83 Wholesome Photos And Stories That Might Make You Appreciate The Internet Again (New Pics)

Can everyday objects become so important to us that we hold funerary rites for them? In some parts of Japan, they can. The rite of kuyō is a practice of helping deceased loved ones to cross to the other side more easily, but since the 19th century, some people have begun holding similar rites for animals, tools, and everyday objects.

As anthropologist Hannah Gould writes, it’s still a marginal practice, and not everyone holds kuyō for their teddy bears and toasters — plenty can still be found next to trash cans on the curb.

“More recently, commercial kuyō services have emerged, promising customers to dispose of their unwanted goods and resolve any lingering ties with the living,” Gould adds. “These companies often employ Buddhist priests to conduct rites on unwanted items.”

Vigilante justice is fun to watch in movies, but have you ever thought about what it would look like in real life? Mexicans got to find that out as their own “Mexican Batman” showed up and started taping criminals to lampposts in public. Five men were found that way over 10 days, and police are currently looking for a culprit.

The “Mexican Batman” seems to have a sense of humor as well. He (or she!) doesn’t just tape thieves to lampposts, but draws cat whiskers, humorous mustaches, and the word “thief” on their faces. On a more serious note, the criminals were also reportedly beaten up, had bloody faces, and visible cuts. Perhaps he’s more of a Zack Snyder-type of Batman than a comic-accurate Batman.

In a world where it seems like there’s no way back to reverse the damage we’ve done to our planet, one country has done something impossible: they’ve reversed the damage of deforestation. That country is Costa Rica, and it went from having some of the highest deforestation rates in the ‘90s and ‘80s to now having more than half its land covered by forests again.

How was Costa Rica able to achieve that? About 30 years ago, the government started paying landowners if they restored or conserved natural forests on their properties. Other countries, like Mexico and Vietnam, are now following suit and implementing subsidized forest conservation programs as well. In Costa Rica, landowners can earn more than $170 per hectare a year if they enroll in a program to restore rainforests, and between $44 and $110 per hectare if they preserve an existing rainforest.

Most of us have probably read or heard something through the grapevine about South Korea’s demographics problem. Fewer and fewer people are willing to have children, and that creates a problem for schools, especially in rural areas. But one school in Gangjin County solved the problem of having no first-graders by enrolling older villagers who wanted to learn to read and write.

By allowing seniors to become first-graders, the county hit two birds with one stone: they kept the school afloat until enough children enrolled and raised the literacy of its neglected elders. “My memory, hand and tongue don’t work like I wish,” one of the students, 75-year-old Park Park Jong-sim, said. “[But] you don’t know how I feel when I go to a government office, they ask me to fill out a form and the only thing I know how to write is my name.”