There’s some bizarre characters out there.

Many of them are artists. Take this guy:

(photo from the New York Post)

Tourists’ eyes were popping and locals’ jaws were dropping yesterday morning when a curly-haired hipster bopped around Times Square in the buff. Stunned passers-by stopped, stared and snapped pics of Josh Drimmer, 26, during his several-minutes-long naked stroll at the Crossroads of the World. After stripping to the altogether, he zigzagged back and forth along Seventh Avenue between West 47th and 48th streets in all his glory at around 11 a.m.

Drimmer is a playwright and Yale alum from Greenpoint, Brooklyn. “He was a strange guy,” said a man who lived in Drimmer’s Yale dorm during freshman year. “He would do weird things. He would eat scraps of food people left around for a couple of hours.”

Drimmer was taken to Bellevue Hospital for evaluation, police said.

“I want to be on what he’s on,” said Xavier Sanchez, 23, of Manhattan.

“The Naked Cowboy’s always here. What’s the difference?” asked one unimpressed woman. The Naked Cowboy - a k a Robert Burck - told The Post he wasn’t in Times Square yesterday.

The last statement there is telling. This kind of thing happens often enough that a woman gets the guy confused with somebody else!

I found Josh Drimmer’s blog here. It’s called Excellence Makes Wack Irrelevant. His last post is in March of 2007. I’m skimming through it and it looks pretty normal for a blog. So what the hell happened to him between March and October? Maybe the nice folks at Bellvue can figure that one out. I mean, sure the guy is a playwright (robot drummers?) but, I don’t know, I just expect more from Yale than streaking.

Now here’s a guy who knows crazy.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears! No, seriously! I need an ear! Anybody got a spare one?

Performance artists are known for pushing the bounderies, but one Australian has astonished his contemporaries by having a third ear implanted onto his arm. The Cypriot-born eccentric Stelios Arcadious spent 10 years searching for a surgeon willing to perform the controversial operation. He got his wish after working as a Research Fellow at Nottingham Trent University’s Digital Research Unit. The ear was grown in a lab from cells and implanted into the 61-year-olds left forearm in 2006.

Mr Arcadious said he thought art “should be more than simply illustrating ideas.” “I hope to have a tiny microphone implanted to it that will connect with a bluetooth transmitter; that way you can listen to what my ear is hearing.”

An audience in Newcastle Centre For Life was introduced to Stelarc’s latest project, a ‘walking head’ robot which will be a feature there for a month. The six legged robot with its head on a screen is one of the highlights of the Dott 07 design festival. It is programmed to respond to someone entering the room, so every visitor will be treated to a little robot dance.

You know, there was a time where people enjoyed Shakespeare, listened to classical music recitals, and looked at Tintoretto paintings.

Sure, Van Gogh cut his ear off but I’m sure he didn’t implant it into his forearm.