It’s not the first time we’re hearing about someone who is homeless by choice. A while ago, we wrote about a man who lives with only 15 possessions and a college student who chooses not to live in a house. Minimalism is a concept that several people around the world are embracing, and Richard from England is one of them. What makes Richard’s story unique is how happy his homelessness has made him, in a world that sees it as a pitiable condition.

I found out about Richard from a video on Vimeo. Although it’s only about 4 minutes long, the video tells quite a powerful story, depicting Richard’s life in his own words. The young piano tuner says he used to live in an apartment with all the modern comforts, and yet that didn’t really make him happy. He had student loans and other debts that he hadn’t been able to clear for several years. And then one day, he realized how pointless it all was. “I remember specifically one afternoon I looked around my flat, looked at my LCD TV and I thought, ‘When was the last time I had time to watch that?’ And then I looked at my Playstation I had never even played. I still had this mountain of student debt, of bank loan debt which I was still scratching the surface of. And in the end, I just thought that the only thing I really value in the flat is the hot shower. Everything else, I can do without.”

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At one particular Brazilian jail, inmates don’t actually need both wheels on their bicycle to make an escape. By pedaling on stationary bikes, they can reduce their sentence and also get into shape.

The medium-security penitentiary of Santa Rita do Sapucai, a mountain range city about two hours north of Sao Paolo, has recently made headlines for its controversial sentence-reducing program. Thought up by the local judge, Jose Henrique Mallmann, who said he was inspired by a piece of news he read on the Internet about gyms in the United States where people generate electricity by riding stationary bikes, this two-month old program has inmates doing the same thing to reduce their stay in jail. For every three eight-hour days riding the bikes, criminals have one day of sentence shaved off. It’s a pretty good deals, but like other recently-implemented programs in Brazilian jails, it sparked some controversy around the South-American country.

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Stepping in dog poo is said to bring good luck, but for most people it’s one of the worst things that could happen as they walk through the city. Owners not picking up their pets’ droppings is a global problem, but a Mexican Internet portal has come up with an invention that might just inspire people to do the right thing. It’s called Poo Wifi and it’s pure genius.

Walking through the park trying to avoid every dog poo that comes in your way is an almost impossible task, but it wouldn’t be a problem if owners would just clean up after their pets. So Internet portal Terra has teamed up with ad agency DDB to create something that would motivate people to actually pick up their dogs turds. After some brainstorming, they came up with Poo Wifi, a machine that offers a free wifi connection in exchange for dog poo. So after they’ve picked up the droppings, people can drop the bags in a special box on top of the machine, after which the machine offers a number of minutes of free wifi, depending on the weight of the poo. Obviously, large dog owners will get more free wifi, which makes sense since their dogs’ droppings are the messiest.

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Misstravel.com is a creative new website that hooks up beautiful women with rich men. It’s essentially a dating service, but only meant for the wealthy and the attractive. Once registered, good looking women can go on a trip with generous rich men, who will, of course, take care of all the expenses.

Registering at misstravel.com is absolutely free. You could sign up either as an Attractive Traveler or a Generous Traveler. The former obviously gets to travel for free and the latter pays for the trip. According to the website, an Attractive Traveler account is meant for “beautiful people who want to travel for free” and the Generous Traveler option is for “generous members who are seeking to travel with a beautiful companion, and who are willing to pay for all travel expenses.” The Generous Travelers also need to pay the website when they decide to make communication with an Attractive Traveler.

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It’s news like this that makes me wish I could become a kid and go back to school again. I mean, just look at the pictures. If school was like this, who wouldn’t want to go? To me, the school looks like it’s come out of the future, or from a sci-fi movie. It’s definitely surreal. But a closer look shows that it isn’t very different from, say, a Google office. Kids seem to be working independently on their laptops, in a place that’s comfortable and convenient for them. I do wonder if all that lounging around is good for their posture, though.

The school you’re looking at is the brainchild of Swedish Free School Organization, Vittra. They operate 30 schools around Sweden, with an aim to ensure that learning takes place everywhere on campus. So, they’ve eliminated classrooms all together. This particular school is the latest, called Telefonplan, and it was opened last August. It was designed and built by the architecture firm Rosan Bosch. At Vittra, students are free to work independently, and if they find the need to collaborate with peers on a project, they have a few options for that too. The ‘village’ is a tiny house meant for group work, and ‘organic conversation furniture’ allows the kids to interact with each other as well. Each student receives a computer from the school too, which is used as a major tool for learning.

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It is surprising to find business owners in this day and age who aren’t all about the money. Michael Diedrick from Milwaukee is one such person. The fact that he sold his restaurant located in a prime neighborhood for a paltry sum of $100, is something strange and unfathomable. Although, once you get to know more about the deal, it might not seem so bizarre after all.

Forty year old Diedrick opened the National Café and Takeaway around three years ago with a goal. His aim was to introduce the city of Milwaukee to the sustainable concept of local and organic food, centered around minimal waste. The place was opened as an experiment, with the intention of being sold eventually, to a person capable of managing such a restaurant. Diedrick, in fact, runs his own website design studio in the same premises, three floors below.

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Megan and Eric Kellermeyer decided to name their baby born on 11/11/11 Dovahkiin, after the leading character in Bethesda Studios’ “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” video game.

Dovahkiin Tom Kellermeyer was born at 6:08 pm PST, and his parents explained their decision because they wanted to give their son an “awesome name”. Meaning “Dragonborn” in dragon language, Dovahkiin certainly sounds like a very interesting name, but it’s also one that will earn its bearer and his family free Bethesda games for life. You see, the video game developer posted a challenge back in February that whoever would deliver a baby on 11/11/11 and name him/her Dovahkiin, would get free games for life. Megan and Eric were the first to prove they’d completed the challenge.

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American company ArKay Beverages has created the world’s first alcohol-free whiskey and claims their product tastes just like the real thing.

I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t get why anyone would want to drink alcohol-free beer, so ArKay’s whiskey-flavored drink is something I will probably never understand. I mean who drinks whiskey simply because they love the taste? Sure it has certain hints, but unless it’s mixed with Red Bull, Coke, or mixed in a Long island cocktail, I don’t get it. Of course I’m not a connaisseur, but I’m sure even they find the idea of an alcohol-free whiskey a little unusual.

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At 37 meters tall, the Excalibur Tower is the tallest free-standing climbing wall in the world. A part of the Bjoeks climbing center, in the Dutch city of Groningen, Excalibur is the tallest thing for miles, offering a memorable panorama to climbers who manage to reach the top.

You’ll probably find considerably higher climbing walls set up on the side of buildings, bridges and dams, but as far as free-standing climbing walls go, Excalibur is the tallest, beating the Texas Stone Works wall by just a few inches. The 37-meter-high tower has an overhang of 36 feet, and is ideal for both beginner climbers and experts who will find themselves literally hanging in the air, due to the tower’s curvy shape.

According to both creators of the tower and climbers who have actually made it all the way to the top, the views from up there can prove a bit too much intimidating, considering the Netherlands aren’t known for their mountainous landscape, which makes the Excalibur the tallest thing as far as the eye can see.

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The Freestyle Music Park was inaugurated in April 2008 near Myrtle beach, South Carolina. The 55-acres amusement park is also formerly known as the Hard Rock Park because it was designed on a rock-and-roll theme. In September 2008, the park was closed and reopened for public in May next year.

The amusement park is known for its Stonehenge replica. Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument from Wiltshire, England and is one of the most famous sites in the world, dating from 3000BC, according to archaeologists. The replica near the Myrtle beach is made from red old British phone booths and doesn’t fully resemble the original but only a semi-circle structure containing three inner trilithons.

Even if the Phonehenge from the Freestyle Music Park is not a very successful replica of the original Stonehenge monument, it has its role in attracting visitors at the amusement park, like any other replica around the world.

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Looked at from up close, Zac Freeman’s artworks look like common piles of junk, but take a few steps back and you’ll discover amazingly detailed portraits.

You know that stuff most of us throw away after a while, things like old buttons, LEGO bricks, keyboard keys? That’s exactly the kind of material Zac Freeman uses to create his unbelievable portraits. He began gathering junk and found objects in 1992, and started gluing them to pieces of wood, creating various portraits.

In the words of the artist:

“I was interested in communicating through visual representation in apparent 2-dimensional space and through the actual objects used for the medium in 3-dimensional space. It is very important to me that I incorporate the actual objects into the art as opposed to a picture or rendition of it because it better expresses the intention of the artwork. I feel the junk is more powerful being present. It is an actual thing to be reckoned with that existed in this time and place and carries energy in and of itself.”

I was thinking about how many artists use junk as an art medium these days, and then it hit me: it might seem like a peculiar thing to use in art, but junk is everywhere around us, and so easy to come by, so it’s no wonder artists use it in their artworks.

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The Freetown of Christiania is a self-governing neighborhood in Copenhagen, Denmark’s capital city, where the people actually live freely.

Chritiania was created in 1971, and consists of the old Bådsmandsstræde Barracks and parts of the city ramparts. After the barracks were abandoned by the military, the area was simply taken over by the locals in the surrounding neighborhoods, as a playground for their children. This was actually a protest against the Danish government of that time, started by the article of one Jacob Ludvigsen.

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In an attempt to undermine Kim Jong Il’s authority in North Korea, members of  South Korean nongovernmental organizations constantly send balloons filled with leaflets into North Korea.

On January 10, 2010 activists for the freedom of North Korea and the unification of the peninsula, from Paju, 51 km north of Seoul, sent two helium-inflated balloons into North Korea. They attached bags of leaflets and sweets to them, hoping to convince their northern neighbors to rise against Kim Jong Il’s dictatorship.

This practice has been going on for the last two years and North Korea has repeatedly asked Southern authorities to punish organizations who send the balloons and undermine the country’s regime. In spite of nuclear-war hints from its northern neighbor, South Korea hasn’t taken any measures against the activists.

The constant nuclear threat, reports of serious human rights violations and the existence of political prisoner camps in North Korea, make the signing of a peace treaty between the two countries virtually impossible.

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At least that was the case when young Kimberley Vlaminck asked for three stars tattooed near her left eye.

The young Belgian says she went to a tattoo parlor to get three small stars tattooed, but the foreign artist misunderstood her request and left her with 56 stars covering the left side of her face. How could that possibly have happened, you say? Simple, she fell asleep during the procedure and woke up when the artist finished his work.

Now, the guy who tattooed her doesn’t exactly look like the most trustworthy person in the world (he’s the guy in the last photo), but I find it hard to believe someone could fall asleep while getting a tattoo. Nevermind the pain, the noise of the tattoo-gun right next to her left ear would have been enough to keep her awake.

Kimberley says she must have been drugged by Rouslan Toumaniantz, the shop-owner and the guy who executed the tattoo, but he insists the girl specifically asked for 56 stars tattooed on her face. He says the whole scandal started when the 18-year-old went home and showed her family and boyfriend the permanent artwork. They went crazy, so miss Vlaminck returned to the tattoo-shop and accused Toumaniantz of misunderstanding her request.

Now Kimberley Vlaminck is suing Toumanintz for 10,000 pounds, the cost of a laser-procedure to remove his ‘mistake’. Although the tattoo artist maintains that the girl asked for 56 stars, and even brought in a witness to sustain his claim, he agreed to pay half of the procedure costs, just because he doesn’t want an unsatisfied customer.

Kimberley hasn’t accepted his offer yet.
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A 38-year-old Japanese man was recently arrested for phone-stalking his own wife, calling her over 100 times a day anonymously and saying nothing until she hung up.

On July 10, a 31-year-old woman from Amagasaki, in Japan’s Hyogo Prefecture, started receiving strange phone calls from someone who would just remain silent until she hung up in frustration. This went on for weeks, because the calls came from an anonymous phone number, so the young woman couldn’t just block the calls. On most days she would get dozens of phone calls, but sometimes, the phone stalker would ring over 100 times per day. Luckily, the phone never rang during the night or when she was playing video games on her husband’s phone, which ultimately got her thinking about who the mystery caller could be…

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