Places & Culture

Japan has over 21,000 businesses that are more than 100 years old, more than any other country. Among them is Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot spring hotel founded in 705 AD that holds the Guinness World Record for the oldest hotel in the world.

Finland gives every expectant mother a free "baby box" containing clothes, diapers, and supplies — and the box itself doubles as the baby's first bed.

In Japan, there's a phone booth called the 'Wind Phone' where people can speak to deceased loved ones. It has received over 30,000 visitors since 2011.

In Sweden, blood donors receive a text message whenever their blood is used to save someone's life.

Dunkin' Donuts in South Korea started spraying coffee aroma into public buses every time their jingle played. Coffee sales increased 29%.

The Sentinelese are a people who live on a tiny island in the Indian Ocean called North Sentinel Island. For thousands of years, they have refused all contact with the outside world. Using only stones and arrows, they have successfully repelled all invaders and remain one of the last uncontacted tribes in the world.

On 2nd Nov 2017, President Trump's Twitter account was deactivated for 11 minutes by a departing Twitter employee.

In 2000, the KKK adopted a stretch of highway near St Louis, the MO government responded by renaming the road the “Rosa Parks Highway.”

In 2008, a 13-year-old boy in Florida was arrested for excessive farting in school.

In 2006, the CEO of Whole Foods reduced his salary to $1 a year, donated his entire portfolio to charity, and set up a $100,000 fund for staff facing personal problems.

After being dumped for being poor by his ex-girlfriend seven years prior, a Chinese man spent $40,000 booking four entire IMAX cinemas for first-day showings of Transformers 4 - just to prove her wrong.

In 2008, Russian man Dmitry Agarkov received a credit card offer from Tinkoff Credit Systems. He didn't like the terms, so he scanned the contract, rewrote it to include 0% interest, no fees, no credit limit, and penalties of up to 6 million rubles if the bank violated the terms, then signed and returned it. The bank approved the modified contract without reading it. When the bank later sued him for unpaid fees, a judge ruled the altered contract was valid and Agarkov only owed the principal. The two parties eventually settled out of court.

In the late 1990s, a South African inventor created the 'Blaster,' a car-mounted flamethrower designed to repel carjackers, which briefly became legal to sell due to a loophole in self-defense laws.

A natural gas vent in Iraq known as Baba Gurgur (The Eternal Fire) has been burning continuously for at least 2,500 years. Ancient writers including Plutarch described eternal flames in the region, and local tradition connects it to the 'fiery furnace' from the Book of Daniel.

The United Arab Emirates donated a laptop to every high school student in Joplin, Missouri, after the city had been devastated by a tornado.

Iceland has no standing army and has been ranked the world's most peaceful country every year since the Global Peace Index began in 2008.

In 2007, an unmanned yacht was discovered drifting off the coast of Australia. The engine and a laptop were running, the radio and GPS were working and a meal was set to eat, but the three-man crew were not on board.

The world’s largest swimming pool can be found at the San Alfonso del Mar resort in Chile. The pool is 1,013 m (3,324 ft) long, has a maximum depth of 35 m, and even has sailing boats.

In 2009, a drunk New Zealander lost a poker bet and legally changed his name to "Full Metal Havok More Sexy N Intelligent Than Spock And All The Superheroes Combined With Frostnova". He only discovered the change had been approved five years later when he applied for a passport.

Most Japanese schools don't have dedicated janitors. Instead, children do the daily cleaning, which originated from the Buddhist traditions that associate cleaning with morality.