Five weird and wonderful hair loss treatments

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n over 15 years of counselling men dealing with hair loss, I’ve pretty much heard it all. Weird, wacky, and even frankly worrisome: there are treatments out there that make you want to shake your head with laughter, incredulous that anyone would resort to such desperate – and unscientific – measures.

But however colourful the treatments I'm about to tell you about, they carry a serious message: that men care deeply about their hair. The fact is that 55 per cent of men experience male pattern baldness by the age of 35, and that partly explains why more than $2 billion is spent annually by these vulnerable blokes on often futile cures ...read more

Ten weird body parts you didn't know you still had - from claw retractors to a third eyelid

Modern humans have been walking the Earth for about 200,000 years.

So it’s not surprising that over time our bodies have adapted.

From looking out for sabre-tooth tigers in the distant past to checking the latest on social media now, our frames have had to cope with changing demands.

But, says BBC Focus magazine, some adaptations have left a few weird leftovers in modern humans...

1) A tail

Before you were born, you had a tail, albeit only for a few weeks.-read more

Local sports used to be really weird

Hello! Chris Donlan here. Simon Parkin and I recently attended a wonderful talk at Brighton'sCatalyst Club, in which historian Mathew Homewood picked over some of the strangest sports in Sussex history. I think it's quite interesting to think of games as being related to this quirky lineage, and so I asked him to write a bit about bizarre and forgotten sports for Eurogamer. I really hope you enjoy it.

Most of us have participated in those classic sports day events; the egg and spoon race, the sack race, and the tug of war. Relatively 'normal' activities for both children and adults. However, many years ago, grown men and women were participating in far more weird and unusual sporting events. The county of Sussex appears to have been one of the leading lights in this world of bizarre sporting behaviour. In Brighton's Royal Gardens, as far back as the 1820s, one could witness such events as climbing the greasy pole, grinning through horse collars, catching a cock 'with hands tied behind'(!), and jingling matches, which involved a man with a bell round his neck being chased around a field by an army of men with blindfolds. An experienced jingler may lead these men into a merry game of cat and mouse. However, one might have some sympathy for the inexperienced jingler, cantering around a field, jangling away, and being bundled over by an excited mob.

The greasy pole was often used in village sports days. A vertical pole, standing upwards of three meters would be coated with grease. A prize would then be placed at the top - sometimes a hat, but more often a leg of mutton - and crowds would watch enthusiastic, and often hopeless attempts to gain the prize. Another use for the greasy pole was to lay it vertically over a pit of cold water, sit two men on it, arm them will sacks full of something heavy, and let them battle it out until one (or both) fell into the water.-read more

Brexit: The weird and wonderful moments of the campaign

This was an area where the Brexiters dominated. Inone YouGov poll, 46 per cent of Leave voters agreed the referendum would be rigged; 28 per cent thought MI5 was already working on it.

One widely-circulated suspicion was that the government had deliberately crashed the voter registration system to allow more time for Remain supporters to register. (Which discounted the possibility that government websites simply do not function very well.)

Another was that any Leave votes made in pencil would be erased, and converted to Remain votes. And yet another theory was that Sarah Wollaston, the fiercely-independent Tory MP who defected from Leave to Remain, was a government plant.

Daniel Jolley, a professor at Staffordshire University, and Karen Douglas, at the University of Kent, recently conducted an experiment asking 400 people to what degree they subscribed to such theories, including one stating that major broadcasters were colluding with Remain by placing its propaganda on their websites.

They discovered that the degree to which people accepted such theories outstripped almost all other factors as a predictor of their voting intentions. (YouGov’s survey found that only 11 per cent of Remainers thought the vote would be rigged, and 16 per cent that MI5 was involved.)read more

TICKLED IS A THRILLING TESTAMENT TO OUR NEED TO EXPLORE THE WEIRD (REVIEW)

The odds have it that you have not harbored a longstanding fascination with the sport of competitive tickling. It’s damn near certain that you’ve never participated in, spectated, read up on, or—hell, let’s be frank—even heard of the pastime or its bizarre subculture before happening upon notice of David Farrier’s new documentary Tickled. And I’d venture to guess that it wasn’t so much with an open embrace but a cautious shudder that you endured this late introduction to the competitive tickling netherworld… though maybe I’m just projecting. Unfamiliar, alienating, and almost intrinsically uncomfortable, competitive tickling the sort of subject matter that you can’t imagine anyone having asked to see a movie about. And yet, here we are.

Why we, platonic ideals of the untickled body politic, would bother to engage with a documentary like journalist Farrier’s directorial debut boils down to a question of the human condition… or maybe just a bit of a cop out answer: curiosity. Clean, twisted, hungry human curiosity. The kind that only grows and quickens the stranger, more confusing, and less traversable its subject becomes. It’s the fuel of not only any given viewing of Tickled, but the movie’s very creation.read more

HERE'S A KANGAROO HUMPING A PIG WHILE A PERVERT GOOSE LOOKS ON

Ryan Frazer said he and a colleague were looking at each other like, "Should we be standing here, watching, taking photos?" Thankfully, the answer was "hell yes," and they snapped a few pics for the greater good of humanity.

After roughly five or 10 minutes of action, Frazer said the pig turned around as if to "reciprocate" the good times, and that's when he and his pal decided they had seen enough.read more

Dig for victory! Hungarian grave diggers compete to be the best

(Reuters) - In a graveyard in Hungary, solemn contemplation gave way to frantic sportsmanship on Friday as dozens of grave diggers battled to prove they were the fastest and best in the business.

Taking their places at plots selected by pulling names out of a hard hat, 18 two-man teams waited for an official to shout "Start!" before shoveling at the ground to dig a precise, regulation-size grave as quickly as possible.read more