French Entrepreneur Creates Special Underwear That Cures Plumber’s Crack

Thanks to French builder Adrien Herve-Pellissier, the infamous ‘builder’s bum’ – a.k.a ‘plumber’s crack’ – could be a thing of the past. He’s invented a special variety of boxer shorts with an elastic band that adequately covers the offensive area. Given how common the eyesore of a problem is, it’s a wonder that no one’s ever thought of such a simple solution before!

“The underwear has a large elastic band on it, you see, so when you squat down we don’t have to see your a**e,” Adrien explained. He was inspired to design the underwear after witnessing the mortifying ‘crack’ first hand in Rennes. He then spent nine months recovering, and also coming up with a prototype of the underwear, which he’s named ‘le sourire de plombier’ (the smile of the plumber).

le-sourire-du-plombier2 Read More »

Marathon Runner-Up Faces Fraud Charges for Only Running Half a Mile of 26 Mile Race

In a bizarre turn of events, the second place winner at the Nairobi International Marathon last Sunday was arrested for blatant cheating. Julius Njogu apparently stayed hidden among the crowd for most of the 26-mile race before joining the other runners for about half a mile, on the last stretch and laying claim to the $7,000 prize money.  

Unfortunately for him, race officials caught on rather quickly – they noticed that he showed no signs of fatigue or sweat as he breezed passed the other runners to the finish line, despite having supposedly run 42 miles. The 28-year-old was spotted jogging effortlessly as he crossed fellow runner Shadrack Kiptoo to come in second. When they investigated the issue, they realised that he hadn’t run the race at all.

cheating-racer Read More »

Google Engineer Saves 90% of His Salary by Living Out of a Truck in the Company’s Parking Lot

In a bid to save money, Google employee Brandon S. has made the company’s vast parking lot his home. The 23-year-old software engineer lives out of a box truck parked near the search engine giant’s campus in Mountain View, California.

Brandon started work at Google as a summer intern in 2014 – he rented a two-bedroom apartment with three roommates at the time. It cost him about $65 a night, or roughly $2,000 a month, to live there. “I realised I was paying an exorbitant amount of money for the apartment I was staying in – and I was almost never home,” he told Business Insider.

So when he signed on as a full-time employee, he decided to opt out of spending on sky-high rents in the Bay Area. Inspired by the story of software programmer Ben Discoe, who lived for 13 months out of a conversion van in the Google parking lot, he bought a $10,000 used Ford E350 and started living in it. It’s now less of a home and more like a place to sleep and store his stuff – he showers, bathes, charges his gadgets, and eats all his meals in the Google buildings. All he spends is $121 a month on insurance for the truck.

living-in-a-truck Read More »

Israeli Restaurant Gives 50% Discount to Jews and Arabs Who Share a Table

32-year-old Kobi Tzafrir has come up with the perfect peace plan for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – bonding over hummus! He’s offering a 50 percent discount to Arabs and Jews who choose to share the universally popular middle-eastern dish at his Tel Aviv restaurant, ‘Hummus Bar’.

“Afraid of Arabs? Afraid of Jews?” his Hebrew poster on Facebook reads. “We don’t have Arabs here, we don’t have any Jews either… BUT we have humans here! And we have excellent real Arabic hummus! And fine Jewish falafel!” He’s also offering “free refills for all hummus dishes, whether you’re “Arab, Jewish, Christian, Indian, etc.”

Kobi revealed that lots of Arabs and Jewish people have stopped by his restaurant ever since he rolled out the chick-‘peace’ offer last Tuesday. “If there’s anything that can bring together these peoples, it’s hummus,” he said. But he admitted that his patrons were more supportive of what the promotion stood for, rather than the discount itself. He told Al Jazeera that he wants to show the world not all Arabs and Jews support violence in the region.

Humus-bar-peace Read More »

Chinese Professor Suggests Men with Lower Income Could Share Wives to Solve Bachelor Crisis

You can’t solve every problem with pure logic. Learning that the hard way is Zhejiang University economics professor Xie Zuoshi. He’s on the receiving end of a nation’s wrath after he suggested wife sharing to solve China’s gender imbalance issue.

News reports say that China’s gender ratio at birth is about 1.02 to 1.07 boys born for every girl, an imbalance created because of the one-child policy and the cultural preference for male children. As a result, men, especially in rural China, are finding it increasingly difficult to get married. In fact, the nation is expected to have 30 to 40 million bachelors by the year 2020.

In the face of such alarming statistics, Prof Xie wrote an essay highlighting what he believes is the most obvious solution – that men of lower incomes should share wives. He reasoned that the huge demand for wives would increase their value, making them unaffordable to poorer men. “Men with high incomes will have an advantage in finding women, because they can afford the high price,” he wrote. “And what about the low income men? One way is for several men to band together to find a wife.”

wife-sharing Read More »

Vivos – The Ultimate Doomsday Community Bunkers for the Rich and Paranoid

Lots of people are obsessed with the idea of a post-apocalyptic world, and playing to their fears and fantasies is Vivos – a company that creates luxurious Doomsday bunkers. Created by California entrepreneur Robert Vicino, the bunkers at are exclusively meant for those who can afford them, and deemed worthy of Vicino himself.

The company claims to own a network of underground shelters, but the exact locations are a carefully guarded secret. “Vivos is the only co-ownership community shelter network on the planet,” reads the marketing material, which assumes that the time for evacuation is fast approaching. “Limited space is still available for those that qualify. Members are now boarding. Don’t be left on the other side of the door.”

Vivos-doomsday-bunker7 Read More »

Japan’s Newest Fashion Craze – Realistic Cat Bags That Cost More Than a Real Cat

Japanese designer Pico has combined her love of cats and handbags to create a line of highly realistic faux feline purses. The bags are shaped like furry, adorable kitties complete with individual markings, whiskers, and tails.

Each cat-bag is priced at about $500 to $700, but buyers don’t seem to mind the steep pricing at all. In fact, the designs are taking social media by storm with thousands of admirers scrambling to buy their own.

Each bag is hand-made by Pico herself – she sews the white faux fur together and then airbrushes the completed cats with acrylic paint to give them individual markings. Her most popular design is the black, white and caramel colored cat-bag with yellow eyes and a pink nose. She sells them at 83,000 yen ($685) apiece. The grey cat-bag, resembling a British Shorthair, is slightly cheaper at 66,000 yen ($545). She is currently working on a black cat design with a masculine face.

Cat bags handbags Read More »

Noodle Fan Has Tasted Over 5,600 Types of Ramen in the Last 20 Years

In his quest to discover the perfect instant noodle, Japanese ramen lover Toshio Yamamoto has tasted over 5,600 varieties from 40 countries, in the past two decades. He reviews every kind ramen he tries on his website and scores them on a scale of 1 to 5. The best rating he’s given out so far is a ‘4’.

On i-ramen.net, 55-year-old Yamamoto offers detailed information on each of the 5,600 varieties of noodles he’s tasted, including the country of origin, cooking time, sodium content, calories, texture, and flavor. The website is hugely popular with thousands of fans around the world, and has recorded over 1.4 million hits since 1996. Some of his fans even send him packages of noodles from overseas.

“When you finish eating the noodles, the content will be gone even though the packaging remains,” Yamamoto explained. “I want to keep records of the content.” He also produces video reviews of instant noodles that he puts up on YouTube – they’ve gotten millions of hits as well. And his book, titled ‘Sokuseki Mencyclopedia’, features info on packets of instant noodles from around the world.

Toshio-Yamamoto-ramen Read More »

Rents in San Francisco Are So Outrageous That Young Professionals Prefer Living in Shipping Containers

Unable to afford ridiculously expensive rental housing in San Francisco, young professionals are trying to find interesting alternative living arrangements. One of them literally involves living in a box – there’s a whole village in Oakland where shipping containers are doubling up as tiny apartments!

At ‘Containercopia’, you can rent a 160-square-foot metal container complete with glass windows, electricity, and private bathroom for just $600 a month . The whole package is considered a steal when compared to skyrocketing rents in the city, which went up by 20 percent in the last year.

The idea for Containercopia belongs to 32-year-old Luke Iseman and his ex-partner Heather Stewart. They were fed up of spending huge amounts on rent, so they bought a shipping container for $2,300 from the Port of Oakland, rented half an acre of land, and moved in. Then they spent about $12,000 converting the box into a home – with a small toilet, custom-built shower, queen-size bed, glass windows, and solar panels.

Containertopia Read More »

Design Studio Creates Installation That Lets You Experience Nature Through the Eyes of Various Animals

Here’s a chance for nature-lovers to experience the world from completely new and different perspectives. ‘In the Eyes of an Animal’ is an art installation in Grizedale Forest, UK, that lets people the woods through the eyes of its various animal inhabitants!

The futuristic project is the brainchild of a London-based design studio called Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF). Commissioned by the AND Festival, it is a virtual reality experience combining nature and technology. Visitors are asked to wear large, moss-faced black headsets as they journey through a LIDAR-scanned woodland, while coming into contact with various creatures.

First, the forest is scanned using a Lidar scanner, a type of remote sensing technology. The points collected are then “decimated into real-time and combined with further data collected with CT scanning and photogrammetry techniques.” The rendered scenes harmoniously blend the elements collected through Lidar with CT scans of insects and animals, thereby interpreting their world. Audio effects are then added to complete and enhance the overall experience. Bass vibrations help recreate the sensations of a breathing, flying animal.

In-the-Eyes-of-an-Animal Read More »

Japanese Monk Goes Nine Days Without Food, Drink and Sleep in Grueling Religious Ritual

Can you imagine going without food, drink and sleep for nine straight days and nights? It sounds impossible, but a Japanese Buddhist monk proved that it can be done, after recently completing a grueling ritual.

Last Wednesday, 41-year-old Kogen Kamahori, one of the “marathon monks” of Mount Hiei, a holy mountain that straddles Japan’s Kyoto and Shiga prefectures, became one of only 13 monks to have completed the endurance test since the end of World War 2. He emerged from a training facility, assisted by fellow monks, after spending nine days without eating, drinking, sleeping or even lying down. During this time, he was also required to chant sutras 100,000 times. Just keeping count under these conditions sounds like a superhuman task.

Kogen-Kamahori Read More »

Hamburgirl Z – Japan’s Hamburger-Themed Girl Band

When it comes to idol groups in Japan, good ol’ music just doesn’t cut it anymore. They’ve got to throw in an additional gimmick or two, just to standout among the massive competition. And Hamburgirl Z is doing just that – it’s the world’s only hamburger-themed girl band!

In the words of Japanese culture blogger Tofugu, the new West Japan band is a “group of cute, smiling girls dancing and singing in hamburger costumes. Their sole purpose is to serenade hamburger lovers, by singing only about, well, burgers.

The girls are dressed like different hamburger ingredients – there’s beef, lettuce, egg, tomato, fish, chicken, onion, pork/bacon, avocado, pineapple, and even eggplant. There are a total of 15 members in the band sporting 14 ingredients. They perform at a variety of events across West Japan, and sell merchandise after the concert is over.

Hamburgirl-Z Read More »

Kind-Hearted Woman Organizes Birthday Parties for Homeless Children

Texas-based Paige Chenault loves birthdays, and believes everyone should have a chance to celebrate theirs. So she hosts beautiful parties for homeless children, giving them birthday celebrations they’ll remember for the rest of their lives. She started with a few parties in Dallas and went on to found a non profit called The Birthday Party Project, with chapters across the US.

Chenault, a former wedding planner, is perfect for the job because of her extensive experience. It all started when she read a magazine on a plane about kids’ birthday parties, when she was pregnant with her daughter. “I was just dreaming about all the great stuff that I could do for my daughter, just because I was an event planner, so I thought, ‘If anybody could throw a big bash, it was going to be me for my kid,’” she said.

And then she picked up another magazine and read about poor children in Haiti who didn’t have anything. That’s when it struck her that there are millions of children in the world who not only have shelter or food, but would never be able to enjoy the kind of celebration she had in mind. “That’s where the idea came from, and it really started stirring in me,” she said.

The-Birthday-Party-Project6 Read More »

ALS Sufferer “Writes” 150,000 -Word Autobiography by Blinking Billions of Times

Meet Gong Xunhui, a 62-year-old Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patient who recently wrote a detailed autobiography using only her eyes!

Gong Xunhui has been suffering from ALS for the past 12 years. She’s been confined to a wheelchair since 2006, but despite her almost complete paralysis, she has actually managed to write a 150,000-word book on her life – something that even able bodied people might struggle with. And she did it with the only part of her body she still has full control over, her eyes. 

It all started about three years ago, when Xunhui’s family bought her an eye-tracking assistive device that she could use to communicate and also control a computer. After it was installed, the first line she typed was: “I am very happy today, and after I get better at typing with my eyes, I will probably write an autobiography.”

Gong-Xunhui-ALS Read More »

This Environment-Friendly Bathing Suit Cleans Polluted Water as You Swim

Thanks to this cool new two-piece bathing suit, cleaning up the world’s oceans might actually become the ‘in’ thing to do during the hot summer months!

The 3D-printed Sponge Suit bikini is made of flexible, carbon-based filler materials that function like a sponge, absorbing all sorts of pollutants from water. So you put it on, wade into the water, and end up cleaning the seas “one stroke at a time”. It’s supposed to be absolutely safe for the wearer. 

The sponge filler was invented by a group of engineers led by electrical engineering professor Mihri Ozkan. But instead of just dumping it into water, they wanted to find a fun way of getting people involved in the cleaning process and add an eco-friendly element to the leisure activity of swimming. So they enlisted the help of design firm Eray Carbajo to convert the material into a functional, wearable swimsuit that’s economically sustainable and environmentally friendly. 

Sponge-Suit-bikini Read More »