Spring fever

Priests at a shrine in Japan wear headgears shaped like green onions and perform rituals of passing through small circles to make religion appear more playful and less formal

The Aruka Shrine in Japan’s Ebina City is the oldest shrine in all of Sagami Province, but to the general public it’s known for a unique ceremony that involves a priest wearing a two-metre-long headgear in the shape of a green onion.

Negi-san, the head priest at Aruka Shrine has been performing the green onion ceremony for about four years, but it only went viral recently, when photos of the priest wearing the bizarre headgear surfaced on Japanese social media. It was a pretty weird thing to see, even by Japanese standards. The pictures showed a masked priest wearing a green skirt and white shirt matching the spring onion on his head bending over to pass through a small circle wrapped in rope. The ritual was inspired by the head priest’s desire to soften the formal and stiff perception of religion and clergy.

A few years ago, 49-year-old Miwako Kojima put on a fake panda head and became Panda Myiaji, a lovable character designed to attract more people to Aruka Shrine. Then, in 2017, Kojima got a new idea. The name of the head priest Negi had the same pronunciation as the word “onion” in Japanese, so she decided to create a new character and ritual around that similarity. And that’s how the Negi head was born.

The headgear shaped like a green onion is made of white cardboard wrapped with imitation paper, over which paraffin paper is layered and fixed with masking tape. The most iconic part of the ritual is the passing of the head priest through a small “onion circle”, as a way to pray for peace and disaster relief. The popularity of the Negi head has inspired other priests at the shrine to make their own onion-shaped headgears.

Twitter to the rescue

Photographer Valerie Contreras, who was visiting the San Francisco’s Sutro Baths Bay Area with friends, was taking pictures of the sunset and the ocean, when she noticed a couple walking around all dressed up. Contreras suspected an engagement was going to happen as she watched the man walking continuously, touching his pocket.That’s when the Texas-based photographer decided to set up her gear “and sure enough, the beautiful moment happened”. While the pair had clearly found love, Contreras, who was far away using her zoom lens, was on a mission to find the lovebirds to give them the sweet snaps. And since she didn’t know the happy couple, she took to Twitter. Contreras was linked to Ricky Johnson Jr. and Jazmine Winn shortly after the photos were posted on Twitter, and they quickly went viral with 6,91,000 likes and 94,000 retweets.

Fast and Furious

A 10-storey apartment building in China came up in just over a day

China’s Broad Group recently showcased its innovative Living Building, a new type of modular building system, by erecting a 10-storey apartment building in Changsha City in only 28 hours and 45 minutes. The Living Building concept developed by Broad Group was technically, assembled on a site in Changsha, by three cranes and a large workforce, as all the components were built in a local Broad Group factory and transported by truck. But that’s one of the features of the Living Building system; it consists of pre-made container-size modules that only need to be bolted together at the “build” site and have their electricity and plumbing connected. According to the Chinese company, the stainless steel structure is ten times lighter and 100 times stronger than conventional buildings, and is resistant to “mega earthquakes and typhoons”. It’s also considerably cheaper to make than traditional structures and carbon steel buildings, because of its streamlined production process. Broad Group claims that the new system is called Living Building because of its versatility. 

Man builds empire with 7,00,000 tiny bricks

Guangzhou-based Lego fan named Li Zhining, recently unveiled his most impressive project yet—a scale model of the Forbidden City in Beijing made out of 7,00,000 Even more impressive is the fact that the Lego artist didn’t use any custom made bricks, instead relying only on his huge collection of standard pieces.

Too busy with work to notice her shirt

A resident of Washington, DC, identified only as “Jackie,” claims she wore the same Hawaiian shirt to 264 remote meetings between April 2, 2020, and June 16, 2021. She thought it would be a funny joke if everyone noticed. Sadly, no one said anything. “And then I thought, well, I’m going to keep doing this until someone notices, and no one ever noticed,” she said. 

Lucky restaurant staff gets tipped $16,000

A $16,000 tip was left by a customer, who ordered food worth $37.93 only at a New Hampshire restaurant. Mike Zarella, owner of the Stumble Inn Bar and Grill in Londonderry, says the staff didn’t notice at first. “It was on the credit card statement; they put it down next to the register and he said three times, ‘Don’t spend it all in one place.’” Zarella said one staffer then flipped it over and looked, “And she’s like, ‘Oh my god, are you serious?’ And he said, ‘I want you to have it, you guys work hard.”

Truth be told

Pic/@hayleymadiganfitness, Instagram

It’s no secret that social media is a distorted view of reality with most people choosing to only share the most exciting and glamorous parts of their lives. One Instagram influencer is on a mission to expose just how easy it is for people with a large following to distort and manipulate the content they’re putting out into the world. Hayley Madigan, who works as a fitness trainer, regularly shows her followers how using lighting, angles and editing can make pictures—particularly bikini photos—look entirely different. “Our younger generation is growing up with such a big emphasis around social media and these teenagers deserve to know the reality behind people’s content,” the 31-year-old, from Portsmouth, said.

Don’t worry to avoid grey hair

A new study published in the journal eLife found that stress can turn your hair grey, but chilling out can reverse the trend. Researchers from Columbia University’s Vagelos College arrived at this conclusion by analysing the hair of 14 volunteers. By looking at a tiny portion of each human hair, reflecting approximately an hour of hair growth, the scientists were able to find a correlation between times of stress and times of greying in the hair. They also found that periods of relaxation correlated with once-grey hair turning dark.

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