Shanghai-based artist Hong Yi, a.k.a. ‘Red’, has combined her love for football and art in a very unique way – she recently painted a massive portrait of three superstars of the 2014 FIFA World Cup – Ronaldo, Neymar and Messi – by dribbling a paint-covered football on a canvas.

Red didn’t use a single paintbrush to create her amazing portraits of the three popular football players! Instead, she kicked a paint-stained football around on the canvas, and actually managed to paint highly accurate pictures of her subjects.

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In the foothills of Mt. Hiei, to the northeast of Kyoto City, lies a huge, 1,200-year old temple complex called Enryakuji. The Tendai-shu monks who inhabit this place are better known to the world as ‘marathon monks’ for their amazing physical feats that put Olympic athletes to shame

Not all the Enryakuji monks are Tendai-shu; only some of them get special permission to participate in the sennichi kaihogyo, or the Thousand Day Challenge – one of the most rigorous spiritual challenges in the world. The trial lasts for seven years and involves walking a distance that is equal to circling the globe once over. During this test of physical and mental endurance, the monk sets on a journey to venerate Fudo-myo-o, the central deity of the Tendai, by visiting a series of religious sites located on Mount Hiei.

The selected monks are called ‘gyoja’ and their challenge consists of seven long years of pilgrimage  to over 250 sites on Mt. Hiei, which is one of the top three sacred places in Japan. During their visits, they need to cover a total of 1,000 long marathons, a feat that seems humanly impossible to accomplish.

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Who knew that the World Cup Fever could actually kill people? Football fans in China are actually succumbing to the ‘disease’ – three men have died so far just from World Cup excitement and exhaustion.

The first to go was 51-year-old Li Mingqiang, from Liaoning Province. He started feeling unwell during the match between Spain and the Netherlands, and his friends quickly called an ambulance. Unfortunately, the paramedics were unable to save his life; he died of a heart attack on the way to the hospital.

Just hours later, a similar incident was reported – a 25-year-old man was found dead in his apartment in Suzhou in Jiangsu Province, on Saturday morning. Once again, he was rushed to the hospital and declared dead on arrival. The police said that the man had been watching the World Cup on his computer.

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The food at Ming General Japanese Sushi Restaurant in Hong Kong is so bad, it actually has its own fan following. In fact the sushi chain is so popular that it has 6 branches located in various parts of the island city, which are regularly visited by bad eaters who dare each other to finish the cheap but hard-to-swallow sushi dishes they serve.

19-year-old Don Tsang, an active member of one of Hong Kong’s ‘bad-eating groups’, said: “It’s the worst. So it’s the most popular.” To me, that’s just weird logic, but it seems to make perfect sense to these groups that actively seek out what they consider bad food, and then spend hours discussing it.

So what exactly is it that makes the food at Ming General so bad? According to food blogger Patrick Lai, 38, the deep fried scallop sushi and the mini-sized prawn sushi are the worst. “They’re very small and very skinny. I don’t know where the restaurant can find such skinny prawns.” Another notable dish, he said, is the tuna sushi, which is served with a ‘mushy brown pool of liquid topping’. The restaurant is also notorious for its unusual dishes like fruit salad sushi and corn salad sushi.

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25-year-old Jinna Yang lost her father to stomach cancer two years ago. Although completely devastated by the loss, she decided that it was not too late to travel the world with her dad. So she set out on the biggest trip of her lifetime, accompanied by a life-size cardboard cutout of her father’s image, to show him all the places he had wanted to visit during his lifetime.

After her father’s passing, Jinna found it hard to cope with her regular life as a corporate employee in New York. “From the outside looking in, I seemed to have it all,” she wrote on her blog. “What people didn’t see was the toll the combination of life events took on every inch of my body, heart, mind and soul.”

“I had reached the point where I lost the will to live,” she wrote on her blog. “I gave up my dreams. I shut myself off from my loved ones and close friends. I developed alopecia and lost my hair at an alarming rate.” Jinna realized that she deeply regretted the fact that her father sacrificed his dreams of traveling and playing golf to provide for the family. For almost two years after her father’s death, she never truly dealt with her feelings.

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Singapore is a rather peaceful place in general, but a recent development is actually scaring the living daylights out of residents. It all started when someone discovered an abandoned doll on the side of a busy street. If you’ve watched your share of horror flicks, you probably know exactly how scary dolls can be.

The particular doll is as creepy as they come – you only need to take one look at its picture to realize something’s not right about it. It was found clad in a very shabby-looking stained lace dress, with an equally filthy face that was blindfolded. The cloth covering its eyes had Arabic writing on it, which translates to ‘bismillah’, or ‘in the name of Allah’. Rumor has it that the blindfold keeps the devil inside the doll in check; if you undo it, you invoke the curse and the doll will follow you home.

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Seven years ago, a homeless man in China was scavenging in a garbage bin when he found something that would change his life forever – a tiny baby girl! He was so overcome with emotion that he decided to raise her as his own child. 50-year-old Xiong Jianguo now lives under a bridge in Nanchang City with his seven-year-old adopted daughter, whom he named Yanyan.

“I guess she was one of those children that was born to a family who didn’t want a girl,” said Xiong. “I had lifted the top of the rubbish bin and was looking to see if there are any plastic bottles I could sell to recycle, when I heard a baby. She was in a box in a blanket and I was absolutely stunned.” The box, apparently, contained a single note: “Was born on October 15, 2007.”

The baby looked so helpless that Xiong took her home; at the time, he lived with his wife in a tiny room. The couple bought a baby bottle to feed her, and that’s when he knew that he wanted to look after her for as long as he could. “No matter how hard it is, I intend to make sure that I raise her until she is old enough to stand on her own two feet. I don’t believe she would have had a good life in an orphanage,” he said.

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75-year-old Sukumaran Menon has been living on just bread and water for almost four years now. Every morning, the puny old man travels to the same bench outside of Mahatma Gandhi Park on M.G. Road, in Bangalore City, armed with only an umbrella, fasts in protest of the government stealing his land.

Once he is seated on the bench, Menon engages in ‘Samadhana Upavasa Satyagraha’ (peaceful fasting protest), which means that he goes without food or water from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. He doesn’t carry any banners or notices and doesn’t like having his photograph taken – he just sits there, hoping that one day, justice will be served. He blindly believes that his persistence will pay off, just like it did for his hero, Mahatma Gandhi.

“Like him, I will continue my protest until justice is done,” Menon declared. “I do not talk, the government should see my plight and talk.”

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Nanjing city, the capital of China’s Jiangsu Province, is the new home of the world’s largest and longest 3D street painting. The artwork, named ‘Rhythms of Youth’ was unveiled on June 11; it is a whopping 365 meters long, covering over 2,500 square meters on the campus of the Communication University of China (CUCN). It has set two new Guinness World Records  – one for the largest, and the other for the longest street painting in the world.

The technique used to make the 3D painting is known as ‘anamorphic’ – the artwork is painted in a distorted fashion so it will only look right from a certain point of view. The team that created it was led by famous Chinese artist Yang Yongchun. “It took my team more than 20 days to finish the painting on the ground,” he said. “Every day, we worked on it from daybreak when we could barely tell the colors apart until it was too dark to see anything. We’ve devoted all of our time, energy and attention to this painting.”

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Jack Link’s, a popular manufacturer of beef jerky, came up with a grand way to celebrate National Jerky Day this year. They organized the construction of ‘Meat Rushmore’, an all-meat replica of the popular American monument, Mount Rushmore. The 13 foot by 17 foot structure was unveiled in New York City on June 12, as a part of the Jerky Day celebrations.

The humongous meat mountain took 1,400 hours to assemble – it is covered in over 1,600 pounds of beef, pork and turkey jerky. If you were to lay out all the meat used in a single line, you’d end up with close to 10 kilometers of jerky. The core of the sculpture was hand carved using foam, and then each layer of jerky was individually applied over it. Over 20 staff members worked on the project, supervised by art director Alex Valhouli.

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Japan’s shinkansen (bullet train) is one of the fastest in the world, covering a whopping 200 kilometers in just one hour. But few people outside Japan know that the high-speed train service comes with a high-speed cleaning service to match, which ensures that the shinkansen have virtually no delays. The cleaning crew manage to cover every inch of the train’s interior in just seven minutes flat! The cleaners’ performance is so efficient and impressive that it is known in Japan as the ‘7-minute shinkansen theatre’.

TESSEI is the rail service company in charge of keeping the fleet of bullet trains clean when they make their final stop at Tokyo Station. Their employees are responsible for preparing the trains before the next wave of customers arrive, and they have only seven minutes to do it. The manner in which they’ve organized themselves to complete the job is really quite impressive.

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Nepal is a land of mysticism, where a select few pre-pubescent girls from the Newar clan are worshiped as ‘Kumari Devi’ or ‘Virgin Goddess’. According to tradition, Durga (the Hindu goddess of destruction) herself is incarnate in young girls belonging to the silver and goldsmith community. Until they attain puberty, Kumaris are worshipped as deities and deemed protectors by thousands of adoring Hindus and Buddhists in Nepal.

To prove that she is the chosen one, a prospective Kumari must go through over 30 tests. Initially, high priests choose girls based on their physical characteristics – with a slender neck like a conch shell, gentle eyes like a cow, and other special traits. In the next stage, the girl must pass through a series of unusual trials. In one test, she is placed in a darkened room with severed animal heads and hideously masked dancing men, while her reaction is observed. In another test, she must correctly identify the items worn by her predecessor (similar to the ritual used in Tibet to choose a new Dalai Lama).

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Earlier this month, a ferocious hailstorm wreaked havoc throughout the American Midwest. Several cities were badly affected, but perhaps none as much as Bray, a small town in Nebraska. The hailstones that hit Bray were unbelievably large, roughly the size of tennis balls. Naturally, the town was completely battered – the storm left it looking like a war zone with houses and vehicles almost completely destroyed.

Large chunks were ripped out of houses and the paint was torn off the walls. The cars in the town looked as though they had been through a gang war – with the windscreens and windows completely smashed in. Although tornadoes were reported in the region, the hailstones did the most of the damage, wreaking havoc among the locals. Over 20 people from Bray were injured as well; they were rushed to the emergency room, but none were seriously hurt.

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This white wedding dress is so elaborate  and stunning that you’re never going to believe what it’s made of – toilet paper. The one-of-a-kind dress was created by art student Olivia Mears, from Asheville, North Carolina. She used only 11 rolls of toilet paper, 100 ft. of tape and lots of glue to put the whole thing together.

The dress was made for a local event called the Annual Cheap Chic Toilet Paper Wedding Dress Contest, sponsored by Charmin, a toilet paper company. “I learned about the contest with only a few weeks to prepare the dress,” said Olivia. So she worked on the project for about 20 hours, and came up with a real winner.

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38-year-old Irishman Daniel Clavin is suffering from what is possibly one of the worst hangovers in history – he’s been hiccuping non-stop after one night of heavy drinking, two years ago. The strange condition has completely disrupted his life – the poor guy has trouble eating, he’s embarrassed to go out in public, and he sleeps alone every night.

Daniel’s hiccups began one morning in July 2011, after attending a stag party the night before. “I just woke up with them and I have no idea why they started,” he said. “I’m not a big drinker and I’d had more than I’d for some time but it was nothing out of the ordinary. Since then, I’ve tried just about everything – all the old wives’ cures – but I can’t stop.”

Living with hiccups is no easy task – they cause serious of inconvenience to Daniel on a daily basis. “Some days are bad and I’ll have difficulty eating and keeping my food down,” he said. “Other times they lock up my diaphragm and I won’t be able to breathe for 30 seconds. I spend most nights in a different room from Susan (his wife) so she is not disturbed but that’s not ideal and it puts a strain on things. I can be lying there for hours, hiccuping every three seconds.”

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