In an effort to prove that been confined or quarantined indoors during the coronavirus pandemic is no excuse for neglecting daily exercise, a Spanish athlete recently spent ten hours running a 61-kilometer marathon in the comfort of his own home.

Like the vast majority of people in his country and much of Europe, Javier Castroverde, a 41-year-old triathlete from the Spanish region of Galicia, has been spending his days indoors, as part of a social distancing effort to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus. However, instead of binging on Netflix, napping and going on social media, he has been busy keeping in shape. Despite being confined to a relatively small apartment, Castroverde was able to run the equivalent of a 61-km marathon in about 10 hours. He shared the data recorded by a smartphone app and dedicated his feat to the health professionals risking their lives to help others.

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A Japanese man is facing serious charges for allegedly causing serious financial losses to his favorite baseball club after reserving and then cancelling nearly 1,900 seats for two of their league games, so he could have more space and stand out on TV.

41-year-old Kiyoshi Shibamura, a fan of the Orix Buffaloes baseball club from the Japanese city of Osaka, came up with an ingenious-yet-costly plan to watch his favorite team compete against the SoftBank Hawks at Osaka’s Kyocera Dome on the 28th and 29th of September, last year. To make sure he stood out on TV and enjoyed some serious privacy, he went through the trouble of creating 1,873 fake names and reserving the same number of stadium seats online. He then cancelled all but his own reservation right before the end of the reservation period, making sure than no one else managed to snatch the seats.

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This is a somewhat older story that was originally reported by media primarily in Indonesia and other East-Asian countries back in 2018. It got a lot of attention because it touched on a very taboo topic – the romantic relationship between an adult male teacher and a 13-year-old schoolgirl.

Erwin Pangaila was 27 when he fell in love with a junior high school student at the SMP Negeri 2 Tenga school, in Sulawesi Utara, Indonesia. In fact, it was 13-year-old Vinda Virginia who first noticed and approached him. She happened to walk by his classroom saw him writing on the blackboard and immediately fell for his broad shoulders and athletic physique. She wasn’t the only girl in school to have a crush on Erwin, but she was determined to be the one that won his heart. She started staying behind after classes to ask him questions and eventually, their student-teacher relationship turned into a romantic one.

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Saudi Arabia state-owned oil company, Aramco, has been forced to apologize for using one of its employees as a human stand for a hand sanitizing gel dispenser.

The oil giant attracted severe criticism this week after photos of one of its employees wearing a body suit with a hand sanitizer attached and a medical mask on his face started circulating on social media. The foreign employee can be seen standing as a virtual stand, as other employees use the gel dispenser he’s carrying. Although the intention may have been to raise awareness of the importance of cleaning your hands using sanitizer during the current Covid-19 pandemic, the humiliating role was harshly criticized.

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Ben Cullen, a former tattoo artist turned food artist extraordinaire, has been getting a lot of attention for his amazing cake illusions, which range from desserts disguised as fruits and vegetables, to treats shaped as realistic human hands.

Looking at Ben Cullen’s mind-blowing cakes, you would think that he has been baking all his life, but in fact he only got into cakes five years ago, when a client he was tattooing showed him some cake decorating models she had made, which he found to be fascinating. He felt like he needed to give it a try himself, an as soon as he did, he became hooked. He had no previous experience or even the faintest interest in making cakes at the time, but as soon as he saw what other food artist were capable of, he felt like he needed to master the craft.

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A young Canadian man who tattooed most of his body, including his face, hands and legs bright blue, claims that the “whimsical element” has really helped him enjoy his life way more than before.

Donnie Snider, a former forklift driver from Scarborough, in Canada’s Ontario region, started permanently coloring his body blue three years ago, and is now almost completely Smurf-like in color. It all started when he asked his sister to tattoo a part of his leg and foot with the bright blue hue; he liked it so much that he kept on turning part of his body blue, partly because of the psychological impact he experienced. If before he felt  trapped by conformity and had a “lack of confidence”, the permanent makeover really gave him a big boost.

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As part of a global effort to find a vaccine for the Covid-19 coronavirus, pharmaceutical companies are offering thousands of dollars to people willing to voluntarily get infected with a form of the virus and spend two weeks in isolation.

Being the first to come up with an effective vaccine for Covid-19 would undoubtedly prove very profitable for any pharmaceutical company, and many are spending big money to increase their chances of success. For example, several companies as well as public sector organizations have reportedly begun offering volunteers up to $4,500 to get infected with a form of the highly-contagious coronavirus to aid the search for a vaccine. It’s a tempting offer, especially for young, healthy and cash-strapped individuals, but there is a catch – they will be banned from contact with the outside world for at least two weeks.

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A French woman is facing up to 10 years in prison and a hefty fine of up to 150,000 euros ($170,000) for remarrying her ex-husband without his knowledge, in order to prevent him from moving on with his life.

The unnamed woman, who worked as a high-ranking judge in Hauts-de-Seine, France’s Ile-de-France region, reportedly decided to take revenge on her ex-husband, after he had left her for another woman. To add insult to injury, the woman had been dumped for the sister of a French minister that she herself had worked as a judicial adviser for. Her bizarre plan involved remarrying her husband without his knowledge or consent, so as to prevent him from moving on with his life alongside his new partner.

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Tatyana Dvazhdova, a 22-year-old female boxer from Russia doesn’t consider herself weaker than a man, and to prove this point she spent years hiding her gender and fighting male boxers under the fake name “Vladimir”.

During a conference called “International Women’s Day – Feminism, Socialism, Sexism”, Tatyana Dvazhdova revealed that a few years ago she posed as a male boxer in order to fight against other men and prove that she was their equal. The muscular woman cut her hair short, let her body hair grow and did everything she could to conceal her female traits. She even got a fake ID and fought under the name Vladimir Ermolaev , winning 9 out of her 17 boxing matches. Tatyana proved her point, that women can compete against men in boxing, but as soon as she revealed her true identity, she was banned from competing against men.

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When it comes to “package” size, most men are of the belief that bigger is better, but a new dating app is trying to help men better deal with the pressure of conforming to unrealistic body ideals by creating a space exclusively for individual with less than average size members…

The aptly named Dinky One is a dating app designed exclusively for men with appendages smaller than 5.5 inches, the global average erect penis length. Actually, woman and gender minorities can sign up as well, but as far as men go, only those with smaller packages that average are eligible to join. That’s because the main gist behind Dinky One is creating a space where less-endowed men can feel comfortable. To do that, Dinky One allows users to remain anonymous and doesn’t require people to upload a picture of themselves.

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Indian doctors recently reported the curious case of a young woman who underwent a double hand transplant almost three years ago and whose hands have changed color to match her skin tone.

21-year-old Shreya Siddanagowder lost both her hands in a freak road accident in 2016, when travelling from her hometown in Pune to her college in Karnataka. Doctors had no choice but to amputate both her hand and forearms, and she needed about a year to recover. As soon as she did, she visited the Amrita Institute to register for a double hand transplant, and doctors there miraculously managed to find a donor for her on that same day, August 9, 2017. There were almost 200 other people on the waiting list, some from foreign countries like Afghanistan or Bangladesh, but she was lucky enough to be compatible with the donor. Doctors called her at the hotel after her visit, and the transplant was carried out that same day.

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It used to be that if something looked, felt and tasted like beef steak, it was probably beef steak, but with the advent of 3D-printing technology as well as meatless meats, that’s no longer the case.

Spanish startup NovaMeat claims to have created the world’s first 3D-printed plant based beef steak, which allegedly has the same texture and appearance as a real beef muscle cut. The Barcelona-based company was reportedly able to achieve this by “finely tuning” the structure of plant-based proteins at a microscopic level. The novel plant-based meat not only matches the unique texture of beef steak, but also its color, which should make it more appealing as a sustainable alternative to real beef steak.

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A New Delhi man was arrested this past Saturday after stealing no less than eight motorcycles to impress his girlfriend who had allegedly teased him about not having one.

The culprit, known only as Lalit, had reportedly never shied away from throwing and attending parties in the New Delhi area, as a way of impressing his girlfriend. But on Valentine’s Day, last month, his efforts appeared pointless as she started teasing him about not having his own motorcycle. She was right, but he felt hurt by her words, so together with a close friend, Lalit decided he would get not one but many motorcycles to prove his worth to his girlfriend. Unfortunately, his plan only landed him in jail.

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A popular televangelist was recently issued a cease and desist order by the New York attorney general to stop promoting his cure-all product as a cure for the highly-contagious Covid-19 coronavirus strain.

The last thing you would expect a holy man to do is promote a fake cure against a potentially deadly disease to desperate people for profit, and yet, that’s allegedly exactly what Rev. Jim Bakker has been doing. To be fair, Bakker had long been peddling his “Silver Solution” – a scientifically unproven medication made from the precious metal – as a cure for all sorts of ailments, but when he included the rapidly-spreading Covid-19 coronavirus strain to the list of curable diseases, authorities stepped in.

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I don’t know what it is about Japanese men and bicycle seats, but for some reason some men can never have enough of these seats. Just a few months after writing about a man who stole 159 bike seats in a year, we now have the story of another Japanese man who claims to have stolen over 5,800 seats over the lasts 25 years.

Hiroaki Suda, a 57-year-old truck driver, was arrested on Feb. 13 after surveillance cameras caught him stealing two bicycle seats worth about ¥8,000 ($75) on Nov. 29 and 30, 2019, at a train station and a parking lot for bicycles in Higashiosaka, Japan’s Osaka prefecture. Suda admitted to the charges, and for some reason confessed to police that he had started stealing bicycle seats about a quarter century before, and had since put together quite and impressive collection.

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