Nexsey is a medical tape designed to make women’s necks look thinner and younger. All you have to do is pinch the loose skin, tape it at the back of your neck, and voila – you just rolled back the clock by a few years.
Nexsey is the brainchild of Linda Gomez, a seasoned beauty product inventor and author of the Baby Boomer Beauty Blog. She claims that she was inspired to create this unusual sticky tape after hearing from women all over the world who had problems with their neck area. Some of them just couldn’t afford corrective surgical procedures, and other were looking for non-invasive alternatives.
“As I started to learn about the options for sagging skin around the neckline, it became obvious that even for women who had undergone a facelift, many still showed signs of aging in the neck area,” Linda writes on her website. “I heard from women all over the world asking about options for other “trouble areas” and neck issues were at the top of the list!”
After being told that she could not have a horse because they were too expensive, 11-year-old Sarah Simpson, decided to try the next best thing – riding a cow. Now 18, Sarah has her own horse, but she still rides her favorite cow, Lilac, just as much, if not more than she used to.
Sarah had been dreaming of having her own horse for as long as she can remember, but after her parents told her that buying one was to expensive, she discovered that riding a cow could be just as fun. It all started when her younger brother, Tim, dared her to try it, and even though she had no riding experience, she jumped on Lilac, a 6-months-old calf living on the family farm. The animal didn’t seem to mind, so she kept on doing it for the last six and a half years.
HandEnergy is an ingenious apple-sized device that charges your phone anytime, anywhere. But what really makes this thing special is the fact that it uses your own personal energy to do it.
In a time where power-banks and solar-power devices have become mainstream, a device that lets you charge gadgets on the go doesn’t sound very special. But while power-banks have to be charged the old fashioned way, and solar panels need the sun to store energy, HandEnergy just needs a hand. And I mean that quite literally. To get this little guy to produce energy, which it then stores in built-in batteries, all you have to do is hold it in your hand and rotate your wrists.
Every holidays season for the past six years, Jim Glaub and Dylan Parker receive hundreds of letters to Santa Claus at their New York apartment. No one knows why this has been happening, or when exactly it started, but the two don’t much care. They’re just focused on making sure that every sender receives a Christmas present from Santa.
Even before 2010, Jim and Dylan used to receive a few letters addressed to Santa Claus, but they simply brushed them off as a “weird occurence”. But that year they got almost 400 of them, for some reason. “It was one batch after another,” Jim recalls. “We would dread opening up the mailbox because we knew 25, 30 letters would pour out.”
The letters are mostly from kids in the New York area, or from parents writing on behalf of their kids and asking for a miracle, explaining that they have fallen on hard times and could use a bit of help with presents from Santa Claus. Most letters ask for clothes, toys, and even turkeys for the Christmas dinner, and Jim and Dylan do everything in their power to make sure that their wishes get fulfilled.
It’s not unusual for youth nowadays to speak more than one language, but 32-year-old Muhamed Mešić is not your typical polyglot. He can communicate fluently in 56 different languages and claims to understand over 70 of them.
Ever since he was a little boy growing up in Tuzla, an industrial city in the former Yugoslavia (currently in Bosnia Herzegovina), Muhamed Mešić was fascinated by languages. His exceptional talent for quickly learning to communicate in different languages was discovered by chance, when he was just 5-years-old. He was on vacation with his family, in Greece, and recalls being able to listen to their local neighbor speaking Greek and figuring out what he was saying from the situation they were in.
“This was the first time I met people whose language I couldn’t recognize,” Muhamed remembers. “I could listen to our neighbors talking and then figure out the meaning from the situation. At the end of the vacation, I was able to help my father to communicate with a local mechanic who repaired our car. My parents were shocked.”
It might look like a DIY subwoofer, but the wooden box in the picture below is actually a ghost repelling device. The Trisaksri Ghost Repellent is made by a Thailand-based company called Boondee Workshop and cost $1,500 plus $140 for U.S. shipping. I know, it’s kind of pricey, but no one ever said keeping pesky ghosts away was cheap.
The Trisaksri Ghost Repellent first made international headlines in 2009, when various Western tech blogs wrote about its alleged ability to scan homes for unwanted spirits and drive them away with a radio wave blast. Back then, everyone laughed at this joke of a “gadget”, anticipating that Boondee Workshop wouldn’t sell a single unit, but here they are, seven years later, launching the new and improved version of their ghost repellent.
Makeup and beauty products are generally created with women in mind, but one company seems to think that there’s a niche for men’s makeup as well. Formen actually has a whole line of makeup and skincare designed to fix several issues that men often struggle with.
Formen is the brainchild of Andrew Grella, who first realized the need for men’s makeup on on the day of his high-school prom. Nobody wants to show up at the biggest party of their life with a face full of acne, but that was just what Grella was going to have to do, unless he could find a way to fix things, and fast.
“I went to my mom and she said, ‘Let me put some makeup on you,’ and I said she was crazy,” the young entrepreneur recalls. “So I left and went to Shoppers Drug Mart and Walmart, places I thought would maybe carry products aimed specifically for men that could fix my problem.” To his surprise, after checking all the aisles at these cosmetic shops, he couldn’t find a single men’s product, so he had to accept defeat, return home and let his mother use her own makeup arsenal on his face.
By Spooky onDecember 12th, 2016 Category: Architecture
From the outside, the Jardines del Humaya Cemetery, in Culiacan, Mexico’s Sinaloa state, looks pretty ordinary, but the deeper you go, the more you get the impression that the place is actually a rich suburb full of over-the-top mansions. These are actually the world-famous mausoleums of some of the most ruthless “narcos” in Mexico.
They say you can’t take your money with you when you die, but that doesn’t mean some people don’t try, or at least take it all the way to the doorstep into the afterlife. Even in death, members of the dreaded Sinaloa cartel love nothing more than to flaunt their ostentatious lifestyle in the form of elaborate mausoleums that cost a lot more than an average family home in Mexico. Jardines del Humaya has become famous for its impressive villa or chapel-like tombs, with people from all over Mexico, and sometimes from abroad, traveling there just to see them in person.
Visiting a cemetery in one of the most dangerous places in Earth doesn’t sound much like a trip too many people would like to make, but there is no denying that the dozens of tombs in the cemetery’s “high-class” area are worth a look. Once you pass the average-looking graves of the poorer folk, near the entrance to Jardines del Humaya, you are treated to a plethora of architectural wonders all of which seem out of place in a cemetery. There are mansion-like mausoleums, two-story villas, small chapels, and even miniature castles, all built to show the greatness of the people resting in them.
And it’s not just the outside that’s impressive about these luxurious mausoleums. According to several reports, many of them come with modern amenities that many regular Mexicans can only dream of, like 24-hour air-conditioning, living rooms, bedrooms, fully equipped kitchens, bulletproof glass, alarm systems and wi-fi. All so that visiting families and friends can enjoy their stay.
“It’s an expression of the power that they once had and a manifestation of their desire for eternity, which is natural in any human being,” Juan Carlos Ayala, a philosophy professor at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, said about the uncanny narco mausoleums. “It’s also a demonstration for those who survive them that this man was important.”
Professor Ayala estimates that the cost of some of these lavish mausoleums reaches up to $390,000, but according to a Daily Mail article from last year, some of them actually cost much more than that. For example, the massive mausoleum complex built for Arturo Guzman Loera, the brother of the famous ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, reportedly cost $1,200,000 to build, and features several bedrooms, 24-hour surveillance and air-conditioning, among others.
The mausoleum of Arturo Beltran Lyva, ‘The Boss of All Bosses’, looks like a small castle-fort and features satellite television, wi-fi internet connection, kitchen, bedrooms and a burglar alarm. It is estimated to have cost around $600,000.
With these lavish tombs boldly flaunting the lavish lifestyle of their permanent inhabitants, it’s no wonder that Mexican authorities have been considering placing a ban on such structures, to deter young people from joining drug cartels.
Interestingly, outrageously luxurious tombs and mausoleums are not unique to Mexico’s narco culture. Earlier this year, we featured Manila’s ‘Beverly Hills of the Dead‘, a Chinese cemetery filled with mansion-like mausoleums that are also equipped with state-of-the-art facilities.
Aleeda Rodriguez Pedrasa has one of the most unusual jobs in the world – she gets paid by the Cuban government to make sure that a statue of John Lennon in Havana always has a pair of glasses on when tourists come to take a picture with it.
In 1964, Fidel Castro declared a ban on Beatles’ music in Cuba, as part of his all-out war against capitalism, but the band was so popular that people steel smuggled copied of their records into the island nation. But when John Lennon became an outspoken political dissident, criticizing the United States for its involvement in foreign affairs, Castro openly embraced him, and in the year 2000, on the 20th anniversary of Lennon’s death on December 8th, he even unveiled a bronze statue of the legendary musician, in the Havana park that bears his name.
The statue of John Lennon sitting on a park bench quickly became a major tourist attraction, but also a target for thieves who loved nothing more than to steal the artist’s iconic round-lens glasses. In the beginning, the Government would replace the stolen accessories with new ones, but the new pair wouldn’t last long. It got really old really fast, and that’s when Aleeda Rodriguez Pedrasa came into the picture, as the guardian of the glasses.
A bankrupt Armenian dairy company that hasn’t paid employees and milk suppliers in months has announced that it will be settling debts in Roquefort blue mold cheese.
The Ashtarak Kat Company started producing large quantities of Roquefort blue mold cheese at its factory in Chambarak earlier this year. In 2015, it produced a trial lot under the brand “Molder Blue”, and market data showed that there was great demand for quality blue mold cheese, both from withing Armenia, but also abroad. Production was ramped up to full throttle in spring of this year, but Ashtarak struggled to find buyers for the cheese, and within just a few months it became unable to pay employees and local milk suppliers. Company debts reached 70 million Armenian dram, and it filed for bankruptcy.
With no cash to settle debts and its refrigerators stocked full of Roquefort cheese, Ashtarak decided that the best way to appease its angry workforce and local cattle farmers was to use the cheese as currency. The price per kilogram has been set at 2,000 dram, and all that remains is to split the cheese until the debts are settled. With around 60 tonnes of Roquefort in stock, the company has more than enough to pay off everyone and even cut some if its losses, but not everyone is happy with the solution.
Authorities in Ghana have recently shut down a fake United States embassy in the capital Accra that had been issuing illegally-obtained but authentic visas for the last 10 years. The fake institution was being run by members of organized crime from both Ghana and Turkey.
The real U.S. embassy in Acra is a large office building complete with security fencing and U.S. military guards, located in one of the city’s most expensive neighborhoods, while the fake one was just a rundown, pink two-storey building with a corrugated iron roof and a United States flag flown outside. There were no actual Americans working there, not even con artists. Instead the staff was made up of English-speaking Ghanian and Turkish citizens. And yet, for 10 years, the organized crime ring operating this fake embassy was able to convince people to pay thousands of dollars for visas and false identification documents. Maybe it was the portrait of Barrack Obama that police found inside that made the place seem legit.
If you’re sick of running out of battery on your smartphone when you need it the most, and don’t mind paying a whopping $2,480 on a coat, you might want to consider getting this solar-powered jacket that can charge your gadgets on the go.
COMME des GARÇONS’ alumnus Junya Watanabe first unveiled his FW16 solar-powered men’s coat back in March, but his unique creation is doing the rounds once again, after becoming available for purchase at the hefty price of $2,480. So what makes this coat so special, apart from being a designer item, you ask? Well, just in case the four large solar panels on the back and the two in the front haven’t given it away already, this coat harnesses the power of the sun, converts it to electricity and stores it in a hidden power pack for on-the-go charging.
For the last 20 years, Elizabeth Eaton Rosenthal, a.k.a. Elizabeth Sweetheart, a fine artist in Brooklyn, New York, has been dressing from head to toe in various shades of green. To her, green is the happiest, most positive color in the world, so she can’t imagine wearing anything else.
‘The Green Lady of Carroll Gardens’, as Elizabeth is most widely known, has always had a thing for experimenting. At one point in her life she wore only 1930s print dresses, before moving on to single colors, like silver, pink, purple, blue and finally green, which she surprisingly never got bored of. Her passion for green started with some home-mixed green nail polish and a neon lime streak in her hair, but it quickly spread to her clothing and her home, as well. Today, she always sports green hair, an attire made up of different hues of green, and most of the things she buys, from towels and skin care products to furniture and appliances, are also green. Read More »
If your idea of a good restaurant experience includes a nice conversation and interaction with the waiting staff, then Ichiran Ramen is probably not a place you want to visit. The popular Japanese chain is all about solo dining, taking extraordinary measures to ensure that patrons avoid human interaction as much as possible.
Manabu Yoshitomi, the founder of Ichiran Ramen, came up with the concept for his famous restaurants when he was just a high-school student, after seeing his female friends attempting to cover their mouths when eating ramen. After asking them about it, Yoshitomi discovered that their reluctance to being watched by other people as they slurped noodles was actually a huge barrier to them visiting ramen shops. This information inspired the young man to open a tonkotsu (pork bone) ramen restaurant that offered almost total privacy instead of human interaction.
They say chocolate makes everything better, and apparently premium wagyu beef is no exception. For the past 10 years, the Mayura Station Farm in southern Australia has been feeding its full-blood wagyu cattle chocolate and other sweets mixed with their regular feed, and the results have been spectacular.
When Scott de Bruin, managing partner at Mayura Station, returned to his father’s farm in the Limestone coast of Australia, in 1998, he knew he wanted to do something special to make their beef stand out from that of other luxury cattle farms around the world. But he didn’t know exactly how he was going to do that, so he consulted a cattle nutrition specialist from Japan and spent two years experimenting with different feed before deciding on the final daily ration for his wagyu cows – a special mix of regular feed, chocolate, gummy bears, strawberries and cream flavored gummy snakes. Each cow eats up to 2 kilograms of ground and partially broken chocolate delivered by Cadbury’s every day.
