Whale watching in Australia has never been the same since 28 June 1991, when an all-white humpback was photographed passing Byron Bay, the country’s most easterly point. It was the first time the world witnessed the existence of a real-life Moby Dick; never before had anyone heard of or seen a completely spotless white humpback whale anywhere else on Earth.

The incredibly rare creature was soon christened ‘Migaloo’, which is an indigenous Australian word meaning ‘white fella’. Since then, he has been spotted traveling up and down the east coast of Australia at least 50 times. As he migrates up from Antarctica to the warmer waters of Tropical North Queensland every year, his arrival is eagerly awaited by locals and tourists alike.

During this year’s migration in June, Australian photographer Ray Alley managed to capture a few stunning pictures of Migaloo off the coast of Nelson Bay in NSW. Alley had been trying to get images of the humpback for the past nine years and his hard work finally paid off. Migaloo stopped for a rare display of showmanship on his way through Nelson Bay, a moment that Alley describes as the ‘holy grail’ in his 27-year career.

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British performance artist Mark Farid wants to spend one month living as another person. He has set up a Kickstarter campaign to fund the project, called “Seeing-I”, and if he succeeds in collecting $235,000, he plans to wear a virtual reality headset through which he will experience life through another person’s eyes and ears for 28 days.

According to the campaign page, “For 24 hours a day for 28 days, artist Mark Farid will wear a Virtual Reality Headset through which he will experience life through another person’s eyes and ears – this person will be referred to as ‘the Other’. Mark has had no previous relationship with this person; he is only aware that the Other is a heterosexual male, who is in a relationship. The Other is required to wear a pair of glasses that covertly capture audio and video. This footage will then be watched back by Mark, who will inhabit a space consisting of only a bed, a toilet and shower area. This area, as well as Mark will be on constant display to the audience.”

So whatever the Other experiences in life, Mark will too – like being stuck in a doctor’s waiting room for hours, partying on a weekend, and even going to the loo, of course. The only human contact that Mark will have is one hour per day with a psychologist, who will observe and listen to him without saying a word.

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Chinese businessman He Liesheng is putting Tiger Moms to shame by taking ‘pushy parenting’ to whole new levels. ‘Eagle Dad’, as he calls himself, has only one philosophy when it comes to raising his son: “We think that not having adventures in life is the most dangerous thing.”

Well, adventures don’t sound all that bad, but wait till you hear what he’s put his son through so far. At age four, He Yide was made to jog in the snow, while wearing only underpants. It was supposed to be a character building exercise, and the video clip that Liesheng shared online showed the boy crying while running in New York’s subzero temperatures. It earned him the name ‘Running Naked Boy’ on Chinese social media.

A year later, Yide was taught to fly a plane and he made a 35-minute flight above Beijing Wildlife Park in an ultralight aircraft, breaking the Guinness Record for the world’s youngest pilot.

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I suppose nothing complements the loudness of heavy metal better than ear-bleeding screeches. And when those sounds come from a bird instead of a human, it’s bound to make an impression. Meet Waldo, a Congo African Grey Parrot, a heavy metal prodigy and the lead vocalist of a Baltimore-based band, ‘Hatebeak’.

The band was formed in 2004, by audio engineers Blake Harrison and Mark Sloan, who played the guitar and drums respectively. Hatebeak was a strictly studio project with unintelligible lyrics and no real melody. They never toured so as to not torture the bird. “We don’t play live,” Blake once explained. “It would be absolute torture for the bird to experience decibels at those levels. Waldo is the only vocalist for Hatebeak. He does parrot noises and also says some words.”

In the years they were active, Blake and Mark never revealed their last names on their releases in order to maintain the mystery surrounding Hatebeak. They were signed by Reptilian Records (which is now on hiatus), and most of their discography had an avian theme with titles like ‘Number of the Beak’, ‘Beak of Putrefaction’, and ‘The Thing That Should Not Beak’.

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Kickstarter features the most awesome inventions! The latest one we’ve found is the ‘Whiskey Element’, a simple tool that claims to make cheap whiskey taste like fine expensive liquor in just 24 hours. “Customize your whiskey in 24 hours,” the product page reads. “It’s your whiskey, drink it the way you want.”

The product is the brainchild of a Portland-based company called Time & Oak. They argue that the best and most expensive whiskeys are made after they are aged in quality oak barrels. But if you can’t afford to buy the finest whiskeys, you can probably settle for their Whiskey Elements, which are nothing more than specially designed oak sticks.

By simply adding the stick to a bottle of cheap whiskey, they claim that you can replicate the taste of high quality liquor in no time at all. That’s because their ‘accelerated transpiration through capillary action’ can properly age cheap whiskey into a quality one by filtering impurities and infusing additional wood flavor in the spirit.

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Apparently, there’s much more to a pink flower than meets the eye – there’s also gold, orange, yellow, purple, blue and red.How do we know this? Well, it’s all thanks to tetrachromats like Concetta Antico. Her unique condition enables her to see 100 times more color than the average person.

“My world speaks to me very strongly and then I can’t wait to paint it,” said Concetta, an artist based in San Diego. “I’ve been told that you see gray, mostly, in a shadow. Well, shadows are fabulous. I see emerald greens, I see magentas, I see lilacs, I see blues.”

The reason for Concetta’s amazing ability to see the world from a different perspective is the extra receptors in her eyes. Most people have three types of cones – structures in the eye that are designed to absorb particular wavelengths of light and transmit them to the brain – in their eyes. But tetrachromats like Concetta have four cones, so while the average person can only see 1 million colors, they can potentially view 99 million!

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Beggars in China are stooping to new lows in order to gain sympathy (and money) from impressionable passers-by. Horrific pictures show deliberately mutilated camels that are being used to beg for donations. Apparently, the trick has worked wonders so far – the beggars’ collections have increased because people are quite sympathetic and end up donating generously to help the poor animals.

The latest case was discovered in Fuzhou city, China’s Fujian Province, where two men in ragged clothes were spotted kneeling down and begging, while holding the reins of a camel. When the police approached them, they found that the camel had no hooves, and the wounds indicated that they had been deliberately cut off.

In another incident, Fuzhou Evening News reported the case of a camel found by the roadside. It had been led through the streets by a beggar, and then abandoned. News reports suggest that beggars have been spotted with injured camels in several other cities such as Shenzhen, Wenzhou, Shaoxing, Xiamen, Guangzhou, and Hefei. Read More »

Imagine your worst nightmares, the scariest movies you’ve ever seen, and the most horrifying haunted houses you’ve been to. Put them all together, and you’re still not going to come close to the experience at McKamey Manor in San Diego, California. The place is so gut-wrenchingly terrifying that it can make the toughest of people cry out for their mommies.

The official McKamey Manor website describes the place as the ‘world’s only true interactive 4 to 7 hour extreme haunt experience’. “Be warned, this is not your standard haunted house,” the site reads. “This is an audience participation event in which (YOU) will live your own horror movie. This is a rough, intense and truly frightening experience.” And the entire experience is filmed, giving you a chance to star in your very own horror movie. Read More »

Peter Combe is a San Francisco-based visual artist who specializes in creating three-dimensional artwork using nothing but paint swatches, hand-punched into small disks. Using his special technique, Combe creates stunning pieces that range from abstract pattern-based compositions to highly realistic pixelated portraits with a vintage photograph-like quality.

Combe has a huge collection of paint swatch disks of over 1,100 colors that he has organized based on tonal increments and light-reflecting values. This enables him to think of tones rather than colors while working. To create a piece, he fits these disks into bezel-cut grooves on a specially prepared archival material, with the aid of a vintage operating-theater lamp.

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While some men like to leave their bushy chests intact, others prefer to stay groomed with a trim or a wax. And then there are a few fuzzy fellas who like putting an artistic spin on body hair. Helping the trend ‘grow’ is British celebrity hair stylist Daniel Johnson, who has been wielding his clippers to create skylines and iconic landmarks on the chests of hairy Brits.

Having cut the hair of English football giants like Ashley Cole, Gareth Blue and Erik Lamela, 32-year-old Daniel is now channeling all his talent and experience towards men who want to do interesting things with their chest hair. He calls the art ‘manscaping’, and his project is being sponsored by male grooming brand Braun.

Daniel said that he was inspired to take on the challenge after he came to know of the #chesthairbikini Instagram movement, where men trimmed their chest to resemble to shape of a bikini. Of course, his work is a lot more complicated and intricate. Once he’s done trimming and carving, the finished design consists of hair at five specific lengths – 0mm, 1mm, 2mm, 5mm and 15mm. This is a tough thing to do because chest hair is a lot shorter and curlier than hair on the head.

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Even though a lot of restaurants are now pet friendly, there aren’t too many places that actually have a separate menu for dogs. So Filipino chef and dog lover Giannina Gonzalez decided to fix that with her unique Whole Pet Kitchen – a small café that caters to dogs as well as humans.

Located in San Juan city, Whole Pet Kitchen is the first pet bakery and dog café in the Philippines. Gonzalez, 29, said that she wanted a job where she knew what went into her dog’s food, and she also wanted a place where she could share a table with her four-legged pet. She started the place in 2011, and it’s been doing pretty ever since.

“We wanted to reach out to a niche market; that’s why the place is small,” she revealed. “When Whole Pet Kitchen was opened, there were so many dog lovers who checked out the place, and now, the café has its own set of regulars who hang out and spend bonding moments with their pets.” The café has two sets of menus – one for pets and one for humans.

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The city of Chiba, in Japan, is home to a real-life superhero who looks almost exactly like the famous Dark Knight of Gotham city. He even wears Batman’s iconic suit and travels on a custom-made Batpod, but his mission is rather different – to bring happiness to the people of Japan.

‘Chibatman’, as our superhero has come to be known, prefers to keep his identity a secret. But we do know that he’s a 41-year-old local welder who likes to fight crime – or in this case, unhappiness – in his spare time. While his costume is store-bought, he built the three-wheeled ‘Chibatpod’ himself, with imported parts worth around $5,700.

Photographs of the caped crusader have been doing the rounds on Twitter for the past three years now. Everytime the citizens of Chiba catch a glimpse of their very own Chibatman, they immediately post a photograph or video of him on various social networks.

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It’s not easy to apologise, and most people would like to avoid it entirely if possible. Well, it turns out it is possible, if you happen to live in Japan. They have these ‘apology agencies’ through which you could simply pay someone to say sorry on your behalf.

I can see why these businesses are so successful – it’s really tough to face the person you’ve wronged and tell  them that you’re sorry. It’s a highly uncomfortable situation, especially if you’ve made someone angry or hurt their feelings.

By hiring an expert, not only do you get to avoid the discomfort, you also make sure that the person gets a proper apology. These agencies train their employees to handle things based on the gravity of the situation. These people are professionals, and it looks like they can get you out of all sorts of sticky situations.

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When millionaire Klaus Zapf passed away this week, the whole of Germany mourned his death. The eccentric tycoon, who always had millions at his disposal, actually lived a frugal life by choice. What endeared him most to the people of his nation was his generous nature – he gave most of his money away, while he lived on only $500 a month.

“I don’t need any money. It just makes us unequal,” Klaus once said. “There are just so many bloody idiots with money around, you don’t need another one.”

Zapf, 62, had made his fortune in the relocation business – he ran a company called Zapf Umzüge, which he often referred to as ‘West Berlin’s best removals collective’. His distinctive blue and yellow vans were quite well-known in city streets as they picked up and unloaded wares from across the country and the world.

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If you want to stay in shape, but don’t have the time to go to the gym, the Mobile Gym is the solution you’ve been looking for. It’s basically a large bus filled with the latest fitness equipment, hardwood floors and air conditioners. You can find everything you need for a complete workout, and here’s the best part – you don’t need to go to the gym, the gym comes to you!

The idea for the Mobile Gym was thought up by Adam Zickerman, founder of InForm Fitnes, a popular chain of gyms across the United States. When his customers requested a place to workout in the Hamptons, he realized that building a new gym over there wasn’t feasible. But inspiration hit him and he was able to solve the problem when he ordered lunch from a food truck one afternoon.

“I realized I could solve the problem by putting a gym on a truck!” said Zickerman, who is also the author of the New York Times bestseller ‘Power of 10’. “We know that people are busy and that is why we are offering this service.”

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