After having its written payment notifications ignored by a client, a utility company in Russia came up with an ingenious way of coercing the debtor to pay his dues – it dumped a three-tonne concrete pyramid in front of his luxurious villa.

Samara Utility Systems Ltd. had long been trying to get the unnamed resident of Zubchaninovka village, in Russia’s Samara region, to pay his 50,000 ruble ($810) debt for unpaid water bills. The company had sent him several written notifications, had contacted him by phone, and even sent people to reason with him in person, but to no avail. So management decided to try something new. They commissioned a 3-tonne-heavy, 1.5-meter-tall concrete pyramid, plastered it with shameful slogans and dumped it in front of his home, to serve as a reminder that he had a debt to bay.

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Paul Gonzales is not the first and probably not the last man to ditch a new date and leave her with the restaurant bill, but he is definitely the most notorious and prolific dine-and-dash dater in recent history. According to news reports, the Pasadena man has been leaving his dates with the bill for over three years.

Gonzales first made headlines in March of last year, after ditching two women on separate dates in Pasadena, California, and leaving them with expensive restaurant bills. One of victims told news reporters that she had checked online and had discovered stories of at least two other women conned by the same man, going back one year. The bad publicity he got last year, following extensive media coverage of his exploits, doesn’t seem to have bothered the dine-and-dash dater too much, as just a few days ago two more women came forward to complain about being left with the bill.

One of Gonzales’ most recent victims, who preferred to remain anonymous, told CNN affiliate KCAL that she had met the man on a dating app and agreed to go on a date with him. After enjoying a scrumptious dinner and two cups of coffee, the man reportedly started talking about his sick aunt and how worried he was about her. Then he excused himself to get the charger for his phone from the car, but never came back, leaving her to cover the $130 bill.

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Having your blood tested, getting a nutritional breakdown of every piece of food you out in your mouth and talking about high cholesterol and vitamin deficiencies sound more like a hospital visit than an enjoyable dinner party, but they are at the core of a new trend among health freaks – health optimization parties.

Keeping track of your calorie intake, drinking kale smoothies and eating quinoa salads are all fine and dandy, but if you’re really serious about your health, you’ll want to take things to the next level. That’s where health optimization parties come in. These social events allow health conscious friends and family to get an in-depth analysis of their actual health, while enjoying healthy foods and drinks and talking about the things that really matter, like cholesterol, vitamins and fitness routines.

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A woman in Norwich, UK, was recently banned from singing and playing loud music in her apartment, after neighbors complained that her screeching sounded like “a drowning cat”.

48-year-old Heather Webb has reportedly terrorized neighbors in her apartment building with her singing for at least four years. In 2014, her neighbors filled anti-social behavior forms and sent them to the local council, but she only received a community protection warning from the police. Then, in 2016, neighbors again complained to the council about her loud, disturbing singing, but no action was taken against the woman. Finally, in December of last year, a judge issued Webb a Criminal Behavior Order which legally banned her from singing in her apartment. But she didn’t let that stop her.

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Iranian actors dressed as Islamic State fighters recently stormed a shopping mall in Teheran, in an attempt to promote a new film about a father and son who travel to Syria to deliver humanitarian supplies but end up kidnapped by ISIS. Unfortunately, their performance was a bit too good, and caused some shoppers to run for their lives.

It was supposed to be a harmless publicity stunt for Iranian director Ebrahim Hatamikia’s new film, ‘Damascus Time’, with actors dressed as ISIS militants peacefully visiting the Kourosh Complex shopping mall and cinema, in Teheran, and posing for pictures. However, the actors decided to show off their acting skills, and really got into their characters, storming the shopping complex and shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ while waving their fake firearms and machetes around. One of them actually rode through the mall on a horse, while another pretended to connect the wires on a fake bomb.

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In what can only be described as one of the dumbest ideas by a criminal ever, a young Russian thief covered his face with green paint to make himself harder to recognize by potential witnesses. Spoilers – it didn’t work.

Last weekend, police in the Russian city of Krasnodar arrested a 23-year-old man accused of stealing a woman’s purse at a local train station. According to a statement by the Krasnodar office of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, the victim notified police that her purse had been snatched while she was waiting at the train station, and a team was dispatched to investigate. Upon arriving at the scene, police officers started questioning eyewitnesses about the perpetrator and learned that he had a very distinctive, albeit unusual trait – his face was completely green.

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Wallace Leatherwood , a beekeeper from North Carolina, went through what most people would consider a living nightmare and came out unscathed. He drove 40 miles with thousands of bees loose in the cabin of his truck, and didn’t get a single sting.

Last Tuesday, Leatherwood bought about 18,000 bees from Wild Mountain Bees in Weaverville, and put them in the back of his truck. But before driving back home to Waynesville, he went to look at a job and then stopped at a local diner to get some lunch. Because he didn’t have anywhere shady to put the bees, he grabbed three of the boxes from the bed of his truck and moved them into the cabin. Only Wallace didn’t notice that one of them wasn’t as securely closed as he had thought, so when he came back from the restaurant, he found the cabin crawling with around 3,000 bees.

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Unravel Project, a non-conformist luxury fashion brand created by French designer Ben Taverniti, is taking the ‘less is more’ concept to a whole new level with a deconstructed blazer that consists of half an actual blazer. Luckily, what this intriguing garments lacks in fabric, it more than makes up in price, costing a whopping $1,450.

The term ‘deconstructed blazer’ isn’t exactly new in the world of fashion, it was just never used to describe half a blazer. Instead, the term suggests peeling layers off the construction of a regular blazer, like the canvas interlining that gives it that characteristic stiffness or the shoulder pads, so that the sleeves fall naturally. But Unravel Project decided to give the term a more literal meaning, by just doing away with half the blazer.

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A Beverly Hills teenager recently dragged her mother on the Dr. Phil show to complain that she has to live like a peasant, after her monthly allowance was cut from $5,000 to just $1,000.

Ever since she was born, 15-year-old Nicolette has been given everything she ever wanted, including a nanny, personal driver and trainers, shopping sessions on Rodeo Drive and a bag collection that would make most women jealous. As a teenager, she would spend between $5,000 and $10,000 on designer clothes, accessories and other things most kids her age can only dream of. However, her mother Nina decided she couldn’t keep up with Nicolette’s spending, so she cut her allowance to “only” $1,000 a month. The self-described “spoiled brat” could’t accept that, so she asked the famous Dr. Phil to straighten things out.

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A Canadian man has been involved in a legal battle with the Nova Scotia Department of Transportation after having his vanity license plate revoked for featuring a “socially unacceptable slogan”. The problem is that that slogan is also the man’s family name.

In December of 2016, Lorne Grabher, of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, was informed that his license plate – which read ‘GRABHER’ – would be canceled because people could “misinterpret it as a socially unacceptable slogan”. The Department of Transportation had apparently received complaints from “some individuals” who considered the plate “misogynistic and promoting violence against women”, and had decided to revoke it. At the time, the phrase “grab her” had taken a political significance, following the leak of a 2005 tape of US President Donald Trump making his now famous statement about grabbing women by the… Well, you know.

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A 40-year-old man allegedly traveled almost 10,000 miles from England to an art gallery in Aspen, Colorado, where he used a sharp object to slash a $3 million dollar painting by New York artist Christopher Wool, before storming out. It was later revealed that the painting was owned by his father.

The bizarre incident occurred last year, on May 2, when a man wearing sunglasses, black jeans, a black jacket, a hat, gloves and a full beard entered the Opera Gallery in Aspen and walked directly up to a painting called “Untitled 2004”. He then took a knife or other cutting object out of his jacket pocket and slashed the painting twice before running out of the gallery. A one-year investigation recently revealed that the man who carried out the slashing was none other than Nicholas Morley, son of the painting’s owner, one Harold Morley.

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A Russian woman who used her credit card to pay for coffee and a cake at a cafe near Zurich, in Switzerland, accidentally typed in her PIN code as the tip and ended up paying 7709.70 Swiss francs ($7,732) for a 23.70 francs ($23.76) bill.

Back in February, 37-year-old Olesja Schemjakowa and her son stopped for coffee and a cake at a New Point cafe in Dietikon, near Zurich. Little did she know that this would turn out to be the most expensive snacks she had ever paid for, and one of the most expensive in human history. When it was time to pay the bill, the woman, who lives in Mullhouse, France, opted to pay with her card, but somehow managed to enter her PIN code (7686) as the tip, and ended up paying a total of 7709.70 Swiss francs instead of 23.70. Interestingly Schemjakowa only realized her mistake at the end of the month, after receiving her credit card bill.

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A young passenger trying to get some fresh air on a crowded plane at Myanyang Airport, in China’s Sichuan Province, ended up accidentally opening the aircraft’s emergency hatch and triggering the inflatable escape slide.

Most passengers consider the flight crew’s instructions before a takeoff to be pointless, but this story is a clear example of why you should pay attention, especially if it’s your first time flying.

The 25-year-old man, known only by his surname, Chen, was waiting to leave the plane after touching down on Myanyang airport, when he decided that letting in some fresh air into the stuffy plane would do everyone good. So he pushed and turned the lever of what he claims he thought was a window, only to see a whole section of the fuselage pop out right in front of his eyes.

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In China, health insurance companies apparently offer discounts to people who can prove they get enough exercise every day by using their mobile phones to monitor their movement. Only instead of actually going for walks, some people use ingenious perpetuum mobile devices to cheat the system.

I first learned about China’s “mobile phone cradles” a few days ago, after seeing a picture of a strange perpetuum mobile device with a smartphone attached to it, tweeted by Chinese comedian Dashan (@akaDashan). He had spotted it in a restaurant in Harbin, where patrons were invited to use it to trick their phones’ pedometer apps into recording thousands of steps artificially, while they relaxed, and had a bite to eat or a drink. Why would anyone want to do that, you ask? Well, that’s where it gets interesting.

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For the past 60 years, every generation of freshman students at Izumo Agricultural and Forestry High School, in Izumo, Japan’s Shimane prefecture, has taken the “Class of Life”, a controversial six-month course during which the students help hatch and raise chickens, before having to slaughter and eat them.

Last year, the Class of Life at Izumo High School started in October, when they were presented with around 60 chicken eggs. Under the guidance of a teacher, they prepared them for incubation, washing them, arranging them in a special tray and learning to adjust the humidity and temperature on the incubator. For the next three weeks, they were in charge of monitoring the eggs and making sure that the right conditions for hatching were met. Once the chicks hatched, each student had to pick one and raise it as their own, knowing full well that in just a few months they would have to kill and eat it.

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