In a bid to make himself instantly recognizable, an Indian real estate agent has surrounded himself with the colors red and white. The man is so obsessed with these colors that they feature in all his clothes, in his car, and his home. He even buys his toothpaste in a red-and-white tube, with a toothbrush to match!

52-year-old Sevenraj, a real estate agent based in Bangalore, developed a fixation with red and white after he realized that it was a great gimmick to get people to notice him. His inspiration comes from Mahatma Gandhi, who was always clad in white. “Mahatma Gandhi is recognized by his glasses and bare torso with a white towel, so I had to do something similar to be recognized by one and all,” he said.

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Miners in Russia’s Irkutsk region found an oddly shaped nugget of gold on Friday the 13th, this month. The discovery scared them quite badly – especially because it happened on what superstition says is the unluckiest day of the year. It was also a full moon night, and to make matters worse, they say that the rock bore an uncanny resemblance to the devil’s ear.

According to the Bodaybo town municipal administration, the gold miners (who work for the metal mining company Ugakhan) didn’t immediately realise that the rock was made of gold. The sifting machine mistook it for a regular rock and discarded it. But one worker had the good sense to take a closer look, and he realized that it was in fact a large gold nugget.

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Philani Dladla, a homeless man living on the streets of Johannesburg, is probably the last person you’d expect to be a bookworm. Yet, the 24-year-old is quite a voracious reader. And instead of begging like other homeless people, he has chosen to make a living by reviewing and selling books.

South African director and cinematographer Tebogo Malope played a tremendous part in bringing Philani’s unique and inspiring story to the world. Malope, 29, recorded an interview with Philani called the ‘Pavement Bookworm’; the videos have gone viral since he put them up online last year.

The two-part interview features Philani speaking about the books he has read and why he likes them – the man is so full of infectious joy as he discusses his love of reading. His sense of passion and appreciation of books is extremely rare, especially for someone who leads a difficult life. Philani seems unfazed by his own living conditions, he only wants to tell the world how great it is to read.

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Hugo Hernandez Garcia, from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, has been living with a disfigured face for the past 17 years. In his quest for cosmetic perfection, the formerly handsome stylist did some pretty weird stuff to his face – he injected it with baby oil, believing it to be a low-cost substitute for collagen. The results, as you can see, were quite ghastly. And, unfortunately, irreversible.

In his desire to look more like a woman, Hugo started a series of beauty practices in 1997, that would eventually lead to his disfigurement. He performed ‘surgery after surgery’ on himself using household products to make his skin look flawless. During one of these surgeries, he injected baby oil into his face because he thought that it would have the same effect as collagen. Read More »

An Indian home appliance company recently introduced the idea of ‘vegetarian water’ in an ad campaign, to appeal to their predominantly vegetarian customer-base. It might seem absurd, but they’ve tried hard to make it sound convincing – they claim that their new product, the Prestige LifeStraw water purifier, ‘gives only pure and vegetarian water’.

“Pure vegetarian water? Must be an advertising gimmick!” the newspaper ad declares. And then it goes on to give reasons why it isn’t a gimmick. “Most purifiers claim to kill all viruses, bacteria and germs,” the ad reads. “But the chemically killed microorganisms remain in the water, making it safe, but effectively non-vegetarian.” Consuming dead creatures in your water, they imply, is against the principles of vegetarianism.

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Zuly Sanguino is a talented young artist and motivational speaker. The 24-year-old Colombian creates beautiful, colorful paintings of flowers and landscapes that have been exhibited in various shows. She has also given several motivational lectures at corporate organizations, schools and prisons. Zuly is an exceptional woman, mainly because she’s managed to achieve so much even though she was born without fully formed limbs.

Born with phocomelia, a congenital disorder that affected all four of her limbs, Zuly was destined for a life of disability. The doctors had informed her mother, Guillermina, that Zuly would have to be lying down all the time for the rest of her life. In spite of their poverty and terrible living conditions (they lived in shacks with dirt floors), Guillermina wouldn’t give up on her daughter – she taught young Zuly to sit at first, and then walk on her own without external support.

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The newly opened Sugar Daddy University aims to teach women how to become professional sugar babies, and men become better sugar daddies. Located in New York, the school is  run by well-known sugar daddy Alan Schneider, who previously created the top dating site, SugarDaddyForMe. He’s roped in one of his own sugar babies, Carla Abonia, as a professor.

Together, Dean Alan and Carla will teach students the five key elements required to become a successful sugar daddy or sugar baby – sexuality, understanding, generosity, attraction and reciprocity. They’re also collaborating with plastic surgeons, relationship experts and financial experts to help women look better and help men manage the relationship better.

Many tend to frown upon this kind of relationship, but according to Alan there’s nothing wrong with a relationship based on a rich man providing for the woman of his dreams if she provides for him as well. The transaction itself is not the problem, but the associated stigma is. “It’s a whole lifestyle that is taught and refined,” he said.

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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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24-year-old Ting Tien has done something that’s not really expected of girls her age – she’s gone and given up all her material comforts to become a monk. In her former life, Ting lived in luxury; she was a fashion designer with access to the best of clothes and make up. But the shine of material objects wore off quite soon in Ting’s case and she chose to look for inner peace instead.

Ting, a native of Jinan City in Eastern China, attended the Qingdao University in Shandong Province, specializing in luxury goods design. But when she graduated, she became disillusioned with the lifestyle that she and her friends were leading. She found everything around her increasingly materialistic and too much to handle.

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