This Japanese Startup Will Quit Your Job for You

For some reason, many Japanese people find it incredibly difficult to quit their job and prefer paying a third party hundreds of dollars to quit on their behalf rather than have to face their boss and co-workers and handing in their resignation personally.

Senshi S LLC is a Tokyo-based startup founded by childhood friends Toshiyuki Niino and Yuichiro Okazaki last year. It operates ‘Exit’ a unique service that basically handles job resignations on behalf od clients, for a fee. Rather, than having to tell their bosses that they can’t or don’t want to work for them anymore, Exit clients prefer to pay between 40,000 yen ($350) and 50,000 yen ($450) to have someone else do it for them. Exit’s founders declared themselves surprised that so many people find quitting their jobs so stressful, but they have been more than happy to help hundreds of them get through this process.

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Artist Uses Ancient Scandinavian Herding Call to Summon Cattle Home from Pastures

Jonna Jinton is a young blogger and photographer known for making an ancient and haunting Scandinavian herding call called “kulning” viral a couple of years ago by using it to call a herd of cattle home from the pasture.

Kulning is an ancient singing technique used by women on the Scandinavian Peninsula since ancient times primarily to call herds of cattle down from mountain pastures, but also as a form of communication, as its high-pitch sounds could be heard over long distances. Today, kulning is still used in isolated villages in Sweden and Norway, but to most of the world it only became known in 2016, after Swedish artist Jonna Jinton posted a YouTube video of herself using the haunting call to summon a herd of cows. It went viral, and she’s been posting kulning videos on her YouTube channel ever since.

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Artist Leaves 100,000 Pennies in Abandoned Fountain to See How People React to It

English artist Anna Brownsted left 100,000 pennies in an abandoned public fountain in Cambridge, over the weekend, in a bid to explore human nature. The money was all stolen in just one day.

The coins worth £1,000 were placed in the fountain at Quayside, in Cambridge, at 8 am on Saturday, and were supposed to be left there for 48 hours. However, by 9 am on Sunday, over 99% of the coins had been removed from the fountain, despite clear signs informing passers-by that the fountain was under constant CCTV surveillance. Only £1.66 worth of pennies were left, but organizers didn’t consider it theft, but a “provocative outcome”.

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Artist Carves Incredible Life-Size Sculpture of Arnold Schwarzenegger Out of a Single Tree Trunk

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been honored with several statues throughout his long and successful career, but few as impressive as the one recently carved by wood sculptor James O’Neal out of a single black oak trunk.

Standing at 1.88 meters, the statue took O’Neal six months to complete, and bears an uncanny resemblance to the “Austrian Oak” in his prime years, when he won back to back Mr Olympia titles. From his signature vacuum pose, to his 70’s hairdo and even the veins on his arms, the sculpture captures the look of Arnold Schwarzenegger almost to perfection. The entire process of shaping the black oak trunk into an ultra-realistic sculpture of the bodybuilding legend was documented on James O’Neal’s Instagram.

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Japanese Artist Creates Hyper-Realistic, 3D Portraits of Cats Out of Felted Wool

If you’re looking for someone to make a realistic, three-dimensional portrait of your pet cat using felt wool, you’ll have a tough time finding someone better than Wakuneco. Just have a look at what she can do with a needle and wool thread.

Looking at some of the feline portraits created by the talented Japanese artist, it’s hard to believe they are made of felted wool and not taxidermy masterpieces. To achieve this level o realism, Wakuneco – which translates as “frame cat” – spends hours on end poking at wool with a needle to create solid layers that mimic cat fur, applying realistic glass eyes and finally adding the whiskers. After everything is just as she wants it, the 3D portrait is framed and sent to the owner who commissioned it.

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Kindergarten Principal Fired After Kids Receive Pole Dancer Welcome

The principal of a kindergarten in Shenzen, China, was recently axed after videos of children as young as three being welcomed back by scantly-dressed pole dancers went viral online.

The first Monday in September marks the start of a new school year in China, and many learning institutions host special celebrations to mark the event. The Xinshahui kindergarten in Shenzhen was no different, but the parents of the roughly 500 children – aged three to six – enrolled there did not expect the ceremony to include pole dancers winding and spinning provocatively on a metal pole with a Chinese flag flying on top.

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Two-Year-Old Smokes 40 Cigarettes a Day And His Parents Don’t Have the Heart to Stop Him

Many smokers pick up the habit at an early age, but there are probably not many who started as early as Rapi Pamungkas. This Indonesian 2-year-old apparently started smoking by picking up discarded cigarette butts nearby his mother’s market stall, which older boys would then light for him, and now reportedly goes through 40 cigarettes a day.

Soon after starting smoking, Rapi became hooked and soon became famous in his native city of Sukabumi for harassing passers-by and pestering them for cigarettes. Many locals found his antics amusing and would give him cigarettes, laughing as he lit them up. Videos of the extremely young child started doing the round online, and his story recently went viral worldwide. In some of these videos, people can be seen trying to take the cigarette from Rapi; he responds by scowling and pulling the cigarette back.

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Man Pedals 650 Km to Take Part in 100 km Bike Race, Wins It, Then Pedals Back Home

This month, Kyle Messier, a 31-year-old bike mechanic, won the Big Red Gravel Run, a 100 kilometer bike race that takes place in Harrington, Quebec. While this is an impressive achievement on its own, what makes Kyle’s win truly exceptional is that he had already pedaled more than 650 kilometers to the race site, and a few hours after winning he got back on his bike and pedealed back home to Waterloo.

Messier’s journey from Waterloo to Harrington took him 3.5 days to complete. After winning first place in the rural cycling race,he celebrated with some pizza, slept for a few hours in his tent, and then got started on the 3.5-day journey back home. And it gets even more remarkable still; Kyle was not only completely new to bicycle racing, but he also managed to win the 100-kilometer Big Red Gravel Run while suffering from an abscessed tooth.

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Women Put Live Fish in Their Collarbone Indentation As Part of Bizarre Fitness Challenge

The so-called “fish in collarbone challenge” has women filling their collarbone indentation with water and put one or more live fish into it to show off how skinny they are.

The bizarre fitness challenge originated in China around three years ago, but recently went viral on social media in other countries around Asia. This sort of challenges have become really popular in China in recent years, as people started taking to social media to show off their physique, but this one has to be one of the dumbest yet. Not only is the depth of a person’s clavicle indentation a poor way of measuring their fitness level – not with so many different body types anyway – but it’s also cruel to the fish.

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Cult Leader Arrested After Allegedly Holding Followers Captive and Forcing Them to Take Part in Bizarre Rituals

The deranged leader of a South Korean cult was recently arrested for holding over 400 of her followers captive at a compound on Fiji Island and forcing them to take part in violent rituals under threat of incurring God’s punishment.

Shin Ok-ju, founder of the Grace Road Church, was detained along with three senior leaders of her cult in connection to allegations that she led hundreds of her followers to the island of Fiji by telling them that a “great famine” was imminent on the Korean peninsula. Once there, she reportedly confiscated their passports and refused to let them leave the 83-acre compound. Under the watchful eyes of handpicked guardians, worshippers were also forced to take part in brutal rituals that often left them bloodied.

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Man Suffers Heart Attack After Following Viral Online “Health Tip”

There’s an abundance of health tips going around on social media these days, but as this story shows, some of them can actually have fatal consequences.

Zhou Xin, a 58-year-old man from Harbin China, recently became the victim of online fake news shared on the internet. The viral news snippet claimed that his home city was about to experience the three hottest days of the year, with extreme temperatures not only rendering heart medication completely ineffective, but, in some cases, actually making their effect harmful on health. After seeing the post widely shared on social media, Zhou, who suffered from chronic heart disease, decided to stop taking his daily medication for the three day period starting on July 17.

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Chinese Couple Are Hiring ‘Love Testers’ to Check Their Partners’ Fidelity

Online entrepreneurs in China have found an ingenious way of profiting off of couples paranoia – renting out ‘love testers’ who do their best to try and seduce one of the partners in order to check how faithful they really are.

China is well-known for its bizarre online services, which range from renting fake girlfriends/boyfriends to trick one’s family that they are in a relationship, to hiring mistress dispellers that teach scorned wives how to get rid of problematic mistresses, and even renting professional bridesmaids to endure all sorts of humiliation during traditional Chinese wedding. And entrepreneurs are constantly on the look out for new ways of profiting off of human relationships – case in point, an increasingly popular service that allows couples to rent ‘love testers’ to check their partners’ fidelity.

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Colombian Sniffer Dog Is So Good at Her Job That Cartels Put a Price on Her Head

Sombra, a drug-detection dog with the Colombian National Police has been causing such problems for drug cartels that they’ve recently started putting bounties on her head, forcing authorities to move her to a safer airport and have more officers accompanying her on her rounds.

The 6-year-old German shepherd has been a thorn in drug traffickers’ side for quite a while now. Over the past few years, her strong sense of smell has helped Colombian police make over 200 arrests and seize around nine tons of illegal drugs. Sombra, which translates as ‘shadow’ has become somewhat of a hero of the fight against drug cartels, but for the criminals losing money because of her radar-like nose, she is a threat that needs to be eliminated. To that end, the Urabeños, also known as the Gulf Clan, have reportedly put a prize on Sombra’s head, with reports on the reward for killing her varying between 20 and 200 million Colombian pesos ($7,000 and $70,000).

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Mule Wins Horse Dressage Competition the First Time He Is Allowed to Participate

Wallace the Great, an 11-year-old rescued mule from Gloucestershire, recently made history by becoming the first ever mule to win an official horse dressage competition in Britain.

Wallace and his trainer, Christie Mclean, had been turned down from official dressage events several times on grounds that he wasn’t a true horse, but a cross between a horse and a donkey, which technically makes him a totally different species, with different chromosomes. However, earlier this month, British Dressage finally ruled in favor of allowing mules to compete in official dressage competitions alongside horses and ponies, as a testament “to inclusion and diversity in dressage, making the sport more accessible to all.” Wallace the Great finally had a chance to prove that when it came to dressage, mules could be just as good, if not better than purebred horses, and on July 22nd he did just that, winning his first British Dressage competition.

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Doraemon-Obsessed Family Turn Their House into a Shrine to the Popular Cartoon Character

As one of the most popular manga and anime characters of all time, Doraemon, the cuddly robotic cat, has millions of fans all around the world, but this family in Indonesia may just be his biggest fans. Just take a look at their house and you’ll see what I mean.

Doraemon is considered to be a children’s cartoon character, Reghina Karwur and her husband seem to have never outgrown their passion for the time-traveling robotic cat. Even though they now have two daughters of their own, the couple still dedicate much of their time to their obsession with Doraemon, and their house is the best example of that. It’s basically a shrine to the Japanese cultural icon, both on the inside and the outside.

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