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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Laetitia KY, a young fashion designer from the Ivory Coast, recently went viral on social media for an original photo series where she sculpts her long hair into a variety of shapes, from human hands, to bunny ears and even the African continent.

KY says that she has always been fascinated by hairdressing, but got the idea for creative hair art a year ago, while admiring the intricate hairstyles of women from various African tribes. She found them amazing and they inspired her to use her own hair as a means of artistic expression. The results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

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Taylor Muhl, a model and singer from California, often says that she is her own twin, and as strange as that sounds, she means it quite literally. The 33-year-old was diagnosed with genetic Chimerism, an extremely rare condition explained as “an organism composed of cells from different zygotes”.

As a child, Taylor was obsessed with twins, constantly asking her mother if she had a twin sibling, and playing twins with her girlfriends, but little did she know that she actually was her own twin. Doctors say that the model absorbed her fraternal twin while in the womb, and parts of its DNA now exist in her body, making her a Chimera, of which there are only 100 known cases in the whole world. But even as a human Chimera, Taylor’s case is a rare and fascinating one, because while most Chimeras only display the symptoms internally or have very small skin marks, Muhl’s stomach is split down the middle into two skin tones.

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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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ekoD Works, a Japanese fashion company that specializes in “humorous art and design”, has recently unveiled an optical illusion t-shirt that can give anyone a busty chest.

The Illusion Grid t-shirt uses distortion and clever shading to manipulate perspective and make anyone looking at it from the front believe that they are staring at two large, perky breasts fighting for space underneath. The design created by ekoD Works is so effective that even loose-fitting t-shirts create the exact same effect. In fact, even when nobody is wearing the garment, the large breasts illusion still works, as long as you’re looking at the grid design from the front.

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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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Every day, a homeowner in Pennsylvania is reminded of a mistake he made 13 years ago. At around 8 in the evening, his otherwise peaceful house comes alive with the beeping of an alarm clock he accidentally dropped down a vent over a decade ago. It’s been stuck in the wall ever since.

13 years ago, Jerry Lynn, of Ross Township, Pennsylvania, wanted to punch a whole through his living room wall, so he could pas the television cable through it. He didn’t want to puncture any pipes or wires in the wall, so he came up with a brilliant idea to ensure that he was drilling in an unobstructed place. He grabbed his alarm clock, tied it to a string and programmed it to go off in 10 minutes. Then he lowered it into the wall through a vent, and waited for it to ring. His goal was to drill near the place where the ringing was coming from, ensuring that there was nothing to puncture through there. It all went according to plan, until the alarm clock fell into the wall.

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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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A family of four from Scotland is offering a £50,000 ($64,000) to a professional nanny willing to work in a haunted house and put up with supernatural occurrences that have so far driven away five other nannies in the last year alone. This may be just a clever hoax, but even so, it’s a very entertaining story.

According to the ad posted on a popular childcare job site, the “friendly family of four with 2 children ages 5 and 7 living in a small village in the Scottish Borders” have been having trouble finding a stable nanny to look after their young ones. They apparently live in a “lovely, spacious, historic property” that offers “spectacular views” of the surrounding countryside, but that hasn’t been enough to keep previous nannies working there long-term. That might have something to do with the place being haunted, the person who posted the ad says.

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A 22-year-old French makeup artist recently caused quite a lot of dropped jaws on Twitter with a set of photos of a “painting” whose protagonist turned out to be a living, breathing model.

I don’t know if that opening line made any sense to you (probably not), but what 22-year-old Kenza managed to do is best explained in pictures, not words. Inspired by the work of Alexa Meade, an exceptionally talented artist whose mind-boggling masterpieces we featured a few years ago, the aspiring makeup artist painted a human model with broad brushstrokes to create the illusion that she was actually a character in a painting, and not a real live person. I think she pulled it off magnificently, and so do the tens of thousands of people who liked and shared her pics on social media.

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