If you happen to visit shops, commercial establishments, and even police stations in Japan, you might be baffled to discover bright orange baseball-sized orbs, generally placed next to the cash register. But they won’t be for sale, because believe it or not, they’re actually anti-crime devices!

The balls, locally known as bohan yu kara boru, derive their bright hue from the orange paint that fills them. In the event of a theft or robbery, store employees are supposed to fling the balls at the perpetrator. When the balls hit the thief, they will burst, marking him with orange paint and making it easy for the police to identify and apprehend him.

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Dutch designer Jeffrey Heiligers’ latest clothing line – ‘Posture’ – targets people who spend most of their time hunched over a computer. By preventing the wearer from slouching, the clothes help people improve their posture in the long run. The concept is simple – every time you slouch, the shirt will tighten uncomfortably around the back, forcing you to sit upright again!

“I engineered a tailor-made remedy that corrects poor posture, nowadays very common amongst the digital generation, not by constraining the muscles, but by training them,” Heiligers told Dezeen magazine. “Posture offers a solution integrated in the clothes you wear. By repositioning the seams in such a way that they start to feel uncomfortable when hunching, it stimulates you to sit up straight.”

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In a bid to improve sales, a Chinese restaurant recently ran a special promotion – they offered discounts to female customers based on the length of their skirts. The shorter the skirt, the heavier the discount! The amount of skin-show upwards of the knee was measured upon arrival, and the discount percentage was determined accordingly.

The promotion, which ran all of last week at Yang Jia Hot Pot restaurant in Jinan, was a huge success. Hordes of women lined up outside the establishment, waiting to have their skirts measured. The highest hemline recorded was 13 inches above the knee, attracting a huge 90-percent discount. The lowest was at three inches, earning a 20 percent saving.

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In a sheer stroke of advertising genius, Salta Beer has given three rugby players who lost teeth in action ‘Beer Tooth Implants’ – metal implants that double as bottle openers! And yeah, they actually work.

“We decided to give rugby players back the teeth they had lost in battle,” Salta Beer explained. “But we weren’t going to give them a simple tooth back, we developed a unique dental implant; a specially designed tooth to open beer.” Three rugby players were selected for the unique procedure and were featured in a commercial created in collaboration with Ogilvy Argentina.

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Lots of people love cats, but how many would actually want to smell like one? Well, as it turns out, there’s a small army of cat-lovers out there who love the smell of cat paws. So much so that they’re willing to spend money on this Japanese hand cream that promises to lend them the irresistible whiff of feline paws.

The cream is the brainchild of Japanese online retailer Felissimo. The company claims that the unusual idea came about during a brainstorming session, when an employee suggested a cream that leaves the skin as soft and squeezable as a cat’s paw. Everyone at the meeting loved the idea, and eventually they got to talking about the smell of cats’ paws, which is apparently considered mysteriously soothing. So the company finally decided to market their cream with the same smell.

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When 29-year-old Didier Jacquemin set out to get the tattoo of his dreams, little did he know that it would turn out to be a huge disaster. While the image he desired was a beautiful forest scenery complete with birds in flight, the tattoo he ultimately got was the stuff of nightmares!

Didier, a resident of Liege, Belgium, said that he found the original pattern on the internet and immediately fell in love with it. So he printed the image and took it to a local tattoo parlor on January 15, asking for a replica. The artist agreed to do the artistic tattoo, but ultimately delivered something that seems drawn by a 4-year-old.

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Looking to teach your misbehaving children a lesson?  Well, a barbershop in Snellville, Atlanta, seems to have hit upon the perfect solution – old-man haircuts that make kids look like they are balding.

Aptly named the ‘Benjamin Button Special’, the haircut involves shaving the crown of the head and leaving the sides long to make them resemble a balding elderly person. The service is offered free of charge three times a week by Russell Fredrick and his team at their suburban salon A-1 Kutz.

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You would think McDonald’s and heavy metal don’t really mix very well, but a new band is actually ‘rocking’ the combination. L.A. based ‘Mac Sabbath’ is a heavy metal group made up of four rockers who dress up as McDonald’s characters – Ronald Osborne, Grimace, the Hamburglar, and Mayor McCheese – and perform Black Sabbath songs with burger-themed lyrics.

According to the band’s Facebook page, they are ‘not a joke page to sell T-shirts’. Instead, they describe themselves as “Ronald Osbourne and the whole gang in full regalia playing all their hits like ‘Sweet Beef’ and ‘Chicken for the Slaves’ in a multi-media show with video, theatrics, audience participation and sing alongs.”

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Believe it or not, someone has actually invented a pill that makes your farts smell like roses or chocolate. It sounds like a joke, but according to their inventor, they work wonderfully.

The pill is the brainchild of 65-year-old French inventor Christian Poincheval.  Christian says that he began developing the pills six years ago, after a rather copious dinner with some friends. “We had just come back from Switzerland and we were eating a lot with our friends and the smell from the flatulence was really terrible,” he revealed.

“When we were vegetarian, we noticed that our gas smelled like vegetables, like the odor from a cow pat, but when we started eating meat the smell of the flatulence became much disagreeable,” he added. “We couldn’t breathe so me and my friends decided something had to be done. We needed to invent something that made them smell nicer.”

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Denmark’s economy might not be in tip-top shape right now, but that hasn’t deterred northern country’s government from awarding 2.5 million Danish kroner ($430,000) in grant money to a study that investigates the existence of underground trolls (mythical creatures, not internet haters).

The money will be received by Lars Christian Kofoed Rømer, a PhD student and part-time anthropology lecturer at the University of Copenhagen, who has spent two years studying ghost activity. With the new funds, he now plans to research ‘actual relationships’ between humans and trolls on the Danish island of Bornholm.

Bornholm is well-known for its flourishing tourism industry, which is mostly centered around the belief that the island is inhabited by trolls who live underground and come out at night. They even have a ‘national troll’ named Krølle Brølle, who is ‘small and cute’ and lives with his troll family on Langebjerg, and comes out at night to have ‘many exciting adventures’.

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Eyeglasses are the bane of a good kiss, especially if both parties happen to be spectacled. Thankfully, Tokyo-based eyewear company Blinc Vase has come up with a great (albeit weird) solution – ‘Kiss Eyeglasses’ – specifically designed for those extra-long lip-locking sessions. These two-way glasses consist of a single pair of lenses that can be worn by two people at once.

How is that even possible, you ask? Well, it’s simple – the glasses have two pairs of arms facing opposite ways, allowing a couple (who would otherwise be wearing two pairs of specs) to get even closer to each other. Of course, an easier solution would be to just take both pairs off for a specs-free experience. But you have to admit, kiss eyeglasses sound way more fun. This way, even people with the worst eyesight can gaze at their significant other while sharing a kiss.

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If you’re secretly worried about your smartphone addiction, then the new NoPhone might be just the thing you need. It’s the perfect smartphone placebo – it looks and feels exactly like a smartphone, but it does nothing. It’s just a piece of plastic that you can carry around in your hand to fool yourself.

NoPhone is currently a prototype that will cost a measly $12 once it hits the market. Its makers are trying to raise $30,000 on Kickstarter in order to cover production and marketing costs. They describe the device as a ‘technology-free alternative to constant hand-to-phone contact that allows you to stay connected with the real world’.

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When authorities in Chongqing city realized that they’re never going to be able put a stop to texting while walking, they decided to go for minimizing the risk instead. So they set up a special lane for pedestrians who are hopelessly addicted to their mobile phones.

The lane was created on Foreigner Street – a tourist hot-spot in Chongqing – in order to reduce collisions. So the sidewalk is basically divided into two halves – one labeled ‘cell phones, walk at your own risk’ and the other marked ‘no cell phones’.

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A bunch of resourceful Russian teenagers who couldn’t afford to take a trip to the beach recently created an unusual indoor swimming pool right in the living room of their apartment. They just used bit of polyethylene film, packing tape, a lot of water, and voila – their carpeted lounge was converted into a fully functional water park.

The boys then posted pictures of their DIY pool online, which quickly went viral on several Russian social media websites. They can be seen swimming and lazing around in the water giving thumbs up signs to the camera. They seem to have covered all their furniture in plastic, including their mattress and radiator.

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When we wrote about the creepy Facewaver Exercise Mask last year, we thought we’d seen the worst of bizarre Japanese inventions. But now they’ve come up with an even weirder gadget – a silly-looking new product called the ‘Facial Fitness PAO’.

The PAO was designed by Japanese beauty company SHLAB – it consists of a round plastic mouthpiece with plastic paddle wings on either side. In order to use it, you simply hold the device firmly in your mouth and bob your head up and down to swing the paddles.

The company claims that performing this exercise for 30 seconds, twice a day, can significantly tone up facial muscles, making a person look much younger. They demonstrate its correct use in their two-minute advertisement, which is so absurd, I dare you to watch it with a straight face.

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