In a time when reality TV is pretty much synonymous with the Kardashian name, launching a reality show centered around life at a secluded orthodox monastery hardly sounds like a winning idea, but one Russian TV channel is going ahead with the project anyway.

A television channel entirely owned by a religious organization affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church is currently busy filming a reality show with a spiritual twist. Named “Island”, the original program will take place at a secluded monastery located on a lake between Moscow and St. Petersburg. There, the 10 chosen participants will embrace the monastic lifestyle, taking part in activities like cleaning the monastery grounds, making candles, preparing foods and meeting with priests, as they try to find the answers to questions that have long been troubling them.

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Called ‘devil lips’, or ‘octopus lips’, a cosmetic procedure that allegedly involves inserting filler into the edge of the upper lip to give it a wavy look is getting a lot of attention on Instagram these days.

No one knows exactly when and where this unusual beauty trend originated, but some sources claim that the procedure was pioneered by Russian plastic surgeon Emelian Braude. One thing’s for sure, though, the unusual lip contouring technique has been raising eyebrows on social media, especially in Russia, where it’s supposedly the most popular. But before you pick up the phone and call your favorite plastic surgeon about the devil lips procedure, you should know that no one is yet clear if it actually exists. Some plastic surgeons say that getting this wavy contour through lip fillers alone is impossible, and attempting to to do can be very dangerous.

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A 43-year-old man was recently caught wearing an old woman’s disguise during a driving test in an attempt to help his mother get her driving license.

After Heitor Schiave’s 60-year-old mother, Maria, failed her driving test three times, the car mechanic felt that he had to do something to help her. Probably thinking that giving her some pointers wasn’t enough, the loving son decided to put on a believable old woman disguise and take the test in her place. He put on makeup and glasses, got a white haired wig, dressed in a colorful blouse and long skirt, and tried to imitate his mother’s voice as best he could. Unfortunately, his disguise wasn’t quite as believable as he had hoped.

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Inserting long, plastic tubes through their oesophagus to induce vomiting has been an unhealthy trend among Chinese girls for a while now, but a 22-year-old woman recently became the first to accidentally swallow her vomiting tube.

Xiao Lu, a 22-year-old girl from Guangzhou, reportedly went to a local hospital on December 3 and told doctors there that she had accidentally swallowed a drinking straw. The object was too deep to reach, so doctors ordered an upper gastrointestinal tract radiography, which revealed a long thick tube in the the woman’s oesophagus. The foreign object measured about 1.9cm-wide and 30cm-long, which made it too thick and too long for a drinking straw, so the doctor pressed the woman for answers.

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A Chinese man was recently sued by an Audi dealership in Guilin,in China’s southern Guangxi region, and had to pay a settlement of more than $10,000 after his young daughter casually scratched 10 luxury cars.

The young girl’s father, identified only as Mr. Zhao, reportedly accompanied a friend  to the dealership, bringing his wife and daughter along. They were looking around at the nice cars and listening to interacting with the staff, leaving the 3-year-old girl to her own devices. After understandably becoming bored, the little girl allegedly grabbed a stone and proceeded to scratch doodles onto the paint of no less than 10 Audi vehicles, including  an Audi Q8 valued at nearly 1 million RMB ($142,000).

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A Ugandan man whose farts can allegedly kill mosquitoes six meters away claims to have been offered deals by companies looking to turn his flatulence into commercial insect repellent.

Joe Rwamirama, a 48-year-old man from Kampala, in Uganda, says he eats ordinary food and that his farts smell no worse than anyone else’s, but to insects, like malaria-transmitting mosquitoes, the gas he passes is deadly. Joe’s insect-repelling farts are famous around town, and people know that whenever he is around, mosquitoes magically vanish. Some say that the man’s farts have evolved to fight mosquitoes.

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It’s not every day that you see pigeons with cowboy hats on their tiny heads walking or flying around. Unless you live in Las Vegas, where cowboy-hat-wearing pigeons are actually a a thing these days.

It all started on December 5, when a Las Vegas resident named Bobby Lee noticed two funny-looking birds pecking the ground near a dumpster. The pigeons drew his attention because they were wearing these tiny cowboy hats – one red and one grey – so he whipped out his smartphone and started filming them, later uploading the video to Facebook, where it quickly went viral. The next day, everyone was talking about Las Vegas’ cowboy-hat-wearing pigeons, and Lee was getting phone calls from agencies trying to license his video.

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When it comes to painting techniques that are satisfying to watch, you’ll be hard pressed to find something better than ink and water painting, the art of dropping a bit of of ink onto water-traced patterns and watching it spread.

French artist David Bayo, whose impressive pointilism portraits we featured last year, has been a lot of attention online for his ink and water painting videos for the past three years. In a 2016 interview, he revealed that he discovered the delicate art form while experiencing with various mediums to find the one that suited him best. After lost of practice, he was able to understand the interaction between ink and water and use the two to create incredible works of art.

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An upcoming video game has been raising eyebrows due to its unusual premise – putting players in the shoes of Jesus Christ and having them perform biblical feats like multiplying fish, healing others and calming stormy seas.

Aptly named “I Am Jesus Christ” the upcoming video game from developer PlayWay is a realistic simulator game inspired by stories from the New Testament, from His baptizing in the Jordan River, to His resurrection after being nailed to the cross. In a recently revealed trailer we see Jesus healing a blind woman (Matthew 21:14), producing fish out of thin air for a hungry fisherman (John 6:35), and walking on water to save a ship caught in a storm (Mark 4:41). All these feats apparently deplete a bar that apparently correlates to Jesus’ holy abilities.

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A 35-year-old mother of three was on trial this week for allegedly pushing her ex-husband and her new boyfriend – both of whom desperately wanted to be with her – into fighting for her hand in “a latter-day medieval duel”.

Asta Juskauskiene, a care worker living in London, UK, has been accused of being a “manipulative and controlling figure” who pushed two men fighting for her affection to settle their differences through violence. A court recently heard that the woman’s ex-husband, 42-year-old Giedruis Juskauskas, was found bleeding in the streets and was later pronounced dead as a result of suffering multiple stab wounds in a bloody street brawl with Juskauskiene’s new boyfriend, a 25-year-old ex con named Mantas Kvedaras. The Lithuanian national admitted to the killing, but the prosecution says they have ample evidence that he and Giedruis were egged on by their common love-interest.

According to prosecutors, Asta Juskauskiene divorced her Giedruis, against his wishes, six months before his brutal killing. They had a five-year-old daughter together and were reportedly still intimate even after the divorce, so he was a constant presence at her home. The man also provided financial support for their daughter and according to prosecutors he still claimed Asta as his own. His ex-wife had other plans, though.

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When their 15-year-old daughter broke the rules by sneaking in boys at a sleepover party, her parents gave her a choice between handing over her phone for a month, or giving them access to her social media for two weeks. She chose the latter and the internet is so grateful for it.

Madelynn Sumpter’s social media takeover by her parents, Tawnya Ford and Larry Sumpter, began early in November with an Instagram post that announced she had chosen to hand over access to her social media for two weeks, so her follower could expect “some amazing Instagram posts, snapchats and tiktoks from her parents”, and boy did that live up to the hype. On November 11, Maddi’s dad had already began his hilarious quest to embarrass his teen daughter, by posting a selfie captioned “Felt cute. Might delete later”. But that was only the beginning, and by her dad’s third post, the teen was already begging her parents to take away her phone for a month.

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Art collectors are going bananas over an artwork that essentially consists of a real banana duct-taped to a white wall at an art gallery, with some paying as much as $120,000 for it.

Titled “Comedian”, the original artwork by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan was on sale this week from Parisian gallery Perrotin, at the Art Basel festival in Miami. The first edition of the artwork was snatched up by a French art collector for the mind-blowing price of $120,000, and according to gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin a second edition of Comedian was already sold for the same dizzying price. After successfully selling two bananas for a total of $240,000, the artist and the Perrotin gallery owner decided to to up the price of the third edition to $150,000.

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If you’re wondering how hard it is to find affordable housing in Germany’s capital of Berlin, maybe this will give you an idea –  On November 24, a whopping 1,749 people showed up to view a reasonably-priced flat, even though it had only been put on the market the day before.

Located near the Schöneberg Town Hall, the popular flat on the third floor of a 1950s building offers 54 meters of usable space and features two rooms and a balcony. So far nothing to write home about, but what really got people interested was the monthly rent of €550 ($610) per month, including extra costs like heating and water. That’s considered a steal in the German capital, and even more so in the sought-after Schöneberg district, so no one was surprised to see people lining up outside for a viewing. They just didn’t expect over 1,700 of them on the same day.

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Airplane food isn’t exactly considered “haute cuisine”, but one budget airline is betting that people love its airplane food so much that they’d be willing to pay for it at restaurants on the ground.

AirAsia, the largest budget carrier in Asia, has announced plans to open over 100 restaurants globally within the next five years. The restaurants will be offering the same menu AirAsia sells on flights, including chicken rice, the airline’s signature Pak Nasser’s Nasi Lemak dish, pineapple fish, noodle chicken inasal with garlic rice, and onde-onde cake . The move is part of AirAsia’s plans to become a lifestyle brand, and the company hopes that its Asia dishes will make people choose it over Western competitors.

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Our online data is already monetized by several technology giants, but one Japanese IT company thinks real-life data could be monetized as well, and it’s willing to pay people to have their everyday life video-recorded and sold to various businesses.

Last month, Tokyo-based Plasma.inc made national news headlines for inviting people to take part in a controversial social experiment called “Project Exograph”. Participants must agree to have their living rooms, bathrooms, changing areas, kitchens and other parts of their homes wired with cameras that would film them continuously for roughly one month. At the end of the experiment, the footage will be edited in a way that would make it impossible to identify protagonists, and then sent to various companies to see if it can be monetized. Believe it or not, hundreds of people have already signed up for a chance to take part in Project Exograph.

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