Surely the strangest Easter custom takes places in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, where there is a tradition of spanking or whipping women on Easter Monday. Males throw water at females and spank them with handmade whips made of willow and decorated with ribbons at the end. The spanking is supposed to be symbolic and according to legend, females should be spanked in order to keep their health and beauty during the next year.
Though seemingly chaotic and unnecessary to those of us in the "West", the truth might be that these "mobs" actually work. Their structure-- or lack of it-- rewards those who want the ticket or item the most, and only displeases those who weren't industrious (or ruthless) enough to work their way up to the front. This is a form of price discrimination in which those who were willing to "pay" the most, in this case with time and effort, are rewarded, while those who weren't, aren't.
More than 125 varieties of ice cream have been available in the two week festival, including cheese, octopus, prawn and a garlic variety called Dracula Premium Ice.
Women own property and determine family relationships. But this so-called free-love society is under threat from modernization.
Short National Geographic video shows a guy who is permitted to see his son.
The Aztecs did not believe your fate was based on whether or not you lived a moral life. Instead, they believed that whichever of the three afterlives you got depended largely on your role in society and the manner of your death. So you could be a total shit who spent their adult life breaking into blind people's houses to move their furniture around, and depending on how you died, you could still find yourself sitting by the side of some god in the late afternoon sun, eating cheese and drinking wine with your feet in the pool.To end up in the hellish realm of Mictlan, you had to die either from old age or from a disease (with a couple of exceptions). So, if your syphilitic Grandpa kicked the bucket, he'd be cremated along with a dog, which would serve as his guide along the dangerous, treacherous, four-year path to Mictlan.
Wikipedia says, "the nurikabe is a yokai, or spirit, from Japanese folklore. It manifests as a wall that impedes or misdirects walking travelers at night. Trying to go around is futile as it extends itself forever. Knocking on the lower part of the wall makes it disappear.”
When Portland police officer, Matt Tobey, got into difficulty, only homeless Clinton Whitman came to help. Tobey's head hit the ground again and again as the man on top of him, swearing and grunting, kept hitting him. Whitman, 53, described by Tobey as 'a blessing' and who had been living in a 1977 Lincoln Versailles, parked in a lot, stepped in and pulled the perpetrator from the officer.
Unagi-Nobori soda is no ordinary energy drink, oh no... this terrific tonic is infused with a generous helping of eel extract. If you think there's something fishy about that, you're unfortunately right.
According to Japanese folk tradition, eating eel is reputed to give one extra energy on summer's hottest, most humid days.
Tibetan sky burial:
A corpse is sliced up, usually atop a mountain, and left for the birds. Tibetans call the practice jhator, which means giving alms to the birds. And also legs, torsos and heads as well.
The bodies, wrapped in white cloth, are bought to the burial site, where the monks have enticed vultures and other airborne scavengers. Monks unwrap the bodies, a process that probably isn't all that pleasant considering they've been left alone for three days (per Tibetan custom).
His main finding: blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.)
From the male:
9. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.From the female list, written by a guy, although other lists linked (available here):
23. From my late teens through menopause, for most levels of sexual attractiveness, it is easier for me to find a sex partner at my attractiveness level than it is for a man.
Senior centers and retirement communities are looking for new ways to promote exercise in order to stave off physical decline. Older people interested in honing their self-defense skills, meanwhile, are delighted to find that something they already own can be used as a weapon.
Dr. Karasu, known as an expert in treating the wealthy and powerful, recognized a common pitfall among his peers: Rich people can be seductive. “The therapist wants to identify with the patients and comes to see it as his role to help them get more wealthy,” he said. In the process, the doctor risks becoming the patient’s “alter-id.”
Choi Yeong-eui, later changed to Masutatsu Oyama... was born in Korea in 1927 and later moved to Japan, where he studied karate...
He used to have live public demonstrations where he would fight and kill a bull with his bare hands... All in all, Oyama fought and killed 52 bulls, three of which were killed instantly with one blow. Forty-nine had their horns chopped off with karate blows. He gained the nickname of The Godhand and was considered the living manifestation of the Japanese warrior's maxim "One strike, certain death."
If you're thinking his skills only worked against livestock, you should know that Oyama once tested himself in a kumite, a series of two-minute fights against different opponents, each of which you must win to continue. Oyama took on 300 men over the course of three days.
Tomeika Broussard thought it was so absurd when she overheard her supervisor refer to her as a "reggin" that she just laughed. Then she realized it was the n-word spelled backward.
The only African-American in the small medical clinic in Los Gatos, Calif., Broussard said she was subjected to racial slurs almost daily. They were not the overt ones that most people would immediately recognize, but rather subtle, surreptitious code words that sometimes take a while to figure out.
Police officials are at a loss to explain precisely why there is a wave of albino killings now. Commissioner Paul Chagonja said an influx of Nigerian movies, which play up witchcraft, might have something to do with it, along with rising food prices that were making people more desperate.
