House that?

The world’s narrowest house, located in Italy, was built to spite a neighbour

Casa du Currivu, aka “House of Spite”, is a bizarre-looking house in the Sicilian village of Petralia Sottana that holds the unofficial title of “world’s narrowest house”. Petralia Sottana, a small village of about 2,000 people in the heart of the Madonie mountains in the province of Palermo, is home to one of Italy’s most unusual tourist attractions—a two-storey house with a normal ground floor and an upper level that is only around three feet, or one metre thick.

It is known as Casa du Currivu, or the House of Spite, mainly due to the local legend surrounding its purpose. Seeing as it isn’t wide enough for two people to pass by each other, let alone live inside it full time, the thin edifice was allegedly only designed to block a neighbor’s window view following an argument.

Although the exact story of Casa du Currivu has been forgotten, it is believed that the strange house was built sometime during the 1950s, following a dispute between two neighbours. It wasn’t unusual for people to expand their residence vertically, by adding another floor, but only with  the consent of their next-door neighbours.

3 feet
breadth of Casa du Currivu’s upper level, built in the 1950s

Your TV presenter may not be real

Korean news channel hires virtual anchor to present news

Virtual news anchors and presenters have been around for quite a while now, but they’ve gotten so good that government organisations are using them to replace actual humans and save money. The government of Jeju Island, in South Korea, recently hired a news anchor to conduct its weekly YouTube program, Weekly Jeju. J-na seems very experienced at her job despite her youth, but that’s only because she isn’t a real human, but a computer-generated virtual avatar managed by a private contractor. The news she appears to read on-screen is also a script generated by AI language models like ChatGPT. Switching to a virtual news anchor was a much cheaper option, as J-na and the news generation script reportedly cost only 6,00,000 won (Rs 37,296) per month.

Not f-eel-ing good

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Vietnamese doctors recently saved a young man’s life by removing a live 30-cm-long eel from his abdomen, where it had caused intestinal perforations. The 34-year-old man was admitted to the hospital with severe abdominal cramps. When the doctors opened his abdomen, they found a live eel.

What did the fox say?

Employees of the Richmond Wildlife Center in Virginia are doing their best to act like mother foxes as they feed and care for an orphaned kit that found her way into their care. In a video posted to their Facebook page, Executive Director Melissa Stanley is shown wearing a red fox mask and rubber gloves while feeding the tiny kit from a syringe. 

Too hot to handle

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A female bodybuilder, Sophie Guidolin, has been slammed by trolls for stating that she won’t stop wearing tiny bikinis in the presence of her 13-year-old son. The 34-year-old has been criticised over a photo hugging her son while wearing a skimpy bikini.

Keeping it in the family

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The Whittaker family, who live in the village of Odd, 75 miles from Charleston, US, communicate through grunts and barks as they’re unable to use words or sign language. The inbreeding started with a set of identical twin brothers, Henry and John, whose children got married and had kids together.

That’s rich!

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A self-proclaimed “rich kid” has hit back at trolls who insinuate spending “her mum’s money” is a bad thing. In fact, Lailli Mirza retaliated that her critics should “tell their mums to work harder” if they want to live a lavish life like hers. The 28-year-old also refers to herself as a “stay-at-home daughter” while living the high life in Dubai. She shares insights into her lifestyle with 2,65,000 followers.

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