Capsule Machine In Japan Dispenses Faces of Strangers

An unusual capsule machine in Shinjuku, Tokyo has been getting a lot of attention on social media for dispensing ID photos of total strangers for 300 yen ($2.30).

Gachapon capsule toys are really popular in Japan, so popular that you can find them virtually everywhere, dispensing all kinds of collectibles, from small action figures and dolls to souvenirs. The concept has become so popular that it has been incorporated in the majority of mobile phone games, where users have to pay real money for the chance of receiving a missing character or skin. Capsule machines have been around in Japan for decades, but back in March, one particular such machine in Tokyo went viral on social media for dispensing something very unusual – ID photos of total strangers.

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Ecuadorian Football Star Arrested Under Suspicion of Gang Activity

Gabriel Cortez, a star midfielder for Ecuador’s Barcelona SC football club and the top scorer of the country’s Serie A this season, was recently arrested for allegedly being a member of a dangerous gang involved in drug trafficking and murder.

On Friday, April 22, Ecuadorian police raided 29 properties and arrested 18 suspects as part of a complex crime-busting operation code-named Gran Impacto 10. Of the suspects, three were reportedly active police officers, and one was one of Ecuador’s top football players, 26-year-old Gabriel Cortez, the country’s top goal-scorer so far this season with seven goals in nine games. Police descended on his home via helicopter and arrested him on suspicion of being a member of Los Tiguerones, a gang that specializes in a variety of criminal activities, including drug trafficking and murder.

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Thrifty Woman Spends Just $7 per Month on Food, Saves Up $80,000 in 4 Years

A 24-year-old woman became the talk of South Korean social media this month after it was revealed that she managed to save up 100 million won ($79,400) in 4 years by being extremely thrifty.

Ji-hyeon Kwak started working when she was 19-year-old and quickly realized that she needed to save money if she was ever going to get her own place to live. Despite earning an average of 2 million won per month (after tax), the young woman managed to put enough aside every month to save over 100 million won in the last four years. That was enough for her to win an apartment subscription, which means she will soon get her own place to live. But, as you can imagine, saving that much money on such a small salary wasn’t easy. She had to take her thriftiness to an extreme level, which included spending just 8,400 won ($6.7) on food per month.

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IT Amulet Promises to Keep Computers Virus-Free and Working Smoothly

Japanese Shinto shrine sells low-tech IT amulets that promise to keep computers from freezing and restarting randomly, as well as free from viruses and malware.

Kanda Myojin, a popular Shinto shrine in Akihabara, Tokyo sells a variety of amulets and prayers, but none as intriguing as the “computer function amulet”. Consisting of a small, CPU-shaped sticker meant to be stuck onto the gadget in need of divine protection and a larger piece of cardboard meant to be worn by the computer operator, the amulet is one of the most popular items offered by Kanda Myojinm. If used correctly, the amulet will allegedly protect your machine from viruses, malware and random errors, as well as keep it from freezing up.

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YouTuber Accused of Crashing His Small Propeller Plane for Views

A popular YouTuber recently had his pilot license revoked after being found guilty of intentionally crashing his plane and filming his parachute escape for views.

Last November, Trevor Jacob, a former Olympic snowboarder turned youtuber, crashed his small propeller airplane into the mountains of California’s Los Padres National Forest. The exact moment when his plane’s propeller stopped working was caught on camera, as was his jump out of the airplane and subsequent deployment of a life-saving parachute. Three weeks later, he published a YouTube video titled “I Crashed My Plane”, which quickly went viral and ended up getting over 2 million views. Now, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is accusing Jacob of purposely crashing his aircraft for the sake of YouTube views.

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World’s Most Loyal Employee Has Been Working for the Same Company for 84 Years

Walter Orthmann, a 100-year-old man from Brazil has been working for the same company since 1938, which officially makes his career worthy of the Guinness Book of Records.

Orthman began working for Industrias Renaux S.A., a textile company in Brusque, on January 17, 1938, when he was only 15-years-old. He began as an assistant in the shipping department, but over the years, he was promoted to administrative assistant and, eventually, sales manager. During his 84-year-long career, Walter went on sales trips all over the world, received his paycheck in nine different currency denominations, and used nearly every commercial airline in the history of Brazilian aviation.

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New Contact Sport Promises the Most Exciting Part of Hockey Minus the Hockey

If you’re of the opinion that fights are the most exciting part of ice hockey, you’re probably going to love Ice Wars, a new combat sports league that pits ice hockey enforcers against each other.

Take away the sticks, the puck and the nets, and you’re left with hockey players with nothing better to do than beat each other to a pulp for the entertainment of paying spectators. That’s essentially the idea behind Ice Wars, a soon-to-debut combat sports league featuring ice hockey enforcers fighting for money. A match will consist of two, one-minute rounds with a 30-second “ice breaker” round in the event that the fighters each win one round.

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Identical Triplets Dating the Same Man Spark Controversy in Kenya

Three Kenyan sisters who happen to be identical triplets are reportedly dating and planning to marry the same man, one Bigman Stevo, who claims that having three partners is no big deal.

Cate, Eve and Mary, three sisters known as “Comrades Triplets” in Kenya, have been making news headlines in their native country over the last couple of weeks, ever since it was first revealed that they are all dating the same man. Cate was the first to notice Stevo, and she later told her two sisters about him. They approached him and asked if he would be willing to date all three of them, and they’ve been together for a couple of weeks now. It was the Comrades Triplets who devised a dating schedule to keep everyone happy, and Stevo has so far been happy to oblige.

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Man Inhales Drill Bit During Dental Procedure

As if we needed another reason to be scared about going to a dentist, it seems those terrifying drill bits can do more than bore through teeth, they can get lodged in your lungs.

Imagine going to a dentist for a routine procedure like getting a tooth filled, and then hearing that you might have to have part of your lung removed because of a dental drill bit. That’s exactly what happened to Tom Jozsi, a 60-year-old man from Illinois, this month. He was at the dentist getting a tooth filled, and the next thing he knows he is being told that he swallowed a drill bit. That would have been bad enough, considering that the sharp metal part could have pierced his intestines, but a CT scan later showed that he hadn’t swallowed the drill bit, he had inhaled it, and it was now lodged in his lung.

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Airport Receives Over 12,000 Noise Complaints in a Year From a Single Person

An anonymous person is responsible for over 90 percent of the noise complaints received by Dublin International Airport last year, a whopping 12,272, or an average of 34 complaints per day.

2021 wasn’t the best year on record for airports, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and Dublin Airport is no exception, but that didn’t stop one unidentified individual from lodging noise complaints regarding the flights that did land or take off from the airport. In fact, this person managed to double the number of noise complaints they made in 2020, a respectable 6,227 of them, even though plane traffic was only up around 10 percent from the previous year, because of pandemic restrictions.

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Boss Asks Employees to Send Him Screenshot of Phone Battery Usage Before Leaving Work

The boss of a small company in Wuhan, China, recently sparked controversy online after it became known that he asks employees to send him screenshots of their phone battery usage before leaving work.

Convinced that the poor performance of his company in recent months was somehow related to how much time employees spend on their smartphones instead of working, a company boss in Wuhan decided to address the issue by checking their phone use daily. According to one employee who took to social media to expose the controversial productivity-enhancing method, he and his colleagues are required to go into their phone settings and take screenshots of the battery usage graph for the day and send it to their boss.

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World’s Tallest Family Has an Average Height of Over Two Meters

The Trapp family in Esko, Minnesota is officially the tallest family in the world with an average height of 203.29 cm (6 ft 8.03 in).

Krissy Trapp loves saying that she is the shortest person in the world’s tallest family. At 191.2 cm (6 ft 3 in), she definitely qualifies as very tall, especially for a woman, but she is indeed the shortest of her immediate family. Her husband, Scott, is a towering 202.7 cm (6 ft 8 in), while her two daughters, Savanna and Molly, measure 203.6 cm (6 ft 8 in) and 197.26 cm (6 ft 6 in), respectively. The youngest member of the Trapp family, Adam Trapp, is also the tallest at 221.71 cm (7 ft 3 in). Together, they have a combined height equal to the length of half a tennis court!

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Smart Chopsticks Use Electrical Stimulation to Enhance Food Flavors

Japanese beverage maker Kirin Holdings teamed up with researchers at Meiji University in Tokyo to create smart chopsticks that reportedly make food taste more savory.

Meiji University professor Homei Miyashita has been researching electrical stimulation as a way to alter the way people experience food and flavor for years. In 2016, along with fellow researcher Hiromi Nakamura, he made international news headlines for developing a revolutionary electric fork that could make any food taste saltier than it actually was. And last year, he got even more attention for his Taste the TV (TTTV) project, a lickable TV screen that could imitate the taste of various foods. Now, he’s once again the talk of the interwebs thanks to his latest invention, a pair of smart chopsticks that can allegedly make food more savory.

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Kentucky Man Fired for Reacting Poorly to His Own Surprise Birthday Party

A Kentucky man won $450,000 in a lawsuit against his former employer who allegedly fired him for having a panic attack and leaving his own surprise birthday party.

Kevin Berling suffers from an anxiety disorder that causes him to suffer panic attacks whenever he is the center of attention in a large group of people. It was for this specific reason that he asked his bosses at Gravity Diagnostics in Covington, a Kentucky medical lab, not to throw him a surprise birthday party, in 2019. However, a manager at the company claims he forgot about Berling’s request, so they threw a birthday party for him anyway. That caused Kevin to have a panic attack and storm out of his own celebration, which later caused him to lose his job.

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‘Tarzan of Karachi’ Has Been Living in Makeshift Treehouse for 8 Years

A 28-year-old man from Pakistan has become known as the Tarzan of Karachi after spending the last eight years of his life living in a makeshift treehouse in the city.

Farman Ali became somewhat of an overnight social media sensation after footage of his unusual home went viral on social media a few weeks ago. People were fascinated by the young man who managed to live in a modest treehouse for over eight years, but as he keeps telling everyone who asks, he didn’t do it by choice. After losing both his parents, Ali was simply too poor to afford any kind of conventional housing, and after living on the streets for a while, he decided to build his own home in the only place where no one would bother him or drive him away – in a tree on public property.

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