A Japanese izakaya bar has come under fire for offering patrons the rather controversial service of being slapped on their faces before having their meals served.

The Shachihoko-ya izakaya in Nagoya served its snacks with a hearty side of slaps delivered by its female staff. The bizarre service is said to have revitalized the establishment’s business, attracting an increasing number of patrons willing to try the painful experience. In the beginning, the face slapping was done by just one member of the izakaya staff, upon request, but as demand grew, management hired several girls willing to dish out some slaps and even started charging a fee of 100 yen (90 cents) per slap.

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A Turkish man had to endure over a month of excruciating pain after he had four of his front teeth extracted by a cleaner posing as a dentist at a clinic in Istanbul.

According to documents relating to a recently resolved case filed with the Istanbul Civil Court, 42-year-old Hakan Yıldırım, an Istanbul man suffering from a severe toothache, called a dental clinic in the Kağıthane district to make an emergency appointment. His call was answered by Cemal Şenaslan, who introduced himself as a dentist and told Hakan to come by the clinic in the evening to have his dental problem examined and hopefully resolved. When the patient turned up at the clinic later that day, he was greeted by Şenaslan, who bragged about being a lecturer at a dentistry university, to make Yıldırım feel more comfortable. Little did the poor man know he would soon endure the most painful experience of his life…

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An android waitress working at a restaurant in Chongqing, China, went viral last month, mesmerizing viewers with its precise robotic movements, but she turned out to be nothing more than a choreographed illusion.

With the threat of AI-powered robots stealing humans’ jobs looming over the world these days, the sight of a humanoid robot seemingly working as a waitress at a restaurant in China scandalized a lot of people when videos of it started circulating on Douyin (China’s version of TikTok). Some viewers were in awe of the android’s human-like appearance and its ability to interact with real people, greeting them as they entered the Chongqing restaurant, taking their orders, and bringing them to their tables, but others declared themselves a little creeped out by it, a relatively common reaction to the uncanny valley effect. But it turned out that the android waitress was more lifelike than people thought…

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The winner of the second-biggest prize in the history of the Mega Millions lottery has taken the mother of his daughter to court for telling his parents about the win despite signing an NDA.

The unidentified man, who chose to remain anonymous, for obvious reasons, claims that his daughter’s mother was one of the few people who knew about his lottery win in January 2023. She was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) preventing her from spilling the beans to anyone for a period of almost a decade, as the lottery winner considered “the best uses of the life-changing prize,” but she broke that legally-binding agreement by allegedly telling his parents and sister. Now, the man wants her to pay compensation of “no less than $100,000 per unauthorized disclosure”.

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A 75-year-old Vietnamese woman claims she has not eaten any solid food in 50 years, instead surviving only on water and sugary soft drinks.

Ms. Bui Thi Loi, from Loc Ninh commune, in Vietnam’s Quang Binh Province, looks in great shape for her age, which only makes her diet that much more surprising. The elderly woman insists that she has lived on water and soft drinks for half a century and that she never craves solid foods. It all started in 1963 when she was struck by lightning while she and other women were climbing up a mountain to treat injured soldiers during the war. She was knocked unconscious and although she survived, she was never the same after that. She didn’t eat anything for days after coming to her senses, so her friends started giving her sweetened water.

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A Chinese man barely managed to get off his smart toilet with his bum intact after smoke started coming out of the toilet bowl and the whole thing burst into flames.

The Yangtze Evening News newspaper recently reported the story of a man from Xiamen, Fujian Province, who recorded his smart toilet burning after a suspected short-circuit. The incident occurred on November 10, while the man was using the toilet. At first, there was the smell of smoke, then plumes of white smoke started billowing from the toilet bowl, and finally, just as the man got up from the toilet, the smart toilet burst into flames. Photos taken by the shocked man show that he didn’t even have time to put his shorts on before the toilet started burning.

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A Vietnamese man who had been suffering from severe headaches and even loss of vision over the last five months recently learned that he had a pair of chopsticks stuck in his skull.

The unnamed man was recently admitted to the Cuba Friendship Hospital in the city of Dong Hoi, Vietnam’s Quang Binh province, after complaining of constant headaches, vision loss, and fluid discharge from his nose. When asked, the man revealed no possible cause for these symptoms, but a CT scan showed a tension pneumocephalus, the intracranial equivalent of a pneumothorax, as well as two foreign objects protruding from his nose into his brain. Upon thorough examination, the objects were identified as broken chopsticks…

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A young mother who went viral for recording herself impersonating her 13-year-old daughter at her school in order to prove a point was recently found guilty of criminal trespassing.

On November 15, a jury sentenced Casey Garcia to six months of probation and ordered her to pay a fine of $700 in connection to a 2021 incident where she attended classes at San Elizario Middle School disguised as her teenage daughter, in order to show how easy it was for an adult to enter the school. The mother, who was 30 years old at the time, dyed her hair, put on skin tanner, and wore a hoodie and a face mask in order to pass for her 13-year-old daughter and gain access to the school. She recorded the controversial experiment and posted the video on social media where it got a lot of attention but ultimately led to her arrest.

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Himenii (ひめにぃ様) is a Japanese male influencer who rose to fame by cosplaying as a young, cute girl and then giving himself away by speaking in a deep voice.

Japan is home to many male cosplayers who choose to wear female clothes and fool everyone with their appearance, but Himenii is one of the few who uses this talent to create funny content for his online fans. Himenii’s cosplaying talent is superb, but he is actually famous for his funny videos, in which he either interacts with random people, speaking in a loud voice while disguised as a girl, or stages sketches while filmed by a friend.

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Doctors in Missouri got the shock of their lives during a routine colonoscopy when they came across a fully developed fly living in the patient’s traverse colon.

The American Journal of Gastroenterology recently published the bizarre case of a 63-year-old man who had a fly living inside his intestines. The man had shown up for a routine colon cancer screening earlier this year, and doctors at a Missouri hospital conducted a colonoscopy – a procedure where a camera is inserted into the intestines to check for any abnormalities. And that is exactly what the physicians found while exploring the patient’s traverse colon – the area at the top of the large intestine. – an intact fly that had somehow survived the gastric acid and was chilling inside the man’s body.

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The people of Omagh, a small town in Northern Ireland, have been complaining about a mysterious humming sound that can be heard at night and disrupts their sleep.

In recent weeks, the Omagh District Council has actively been trying to identify the source of a nighttime noise that several residents from all over the small Northern Ireland town have been complaining about. Unfortunately, all their efforts so far have ended in failure, leaving them with no other choice than to call in sound experts to solve the mystery. People “usually characterize it as a persistent buzz or hum” that differs from the sound of passing vehicles and that can only heard late at night, usually around 12:00 am – 01:00 am. While some have gotten used to it, others claim that it is interfering with their night sleep and demand that something be done about it.

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A California-based book club has recently finished its first reading of James Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake’, a notoriously difficult book that it started reading 28 years ago.

James Joyce once said that the demand he makes of his reader is that he “should devote his entire life to reading my works,” and some people actually took those words to heart. For example, the members of a California book club have spent the last 28 years of their lives decyphering Finnegan’s Wake page by page, in an attempt to figure out its many mysteries. This is a book so difficult to read that no one person can truly say they ‘get it’, which makes it perfect for community reading. It’s apparently written in a convoluted mix of reinvented words, puns, and allusions, referencing about 80 languages, and people can’t even agree on where the book is set or who the characters are.

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A Japanese man planted three banana trees in the median strip of a major road in Kurume City and watered them daily for two years before anyone noticed their existence.

A 50-something man from Kurume City, Fukuoka Prefecture, was recently ordered to remove three banana trees he had illegally planted and cared for in the median strip of a busy city road for a couple of years. It’s unclear why the man chose to plant the trees on public property, and in a median strip of all places, but they eventually got so big that they began affecting motorists’ field of view. It wasn’t difficult for authorities to identify the man responsible for the trees, as he had been watering the tropical plants at least twice a day for the last two years. He was ordered to remove the trees, or risk spending up to a year in jail or pay a fine of 500,000 yen ($3,350).

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A Colombian mother is being accused of staging her own toddler son’s kidnapping along with several accomplices in order to get ransom money from the boy’s father.

On Sunday evening, November 12th, the news of a young boy kidnapped in Caribe Verde, south of Barranquilla, Colombia, started spreading like wildfire. The 2-year-old had apparently been snatched right out of the arms of his helpless mother as she was walking on the street. Two helmet-wearing assailants approached the woman on motorcycles, intimidated her, and then rode away with her child. When police arrived on the scene, they started questioning the woman about what had gone down, and locating the minor became the biggest priority. It didn’t take long before someone reported the presence of a child fitting the kidnapping victim’s description in a Caribe Verde apartment. A police team burst into the apartment, only instead of masked assailants, they found the boy in the care of a friend of his mother’s…

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A Romanian man was recently saved by doctors after cutting his wrist with an angle grinder because he was convinced he had colon cancer by simply reading about his symptoms online.

The bizarre incident took place on Saturday, in the Romanian city of Botosani. The unnamed man had been depressed about colon pain he had been experiencing for a while, but his wife didn’t suspect just how desperate he had become. At one point, he told his spouse that he was going into the outhouse to get some firewood for their boiler, but he had more sinister plans. A few minutes later, the woman received a text from her husband telling her that he was sorry and that she had been a good wife. Luckily, the woman immediately realized something was wrong and ran to the outhouse, where she found the man with an angle grinder in one hand and his other hand almost severed completely…

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