This Amazing Seattle Preschool Also Doubles as an Elderly Nursing Home

A facility in Seattle has come up with an innovative way of caterung to both the very young and the old.  They’ve paired up a preschool with an elderly nursing home, so that the children and the 400-odd residents at the home have an amazing time with each other.

The preschool, called the Intergenerational Learning Center, is located within Providence Mount St. Vincent senior care center in West Seattle. For five days a week, the kids interact with the residents in fun activities like dancing, art, music, lunch, storytelling, or sometimes just visiting.

According to Evan Briggs, a filmmaker and adjunct professor at Seattle University, who is planning to make a film about the unique center, the elders undergo a “complete transformation in the presence of the children.” She noticed that just moments before the kids came in, some of them seemed half alive. “It was a depressing scene. As soon as the kids walked in for art or music or making sandwiches for the homeless or whatever the project that day was, the residents came alive.”

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Guy Has His Ears Cut Off to Better Resemble His Pet Parrots

British man Ted Richards is so in love with his pet parrots that he wants to look just like them. So he actually went through a six-hour operation to have his ears removed. And now he’s planning to turn his nose into a beak, as well!

The 56-year-old retired shoe factory worker from Hartcliffe, Bristol, is passionate about extreme body art. He sports 110 tattoos, 50 piercings, a hot iron branded peace sign on his shoulder, and even has a split tongue. The tattoos on his face are like birds’ feathers, and he’s got two magnetic horn implants on his forehead. His eyeballs are tattooed too, and with the ears removed, he feels he’s getting closer and closer to resembling his parrots – Ellie, Teaka, Timneh, Jake, and Bubi.

“I think it looks really great,” he said. “I love it. It’s the best thing that has happened to me. I’m so happy, it’s unreal, I can’t stop looking in the mirror.” To keep his glasses in place, he has had small metal pins added to the side of his head. Read More »

ALS Sufferer “Writes” 150,000 -Word Autobiography by Blinking Billions of Times

Meet Gong Xunhui, a 62-year-old Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patient who recently wrote a detailed autobiography using only her eyes!

Gong Xunhui has been suffering from ALS for the past 12 years. She’s been confined to a wheelchair since 2006, but despite her almost complete paralysis, she has actually managed to write a 150,000-word book on her life – something that even able bodied people might struggle with. And she did it with the only part of her body she still has full control over, her eyes. 

It all started about three years ago, when Xunhui’s family bought her an eye-tracking assistive device that she could use to communicate and also control a computer. After it was installed, the first line she typed was: “I am very happy today, and after I get better at typing with my eyes, I will probably write an autobiography.”

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17th Door – A Scary Haunted House Where Monsters Get “Free Reign” and You Need to Sign a Waiver to Enter

With Halloween just around the corner, scary houses around the world are churning up new ways to spook the bejesus out of people. The latest is ‘17th Door’ in Tustin, California, guaranteed to give you one of the ‘scariest’ experience in the world. So much so that you actually have to sign a waiver before entering.

The house is a fictional medical college called Gluttire with 17 rooms, each more terrifying than the last. They’re meant to provide you a glimpse into the demented mind of a first-year student named Paula. She is tormented by her past, and she also grapples with drugs, anorexia, and suicidal tendencies.

Visitors are locked in each room for about 90 seconds, with only grotesque monsters for company. The monsters are free to touch and even lick them. All five senses are engaged, with foul scents, extreme temperatures, detailed visuals, startling sounds, and even a few taste tests. When the bell rings, it’s time to move on to the next, scarier room. And there’s only one way to end the experience: Yell ‘Mercy’! Read More »

Living in the Past – English Couple Fashion Their Lifestyle after the 1940’s

Kitten Von Mew, a burlesque dancer from Warwickshire, England, is so in love with the 1940’s era that she has modeled her entire life around it. Along with her husband Richard, she’s spent thousands of pounds redecorating their home with authentic furniture and decor from the ’30s and ’40s. Her wardrobe is filled with hundreds of vintage outfits, retro shoes, vintage gloves, hats, and other accessories.

Born Michelle, Kitten legally changed her name and dedicated her life to the ’40s about 15 years ago. Since then, she’s spent several hours each morning doing her hair in perfect victory rolls and carefully dressing herself in retro outfits. She inherited authentic furniture from her grandparents and combed through many flea markets to find even more 1940’s style decorations. “I love everything about the 1940s – the fashion, the music, the décor – I find it totally captivating,” she said.

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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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Meet Baddie Winkle, the Internet’s Coolest-Dressing Octogenarian

Lots of people believe in dressing for their age, but Tennessee-based Helen Van Winkle does not subscribe to such hogwash. The 87-year-old sports outrageously loud outfits with peculiar prints and posts photographs of herself on her Instagram account – ‘Baddie Winkle’. With over 1.5 million Instagram followers, she has become the internet’s most popular grandma. Her account is followed by celebs like Miley Cyrus, Nicole Richie, Beyoncé, Drake, and Rihanna. She was even photographed with Cyrus at the MTV Video Music Awards a few weeks ago.

“I don’t feel old,” she told online magazine Refinery29. “I have never felt old. I think you can dress any way you want to.” At age 87, it looks like she’s got more spunk in her than most kids one quarter her age!

But believe it or not, the spirited Winkle was a mess a few years ago, after the deaths of her husband and her son. “You don’t know what’s going to happen to you,” she said of her loss. “I blamed God forever. I cried all the time because I couldn’t come to terms with it.”

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Dutch Farm Becomes World’s First to Sell Cheese Made from Pig Milk

Pig’s meat is undoubtedly delicious, but I’m not so sure you could say the same about its milk. Nevertheless, a family-run farm in the Netherlands has produced the world’s first cheese made from pig milk. They’re selling it at a whopping £1,500 ($2,300) per kilogram – more expensive than the former world’s costliest cheese, made from Balkan donkey milk!

Erik Stenink, free-range pig farmer and owner of ‘Piggy’s Palace’ is the brains behind pig milk cheese. He decided to do it because mainly because he was curious to see if it would work, given that pig’s milk is richer in protein than cow’s milk. But milking pigs is quite a labor intensive process, so he only managed to produce half a kilo of the “chalky” cheese. A bit of it was sold to an anonymous buyer last week, and the proceeds were donated to a children’s cancer charity.

“It’s a product which has never been made before and a lot of people are very interested in it,” Erik said. “We’ve only just recently tried to milk the sows. We’re very happy with it all and although for us it’s a one-time thing, if someone wants to give us £1,500 we’ll make a kilo, but it’s too intensive to make without an order.”

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College Graduate Tries to Sell Diploma for $50,000 After Failing to Find a Job

Although she graduated from Florida State University four years ago, theater major Stephanie Ritter has yet to find a decent job in her field. Fed up of the situation, she’s actually put up her diploma for sale on eBay for $50,000 – $10,000 more than her student loan debt. She says that the drastic solution is the only way for her to validate her “use of time between 2007 – 2011.”

“I thought this piece of paper has so much worth to so many people, but for a theater major, it couldn’t mean less,” she said. “I’m doing the exact same things and probably getting paid the exact same amount as people that dropped out halfway through freshman year, except I’m still $40,000 in debt and they’re, well, not.”

So for $50,000 – or the best offer she can get – Stephanie is offering her original diploma in mint condition, which has “never been used to get a job before.” The price also covers her college experience in a nutshell. The buyer will be treated to a tour of the university, “including everywhere you would have gone/eaten/partied in your four years at FSU.” She’s adding access to all of her college memories and Facebook albums for six months, a show at the FSU School of Theatre, and a tour of all her favorite Publixes including sweet tea at each location.

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College Professor to Spend a Year Living as Pop Icon David Bowie

In a bid to gain insights into the life of pop-icon David Bowie, a London-based professor is spending a year living like the British star.

Will Brooker, who teaches film and cultural studies at Kingston University, came up with the idea for the unusual project in order to experience specific moments of Bowie’s super-successful career. He will be adopting the same eating habits, reading the same books, and visiting the same places as Bowie did.

“The idea is to inhabit Bowie’s headspace in points of his life and career to understand his work from an original angle, while retaining a critical and objective perspective at the same time,” the professor explained. “A kind of split persona, perhaps. No one could be Bowie again, and I’m thinking that no one would want to go through everything he went through, not really. But I want to get some taste of it.”

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Barber Gives Free Haircuts to Kids Who Read to Him

Courtney Homes, a barber at Dubuque’s Spark Family Hair Salon, recently came up with unique way of charging children for haircuts – he asked for stories instead of money! He’s passionate about supporting kids reading, so he had his little clients read out loud to him as he worked on their hair.

“The kids would come in, and I would say, “Go to the table and get a book you might like, and if you can’t read it, I’ll help you understand and we can read it together,” Holmes told reporters. “To be honest, I was amazed, the line started with four kids, and next thing I knew it was like 20 kids, all waiting for a haircut and eager to read.”

Homes conducted the unique initiative during the second annual Back to School Bash at the city’s Comiskey Park. Lots of kids showed up to get free haircuts and read to Homes in return.

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New York Lawyer Charged with Fraud Demands Trial by Combat

In a real-life story that seems taken out of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, a New York lawyer accused of fraud is actually asking for a trial by combat to settle a legal dispute.

Richard Luthmann says his bizarre request may sound ludicrous to most people, but it certainly isn’t against the law. He pointed out that the right to Trial by Combat was technically never outlawed in the state of New York, or anywhere else in America. “The common law of Britain was in effect in New York in 1776,” he told reporters “And the Ninth Amendment of the Constitution recognises the penumbra of those rights. It’s still on the books.” Historically, trial by combat was indeed a little-used but accepted aspect of English common law.

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Chinese Millionaire Gives Up Fortune, Lives in Isolation for Two Years to Become Buddhist Monk

We thought Indian millionaire Bhanwarlal Raghunath – who gave up his fortune to become a monk – was one of a kind, but we were wrong. Meet Liu Jingchong, a rich Chinese businessman who has also renounced his wealth for monkhood.

Jingchong, 39, was bitten by the spiritual bug in 2012, after a freak car accident. “It is true that I earned a lot of money and I can’t say I hated my life,” he told the media. “I would say that I even loved it, but all that changed when friends of mine and I had a car accident in a remote part of the country in northwestern China’s Qinghai province.”

“We needed to get a new car and not all of us were fit to travel immediately,” Jingchong recalled. “But as I was relatively okay, I stayed in a hotel where about the only thing to do was read a book on Buddhism. I have to say it changed my life.”

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Obsessed Cristiano Ronaldo Fan Spends Thousands to Look Like His Idol

Star footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has millions of fans all around the world, but none as dedicated as 17-year-old Shanta. The Danish teenager has spent thousands of dollars in a bid to emulate his idol.

For starters, Shanta goes by the last name ‘Ronaldo’. He copies the ex-Manchester United player’s fashion sense, wearing clothes as similar to Ronaldo’s as possible, buying all his football shirts and getting the same haircuts. He has also made five trips to Madrid this year alone, just to meet Real Madrid’s star.

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This Ghost Pepper Ice-Cream Is So Hot You Need a Waiver to Eat It

Savory ice creams have been around for some time now, but none quite as hot as the Ghost Pepper Ice Cream. This bad boy is so spicy that you actually have to sign a legal waiver before attempting to eat it.

The frozen treat is available at The Ice Cream Store in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. It’s basically a vanilla ice cream with strawberry sauce streaks, but it’s also infused with some of the world’s hottest chillies and capsicum sauces. These chillies are so hot that villagers in India actually smear sauce made from them on fence posts to keep elephants away!

According to Delaware Online, the first mouthful tastes of a “deep, rich, creamy vanilla with a hint of sweetness,” but that’s quickly followed by “a Mike Tyson worthy wallop of mouth-searing heat.” The paper warns people to “be prepared for a loitering burn that outstays its welcome.”

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