A Houston woman recently took to social media to complain about her daughter’s Elsa doll, which not only starts singing on its own even when switched off, but has also returned after being thrown away multiple times.

Emily Madonia recalls that the problematic Elsa doll became a part of her family’s life on Christmas 2013, as a gift for her daughter. It recited several lines from the Disney animation blockbuster “Frozen”, as well as the iconic song “Let It Go” when a small button was pushed on her necklace. Everything was fine for two years, but in 2015, she started alternating between English and Spanish, when before she had only recited lines in English. Then it started singing and speaking randomly, even when her switch was turned off, but the family brushed it off as some sort of glitch or wiring problem. But things got really weird lat December, when Emily decided to throw the doll out with the trash, and it somehow kept coming back…

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Getting cold feet is not as unusual as some people might think, but breaking the news to one’s fiancee that they no longer want to marry them can be tough, so some people come up with the most ridiculous scenarios…

A young man from Shanghai, China, who was due to marry his girlfriend this year, suddenly realized he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with her, so he devised a plan to make sure he didn’t have to. The man, surnamed Chen, could have just told his partner that he had had a change of heart, but he couldn’t break himself to do that, so he came up with a strategy that he hoped would make the girl break up with him – he became a petty criminal and got himself arrested on purpose.

Social status and reputation are very important in Chinese society, so Chen thought to himself that his bride-to-be and her family would be so disappointed by the news that he had been arrested for theft that they would cancel the wedding arrangements on the spot, allowing him to walk away with a guilt-free conscious.

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Wearing pajamas in public may not be a thing in the Western world, but it’s actually pretty popular in some parts of China, including the ultra-developed city of Shanghai, so when authorities in Anhui province decided to publicly shame a number of locals on their social media account for walking on the streets in their sleeping outfits, they received some serious backlash.

In a so called attempt to discourage “uncivilized behavior”, Government officials in Suzhou City, Anhui province, recently released photos of seven people wearing pajamas in public, along with the offender’ surnames, headshots and redacted ID numbers. The seven citizens – six women and one man – were thus shamed for breaking the supposed local dress code. The pictures were originally posted on the local Government’s Weibo account, but were swiftly deleted after receiving criticism from citizens. Eventually, authorities were forced to issue a public apology, claiming the photos had been posted on its social media page after an “inadequate review process”.

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This story’s a little old, but for some reason it didn’t get much media attention in the States, and it just seemed like the kind of wacky news we like so much here on Oddity Central, so we decided to share it.

Tony Traconi, a U.S. paratrooper stationed in the Italian province of Padova, had a commendable but complex wish – for his first son to be born on Texas soil. But with just a month before his first child was due to come into the world, he was thousands of miles away from his home state, with no chance of getting home and back before the big day. But then an idea sprouted in his head: he would ask his parents to fill a Tupperware container with Texas dirt and ship it to him. The end goal – to hide it under his wife’s hospital bed, so his son would technically be born on Texas soil.

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When it comes to backing out of a wedding, faking your own kidnapping sounds like overkill, but that didn’t stop a Colombian man from using this technique to avoid attending his own wedding.

The unnamed 55-year-old man, from the Colombian town of Pitalito was scheduled to marry his fiancee, a local woman, in front of family and friends last weekend. As the big day grew closer, the man started getting cold feet and confessed to some of his closest buddies that he planned to break the engagement and pull out of the wedding. Only he didn’t know how to go about it, so his good friends came up with the idea of faking a kidnapping. What they didn’t plan for was for authorities to launch a full scale operation involving the police and the army.

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A tailoring shop in the Spanish city of Bilbao has sparked a heated debate online after it was reported that it started charging people 15 euros ($16.7) just for trying on clothes.

Camino Azula Pascual, co-owner of the Pascual Bilbao tailoring shop in downtown Bilbao, has been making custom men’s suits and tuxedos for 40 years, so she doesn’t even need a measuring tape anymore. As soon as someone walks through the door, she knows their measurements, and, if they’re in a hurry, she can even recommend something that would suit the special occasion perfectly. But this is a skill that she and her brother Carlos have  honed over four long decades, and wasting it all on people who don’t even want to buy anything is no longer acceptable. That’s why starting this year, Pascual Bilbao has implemented a 15 euro tax for everyone looking to try on suits in the shop.

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In a news story you would expect to read on websites like The Onion, a Ugandan holy man was suspended from his duties as imam, after it was discovered that he had unknowingly wed a fellow man.

27-year-old Sheikh Mohammed Mutumba, was recently suspended from his duties as a cleric at the Kyampisi Masjid Noor mosque in Kayunga, after his wife of two weeks was caught stealing a TV from a neighbour. The theft wasn’t what caused the imam’s suspension, but the shocking revelation that his wife, Swabullah Nabukeera, was actually a man. Mutumba is said to have been totally oblivious to his wife’s real gender, and was devastated by the news. His superiors at the mosque still decided to suspend him in order to ‘preserve the integrity of their faith.’

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A Ukrainian man nearly lost his genitals after his wife put him in a painful DIY chastity belt for being unfaithful.

The unnamed man in his 40’s, from the city of Zaporizhia, in southern Ukraine, told doctors that he woke up one morning earlier this week to find a big metal nut screwed onto his wiener. It had been “installed” by his wife, as a way to stop him from being unfaithful, but the man claimed that it was strangulating his  organ. He tried removing it himself, but the nut didn’t budge, so he had no choice but to call an ambulance.

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A Kansas man made international news this week after it was revealed that he asked an Iowa court to approve a trial by combat so she could meet his ex-wife and/or her attorney on the field of battle.

David Ostrom, a 40-year-old man from Paola, in Kansas, asked the Iowa District Court in Shelby County to give him 12 weeks lead time to forge his own Japanese katana and wakizashi swords, so could he meet his ex-wife and her attorney “on the field of battle where (he) will rend their souls from their corporal bodies.” Ostrom, who doesn’t have any experience in sword fighting, told reporters that even though he doesn’t anticipate a favorable response from the court, he still wants an answer to his request.

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Tirer of her husband’s drinking habit, a Mexican woman decided to make him think he had become allergic to booze by lacing his beers with natural laxatives like castor oil and plum extract.

After consulting various internet pages and forums, Michel N., a young woman from Sinaloa, devised a plan to make her husband, José Brayan, quit drinking. She managed to get a hold on a mixture of castor oil and plum extract and started putting a few drops of it into his beer bottles, to achieve a mild, gradual laxative effect. José later told police that he found it a bit strange when his wife offered to pop open his beer and bring it to him whenever he needed one, but he simply “let himself be loved and pampered”.

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A Moscow man made national news headlines this week for putting a drawing he made when he was only six-years-old on sale online for no less than 140 million rubles ($2.3 million).

41-year-old journalist Vladimir Mkrtchyan placed the ad for his old childhood drawing on Russian classifieds site Avito on Monday, and it quickly went viral due to its exorbitant price. 140 million rubles seems kind of steep for a childish drawing, but the seller considers it’s worth twice that much, because it reflects the realities of the Soviet era through the innocent eyes of a six-year-old boy.

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A convenience store owner in Osaka, japan, sparked a lot of controversy recently when he decided to close his business for a day on New Year’s. Appaerntly that was a pretty big deal in a country where convenience stores a traditionally open 24/7, all year long.

While convenience stores are still pretty popular in the United States, they are nothing compared to the so-called “konbini” stores found on every corner of every street in urban Japan. They are beacons of hope that make life easier for the average person, offering a wide range of services (ATMs, Wi-Fi, printing, delivery services, etc.), as well as groceries, all in one place, day and night. In fact, the thing that makes Japanese convenience stores so convenient is that they are open all 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, making it possible for anyone to pick up some groceries, pay the bills or get a quick bite to eat,whenever they need to. So when one convenience store owner decided to close his business for a day on New Year’s, it made national news.

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The Thammasat Khlongluang Wittayakom School, in Pathum Thani, Thailand was forced to stop using decibel meters to measure students’ loudness while singing the national anthem, after getting some serious backlash online.

Singing the national anthem as loudly as possible in front of the flagpole every morning is apparently a big deal at Thai schools, so one learning institution got the bright idea to track the loudness of the students using a decibel measuring mobile app. If the students’ singing registered at over 85 decibels, they would be given the green light and be dismissed to head to their classrooms. However, if their singing was only between 80 and 84 decibels, they would have to sing the anthem again two more times, as punishment. If the loudness was under 80 decibels, they would have to sing the anthem three more times. The measure was supposed to instil discipline in students, but it only sparked outrage in everyone who learned about it.

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A 35-year old Spanish man was recently arrested after ramming his SUV through the wooden doors of a church so he could gain access inside, claiming it was the only place where he could take shelter from his demonic “possession”.

On January 8th,the unnamed man reportedly drove up to the large doors of the San Juan Evangelista church, in the Spanish town of Sonseca, and started ramming his Jeep into it. At first passers-by didn’t really understand what was going on, and one woman, who thought the driver had been involved in an accident, walked up to the car to see if he was alright only to be scared away by having obscenities shouted at her.

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A Japanese billionaire has announced plans to donate a billion yen (about $9 million) to 1,000 of his Twitter followers in an intriguing social experiment designed to show how money affects people’s lives.

On January 1st, Yusaku Maezawa, founder of Japan’s largest fashion retail website, tweeted that he would be giving away 1 billion Japanese yen ($9.1 million) to 1,000 random people, as part of an effort to find out if money really can buy happiness. All people had to do for the chance to win $9,118 was follow and ‘retweet’ him before January 7. At the time of this writing, Maezawa’s Twitter post announcing the giveaway had been retweeted over 4.5 million times.

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