Every year, during the rainy season, trillions of midges – small flies – rise from the water of Lake Victoria, in Africa, and fly in giant swarms that are said to be so dense they can suffocate a person. However, for the people living on the shores of the great lake, they are just a welcome source of protein.

Some bird species migrate to Lake Victoria during the rainy season so they can take advantage of this free feast. The flies create a sort of constantly buzzing living smog and cover every available surface as they break off from their mating ritual. But no matter how many of them are gobbled up by birds and other natural predators, there are always more than enough for the locals. As disgusting as eating flies may seem, the reality is they make up a huge quantity of biomass equivalent with large herds of big game. People living on the shores of Lake Victoria simply can’t ignore the nutritious protein flying all around them, so they catch the flies and cook them as charcoal-black fly burgers.

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Chen Yinxi, a 27-year-old motorist from China, stole the show at the 2015 Hainan International Automotive Industry Exhibition, last week, with an impressive-looking futuristic supercar he built by himself, from scratch.

Majoring in automobile engineering, Chen has always dreamed of doing car design, and spent two years studying it in school. However, his parents always had other plans – their son was to work in the family factory, which he will one day inherit from his father. They encouraged him to drop out of college to work at the factory, but have remained supportive of him working on car design as a hobby. Now that the young motorist has gained international attention for building an original-looking supercar by himself, their plans may have to change.

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Constantly having to look at your cat’s butt comes with the territory when you’e a pet owner. Luckily, however, now you don’t have to, thanks to a little accessory called Twinkle Tush.

Some people are apparently put off by the sight of a cat’s bare derriere, but now you can just cover that sucker up with some fake bling. Introducing the Twinkle Tush, a plastic jewel that hangs around the base of the feline’s tail and covers its butt. It was introduced to the world on July 8th, when the makers of Cat Crib, a cat hammock that attaches to chair legs, released a video of felines wearing the Twinkle Tush.Cats are usually don’t like it when you mess with their tales and will do anything to remove whatever you attach to them, but they seemed oddly comfortable wearing this concealing piece of plastic.

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When you think “kawaii” and “J-pop” the first image that comes into your head is probably not of a fit, hairy Caucasian dude wearing pony tails and tiny women’s clothes. Which is exactly what makes “Ladybeard” so unique and popular in Japan.

Richard Magarey hails from the Australian city of Adelaide, but moved to Hong Kong in 2006 to pursue a career in martial arts stunt career. Drama had been the only thing he was good at in school, and because he also practiced martial arts, he decided to pursue a career as a stunt actor. He worked as ‘Mirrorball Man’ for a while, a persona that required him to put on a giant mirror ball, go to clubs and get patrons grooving to dance music. As weird as that may sound, Magarey claims the gig changed his notion of what a performance could be. “I was in a costume and environment that stripped me of my usual physical, vocal and emotional expression,” he said, in an interview with Japan Today.

But it wasn’t until he got involved in wrestling and adopted a truly bizarre persona that the Australian entertainer discovered what destiny had in store for him. After training in a wrestling gym for over two months, Richard showed up for his first match wearing a skimpy Lolita dress and his hair tied in two childish ponytails. He still had his fuzzy beard and hadn’t bothered to shave his hairy body either. He remembers sitting backstage and thinking to himself “What am I doing? I’m wearing a dress, about to go do this thing that I’ve been doing for two months, in front of a bunch of people. What is wrong with me? Why did I make this decision?” But he eventually did it anyway, and everyone loved it. Ladybeard was born that night, and the rest, as they say, is history.

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Fed up of with being constantly groped by women, the waiters of Scottish pub ‘Hootananny’, in Inveness, have decided to stop wearing their kilts. That’s a pretty big deal, since Hootananny staff have been wearing tartan to match the traditional Scottish atmosphere, ever since the place opened. But now the guys say that they’re being sexually harassed by female revelers who lift up their kilts to check if they are true Scotsmen!

According to Hootananny assistant manager Iain Howie, the harassment usually occurs during the weekends when the pub is at its busiest. “You get large groups of drinking women circling around when you are collecting glasses and asking whether you are a true Scotsman,” he said. “And they find out for themselves.”

“The first few times it’s funny,” he added. “But when it is really busy and everyone has to work fast and hard, and your hands are full of glasses, you feel quite vulnerable. You are thinking, ‘are you going to get broken glasses, or is your kilt going to get lifted up again?’ They see it as a bit of fun, but it is a bit of an embarrassment.”

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29-year-old Ren Lu You is so fed up of trying to find his soul mate that he’s actually outsourcing the job. The young man from Alabama has created his own dating website which explicitly states: “Find me a girlfriend and I’ll pay you $10,000. Seriously.”

Ren, a Harvard Business School graduate, moved to Birmingham last year for work. He spent the last 12 months going on a lot of dates, “some interesting, some dull, and a few utterly bizarre” ones. But then he felt like he was wasting too much time, so he decided to cut to the chase by offering money in exchange for connections. “If you introduce me to a girl and I date her for more than 6 months, I’ll pay you $10,000,” his website states. There’s a catch, though: if a woman submits her own name, she isn’t eligible for the reward.

Ren’s dating strategy is unconventional, and also a bit weird, but he offers an explanation: “Look at it this way: if you work 12 hours/day, how would you want to spend the few waking hours you have left?” he writes. “Probably not standing around in a bar with your fingers crossed. This way is more fun for me.” And he told Business Insider that he thinks $10,000 is a pretty reasonable fee for such a service, given the importance of meeting someone you may end up marrying.

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A pastor from South Africa, who previously made headlines for praying for his congregation until they stripped, is now in the news again for turning a young woman’s hair into food and having his followers eat it straight from her head.

Pictures posted on The End Times Disciples Ministries’ Facebook page show the pastor, Prophet Penuel Mnguni, placing his hands on the woman. Other members of the congregation are seen holding her hair in their hands and actually attempting to eat it. The pictures are captioned: “Man of God held the head of a woman of God Thapelo from Mabopane and her hair turned into food for the sons and daughters of God to eat. Everything depends on what we say because we carry life in our tongue.”

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There are two things you need to have if you live on Baldwin Street, in the city of Dunedin, New Zealand – strong leg muscles and stamina! Locals claim that the 350-m long street holds the world record for the steepest in the world, and while this isn’t officially confirmed, it’s definitely believable – the street is so steep that it had to be laid with concrete, because asphalt would flow down the slope on a warm day.

Baldwin street has a maximum slope of 1:2.86, a 36% gradient. This means that for every 2.86 meters traveled horizontally, the street rises by one meter. That’s plenty of exercise for the residents of the residential suburb of North East Valley, where the street is located. The lower reaches are only moderately steep, but the upper reaches are hair-raisingly abrupt.

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Thousands of Instagrammers around the world are risking skin cancer in a bid to follow the latest online craze – ‘sunburn art’.

One of the unhealthiest trends to hit social media in recent years, sunburn art involves using sunscreen or stencils on parts of their body to burn various designs into their skin. The sunburn patterns range from straight lines to floral themes and abstract shapes. Some designs cover a small patch of skin, while others span the entire body.

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A homeless man in Moscow has steadily been building himself an army of followers online ever since he started video blogging in May. The self-confessed ‘bum-blogger’ says his videos are so popular because they “show you the Moscow you have not yet seen “.

Many of the homeless blogger’s videos have gone viral in Russia, and his YouTube channel – where he goes by ‘Zhenya Yakut’ – now has over 35,000 subscribers. His most-viewed videos have nearly half a million hits, and he has over 3,000 followers on Instagram. Yakut, 43, says he’s been homeless for five years now. Through his videos, he tries to give people the low-down about life as a homeless man in Moscow, including “where to eat for free, to sleep, to wash up, where to go, what to see.”

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One of the most exclusive colleges in the world is located bang in the middle of the remote high California desert. The institution accepts only 12 male students a year, and believe it or not, it consistently tops Harvard’s yield rate!

Deep Springs College, founded in 1917, is unusual in every imaginable way. It has a miniscule student body, an alfalfa-farm-and-cattle-ranch campus, and a mandatory 20 hours of manual labor per week. In fact, the college was built on the concepts of self-governance, manual labor, and rigorous academics. So the 24-odd guys up there spend their college years studying hard and, farming even harder.

Located in the Inyo-White Mountains, just east of the Owens Valley and the Sierra Nevada range, the campus spans 50 square miles in Deep Springs Valley. It offers a two-year liberal arts course, technically making it a junior college. But according to Vanity Fair, “Roughly 80 percent go on as juniors to colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia and Oxford, while the remainder typically embark on a year of service first.” This places Deep Springs college in a category of its own.

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Twitter, along with countless other social media websites, is often viewed as a productivity killer. But a small town in Spain has actually been using the platform to improve communication between authorities and the people. In fact, Twitter is so important to the people of Jun that they actually built a monument of the iconic ‘blue bird’ in the town’s square.

Since September 2011, the 3,500-strong community has used Twitter to spread local news, developments, job opportunities, orbituaries, and even school dinner menus! Residents book doctor’s appointments, register consumer complaints, and report crimes through their tweets. Jun’s Mayor, José Antonio Rodriguez Salas, has his own account, with a massive following of over 340,000. Locals can contact the Mayor by tweeting him directly.

All the town’s public services, including the police force, have their own Twitter accounts. The force, consisting of only one officer, drives a squad car with ‘@PoliciaJun’ painted on the bonnet. In fact, the bird logo can be seen everywhere, including the Mayor’s office. Even the guy who sweeps the streets tweets amusing messages, with before and after shots of his handiwork.  The town’s elderly aren’t ignored either – there’s a special program in place to teach them how to use the internet and social media.

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The otherwise quiet town of Westfield, New Jersey, has become the focus of international media attention, after a family was reportedly forced out of their home by a series of bone-chilling letters from a stalker who calls himself “The Watcher”.

Derek and Maria Broaddus bought the six-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot turn-of-the century home for $1.3 million, in June 2014. Three days after signing the papers, they started receiving creepy letters from someone who claimed to be watching the house. “My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time,” the first one read. “I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming.”

The creepy letters also mentioned the Broaddus’ children: “Do you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested?” the mysterious stalker asked. “Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them out to me.”

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A 65-year-old dog lover from China, has gone to great lengths to save as many dogs as she possibly could from being eaten during this year’s Yulin Dog Meat Festival. She managed to pay around $1,000 for the release of 100 otherwise doomed canines. It may not sound like much, but the media attention her actions got in international media also helped raise awareness about the cruel festival, thus increasing the chances of it being banned in the near future.

Yang Xiaoyun, a retired school teacher from Tianjin, China, traveled 1,500 miles from her home to the city of Yulin, to save scores of dogs from being slaughtered and eaten during the Dog Meat Festival. Photos shared on Chinese internet portal Netease show the 65-year-old woman walking through a market where dogs were kept in cages and paying for various sums of money for their release. Reports say she ended up paying 7,000 yuan ($1,000) to save 100 dogs.

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Calling Albert Podell ‘well traveled’ would be an understatement. 78-year-old Podell, a former Playboy editor, can truly say that he’s seen it all, after spending half a century visiting every country in the world. He’s encountered pretty much everything on his travels, right from guerillas in Yemen, to flying-crab attacks in Algeria, and police interrogations in Cuba. He has chased water buffaloes, broken his bones, and eaten all kinds of weird stuff. He’s been robbed, arrested, and almost lynched!

Podell was bitten by the travel bug at a very young age. “Aged six, I started to collect postage stamps, and where the other kids specialised in certain countries, I wanted a stamp from every country in the world,” he told Daily Mail. “Getting a passport stamp from every one may have been inspired by that.”

“Those little coloured bits of perforated paper also instilled in me a fascination with travel because I wanted to see the lands where all the objects, people, and places depicted on those stamps came from.” So he resolved early on that “there was more to life than hanging around in one city forever.”

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