Australian company HommeMystere specializes in sexy lingerie for men. The idea of guys wearing lace underwear, silk bralettes and G-strings may seem strange or funny to a lot of people, but apparently the undergarments are in such high demand that the company has had to expand online just to keep up with incoming orders.

HommeMystere has been around since 2008; its co-founders Brent and Laura Krause started designing men’s lingerie when they realised that men who wanted to dump their boring boxers were forced to shop at women’s stores. So they wanted to give men the option of buying sexy underwear that’s designed with the male form in mind.

Their idea turned out to be a big hit, and the small hobby-sized business soon grew to epic proportions. Today, HommeMystere is a global online store that serves a wide range of clients from over 30 countries, including Canada, America, and Russia.

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A University of California – San Diego (USCD) professor is making waves for requiring his students to strip naked during their visual art final exam. The drama intensified after a student’s mother got a whiff of what was going on. Speaking to the media, she lashed out at the professor’s unorthodox teaching methods.

“It bothers me, I’m not sending her to school for this,” the woman told 10News . “To blatantly say you must be naked in order to pass my class… it makes me sick to my stomach. It’s just wrong. This is a memory that my daughter is going to carry with her for the rest of her life.” The woman, who chose to remain anonymous, broke down in tears during the phone conversation.

Professor Ricardo Dominguez, who has been teaching Visual Arts 104A: Performing the Self  at UCSD for the past 11 years, confirmed that his students do have to be in the nude during the final exam. “The class focuses on the history of body art and performance art in relation to the question of the self or subjectivity,” he explained. “At the very end of the class, we’ve done several gestures, they have to nude gesture. The prompt is to speak about or do a gesture or create an installation that says, ‘what is more you than you are.”

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Mexican politician Renato Tronco Gomez has turned to social media to reduce his workload – he’s currently running a competition on Facebook to find a lookalike willing to attend official engagements in his stead. He’s offering the winner a prize of 40,000 pesos (US $2,700), apart from the obvious media attention the position will bring. Four people have entered the contest so far.

Gomez, an independent deputy in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz, plans to thoroughly train the winner on speaking and acting like him, and taking care of his ‘many obligations’. The double will be on the payroll as his assistant, but some duties will remain off-limits, like official responsibilities and spending time with Gomez’s family.

“My double will not be able to attend sessions of parliament, because you vote with your fingerprint and I’m not going to cut off my finger to give it to my double,” Gomez joked. “There is going to be an agreement that he can’t sleep with my wife, nor live in my house, nor be father to my children.”

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American student Barclay Oudersluys is making headlines for attempting a 100-day coast-to-coast run, inspired by the movie Forrest Gump. He set off on the epic journey on Saturday, from California’s Santa Monica Yacht Harbor and Pier, and he plans to reach Marshall Point Lighthouse in Maine at the end of 100 days. That’s a total of 3,200 miles, with 32 miles to cover per day.

Barclay is calling his attempt ‘Project Gump’, as it was inspired by the protagonist of the 1994 film Forrest Gump. Although the route covered by Tom Hanks’s character isn’t completely revealed in the movie, Barclay has managed to chart a course quite similar to it, by studying contextual clues.

“I don’t really know what made me want to do it,” he said. “Forrest Gump is my favorite movie. And so when I decided to do this run, I looked up the two points where he had gone to and decided then.” The course he’s charted will take him through California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

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Unwilling to accept that he was stood up, a Taiwanese man has reportedly been waiting for his date to show up for the last two decades! 47-year-old Ah Ji is now a permanent fixture at Tainan train station, where the love of his life promised to meet him all those years ago. It’s unclear whether the girl in question was his lover, or if they had arranged to meet for their first date, all we know is that he went to the station expecting to see her, and has never left since.

In the initial years Ah Ji was always seen hovering over a large staircase, as though ready to greet someone. After a few years of waiting he moved to a side door next to the exit station, from where he stares at passengers’ faces every day. The man is so heartbroken that he has taken to a life of hunger and homelessness at the station.

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A Chinese billionaire has made a serious claim for the title of best boss ever, after taking half of his employees – over 6,400 people – on an all-expenses-paid nine-day holiday to France, to celebrate his company’s 20th anniversary. The epic trip is expected to cost a whopping 33 million euros, of which 13 million will be spent in Paris, and 20 million in Nice.

Li Jinyuan, the chairman of Tiens Group Company, booked rooms in 140 three, four, and five-star hotels in Paris for 6,400 employees, and made reservations at some of the most popular attractions, including The Louvre museum. The huge group, consisting of Chinese, Russian, and Kenyan employees, has also traveled to the breathtaking French Riviera, where Li Jinyuan booked a whopping 4,760 rooms in 79 hotels in Cannes and Monaco.

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A pensioner in China recently posted a very bizarre newspaper ad – he is looking for a family willing to adopt him in exchange for his monthly pension.

75-year-old Huan Qi, from Changzhou in Jiangsu province, told People’s Daily Online that he has been by himself ever since his wife passed away in 1999. His surviving relatives rarely visit him, and he is tired of waking up to an empty house, feeling lonely and miserable.

Huan’s only son lives in a work dormitory in Changzhou, so is unable to take his father in. One of his older brothers lived in Changzhou, but he died years ago, and all his other siblings live in Shandong. His granddaughter is married, with a child, so she is to busy to visit him regularly.

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If you think about it, logos are works of art too – they’re clever, well designed and come in a variety of colors. But are they appealing enough to tattoo on to your body? Well, for 23-year-old Indian tattoo artist Jason George, they are. The self-confessed ‘human billboard’, sports hundreds of tattooed logos of international companies that have impacted his life in some way.

“I know it seems insane but these tattoos are my way of giving thanks to the brands that have made an impact on my life,” said Jason, a college-dropout and founder of 21 Tattoo Studio in Mumbai. The logos inked all over his body include those of his favorite TV channel, mobile phone networks, fast food chains, and social networking sites. “All the logos that you will find on my body have a special place in my heart. They are related to my life in some way and I have memories and stories attached to these brands.”

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A Chinese man is gaining notoriety for trying to cure his patients’ illnesses by literally beating it out of them. Former investment banker and self-styled healer Hongchi Xiao apparently believes that by slapping themselves black and blue, they are getting rid of toxins. But his methods have come under scrutiny ever since the death of a seven-year-old boy who attended his slapping workshop in Sydney.

Hongchi, who claims to have learned the ancient practice of ‘paida lajin’ from a Taoist monk, says that his slaps have cured several medical conditions ranging from diabetes to hypertension. “The slapping and stretching work together to clear the meridians of blocks and help the body get rid of the disease,” he explained. Slapping the body, he said, “builds heat, causing blood vessels to expand, and ‘chi’ to flow strongly. Yang rises, yin melts and long-held toxins and blocks are released.” Read More »

Brazilian body builder Romario Dos Santos Alves was so desperate to emulate the Incredible Hulk that he actually injected his arms with a potentially lethal combination of oil and alcohol. The 25-year-old risked his life in the process, and almost had both arms amputated. His grotesquely swollen muscles have earned him cruel nicknames like ‘beast’ and ‘monster’.

Romario, a former bodyguard and father-of-one, said that he became obsessed with the drug when he first moved away from his hometown to Goiania city. “I saw some really big guys in the gym with huge arms and I started to make friends with them,” he told reporters. “They introduced me to synthol and I got excited about the results – I lost control.”

“If you take it once, there will definitely be a second time – it’s addictive,” he added. And that’s exactly what happened to Romario. Impressed with the initial results, he soon began using the substance frequently. He even tricked his wife Marisangela Marinho into injecting the drug in places that he couldn’t reach. “I told her there was no problem with it – that it left the body after a short time.” Read More »

Entrepreneurs in Japan really do manage to come up with the most eccentric ideas for their customers, right from cat cafés to Godzilla hotels. Continuing the tradition is the Mitsui Garden Yotsuya hotel in Shinjuku, with specially allocated ‘crying rooms’ for female guests!

The hotel offers women looking to release tension or overcome emotional issues special accommodations designed for crying. They are stocked with luxury tissues that can be used to ‘gently wipe away tears’, as well as a steam eye mask to ‘avoid swollen eyes’ the following morning. A selection of sentimental manga comic books and films are also provided, including tear-jerkers such as Forrest Gump and South Korean film A Moment to Remember.

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A California therapist is helping couples resolve their relationship issues in the most unusual way – by having them assemble IKEA furniture. The experience, she believes, is so frustrating that it might actually bring couples closer to each other!

“The store literally becomes a map of a relationship nightmare,” licensed psychologist Ramani Durvasula explained. “Walking through the kitchens brings up touchy subjects, like who does most of the cooking. Then you get to the children’s section, which opens up another set of issues. And that’s before you’ve even tried to assemble anything.”

“I would laugh with my ex-husband about it,” she added. “I saw what a pressure cooker it was. In the end, we hired someone to put the furniture together.”

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Thoroughly exasperated by her son’s misbehavior, a mother from Columbus, Georgia, came up with an innovative method to teach him a lesson. She teamed up with the local police force to stage an arrest of her fifth-grade son, hoping to scare him into behaving well at school.

33-year-old Chiquita Hill said that her son Sean’s teacher complained about him being “rude and disrespectful, not listening, talking back, and not doing his school work,” for the umpteenth time. She was running out of options and desperately looking for a solution, because she was scared that Sean’s behavior could escalate into serious disrespect for authority as an adult. That’s when she got the idea for a fake arrest.

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Meet James Wannerton, an Englishman with an incredibly rare ability to taste sound. That might seem absurd, but it is very much a reality for people with a condition called synaesthesia, which causes senses that are usually separate to intermingle.

Even as a young boy, James always experienced an involuntary taste on his tongue every time he heard a sound. Hearing the name Anne Boleyn in History class, for example, gave him a strong flavor of pear drops. He associated most of the British monarchs with a specific taste, making it easy for him to remember facts and events. His word-taste associations always helped him do better in school.

As he grew older, James found that his unique ability helped him in other aspects of life too. His relationships were all too delicious – he chose his companions not because of their looks or personality, but based on how their names felt on his taste buds. His schoolmates often had a strong essence of sliced potatoes and strawberry jam, while his dates’ names tasted like slices of rhubarb and melted wine gums.

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Meet Kalyanasundaram, an Indian librarian with a heart of gold. During his 35 years of service, he donated almost all the money he earned to orphanages and children’s welfare funds. Now that he is retired, Kalyanasundaram donates his entire pension to those who need it more than he. Although he has no material possessions to his name, he considers himself one of the richest people in the world.

The 73-year-old retiree, from the southern state of Tamil Nadu, started to think about helping the poor and underprivileged at a very young age. He lost his father at the age of one, and his mother struggled to raise him all by herself. As he grew older, his shrill, high-pitched voice troubled him to such an extent that he became depressed and suicidal. But his life turned around when he met a local motivational writer, who told him, “Don’t bother about how you speak. Strive to make others speak well about you.”

Kalyanasundaram took the advice seriously, and decided to dedicate his life to the service of others. The humble man insists that the reason he started helping people was to make himself happy.

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