A Kansas man made international news this week after it was revealed that he asked an Iowa court to approve a trial by combat so she could meet his ex-wife and/or her attorney on the field of battle.

David Ostrom, a 40-year-old man from Paola, in Kansas, asked the Iowa District Court in Shelby County to give him 12 weeks lead time to forge his own Japanese katana and wakizashi swords, so could he meet his ex-wife and her attorney “on the field of battle where (he) will rend their souls from their corporal bodies.” Ostrom, who doesn’t have any experience in sword fighting, told reporters that even though he doesn’t anticipate a favorable response from the court, he still wants an answer to his request.

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45-year-old Theresa Furrer, a lifelong knitter and crocheter, is helping pet owners keep their beloved animals close to their hearts by knitting their hair into garments and accessories they can wear.

Theresa is part of a community of artists that specialize in a form of yarn spinning known as “chiengora”  – ‘chien’, the French word for dog, and ‘angora’, from the yarn spun from the soft belly fur of the angora rabbit. They basically take dog and cat hair and spin it into yarn that can subsequently be used to make soft clothing or accessories for grieving pet owners. The 45-year-old Pittsburgh woman says that she understands how some people might find her craft somewhat creepy or even gross, but she is not fazed by it at all.

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Tirer of her husband’s drinking habit, a Mexican woman decided to make him think he had become allergic to booze by lacing his beers with natural laxatives like castor oil and plum extract.

After consulting various internet pages and forums, Michel N., a young woman from Sinaloa, devised a plan to make her husband, José Brayan, quit drinking. She managed to get a hold on a mixture of castor oil and plum extract and started putting a few drops of it into his beer bottles, to achieve a mild, gradual laxative effect. José later told police that he found it a bit strange when his wife offered to pop open his beer and bring it to him whenever he needed one, but he simply “let himself be loved and pampered”.

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There’s a hilarious trend sweeping Chinese social media these days and people can’t get enough of it. Videos of people sneaking in their own raw ingredients into hotpot restaurant and dropping them into bowls of simmering broth have been going viral since December.

If you’re ever been to a Chinese restaurant, you probably know all about the hotpot. A staple of Chinese cuisine, it basically consists of a simmering pot of soup stock and a selection of raw ingredients that patrons drop into the stock to be cooked right at their table. Hotpot restaurants are all the rage in China, and they usually offer all the raw ingredients you need for a delicious meal, but a new trend has people sneaking in their own ingredients, which range from mushrooms and herbs to whole chickens and fish.

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A Moscow man made national news headlines this week for putting a drawing he made when he was only six-years-old on sale online for no less than 140 million rubles ($2.3 million).

41-year-old journalist Vladimir Mkrtchyan placed the ad for his old childhood drawing on Russian classifieds site Avito on Monday, and it quickly went viral due to its exorbitant price. 140 million rubles seems kind of steep for a childish drawing, but the seller considers it’s worth twice that much, because it reflects the realities of the Soviet era through the innocent eyes of a six-year-old boy.

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An unnamed woman was recently mocked on social media after one of her co-workers shared a poorly edited photo of a flat tire that she had allegedly used to justify being late for work to her boss.

Twitter user Sydney Whitson, from Oklahoma posted the hilarious photo that her colleague allegedly sent her boss last week, and it quickly went viral, getting almost 250,000 likes and 46,000 retweets. That’s fairly unusual for a picture of what appears to be a car tire with a nail sticking out of it. But if you take Sydney’s advice and take a closer look, you’ll realize that there’s something not quite right about the nail. It looks very cartoonish, and the tire it seems to be stuck into appears heavily edited as well. Unfortunately for the anonymous woman, her boss was quick to notice too, and apparently shared the photo with the rest of the workplace.

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A convenience store owner in Osaka, japan, sparked a lot of controversy recently when he decided to close his business for a day on New Year’s. Appaerntly that was a pretty big deal in a country where convenience stores a traditionally open 24/7, all year long.

While convenience stores are still pretty popular in the United States, they are nothing compared to the so-called “konbini” stores found on every corner of every street in urban Japan. They are beacons of hope that make life easier for the average person, offering a wide range of services (ATMs, Wi-Fi, printing, delivery services, etc.), as well as groceries, all in one place, day and night. In fact, the thing that makes Japanese convenience stores so convenient is that they are open all 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, making it possible for anyone to pick up some groceries, pay the bills or get a quick bite to eat,whenever they need to. So when one convenience store owner decided to close his business for a day on New Year’s, it made national news.

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Every February, on the day before Lent, the small Mexican town of San Juan de la Vega honors its namesake saint with a loud tradition that has come to be known as the Festival of Exploding Hammers.

The origins of this bombastic festival are shrouded in mystery. According to one local story, Juan de la Vega, a wealthy miner and rancher, was aided by San Juan Bautista (Saint John the Baptist) to recover gold stolen by bandits and residents came up with the exploding hammers to loudly commemorate their victory over the outlaws. Another story claims that “San Juanito” the patron saint of the town, was an outlaw himself, a sort of Mexican Robin Hood who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, and that the today’s celebration is a reenactment of the fight between San Juanito and the local dons. Whatever the real origin may be, the explosive tradition is so popular in San Juan de la Vega that locals will risk life and limb to keep it going.

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The Thammasat Khlongluang Wittayakom School, in Pathum Thani, Thailand was forced to stop using decibel meters to measure students’ loudness while singing the national anthem, after getting some serious backlash online.

Singing the national anthem as loudly as possible in front of the flagpole every morning is apparently a big deal at Thai schools, so one learning institution got the bright idea to track the loudness of the students using a decibel measuring mobile app. If the students’ singing registered at over 85 decibels, they would be given the green light and be dismissed to head to their classrooms. However, if their singing was only between 80 and 84 decibels, they would have to sing the anthem again two more times, as punishment. If the loudness was under 80 decibels, they would have to sing the anthem three more times. The measure was supposed to instil discipline in students, but it only sparked outrage in everyone who learned about it.

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It’s hard saying goodbye to your favorite pair of jeans, even when they’re way beyond wearable, but English artist Ian Berry has found a way to avoid throwing away denim, by using it to create beautiful works of art.

Netherton-born artist Ian Berry, aka Denimu, has made quite a name for himself after his unique art took the art world by storm. It’s hard to believe the idea of using old denim as medium for his art came after a call from his mother, Christine, asking him to clean out his room.: “It was about six or seven years ago my mum was clearing out my old room and she wanted me to go through my things. I found loads of old jeans and denims and I noticed the different colors and shades. I kept hold of them but it was only about 18 months later I began to do something with them.” Little did he know his experiment would soon make him and his denim art famous all over the world.

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A 35-year old Spanish man was recently arrested after ramming his SUV through the wooden doors of a church so he could gain access inside, claiming it was the only place where he could take shelter from his demonic “possession”.

On January 8th,the unnamed man reportedly drove up to the large doors of the San Juan Evangelista church, in the Spanish town of Sonseca, and started ramming his Jeep into it. At first passers-by didn’t really understand what was going on, and one woman, who thought the driver had been involved in an accident, walked up to the car to see if he was alright only to be scared away by having obscenities shouted at her.

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If you thought Coca Cola Vanilla was weird soft drink, the flavors developed by Shizuoka Prefecture-based company Kimura Beverage will probably blow your mind.

When it comes to new and completely unexplored soft drink flavors, Kimura Beverage is considered somewhat of a pioneer in Japan. Remember, this is the same country where limited edition flavors for popular soft drinks – like sakura Pepsi or Coca Cola Apple – are pretty much the norm. What sets Kimura apart from any other drinks company is the originality of their flavors, which range from pickled plums to fish eggs and potato chips.

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The most interesting sight of Taganai Park, in the southern Ural Mountains, Big Stone River consists of thousands of large stone boulders cutting a path through a thick forest of pine trees.

Stone rivers, also known as stone runs, can be found all over the world, from Bulgaria’s Vitosha Mountains, to the Falkland Islands, but none are as impressive-looking as the Big Stone River, in Russia’s Chelyabinsk Oblast region. Spanning 6 km long, this gigantic conglomeration of boulders starts off as several small “streams” with and average width of 20 meters that later join to form a large stone river with an average width of 200 meters (in some places up to 700 meters). Big Stone River is considered the most interesting sight of Taganai Park, and one of the most impressive in all of Russia.

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A Japanese billionaire has announced plans to donate a billion yen (about $9 million) to 1,000 of his Twitter followers in an intriguing social experiment designed to show how money affects people’s lives.

On January 1st, Yusaku Maezawa, founder of Japan’s largest fashion retail website, tweeted that he would be giving away 1 billion Japanese yen ($9.1 million) to 1,000 random people, as part of an effort to find out if money really can buy happiness. All people had to do for the chance to win $9,118 was follow and ‘retweet’ him before January 7. At the time of this writing, Maezawa’s Twitter post announcing the giveaway had been retweeted over 4.5 million times.

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It sounds almost impossible to believe, but the Japanese schoolgirl in the pictures below is actually a middle-aged, married man.

According to Wikipedia, Takuma Tani is a Japanese male vocalist born in 1977. That description doesn’t fit too well with his current image, because virtually every photo of the guy has him looking like a young schoolgirl. Takuma showed an inclination for the art from a very young age, learning piano and vocal music at the age of three. In junior high-school he started writing poems, and at age 28, he became the vocalist of a Japanese rock group. At 34, Takuma decided to adopt the image of a petite schoolgirl, and he’s been doing it successfully ever since. Even though he’s in his early 40s now, Takuma Tani still maintains his incredibly youthful and feminine looks, which have been known to confuse many on the internet.

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