A number of Taiwan sushi fans who legally changed their name to include the characters for the word ‘salmon’, as part of a restaurant promotional stunt, have now become stuck with it.

Taiwanese legislators are currently debating the possibility to change a law that only allows citizens to legally change their names a maximum of three times as a way to mitigate the aftermath of an event known as “Salmon Chaos”. In March of 2021, international news outlets covered the bizarre promotion of Taiwanese restaurant chain Sushiro, which offered sushi at discounted prices or totally free to people who legally changed their names to include the characters for ‘salmon’. Over 300 people reportedly took Sushiro up on their offer, and while most managed to switch back their old names days after taking advantage of the promotion, some have been stuck with hilarious names like ‘Handsom Salmon’, ‘Dancing Salmon’ or ‘Salmon Dream’.

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Medico Life Partner, an Indian dating site that only accepts doctors, recently sparked controversy online, with many claiming that it promotes classism.

Ever wish you could find a significant life partner that shared your profession? Well, if you happen to be a doctor, you’re in luck! Medico Life Partner is an online matchmaking service that aims to help male and female doctors find “hi-quality partners” who share their profession. The website claims that doctors of all religions, castes, and geography can register, but it seems to be particularly popular in India, where the vast majority of users come from.

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A trio of origami and paper plane building enthusiasts recently obliterated the world record for the farthest paper plane flight by achieving a jaw-dropping distance of 77.134 m (252 ft 7 in).

On April 16, 2022, at an indoor sports venue in Daegu, South Korea, Kim Kyu Tae managed to shatter the world record for the longest paper plane flight with each one of his eight throws. The previous record of 69.14 m (226 ft 10 in) set by Joe Ayoob and John M. Collins had been standing for a decade, but Kim managed to break it on all of his eight measured attempts (71.813 m being the shortest and 77.134 m being the farthest). But Kim was just one part of a trio who worked hard on designing and building this simple-looking but remarkable paper plane.

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A single dad in the Philippines recently made international news headlines after it was revealed that he named his only son after popular anime protagonist Naruto and his parents.

Jamesey Bolivar Maribojo, a 29-year-old anime buff from Davao City in the Philippines, is a big fan of Naruto, the mischievous teen ninja whose adventures have fascinated several generations of anime enthusiasts. He loves Naruto so much that when his girlfriend became pregnant he worked hard to convince her to name their son after the popular character. She agreed, but Jamesey did not stop there. Once he got his foot through the proverbial door, he pushed hard to have the surnames of Naruto’s parents written on the boy’s birth certificate. His son’s full name is Naruto Uzumaki Namikaze Maribojo.

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An Indian man was recently ousted as the cause of frequent power outages in his native village, as he always cut the power in the entire settlement whenever he wanted to see his girlfriend.

For weeks, the people of Ganeshpur, a small village in eastern Bihar’s Purnia district, had to put up with frequent power outages that only seemed to occur a few hours after sunset. No one seemed to know what was causing the problems, as the power company had not reported any power grid malfunctions, and none of the neighboring villages were dealing with similar issues. Exasperated, many in the villages started paying attention to the time when the outages occurred and came to the conclusion that power always went down after dark. They started to suspect foul play and came up with a plan to investigate…

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Japan is home to a variety of weird shops, from ones offering magic love-granting apples to others selling hoof sandals, but when it comes to services, this hard-disk crushing shop definitely stands out.

Dark Past Final Disposal Site is a unique shop where anyone can safely destroy their potentially sensitive digital data by crushing their old drive in a special machine, for just 100 yen ($0.80). The Akihabara-based shop introduced the service in 2020, when a growing number of personal computer owners began raising questions about what happened to their personal data when they changed their PCs. The owners of Dark Past Final Disposal Site bought a professional hard drive destroying machine and began offering people the chance to safely dispose of their potentially compromising data.

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A dog owner in Eastern China’s Jiangsu province spent the last three years and a whopping 340,000 yuan ($51,156) building a miniature mansion for his 10 pooches.

Mr. Zhou, a 33-year-old businessman who made his money in the crayfish trade, started his pet project in 2019, soon after finishing another, much more modest abode for his dogs. Proud of his achievement at the time, he decided to share a video tour of it on Chinese streaming platform Douyin, hoping to get some positive feedback. However, most of the comments from viewers turned out to be negative, which only motivated the young businessman to start over and this time give the internet and his pets something special. After three years of hard work and hundreds of changes, Zhou finally completed his masterpiece, and this time people were indeed impressed.

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A Japanese man who had always wanted to live as an animal managed to fulfill his dream thanks to a professional dog costume made by a company specializing in special effects and special modeling.

Ever wanted to live as an animal? No? Well, Japanese Twitter user ‘Toco’ had been thinking about it for a while, and he recently decided to follow his dream. He contacted special effects workshop Zeppet and asked them to build him an ultra-realistic dog costume that would conceal his human frame and allow him to live out his fantasy. They reportedly charged him about 2 million yen ($15,000) for it, but the end result was indeed pretty darn impressive.

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A Japanese woman has been compared to The Incredibles’ Elastigirl because of her ability to stretch her earlobes enough to wrap them around things like umbrellas or selfie sticks.

Ayumi Takada, a 37-year-old woman from Tokyo, first noticed that her earlobes were super-elastic when she was in elementary school. It was a rainy day, and her hands were full, so she tried holding the umbrella with her ear as a third hand and it worked. That was only the beginning, as the Japanese woman has since used her unusually stretchy ear lobes to hold selfie sticks, calligraphy brushes, cleaning appliances and others.

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Ever wish you had the deep voice of James Earl Jones? Well, maybe that’s an unattainable goal, but if you’re willing to go under the knife for a deeper or higher voice, there’s a surgeon in Turkey who can help.

Dr Kursat Yelken has been performing voice deepening surgeries for 15 years and claims that demand for the procedure has been increasing. He currently operates on 100 – 150 people a year, from executives wanting to sound more assertive, to transgender people looking to make their voice match their new gender. The Turkish doctor, who trained at Harvard Medical School, can tweak patients’ pitch and tone, giving them a deeper or higher voice, depending on their preferences.

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Despite failing the dreaded gaokao university entrance exam 25 times in a row, a 55-year-old man in China is still not giving up on his dream of attending college.

At age 55, Liang Shi is the owner of a successful building materials company in Chengdu, the capital of southwestern China’s Sichuan province. He has enough money to do whatever he wants, but he doesn’t fell completely fulfilled. That’s because he has been dreaming of getting into Sichuan University ever since he was a teenager, and he has yet to achieve his goal. At an age when most people are starting to think about retirement, Liang Shi is only focused on studying hard for this year’s gaokao university entrance exam. It will be his 26th attempt to pass it, and hopefully the last.

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If you’re the type of person who struggles with the classic Rubik’s Cube, you should stay far away from this “impossible” version that recently went on sale in Japan.

Designed by the wicked minds at Bandai Namco’s MegaHouse Co., the Rubik’s Cube Impossible is being marketed as the most challenging variant of the popular toy invented by Hungarian sculptor Ernő Rubik. The differences from the original are hard to identify at first glance, as the principle is exactly the same, the number of facets is identical, with the only different thing being the coloring. The difficulty of the Rubik’s Cube Impossible lies in the duality of the colors. Nearly all 54 facets are iridescent, meaning that they change color when looked at from different angles. That apparently makes it a lot harder to align all the colors, as the rules of the classic cube no longer apply.

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After losing her husband to a heart attack, an Indian woman spent 39 years pretending to be a man so she could raise her daughter alone in a patriarchal society.

S Petchiammal had only been married for 15 days when her husband succumbed to a massive heart attack. She was 20 years old at the time and pregnant with her daughter. Soon after giving birth, she started working various jobs to make ends meet, but raising a child as a single mother in Tamil Nadu’s Katunayakkanpatti village, a dominant patriarchal society, was tough. The young woman worked jobs at construction sites, hotels, and tea shops, but she faced harassment and sexual taunts every day, so one day she decided that she needed to make a big change.

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Clive Wearing, once an accomplished musicologist and orchestra conductor, is now known as the man with the 30-second memory, and for having one of the worst cases of amnesia ever recorded.

Can you imagine being unable to remember most of your life or to make any kind of new memories? Most of us can’t even begin to understand what it must be like to do something or meet someone and then forget the entire experience in a matter of seconds. The most mundane things, like eating, waking up, or seeing a family member all melt like snow every 7 to 30 seconds, leaving a blank canvas that is wiped clean again at short intervals. It’s impossible to even imagine, and yet that has been the life of Clive Wearing, a former musicologist, conductor, tenor, and keyboardist, for nearly four decades now.

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A young Florida fashion designer and tattoo-loving mother-of-one has been getting a lot of the online for covering her one-year-old son in hyperrealistic temporary tattoos.

29-year-old Shamekia Morris, a fashion designer from West Palm Beach, started putting temporary tattoos on her son Treylin when he was only six months old, and it has since become a habit that she shares with thousands of fans on social media. Although the effect is admittedly quite striking, not everyone is a fan of Shamekia’s idea, with some going as far as calling her irresponsible or a bad mother. Still, the mother-of-one, who herself is covered in tattoos, said that she won’t let the criticism stop her from living a lifestyle that both she and her son enjoy.

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