Trying out a coffin while you’re still alive can be a rather unnerving experience. But the Japanese seem to love it!  They even have a creepy ‘try-before-you-die’ festival where people can lay down in coffins, try out funeral garments and even get a morbid makeover.

Called ‘Shukatsu Festa’, the unique event has become very popular in recent years. In fact the whole ‘shukatsu’ trend, which translates as preparing for one’s end, has become really big in Japan. Apparently, people no longer think it’s bad luck to prepare for their death. Participants can choose their funeral outfit, put it on, slip into the flower-filled casket they like and have a picture taken. That way, they get to know exactly what they’ll look like on the day of their funeral. They can even have funeral make-up applied on their faces for a deathly pallor. They can also choose to be covered with white blankets have have the attendants softly close the lid. Read More »

Most people aren’t aware of this, but an alarmingly large number of cats die of leukemia every year. To raise awareness about the plight of these suffering cats, Maria Torero has converted her own two-story, eight-room apartment into a feline hospice. The 45-year-old nurse from Lima, Peru, currently has 175 patients residing with her, and spends over $1,500 a month just to care for them.

Maria has been caring for the diseased cats for the past five years now – she brings unwanted strays into her home and nurses them as they slowly succumb to their deadly illness. The mother-of-three doesn’t distinguish between her own children and her cat-patients. In fact, she says that she considers it her duty as a nurse to take in creatures that no one else wants to care for.

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The talented Sumie painters of Kousyuuya Studio in Nikko, Japan can paint the body of a dragon with a single stroke of the brush. The delicate technique is known as ‘hitofude ryuu’, which literally means ‘dragon with one stroke’, and it’s been around for four generations.

Watching these painters create a perfect dragon – with all the shades and scales – in just a couple of seconds is a true delight. It all looks so effortless, but there’s a lot of hard work and practice involved in getting the stroke right.

To create a single dragon painting, the Sumie artists first make the ornate head with various flourishes, using a smaller brush. Then, they dip a much larger sumie brush into the desired paint color and simply swipe it across the canvas in one swift movement. You really have to watch a video to realize the brilliance of the technique.

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16-year-old Ann Makosinski, from Victoria, Canada, has come up with a marvelous invention – a flashlight powered solely by body-heat. Her project won second prize at a local science fair, and made it all the way to the 2013 Google Science Fair, where she was declared the winner for her age group. She also updated it to a handsfree version this year – a body-heat powered headlamp, for which she won the 2014 Weston Youth Innovation Award.

Ann’s project is truly remarkable for its sheer simplicity and brilliance. I mean, it isn’t every day that you come across a light source that doesn’t use batteries, solar power, or wind energy. The device just powers on as soon as you hold it in your palm. If that isn’t genius, I don’t know what is!

The secret behind Ann’s invention is thermoelectric technology, and devices called Peltier tiles. And it’s really surprising that no one’s ever thought to use that kind of technology to power a flashlight before. Think of all the AA batteries we could avoid using!

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When millionaire Klaus Zapf passed away this week, the whole of Germany mourned his death. The eccentric tycoon, who always had millions at his disposal, actually lived a frugal life by choice. What endeared him most to the people of his nation was his generous nature – he gave most of his money away, while he lived on only $500 a month.

“I don’t need any money. It just makes us unequal,” Klaus once said. “There are just so many bloody idiots with money around, you don’t need another one.”

Zapf, 62, had made his fortune in the relocation business – he ran a company called Zapf Umzüge, which he often referred to as ‘West Berlin’s best removals collective’. His distinctive blue and yellow vans were quite well-known in city streets as they picked up and unloaded wares from across the country and the world.

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Looking at the detailed sculptures in the photos below, You’d be tempted to think they are made of wax, but believe it or not, they’re actually gourds! Enterprising Chinese farmers are able to grow these veggies into any shape they want. The most popular one is Chairman Mao, but there are many others as well – Buddha, Jesus, Santa Claus, babies, old men, monks, dragons, and pretty much anything else that attracts people’s attention.

You might think there’s some complex bioengineering or agricultural science going on behind these gourd-sculptures, but in reality, they’re just grown in simple plastic molds. It all started when a man named Xie Lyu Zhi visited the Thousand Year Temple in Sichuan Province. He claims that during the visit, a Buddhist monk told him about a dream he had about a gourd shaped like a deity.

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58-year-old oil investor Richard Gibson has one of the weirdest collections in the world. For the past 36 years, he has been religiously saving all his toenail clippings in a glass jar.

Collecting toenails is a strange hobby, but Richard says that he didn’t exactly plan for it – it sort of happened as a result of his curiosity, and he just never stopped. He happened to be clipping his nails one day in February, 1978, and instead of throwing them out, he just put them in a manicure box. He then started doing it repeatedly, just to see how long it would take to fill up the box. That didn’t take too long – only two years – and by then he was pretty much hooked. So he moved his collection to a large glass jar, which is what now uses to put the clippings in.

“I have no idea how many nails are in the jar,” Gibson admitted. “It’s well into the thousands.”

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Lillian Weber, from Iowa, is almost 100 years old, but she doesn’t let her age stand in the way of her life’s mission – helping those in need. She spends every single day making a dress from scratch, so that a child in need will have something to wear. She started the unique project in 2011, and she’s made over 840 dresses so far. Her goal is to  make 1,000.

Lillian, who was nominated for WQAD-TV’s ‘Pay It Forward’ award, gets started on a new dress every morning, takes a break at midday, and is finished by the afternoon. “It is just what I like to do,” she said. The dresses she makes are donated to Little Dresses for Africa, an organisation that distributes clothes to impoverished young girls in Africa and beyond.

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While most people prefer their ice-cream frozen, Baghdad-based artist Othman Toma likes it melted. He uses multi-colored melting treats as a medium for his art, instead of normal paint. And it works incredibly well. In fact, to the untrained eye, his artworks seem painted with regular watercolors.

Toma paints all sorts of stuff using ice cream – lions, tigers, women’s faces, popular monuments, and more. It’s  just marvelous how he manages to get such a wide array of colors with very few shades of the cold dessert. All he needs to do is reach out into his freezer, and he’s ready to paint!

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It’s hard to find a partner with similar interests, especially if you’re into weird things. That’s why I’d say Dan MacIntyre and Dunya Kalantery are quite lucky they found each other. The two lovebirds share an extremely rare and gross hobby – looking at ‘fatbergs’.

If you have no idea what a fatberg is, well, you’re not the only one. The relatively unknown term is used in the UK to describe a great lump of fat, sanitary items and other stuff that doesn’t break down when it goes down the toilet. These deposits are found underground in city sewer systems, and are known to cause problematic clogs.

Fatbergs are exactly as gross as they sound, so it’s really surprising that Dan and his girlfriend Dunya discovered a common interest in them when they got together last year. Well, as they say, birds of a feather… “Like wet wipes and congealed cooking oil, we are inseparable,” Dan wrote to Dunya in what they consider to be a ‘romantic email’.

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I’ve seen plenty of dog lovers displaying their affection in rather questionable ways, but this is a first – a woman in China loves her so much that she loves eating its hair! Wang Jing, 27, is a self-proclaimed canine lover from Heilongjiang province – she actually gave up her regular job to become a dog tailor. Two years into the role, she claims that she has swallowed over 1,000 hairballs.

It all started when Wang adopted a cute little poodle called ‘Kuku’, four years ago, just after she graduated from college. She soon became obsessed with the furry brown pup, feeding it imported dog food, pig liver-mixed rice, ice cream and dried fruit. Still, things were pretty much normal until she began to feel enormous amounts of stress from her job as a graphics designer.

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While most makeup artists tend to follow the conventional rules of of the trade, 25-year-old Laura Jenkinson prefers to do her own thing. For the past year, she has been using all her colorful cosmetics and makeup brushes to recreate popular cartoon characters on her mouth and chin. She paints them in such a way that her mouth becomes their mouth as well, making the characters instantly come alive.

London-based Laura has so far painted a host of characters on her mouth, including The Cookie Monster, Shrek, Taz the Tasmanian Devil and several others from Disney movies, Looney Tunes, Pixar, and South Park. Last week, she did Robin Williams’ genie from Aladdin as a tribute to the actor. She does the paintings so accurately that every time her lips move, it appears as though the character is talking.

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Brendan Walsh is a professional sewage diver who, believe it or not, actually loves his job. He’s covered in poop for a large part of the day, every day, but that doesn’t seem to bother him at all. He runs a commercial diving business in Melbourne and he has been doing the job for over 25 years. “My company will do any job that involves wetness,” he proudly declares. “As long as there’s a fluid of some kind, we’ll attack it.”

But what in the world would anyone need to dive into a sewer for? Well, as it turns out, there are plenty of reasons. “Mostly we do general maintenance at the sewage farms but it could be rebuilding pumps or clearing blockages,” Brendan explained. “We found lots of false teeth but mainly male and female hygiene products. When we come back out we often have condoms hanging off you. People also don’t chew their corn,” he joked. Australia’s sewage farms need divers because they use bacteria to break down their waste, and not chemicals.

“It’s definitely not a job for the faint-hearted,” Brendan admitted. “It’s more thick than normal diving and you can’t see anything no matter what. It’s more like walking than swimming when you get down there.” Despite that, he says that working with sewage is like working with ‘brown-gold’. “I love my job and always have. I’m a passionate diver from way back, and I’m a mechanic. I’ve never worked a day in my life because I combine my passions. You can’t do a job well unless you love it,” he said.

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Men can be real jerks sometimes, but this guy has got to be the worst of the lot – he actually faked his own death to get out of his wedding. 23-year-old Tucker Blandford, from Connecticut, didn’t have the guts to tell his fiancee the truth – that he wasn’t ready for marriage – so he just led her to believe that he had died. When bride-to-be Alex Lanchester found out the truth, she was livid and heartbroken.

“He has shattered my trust and I’m not sure I’ll ever be in a relationship again,” said Alex, also 23. “All I ever did was love him. I’m so sick of being messed around and I’m glad to be rid of him. Looking back, maybe I was naive. But I really loved him and never thought he would go to such extreme measures to dump me. I’ve cried until I felt numb but now I’m just really angry.”

So how exactly does one go about faking their own death? Well, conveniently for Tucker, Alex lives in another country, so he probably thought she wouldn’t be able to verify his story. He simply called her one day, a week before he was due to visit her, and pretended to be his own dad. “I picked up my phone and there was a man saying he was Tucker’s dad,” said Alex.

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Kong Keng, a 2-year-old kid from Khnor village in Cambodia, is being hailed as a miracle baby with special healing powers. Thousands of people are traveling from as far as Laos and Vietnam, believing that even a glimpse of Kong will help cure them of their ailments. He appears to be the last ray of hope in a nation that doesn’t exactly have the world’s best healthcare system.

Hundreds of people throng outside Kong’s single-room wooden home every single day. It’s a motley crowd of handicapped people in wheelchairs, and ailing, dying patients on stretchers. Phat Soen, Kong’s 21-year-old mother, brings the boy out and places a row of eucalyptus balm bottles in front of him. She then guides his hand over each bottle – his touch is believed to transfer healing powers to the balm.

The toddler’s healing powers were discovered by an accidental healing ‘miracle’ that occurred a few months ago. “The miracle happened to my brother,” said Sung Bahn, Kong’s uncle. “He was paralyzed from the waist down after a motorcycle accident. Doctors couldn’t cure him and neither could the Kru Khmers (traditional Cambodian healers).”

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