Japanese artist/musician doooo created this fantastically creepy coin purse so he can really put his money where his mouth is. Previous works include the flesh phone case and a finger hanko (stamp), below.

人肉小銭入れ作りました pic.twitter.com/k6SIDETWD5

— doooo (@44doooo) June 1, 2019

今週3/9(土)の夜はBIMと金沢のMANIERにお邪魔します。人肉各種も持って行きますので、もし宜しければLANGS 12周年を祝うついでに触りにいらして下さい。 pic.twitter.com/igMNugHnO7

— doooo (@44doooo) March 7, 2019

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Over five days, a 32-year-old woman in Russia took selfies to document a strange lump on her face that moved from under her left eye to above it and then later to her lip. She finally visited a physician who reported a "superficial moving oblong nodule at the left upper eyelid." Turns out, she had a particular kind of parasitic worm, Dirofilaria repens, living under her skin. From Live Science:

Humans are "accidental" hosts — in other words, not where the worms want to end up — and once a worm gets into a human, it typically can't reproduce.

The worms are spread by mosquito bites, and human cases have been reported in parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, the 2011 report said. The Russian woman said she had recently traveled to a rural area outside Moscow and was frequently bitten by mosquitoes, according to the new report (in the New England Journal of Medicine)...

The Russian woman had the worm removed and made a full recovery, the report said.

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This recently-posted video of a freaky cryptid was reportedly shot in a Portuguese "desert." Is it a sad transatlantic chupacabras? An exhausted yeti who wandered (very) far from home? A vacationing bigfoot on a bender? Or something else entirely...

(Mysterious Universe)

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As a kid, I devoured cheap paperback books about “strange but true” phenomena. The short stories were anthologized from men’s adventure magazines of the 40s-60s and recounted mysteries such as: Who made the eerie statues on Easter Island? What happened on Amelia Earhart’s final flight? How do rocks in the desert move by themselves and leave trails in the mud? How do people spontaneously combust? Why did hundreds and hundreds of fish rain from the sky onto the heads of astonished residents of a small town in Australia? These stories set my imagination on fire.

Unfortunately, as I learned years later by going online, most of the stories turned out to be poorly researched or outright bogus. Mysteries of the Unknown is like these old books, but the stories are backed by solid research and a healthy amount of skepticism that does not detract from the fun. In fact, it makes the stories more fun. As an added bonus, the ample photos and illustrations bring the mysteries to life, making them even more mysterious.

Mysteries of the Unknown by Time-Life Books Time Life 2014, 272 pages, 9.8 x 8 x 0.8 inches, Softcover

Take a look at other beautiful paper books at Wink. And sign up for the Wink newsletter to get all the reviews and photos delivered once a week.

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When I was a kid, I devoured Frank Edwards' 1959 book of weird "true" stories, Stranger Than Science, and C.B. Colby's book of "hair raisers and incredible happenings," called Strangely Enough. The story about the Inuit village that mysteriously became a ghost town (with cooking fires still burning), and the one about the man who vanished on his front lawn in front of his wife and kids enthralled me and my friends.

Unfortunately, most of the stories weren't even "true." They were flat-out false, as I learned in recent years when I googled them.

A couple of months ago I received a review copy of Dan Lewis' Now I Know, which has 100 strange phenomena stories that are just as fun as Stranger than Science and Strangely Enough, with the bonus of being true. (UPDATE: It's on sale as a Kindle ebook for just $(removed)) Read the rest