Man Takes Perfect Photo of Diving Kingfisher after Six Years and 720,000 Tries

It’s a trite saying, but ‘Try, try until you succeed’ does hold true even today. Case-in-point is Scottish photographer Alan McFadyen, who spent six long years trying to get the perfect shot of a kingfisher diving into water. 720,000 tries later, he finally succeeded!

Alan, 46, was adamant about getting the shot in memory of his late grandfather Robert Murray, who often took him to see the kingfisher nesting spot at the beautiful lakeside near Kirkcudbright, Scotland, when he was about six years old. In fact, those childhood treks actually inspired him to take up photography at age 40.

“As a small boy of about six, I remember my grandfather taking me to see the kingfisher nest, and I just remember being completely blown away by how magnificent the birds are,” Alan said. “It was extraordinary how quick they flashed into the water with their brilliant blue colors – they didn’t look real, they were like a bullet they were so quick. So when I took up photography, I returned to this same spot to photograph the kingfishers.”

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Man Embarrassed to Use Selfie Stick Creates Ridiculously-Long Selfie Arm Instead

A Japanese man named Mansun has invented a new contraption that’s supposed to be an improvement on selfie sticks. It’s called the ‘selfie arm’, and as the name suggests, it’s a super-long stick fitted with a fake hand.

Mansun said that he felt compelled to invent the device because he was too embarrassed to use selfie sticks in public. But he might just have made things worse for himself, because selfie arms are way more ridiculous – they’re just selfie sticks concealed inside an altered shirt with extremely long sleeves and fake hands attached at the ends. Thankfully, he isn’t planning to mass produce the device, but he’s provided detailed pictures for anyone who might be interested in making their own set of arms.

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Alleged Cancer Sufferer Wanting to Experience Wedding but Not Leave Widow Behind Marries a Love Doll

An unidentified Chinese man’s wedding pictures recently went viral because of his unusual bride – a life-size plastic love doll!

The ‘bride’ was apparently treated to a make-up artist, a hair stylist, and even given a selection of dresses to pose in, to make her look like a real girl. She’s seen in a splendid white mermaid gown in the wedding portraits, and a beautiful lilac dress with sequins and precious stones in other photographs. Each picture is surprisingly tender, as though they’re a couple deeply in love.

With the identity of the man kept a secret, no one knew the real reason behind the bizarre wedding. The photographer said that she didn’t really agree with the man’s choice to marry a plastic doll, but added that he still deserved to be respected since we all have the freedom to choose what we like.

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New Service Allows NYC Millennials in Need of Motherly Advice to Rent a Mom

Once they reach a certain age, lots of women find motherhood exhausting, but not Brooklyn-based Nina Keneally. The 63-year-old still has lots of ‘mothering skills’ that she’s actually more than happy to rent  out through a unique service called ‘NeedAMom’.  Her motto is “When you need a mom… Just not YOUR mom.”

A former theatrical producer and drug-rehab counselor from Connecticut, Nina now spends all her time using her motherhood experience and her associate degree in counselling to help millennials in New York. For $40 an hour plus expenses, Nina will listen to all your problems, offer advice (free from ‘I told you so’), help you plan and shop for a dinner party, sew your buttons back on, bake you a cake, and do all sorts of other things a real mother might do. She’ll even buy and wrap a present for your actual mother.

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Meet The Guardian Shield, a Real-Life Crime-Fighting Superhero

The residents of Beaverton, Oregon, can rest peacefully at night, knowing their streets are being patrolled by their very own real-life superhero. ‘The Guardian Shield’ has taken it upon himself to ensure the neighborhood’s safety after dark, and in true superhero fashion, the masked crusader hasn’t revealed his identity because he wants people to focus only on his mission.

“I want to be taken seriously,” he told FOX 12 Oregon. “Everything I do is legit, as much as possible. I make sure no one is breaking into cars, no one’s fighting, everyone is getting home to their families after a hard day of work.”

The Guardian Shield, or simply ‘Shield’, wears a red costume and is always armed with pepper spray, a stun gun, a baton, a flashlight, a first aid kit, a GoPro camera, and of course, a shield. He says the police are aware of his crime-fighting ways and he’s only had positive interactions with officers. They don’t encourage him to intervene in dangerous situations, but they do appreciate being tipped off when there’s trouble brewing.

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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.

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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.

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Santa Claus Runs for North Pole City Council

Turns out Santa Claus is real, and he actually lives in North Pole! Don’t get too excited though – North Pole is a suburb in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Santa Claus is the legal name of one of its residents, although he definitely looks the part.

At North Pole, the atmosphere is festive all year. The streets are always decorated in holiday spirit, the light posts look like candy canes and the streets have names like ‘Snowman Lane’ and ‘St. Nicholas Drive’. So it’s only befitting to have a ‘Santa Claus’ live there. According to his Facebook page, Claus is “the only man legally named Santa Claus ever to live in North Pole, Alaska.”

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Extreme Phone Pinching – Probably the Most Nerve-Racking Internet Trend of 2015

Move over extreme sports, ‘extreme phone pinching’ is guaranteed to deliver an adrenaline rush like never before. Warning: It’s not for the faint-hearted.

The nerve-wracking new challenge has people dangling their expensive smartphones over all sorts of dangerous places like toilets, drains, balconies and even high cliffs. There’s only one rule – they’ve got to ‘pinch’ their gadgets using only their thumb and forefinger!

The bizarre, rather pointless trend was apparently started by Twenty One Pilots, an American indie pop band. They posted a YouTube video of them performing the phone pinch stunt and it spread like wildfire across various social networks, garnering over 300,000 views. Before long, the hashtag #extremephonepinching became a thing and people began tweeting videos and pictures of their own attempts.

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Japan Is All Set to Introduce Robot Taxis Next Year

Robot Taxi Inc., a Tokyo-based company, is gearing up to bring self-driving robot taxis to Japan’s roads early next year. They’ve invited residents to try out the taxi service in Fujisawa, in Kanagawa Prefecture. 50 people are all set to take part in the experiment.

According to Robot Taxi, the new cabs will take residents to pre-decided supermarkets about three kilometers from their homes. A company attendant will be present in the driver’s seat for safety reasons. The self-driving cars will be equipped with GPS, millimeter-wave radar, stereo vision cameras, and image analysis technologies.

The local government is fully supportive of the firm’s initiative, given that they’ve already tested automated cars on expressways before. But this will be the first time on local roads with residents. “This time, the robot taxi experiment will be conducted on actual city streets,” said government official Yuji Kuroiwa.

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Taiwan’s Betel Nut Beauties – Scantily-Clad Girls Peddling Nuts on the Side of the Road

If you ever happen to visit Taiwan, you might be greeted to the sight of scantily-clad women in neon-lit glass kiosks by roadsides, waiting for men to pull over. Well, they’re not what you think!

These women are ‘Betel nut girls’ who peddle small snacks of tasty, stimulative betel nuts wrapped in betel leaves. They dress provocatively to attract potential buyers, but nuts is pretty much the only thing they sell.

The main roads are filled with around 60,000 such phone booth-style kiosks; they’re so much a part of the nation’s identity that they’re actually featured on old tourist guides. The women who operate the stalls are usually from poorer families, but according to news reports, the job pays more than housekeeping, waiting tables and other conventional jobs.

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Woman Has Ingenious “Robot” Standing in Line at an Apple Store in Australia

Believe it or not, the day has finally come when people can have their iPads wait in line every time a new iPhone is released! A woman named Lucy Kelly was the first to try it out – she sent an iPad robot to stand proxy for her at an Apple store in Sydney, just before the launch of the new iPhone 6s.

The robot, also named Lucy, consists of an iPad attached to a Segway-type device. Created by Californian company Double Robotics, it allows a person to be virtually present anywhere without actually having to be there. And the company that Kelly works for – Atomic 212 – happened to order six of these robots to play with at their office.

“We use them for everything, just to show new technology,” Kelly said. “It is a cool demonstration of what the future of technology will be. We are obsessed with them.” So on the eve of the iPhone 6s release in Sydney last Thursday, Lucy the robot arrived to take the fourth place in the long line of Apple fans.

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23-Year-Old Takes Welding Art to a Whole New Level of Awesomeness

Fusing bits of metal together hardly qualifies as art, unless it’s the handiwork of a welding master like Richard Lauth. The 23-year-old professional welder from Chicago creates beautiful portraits, themed sculptures, decorations, and models using nothing but metal and a welding machine

Lauth is an Operating Engineer and member of the trade union Local 150 by day, but he likes to spend his free time using his welding skills on artistic pursuits. Or as he writes on Instagram, he loves making “cool s***” out of metal. Some of his pieces include metal portraits of popular characters like Stormtroopers and Minions, animal faces, and small metal sculptures of everyday objects.

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Russian Teen Has Detailed Skull Tattooed on Side of His Face

This Russian teenager is turning heads in his hometown of Krasnoyarsk for looking like a walking, talking X-Ray. The entire right side of his face is covered with a skull tattoo, complete with gaping eye sockets, blackened nose, and perfectly traced bones and teeth. He’s even colored his right eyeball black for a hollow effect!

Nikita Lesnoy was fascinated by tattoos as a child, ever since he saw one made by his father. As he grew older he began to research the subject more, eventually getting his first tattoo at age 15. And now at 18 years, half of his face is inked with a skull. He works at a tattoo parlour himself, so his bizarre face hasn’t affected his career.

“Nobody worries about my look too much in my line of work, because I also have my dream job working in a tattoo studio,” he said. But he admitted that people on the streets are often shocked by his appearance. Nearly everyone gapes at him, some in admiration, others in disgust. Read More »

Korean Couple’s Five-Month Body Transformations Will Blow Your Mind

A Korean couple are taking Instagram by storm with their phenomenal body transformation photographs. In a short span of five months, they have gone from ‘somewhat chubby’ to super-lean workout machines!

Song Jin Yoo and Shin Ji Hoo been exercising together at the gym for the past five months – spending three hours a day on aerobic exercise and one-and-a-half hours lifting weights twice a week. They have recently shared their amazing results on a Korean Facebook pace titled ‘Dieting is the Best Plastic Surgery’. Their before-and-after simply left everyone speechless and soon went viral in Korea.

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