holds the record for the longest toss at 37.23 metres set in 1998.

Roswell UFO Festival (USA)

The Roswell UFO Festival celebrates the anniversary of the "Roswell Incident," when a UFO was said to have crashed into military grounds nearby. Featuring experts, authors, researchers, and lecturers dissecting the infamous incident, the celebration will also sport an alien parade, an alien costume contest , and an alien hot air balloon ride.

La Tomatina (Spain)

In late August, thousands of people pelt each other with over 250 lbs. of tomatoes in a span of 60 minutes in an event modestly described as the world's largest tomato fight. Every year, over 30,000 tourists come to Bunyol for this festival. Rules of conduct keep the festivities from becoming a more dangerous brawl.

10 Most Bizarre Beauty Pageants

Miss Landmine

The millions of landmines planted in Angola during the bloody civil war inspired a competition for injured women. Created by Norwegian artist Morten Traavik, Miss Landmine celebrates pride and empowerment over physical perfection. In this beauty contest 10 women competed for the title of most beautiful mutilated Angolan woman. The first prize? A leg prosthesis.

Miss Pregnant

Just because your belly is expanding doesn't mean you can't enter a beauty contest. No more hiding behind tent-like dresses for pregnant women of the twenty-first century, Ms. Pregnant celebrates beauty with a bump. And yes, they parade in bikinis!

Miss Klingon Empire

The Miss Klingon Empire Beauty Pageant, held every year at the Star Trek Convention at Dragon*Con in Atlanta, aims to discover beauties who are out of this world. The pageant's definition of beauty might seem weird to most of us - these ladies get glammed up to assume the persona of any female Klingon character, official or created, from "Star Trek." The pageant features the most beautiful women the Klingon Empire has to offer, to be judged in Beauty, Talent and Personality categories.

Miss Artificial Beauty

After a Chinese girl was banned from a beauty competition for having some surgery work done, a group of people decide to create a very unusual contest in 2004, with one requirement only: they must have a plastic surgery. The contestants competed for the title of Miss Artificial Beauty, with finalists ranging in age from 18 to 62. All competitors --including one transsexual-- had to provide a doctor's certificate to prove they’d been under the knife. It was a one-time-only event.

Miss Navajo Nation

Obviously, the contestants of Miss Navajo Nation are members of the Native American Navajo Nation, but the interesting part is the Tribal Skills area, where the contestants demonstrate their skill in essential tribal skills such as butchering sheep. The contestants must butcher a sheep and are judged on their neatness and efficiency. They do it wearing pageant-wear (dresses or tribal garb), with butcher’s smocks over the top.

Miss Jumbo Queen

Thailand hosts the Miss Jumbo Queen pageant for big beautiful women. This wobbly annual event is staged at the Samphran Elephant Ground near Bangkok, as part of the Jumbo Banquet elephant feast. The contest is held to select the contestant who best exhibits the characteristics of an elephant by virtue of her grace, elegance and size, and the winner will lead a jumbo banquet and help promote elephant conservation causes in Thailand.

Ms Senior Sweetheart

Ms Senior Sweetheart is a national pageant for lovely ladies over age 58 and is held every year in Fall River, Massachusetts. Intended to show the public that senior ladies still have lots of pep in their step, contestants compete in talent, interviews, and an evening gown presentation. The pageant was started in 1978 as a Lions’ Club fund raiser and has been a national competition ever since.

Miss Russian Army

What could the Russian Army do to get good publicity and to recruit more man? The Russian Defense Ministry decided to throw a beauty contest. So in June 2005, nineteen female soldiers and sailors participated in the competition (entitled Beauties in Shoulder Straps), which was broadcast on live television. The event included the soldiers walking down the catwalk in uniform and singing songs while accompanied by guitarists (a memorable lyric included the phrases, "Since we're soldiers, our first concern is automatic weapons; boys come second"). Other events, shown on film, saw the contestants competing in drills, crawling in combat uniform, entering tanks, and running with automatic weapons. The jury ultimately gave the title to Lieutenant Ksenya Agarkova, an engineer with Russia's Northern Fleet. Unfortunately, Bikinis were not allowed.

Miss Exotic World

The Miss Exotic World Pageant is an annual burlesque pageant and convention held in Las Vegas, and is the annual showcase event (and fundraiser for) the Burlesque Hall of Fame. The pageant attracts former burlesque queens from past decades, as well as current participants of the neo-burlesque scene. The pageant consists of burlesque performances spanning a weekend, culminating with the competition to crown a single performer as Miss Exotic World. Because of the significance of the Exotic World Burlesque Museum to the burlesque community, winning the pageant is considered a top honor for a burlesque performer.

Miss and Mister Beautiful Bottom

The Most Beautiful Bottom in the World contest was launched in 2007 by the underwear manufacturer Sloggi. Open to both men and women, the winner for each category gets a modeling contract.

10 of the World's Most Bizarre Competitions

Midget Throwing Contest

The Midget Throwing, or Dwarf Tossing, originated in Australia in the 1980's. A bar attraction in which dwarves wearing special padded clothing or Velcro costumes are thrown onto mattresses or at Velcro-coated walls, participants of the contest compete to throw the dwarf the farthest.

Dwarf tossing is widely considered to be offensive to the dignity of dwarfs, and some legislators have considered bans. Proponents of the sport have criticized such moves, with some arguing bans deny dwarfs a possible source of income.

Air Guitar Championships

Since 1996 the annual Air Guitar World Championships contest has been a part of the Oulu Music Video Festival in Oulu, Finland. The idea of the contest was originally coined as a joke (in which the performers pretended to play rock or heavy metal-style electric guitar solos) meant only to be a side attraction for the music video festival.

The first on-off air guitar competitions have been organized in the early 1980s in Sweden and in the United States. With rules such as “No back-up bands – air or real – are allowed” and “Competitors may finger pick or strum with either electric or acoustic – but all ‘real’ instruments are banned”, it’s obvious that these guitar heroes take the competition quite seriously. In 2008, the gold winner was Craig “Hot Lixx Hulahan” Billmeie from the US.

Extreme Ironing World Championships

The Extreme Ironing World Championships started in Leicester, UK in 1997, and is an exciting and dangeous sport where anyone who would like to participate should be ready for ironing a few items of laundry, preferably on a difficult climb of a mountainside, ice or under water.

The description on the official Extreme Ironing Bureau does the sport some justice: "It is an outdoor activity that combines the danger and excitement of an 'extreme' sport with the satisfaction of a well pressed shirt. It involves taking an iron and board (if possible) to remote locations and ironing a few items of laundry. This can involve ironing on a mountainside, preferably on a difficult climb, or taking an iron skiing, snowboarding or canoeing."

World Sauna Championships

The World Sauna Championship takes place in Heinola, Finland every August. This championship was started in 1999. Competitors from over 20 countries take part in the competition at their own risk, and have to sign a form agreeing not to take legal action on the organization. The competitors must sit in a 110° sauna and half a liter of water is added every 30 seconds. They must sit erect with their thighs and buttocks on the seat. They cannot touch any surface with their hands and forearms have to be in an upright position and must stay on their knees. The person who sits longest is the winner.

World's Ugliest Dog Contest

The World's Ugliest Dog Contest takes place every year at the coliseum in Petaluma, California, U.S., to decide which of the dogs entered in the contest is the ugliest. Along with the title of "The World's Ugliest Dog", the winner's owner gets a USD $1,000. The winner of the 2007 World's Ugliest Dog was Elwood, a Chinese Crested-Chihuahua mixed breed dog owned by Karen Quigley, a resident of Sewell, New Jersey. 2008's winner was also a Chinese Crested, Jeanenne Teed's Gus. He is hairless, with three legs and one eye.

World Beard and Moustache Championships

This beardy weirdy competition gives rise to thousands of carefully coiffed men, all vying for the title of most inventive and perfectly sculpted facial hair. Entrants include bearded renditions of the Golden Gate Bridge, Buckingham Palace, or just plain whacky handlebar creations. The next competition will be held on May 23, 2009 in the City of Anchorage, Alaska. Don’t forget your scissors.

Miss Russian Army

What could the Russian Army do to get good publicity and to recruit more man? The Russian Defense Ministry decided to throw a beauty contest, so in June 2005, nineteen female soldiers and sailors participated in the competition (entitled "Beauties in Shoulder Straps"), which was broadcast on live television. The event included the soldiers walking down the catwalk in uniform and singing songs while accompanied by guitarists (a memorable lyric included the phrases, "Since we're soldiers, our first concern is automatic weapons; boys come second"). Other events, shown on film, saw the contestants competing in drills, crawling in combat uniform, entering tanks, and running with automatic weapons. The jury ultimately gave the title to Lieutenant Ksenya Agarkova, an engineer with Russia's Northern Fleet.

The World Black Pudding Throwing Championship

The bizarre contest celebrates the ancient rivalry between Lancashire and Yorkshire and attracts people from far away as Australia to the small town of Ramsbottom. The aim of the game is to throw a Black Pudding that has been 'swaddled' or wrapped in a pair of ladies tights at collection of Yorkshire Puddings ( if you don't know, do a search on the web for the recipe, this is a Lancashire site) on a plinth 20 feet up on the side of the pub wall. To a competitor standing on the 'Golden Grid' introduced by a member of the media in 2001 for pictorial effect, it's a difficult task as only an underarm throw can be used.

World Conker Championships

It’s a great spectacle as modern day gladiators fight for glory armed only with a nut and 12” of string. Organised by Ashton Conker Club, the competition first took place in 1965 and has grown ever since. Teams from all over the world meet for the competition. The competitors play on eight white podiums on the village green and go through rounds until the winner emerges and is lead to the Conker Throne and crowned with conkers. There are separate Men’s, Ladies’ and Junior competitions.

As well as being a fantastic fun family day out with stalls and sideshows, there is a serious point: to raise money for charities for the blind and the visually impaired. Last year’s total raised was £25,000.

Worm Charming Championship

What could bring together hundreds of people, TV camera crews and funny dressed up men with WORMS? It could only be the Worm Charming competition, of course! Charmers came from all over the world to take part in 30 minutes of muddy madness - banging, tapping and stabbing the ground with pitchforks to entice the worms to the surface.

The World Worm Charming Championship started in 1980 and is now an annual event that celebrates the sport. It was organized by then-headmaster John Bailey, who wrote the original rules for the competition. The current world record, as listed by Guinness World Records, was established at that first event with teenager Tom Shufflebotham collecting 511 worms in 30 minutes.