Kayabuki no Sato, a small hamlet in Kyoto famous for its traditional thatched roof houses, features a concealed sprinkler system that turns the whole place into a water fountain.

Known as Miyama’s Thatched Village, Kayabuki no Sato has a higher percentage of thatched roof farmhouses than any other place in Japan. This makes it very popular with tourists, who love walking among the over 40 traditional thatched roof abodes and even spending the night in one of them, but also very vulnerable to fire. Local officials realized this in the year 2000, when a fire burned down the archive center, so apart from asking people to be vigilant at all times, they decided to install a special sprinkler system to cover the whole hamlet. They test it twice a year, usually in May and December, and people from all over Japan and beyond come to see the powerful sprinklers in action.

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A newly-married woman from the UAE recently filed for divorce from her husband, who she accused of being too cheap and making her pay for everything.

Arabic newspaper Al Baiyan reports that the unnamed woman filed a case in the Personal Status Chamber at Abu Dhabi court, asking for a divorce from her Iranian husband, even though they were technically still in their honeymoon. She claims that the man, who is 13 years her junior, asked her to pay for everything, including groceries and bills for electricity and water. The scorned woman is apparently so determined to be rid of her husband that she agreed to waive all of her rights just to get the divorce.

The woman complained that her “cheap” husband specifically asked her to register all utility bills under her name, claiming that he had lost all of his personal documents. Her attorney told the court that the man even asked her to handle all the registration for services, while he had his personal documents processed.

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Laleh Mohmedi is an acclaimed food artist with hundreds of thousands of fans on social media, but few people know her career began as a way to make food more appealing for her son.

While most parents discourage their children from playing with their food, Australian blogger and food artist Laleh Mohmedi has literally made a career out of making edible toys for her son. It all started one day when she decided to mold her three-year-old son’s spelt pancake in the shape of a lion, to make it more appealing. He loved it, and, inspired by his reaction, Mohmedi continued experimenting with food art. After posting some of her best works on social media, she learned that her son wasn’t the only one who loved food sculptures shaped as popular cartoon characters and various celebrities. She now has over 150,000 followers on Instagram alone and works with some of the world’s biggest brands.

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Ma Sanxiao, a 70-year-old double amputee and army veteran from Jingxing, North China’s Hebei province, has pent the last 19 years of his life planting thousands of trees and turning the once barren hills surrounding his village into a small forest.

Ma was diagnosed with blood poisoning in 1974, while serving in the Chinese Army. His condition got worse after he retired, and eventually had both legs amputated because of it – his right leg in 1985, and the left one in 2005. After seven major operations and constant medical treatments, he could barely afford to take care of his family, and ,because of his disability, finding a job proved very difficult. His veteran subsidy was enough to cover his medicine, but he couldn’t remain idle, so in 2000, after getting inspired by another tree-planting story on TV, the double-amputee started planting parasol trees in the barren hills around his remote village, with the intention of selling them for profit.

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Inspired by 17th century German monks who allegedly survived on a rich beer called doppelbock during Lent, an Ohio man has embarked on a 46-day beer diet, dropping all solid food until Easter Sunday.

Many Christians choose not to consume beer during Lent, as a way of abstaining for something they find pleasurable, but Dell Hall, the director of sales at Fifty West Brewing Company in Cincinnati, Ohio, is doing the exact opposite. On March 6th, he embarked on a 46-day beer diet, dropping all solid food and getting his nutrients only from beer and vitamin supplements. Although he admits the first few days were rough, Hall claims he now feels amazing and is 25 pounds lighter than when he started.

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A 3km stretch of narrow road in the village of Taojia, China’s Shaanxi Province, has been dubbed the world’s most well-lit road, with over 1,000 light posts lining it on both sides.

Street lights are usually installed 30 to 50 meters apart from each other, but in Taojia, they can be as close as 3 meters from each other, on both sides of the narrow road. Instead of making life easier for the drivers during the night, the large number of street lights have become a nuisance for them, as they have to be extra careful not to crash into one. And it’s not like the village road is thick with traffic anyway. In fact, a team of reporters recently visited the village to investigate this famous road and reported that no cars passed through during their hour-long stay. So why the absurd number of street lights? Well, apparently, the answer is “money”.

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CCTV footage showing a 12-year-old boy from the town of Moche, in Peru, doing his homework on the sidewalk, under a streetlight, because his family can’t afford electricity in their home, has been viewed millions of times on social media after being shared by local police.

Staff at the Moche police department first noticed Víctor Martín Angulo Córdoba late last month, while checking security cameras. They noticed a young boy sitting on the sidewalk by himself at night, which they thought was suspicious. It was only when they zoomed in that they realized he was actually reading and writing something in his notebook, taking advantage of the streetlight overhead. Touched by the boy’s dedication to his studies, the police department shared the CCTV video on their official Facebook account and it quickly went viral.

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In a medical case that doctors have called a “world’s first”, a Taiwanese woman was found to have four live sweat bees living in her eye, feeding on her tears.

The patient, referred to only as Ms. He, was reportedly tidying up a relative’s grave at the cemetery by pulling out weeds when a gust of wind blew what she though was sand and dirt into her eye. She cleaned her eyes with water, but a few hours later she started feeling a sharp pain in her left eye and started constantly tearing up. The 20-something woman was taken to Fooyin University Hospital in Taiwan’s southern county of Pingtung , where ophthalmologists were shocked to find four live sweat bees feeding on her eye like it was a salt lick.

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If you love exotic fish and don’t mind hundreds of them eyeballing you while you answer nature’s call, you’ll probably love using this unique aquarium toilet in Akashi, Japan.

Hipopo Papa (formerly Mumin Papa) Cafe, used to be known as one of the most popular dating spots on Hayashizaki Matsue Coast. It still is, but ever since the owner decided to do something special with the women’s toilet, it’s become famous primarily for being the only cafe in Japan – and probably the world – to feature an aquarium toilet. It’s technically surrounded on three sides by a giant aquarium filled with hundreds of exotic fish and a male turtle, which, considering this is a women’s only toilet, is a bit weird.

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Dozens of shoppers at a Lidl supermarket in Gloucestershire, UK, recently reported mysterious anomalies with their car alarms and central locking systems which left them unable to leave the parking lot.

There’s something fishy going on in the parking lot of a Lidl supermarket in Kingswood, a suburb on the eastern side of Bristol City, but nobody knows what’s causing it. Last month several articles in the media reported cases of shoppers being unable to lock and unlock their cars or disable their alarm systems, and dozens of other people shared similar experiences in the comments section and on social media. At first, most of the “victims” of this bizarre phenomenon though the batteries of their car alarm keys had died, but the symptoms persisted even after changing the batteries. Some think it might have something to do with the Internet-based traffic cameras installed in the car park, which may be blocking systems, but the supermarket chain claims that’s very unlikely.

A Lidl spokesperson told The Mirror that the internet-based cameras don’t transmit a signal that could interfere with that of an alarm key, but admitted that they have no idea what’s causing so many of them to malfunction in this particular location.

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A 19-year-old woman from the UK went from having no idea she was pregnant to giving birth to a healthy baby girl, literally overnight, after going to bed with a flat stomach and waking up with a full-on baby bump.

On the morning of July 17, 2018, 19-year-old Emmalouise Leggate got the shock of her life. She woke up with a baby where there hadn’t been one the night before. Alarmed, the teenager called her mom, who in turn contacted her grandmother Louise to see if she could make sense of the bulging belly. Louise could tell it was a baby bump the moment she saw it, so she drove Emmalouise to the hospital and had her wait in the car while she went in to find a midwife. Only by the time she came back, the teen had given birth in the backseat. She had only noticed the baby bump 45 minutes earlier.

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Two Arkansas men were arrested this week for taking turns shooting each other with a semi-automatic rifle while wearing a bulletproof vest.

50-year-old Charles Eugene Ferris was admitted to a Benton County hospital late last Sunday with a red spot on his upper chest. Doctors there notified police about the suspicious wound and in an interview with a deputy from the Benton County Sheriff’s Office, the man tried to come up with a plausible explanation. He claimed that an “asset” had paid him $200 for protection and after they met with a third individual at around 10 p.m. on Sunday, a gunfight ensued. The 50-year-old told police that he had been shot several times and returned fire before escaping in a car. Luckily, he had been wearing a bulletproof vest, but the asset brought him to the hospital anyway. Unfortunately, Ferris forgot to tell his wife his version of the story, so she spilled the beans on what really happened.

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For over a year a couple angered their neighbors by keeping around 10,000 bees in the balcony of their high-rise apartment in the Chinese city of Ningbo.

Police were recently called to a residential building in the coastal city of Ningbo after a couple living there ignored numerous complaints from their neighbors about the thousands of pet bees they kept on their balcony. About a year ago, the unnamed couple installed a small beehive in their high-rise apartment with the intention of using them for “bee sting treatment”, a form of alternative medicine believed to help alleviate the symptoms of painful conditions like rheumatoid arthritis. However, the insects kept breeding and their number swelled to around 10,000, becoming a nuisance to the other residents.

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Russian social media giant VKontakte and online video subscription platform Amediateka recently launched a unique experiment where a person who has never watched Game of Thrones spends a week binge watching the series for 10 hours a day in a transparent glass cube.

The project, called “One More and I Sleep. Seriality”, is designed to promote the 8th season of Game of Thrones, which launches on April 15, in Russia. VK and Amediateka managed to find a young man who had never watched an episode of the popular HBO series and convinced him to binge watch all 7 previous seasons for 10 hours a day locked in a glass cube at the October Cinema Center, in Moscow. The protagonist of this experiment is not able to leave the cube – except the occasional trip to the toilet – until he finishes watching all the episodes of Game of Thrones, which organizers estimate will take about a week.

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PomPom, an adorable Pomeranian from Singapore, recently achieved celebrity status on social media thanks to the efforts of a freelance groomer who managed to turn him into a fluffy egg.

Back in January Andrea Aubrey Sim (@groomer_andrea), a freelance groomer from Singapore, posted photos and videos of one of her most ingenious projects yet, a cute Pomeranian styled to look like a giant egg. She posted the results of her labor on Instagram, but they only went viral late last month, spawning the now trending “Egg Dog” meme. In a video shot from just the right angle, Pom Pom can be seen sitting still, with his ears flat behind his head. while the groomer puts the finishing touches on her work of art – a living dog shaped like an egg.

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