‘Happening Girls’ is a new reality TV show in Japan, featuring a girl group that fans can date and potentially even marry. The band currently consists of four girls who always wear bikinis or swimsuits in public. Male fans interested in dating the girls can apply to the producers of the show and take part in X-Factor style auditions and interviews for the chance of winning a date.

The four bachelorettes who currently make up the band are: Manaka, 20, Saaya, 22, Kaori, 26, and Eri, 25. If one of them gets married and leaves the show, her place will be taken by a new band member. The show’s producers are recruiting replacements under strict conditions – applicants must be between 17 and 30 years of age, living in Tokyo, and must have no objections to wearing bikinis in public at all times.

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Meet Leanne, a 40-year-old Australian website designer who loves dressing up like a horse. She goes by the name ‘Shyanne’ in her pony get-up, which includes a saddle, bridle and bit. Once the transformation is complete, she likes to trot about and pull her friend Grace behind her in a custom-made trap.

Each of her ensembles costs anywhere between £5,000 and £10,000 (that’s $8,000 to $16,000). “Once the bit’s in, the tongue is out so you’re not speaking,” she explained. “If you drool while wearing a bit, you’ve got to be wearing the wrong-size bit.”

As bizarre as it sounds, Leanne insists that behaving like a horse is fun and that it takes her to a wonderful place where she can relax and be herself. “When I’m in the pony gear, I feel freer,” she said. “It’s about who you are, it’s about expressing yourself. I become me.”

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77-year-old Hava Cebic, from the village of Crnjevo in northern Bosnia, is popular for her miraculous, golden tongue. If her claims are to be believed, she can cure any kind of eye ailment by just licking sufferers’ eyeballs. She’s been helping her neighbors and friends for 40 years now, and people from nearby villages travel several miles for her services.

Granny Hava said that she discovered her tongue’s mysterious healing properties when she was just a little girl. Her brother had complained of dry eyes, and as a joke, she pinned him down and licked his eyes. Later, he told her that he had been able to see better after that.

The incident intrigued Hava and she decided to try the technique on others with eye problems. To her surprise, it worked wonderfully – she found that she was able to cure allergies, dry and tired eyes, conjunctivitis and ocular hypertension. She could even reduce the symptoms of more serious ailments such as cataracts. Read More »

You can forget about carving jack-’o-lanterns this year, and take your Halloween decorations to a whole new level with Tony Dighera’s organic ‘pumpkinsteins’ – pumpkins that are grown to resemble the head of Victor Frankenstein’s grotesque monster. They’re admittedly expensive at $75 apiece, but these bad boys really do bring in the Halloween spirit!

The price is kind of justified considering the effort that Dighera put into creating these fabulous pumpkins. The California farmer used two special $100,000 tooling machines to make the pumpkin molds, which is quite huge in terms of investment. But he seems confident that his product is going to be a huge hit and that he will earn back the initial investment within the year.

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Thomas Cantley isn’t your average cancer survivor – he’s so passionate about raising awareness that he’s actually pushing a giant inflatable ball across America. The ball, nicknamed ‘Lefty’, serves as a metaphor for testicular cancer – the disease that Cantley managed to survive. He started the ‘ballsy’ quest at Santa Monica, California, and plans to make it all the way to the southern coast before heading towards New York, stopping at 11 cities on the way.

Cantley’s cancer journey started in 2009, when he suffered abdominal and lower back pain. He didn’t realise right away what the symptoms meant, and he says that he never received preventive information. In fact, he wasn’t even aware of the disease’s existence.

“I had this ‘Superman Complex’ all these men create,” he admitted. “I was a fashion photographer in New York and I was so self-centered.” So he didn’t see a doctor until things got really bad and he had to go to the emergency room. That’s when he was diagnosed with Stage III testicular cancer – the illness had spread to other parts of his body besides the lymph nodes.

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While some men struggle to grow beards, here’s a 65-year-old woman who managed to sprout one that’s a whopping eight inches long. Her unusual facial hair has made Mukhtabor Toraeva a celebrity in her hometown of Turbat , in southern Kazakhstan. But what’s really bizarre is that she says the beard is the secret to her successful 42-year marriage.

“My husband married me when my beard had already started to grow,” she explained with pride. “He loves it and we now have a son, a daughter, and six grandchildren. Although beards run on my side of the family, my daughter does not have one and although both my mother and grandmother have them, they are not as fine as mine. Theirs reached only six inches.”

Mukhtabor said that she started growing her beard when she was 25 years old, and that people have always admired her for it. Her friends and relatives appreciate her, as do the strangers she meets when she travels to the neighboring Uzbekistan.

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The tiny Lone Star tick can succeed where countless health experts and diet planners have failed – this bug has the power to put people off red meat! The tick isn’t vegetarian itself, but it sure can turn you into one for life.

Scientifically known as Amblyomma americanum, these ticks carry a variety of diseases, but what makes them truly fascinating is their ability to make people allergic to meat. That’s because they carry a substance called alpha-gal (Galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose), which is a type of carbohydrate found in non-primate mammals. Now, alpha-gal isn’t present in the human body, but our guts can digest it without negative effects under normal conditions. So when we eat meat that contains alpha-gal, we’re able to handle it without any problems.

But when the stuff enters the bloodstream through the Lone Star’s bite, it’s a totally different ballgame – the human immune system recognizes it as a foreign substance and produces antibodies to protect against it. These antibodies remain in the system, so the next time meat containing alpha-gal is ingested, it can trigger violent allergic reactions.

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Meet Evan, a cute little 8-year-old with the world’s best job. He rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars while doing what all kids do – playing with toys. He is the face of EvanTubeHD, a family-friendly YouTube channel that reviews toys and video games. Evan’s videos regularly exceed a million views and the channel earns him a whopping $1.3 million a year.

This is one of those internet success stories that make you wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that?” It started out as a playful project between Evan and his father Jared – they would make stop-motion videos using clay models of Angry Birds. “When we started, we were making about a video per month as a fun little project,” Jared recalled. “It was interesting to see who was tuning in.”

The videos were so cute that they started to get really popular, and when their first video hit 1 million views, Jared realized how huge it was getting. It wasn’t long before the channel became a serious business model. “By doing toy reviews that are a bit ‘out of the box’, we try to provide information about the product as well as have that creative flair,” he said.

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Israeli-born fashion designer Elie Tahari has created an ‘iPhone Dress’ as a way of paying tribute to Apple’s latest product offering. While the design of the dress is a very basic black silhouette, it is made of a special mesh ‘techno-fabric’ that allows over 50 iPhones to be sewn into it.

The iPhone Dress isn’t exactly what you’d call wearable, but Tahari’s intention was to make a statement about the fusion of fashion and technology, and to honor the iPhone 6. “I’m inspired by the iPhone,” he said. “I’ve always been. The only device I really have is an iPhone.”

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We’ve seen lots of bizarre plastic surgery stories in the past, but this one surpasses them all – a 21-year-old woman went and got herself a third breast! It’s so ridiculous that I won’t blame you for thinking it’s a prank, but she says it’s not. She got a fake breast implanted in between her two natural ones, and even started going by the name ‘Jasmine Tridevil’ to reflect the change.

Why would anyone in their right mind do this to themselves, you ask? It turns out that Jasmine, a massage therapist by profession, wants to earn a bit of fame and money and if getting a third boob is what it takes to accomplish her goals, then so be it. She’s created a little reality show around her life called ‘Jasmine’s Jugs’ and she’s hoping that MTV will pick up the idea.

In the meantime, Jasmine has turned to YouTube, hoping to gain an army of followers. She’s put up a few videos in the past couple of months flaunting her new look and answering her viewer’s incredulous questions. Going by her responses, it looks like she actually wants hate comments and extreme reactions. Read More »

In a bid to raise fitness consciousness, Moscow’s authorities have decided to replace ordinary park benches with high-tech scales. The change, which will affect the city’s most popular parks, is being sponsored by gyms that are hoping to attract more weight-obsessed clients.

A similar campaign is already in place at a public bus stop in the Netherlands, where benches are attached to large electronic panels that display the seated person’s weight in kilograms. The panels also feature nutrition-related information and gym advertisements.

One of the first parks in Moscow to embrace the change is the northern Sokolniki Park – director Andrei Lapshin said that 20 weighing benches could be placed there by the end of the year.

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It’s that time of the year again when people do the stupidest things to get their hands on Apple’s latest iPhone. It’s been pretty crazy so far, but this story is a clear winner – a Chinese student is offering to share his girlfriend with anyone who will pay up in cash. He plans to use all the money his girlfriend earns him to pay for the highly coveted iPhone 6.

The kid recently stood outside Shanghai’s Songjiang University, holding up a sign that read: ‘Girlfriend Sharing’. To avoid being misunderstood, he also stated the ‘rules’ quite clearly. The deal, he wrote, included eating together, studying together, playing games, saving seats (in libraries/classrooms) or going on dates. The sign was pretty clear on one thing – ‘no funny business’.

“Sharing girlfriend for pocket money,” the sign read. “If you are interested, connect to personal hotspot ‘wifi sharing master’  to check out the girlfriend.”

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Like many girls her age, 25-year-old Lauren Adkins has a huge crush on vampire Edward Cullen from the Twilight movies, played by Hollywood heartthrob Robert Pattinson. But Lauren has taken her infatuation to a whole new level – she actually got married to a life-size cardboard cut-out of her perfect man. She lives with the cut-out, goes on dates with it, and pretty much considers it her partner for life.

Lauren, from Las Vegas, said that she’s been obsessed with romantic fairytale endings ever since she was a little girl. “When I was a child, I watched the Disney versions of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella until the tapes wore out,” she recalled. As she grew older, her interests shifted towards romantic teen movies, like Twilight.

After every guy she met and dated at college failed to meet her ideal of Prince Charming, she finally found what she was looking for in Edward Cullen. “It was different from any love story I’d ever seen before – after all, the leading character was as likely to suck your blood as open the door for you. I was obsessed.”

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‘Netropolitan’ is a new social networking website that caters exclusively to the ultra-rich. Described as ‘the online country club for people with more money than time’, the website costs a whopping $9,000 to join. And that’s just the initiation fee; there’s also an annual membership fee of $3,000.

That sounds like an exorbitant amount, considering the fact that popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter are free of charge. The whole thing almost sounds like a prank, but Netropolitan founder James Touchi-Peters assures us that the service is quite real.

“This is 100 percent real, and I believe there is a need and an audience for this service,” said Touchi-Peters, 48, a composer and former conductor of the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra. He got the idea for Netropolitan when he had trouble relating to the people he met on other social websites.

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A man from China’s Sichuan Province wants a mother so badly that he’s offering one million yuan (a little over US$160,000) to any woman willing to take on the role. Kuan-Yin Tsui, who is in his 30s, has become an internet sensation in China, following his bizarre proposition.

Eye-witnesses say that he was actually seated at Fanghu Park with a bowl of banknotes in front of him, in the hopes of finding a mother. Behind him was a red lantern with his phone number plastered on it, and a large poster that displayed his terms – he wanted his would-be mother to be a woman who was at least 57 years old, well educated, and without a history of drug use. The final decision, he wrote, would depend on whether he felt a ‘connection’ with any of his applicants.

Juan Lei, who happened to be visiting the park at the same time, took pictures of the entire affair and posted them online. “I went to speak to him to ask if it was a real offer, and he told me I was too young for the job and he only wanted older women,” she recalled.

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