Every year, landscaping experts from all over Japan get together to compete in the Key Truck Garden Contest, a unique event that has participants turning the beds of mini trucks into the most impressive miniature gardens they can.l The results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

The Kei Truck, or “kei-tora”, is a small yet practical utility vehicle invented in Japan, but used throughout Asia, primarily in construction and agriculture. It’s been a part of Japanese culture for decades, and people love it because it provides plenty of space and it’s easy to maneuver on narrow streets. But once a year, Key trucks take center stage as canvases for ingenious landscaping masterpieces, during the Key Truck Garden Contest, a special event sponsored by the Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors. As you can see in the photos below, these mobile miniature gardens are something else!

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An Indian man was recently arrested after bringing home a human hand that he had allegedly taken from a crematorium and asking his wife to cook it for dinner.

The disturbing episode unfolded last week in Tikkopur village, India’s Uttar Pradesh and sent shock waves through the entire area. The accused, known only as 32-year-old man named Sanjay, reportedly brought home a human hand and casually handed (pun intended) it to his wife to cook for dinner. The horrified woman reportedly lost consciousness and fell to the ground, only to wake up to an even more macabre sight – her husband getting ready to cook the human appendage himself. All she could do was run out of the house, lock her husband inside and call the police.

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A Japanese man is facing serious charges for allegedly causing serious financial losses to his favorite baseball club after reserving and then cancelling nearly 1,900 seats for two of their league games, so he could have more space and stand out on TV.

41-year-old Kiyoshi Shibamura, a fan of the Orix Buffaloes baseball club from the Japanese city of Osaka, came up with an ingenious-yet-costly plan to watch his favorite team compete against the SoftBank Hawks at Osaka’s Kyocera Dome on the 28th and 29th of September, last year. To make sure he stood out on TV and enjoyed some serious privacy, he went through the trouble of creating 1,873 fake names and reserving the same number of stadium seats online. He then cancelled all but his own reservation right before the end of the reservation period, making sure than no one else managed to snatch the seats.

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A Chinese migrant worker who lost his memory in 1990 due to brain injuries recently remembered his hometown while watching a news report about the coronavirus outbreak.

Thirty years ago, Zhu Jiaming, a young man from Guizhou Province in south-western China, left his home to work construction in the central province of Hubei. Unfortunately, that same year he suffered a serious work accident that left him with brain injuries and long-term amnesia. Too make matters worse, the migrant worker also lost his ID and ended up living on the streets until a kindhearted couple offered to let him live with them. Despite trying very hard to remember his past life, he could not remember much, including anything about his home and family.

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This is a somewhat older story that was originally reported by media primarily in Indonesia and other East-Asian countries back in 2018. It got a lot of attention because it touched on a very taboo topic – the romantic relationship between an adult male teacher and a 13-year-old schoolgirl.

Erwin Pangaila was 27 when he fell in love with a junior high school student at the SMP Negeri 2 Tenga school, in Sulawesi Utara, Indonesia. In fact, it was 13-year-old Vinda Virginia who first noticed and approached him. She happened to walk by his classroom saw him writing on the blackboard and immediately fell for his broad shoulders and athletic physique. She wasn’t the only girl in school to have a crush on Erwin, but she was determined to be the one that won his heart. She started staying behind after classes to ask him questions and eventually, their student-teacher relationship turned into a romantic one.

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Chinese schoolchildren in Wuhan and other areas where school has been suspended because of the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak have apparently been trying to have a homework app taken down from the App Store so they could enjoy their vacation.

The threat of Covid-19 is no joke, but for Chinese students the shutdown of schools in affected areas has been met with excitement as it basically meant an extra holiday period. Sure, they couldn’t hang out or even leave the house for weeks, but at least they didn’t have to attend classes and, most importantly, they din’t have any homework. At least that’s what they thought, because soon after schools closed, teachers started using an Alibaba-owned app to both hold classes online and issue homework to their students. But somehow the schoolchildren managed to coordinate a massive campaign to hopefully have the app taken down from the App Store so they could enjoy their time off.

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Indian doctors recently reported the curious case of a young woman who underwent a double hand transplant almost three years ago and whose hands have changed color to match her skin tone.

21-year-old Shreya Siddanagowder lost both her hands in a freak road accident in 2016, when travelling from her hometown in Pune to her college in Karnataka. Doctors had no choice but to amputate both her hand and forearms, and she needed about a year to recover. As soon as she did, she visited the Amrita Institute to register for a double hand transplant, and doctors there miraculously managed to find a donor for her on that same day, August 9, 2017. There were almost 200 other people on the waiting list, some from foreign countries like Afghanistan or Bangladesh, but she was lucky enough to be compatible with the donor. Doctors called her at the hotel after her visit, and the transplant was carried out that same day.

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Since late last month, Indonesian social media has been buzzing with news of a controversial wedding in South Sulawesi, where a 103-year-old Dutch colonial war veteran recently married a 27-year-old woman.

Photos and videos of the unlikely couple on their wedding day have been doing the rounds online for over a week now, sparking both outrage and humorous comments. There are also those who can’t believe the wedding was for real, but several Indonesian news outlets have confirmed that 103-year-old Puang Katte married a 27-year-old woman named Indo Alang in the District of Siwa, South Sulawesi. The groom, who is reportedly a widower, fought in the Dutch colonial war (1945 – 1949).

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An amateur actor has become an unlikely celebrity on Chinese streaming platform Douyin by livestreaming himself sleeping to hundreds of thousands of curious viewers.

The man, who goes by Yuansan on the internet, originally livestreamed himself sleeping on Douyin on February 9th, allegedly to verify whether he snores. When he woke up, he was shocked to see that he had attracted hundreds of thousands of views and about 800,000 new followers for his channel. The unexpected viewer spike prompted the young streamer to repeat his performance several times, and his channel soon went viral garnering up to 18.5 million viewers and nearly a million followers. He’s been trying to offer his viewers other types of content, but all they seem to want is watch him sleeping.

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Turtles may be cute, but they are also slow and clumsy, which doesn’t really help them when they are trying to cross train tracks. Luckily, for the turtles in Japan’s Hyōgo Prefecture, railway operators and a local aquarium teamed up to find a solution.

Between 2002 and 2014, disruptions of train operation caused by turtles were reported 13 times, with many more probably going unreported. That is why, in 2015, West Japan Railway Co. and Suma Aqualife Park in Kobe joint forces to prevent tragic turtle deaths on the tracks and unnecessary train delay. After running a series of tests and experiments, they came up with a U-shaped ditch that collects the turtles, preventing them from getting stuck between the metal tracks and getting squashed to death.

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The coronavirus wreaking havoc in China right now has really turned things upside down for a lot of people, but not even it can come between a marathon runner and their training.

Like many of his countrymen, Pan Shancu, an amateur marathon runner from Hangzhou, in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang, is trapped in his apartment because of the coronavirus epidemic, but he didn’t let that small detail stop him from keeping in shape for his next race, whenever it may be. He has been using the small space in his apartment as a miniature track, jogging around two tables and the short length of a small hallway, and recently posted on social media that he had covered a distance of 50 kilometers (31 miles).

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After struggling to convince members of his community to join him in making their streets and beaches cleaner by picking up trash, an Indonesian man put on a superhero outfit in hopes of becoming more convincing.

Rudi Hartono, a cafe worker from Pare-Pare, South Sulawesi, had long been struggling to persuade residents of his small coastal community to get more involved in keeping their home clean by picking up the plastic trash strewn on streets and beaches, but had had little success. But then he put on a Spiderman suit just to amuse his nephew, and people took notice. He accidentally became somewhat of a local role-model, and people started following his example.

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The cakes below may look perfect to satisfy your sweet tooth, but they’re actually not desserts at all. They’re made of instant noodles and topped with stuff like chicken gulai (curry stew), opor (coconut milk stew) and rendang (beef simmered in coconut and spices).

The people at Tot Aw (short for totally awesome) bakery in Jakarta, Indonesia have getting a lot of attention lately and it’s all due to their unusual cakes. Instead of sweet sponge and sweet cream and toppings, they are made of Indomie noodles shaped as tiered cakes and topped with all kinds of foods, like meatballs, chicken or salted cuttlefish. The squiggly creations are apparently quite popular at weddings, birthdays and other events.

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A Singaporean couple who had recently visited a village in the same province as Wuhan, the epicenter of the Coronavirus epidemic, decided to livestream themselves to their own wedding from quarantine, in order to avoid spreading the dreaded virus.

The newly-married Mr. and Mrs. Yu had a very unconventional wedding. Instead of being there in the flesh to greet and interact with their guests in the flesh, they decided to livestream themselves from a hotel room miles away from the wedding venue. The couple had visited the groom’s mother in a village in Hunan, the same Chinese province as the city of Wuhan, where the Coronavirus epidemic reportedly originated from, and decided that it was best to quarantine themselves for 14 days, just to be sure. the problem was that canceling the wedding on such short notice wasn’t really an option either, so they decided to compromise.

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Indonesian officials are offering a monetary reward to whoever manages to remove a motorcycle tyre from the neck of a 13-foot-long crocodile.

The full-grown crocodile has reportedly been wearing the tire around its neck since 2016, but authorities in Palu, the capital of Central Sulawesi, are worried that it may end up strangling the reptile, so they are turning to the public for help. In 2018, conservationist and “animal whisperer” Muhammad Panji tried to remove the tire, and later that year the local conservation office tried luring the 4-meter-long crocodile with food. Both attempts proved unsuccessful so Palu officials are now hoping that brave locals can do the impossible for an unspecified cash prize.

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