The Tokay Stakes 2023 horse race at the Chukyo Racecourse in Nagoya, Japan was technically won by a racehorse that ran the entire race without a jockey.

While it’s true that a jockey can’t really help a slow horse win a race, their role in professional horse racing is undeniable. The jockey plays many roles during a race. They control the pace of the animal, either pushing it from the beginning in a race where setting the pace for the rest of the pack is important or conserving its energy for a final push. They are also responsible for how fast the horse comes out of the gates at the start and tactical movement during the race. At least that’s what most horseracing enthusiasts will tell you, but one animal recently proved that they are just dead weight…

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A Bangladeshi boy can consider himself lucky to be alive after hiding in a shipping container while playing hide and seek and getting locked inside for six days.

On January 17, while unloading containers off of a Bangladeshi vessel, staff at Malaysia’s Port Klang were shocked to see a confused and emaciated boy step out of one of the containers. He didn’t speak the local tongue so the port authorities couldn’t get any information out of him, but they suspected that he was the victim of a human trafficking crime organization, so they immediately called the police. It turned out, that the young boy had been playing hide and seek with friends in his home city of Chittagong, Bangladesh and chose a shipping container as a hiding spot. He got locked inside and spent the next six days on a ship to Malaysia.

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Several kids in Indonesia have reportedly suffered stomach burns after consuming a popular liquid nitrogen-containing street snack called ‘chiki ngebul’.

Commonly known as ‘dragon’s breath’ in Indonesia, chiki ngebul is an assortment of rainbow-colored candies coated in a cloud of liquid nitrogen mist that causes the person eating them to exhale that mist, like a dragon. However, health experts warn that if the snack is consumed before the liquid nitrogen has evaporated, it poses a very real risk of intestinal burns and perforations. So far, over 20 kids have been diagnosed with stomach burns after allegedly filming themselves eating chiki ngebul as part of a dangerous TikTok trend.

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A Chinese woman accused her ex-husband of getting her addicted to hormone-based drugs that have ruined her life, after wrongly suspecting that she had cheated on him.

Liu Chang, a doctor from the Chinese province of Shandong, first accused her ex-husband, who is also a physician, of slowly poisoning her in 2019. At the time, Liu posted on social media that her spouse, Gao Zhisen, had been secretly administering her hormone-based drugs since 2016, and that they had caused her physical disability and severe second-degree injury. The couple divorced in 2017, and Liu has been fighting to bring her ex-husband to justice ever since. Despite efforts to have Gao answer for his alleged crime, Liu only managed to get a court date earlier this month, four years after her first revelations.

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Bolivia’s state airline has become the target of ridicule after hiring an “interspecies communicator” to track down a passenger’s missing pet cat.

The disappearance of Tito the cat has been a matter of state business in Bolivia for about a month, ever since the feline was lost by staff of Bolivia’s state-owned airline. Tito’s owner, a woman working in Ireland, was taking the feline from Tarija to Santa Cruz to have it certified as a therapy animal, but was told that the cat had to go into the cargo hold. When the plane landed, she was shocked to see Tito’s cage empty. Airline staff admitted to losing Tito prior to takeoff and the cat’s disappearance became the number one news story in Bolivia. Recently, the Ministry of Justice even hired a self-proclaimed interspecies communicator in hopes of finding the cat.

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A 41-year-old man has reportedly been making a killing selling women’s high heel shoes and boots by modeling them himself.

The unnamed man who reportedly hails from China’s Sichuan province recently made news headlines after it was revealed that he had been using a very unusual technique to boost up his online sales. Live stream commerce is big business in China, but the competition is so stiff that entrepreneurs constantly have to come up with gimmicks to set themselves apart and gain potential customers. In this particular case, the guy films himself walking and even running in the high-heel women’s footwear he sells, and people seem to love it.

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Online commerce businesses in China are reportedly using male models to showcase women’s lingerie in order to exploit a legal loophole.

Live stream commerce is very big in China. From makeup and apparel to food products and tools, businesses rely on this model to significantly boost their sales. However, a couple of years ago, the Chinese authorities started cracking down on the live stream industry in general, imposing a series of rules and guidelines that make it possible for Big Brother to immediately and permanently ban channels that break them. For example, mukbang, the South Korean earing show genre was banned for promoting food waste. Similarly, women wearing lingerie on stream risk being charged with “spreading obscene information”…

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A Taiwanese student recently made news headlines for a clever art project involving a racy billboard that wasn’t exactly what it looked like.

Facebook has a very strict policy when it comes to nudity, but this policy is often poorly enforced. For example, photos showing female nipples are considered nudity and are almost instantly removed by the Facebook algorithm. However, the tool is far from perfect, and it has a tough time distinguishing between male and female nipples, especially in the case of androgynous men. This was the case with Wu, a slender, long-haired art student from Shezi, village, in Tainan, who recently had an artistic picture removed from Facebook for indecent exposure. The experience gave him an idea…

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A Tennessee romance book writer whose own daughter announced her tragic death to friends and fans two years ago recently announced that she is coming back to writing, and everyone is really confused.

In September 2020, friends and colleagues of Susan Meachen, a self-published romance fiction writer, were shocked to hear that she had taken her own life due to online bullying. Someone claiming to be her daughter announced the devastating news on Facebook, and tributes from fans and authors who had known and worked with her started pouring in. For the next couple of years, Meachen’s Facebook profile was seemingly used by her family to post tributes to the author and inspirational stuff, as well as to promote her books. Some claim to have bought her work as a way to support her grieving family. But a couple of days ago, something weird happened – someone claiming to be Susan Meachen took to Facebook to announce that she wasn’t really dead, and that she was coming back to writing…

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Chaco Chaco is a popular South Korean Youtuber whose claim to fame is the ability to reproduce popular songs on one or multiple musical calculators.

Calculators are handy when dealing with math, but one particular calculator is actually more popular as a musical instrument. The Egoelife AR-7778 and AR-8001 are designed as instruments and even come with instructions on how to use them as such. But, just like with any other musical instrument, you need talent and practice to produce music worth listening to, otherwise, you’re just using it as a cool toy. That’s what sets Chaco Chaco, a musical calculator artist with over 800,000 subscribers on YouTube alone, apart from pretty much any other musical calculator user.

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A Chinese man who recently bought 20 robot vacuums online for an unbelievable bargain price documented his experience to the delight of the internet.

The average price of a decent robot vacuum in China is around 1,000 yuan ($145), with more advanced models costing several times that much. So imagine finding a robot vacuum for just 27 yuan ($4) online! Can you blame this guy who bought 20 of them at once, just to make sure that their number compensates for performance only to learn the hard way that that’s not how these things work? As you can imagine, there was a reason those things cost next to nothing, but at least he got a good laugh and a lot of online attention out of it.

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For about a year now, authorities in Salt Lake City have been trying to solve the mystery of a series of solar-powered antennas that keep popping up in the foothills around the city.

The first devices were discovered around a year ago. There was just a couple of them, but since then about a dozen have been reportedly located and disabled. According to the city’s recreational trails manager, the devices consist of a locked battery box, a solar panel, and an antenna. No one knows who keeps planting them and for what purpose, so for now all anyone can do is speculate and attempt to dismantle them, because they are installed on public land without a permit.

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Gregorio Romero, an 84-year-old man from Mexico’s Sonora state, owes his life to his pet dog, El Palomo, who led rescuers to him after becoming lost in the desert for a week.

On November 27, Gregorio Romero left his home in Moctezuma to go for a walk, but he didn’t come back. His family wasn’t concerned at first, as the octogenarian sometimes used to visit nearby villages in the area and return a few days later. However, after four days, the man’s niece, Ramona, alerted the authorities about his disappearance, and a search party was put together. They searched the area around Romero’s home, but a week after his disappearance, the octogenarian was nowhere to be found. In the end, it was the man’s faithful pet dog that saved the day.

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Mzee Musa Hasahya, a 67-year-old Ugandan farmer, is one of the most prolific polygamists in history, with 12 wives, 102 children, and a whopping 568 grandchildren to his name.

Even by the standards of his home village of Lusaka, where polygamy is legal, Mzee Musa Hasahya’s family is considered gigantic. Despite growing up in abject poverty, he managed to rise above his condition, accumulating enough wealth and prestige to be appointed village chairperson for several decades and to ensure that whenever he approached a family about marrying their daughter, they always agreed. Hasahya married his first wife in 1971, at age 16, and then kept taking new wives until he reached 12. Because his father only produced two children, which threatened to render his clan extinct, the Ugandan farmer took it upon himself to ensure that his bloodline endured, producing over 100 children.

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An Indonesian woman allegedly posed as a corpse and then had her son upload the photos to Facebook in order to get out of having to pay a $268 debt.

People trying to get out of having to pay their debts is nothing new, but some people go to extreme lengths to accomplish this. Take, for example, this Indonesian woman who framed her own death on social media in order to not have to pay back her IDR4.2 million ($268) debts. According to her creditor, Liza Dewi Pramita had already asked for an extension on the loan because she couldn’t pay her money back, but when the second deadline was about to expire, the woman’s son announced her tragic death on Facebook, along with photos of the woman’s dead body, complete with bits of cotton in her nostrils. Only things weren’t what they seemed…

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