By Sumitra
27-year-old Brian Tagalog was born without arms, but he has never let this serious adversity keep him from leading a normal life. He learned to use his feet to perform mundane tasks, drive a car, fly planes and even ink intricate tattoo designs. The ambitious young man believes he is the only certified tattoo artist without arms in the world.
A native of Honolulu, Hawaii, Tagalog moved with his family to Tucson, Arizona, where he attended Sunnyside High School and the University of Arizona. He had always shown an interest in drawing, and set his mind on becoming a professional tattoo artist. Not many people gave him a chance, but he steadily honed his foot drawing skills, and after his aunt helped him buy his first tattoo gun, he learned to operate it with his toes just as well as others did with their hands.
Angie Tagalog, Brian’s mother, admits that raising him was not easy, but she always made it a point to let him explore his options. “The day I gave birth to him, well, I freaked out,” she recalled. “The first year I would cry almost every day. I still do every now and then. But we never hid him. He wore a tank top when he was a newborn. I didn’t shield him in any way.”
And perhaps that’s what gave him the confidence to achieve everything he’s ever wanted, despite the very obvious absence of two limbs. “I was born without arms,” he said. “But that has not slowed me down.”
By Sumitra
In a bizarre stroke of luck, a boy from Vienna, Austria managed to fish out a sizable treasure from the River Danube: €100 and €500 banknotes totaling a whopping €100,000!
The boy apparently noticed the notes from afar, and jumped right into the icy cold water to retrieve them. Passersby, worried that he was attempting suicide, immediately notified the police, who arrived at the spot just as the boy was coming out with the money. They later dried the soggy notes using a clothes dryer, giving rise to cheeky puns over ‘money laundering’.
At first, police thought the €100,000 were fake, and thrown in the river as a prank, but upon closer inspection, they realized the banknotes were genuine.
There’s a law in Austria that allows anyone who finds cash and brings it to the police to claim 5 to 10 percent of the total amount, and keep the entire sum if the rightful owner cannot be identified within a year. Sadly, the boy in question wasn’t given a chance to call the police himself, as the bystanders did that for him. So it isn’t clear if he’ll be allowed to keep the money or not.
The boy said he wanted to bring it to the police, but the question is whether the police found it or the boy,” a police spokesperson said, adding that the origin of the notes is unclear because no crimes were recorded in the area. “At the moment, we are all checking the serial numbers of the notes to see whether this will give us a clue as to their origin.”
