In Taiwan, staging a dramatic funeral for relatives who have passed away is of the utmost importance. So, to create the proper atmosphere, wealthy families hire professional mourners who cry, sing and crawl on the ground to show their grief.

Taiwan’s “filial daughter” phenomenon emerged during the 1970s, when sons and daughters left their families to work in the city. Transport was limited, so if one of their parents died and they couldn’t make it back in time for the funeral, they would hire a filial daughter to take their place and lead the family in mourning. For some Taiwanese, showing grief in a dramatic fashion is the highest reverence for relatives who have passed away, because funerals are considered the most important times to honor one’s family. But not everyone has it in them to shed tears and show their pain in public, so to help create a grieving atmosphere, they hire professional mourning daughters. They chant, dance and wail, warming the hearts of the audience and helping them release their emotions. Crying on command isn’t easy, but professional mourners, like 30-year-old Liu Jun Lin, say it helps to really get involved in the event and consider the family that hired them their own. “I just imagine that I am part of the family and I fuse myself into the occasion,” she says.

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Nobody does dangerous driving stunts quite like the youth of Saudi Arabia. Sure, drifting is pretty cool, and Ken Block’s Gymkhana is awesome, but they’re nothing compared to the latest driving craze in the Middle East. It’s called “sidewall skiing” and it basically means driving a car on its side wheels at high speed.

A few years back, footage of Saudi daredevils skating on the country’s dessert highways while clinging to speeding cars went viral on video sharing sites like YouTube. But that got old really fast, and the bored youth had to come up with something even more dangerous exciting. These days they get their kicks by driving around on two wheels, while passengers perform all kinds of tricks, like standing on top of the car, or even changing tires at high speed. The life-threatening stunt was apparently popularized by action films like “The Dukes of Hazzard” or “Diamonds Are Forever”, and was recently featured in rapper M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls” video. Sidewall skiing has also become a spectator sport, with crowds of young men and women sitting on the side of the road cheering on the adrenaline junkies. Some even take part in their death defying routines by laying down on the asphalt and allowing the vehicle to pass over them at breakneck speeds. Drivers use a ramp to tilt their cars on two wheels, then rely on their maneuvering skills to keep it from flipping over and potentially killing their balancing passengers. Somehow, saying this sport is extremely dangerous seems like a huge understatement.

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French luxury goods manufacturer Hermes has recently made headlines after it’s been discovered that its flagship store on Madison Avenue is selling a crocodile skin shirt for the mind-blowing price of $91,500.

Yes, today is April 1st, but this story is no joke. The pricey men’s garment was actually presented last fall as part of Hermes’ spring 2013 “crocodile chiffon” collection, but was only recently spotted in the company’s New York store. Judging by the French brand’s reputation for outrageous prices and the fact that the t-shirt is apparently made of innovative lightweight crocodile skin, everyone expected it to cost a small fortune, but probably not as much as four decent cars. Most people wouldn’t pay more than $30 for at-shirt, but that didn’t stop Hermes from slapping a $91,500 price tag on its black crocodile tee. Pretty unbelievable right? That’s what bloggers from The Awl thought, so before breaking the story, they managed to snap a shot of the label as evidence, despite the store’s no-photo policy. While the technology behind making Hermes crocodile skin clothes lighter and less sticky during the hot summer months may be impressive, does it really justify the astronomical price?

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Who says booze and religion don’t mix? That’s certainly not the case at Vowz, a unique Tokyo bar run by two Buddhist monks who serve customers delicious cocktails, religious chants and sermons.

There are over 10,000 bars in Tokyo, but none like the Vowz, in the city’s Yotsuya neighborhood. Opened by Japanese Buddhist monk Yoshinobu Fujioka, this offbeat watering hole has been bringing members of his congregation together for 13 years. “They become totally different believers here, the distance between them and myself diminishing,”the shaved-head bartender says. “They are more connected with each other.” In the old days, people would go to Buddhist temples to socialize and have a drink, but times have changed, and Fujioka decided to adapt in order to remain close to the people. So he opened the Vowz Bar, a place where people could come in and listen to Buddhist sermons and homilies without feeling constrained in any way. “At the temple, folks are always well-behaved and attentive, no matter how long or boring the sermon is,” head monk Gugan Taguchi says. “Here at the bar, they don’t like my sermons — they walk out.” But thanks to the friendly atmosphere and the tasty cocktails prepared by the monks themselves, that hardly ever happens.

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It’s called the Saltdean Sizzler, and according to recent tests performed by the Warwick University, it’s three times hotter than the world’s strongest chili and even police pepper spray. That makes it the spiciest pizza on Earth.

The world’s hottest pizza was created by Paul Brayshaw, of Paul’s Pizza, in Saltdean, England, a self-confessed spicy food fanatic and fan of the Man vs Food TV show. After opening his own pizza place, Paul decided to include a challenge on the menu, and stared working on the hottest pizza he could make. He used one of the strongest chilies on the planet – the ghost chili – and spiced it up even more with a special chili paste with chili extract. The 32-year-old father of two says the Saltdean Sizzler starts out as a regular pizza, with a homemade dough base, regular Italian tomato and herb sauce and fresh mozzarella, but turns into a world of pain after he adds his killer sauce. Apparently it even changes from a nice “red tomato color” to an “evil black/red”. Ever since he put it on the menu last year, Paul has sold over 1,300 Saltdean Sizzlers, but only eight men and one woman have managed to eat all six slices of the 10-inch pizza. That’s just 0.1% of challengers.

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Tired of having people walk into her gluten free produce store looking around and asking questions only to leave empty-handed and buy similar products somewhere else, a business owner from Brisbane, Australia, put up a sign announcing would-be shoppers they will be charged a $5 fee for “just looking”.

A photo of the notice in the window of Celiac Supplies went viral on popular social news site Reddit, this week. A lot of people thought it was a joke, but reporters from the Australian Associated Press tracked down the owner of “Brisbane’s only glutenfree and wheatfree store” who confirmed the measure was for real. Apparently Georgina felt forced to take radical action after spending several hours each week giving advice to people only to see them walk out empty handed and buying the same kind of products from local supermarkets or online shops. “I’ve had a gut full of working and not getting paid,” she told AAP. “I’m not here to dispense a charity service for Coles and Woolworths to make more money.” Her frustration is also fueled by the fact that in most cases her prices match those of larger supermarkets, but people still prefer to shop elsewhere thinking they’d find them cheaper. As you can imagine, her $5 “just looking” tax has turned some potential customers away, but Georgina says a few have actually paid up.

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Driving down the No. 2 highway south of Moose Jaw, bang in the middle of the Saskatchewan prairie, one can see a large ship flying Finnish and Canadian flags. Confused about a ship so far away from the sea? Well, we were too. But it turns out the ship was built there for good reason by a Finn named Tom Sukanen during the Great Depression. His plan was to use the vessel to sail back to his homeland of Finland.

Tom’s story is the stuff that several Finnish and Canadian documentaries and plays are made of. Born in 1878 in the Finnish archipelago, he learned to sail and navigate with a compass and sextant, and also became proficient in steel working and shipbuilding – the only trades available on the coast where he grew up. At the age of 20, he sailed to America and ended up in Minnesota, like many other Norwegians, Finns and Swedes. He married a young Finnish girl and managed to make a small living on the farm his father-in-law had left them, raising a family of three daughters and a son. It wasn’t the life he had dreamed of when he left Finland, so 1911, out of desperation, he abandoned his family and went across the Canadian border in search of his brother. He completed the 600-mile journey on foot, finally reuniting with his brother in the Macrorie-Birsay area in Saskatchewan.

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32-year-old Brian Manowitz, better known as the Vegan Black Metal Chef, has one of the most unusual cooking shows on the internet. Dressed in his vinyl Armor of Death and boasting a KISS-inspired face paint mask, he cooks all kinds of delicious vegan meals to the sound of black metal.

Manowitz, a freelance sound engineer from Orlando, has been a vegan for the last 13 years. He’s also a big fan of black metal music, so he decided to combine both of his passions into a unique and entertaining project known as Vegan Black Metal Chef. He set up a site where he posts recipes and photos of his delicious cooking, but it was his YouTube channel that brought him worldwide fame a couple of years ago. Brian’s videos always open to the sound thunderous drums and distorted guitar riffs, and show him in his dark dungeon-like kitchen decorated with leather-bound cabinets, medieval chopping tools and spooky candles, as he explains how to prepare vegan dishes with a crackly voice. All vegetables are “butchered” with his collection of awesome knives, or smashed with a mace, and cooked on a pentagram stove altar. “You can’t summon the essence of Satan into your food without the pentagrams,” Manowitz says.

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China’s growing problem with internet and video game addiction is probably best described by the case of Li Meng, a young man who has virtually been living in an Internet cafe for the last six years, leaving only to buy food and take the occasional shower.

According to Chinese media, Li Meng graduated from university six years ago, but unlike most of his peers, who went on to look for jobs, make a name for themselves and start a family, he opted for a life in the fantasy world of online gaming. Ever since he finished school, Li has spent most of his time in one of the many internet cafes in China’s Northeast city of Changchun. The owner of the place says he’s been there for such a long time that he’s basically part of the furniture, and doesn’t even notice his presence anymore. He spends every day and night tucked away in a corner, with an open bag of food by his side, staring at the monitor and mashing the keyboard and mouse buttons, leaving for brief periods of time to catch a bite to eat and take a bath. Reporters who visited the young Chinese gamer at his “workplace” described him as a pale “bespectacled youth that clearly hadn’t been to a hairdresser for a long time”.

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They work seven days a week regardless of weather condition, never go on breaks, don’t take bribes and best of all, they require no pay. They are – wait for it – Bangalore’s new lifelike cardboard traffic policemen, and they’re watching you!

India’s tech-city of Bangalore has been facing serious difficulties dealing with traffic violations. Despite low car ownership, the rate of row fatalities has risen sharply in this city of 8.5 million people to at least two road-related deaths per day, in 2012. Some sources say Bangalore needs at least 6,000 traffic policemen to keep things under control, but it currently has a personnel of 3,000. Instead of supplementing their ranks, local authorities have come up with an ingenious idea to make drivers behave at the wheel that doesn’t require significant expenditures – life-size cardboard cutouts of traffic policemen strategically placed on the city’s busiest roads. Only three of them have been deployed so far, but results have been so encouraging that 10 more khaki-wearing fake cops will soon be rolled out to improve Bangalore’s chaotic traffic.

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Tel-Aviv-based artist Michal Taharlev creates stunningly-beautiful artworks inspired by old family photos without using brushes or writing tools. Armed only with a sharp needle and mountains of patience, she pokes the canvas thousands of times to reveal heart-warming images.

Inspired by pointilism, the painting technique that uses dots to trick the eye into making up a detailed image, Israeli artist Michal Taharlev used an 0.5mm needle and methodically poked holes in canvases to create her “Holes in Memory” series. Focusing on the details of old family photographs, she managed to recreate the original images in a gradient-like fashion. “The use of a needle on a photo and the violent act of damaging and obsessing over memories, yet in a very strict manner, gives a new meaning to the innocence and the unknown future the photos hold,” the artist says. I can only imagine the patience and concentration required to complete just one of these incredible works of art, as just a few miscalculated holes can ruin days-worth of painstaking work.

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If someone tried to sell me the moon, I would dismiss them as con artists. So I was pretty surprised to learn about Denis Hope, a 65-year-old man from Gardnerville, Nevada, who runs a legit business selling land plots on the Moon, Mars, Venus, Io and Mercury. Of course, there’s no legal backing to all this, but there’s nobody stopping him either. As long as he’s able to make people smile, he says he can do anything he wants. He’s been in business since 1980.

Hope is a former-ventriloquist, now in the business of space real-estate. Some people view his work as the selling of ‘novelty items’ such as pet rocks and certificates. Others argue that he’s taking forth the age-old American tradition of land speculators selling plots of useless land. Hope admits that there are several others selling property in outer space, but the difference is that those people are criminal in their intent. He considers himself the legit owner of the Moon, so what he’s doing is all right. How come he is so confident, you ask? Well, he says this is as real as any other property you can buy on Earth, and that’s because he filed a declaration with the United Nations. Otherwise, Hope says he wouldn’t be selling at all.

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After seeing the blockbuster movie series “Pirates of the Caribbean”, Alexander Marchenko, a 38-year-old entrepreneur from the small Russian village of Cheryomushki decided to build his very own replica of the Black Pearl pirate ship.

Alexander Marchenko has traveled all over Russia, and is now convinced there is no land more beautiful than his native land of Krasnoyarsk and no people more friendly and welcoming than his fellow locals. Upon returning from his travels a few years ago, he decided to take advantage of the beautiful surroundings and build a hotel. He had noticed the other resorts and lodgings in the area all looked the same way, so he tried to come up with something special that would attract visitors. As luck would have it, the movie Pirates of the Caribbean was running at local cinemas, and as soon as Alexander saw Captain Jack Sparrow’s beautiful pirate ship, the Black Pearl, he instantly knew that’s what he wanted his unique hotel to look like. Although he didn’t have any ship building experience, he went online and downloaded photos and schematics of the famous ship to use as guides, and started working on it immediately. It’s been two years, and now, his own Black Pearl is starting to take shape on the Yenisei River.

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If you’re looking to buy the world’s toughest watch, you might want to take a look at the Kaventsmann Triggerfish Bronze A2. This little timepiece has been pressure tested to 300 bar (that’s 3000 meters of water pressure), blown up with 10 pounds of C4, and survived to tick another day.

Kaventsmann Uhren is a one-man business run by Michael Barahona Fernandez, who creates all of the watch case parts by hand, in his Berlin workshop. It’s a time consuming process, so only a few of these solid watches go on sale each month. For his Triggerfish Bronze A2 model, the watchmaker used shock-resistant CuSn8 phosphor-bronze, the same material bridge load bearing plates are made of, stainless steel for the detachable back cap, and a 10 mm domed polycarbonate crystal. The finished watch measures 45 mm wide and 20 mm tall, and is a bit heavier than conventional wristwatches, but that’s to be expected, considering its extreme durability. After confirming the timepiece can resist water pressure of up to 300 bar, Fernandez enlisted the help of U.S. Special Forces for the ultimate test – his KAVENTSMANN Triggerfish Bronze A2 against the blast generated by 10 pounds of C4 plastic explosive.

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By design, the “Mohawk” hairdo is really hard to miss, but someone found a way to actually make it even more of an attention grabber. Florida native Mohawk Gaz uses spray paint to turn his head into a truly unmissable advertising billboards for friends and businesses.

31-year-old Mohawk Gaz – real name Gasmy Joseph – from Pompano Beach, Florida, has been a fan of the Mohawk for many years, but it was only a year ago that he discovered the true potential of his outrageous hairdo. A buddy had asked Gaz to spread the word about his birthday party, and suddenly a light bulb went off in his head – why not advertise the event on his hairdo for everyone to see? The idea was a huge success, and he has been spray-painting his Mohawk with all kinds of designs ever since. He has been offering his head as advertising space to friends who needed promotion, and has even been contacted by small businesses. A health-food catering company called Deliver Lean send Mohawk Gaz to Miami Heat and Florida Panthers games with its logo painted on his hair and was very pleased with the results. “It’s been tremendous marketing,” the company’s founder said. “It’s great exposure, and it’s never been done before.”

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