Chinese social media is abuzz with the story of Guo Gantang, 45, who has spent the last 18 years on the road in search of his missing son.

Guo’s ordeal began on September 21, 1997, when his two-year-old boy, Guo Zhen, was abducted from the front gate of his home in Liaocheng, Shandong Province. According to a little girl he was playing with at the time, Zhen was snatched by a middle-aged woman. Since then, the heartbroken father has dedicated his life to finding the boy. Guo has traveled over 400,000 kilometers to all of China’s provinces, except Xinjiang in Tibet, wearing out 10 motorcycles in the process.

In the hopes that someone might recognize the boy and give him some useful information, Guo always has two flags with an old photo of him strapped to his motorcycle.

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A  young groom from China’s Hubei province was so disappointed after seeing his bride for the first time, he actually tried to kill himself at his own wedding! 

33-year-old Kang Hu was all set to marry 30-year-old Na Sung, a woman chosen by his parent, who he had never even seen before. But after laying eyes on her for the first time, at their wedding, he Kang found she did not meet his high standards. He stunned everyone by actually telling Na Sung that he found her ‘ugly’, and, claiming that she would be ‘bad for his image’, he simply walked out of the ceremony and tried to drown himself in a nearby river.

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In a bid to achieve a tiny waist, 25-year-old  Aleira Avendano has been wearing a tight corset 23 hours a day, for the past six years. The result? She literally looks like an hourglass, with 34DD breasts, an enlarged derriere, and a shockingly slim 20-inch waist.

Aleira said that she began ‘waist’ training as a teenager. Her skinny core now attracts attention wherever she goes. “People stop what they’re doing and stare – everywhere I go I get attention,” she said. “People shout at me in the street – they can’t believe that figure is real.”

She does admit that wearing a corset was uncomfortable at first and it took her some time to get used to. But over time she got so used to it that her skin would start to itch when she took it off. And she says that she actually loves wearing it now. “I’m completely obsessed with belts and corsets – I even sleep with them on,” the busty Venezuelan model said. Read More »

A bizarre men’s toilet at a restaurant in Taiyuan city, in northern China’s Shanxi province, has a trio of realistic female mannequins placed behind the urinals. The weird arrangement has men standing face-to-face with these scantily-clad dolls while relieving themselves!

Predictably, several of the restaurant’s male customers have expressed discomfort with the toilet setup. They complained that they weren’t able to urinate because of the “sexy” models were staring at them.

“I walked back out again when I saw the women there because I thought at first I was in the wrong place, but then I realised it was the proper place and I tried to relieve myself, it just didn’t work,” said 24-year-old customer Sun Kao. “It was very off-putting having a good-looking woman even if it was a plastic one apparently staring at me as I tried to do my business.”

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San Francisco-based rock band ‘ArnoCorps’ is the world’s first musical group to feature lyrics that are based exclusively on the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger. The lyrics mainly parallel movie dialogs and plots from Arnold’s action flicks in the 1980s, like The Terminator, Predator and Total Recall.

ArnoCorps is generally regarded as the pioneer of Action-Adventure Hardcore Rock and Roll. Founded in 2001, the group consists of six members who look like highly-trained militant Austrian action-rock heros. Each member has a pseudonym and a heroic backstory. At every performance, they are clothed in combat fatigues and camouflage paint, and they address the audience in ‘ballsy’ accents.

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Nepalese eye doctor Sanduk Ruit is being hailed as a miracle worker – he has single-handedly managed to restore the eyesight of over 100,000 people across two continents. All it takes him is a simple, five-minute procedure!

According to WHO statistics, 90 percent of the world’s blind population live in low-income areas, and 80 percent suffer from easily treatable conditions. But because of poverty and limited access to public health services, they are unable to seek treatment. Sanduk Ruit, driven by a belief that the world’s poorest people deserve high-quality eye care, has made it his life’s mission to treat such people. So he devised a quick five-minute technique that enables large droves of patients to be treated in a short period of time.

His genius technique involves making a small incision in the patient’s eye through which the cloudy cataract impairing the vision is removed. He then replaces it with an inexpensive artificial lens. He offers this surgery to scores of poor patients all over the world, and also teaches it to countless eye surgeons in the hope of curing as many blind people as possible.

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Not many people working in the film industry are aware of a 1930’s Hollywood actor-turned-agent named Marty Martin, so it’s rather baffling that 10-year-old Ryan is familiar with the man’s life and work. In fact, Ryan is able to recount vivid and stunningly accurate descriptions of the actor and the era he lived in, even those that have never been documented. And he’s able to do so because he claims to be the incarnation of Martin himself!

Ryan, who lives in Muskogee, Oklahoma, was born to Baptist parents in 2005. When he was only four years old, he started having nightmares that his parents had no idea how to stop. He would often talk about his heart exploding, and of Hollywood, a place that is several thousands of miles away from Oklahoma. According to Ryan’s mom Cyndi, he would always talk in a matter-of-fact manner during these incidents.

After a year, Cyndi said that Ryan confided to her about his  reincarnation. “He said, ‘Mom, I have something I need to tell you. I used to be somebody else,’” she said. Being a Baptist, Cyndi’s first reaction was to deny everything and hide it from her husband, but she slowly became curious as Ryan revealed more details of his past life, especially because he would cry and beg for his mom to take him ‘home’. “His stories were so detailed and extensive, that it just wasn’t like a child could have made it up,” Cyndi said.

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Cheating at exams is an age-old phenomenon, but the practice literally scaled new heights last week in the eastern Indian state of Bihar. News reports showed how parents and relatives of 10th-grade students climbing the walls of a school building to hand cheat sheets to the students taking their year-end exams inside!

Photographs and videos of the stupefying event went viral in India, even as police officers stood watching helplessly. Some videos also showed inspectors slapping young students as they pulled out cheat sheets from under their tables. It seems that several students were able to smuggle textbooks and notes into the exam centers despite tight security.

Cheating is apparently common in rural areas of the state, where the competition is fierce and opportunities are few. Just last month, dozens of 12th-grade students were expelled and parents detained in cases of cheating. But the sight of parents risking their life and limb to help their kids has truly shocked the nation.

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If the claims of a group of Siberian entrepreneurs are to be believed, their new product might just give Viagra a run for its money. They aren’t selling another expensive pill, just a can of fresh air!

According to Vladimir Makuta, head of the local Tashtagol district, air from Azasskaya Cave and its surrounding area, which is where the fabled Yeti (a.k.a Bigfoot) was supposedly sighted on more than one occasion, is crystal-clear, full of goodness, and has a healing effect. It can apparently help strengthen immunity and positively impact mental state. But most importantly, it is said to works wonders for people who want to perform better in bed.

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For over four decades, Egyptian woman Sisa Abu Daooh was the sole breadwinner in her family, which is highly unusual for the patriarchal society she lives in. What’s more unusual is the way she did it – by dressing herself like a man! Now 64, Abu Daooh is being honored as the ‘ideal mother’ by the Social Solidarity Directorate of Luxor.

Sisa lost her husband when she 21 and pregnant. After the birth of her daughter, she was left with no money and no source of income, either. Since the local culture did not permit women at the workplace, she had no option but to dress like a man. Her disguise consisted of a  ‘jilbab’ – a loose, full-length robe with wide sleeves – along with a white turban, or a men’s hat called ‘Taqiyah’, and black shoes.

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It’s good to get  in touch with your inner child from time to time, and apparently some people are willing to pay big money for the chance to do so in a proper environment. A Brooklyn-based preschool for adults is charging clients between $333 and $999 for the chance to act like a kid again.

At ‘Preschool Mastermind’,in New York, adults get to participate in show-and-tell, arts-and-crafts such as finger painting, games like musical chairs, and even take naps! The month-long course also has class picture day where the adults are expected to dress to their ‘four-year-old best’, a field trip, and a parent day when students get to bring two adults of their choice.

30-year-old Michelle Joni Lapidos, the brains behind the adult preschool, studied childhood education and has always wanted to be a preschool teacher. She’s always on the lookout for new ways to get people in touch with the freedom of childhood – she had started a skipping club in Brooklyn in 2013, but a friend encouraged her to start the mastermind course instead.

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The semi-nomadic Moken people, living along the coasts of Burma and Thailand, are hunter-gatherers who for centuries have harvested the sea’s bounty. They use traditional diving methods to this day, instead of modern masks or scuba gear. And their underwater vision is so evolved that they are able to gather tiny shellfish and other food from the ocean floor at depths as low as 75 feet!

Diving for food sounds like a difficult way to survive, but scientists have discovered that young Moken children have underwater vision that’s twice as good as European children of the same age. Scientist Anna Gislén, of Sweden’s Lund University, studied the children’s unique vision after hearing about them from a colleague.

“Another scientist, Erika Schagatay, was in the south of China working with sea nomads and their diving response,” she said. “She noticed that the children were picking out small brown clams from among brown stones. To her, this was incomprehensible, as she could hardly see them with her goggles, and the children used no such thing. It was not her area of science, so eventually it ended up on my desk.”

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A Chinese man was recently presented with the ultimate test of love – he was forced to choose between saving his current and ex girlfriends! The two love-struck women jumped into a river to see which one he would save.

The poor man in question is 21-year-old Wu Hsia, who recently broke up with his long-time girlfriend Jun Tang, 20, after falling in love with 22-year-old  Rong Tsao. The ex-girlfriend took the split rather badly and began to harass Wu in the hope that he would leave Rong and come back to her.

Tired of the bickering women, Wu decided to meet with both of them and make his intentions clear. “I was sick of being nagged from both sides,” he said. “Rong was moaning about Jun and Jun was moaning about her and it all got too much.” Unfortunately, the meeting turned out to be a bad idea. Jun and Rong got into an argument, which ended with Jun throwing herself into the river. Rong quickly followed suit.

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When the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant went into meltdown, after the devastating tsunami in 2011, most of the locals fled to overcrowded temporary shelters. So did Naoto Matsumura, but the brave man soon decided return to his home town of Tomioka, just to take care of the many animals left behind! And even though the radiation levels are dangerously high (17 times higher than normal) in this area, Matsumura says he isn’t going anywhere.

He now spends most of his time running a charity along with a few supporters, taking care of animals left behind in the evacuation zone. “I have two cats, one dog, one ostrich, one horse, 31 cows and four wild boars,” Matsumura proudly declared.

He started off by taking into his care the animals that were abandoned in his hometown. He described how most of the pets were still tied up, because locals had believed they would be back home soon. Matsumura took it upon himself to feed the animals every day. “They couldn’t stand the wait, so they’d all gather around barking up a storm as soon as they heard my truck,” he recalled. “Everywhere I went there was always barking. Like, “we’re thirsty” or, “we don’t have any food.”

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Wang Weibu is one of the few remaining Chinese hairdressers practicing the ancient hair-cutting art of ‘Dahoujia’. The rather extreme technique involves the use of a pair of red hot metal tongs to burn hair off, instead of cutting it!

Weibu, 72, starts by heating the clamp in a wooden fire until it is red hot, and cooling it slightly in water. He then uses it like scissors to chop of the hair to the desired length. Later, he slides the hot metal all over the remaining hair. The technique is rather baffling – after all, who would want to walk around with a head of scorched hair? But surprisingly, the final effect is rather nice – sort of like a perm – and lasts for about three months.

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