Ada Keating, a 98-year-old mother of four, recently moved into a care home in Huyton, Liverpool, not because she couldn’t take care of herself, but to look after her 80-year-old son Tom.

Tom Keating became a resident of the Moss View retirement home in 2016, when it became clear that he was no longer able to care for himself. His mother Ada joined him after about a year, when it became apparent that he would require additional support. The mother and son, originally from Wavertree, share a special bond, as Tom never married and had always lived with Ada. Tom was a painter and decorator at HE Simm building services before his retirement, while Ada was an auxiliary nurse at the former Mill Road Hospital. They lived together in the family home for most of their lives, and now do so again, in a retirement home.

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Meet Mahdi Gilbert, the 25-year-old Canadian magician making waves in the world of magic. He practices card manipulation and sleight of hand, a common skill set for a magician, but what sets him apart is his lack of hands.

Standing at four-feet-six inches, Gilbert’s left arm stops at the elbow, and he has an articulated appendage on his right arm. Gilbert was forced to reinvent magic for himself, individually recreating all of the techniques used in his illusions. “I had to become self-sufficient from an early age; there’s (sic) no magic books written for me,” Gilbert said in an interview for the documentary Our Magic.

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Pisonia Brunoniana is a species of small flowering trees native to tropical regions from Hawaii to New Zealand, and as far west as India. The pisonia tree has soft brittle wood with large glossy leaves and a dark secret. If you search among its roots and branches, you’re likely to find thousands of delicate bones and tiny mummified corpses. It is this macabre feature that gives the tree its creepy nickname – “the birdcatcher tree”.

The pisonia tree produces long seed pods coated with a thick sticky mucus that entraps insects and the birds tempted to feast on them. The ensnared insects look like easy pickings to unsuspecting birds, but if they’re not careful, they can easily get entangled in the sticky seedpods themselves. Too many seeds caught among their feathers can weigh the birds down and prevent them from flying off the tree. If they’re not picked off by a passing scavenger, the birds are doomed to a slow death by starvation. Often, the birds die without ever escaping the pisonia’s branches, which means their withered corpses are left dangling like some strange fruit or a creepy Christmas ornament. In what can only be described as a vicious cycle, birds of prey tempted by the trapped birds sometimes also get entangled in sticky seeds and become trapped themselves.

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A sprawling 10-acre desert ranch in Arizona, aptly named Stardust Ranch, has come onto the market for $5 million (USD). Located in the scenic Rainbow Valley just outside of metropolitan Phoenix, the ranch includes a 3.436 square foot house, an in-ground pool, and allegedly a constant stream of extraterrestrial traffic.

Owner John Edmonds has grown tired of fighting off aliens, and recently decided to put it up for sale. Edmonds claims that over the past 20 years he has been abducted multiple times, and has had medical experiments performed on him by the aliens. He also alleges that his wife has been the subject of extraterrestrial abuse on several occasions. He originally purchased the property as a preserve for rescue horses who are unwanted or have experienced abuse. Allegedly the horses have also been molested by the aliens, with several turning up mutilated.

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An English adventurer recently got to experience what most of us have only seen in the 2009 Pixar animated movie “UP” – flying 8,000 feet above ground while tied to colorful party balloons.

The Adventurists, an adventure company based in Bristol, England, offers unusual holidays to those seeking extraordinary experiences. Past projects have included, among several others, a rickshaw runs across the Himalayas and a motorbike race across the planet’s largest frozen lake in Russia. Every adventure raises money for charity, and in the past 12 years they have raised over £5 million. For their latest fundraising project, the company has taken inspiration from the critically acclaimed 2009 Pixar film UP, tying a lawn chair to 100 balloons and getting a crazy adventurist to sit in it at 8,000 feet above ground.

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Polygamy, the practice of taking several wives, is legal in Indonesia, but it usually implies marrying one woman at a time. However, one impatient polygamist decided to beat the system by marrying two ladies at the same time and even sent out bizarre wedding invitations where he can be seen posing with both his brides-to-be.

The unique wedding invitation has been doing the rounds on Indonesian social media for the past week, with the vast majority of users condemning the event for being degrading to the two women. Interestingly, even polygamists are against it, as most of them believe that a Muslim man must learn to live with one woman before taking second wives. Some made fun about how the wedding night would play out, while a few just thought it was just a prank. It isn’t.

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Deepti Regmi, an 11-year-old girl from Nepal, spontaneously developed a peculiar ability last year. She is, inexplicably, able to smell colors, and can supposedly even identify them while blindfolded. Although she does not have an official diagnosis, her ability appears to be related to the sensory phenomena known as synaesthesia.

Synaesthesia causes the person’s senses to become confused, causing sensation to one sensory input (such as the eyes) to stimulate sensation in another (the nose). This is what causes Deepti to smell color, and others to visualize color when they hear music, or to taste flavors when they hear certain sounds. Any combination of this sensory “cross-wire” is possible however, and not at all limited to the examples above.

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Paul Ferrell, a British ex-pat who has been living in Taiwan for the last 13 years, recently decided to show everyone how much he loved the small Asian country by getting a tattoo of its Chinese name on his forehead and its green independence flag inked on his chin.

Ferrell became the talk of the town in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, where he owns a popular bar, after getting the unusual tattoos inked on his face. He claims to have made the “rash decision” after a night of heavy drinking and a passionate discussion about Taiwan’s independence. The British ex-pat recently told reporters that he was inspired by his love for Taiwan, but insists that he would not have gone through with his impulse, had he not been so drunk at the time.

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Some people can barely make a living working 9-to-5 jobs, but that’s definitely not the case of Jessica Gould, a 32-year-old woman from a small town in Ontario, Canada, who makes upwards of $70,000 by taking photos of her feet in various positions and posting them on Instagram.

Gould discovered the lucrative albeit unusual source of income completely by accident. While casually searching for a hobby to fill her free time, the young Canadian came across a local job ad for female foot fetish models. She scoffed at the idea that anyone would be interested in her feet, but some part of her was curious and intrigued by the idea. So she had some professional photos of her feet taken and started posting them under the name that became her alter ego, Scarlet Vixxen. It didn’t take long for her to realize that she had accidentally discovered a virtual gold mine.

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Ladies, meet Alan, a 37-year-old computer science graduate looking for a partner to share his life with. But he doesn’t want just any lady, he’s looking for the ideal woman, and to increase his chances of finding her, he has set up a one page website as a guide for possible candidates. If you can’t find the perfect woman online these days, I guess she doesn’t exist.

Alan describes himself as a “European male born in 1980, 1.89mt tall with pleasant look and a slender/athletic figure,” and, while he doesn’t feel comfortable in being categorized under a specific behavior, he feels that the  INFJ personality type (Introversion, Intuition, Feeling, Judging) and the HSP trait (Highly Sensitive Person) can be used to characterize him. He is currently trying to “find his way out of the rat-race” and wants to find his ideal woman to start a life from scratch with. Interested yet?

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A 47-year-old man from La Paz, in the Agusan del Sur province of the Philippines, had last felt solid ground under his feet in 2014, before climbing a 60-foot-tall coconut tree near his house. He had never come down since, and would have probably stayed atop the tree till the end of his days, had authorities not rescued him by force recently.

The man, identified as Gilbert Sanchez, had apparently left his home to live atop a nearby coconut tree three years ago, after being hit on the head with a gun, during an altercation. His mother remembers that he was so afraid that someone would come to kill him that he felt that the only way to stay alive was to climb the tallest tree he could find and stay there. And that’s exactly what he had been doing for the last three years, surviving only on the food and water his mother brought him every day, which he would pull up in his tree haven with an improvised rope. He would relieve himself from the top of the tree, and not even the raging storms, the blistering heat or the ruthless insects could get him to come down.

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If you’re looking to get a tattoo, but don’t have a specific design in mind, or if you’re just looking to get a classic tattoo at a discount, the Get What You Want tattoo gumball machine may be just what you’ve been looking for.

Located at the Elm Street Tattoo shop, in Dallas, Texas, the Get What You Get gumball machine is filled with random tattoo designs packed in plastic balls. Interested customers must pay $100 to turn the little knob and have the machine release a random tattoo design which they can then have inked for free at the shop. While there are no bad designs in the bunch, the owner of the Elm Street Tattoo shop anticipated that some people may not be satisfied with their first design, so for an extra $20, they get another turn. You don’t have to get the design tattooed, but the shop does state that the fee for using the Get What You Get machine is not refundable.

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7-year-old Wyatt Shaw, a 7-year-old boy from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, recently woke up from an 11-day slumber that left doctors scratching their heads. When he finally woke up, the second-grader had trouble speaking and moving around, but has since made good progress and is expected to make a full recovery.

After attending his aunt’s wedding and being the life of the party, Wyatt’s mother, Amy, expected him to sleep in the next day, but she never imagined that it would take 11 days for him to finally wake up. She tried waking him up several times, but Wyatt just couldn’t stay awake, and even though he sometimes opened his eyes, it just seemed like he wasn’t really aware of anything.

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You probably didn’t even know there was such a thing as a hipster-only bar, did you? Well, there is (sort of) and if you plan on getting in, you better grow a beard, put on some glasses and wear those checkered shirts hipsters love so much.

The Hipster Bar isn’t technically a bar, but an art project thought up by English artist Max Dovey, who created a software that relies on artificial intelligence and face recognition technology to tell hipsters apart from regular folks. He has been touring the UK for the last two years, turning regular watering holes into pop-up hipster bars by having patrons pass his hipster test in order to gain entry. According to 28-year-old Dovey, his machine will only grant you entry if you register as over 90% hipster.

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A Michigan man wanted for violating the terms of his probation promised to turn himself in and also bring police some donuts if they could get at least 1,000 shares on a Facebook post. The unusual challenge went viral and once the police got their shares, the man fulfilled his end of the bargain.

21-year-old Michael Zydel broke the rules of his probation for DUI and assault charges, which prompted the police department in Redford Township to post an appeal to their Facebook followers to assist them in locating him and bringing him to justice. Zydel, who goes by “Champagne Torino” on Facebook, was actually one of the people who replied to the post, saying that he wasn’t to worried about it and challenging police to get at least 1,000 shares on their next post if they wanted him to turn himself in.

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