Slope Point is known for being the southernmost tip on New Zealand’s South Island, but also for hosting some of the strangest-looking trees in the world. They are shaped by the relentless winds that constantly pummel this place.

Trees don’t usually grow in the Slope Point area. It’s not that the soil isn’t fertile enough, but the winds blowing through the slopes and fields of this place make it an inhospitable place. Still, the farmers that bring their sheep here for grazing planted patches of trees as shelter for the animals. Only instead of growing upright, like other specimens, most of these trees are twisted and crooked, with their canopy looking like windswept hair. They look unlike anything else in the world, and they have made the otherwise unremarkable Slope Point famous around the globe.

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Fed up with people constantly neglecting self-isolation and quarantine rules, a local politician on Indonesia’s Java Island decided to lock rule breakers in a haunted house to set an example for others.

Kusdinar Untung Yuni Sukowati, the head of Sragen regency came up with the idea of taping into the locals’ fear of ghosts as a way to deal with an influx of newcomers in the area. Because of lockdowns in the capital Jakarta and other major cities, Sragen has started seeing quite a lot of people coming in, many of whom completely disregard the rule to self-isolate themselves for 14 days, in case they are infected with the novel coronavirus. To make sure people started respecting the rules, Kusdinar started putting offenders in abandoned houses locals believe are haunted.

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Joe Bagley, a 20-year-old self-confessed “jungle boy”, has turned his one-bedroom apartment in Loughborough, UK, into an indoor jungle with over 1,400 potted plants.

From cacti and succulents to tropical flowers and vines, you can find all sorts of plants growing in Joe Bagley’s home. They are everywhere, on the dining table, on bookshelves, even in the bathroom, pretty much wherever there is any spare space that hasn’t been occupied by something else. There isn’t that much space available, s cramming 1,400 potted plants into it has made it look like a sort of indoor urban jungle. As you can imagine, looking after so many houseplants takes a bit of time, and Joe admits that he spends most of his free time watering them and making sure they are healthy.

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Four years ago, Rita Gaviola was a 13-year-old street beggar in the Filipino town of Lucban. Since then she has worked with some of the world’s hottest brands as a fashion model, starred on hit reality TV shows and gained over 100,000 Instagram followers. And it was all thanks to a random photo…

Rita Gaviola’s incredible ‘rags to riches’ story began in 2016. Back then, she was asking for alms on the streets of Lucban, to help her family make ends meet. Her father worked as a garbage collector and her mother stayed home to look after her and her five siblings. None of the children attended school at the time and the family barely managed to put food on the table, so Rita often went out to beg for change or food donations. That’s how she was spotted by Filipino photographer Topher Quinto Burgos, who happened to be attending the Pahiyas Festival in Lucban, in May 2016. He was attracted by her natural beauty and posted the photos of her on the internet, changing the girl’s life completely with a single click of the ‘upload’ button.

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Portuguese street artist Vile has a gift that some would consider similar to a superpower – he can make concrete walls look transparent to the naked eye, using only cans of graffiti paint.

Rodrigo Miguel Sepulveda Nunes, aka Vile, started doing graffiti when he was 14 years old. In college he studied Cartoon and Animation Film and Drawing and Illustration, and in 2007 he started working as an independent artist. Vile has several remarkable paintings and portraits under his name, but graffiti always remained his biggest passion, and today he is better known as a street artist. Looking at some of his most impressive works, it’s easy to see why Vile is considered one of the world’s most talented graffiti artists.

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52-year-old Simon Lee has been sleeping rough on the streets of Hong Kong for the last seven years, but unlike most homeless people, he didn’t just wind up there after some tragic, life-altering event. He actually chose to be homeless, giving up on his material possessions and a comfortable office job for a carefree, stress-free life.

You couldn’t really tell by looking at him, but Simon Lee graduated from university with a degree in chemistry, and until 1997 he had a steady office job. But one day he decided he didn’t need the stress of a white-collar job, so he quit and moved to neighboring Macau. He made a living tutoring children for a few years, but in 2004, he moved again, this time to Zhuhai, where he lived off of his savings, before going back to Macau two years later. The casinos were starting up and rich gamblers were more than happy to share a tiny fraction of their winnings with someone less fortunate than them, so Simon decided to live on the street and survive off casino hand outs.

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A 58-year-old street cleaner in China has been hailed as a hero after it was reported that he has donated over 180,000 yuan ($27,000) to dozens of poor children in the last 30 years, despite earning a monthly salary of just 2,000 yuan ($300).

Mr. Zhao, a street cleaner from Shenyang, in China’s northeast Liaoning Province, leads a very frugal lifestyle. Most of his meals consist of simple boiled noodles, he hasn’t bought new clothes in about 30 years, and he and his family live in a very modest house. Even though he earns just 2,000 yuan per month, he could probably have  much more comfortable life if he didn’t give most of his income away. Coming from humble beginnings himself, Zhao known all about poverty, so he has dedicated the last three decades of his life to helping impoverished children, while also taking care of his own family.

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A 19-year-old volunteer firefighter from western Pennsylvania was recently charged with arson, criminal mischief and risking catastrophe after allegedly setting two houses on fire out of boredom.

Last month, police in Munhall, a community located about 8 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, arrested Ryan Laubham, a local volunteer firefighter, for allegedly setting fire to a pair of occupied homes on December 3 and 10. After interviewing witnesses and checking CCTV footage, authorities identified Laubham as the prime suspect in both cases, and he himself admitted to the crimes, saying that he had set the houses on fire because he was bored.

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Cats get stuck high up in trees all the time, and there’s often no one to call for help, but if you live within an hour’s drive of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, you can rely on Randall Kolb, a 64-year-old retiree who has dedicated the last four years of his life to rescuing felines from trees.

Kolb, aka “Cat Rescue Guy”, discovered his calling in 2014, just two days after retiring from his IT job at Louisiana State University. A cat had become stuck in a tree near his house in Baton Rouge, and he spent two days trying to find someone willing to climb up and bring the feline down. When he did, he paid close attention to the rescue and decided to learn how to climb trees so he could rescue cats in the future. He has since bought or created his own tree climbing equipment and used it to save over 150 cats, for free.

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While most songbirds build small, discreet nests designed to shelter one clutch of eggs, the Social Weavers (Philetairus socius) of southern Africa build communal nests so large that they can pull down mature trees. Each structure can weigh over a ton, and range upwards of 20 feet wide and 10 feet tall, with over a hundred separate nesting chambers. Successive generations refurbish and reuse these compartments, often for more than a century.

Social Weavers utilize several different building materials, starting with a basic structure of woven twigs. They then line the interior with grasses and feathers and construct a 10-inch long, one-inch wide private entrance with downward pointing spiky straws to deter snakes. While a breeding pair will have a private apartment, most chambers house three or four of the birds at a time. The benefits of this lifestyle become clear in the context of the desert where temperatures vary dramatically.

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A 47-year-old man from La Paz, in the Agusan del Sur province of the Philippines, had last felt solid ground under his feet in 2014, before climbing a 60-foot-tall coconut tree near his house. He had never come down since, and would have probably stayed atop the tree till the end of his days, had authorities not rescued him by force recently.

The man, identified as Gilbert Sanchez, had apparently left his home to live atop a nearby coconut tree three years ago, after being hit on the head with a gun, during an altercation. His mother remembers that he was so afraid that someone would come to kill him that he felt that the only way to stay alive was to climb the tallest tree he could find and stay there. And that’s exactly what he had been doing for the last three years, surviving only on the food and water his mother brought him every day, which he would pull up in his tree haven with an improvised rope. He would relieve himself from the top of the tree, and not even the raging storms, the blistering heat or the ruthless insects could get him to come down.

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Alarmed by how many cigarette butts littered the parks of Amsterdam, two Dutch designers came up with an unusual plan to train crows to pick up the butts and trade them for tasty rewards.

Industrial designers Ruben van der Vleuten and Bob Spikman originally considered using robots to clean the streets of cigarette butts, but they presented a series of difficulties, particularly the complicated programming required to have them vacuuming the buts out of every nook and cranny while trying to avoid bicycles and passers-by. So they turned their attention to one of the most abundant resources of urban areas – birds. Pigeons were the first ones they considered, because they can be found in virtually every city in the world, but a quick search revealed that they aren’t really known for their intelligence, so training them would have been very hard. But the two designers soon found a bird that was both very common around human settlements and much, much smarter – the crow.

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A family in Forest Hill, Toronto, has taken their neighbors to court for copying the design of their multi-million dollar house when renovating their property, thus decreasing the value of their own home. They are asking for $2.5 million in damages.

It turns out you can’t just copy design elements of a house you like without suffering the consequences. Barbara Ann and Eric Kirshenblatt learned that the hard way three years ago, when they were taken to court by their neighbors, Jason and Jodi Chapnick, whose home they had allegedly used as inspiration when renovating their own property. The Chapnicks claimed that the defendants had fixed up their house to look “strikingly similar” to theirs, including using matching stonework the same shade of blue. They were asking for $1.5 million in damages, $20,000 in statutory copyright damages, $1 million in punitive damages, and for the defendants to change the look of their house.

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Jacqui Kenny has always wanted to travel the world, meet new people and discover different cultures, but she suffers from agoraphobia – an anxiety disorder characterized by fear of public spaces, public transportation, open spaces and/or large crowds – so she rarely gets to leave her house. Luckily, modern technology allows her to live out her dream, sort of.

Jacqui was diagnosed with agoraphobia 8 years ago, but she has been dealing with extreme anxiety and panic attacks for over 20 years now. Last year was a particularly trying time, as a company  that she had co-founded for many years had just closed, and dealing with the stress of it, on top of her mental issues, was tough. She didn’t know what she was going to do with her life, and leaving the house to face the world was not an option. She needed something to keep her busy, and somehow, she discovered Google Street View.

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You know housing prices in San Francisco are absolutely insane when the cheapest house on the market costs half a million dollars and is virtually uninhabitable.

It’s no secret that buying a house in the Bay Area is next to impossible for the average person. According to Zillow real estate experts, the median listing price for a detached home in San Francisco is $1.15 million, and the median monthly rent is around $4,000. That’s a lot more than most people can afford, but if you keep an eye out, you can sometimes find better deals. Like this house in the Excelsior District of San Fran currently on sale for “just” $499,000. Half a million bucks is not pocket change, but compared to most of the houses listen on real estate sites, it’s practically a steal. The only problem is that you can’t really live in it.

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