Phoenix-based heavy-metal outfit ‘Okilly Dokilly’ call themselves the world’s first ‘Nedal’ (Ned+metal) band – a tribute to the well-meaning, yet super-annoying Simpsons character Ned Flanders.

The members of Arizona’s most ‘neighborly’ rock band are bespectacled, mustachioed, and always dressed in Flanders’ signature costume – pink shirt, grey trousers, and green sweater. They even have creative names for themselves – Head Ned – vocals; Red Ned – synth; Thread Ned – bass; Stead Ned – guitar; and Bled Ned – drums. Most of their songs feature ‘direct Ned quotes’.

Lead singer Head Ned revealed that the idea for the band came about when he was shopping for groceries one day. “Myself and our drummer were in line at a grocery store, entertaining ourselves by coming up with really cutesy names for really hardcore, brutal bands,” he said, speaking to Australian magazine Rip It Up. “The name Okilly Dokilly came up and was very funny to us.”

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Courtney Homes, a barber at Dubuque’s Spark Family Hair Salon, recently came up with unique way of charging children for haircuts – he asked for stories instead of money! He’s passionate about supporting kids reading, so he had his little clients read out loud to him as he worked on their hair.

“The kids would come in, and I would say, “Go to the table and get a book you might like, and if you can’t read it, I’ll help you understand and we can read it together,” Holmes told reporters. “To be honest, I was amazed, the line started with four kids, and next thing I knew it was like 20 kids, all waiting for a haircut and eager to read.”

Homes conducted the unique initiative during the second annual Back to School Bash at the city’s Comiskey Park. Lots of kids showed up to get free haircuts and read to Homes in return.

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An Alabama church has shocked the nation by converting an unused patch of land on the church grounds into a gun range for parishioners. It appears that the members of Rocky Mount United Methodist Church, in Jemison, unanimously voted to mix religion and guns, “in the name of Jesus Christ.”

“We have had this large hole in the back of our property at the church for quite some time, and we thought it would be neat to start a gun range,” said Pastor Phil Guin. “The hole was primarily filled with kudzu, and had been used at one time to get fill dirt for the new facility that was built on the end of our church building.”

“We started working on the gun range about a year ago with some of the members of our church helping to clean out the hole,” the pastor added. “Not only did we think it would be a good outlet for members of our church to be able to learn more about gun safety, but it would be a good outreach for the community.” According to pastor Guin, a lot of the church’s female members owned or carried firearms but didn’t know how to use them.

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In a real-life story that seems taken out of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, a New York lawyer accused of fraud is actually asking for a trial by combat to settle a legal dispute.

Richard Luthmann says his bizarre request may sound ludicrous to most people, but it certainly isn’t against the law. He pointed out that the right to Trial by Combat was technically never outlawed in the state of New York, or anywhere else in America. “The common law of Britain was in effect in New York in 1776,” he told reporters “And the Ninth Amendment of the Constitution recognises the penumbra of those rights. It’s still on the books.” Historically, trial by combat was indeed a little-used but accepted aspect of English common law.

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A Texas Judge recently sparked controversy for making young Josten Bundy choose between spending 15 days in jail or marrying his 19-year-old girlfriend Elizabeth Jaynes. He took – what he thought was – the easy way out. 

It all started in February, when Bundy got into a fight with Jaynes’s ex-boyfriend. “[He] had been saying disrespectful things about Elizabeth, so I challenged him to a fight,” Bundy said. “He stepped in and I felt like it was on and I hit him in the jaw twice.” The ex, according to Bundy, did not require medical attention, but he pressed charges anyway.  “I took matters into my own hands and I know that’s wrong,” he later admitted. “I know I was raised better, but it happened.”

At one point during the hearing, Judge Randall Rogers asked Bundy if his girlfriend was worth it, to which he replied: “Well, to be honest sir, I was raised with four sisters and any man was talking to a woman like that I’d probably do the same thing.” And that’s when the judge threw Bundy a curveball. He’d have to marry Jaynes within 30 days, or spend 15 days in jail.

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Have you ever seen currency notes so beautiful that you’d actually hesitate to spend them? Well, they’re called ‘artisanal currency’, and they’re all the rage in several parts of the world, including London, Amsterdam, and New York. The concept is quite similar to artisanal coffee, cheese, or chocolate that is handmade, not mass produced.

According to The New York Times, “these are small-batch currencies designed by locals and lovingly handled by millennials, who came of age during the rise of the Internet.” Interestingly, this local currency is not meant to be a collectible, but is legally accepted at cash-only community businesses so that the money stays within the town or district.

London’s Brixton district, for example, has its own artisanal currency designed by award-winning artist Jeremy Deller. His £5 notes feature a “fuzzy, psychedelic image of an androgynous face surrounded by rainbow clouds and swirling etchings.” Deller said that he wanted to create “something old-fashioned looking, something almost pre-currency.” And the people of Brixton are quite pleased with their own special pound notes. “I’d be more inclined to save money if it all looked like that,” said Ewan Graham, a 31-year-old architect.

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Despite being a part of India, the northern state of Manipur can culturally be described as Korean. Ever since local authorities banned Bollywood movies and Hindi TV channels in a bid to “stamp out Indianisation”, a vast majority of the local population have turned to Korean pop-culture. They are now big fans of Korean films and music, and have adopted various elements of Korean culture. 

It all started with Airarang TV, a 24-hour network from Seoul, being broadcast in Manipur. As the channel grew in popularity, so did the demand for more programming from Korea. It wasn’t long before Korean cinema caught on as well, with pirated DVDs flooding Manipur’s markets.

To understand the Manipuri fascination with Korean pop culture, it make sense to first look at why the ban on Indian cinema was imposed in the first place. “Since the late ’90s, the people of Manipur are facing a cultural forbiddance imposed by a radical, fringe institution in the name of preserving the local culture,” writes Mahitha Kasireddi, in an opinion piece in the Indian online publication, Youth Ki Awaaz.

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We thought Indian millionaire Bhanwarlal Raghunath – who gave up his fortune to become a monk – was one of a kind, but we were wrong. Meet Liu Jingchong, a rich Chinese businessman who has also renounced his wealth for monkhood.

Jingchong, 39, was bitten by the spiritual bug in 2012, after a freak car accident. “It is true that I earned a lot of money and I can’t say I hated my life,” he told the media. “I would say that I even loved it, but all that changed when friends of mine and I had a car accident in a remote part of the country in northwestern China’s Qinghai province.”

“We needed to get a new car and not all of us were fit to travel immediately,” Jingchong recalled. “But as I was relatively okay, I stayed in a hotel where about the only thing to do was read a book on Buddhism. I have to say it changed my life.”

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Instead of splashing out on a fancy wedding last week, a Turkish couple chose to share their special day with 4,000 Syrian refugees instead. After exchanging vows in their hometown of Kilis, near the Syrian border, they went on to feed thousands of refugees through the Turkish charity Kimse Yok Mu (KYM).

KYM has been offering hot meals to Syrian outcasts who fled the nation’s bloody civil war and are now struggling to fulfill their basic needs. Having seen these people suffer at close quarters, it only made sense for Fethullah Üzümcüoğlu and Esra Polat to allocate a portion of their wedding budget to the charity. The thoughtful couple contributed to the cost of the food being served that day, and arrived at the venue to help serve the food themselves with their guests in tow.

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Time travel is technically possible, by just hopping on flights and traveling across time zones. A German man recently decided to take advantage of this fact to bag the Guinness Record for the world’s longest birthday. Of course, the longest birthday isn’t necessarily the most fun, given that he spent almost all of it sitting in a plane seat, eating airline food!

Sven Hagemeier enjoyed a 46-hour long 26th birthday last year, by flying from Auckland, New Zealand, to Brisbane, Australia, gaining two hours. Then he took a flight to Honolulu, Hawaii, which is 20 hours behind. He actually only spent 13 hours and 10 minutes in the air, but his birthday lasted 46 hours, if you add the time he gained by flying across the International Date Line.

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In spite of being homeless himself, a California man named Steve has made it his mission to take care of stray dogs. He has adopted 50 canines in the past 14 years, tended to their daily needs and sometimes even finding new homes for them. Steve has never abandoned any of the dogs in his care, not even when he had to move to another state.

This year, Steve decided that he’d had enough of California. He believed that a change of scene might help him get back on his feet, so he started to think of moving to Indiana to meet an old friend who had offered him help. He had a distance of 2,000 miles to cover, with nothing but a bike, but he couldn’t think of leaving his beloved dogs behind. So he put the 11 dogs currently in his care in a shopping cart and attached it to the back of his bike. He only had $6 in his pocket at the time.

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Star footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has millions of fans all around the world, but none as dedicated as 17-year-old Shanta. The Danish teenager has spent thousands of dollars in a bid to emulate his idol.

For starters, Shanta goes by the last name ‘Ronaldo’. He copies the ex-Manchester United player’s fashion sense, wearing clothes as similar to Ronaldo’s as possible, buying all his football shirts and getting the same haircuts. He has also made five trips to Madrid this year alone, just to meet Real Madrid’s star.

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Some fashion trends are so odd that they leave you wondering how they ever caught on. Take this latest ‘bubble nails’ craze – bulbous acrylic fingernails painted in a variety of colors and patterns.

The technique has apparently been around since 2009, but has only gained popularity recently, after a series of photos went viral on Instagram. Due to the growing demand, beauticians are having to teach themselves the art, through trial and error. They start by placing a ball or multiple balls of acrylic at the center of the nail, and builds it out by adding layers. Then, they paint it as per the customer’s choice.

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Laura Ponce, a nursery school teacher in Lins, Brazil, suffers from a strange condition that causes her to cry ‘crystal’ tears. The white plaques start off as soft blobs inside her eyes, but they harden when she blinks in an attempt to expel them, finally emerging as solid white crystals.

This happens to her for weeks at a time, with a new plaque forming as soon as she expels another. It gets so bad at times that she has to take time off work, to remove as many as 30 plaque membranes from her eye in a day. “A clot starts to swell then I have to open my eye to take out the membrane,” she explained. “When it dries it hardens, it gets really hard, it hurts a lot.”

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Meet Gangadhara Tilak Katnam, the man who single-handedly fixed over 1,000 potholes in his hometown of Hyderabad, India. The 66-year-old pensioner has made it his mission to fix the city’s roads, earning himself the nickname ‘road doctor’.

Since 2011, the former railway engineer has been driving around the city every single day, looking for abandoned tar and gravel on roadsides. He collects the unclaimed material and uses it to fill potholes, at times spending his own pension money to do it. Tilak, who calls his work ‘Shramadaan’ (offering physical help), doesn’t confine himself to his neighborhood – he patches up every pothole he can find in the city.

“After working for the South Central Railway for 35 years, I retired in October 2008 and spent some time off in 2009, also traveling to the US to meet my son,” Tilak told the local media. “In January 2010, I came back and settled down in Hydershakote, in Hyderabad and took up a job as a consultant in a software agency.” It was during the course of commuting to this job that Tilak found his calling.

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