Photo: Dietmar Eckell

In his photo series "No Vacancy," German photographer Dietmar Eckell traveled around the world to document abandoned hotels in the middle of nowhere. Once, these hotels were luxury retreats, pleasure domes or wellness sanctuaries - but for one reason or another, they have all been abandoned for nature to reclaim.

The photo above is of the "Hotel Royal," an infamous love hotel in Kanagawa, Japan. The hotel boasted seven stories and 35 rooms with a view of Lake Sagami. At first, the remote place seemed ideal for wayward married men and women to conduct illicit love affairs, but at the end it was just too far away (either that or love birds just really didn't care for the view).

An abandoned resort on the Tagaytay ridge in the Philippines. It was once billed as a weekend escape from Manila, but has been abandoned for decades.

... and I say Morgan Freeman got the best gift of them all! Wes of The Gentleman's Armchair explains to us how the famous actor got to play God (or at least his voice) in the movies.

But seriously - do you want to know the secret to Morgan Freeman's amazing voice? Freeman himself gave the surprising answer in this interview with The Showbiz 411:

Photos: Jeffrey Vanhoutte

Is your coffee creamer so good it makes you wanna dance? Belgian photographer Jeffrey Vanhoutte shot these wonderful photos of an acrobat dancing in a cloud of milk powder in this ad campaign for FrieslandCampina Kievit's new creamer.

Vanhoutte said:

I made this campaign for Norvell Jefferson whose client is Dutch company Campina Friesland Kievit, makers of powdered milk. Based upon the agency’s concept, I formed the shoot together with the Creative Director. We used lighting from Broncolor -- “really fast flash duration so it could freeze the particles of the powder.” The model was a professional acrobatic dancer, and “the movement that she did and the powder together, we were all amazed that it was perfect from the start! First she had some powder in her hands and she put it in the air . . . every time the same movement, five or six or ten times, and then she was completely full of powder and had to start again. It was a messy process for the camera. We had to put plastic around the camera to protect it. It was one whole day from early morning until the evening to do this job and to clean up it took longer.

View the original photos over at Vanhoutte's website - via My Modern Met

Oona McGee of Rocket News 24 explains that eating oranges is a popular New Year’s tradition in Japan. This is often done over a kotatsu, which is a low table with heater underneath it. People sit under them during the winter to stay warm. This photo was taken by a person who cut and arranged his orange peels into a map of the prefectures of Japan.

Lies girlfriends tell each other and what they really mean

Read my lips: what people say and what they really mean are usually two different things. Thankfully, writer Mikael Wulff and artist Anders Morgenthaler who teamed up to publish a series of "Truth Facts" cartoons under the name Wumo (previously on Neatorama), has got the translations:

Twitter user @bonerman_inc (I know, I know) ordered an ice cream sundae from a local McDonald's restaurant but got something extra: souls of the damned, right there in the strawberry rivulets (or demon core, your pick) of his soft serve ice cream.

Naturally, he tweeted the ordeal to warn humankind of the impending apocalypse that the "souls of the damned ice cream" heralded. Either that or diabetes so repent, people, repent.

Redditor shanbuscus offers this photo of his dad on top of HMAS Onslow, a diesel submarine operated by Australia's navy from 1968 to 1999. It's now on display and open to visitors at the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney.

In the comments, other redditors who were submariners describe at great length what submarine air smells like after a lengthy cruise.

-via Twisted Sifter

Chelsea Krost is a millennial, which means a 20-something who is often derided by grumpy members of older generations, including mine. She bills herself as a millennial lifestyle expert and she appeared in that capacity as a guest on ABC's Good Morning America.

In this segment, which you can watch here, Krost responds to the question, "It it okay to stalk your ex on Facebook?"

-via David Burge, who quips, "What would we do without experts?"

(Photo: Bartz Snow Sculptures)

Every winter for the past few years, Austin, Trevor, and Connor Bartz of New Brighton, Minnesota have built a huge snow sculpture of a sea creature on their front lawn. Last year, we saw their huge snow shark. This year, the Bartz boys made a 12 foot tall turtle. You can see a time-lapse video of its construction here.

-via Twisted Sifter

Redditor felibb writes, "I took a ride in a triangular elevator today." That's fascinating! I've never seen one before. Wherever this elevator is, it's not the only one. Here's a video of another triangular elevator in an airport in Amsterdam.

-via BuzzFeed

Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden channeled her inner M.C. Escher for this topsy-turvey art installation titled The Flat Side of the Knife, as displayed at MoMA/PS1. For the display, Golden converted a two-story space with common household things like couches, beds, staircases, tables and lamps. The mirrored floor finishes the optical illusion reminiscent of Escher's mind-bending 1953 artwork Relativity.

Four-year-old River holding a LEGO octopus that she and her father Robin found at Castle Beach, Cornwall, England.

In 1997, a huge rogue wave hit the container ship Tokio Express, knocking 62 containers overboard just 20 miles off Britain's southwest coast. One of those containers contained 4,756,940 pieces of LEGO (ironically, many of those pieces are for toy kits with nautical theme, including LEGO Pirates, 418,000 swimming flippers, 97,500 scuba tanks, 26,600 life preservers, 13,000 spear guns, and 4,200 octopuses.)

Shortly after, some of those pieces of LEGO toys started washing up on the beaches of Cornwall - and today, eighteen years later, they still kept on coming.

Discovering these LEGO pieces have become a hobby for British writer and beachcomber Tracey Williams, and she has created the Lego Lost At Sea Facebook page to chronicle the all the wonderful things that people have found:

"Whoop whoop, I found a Christmas Dragon!" writes Suki Honey, who sent in this picture an hour or so ago of a Lego dragon she has just discovered on the south coast of Cornwall. Suki is an experienced dragon whisperer having lured a fair few out of their nests in recent years and now has six living with her. She has also given a few away.

Image: Nathalie Kalbach

You may have seen this photo of 85-year-old civic activist Doris Diether of West Village, New York City, feeding a squirrel with a marionette that looks like herself.

The story behind the old lady and her "mini me" marionette is actually an interesting one. It all started one day at the park, where puppeteer Ricky Syers was performing with his handmade marionette, according to Nina Golgowski of NY Daily News:

"One day she comes up to me and whispers, 'I have something for you,'" he recalled.

Opening a scrap book she revealed old newspaper clippings and articles she had written on marionettes back in 1974. Articles more recently added to her collection were ones she had seen on Syers' work, which she cut out and saved for him.

The gesture floored him.

Syers proceeded to build Diether her own marionette, made to look just like her "featuring Diether's short, white hair and rosy cheeks ... complete with handbag, cane and floral blouse and skirt."

"She's ... known as the woman who feeds the squirrels," Syers said to NY Daily News, "Now, her little marionette feeds the squirrels."

Image: Reuters

What's the largest check you've ever received? We betcha it wasn't $974,790,317.77 - yep, nine hundred seventy four million seven hundred ninety thousand three hundred seventeen and, don't forget, 77 cents. It took two lines to write out the sum - as you can see above.

That's the check that Oklahoma oil magnate Harold Hamm wrote to his ex-wife Sue Ann Arnall, who promptly rejected her $1 billion dollar divorce settlement because it was "not fair." Arnall claimed that Hamm is worth an estimated $18 billion; Hamm countered that his net worth had taken significant beatings in the recent sharp fall in oil prices.

Well, while the rich people duke it out in divorce court, feast your eyes on what is probably the largest hand-written personal check you'll ever see in your lifetime.

(Photo: Reuters/Kim Kyung-Hoon)

Every year, the chilly Chinese city of Harbin hosts the Harbin International Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival. And every year, they just keep getting bigger and better. I'm especially impressed with this train made of solid blocks of ice. I wonder how the artists made the smoke.

The Atlantic has a roundup of 26 photos of these spectacular sculptures. They include impressive pictures showing the sculptures lit up at night.

-via VA Viper