A 4-and-a-half-year-old Nelore breed cow known as Viatina-19 FIV Mara Imóveis was recently priced at $4.3 million, making it the most expensive cow in the world by a large margin.

One-third of the ownership of the cow was recently sold at an auction in Arandú, Brazil for 6.99 million real ($1.44 million), putting its total value at a staggering $4.3 million. Viatina-19 FIV Mara Imóveis had already been named the world’s most expensive bovine last year when half of its ownership was auctioned off for around $800,000, which was another record-breaking price at the time. The record-breaking transaction is indicative of the Nelore cattle breed’s genetic qualities, as well as the demand for high-quality animals with outstanding genetic characteristics.

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A Chinese manufacturing company has come under fire for allegedly firing employees who can’t finish a 5 km (3 miles) race in 30 minutes, because ‘they lack hard-working spirit’.

Mr. Liu, a man living in Suzhou City, China’s Jiangsu Province, filed a lawsuit against his former employer for wrongful termination after allegedly being fired for not being able to run 3 miles in 30 minutes at 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Liu apparently applied for a job at a mechanical parts factory and, after passing a series of practical tests that involved electric welding and gas cutting, he was announced that he had gotten the job. After paying for a medical examination out of his own pocket, Mr. Liu started working at the company in a maintenance position. Little did he know that he still had one more big test to pass…

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Thai Ngoc, an 80-year-old farmer in Vietnam, claims that he hasn’t slept in over 60 years, since coming down with a fever as a young man. Somehow, this severe insomnia hasn’t affected his life.

Most people can’t go an entire day without a few hours of sleep, but one Vietnamese man claims that he has spent the last 60 years wide awake, without so much as a short nap. Thai Ngoc has been making news headlines in his home country for years now, ever since it was originally reported that he does not need any sleep to lead a happy, active life. Ngoc’s family, including his wife, children, friends, and neighbors insist that they have never seen the octogenarian sleep, and he insists that the complete lack of sleep has never affected him negatively.

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The Putrajaya Roundabout in the administrative capital of Malaysia holds the Guinness record for the world’s largest roundabout. It measures 3.4km in circumference and features 15 entry/exit points.

Located in the heart of Putrajaya, the administrative capital of Malaysia, the Persiaran Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah Roundabout, aka Putrajaya Roundabout, is one of the most unusual attractions in the Southeast Asian country. It was designed by renowned Malaysian architect Hijjas Kasturi and inaugurated in 2003. A feat of modern infrastructure engineering, the world’s largest roundabout is built around Istana Melawati, the second-largest palace of Malaysia’s Yang di-Pertuan Agong, the Putra Perdana Landmark, and a luxurious five-star hotel. It is also the main access point to Putrajaya’s major attractions, including the prime minister’s green-domed office complex and the city’s enormous mosque.

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An Indian man is currently under investigation for fraud, after allegedly spending a total of 603 nights at a New Delhi 5-star hotel despite only paying for one night.

On May 30th, Ankush Dutta booked a room at the renowned Roseate House Hotel in Delhi. He was supposed to check out the next day, but according to investigators, he ended up living at the hotel continuously until January 22, 2021, without paying a dime for his stay, food, beverages, or any other services he used at the hotel during that period of time. It’s unclear how exactly the Indian man managed this feat, but the hotel has already filed a complaint against one of its employees, whom management suspects of conspiring with the clandestine guest. The exact nature of their relationship is unclear, but investigators believe that the employee may have received some kind of financial incentive for their assistance.

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An Italian professor who was recently fired for around 20 years of absence out of 24 years of service at schools near Venice has vowed to contest her recent firing by the Ministry of Education.

51-year-old Cinzia Paolina De Lio, a secondary school teacher who specializes in history and philosophy, became famous in her home country of Italy for managing to skip work for a total of 20 years out of the last 24 years of service at a number of schools around Venice. De Lio was originally sacked in 2017, after an inspection found her to be “unprepared” and “inattentive” in class, but she appealed the decision, and a judge reinstated her the following year. She continued to provide all sorts of excuses to miss work until Italy’s Supreme Court of Cassation decided that her original termination had been justified, especially since she had been absent from the classroom for most of her two-and-a-half decades as a school professor.

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American company Throw Flame recently unveiled its latest product, Thermonator, the world’s first flamethrower-wielding robot dog.

Robot dogs have been around for a while now, and in countries like China, they’re actually competing against actual pooches. But it turns out that these four-legged robots can be more than lifeless pets. For example, Throw Flame, a US-based company specializing in flamethrowers, recently showcased the world’s first flamethrower-equipped robot dog. Dubbed “Thermonator”, it comes with a high-performance flamethrower mounted on its back which allows it to shoot flames up to 9 meters in front of it. According to the Throw Flame website, the Thermonator allows users to remotely “shoot flames anywhere you want!”

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A ramen restaurant in Yunlin, Taiwan, recently unveiled its latest menu entry – Godzilla Ramen, a bowl of ramen soup with a braised crocodile leg sticking out of it.

Taiwanese ramen has been getting weirder and weirder in the last few weeks. It all started with the isopod ramen we featured at the end of last month, which featured a giant isopod as the main ingredient. Then it was the ‘Frog Frog Frog Ramen‘ by Yuan Ramen (圓拉麵), which featured a giant unpeeled frog, and recently culminated with another Yunlin area ‘delicacy’, a crocodile ramen aptly named ‘Godzilla Ramen’. The dish is reportedly made with 40 different spices, but the main ingredient literally sticking out of the bowl is a braised crocodile leg.

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A Shanghai woman has become famous in her home country for promoting the physical and psychological benefits of hugging trees.

Qishishiqi hugged her first tree back in April, while out on the tow with her husband. Feeling a little tipsy, the woman hugged a random tree on an empty street in Shanghai and immediately felt positive effects. A constant ringing in the ears that she claimed was caused by work-related stress ‘magically disappear’ while hugging the thick tree trunk, and this ‘superb’ first experience motivated her to not only look for other trees to hug but also share her story with others so that they may also benefit from it.

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Comparable in height to a skyscraper and weighing a whopping 13,500 tons, the German-made Bagger 288 holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest excavator.

Here at oddity Central, we love big, heavy machinery! In fact, we just featured the world’s largest dump truck, the BelAZ-75710, a Belarussian behemoth capable of carrying a load of over 500 tons. However, this metal monster looks positively tiny next to the world’s largest excavator. A one-of-one, the Bagger 288 giant excavator was produced in 1978 by German company Krupp and has been holding on to the title of ‘world’s largest excavator’ ever since. It can go through 240,000 cubic meters of rock per day, and is used to produce around 8.5 million tons of coal per year.

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German artist Werner Härtl has carved out a truly unique niche for himself – he is currently the only known artist who uses diluted cow dung to create sepia-style paintings.

Here at Oddity Central, we’ve featured some funky art mediums in the past, from the artist’s own blood as paint, to dead cockroaches as canvases for tiny paintings, but in terms of weirdness, few things come close to Werner Härtl’s chosen medium. The German artist started experimenting with cow dung in 2012, during a stint as an agricultural worker. He packed some manure into a canister and used water to dilute it in order to obtain different sepia tones. These days, he prefers to get the ‘paint’ directly from the source, placing the canister just under the cow’s rectum as it poops. He claims that harvesting just two bovine bowel movements provides him with enough material for at least half a year.

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An Indonesian fisherman claims to have shared a friendship with a four-meter-long saltwater crocodile for over 20 years and calls the reptile part of the local community.

59-year-old Ambo, a fisherman from Bontang City, in Indonesia’s East Kalimantan, has become somewhat of a celebrity in his country because of his unusual friendship with a giant saltwater crocodile named Rizka. The giant reptile has been a constant part of Ambo’s life for the past 26 years, ever since he first laid eyes on her in the waters of Pupuk Kaltim. She was only about one meter in size back then, and he didn’t pay much attention to her as she swam past his boat, but when he noticed that she had followed him home, Ambo grabbed some food and tossed it in the water. That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship spanning 26 years and who knows how many more going forward.

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A Tulsa gas station clerk is being accused of staging a robbery because he felt tired and needed an excuse to get off work early.

On June 5th, Isaias Jones called the Tulsa Police Department that a masked man had walked into the gas station store he was working in, pulled out a firearm, and threatened to shoot him if he didn’t give him all the money in the register. Jones allegedly complied and the masked robber left in a hurry. Surveillance cameras confirmed the clerk’s version of the events, but the footage also helped police identify the robber, and when they managed to apprehend them, they learned that there was more to this case than they originally believed…

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Suodiu is a bizarre type of Chinese street food that consists of small river rocks stir-fried with a mixture of spices and herbs. You are supposed to suck on the stones and then spit them out.

Roughly translated as ‘suck and throw away’, suodiu is believed to have been invented hundreds of years ago by boatmen who would prepare the dish when they became stranded in the middle of the river with no real food while delivering goods. To trick their stomachs, they would stir-fry some river pebbles with various condiments and then suck the stones dry. The traditional dish was passed down through several generations, and today roadside vendors in China can sometimes be seen stir-frying bunches of river rocks with cilli oil, garlic sauce, garlic cloves and a mixture of spices.

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Ayam Ketawa, or the Indonesian laughing chicken, is a breed of long-crowing chicken known for the clarity of its crow, which has an unusual similarity to a human laugh.

Originating from Indonesia’s South Sulawesi province, the Ayam Ketawa was originally a status symbol for the region’s Buginese royal family. Its captivating appearance made it a symbol of courage, social status, and heroism, but if you know Indonesian, you will have noticed that the breed’s name, Ayam Ketawa, literally translates to ‘laughing chicken’. That’s because this chicken’s unusual chuckling noises seem to mimic human laughter. It is this distinct characteristic that makes the Ayam Ketawa popular as an exotic pet not just in its native Indonesia, but around the world.

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