Hello Kitty was designed to appeal to young girls, but its biggest fan may just be an adult Japanese man. 67-year-old Masao Gunji has been collecting Hello Kitty memorabilia for the last 30 years, and he was recently acknowledged by Guinness Records as the owner of the largest Hello Kitty collection in the world.

Gunji, a retired police officer from Yotsukaido, in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, bought his first Hello Kitty item over thee decades ago, at a sightseeing spot. He just thought it looked really cute, and it ended up making his stressful job a bit easier. Whenever he would take a look at the cute character, it put a smile on his face and helped him push through whatever hardships he faced. Masao soon became a Hello Kitty fan and started buying all kinds of items featuring Sanrio’s popular creation. But his obsession really kicked in after he retired from the police force.

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Most people have never even seen, let alone tasted, white strawberries, but they’ve been a staple of the Japanese luxury fruit market for years. The Asian country actually has several varieties of white strawberries, among which the White Jewel, or Shiroi Houseki stands out as the rarest and most expensive.

White Jewel strawberries were created four years ago, by Yasuhito Teshima, and his farm in Japan’s Saga Prefecture remains the only one in the world that produces this unique fruit. Teshima-san claims he spent years cross-breeding different types of strawberries and perfecting his growing technique in order to come up with a large strawberry that was white both on the inside and the outside.

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Thai women looking to date a walking ATM machine, but with no clue on how to catch one, can now rely on the services of “Madam Raya”, a seduction expert who claims to have dated 5,000 wealthy men. She is offering online course to help like-minded women bag the rich foreigner of their dreams.

24-year-old Praiya Suriya has been advising other Thai women in the art of seduction for four years now, via her popular Facebook page. She specializes in rich foreigners, and claims to have dated 5,000 of them, which, at her age is definitely an impressive achievement. Suriya recently made news headlines in Thailand after announcing a series of paid online courses that are 100% guaranteed to help takers find the perfect sugar daddy and teach them how to deal with them in order to get their hands on huge sums of money and expensive presents.

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Dr. Sri Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swamiji has recently been recognized by Guinness Book of Records for housing the most bird species under a single roof, 468. He is not a collector who takes pleasure in depriving exotic birds of their freedom, but simply a compassionate man who rescues endangered, injured and abandoned birds from around the world and offers sanctuary in his aviary.

Swamiji, the founder of Avadhoota Datta Peetham ashram, in Mysuru, India, has been passionate about birds for as long as he can remember. Growing up in Mekedattu woods, on the shores of the Cauvery river, he remembers spending much of his time watching many species of birds as they took shelter in the trees outside his house. But it was an accident in 2011 that made him understand his purpose in life – to save as many endangered and abandoned birds as possible – and build his 21-acre aviary in the forests of Mysuru.

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Aílton Manuel da Silva is not your usual waiter. He dresses as one, carries himself as one and even sports a tray full of cold drinks and snacks, but instead of a restaurant or a cafe, he works in the streets, braving the hot sun and incoming traffic to provide for his family. He is the “traffic waiter” of Recife, and probably the world’s most elegant street vendor.

Every morning at 5 a.m., 43-year-old Aílton Manuel da Silva wakes up, puts on his creased pants, white shirt, bow tie and lacquered shoes and leaves for work. He arrives at the busy intersection of Avenida Almirante Dias Fernandes and Rua Emiliano Ribeiro at around 5:30 and gets ready for a long day of waiting through traffic. He prepares his bottles of cold water, cans of soda and snacks like popcorn and chips, sets them neatly on his metal tray, and at 7 in the morning he steps into traffic to offer motorists his assortment of refreshments.

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When they hear the phrase “ice cream sandwich”, most people think about creamy ice-cream squeezed between two waffers or cookies, but in Mexico, it can mean a regular bun stuffed with scoops of ice-cream.

Street vendors in various parts of Mexico have been selling “tortas de nieve” for a few years now, but they’re once attracting attention on social media, after an older video of a man preparing the bizarre snack recently went viral. In it, you can see the ice-cream man slicing a bun usually filled with ingredients like meat,vegetables and sauces, and stuffing it with six scoops of ice cream.

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Eclipse, a black Labrador-bull mastiff mix from Seattle, really loves going to the park. So much so that when her owner is too busy to take, or when he’s taking too long, she just leaves the house by herself, gets on the bus and goes to the park by herself.

It all started one day, four years ago, when Eclipse and her master, Jeff Young, were waiting for the D-Line bus at the bus station. The dog knew they were going to the park and she was impatient, so when the public transportation vehicle pulled up and the doors opened, she just jumped right in. Jeff was smoking a cigarette and decided to just wait for the next bus, but Eclipse wouldn’t hear of it, so she ignored his commands to come down. So she just rode the bus by herself and Young caught up with her later, at the park. While impressed with his pet, Jeff Young had no idea that this would eventually become a habit, one that would turn Eclipse into a local celebrity.

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Scientific evidence shows that fasting for brief periods of time can have positive effects on our health, but one California couple say they haven’t eaten any real food in 9 years, as they live off “the universe’s energy” instead.

36-year-old Akahy Ricardo and his wife, Camilla Costello, 34, had their last real meal in 2008, before becoming “bretharians” and embracing a food-free lifestyle. They both claim that humans can easily live a healthy life without food, as long as they are connected to “the energy that exists in all things and through breathing.” Furthermore, Costello claims that this lifestyle is considerably cheaper, allowing her and her husband to spend money on travelling rather than groceries.

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A 57-year-old Italian conman was recently arrested and charged with fraud and document forgery, after its was revealed that he had been posing as a member of the Montenegro Royal Family for years. His con was so elaborate that he had even managed to fool many real royals and celebrities.

The man, whose real identity has not yet been revealed, called himself “His Imperial and Royal Highness Stefan Cernetic, Hereditary Prince of Montenegro, Serbia and Albania”, and claimed to be a descendant of the Roman emperor Constantine, and the head of the Montenegrin royal family. He travelled all around Europe in a black Mercedes sporting Montenegrin flags and fake royal insignia, and stayed in luxury hotels, free of charge. To make his claims even more believable, Cernetic set up a website and several social media accounts, where he regularly posted photos of him alongside known royals, like Prince Albert of Monaco, and members of famous aristocratic families, like Savoy, Hapsburg and Hohenzollern.

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If you’re looking for the perfect place to take an Instagram-worthy photo in Los Angeles, these three completely pink houses in the city’s Pico neighborhood are bound to catch people’s attention.

The question “what would Barbie’s house look like in real life?” has just been answered courtesy of Los Angeles artist Matty Mo, a.k.a @themostfamousartist. He was asked by M-Rad Architecture, a local housing developer, to create some buzz about their new project, a a 45-unit apartment complex to be built on the lot currently occupied by three abandoned houses. Mo and his company, The Mural Agency, specialize in “‘Instagrammable’ experiences as a service for brand partners worldwide,” and in this particular case, they decided to paint the three houses completely pink, before they are demolished.

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EverYoung, a technology company based in Seoul, South Korea, has an unusual yet strict condition when hiring new staff – candidates have to be at least 55-year-old. It’s been this way ever since EverYoung was founded, in 2013, and it now employs 420 seniors aged 55 to 83.

South Korea’s corporate culture is notorious for forcing workers into retirement before they reach the official retirement age of 60, but EverYoung founder, Chung Eunsung, hopes to change this practice by proving that seniors can be just as valuable to a company as young workers. In 2013, he set out with the clear goal of only hiring only individuals over the age of 55 and he has stuck with this rule for the last 4 years.

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Ever take a look at your Facebook friend list and wonder ‘how many of these people are actually my friends?” Well, artist Tanja Hollander did, and after thinking about if for a while, she decided to find out the answer to that question by visiting all of her 626 Facebook friends. She documented the experience in an epic 5-year-long project called “Are You Really My Friend?”

It all started on New Year’s Eve 2010, when, after conversing with some of her online friends, Maine-based artist Tanja Hollander stared wondering what her relationship with all the people in her Facebook list was. She asked herself if friendships formed online were as real as offline ones and if many of her “friends” were actually just acquaintances. “Am I really friends with all these people?” Tanja told herself, and she immediately knew she had to find out.

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Radomir Novakovic Cakan is a successful businessman from Montenegro, who has earned himself nicknames like “the best boss in the Balkans” and “Brother” by being incredibly generous to his employees.

Cakan, who owns “Cakan Sports”, the largest sporting goods store chain in Montenegro, and recently went into politics, has been making news headlines in Balkan countries for years, but not for his professional success. He is best known for the generosity he shows his loyal and hard-working employees, and the close relationship he has with them. The businessman firmly believes that his company can only thrive if he keeps his employees happy, and to that end, he has offered the best of them some pretty unbelievable presents.

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Retirement usually involves slowing down, taking it easy for a change, but not for 81-year-old Wang Deshun. For him, it’s all about commercial photo shoots, parading bare-chested on fashion runways and brushing shoulders with Chinese superstars. He is “China’s hottest grandpa” and the man praised for changing the country’s traditional view of old age.

Wang Deshun’s life changed one march evening, two years ago, when he got the chance to walk on the runway at the China Fashion Week in Beijing. With his chiseled physique, hipster beard, long silver hair and youthful attitude, the 79-year-old made quite an impression, and things just kept getting better for him after that. But how he ended up on the stage of an international fashion festival is quite a story in itself.

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When they hear the word “Styrofoam”, most people think about disposable food containers or packaging material, but for one Japanese modular home manufacturer, it is the building material of the future. Its increasingly popular Styrofoam dome houses are highly earthquake-resistant, super cheap and quick to build, and have very high thermal insulating properties. What’s not to like?

Japan Dome House has been selling Styrofoam houses in Japan for the last 15 years, but it was last year that demand for the ultra light housing skyrocketed. In April 2016, Japan’s Kumamoto prefecture was hit by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake that killed 49 people and injured another 3,000. Over 44,000 people were evacuated from their homes, after they had collapsed or caught fire, with thousands of them still living in temporary housing. Structural damage to conventional buildings was reported both in Kumamoto and the neighboring Oita prefecture, but one place that didn’t suffer any damage was Kyushu’s Village Zone, a housing complex made up of 480 closely-packed dome-shaped houses built by Japan Dome House.

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