Highway Passes Through Gate Tower Building

Did you ever seen the highway passes through a building? It's happened in Gate Tower Building at Osaka in Japan. That's one of the most amazing facts in Osaka from the Umeda Sky Building observatory was this famous skyscraper traversed by a highway.

 Surprisingly, there is no connection between the two structures, the highway passes between the fifth and seventh floors of this building like a tunnel, wrapped in the noise protection walls. The side of the Gate Tower Building simply opens up like a mouth to release traffic coming off of the Hanshin Expressway. Futuristic-looking and against all classic notions of creating high rises, the Gate Tower Building is actually the result of a compromise between the Japanese government and landowners who had staked a claim on the land back in the mid-19th century.

 

The land was owned by the Suezawa Sangyo Company, which in 1983 started to plan an office building. However, the land was also included in the Hanshin Expressway plans for the highway construction, so 5-year-long fruitless negotiations took place. In 1989, because of a similar issue in Minato-ku, Tokyo, the building codes were changed to allow the development of buildings and highways in the same space. In the end the project from Tokyo was abandoned, so the Gate Tower Building from Osaka, finished in 1992, became the first building in Japan having a highway passing through building.

Vijay Sharma – The most flexible man

Vijay Sharma can bend his own body in the most amazing ways. Actually, Vijay has earned the nickname “Rubber Man” in his native Rajasthan in India, for performing incredible flexibility stunts. Vijay is able to wrap his legs over his head, wind his arms around his back, crawl his body through a tennis racket and even drink from a coke bottle held between his toes. The 27-year-old shop assistant says his passion for extreme flexibility tricks comes from watching Jackie Chan movies when he was a kid.

Vijay Sharma discovered his unusual talents when he began taking martial arts lessons, so he could follow in the footsteps of his idol. He started crawling into tight spaces, curling up in boxes, and before he knew it, he was earning the title of “Rubber Man” in the Limca Book of records. That’s India’s version of the Guinness Book of Records and he is now hoping to get recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records.



"It was when I was training for martial arts as a boy that I realized my body was so bendable I might be capable of setting a world record in flexibility,” Vijay recently said. The most flexible man, who admits he would do "anything for fame" has already appeared on local TV shows, but is now looking to go international with his art.

Guinness Rishi getting tattoos of all national flags on his body

The 67-year-old Guinness Rishi wants to enter the Guinness Book of World Records by tattooing the flags of all the countries in the world on his body. He is planning to cover himself in 220 different banners in his quest to become a walking global flag-pole.

Already sporting six tattoos, (Union Jack, Indian, USA, Cyprus, Indian Congress Party, Canada) on his face, Guinness, who changed his name in honor of the famous record book, believes that he will be finished in three years.

He plans to cover his head and face with the most important one-inch flags before inking from his neck down in alphabetical order.


"I am tattooing my entire body including my private parts, but I am not sure which flag I will be sticking there. In the first phase, I believe that I can put 60 tattoos on head and then we will start working on my body. People consider me an extraordinary person, not an ordinary person," he said.

An obsessive record breaker, Guinness already holds four certified world bests and feels that this will be a crowning glory for India.

Over the course of three years, Guinness’ tattoos will set him back more than $20 000, which he believes is a small price to pay for his eventual achievement.

Guinness also built the tallest sugar cube tower in the world, which stood at 64 inches.