If you thought your hairstylist was a little rough, you’ve probably never seen Russian hairdresser Daniil Istomin work. He taught himself to cut hair with a sharp hatchet instead of scissors, and while the process is allegedly very effective, it’s also about as brutal as you can imagine.

Like many other hairstylists, Daniil wanted to come up with an idea to set himself apart from the competition. Inspired by old stories about how rugged men once shaved their beards, he started experimenting with a very sharp axe about two years ago, and steadily improved his hair-cutting skills. He worked on mannequins at first, and as he built up his confidence, he started asking women if they’d  let him chop their head hair off. Some of them, the “crazy ones, as Daniil calls them, actually agreed.

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Indonesian media has been abuzz with the unlikely love story of Ilaria, a young waitress from Italy, and Dzufilkar, a young man from a small village in Central Java. The two reportedly met on Facebook two years ago, and Ilaria has been saving money ever since to be able to meet and marry her soulmate. Her dream recently became a reality.

Internet romances are not exactly uncommon in this day and age, but they rarely involve leaving your old comfortable life behind to fly halfway across the world to a small Indonesian village just to be with the person you love, especially since you’ve never actually met them in person before. But that’s exactly what Ilaria did, after saving up her waitress salary for a couple of years.

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For the past couple of days, fashion retailer Nordstrom has been the butt of a lot of jokes on social media, after it was revealed that it is selling a pair of jeans caked in fake mud for a whopping $425.

The Barracuda Straight Leg Jeans are apparently brand new, but make you look like you’ve just finished feeding your pigs, or you just fell in a ditch after a wild night of partying. They look filthy, but that’s apparently the point, as Nordstrom claims the mud “shows you’re not afraid to get down and dirty.”

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A Dutch physical therapist turned inventor has spent 15 years developing a tailor-made pillow that he claims will solve any sleeping problems. At a price of $57,000, it better!

Created by Thijs van der Hilst, who is supposedly some sort of neck specialist, the world’s most expensive pillow is made of Mulberry silk, Egyptian cotton, non-toxic Dutch memory foam and 24-carat gold fabric, while its zipper is  studded  with  four  diamonds and a huge 22.5-carat sapphire. It sounds pretty expensive already, but it takes more than high-quality materials and jewelry to justify such an outrageous price tag for a pillow.

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With cattle breeding at an all time high, manure has become one of the world’s greatest environmental hazards, but one Dutch artist is using chemistry to turn into something that is both eco-friendly and valuable. Her innovative technique turns manure into a variety of useful materials like clothing fabric, bio-degradable plastic and paper.

In recent years, scientists around the world have made great progress in their attempts to recycle cattle manure, including turning it into natural fertilizer and biogas, but Eindhoven designer Jalila Essaïdi didn’t think they were efficient enough to solve the global manure surplus problem. So she started on her very own solution, one that approached animal waste as a valuable material that could be processed into useful products. The results of her work prove that manure really is worth its weight in gold.

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82-year-old Sumiko Iwamuro runs a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo, where she spends her days making “gyoza” dumplings, but when the sun sets, she turns into DJ Sumirock, an energetic party-starter dropping beats in popular nightclubs around the Japanese capital.

Sumiko discovered her passion for techno music 12 years ago, while choosing the music at her son’s birthday party, and apparently found it fascinating enough to dedicate a whole year of her life to learning the tricks of DJ-ing at a school for disc jockeys. She then started making her own tracks, most of which consist of techno beats mixed with jazz, French chanson and classical music. These combination proved a hit with Japanese nightclub-goers and 82-year-old DJ Sumirock is one of the most popular disc jockeys in Tokyo.

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Imagine a sport much like equestrian show jumping, but where the horse is replaced by a wooden stick with a plush toy at one and the rider actually does all the jumping over increasingly difficult hurdles. That’s the popular sport of Competitive Hobbyhorsing in a nutshell.

The hobby horse is one of the oldest children’s toys still used today. Many of us remember prancing around in the yard on a stick imagining that it was a noble steed, but for the tens of thousands of members of the hobbyhorsing community in Finland, riding a toy horse is more than just a game. Many of them train for hours and hours on a daily basis and regularly take part in large-scale show jumping competitions where they try to impress judges with their posture, footwork and jumping.

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A 20-year-old man from Russia’s Sakhalin Oblast region recently made national headlines after being declared the winner of a women’s lingerie photo contest organized by a popular store chain.

Andrey Nagorny, a resident of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, heard of the online photo contest through his girlfriend. Aware of his feminine features, they decided to take a few photos of Andrey wearing some sexy women’s lingerie and enter them into the contest, just for fun. Andrey’s girlfriend, whose name has not been made public, fixed his hair and did his makeup before asking a talented photographer to snap some rather professional-looking photos of him and submitting them to the contest organizer online. They expected to get a good laugh out of the whole thing, but what they didn’t expect was for Andrey to be declared the winner.

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Heavy metal music and yoga may seem incompatible, but one New York yoga instructor with a passion for metal has mixed them together in a series of classes that help people relax and unleash their inner beast at the same time.

Headbanging, death growls or “devil horns” hand gestures, all executed to a background of loud metal music, aren’t exactly elements associated with yoga, but it’s exactly what you can expect while attending a Metal Yoga Bones class run by Saskia Thode. It’s not the most Zen experience in the world, that’s for sure, but the Brooklyn-based yoga instructor claims that her classes are just as liberating, if not more so, than regular yoga.

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Authorities in the Chinese city of Wuhan have recently equipped busy intersections with automatic pedestrian gates that only open when the traffic light turns green. The measure is aimed at preventing jaywalking, which has become a serious problem in many urban centers across China.

Chinese officials have been cracking down on jaywalkers for years. Jaywalking in the Asian country, often referred to as “Chinese-style street crossing”, often involves pedestrians completely ignoring traffic signals and crossing busy streets and roads, usually in large groups. This contributes heavily to traffic jams and bottlenecks in busy Chinese cities, and fines haven’t proven as effective a deterrent as authorities had hoped.

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Ever since he decorated his prized Jaguar S-Type with 4,600 colorful toy cars from his Hot Wheels collection, a Malaysian businessman has been turning heads in and around Kuala Lumpur.

Reports of an unusual-looking Jaguar S-Type limousine covered in thousands of miniature cars driving around the Malaysian capital had been circulating on social media for a few weeks, but no one knew anything about it, who the owner was or if it was just some sort of marketing stunt. Luckily, the Harian Metro managed to track down the owner and get to the bottom of this mystery.

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Driven by a desire to improve the living conditions in his home, Huang Dafa, chief of Caowangba, a small village hidden deep in the mountains of Guizhou Province, China, spent 36 years digging a 10-kilometer-long water canal through three mountains.

The Chinese legend of Yu Gong speaks of an old man whose house was separated from the nearest village by two mountains. So he started digging away at them to make a direct route to the village. People mocked him for what they called a futile effort,  but he responded that while his descendants could dig for generations, the mountains couldn’t grow any higher. Moved by his determination, the gods moved the mountains, clearing the way for Yu Gong. Today, the saying “yu gong yi shan” – “the old man that could move mountains” – is used to describe ambition in the face on insurmountable odds.

But while the mythical Yu Gong was helped by divine intervention, Huang Dafa, village chief of Caowangba, in the mountains of Guizhou, could only rely on his will and the power of persuasion to build a long water channel through three karst mountains. His ambitious project began in 1959 and required 36 years of hard labor to complete. Today, his village is thriving thanks to constant running water, and he is celebrated as a real-life version of Yu Gong.

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Dilini Jayasuriya, a 30-year-old woman from Austin, Texas, recently won a brand new 2017 KIA Optima LX after kissing it continuously for 50 hours in a “Kiss a KIA” contest.

Sponsored by iHeart radio station 96.7 KISS FM, the Kiss a KIA contest started on Monday morning, with 20 people gluing their lips on the new car for the chance to win it. The rules were pretty straightforward: the last person to be smooching the sedan after 50 hours would be declared the winner. If multiple contestants reached the 50-hour mark, the winner’s name would be drawn in a raffle. Participants had a 10 -minute break every hour, so they could visit the bathroom, have a drink of water and stretch, but other than that, their lips had to be touching the car or they would be disqualified.

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Coffee is more popular today than ever before, but many people abstain from consuming to much of it because it can really take a toll on their pearly whites. Well, thanks to the world’s first colorless coffee, you don’t have to worry about stained teeth anymore.

After getting tired of looking for a coffee drink that had the natural flavor they loved so much but didn’t stain their teeth, David and Adam Nagy, two Slovakian brothers who like strong coffee and their teeth white, decided to create it themselves. Called CLR CFF, their innovative drink is exactly what it sounds like – clear coffee, without the vowels.

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To make its newest romance video game stand out from the competition, a Japanese company is giving users the chance to marry their virtual girlfriends in a real life wedding ceremony, with the help of VR technology.

At first glance, Niitzuma LovelyxCation is a romance and dating simulator like many others in Japan. It lets players court one of three anime protagonists – Yuki Isurugi (long black hair), Aiko Kurihara (short brown hair), or Nono Naruse (blond hair) – and eventually get married to them, but in order to make the illusion of a virtual marriage more believable, it plans to organize a real-life wedding for the “grooms” in an actual chapel, where they can exchange vows with their cartoony betrothed.

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