Welcome to the greatest car exhibition on Earth: the Specialty Equipment Market Association Show in Las Vegas. Every year, aftermarket suppliers, tuners, hot-rod builders and even mainstream carmakers wrench tirelessly in the months prior to this Sin City mainstay to craft the most imaginative machines their minds can conceive. While innovation has its place, sometimes these automotive artisans can venture into the extreme zone. Here are our picks for the most outrageous machines on display at the 2010 SEMA Show.

While our gal pals will almost always give their stamp of approval to fashion-forward outfits, it turns out that some trendy pieces just freak guys out. Here, a few of our guy buddies recall the date outfits that confused them and surprised them—and a few that made them run for the hills.

Nothing is more beautiful than a big, pregnant belly. Readers had some fun while they waited, and emailed hundreds of beautiful painted bumps. Here are our 25 favorites, including the winning masterpiece!

Fish Bowl Belly

1. Monaco
per capita GDP: $203,900Monaco, a major tourist resort in the Mediterranean. The Principality of Monaco has booming high value-add industries and a strong services sector. Monaco has no income tax, but it makes most of its money from being a tax haven.

Paris Fashion Week revealed plus-size models on its runways, including Beth Ditto for designers like Jean Paul Gaultier. The singer is a size 26 and has also been featured on the cover of Love Magazine.

The word chic was coined in Paris, so it's no great surprise that the biennial Paris Motor Show is filled with stylish and elegant machines. Among the most fashionably dressed sheet metal are the concepts, cars built to demonstrate an automaker's creative vision and technical prowess and to test it, in a public way, without taking a huge financial gamble on a full production car. Here, we've selected 10 concepts on display in the City of Light that we think represent the best of the breed.

Reko Rivera and Bobby Hartman’s iPhone costumes take an obsession with Apple products to particularly tech-savvy extremes for Halloween 2009. They teamed up with John Savio and John Matthews to recreate the iPhone 3GS using 42” LCD TVs.

When the hub-bub of the day fades out, the real face of the city appears. Night markets are the hottest places. Therefore, someone says strolling around night markets is the best way to get to know a city.