Villages on the east coast of the Kamchatka peninsula, in the Russian Far-East are experiencing scenes that seem taken out of an Alfred Hitchkok movie. Only instead of birds invading their community, it’s billions of mosquitoes swirling into visible “tornadoes”.

Villages like Ust-Kamchatsk are used to being invaded by large number of mosquitoes every summer, it’s normal for this insects to swarm near bodies of water, but this year it’s much worse than usual. Because of an unusually hot summer, the number of mosquitoes is much larger, making them an even bigger nuisance than they usually are. Window and door nets do little to keep the pesky buzzers out of people’s homes, as they seem to get in through the smallest of cracks, and going outside means dealing with large swarms of mosquitoes that seem to reach the sky when seen from afar.

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Sports are usually associated with skill and effort, be they physical or mental, but in Vinkensport or vinkenzetting (literally ‘Finch Sitting), a traditional animal sport practiced in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, it’s all about sitting down and listening to birds singing.

In Vinkensport, small cages are lined up in a row about six feet apart on the street. Inside each box is a single male chaffinch whose job is to produce as many bird calls as possible in one hour. Sitting in front of the wooden cages are their owners, the vinkeniers (“finchers”) who tally the bird songs with chalk on a large wooden rod. Each chalk line represents one complete bird call which ends in a characteristic flourish known as a susk-e-wiet. Judges walk along the row of cages to make sure no one cheats. The chaffinch with the most bird calls in an hour is declared the winner. Vinkensport is a very passive sport, some would even call it boring, but it is also a very controversial one.

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The Gate Tower Building is one of the many several tall office buildings that make up Osaka’s impressive skyline, but there is something about it that makes it unique in the world – it has a functional highway going right through it.

Photos of this architectural anomaly have been doing the rounds on social media for over two decades now, and it’s easy to see why. 16-storey buildings don’t usually have highway off-ramps going right through them, but the Gate Tower Building does, and the traffic doesn’t affect the people working inside it one bit. The elevators are located on the side of the building, and the highway itself doesn’t touch the tower, which is properly insulated against traffic noise and vibrations anyway. It’s still quite a sight to behold, and if you’re ever in Osaka you should definitely pass by, or rather, through.

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If you’re tired of growing or eating the same old green cucumbers, you’ll be pleased to hear that there is actually an alternative – albino cucumbers.

As their name suggests, these heirloom cucumbers are a bright white, even though the stalks they grow on have a common dark green foliage. Albino cucumbers don’t simply occur as an anomaly, although that may have been the case with the first such specimen. They are actually a slowly developed variety of cucumber that dates back to the 1893, when the Burpee seed company featured it in its famous catalog for the first time. It had been sent in by a customer in 1890, and Burpee spent the next three years breeding and evaluating the plant before launching it commercially.

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If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to get hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, staring absently into the camera might actually be a good idea.

At least that’s what Indonesian youtuber Muhammad Didit did earlier this month, posting a 2-hour-long clip of himself sitting on a couch and doing nothing but staring into the camera. The video has since received nearly 1.5 million views and has inspired countless memes on Indonesian social media. In fact, ever since Didit’s video went viral, other would-be internet celebrities have been been busy imitating him, hoping to also copy his success. You can now find YouTube videos of people doing nothing for four, five and even eight hours at a time.

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Seattle-based Lauren Ko is a self-taught baker who rose to fame thanks to the mathematical precision of her pie designs, most of which are inspired by complex geometric patterns.

A former executive assistant in higher education, Lauren Ko got into baking completely by accident. She saw a picture of a really beautiful pie while surfing the internet and asked herself if she could do something like that. Little did she know that the seemingly unimportant self-challenge would change her life forever. After baking her first pie in 2016, Lauren never looked back, and soon after starting her Instagram in 2017, her mesmerizing pies were already a big hit on the popular social network. It wasn’t long before juggling her job and pie making got too difficult and she decided to focus her efforts exclusively on her passion.

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Introducing the electric toy car for the 1%. Luxury car maker Bugatti teamed up with London-based Little Car Company to create 500 miniature electric cars for kids, priced at a spicy $35,000 each.

The French car maker originally unveiled the children’s electric car, named Bugatti Baby II, at the 2019 Geneva Motor Show, and soon after announced that all planned 500 units had been sold to wealthy parents all over the world. But then the Covid-19 pandemic happened and suddenly some of the buyers decided that spending tens of thousands of dollars on what is essentially a children’s toy was ill-advised under the circumstances. So Bugatti had no choice but to announce that some Bugatti Baby II electric cars for kids are once again available for purchase. They start at $35,000, get them while they’re hot!

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Gyromitra esculenta, or the False Morel, is a Spring mushroom that contains the toxin and carcinogen gyromitrin, which makes it illegal to sell and cook in countries around the world. In Finland, however, it is considered a delicacy.

False Morel mushrooms have historically been consumed in northern Europe for centuries, but as chemistry and medicine evolved, it became somewhat of a forbidden fruit due to the dangers of consuming even small amounts of gyromitrin. Symptoms associated with the ingestion of this known toxin and carcinogen include severe headaches, vomiting, nausea, extreme dizziness, diarrhea and, if the damage to the liver is too serious, even death. Their sale in countries like Sweden and Norway was made illegal years ago, but in Finland people still eat it with gusto.

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From flamboyant wedding cakes shaped like fantasy castles, to edible optical illusions, we’ve featured some amazing cakes here on OC, but this collection of marine-themed treats definitely take the cake!

The Covid-19 pandemic has made vacationing in a tropical island paradise a lot harder this year, but you can satisfy your craving for tropical destinations as well as your sweet tooth with some ultra-realistic paradise island cakes. We didn’t even know something like that even existed, but it turns out some cake masters are so skilled that they can recreate a tropical island setting using regular baking ingredients, food coloring and jelly.

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Alexis Stone a makeup artist so skilled that he can virtually transform into anyone, including male and female celebrities, movie characters and historical figures.

Elliot Joseph Rentz, aka Alexis Stone, is a drag queen and online influencer from Manchester, UK who rose to fame for his talent of using makeup to transform into various pop icons, from Leonardo DiCaprio to Adele. Some of his impersonations are so good that most people think his photos are digitally altered, but the artist swears that it’s all in the makeup and the careful mimicking of stars’ facial expressions.

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India is one of the most affected countries by the Covid-19 pandemic, and people are turning to spiritual and divine powers in an attempt to protect themselves from the new coronavirus.

Last month, Indian media reported on a group of women from a village in West Bengal who had decided to fight the coronavirus in their own way – by worshiping Corona Mai, or ‘Corona Goddess’. They set up a small shrine on the banks of Chinnamasta pond, near Asansol city, and started singing songs and mantras, burning incense and bringing offerings like fruits, vegetables, ghee, and jaggery. The women said that they planned to worship and pray to the goddess until she takes away the coronavirus. That may take a while…

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Belgian tattoo artist Indy Voet has earned a reputation for executing permanent tattoos in the most unconventional places, from people’s finger webs, to the hidden space behind their ears. But his specialty is hand poking tattoos on the roof of people’s mouths.

Voet has been doing roof of the mouth tattoos for about five years and has since developed his own technique as well as a portfolio of tattoos that fit the unusual location. A former body piercing artist with ten years of experience under his belt, the young Belgian found the transition to doing tattoos in uncommon places natural. Although having a tattoo inked on the roof of the mouth means that dentists are the only ones who will truly be able to admire it, people seem to think having a secret tattoo is pretty cool.

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Nguyen Thi Dinh, an 83-year-old woman from Vietnam’s Ben Tre Province, allegedly stopped cutting her hair when she was 19, which explains why it measures 6 meters in length and is shaped like a python.

Just a week after Indian man Doddapalliah made international news headlines with his 7.3-meter-long-hair, which he claimed he had never even trimmed, we feature the story of a Vietnamese pensioner who insists that she hasn’t cut or even shampooed her locks in the last 64 years. It all started when Nguyen Thi Dinh, from Binh Thanh Commune, in Giong Trom District, was 19 years old and cut her hair for the first time. She claims to have experienced such severe headaches that her parents took her to see a doctor, but even after taking the prescribed treatment, the symptoms persisted. The headaches only went away when her hair started growing longer again, so she has refrained from cutting her locks ever since.

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Wat Pariwat, in Bangkok, Thailand, gets its famous nickname – “David Beckham Temple” – from a gold-plated statue of the English former football player holding up a statue of Buddha. But that’s just one of the unexpected characters you’re bound to notice visiting this unusual holy place.

David Beckham’s statue was installed at Pariwat Temple in 1999, when the sculptor, who happened to be a die-hard Manchester United fan, was allowed to include it as a permanent temple decoration as a symbol of his love for the club. It has since become famous all over the world and has even given the temple its nickname. But this statue isn’t all that’s unusual about this Buddhist temple, not even close. Among Buddhist-themed artworks and representations of mythical creatures, you’ll notice some characters that don’t quite belong, like Batman or Albert Einstein…

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If you find yourself walking thorough the forest of Rambouillet, just west of Paris, and happen to see an animal resembling a kangaroo, know that your eyes aren’t playing trick on you, the French forest has been home to up to 150 wallabies for over 40 years.

The colony of red-necked Bennett’s wallabies living in Rambouillet Forest can be traced back to a small group of animals that were brought into a zoological reserve in the nearby village of Emance, during the 1970s. A few of them escaped through holes in the fencing, and were never retrieved. They’ve been living in the wild for decades and researchers believe that the woods may now be home to around 150 wallabies. The forest provided them with shelter and sustenance, they had no natural predators to fear, and the climate was apparently very similar to that of their native Tasmania. The biggest threat to the wallabies of Rambouillet are passing cars.

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