A 31-year-old man from the UK works as an “expert waiter” in his spare time, spending hours in long queues on behalf of rich people too busy to do it themselves.

For the last three years, Freddie Beckitt, a historical fiction writer from Fulham, in the United Kingdom, has been supplementing his monthly revenue by working as a professional queuer, waiting in line on behalf of wealthy clients to the tune of £20 ($27) an hour. By virtue of being a Londoner, Beckitt says he has queuing “down to an art” and will easily spend hours standing in line, as long as someone is willing to pay him for it. In fact, he only wishes he could spend more time in queues, so he could turn his service into a full-time job.

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An 87-year-old Iranian man who has been living on the streets and hasn’t taken a bath in almost seven decades recently baffled scientists with his good health.

We first wrote about Amou Haji in 2014, dubbing him ‘the world’s dirtiest man‘. At the time, he was living in a small village in Southern Iran’s Fars province, surviving on roadkill and dirty water, and staying as far from bathwater as possible, thinking it would make him sick. He was 80-years-old at the time and appeared to be in good overall health, despite his questionable hygiene and living conditions. Well, apparently not much has changed since then, as a team of doctors recently conducted a series of tests that showed he was in surprisingly good health.

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Japanese lingerie manufacturer Wacoal recently launched a line of lace boxer briefs for men that are said to be both beautiful and functional.

Lace lingerie doesn’t sound like the most masculine thing ever, but reputed underwear company Wacoal didn’t just jump into this project blindly. In November of last year, they tested the waters of this ultra-niche market by offering the Lace Boxer on Japanese crowdfunding platform Makuake. The company knew it had a winner on its hands when its product smashed its modest crowdfunding goal of 300,000 yen ($2,627.87) by 1,090 percent, earning about 3.27 million yen ($28,578.92) in pledges. The Lace Boxer went straight into production, and now Wacoal offers an entire line that consists of seven colors.

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An 85-year-old man from India’s Bihar state is being investigated after claiming to have received 11 Covid-19 vaccine doses in less than a year.

Brahmdeo Mandal, a retired postman from Bihar’s Madhepura district was stopped from getting what he claimed would have been his 12th Covid-19 shot at the beginning of January. Although it’s unclear how exactly word of Mandal’s vaccination marathon reached authorities, it is believed that he boasted about the positive effects of the repeated jabs on his general health to someone, and they tipped off the police. You see, instead of the terrifying potential side effects touted by anti-vaxers, Brahmdeo Mandal claims that the Covid-19 vaccine has made his ailments, many of them considered normal at his age, disappear.

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Saskatchewan’s Crooked Bush, a small grove of aspen trees that grew in a very unusual way, is a botanical oddity that has fascinated both tourists and scientists for years.

Aspen trees don’t usually grow crooked. Like most other threes, they grow straight up, towards the sun, but not the specimens that make up the Crooked Bush. Located near Hafford, in Canada’s Saskatchewan province, this anomaly is the world’s only known crooked aspen tree grove. The strange appearance of the trees was first observed in the 1940s and it has since attracted thousands of tourists to this place. The advent of the internet only made the Crooked Bush more popular and there is now even a wooden walkway that visitors can use to avoid stepping on new growth.

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Indian police recently arrested a disgruntled charity worker accused of setting fire to a bank branch in Karnataka after being denied a loan.

33-year-old Wasim Hazaratsab Mulla, a charity worker from Haveri, approached state-run Canara Bank for a loan of 1.6 million rupees ($21,600) in December of last year. His application was eventually denied, because of discrepancies in the submitted paperwork which broke the bank’s credit policy. Wasim allegedly didn’t take the news too kindly, riding his motorcycle to the bank branch on Sunday, January 9th, breaking open a window to spray a flammable liquid inside and setting the building on fire.

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A 57-year-old Tongan man who reportedly swam for 28 hours after being washed to sea by a tsunami has been dubbed a real-life Aquaman.

On Saturday, the island nation of Tonga was hit by a devastating tsunami caused by the eruption of an underwater volcano. Lisala Folau, who lived on the small island of Atata, which is about 8km northwest of Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa, was alerted about the incoming tsunami by his brother and managed to take refuge in a tree. However, he came down after the tsunami passed and was taken by surprise by a second, even bigger wave that swept him and his family out to sea. Despite having serious mobility issues, Folau managed to swim for a total of 28 hours and eventually reached the southern tip of Tongatapu, on the other side of the country.

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Authorities in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, have come up with an ingenious way of getting drunk drivers to reflect on their behavior – they are now required to clean funeral parlors in order to feel what it’s like being close to death.

Last month, Kaohsiung was rocked by a car accident caused by a drunk driver, which left one family man dead and three other people injured. Mayor Chen Qimai announced that those convicted of drunk driving or deferred prosecution should perform social labor service at local funeral parlors as punishment. A couple of days ago, the first batch of 11 drunk drivers went to Kaohsiung City Funeral Management Office to accept their punishment and spent hours cleaning the mortuary, refrigeration unit, and the crematorium.

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A 79-year-old man who underwent a series of cosmetic procedures to make himself look young found himself unable to fully close his eyes, and having to tape them shut at night.

Pete Broadhurst decided to go under the knife in 2019, after the mother of his two children allegedly broke up with him over his looks. A dental procedure he had done earlier had left him with puffy hamster cheeks, so he decided to get those fixed and smooth out some of the wrinkles on his face as well. He ended up paying £11,000 for a neck lift, under-eye blepharoplasty and a rhinoplasty, but despite being discharged from the hospital soon after the nine-hour procedure, he immediately knew something was wrong.

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Once driven close to extinction, the blue cows of Latvia, a proud symbol of the Baltic country, have been making a comeback over the last couple of decades.

Originally found only on the Baltic coast in the Kurzeme region, cows with light blue or dark ultramarine hides can now be found grazing all over the Latvian countryside. In the Soviet era, they were rendered almost extinct, with only a few specimens surviving the culling. Even back in the year 2000 there were only 18 blue cows in Latvia, but today they number around 1,500. The unique breed is now considered a symbol of national identity.

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The Tamaskan is a relatively new and rare breed of dog created with the specific purpose of mimicking the looks of a grey wolf without any genetic relation to the wild predator.

In the 1980s, a group of British dog breeders set out on a mission to develop a new dog breed with a wolf-like appearance. To that end, they combined German Shepherds, Siberian Huskies, Alaskan Malamutes, and Samoyeds, and the Tamaskan was one of the breeds they came up with. However, some experts believe that crossing this new breed with the Czechoslovakian Wolfdog made the Tamaskan what it is today. But while the Tamaskan may look like an actual wolf, or at least a close cousin, genetically speaking, there is no relation between the two species. The Tamaskan is all dog.

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Most people can only dream of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their dream home, but some are paying the same amounts, if not more, on intricate, fully-furnished playhouses for their kids.

Charmed Playhouses, a family business based in Letherbridge, Canada, claims to build the world’s most fantastic, luxurious and quality playhouses, and looking at some of their creation, we’re inclined to agree. But before you start dreaming about your very own backyard fantasy playhouse, you should know that some of these can cost an arm and a leg. Even though prices start at a respectable $3,500 for a basic playhouse, if you’re looking for something special, the bill can easily go into the tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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Two LAPD police officers ended up losing their jobs after ignoring calls about a robbery so they could drive around hunting pokemon in the augmented reality mobile game Pokemon Go.

Last week, California’s court of appeals upheld a previous decision according to which officers Louis Lozano and Eric Mitchell were rightfully terminated from the Los Angeles Police Department almost five years ago. Court documents showed that in April 2017 the two men were driving in their patrol car and discussing Pokemon Go, when they were asked to respond to a robbery in progress with “multiple suspects” at a Macy’s in southwest LA. The officers chose to ignore the call, with Mitchell reportedly saying ‘Aw, screw it,’ choosing to hunt for a nearby pokemon called a Snorlax instead.

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An Indian man who had become paralyzed and unable to speak after being involved in a tragic car accident 5 years ago, reportedly started walking and talking again after getting the Covid-19 vaccine.

We keep hearing about potential negative side-effects of getting vaccinated against the coronavirus, but Dularchand Munda, a 55-year-old man from India’s Jharkhand state will tell you that getting the Covid-19 vaccine was the best thing that ever happened to him. Bedridden and unable to speak ever since being involved in a serious car accident 5 years ago, Dularchand got the jab on January 4th and started regaining feeling in his legs within a few hours. Now, he is able to speak again and can walk with the help of a walking cane.

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A Japanese engineering university in Kumamoto is famous for holding a unique competition, challenging students to build toothpick towers that can resist a simulated earthquake.

As you probably already know, because of its location in the Circum-Pacific Mobile Belt, where there is constant seismic and volcanic activity, Japan is the world’s most earthquake-prone country. Even though Japan takes up only 0.25% of the land area on our planet, 18.5% of earthquakes in the world occur here. So I guess you can say that building earthquake-resistant architecture is paramount for the Japanese nation. To that end, one engineering school has been challenging students to come up with toothpick tower designs that can resist a simulated earthquake.

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