Get a Life-Size Tattoo of a Burger, Win Free Burgers for Life

Cafe 51, a popular burger joint in Melbourne, Australia, is offering anyone the chance to receive a free burger per day, for the rest of their lives, if they get a scale tattoo of one of their delicious burgers, anywhere on their bodies.

“Tattoos are for life, so why shouldn’t burgers be free for life too, right?” the #freeburgersforlife campaign page on the Cafe 51 website states. “It’s simple, pick a burger, any burger from our current menu and get it tattooed anywhere on your body. You are then forever part of our #burgerfamily and you qualify to get this burger absolutely free everyday for the rest of your life. Coz we reckon that since you love us enough to join our #burgerfamily by getting a tattoo of one of our burgers, we love you enough to give you a free burger every day for the rest of your life!”

The controversial promotional stunt had been teased for about a month and finally launched on Sunday night. By Monday, over 450 people had registered, and at the time of this writing, over 3,000 Cafe 51 are waiting to get their favorite burger tattooed. Considering all the media attention the campaign is getting and the fact that Cafe 51 plans to take registrations all through October, the number of applicants will probably reach into the tens of thousands.

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Japanese Bar Replaces Seats and Tables with a Giant Ball Pit

If you ever feel like connecting with your inner child while sipping on your favorite alcoholic drink, the Ball Pool Bar Dive in Osaka, Japan, is probably the best place to do it.

Kids love ball pits, and the masterminds behind Ball Pool Bar Dive seem to think adults do too, so they got rid of the usual bar furniture and instead turned the place into a giant ball pit filled with over 20,000 colorful plastic balls. But there’s nothing remotely childish about the drinks menu, as you can order pretty much any alcoholic drink served at a regular bar, only instead of drinking yourself unconscious at a table, you get to do it buried up to your neck in balls, while other intoxicated patrons dive in all around you. What’s not to like?

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Someone Invented an Alcohol-Free Spirit and People Are Loving It

Until recently, having an alcohol-free night at the local bar left you with only a few bland options – water, a sweetened soft drink or a non-alcoholic cocktail. But that was before someone had the brilliant idea to create Seedlip, the world’s first alcohol-free spirit.

Ben Branson, the mastermind behind Seedlip, claims he came up with the formula for his unique spirit while reading John French’s 1651 book, “The Art of Distillation.” In it he found a large number of remedies for various ailments, and while some included alcohol, a lot of them didn’t. “It’s easy to forget that alcohol had its origins in medicine. That quickly moved to drinking for pleasure, and it seems we forgot about the non-alcoholic side,” Seedlip Ben (the name he usually goes by) says. “I’m not a distiller and I’m not scientific, but I thought that was interesting. So I bought a little still and starting playing around in my kitchen.”

Using various herbs he was growing in his backyard, a copper still, water and steam, Ben started experimenting, and eventually realized he could make a liquid that smelled and tasted like whatever plant he put in the still. He calls it his “eureka” moment because it got him wondering if he could make a drink like this and, if anyone else had done it before. It turns out they hadn’t, at least not commercially, so he ended up marketing his final formula for Seedlip as the world’s first non-alcoholic spirit.

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Turkish Company Creates Real-Life Car-Morphing Transformers

Thirty-some years after making their debut as cartoon characters, vehicle-morphing Transformers have finally become a reality, thanks to the efforts of a Turkish company out of Ankara.

The R&D-focused company, called Letvision, recently wowed the internet with a presentation video for their prototype car-transforming robot, ANTIMON. The recently-released footage shows a red BMW M3 being unveiled and remotely driven toward the camera, where it proceeds to transform into a mighty Autobot-like robot. The whole process takes a bit longer than in Michael Bay’s CGI movies, but it’s still mesmerizing to watch.

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This Swedish Eco-Lodge Offers Tourists the Opportunity to Escape Modern Life

Modern life has its perks, but if you feel like taking a break from it all and going back in time for a few days, there’s a unique tourist facility in Sweden that offers you the opportunity to live in a wooden charcoal-burner hut located in the middle of a forest, cook your own food over an open fire, chop wood and clean your dishes in a nearby spring.

The Kolarbyn Eco-Lodge Hotel is not for everyone. If you can’t even fathom the idea of living without electricity, running water, or a modern toilet, then the rustic charm of this place will probably not appeal to you. But for anyone trying to escape the pressure and busy life of the big city or take a break from the internet and other modern gadgets, this place is paradise. Located 1 km south of Skärsjön Beach, in the middle of a pristine Swedish forest, Kolarbyn Eco-Lodge consists of 12 charcoal-burner huts with nothing but two sheepskin-covered wooden beds, and a wood stove that uses wood chopped by the guests themselves.

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Bicycle Company Puts TV on Boxes, Reduces Delivery Damage by 80 Percent

Dutch manufacturer VanMoof has come up with a very ingenious way of making sure that its products arrive safely to their customers – printing a flat screen TV on their delivery boxes instead of a bicycle.

VanMoof plans to sell 90 percent of its bicycles online by 2020, but after seeing a considerable number of products getting damaged during deliveries and incurring serious losses, the company was left with two options – rethink its business plan or come up with an effective solution. Luckily, they managed to come up with something so brilliant that it’s bound to be copied by other companies that rely heavily on online sales.

“No matter who was doing the shipping, too many of our bikes arrived looking like they’d been through a metal-munching combine harvester. It was getting expensive for us, and bloody annoying for our customers,” creative director Bex Rad wrote on the company blog. “Earlier this year our co-founder Ties had a flash of genius. Our boxes are about the same size as a (really really reaaaally massive) flatscreen television. Flatscreen televisions always arrive in perfect condition. What if we just printed a flatscreen television on the side of our boxes?”

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World’s Most Expensive Chili Peppers Cost $25,000 per Kilo

You should never judge a pepper by its size, especially when it comes to price. The Aji Charapita chili pepper grows is roughly the size of a pea, but there’s nothing small about its price. A kilogram of this stuff will set you back a whopping $35,000.

Native to the jungles of norther Peru, the Aji Charapita is known as a wild pepper, and has only recently recently being cultivated for commercial use. Used fresh, this tiny pepper is said to have a strong fruity flavor that gives salsas and sauces a tropical taste, but it is mostly used in powdered form to a bit of spiciness to various dishes. Although still fairly unknown in most Western countries, the Aji Charapita is a highly sought-after treat among chili pepper connoisseurs and five-star restaurant chefs.

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World’s Spiciest Tortilla Chips Are Sold One at a Time in Coffin-Shaped Boxes

Using extract from the hottest chilli pepper on the planet, American company Paqui Chips has created the world’s spiciest tortilla chip – the Carolina Reaper Madness. It’s apparently so hot that it only comes in packs of one.

Usually, when you open a bag of tortilla chips, you never stop at one, but when it comes to Carolina Reaper Madness chips, Jeff Day, Brand Manager for Paqui Chips, says that one is all you need. “It’s the hottest chip you’ll ever have, I can guarantee you that. After you eat that one chip, trust me, you’re not looking to dig back into the bag and have a second one. So, one chip is what we created to have the experience,” he says.

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Chinese University Students Sit in on Extra Classes Just to See the Beautiful Teachers

Students at the Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu, south-west China, are apparently studying harder and sitting in on extra classes just to see their ‘impossibly beautiful’ female educators.

Photos of 16 attractive female teachers from Sichuan Normal University have become a hot topic on Chinese social media websites, after they were uploaded online by their school. The good-looking teachers, who specialize in a variety of majors, including singing, dancing, artistic design, theater and English, were apparently selected to pose for the photos in a bid to change Chinese people’s views on successful female teachers, who are often perceived as old, ruthless and cold. The campaign was a big hit, and after the success of the first batch of photos posted in May, the university published a second series of photos on September 19.

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Hungarian Anti-Semitic Political Leader Discovers He Is a Jew, Moves to Israel

Four years ago,  Csanad Szegedi was a deputy leader of the radical nationalist Jobbik party in Hungary, and he blamed Jews as well as the Roma people for his country’s problems. But then he learned he was a Jew himself, and everything changed.

Szegedi was once notorious for his extremist views and anti-Semitic statements, and as a leader of Jobbik, he helped co-found the Hungarian Guard – a paramilitary group that marched through Roma camps wearing black uniforms reminiscent of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross party that ruled Hungary during the Second World War. He was regarded as a rising star in the anti-immigration party Jobbik, the third biggest party in Hungary’s National Assembly, but after making a startling discovery four years ago, Szegedi realized that his life to that point and everything he thought he believed in had all been a lie.

In 2012, the young politician discovered that his own grandmother was Jewish, and had been wearing long sleeves or plasters in the summer to conceal the Auschwitz concentration camp number tattooed on her arm. She was a Holocaust survivor, but Szegedi didn’t even believe the Holocaust had happened. He later described how “shocking” this revelation was to him “First of all because I realized the Holocaust really happened.”

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App Gives Japanese Drivers Free Coffee for Not Checking Their Phones at The Wheel

In a bid to convince drivers in Aichi Prefecture to keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road, a new Japanese smartphone app offers free coffee coupons to drivers who don’t check their phones for at least 100 km.

For the last 13 years, Aichi Prefecture has recorded the highest rate of traffic fatalities in Japan. Last year, there were 443,691 accidents that resulted in injuries or deaths, and 50,101 arrests involving the use of smartphones while driving. With handhelds becoming such a big part of people’s lives, there appears to be an increase in violations of this nature, and authorities have yet to come up with an effective plan to combat the problem.

Interestingly, a trio of Japanese company seem to think that an ingenious new app could incentivize drivers to restrain themselves from checking their phones at the wheel and reduce the number of traffic accidents. Toyota Motor Corporation, Komeda Co Ltd and KDDI Corporation have teamed up to create Driving Barista, an app that uses the phone’s gyro sensor to sense the tilt of the device, and the GPS to determine the distance driven. This allows it to calculate the number of kilometers a driver has traveled with the smartphone facing down.

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Mother Forces Toddler Son to Sit in a Parking for 20 Minutes to Save Her a Spot

A photo showing a young boy sitting in a busy Kuala Lumpur parking lot has been doing the rounds online, causing controversy. According to the original Facebook post, the boy had to wait all alone in the hot sun for 20 minutes, to save the empty spot for his mother, while she went to bring the car.

The incident took place in a business area on Jalan Kuchai Lama road, in Kuala Lumpur, where it is usually difficult to find a parking spot during peak hours. The mother allegedly had the bright idea to leave her young son sitting in a free parking space, to save it,  while she went back to where she originally left the car. According to a Facebook post that has so far been shared over 8,000 times, the young boy was left unattended for 20 minutes.

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Activist To Wear All The Trash He Creates in a Month

Environmentalist Rob Greenfield wants to change the way Americans think about their trash footprint by wearing every piece of trash he creates over 30 days.

“For one month, Rob Greenfield is going to live like the average American. He’ll eat, shop, and consume just like the average American which produces 4.5 pounds of trash per day. The catch? He has to wear every piece of trash he creates,” an announcement on his website states. “That’s over 30 pounds of trash on his body by the end of the first week and nearly 140 pounds by the end of the month (almost his body weight)! Every coffee cup, plastic bag, pizza box, every single piece of trash he creates will be on his body, everywhere he goes.”

The idea behind Rob’s “TrashMe” project is to show people the cumulative effects of trash. Most people never think about how much waste they are producing every month. They just seal their garbage bags, put them in the bin and wait for someone to pick it up. But what if they came face to face with a walking, talking display of overconsumption? That might get them thinking about the world’s growing trash problem and maybe even get them to limit the amount of trash they generate.

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The NoPhone Air – Plastic Phone Packaging with Nothing but Air Inside

While millions of people around the world eagerly awaited the release of Apples’s new iPhone 7, dozens of attendants at the Fireside Gathering – a no-phone, no-reception event held at a summer camp two hours west of Ottawa – had to make due with a “revolutionary NoPhone Air, a simple phone package with nothing but air inside.

“We are very proud to introduce the least-advanced NoPhone ever,” inventors Chris Sheldon and Van Gould told Fireside Gathering attendees on September 10th. “We took away the headphone jack. And then we took away everything else. It may look like nothing is in this packaging. But that’s what’s so beautiful about it.”

Sheldon and Gould are part of a growing smartphone-resistant counterculture, and claim they came up with the idea for the NoPhone after seeing everyone at a rooftop bar in New York with their eyes glued to their smartphones. “The NoPhone was created to combat the rapid decline of real life social engagement that has stemmed from chronic smartphone use. It’s sleek, plastic design serves as an idle hand’s security blanket and is devised to alleviate the constant need humans have to hold a mobile device without preventing users from fully experiencing their immediate surroundings,” they wrote on the NoPhone official site.

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Russian Driver Turns Dented Car Door into an Artistic Map

True to the saying “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade”, a Russian driver turned a badly dented car door into a beautiful map of the Altai mountains.

The details of the accident are unclear, but by the looks of things, the artistically-gifted driver got a bit to close to a parked BMW SUV and dented one of the car doors pretty badly. According to Slavorum, Russia doesn’t have mandatory car insurance, so in most cases, drivers have to pay for repairs themselves. But instead of getting a fresh paint job, our man went for a much cooler alternative – turning the car car door into an artistic map of the Altai Mountains. As you can see in the photos below, the dent actually blend into the artwork perfectly, either enhancing the shading effect of the mountains or acting as lines in the map.

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