It’s that time of the year again when people do the stupidest things to get their hands on Apple’s latest iPhone. It’s been pretty crazy so far, but this story is a clear winner – a Chinese student is offering to share his girlfriend with anyone who will pay up in cash. He plans to use all the money his girlfriend earns him to pay for the highly coveted iPhone 6.

The kid recently stood outside Shanghai’s Songjiang University, holding up a sign that read: ‘Girlfriend Sharing’. To avoid being misunderstood, he also stated the ‘rules’ quite clearly. The deal, he wrote, included eating together, studying together, playing games, saving seats (in libraries/classrooms) or going on dates. The sign was pretty clear on one thing – ‘no funny business’.

“Sharing girlfriend for pocket money,” the sign read. “If you are interested, connect to personal hotspot ‘wifi sharing master’  to check out the girlfriend.”

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Like many girls her age, 25-year-old Lauren Adkins has a huge crush on vampire Edward Cullen from the Twilight movies, played by Hollywood heartthrob Robert Pattinson. But Lauren has taken her infatuation to a whole new level – she actually got married to a life-size cardboard cut-out of her perfect man. She lives with the cut-out, goes on dates with it, and pretty much considers it her partner for life.

Lauren, from Las Vegas, said that she’s been obsessed with romantic fairytale endings ever since she was a little girl. “When I was a child, I watched the Disney versions of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella until the tapes wore out,” she recalled. As she grew older, her interests shifted towards romantic teen movies, like Twilight.

After every guy she met and dated at college failed to meet her ideal of Prince Charming, she finally found what she was looking for in Edward Cullen. “It was different from any love story I’d ever seen before – after all, the leading character was as likely to suck your blood as open the door for you. I was obsessed.”

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‘Netropolitan’ is a new social networking website that caters exclusively to the ultra-rich. Described as ‘the online country club for people with more money than time’, the website costs a whopping $9,000 to join. And that’s just the initiation fee; there’s also an annual membership fee of $3,000.

That sounds like an exorbitant amount, considering the fact that popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter are free of charge. The whole thing almost sounds like a prank, but Netropolitan founder James Touchi-Peters assures us that the service is quite real.

“This is 100 percent real, and I believe there is a need and an audience for this service,” said Touchi-Peters, 48, a composer and former conductor of the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra. He got the idea for Netropolitan when he had trouble relating to the people he met on other social websites.

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A man from China’s Sichuan Province wants a mother so badly that he’s offering one million yuan (a little over US$160,000) to any woman willing to take on the role. Kuan-Yin Tsui, who is in his 30s, has become an internet sensation in China, following his bizarre proposition.

Eye-witnesses say that he was actually seated at Fanghu Park with a bowl of banknotes in front of him, in the hopes of finding a mother. Behind him was a red lantern with his phone number plastered on it, and a large poster that displayed his terms – he wanted his would-be mother to be a woman who was at least 57 years old, well educated, and without a history of drug use. The final decision, he wrote, would depend on whether he felt a ‘connection’ with any of his applicants.

Juan Lei, who happened to be visiting the park at the same time, took pictures of the entire affair and posted them online. “I went to speak to him to ask if it was a real offer, and he told me I was too young for the job and he only wanted older women,” she recalled.

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Joe is a crafty young homeless man in New York who hooks up with a different woman each night just to avoid sleeping out in the cold. The 26-year-old serial charmer has managed to lure hundreds of women into inviting him to spend the night with them. Originally from Boston, Joe says that he loves New York because it has 8 million people, and he can be with a different girl whenever he wants.

“Dude I’ll go up to any random girl and tell them I love them, I wanna marry ‘em – just for recreational purposes,” he bragged. Joe isn’t exactly the definition of handsome, but his confidence and arrogance seem to be serving him quite well. And his homeless status doesn’t really stop him from trying to look good.

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29-year-old Koichi Kuwabara has made it his mission to distribute ‘Free Hugs for Peace’ to as many people as he can – he’s been traveling across Asia for the past three years, hugging random people on the streets. His videos have gone viral on YouTube, garnering over 1.5 million views. He also has over 5,300 followers on Facebook and about 3,000 on Twitter.

Koichi, an aspiring school teacher, said: “I don’t want to just regurgitate theories written on textbooks. I want to tell the kids what I saw and learned first-hand from giving free hugs worldwide.”

He began his extraordinary adventure in August, 2011, just after he graduated from university. Since then, he has taken his Free Hugs initiative to several cities in China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. At each location he visiyed, Koichi held up a sign that displayed the flags of Japan and the country he was visiting, along with the caption ‘Free Hugs for Peace’.

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Of all the unusual ways to get a massage, this has got to be the weirdest one. 51-year-old Li Chia rolls himself down 30 concrete steps every morning at Xi’an Changle Park. Once he gets to the bottom, he rocks himself back up to the top again without getting up, using a careful, self-taught technique. He claims that by doing this he receives a thorough massage that addresses all the pressure points in his body.

“I got the idea from rolling on pebbles at a health club, and when I couldn’t find any pebbles at my local park, I decided to try the stairs and was surprised to find it really works,” Chia explained. “I have always been a great fan of Chinese massage and the possibility that pressure points can do all sorts of things including relieving stress. After all, that’s why massage is so popular,” he said. “However, I don’t believe that any masseuse will be able to give me the sort of massage I get from the impact of the stairs. I find it’s a great way to relieve pressure and has all sorts of other health benefits as well.”

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Cathy Price, from Preston, Lancashire, has paid a visit to 500 different pubs named ‘Red Lion’ in Britain. In fact, she’s made it her life’s mission to visit every single Red Lion in the UK, which just happens to be the most common pub name in the country. She celebrated her 500th visit last weekend in Bedfordshire, where she visited a Red Lion at Dagnall, near Whipsnade Zoo.

55-year-old Cathy has been touring the nation since 2011, visiting local Red Lions in Milton Bryan, Studham, Upper Sundon, Leighton Buzzard, Great Brickhill and Houghton Regis. She said that she got the idea for the project on a whim: “I was away in the Lake District for the weekend a few years ago and I was watching the Grand National at a pub and I read a sign which said the Red Lion was the most common pub name in the country.”

“I thought they must be absolutely everywhere and that was when I decided I had to see them all,” she explained. “I began on Grand National day, April 9, 2011, and aim to complete the quest as near to Grand National day as I can next year, which will have taken four years.”

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Dr. Jeff Wilson, a professor of environmental science at a university in Austin, Texas, is living in a 33-square-foot dumpster for a year. He kickstarted the unique project in February, and his efforts have earned him the nickname ‘Professor Dumpster’ among his students. Harvard-educated Wilson says that his goal is to show people that it is possible to have a pretty good life even in austere conditions.

The dark green dumpster is currently parked behind the women’s residence halls in a corner of Huston-Tillotson University’s campus. Wilson describes it as ‘the most thoughtfully designed, tiniest home ever constructed’. Before he moved in, Wilson’s students cleaned and fixed the dumpster for him, making sure that it wasn’t smelly or unfit for living. And to make the dwelling as energy efficient as possible, they plan to set up solar panels and an energy producing toilet.

Having previously lived in a sprawling 2,500 square foot house, Wilson started downsizing his life after going through a divorce. He moved into a 500 square foot apartment, and sold all his spare clothes and furniture for $1 per item. He soon realized how little he needed to survive, and dumpster-living sounded like a great idea.

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For several months, master impersonator and conman Jeison Neck Jair Garcia managed to fool Colombian authorities into believing that he was a diplomat from Lebanon. Originally from the city of Valledupar, in Colombia, Jeison posed as a fake Lebanese ambassador named Jason Abdulaziz Al Hakim Ali Nayb, using only a couple of fake IDs and his native wit.

Jeison managed to keep up the charade for months, living in style and enjoying all the comforts that come with being a foreign dignitary. He stayed at the best hotels and dined at exclusive restaurants until his game was finally up. When he was caught, he insisted that he was only playing a prank and that his intention was never to ‘hurt anyone’.

It’s really surprising that Jeison managed to convince so many people that he was a diplomat for so long, without anyone calling his bluff. He used two fake cards – one identifying him as Ambassador of the Republic of Lebanon, and the other issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia. Strangely enough, nobody bothered to check the authenticity of the documents or even contact the Lebanese embassy about his credentials.

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They say money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can buy empathy in China. Lonely businessmen are actually paying women up to $5 a day, just for a few kind words and a bit of understanding. A similar service is available for women as well.

Many young men and women are making quick money by offering the service through Taobao – China’s leading e-commerce website. They call themselves ‘virtual girlfriends/boyfriends’, and they’re willing to listen to their clients complaining about a tough day at work.

Male clients have a range of virtual girlfriend personalities to choose from, including ‘doll-like girls’, ‘mature women’, and ‘the girl next door’. For women, the choices include ‘men in uniform’, ‘CEO’, ‘handsome men’ and ‘comforting men’.

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When 22-year-old Australian car-crash victim Ben McMahon woke up from a week-long coma, the only language he could speak was fluent Mandarin. So fluent, in fact, that he is now a popular TV star in China!

The incident took place in early 2012 – Ben was in a terrible car crash in Melbourne that left him battling for his life. While his survival seemed like a miracle, nobody was prepared for the bizarre twist that occurred when he finally regained consciousness a week later – his brain simply decided to switch from English to Mandarin.

“Most of it’s hazy, but when I woke up seeing a Chinese nurse, I thought I was in China,” recalled Ben. “It was like a dream. It was surreal. It was like my brain was in one place but my body was in another. I just started speaking Chinese – they were the first words that left my mouth.”

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The city of Chiba, in Japan, is home to a real-life superhero who looks almost exactly like the famous Dark Knight of Gotham city. He even wears Batman’s iconic suit and travels on a custom-made Batpod, but his mission is rather different – to bring happiness to the people of Japan.

‘Chibatman’, as our superhero has come to be known, prefers to keep his identity a secret. But we do know that he’s a 41-year-old local welder who likes to fight crime – or in this case, unhappiness – in his spare time. While his costume is store-bought, he built the three-wheeled ‘Chibatpod’ himself, with imported parts worth around $5,700.

Photographs of the caped crusader have been doing the rounds on Twitter for the past three years now. Everytime the citizens of Chiba catch a glimpse of their very own Chibatman, they immediately post a photograph or video of him on various social networks.

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Six thirsty Norwegian cyclists were accidentally poisoned last week, during the ‘Fredagsbirken’ race in Rena, near Oslo, when they mistook samples of liquid detergent for sports drinks and gulped down the stuff . All six of them were rushed to the emergency ward of a nearby hospital for treatment.

It all started when Lilleborg, the makers of ‘Omo Activ & Sport’ liquid detergent, handed out free samples to all the competitors, before the race. “Since this clothes washing detergent is especially developed for training clothes, we thought it would be relevant to give it to our contestants,” said organizer Ingunn Rønningen. “They could use it to wash their training clothes after the event.”

While most participants understood that it was washing liquid, some of them apparently thought it was an energy drink. According to the organizers, the samples were clearly labelled as detergents. They even told cyclists not to mix the liquid with drinking water. In spite of these warnings, there were people who just didn’t get the message. When the organizers realized that some of the cyclists got ill, they put up large signs to stop the others from repeating the mistake.

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29-year-old Kuang Zhengxuan is currently making waves on Chinese social media websites for his atrocious behavior – he’s actually suing his parents for not taking care of his financial needs. Despite his age, Kuang apparently expects his parents to continue ‘raising’ him, an attitude that has earned him the nickname ‘man-baby’.

Kuang is said to have quit school at a young age and studied woodworking and haircutting instead. He tried working for a while, but he says he was wrongly accused of stealing and beaten. That’s when he concluded that he has no real abilities, so he simply stopped working.

According to news reports, he lived a rather lazy lifestyle in his parents’ home. He spent all his time sleeping or playing with his cellphone. Fed up with his behavior, his parents recently asked him to leave home and fend for himself.

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