On the advice of her shrink, 22-year-old Londoner Georgia Horrocks is trying to declutter her mind by selling her imaginary friend on eBay!

“I have recently come to the decision that it is time to sell my imaginary friend Bernard who was created during a time of emotional instability,” Georgia wrote in the eBay listing.

“My psychiatrist recommended that I say goodbye to Bernard, and although I would like some financial compensation, it is more important that he finds a good home.” She added that he has an ‘active’ and ‘mischievous personality’.

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Massachusetts residents can now make a modest living out of their own bodily functions – by donating a sample of their poo. An independent non-profit stool bank called OpenBiome is willing to offer volunteers $40 per deposit, and what’s more, it’s all for a good cause. The stool samples will be used for fecal transplants, to fight the deadly superbug C. difficile, which affects more than 500,000 and kills 14,000 Americans per year.

If you’re wondering about fecal transplants, you can read all about the life-saving procedure in this feature we did a couple of years ago. At the time, there was only one doctor in the UK to have ever performed the transplant. Now, it seems that the treatment has become more popular and people are being invited to generously donate their poo at the OpenBiome stool bank.

Stool transplants are being praised by many doctors as a miracle cure for C. difficile, a bacterial infection that most commonly affects hospital patients. It causes fever, painful cramps, severe diarrhoea, and in some cases, life-threatening complications such as severe swelling of the bowel. Patients with recurring episodes are ill for several months, and only have a 75 percent chance of survival.

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A special project in the town of Essen, Germany, is designed to engage alcoholics and drug addicts in cleaning up the city’s streets, giving them a chance to pick themselves up and rejoin society. The project is called ‘Pick-Up’, and it pays the participants with a small hourly wage, along with free beer!

Although the beer is meant to be an incentive, the amount given away is small, so it won’t really cause a lot of damage. “The beer is distributed on the individual needs of the participants,” read a fact sheet from the organisation that manages the project. “Not everyone gets beer. Only the participants who aren’t able to do their work without it.”

The statement also mentioned that “Pick-UP isn’t about just cleaning the streets. The project has nothing to do with exploiting people. The idea is to allow participants, who are not forced to take part, to contribute to society in a way they otherwise wouldn’t.”

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When 57-year-old Shen Ailan got drunk on two whole bottles of baijiu – a type of Chinese vodka – she decided that a dip in the river was just what she needed to ‘clear her head’. So she dived into the waters of the Yangtze River at Huangshi city, Hubei Province, and passed out soon after. When she finally opened her eyes, she found herself in Ruichang City, Jiangxi province – roughly 75 kilometers away from where she had went into water!

“I decided a dip in the water would clear my head and I remember wading into the water,” she said. “It was the middle of the day and the next thing I knew was everything had gone black.”

Having blacked out in the water, it’s a real miracle that she survived. She was found suffering from acute hypothermia, and the medics who treated her speculated that she might have become semi-conscious after going into the cold water. They added that her body must have acted automatically to keep her head above water as the river’s current swept her downstream.

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While the rest of us roll around in bed all night trying to find that elusive ‘sweet spot’, 51-year-old Liang Yanguo can make himself quite comfortable on a single-rope hammock. That’s right, his favorite resting spot is actually a sling made of a single nylon rope tied between two trees.

Nicknamed the ‘Kungfu Man’, Liang has been spotted lying on a rope at a park in Huangyan, China’s Zhejiang Province. Sometimes he hangs on with one hand while the other rests on his chest. He is also able to kick up his legs and open his arms, or even bring his palms together to salute passersby. Irrespective of the position he assumes, he always appears calm and Zen-like.

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You can’t help but feel sorry for this Florida couple – their newly constructed dream home is now turning out to be a mega-nightmare. Although Mark Voss and his wife own eighteen residential lots in the gated Ocean Hammock community, their house was accidentally built on one that doesn’t belong to them!

“We’re in total disbelief,” said Mark, who is the owner of a property management and real estate company in Missouri. “We may have moved someday. But, with this headache and grief, we’re not so sure. The Midwest is looking pretty good now.”

The couple said that they purchased the lot – with the address of 23 Ocean Ridge Blvd. – in 2012. Then they hired a company called Keystone Homes to build the three-story, five-bedroom, 5,000-square-foot vacation rental that cost them a whopping $680,000. Six months after the custom house was built, however, a survey crew working nearby realized the error – that the house actually stands on the lot next door to the Vosses’ – 21 Ocean Ridge Blvd. North. This one belongs to a North Carolina couple who bought it way back in 2003.

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It seems that all it takes to make the news these days is a social media account and a bizarre quest of some sort. Like this Australian man, who is making headlines with his quest to have coffee with all 1,088 of his Facebook friends. His project is called ‘1000+ Coffees’ and he describes it as “an exercise in remembering to socialize with and get to know people”.

“I plan to have a one-on-one coffee with every single one of my 1000+ Facebook friends over the space of the next three years, or as long as it takes to complete,” 28-year-old Matt Kulesza wrote on his Tumblr page. “I obviously don’t have 1,000 real-life friends. The point of the project is to see who these people actually are and get to know them.”

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Woodkopf is a crazy new sport invented in the Czech Republic that’s been gaining quite a lot of national media attention lately. The popular sport involves a pair of opponents wearing two-meter wooden boards on their heads and trying to knock the other’s board down without dropping their own. As strange as it sounds, a rousing match of Woodkopf can be quite exciting to watch.

The wacky sport can be traced back to July of 1992, when it was practiced during a cultural festival of art school graduates in Prague. Woodkopf (which literally translates to ‘wooden head’) is popular partly due to the fact that the game is simple, inexpensive and requires no complex equipment, but also because it never fails to supply a good dose of humor.

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The Teatreneu comedy club in Barcelona has come up with an innovative way of charging customers; they’re calling it ‘Pay-Per-Laugh’. The concept is as simple as it sounds – the club has reduced its entry fee to zero, and instead, users are charged every time they laugh. A special facial-recognition software helps track the exact number of laughs per customer.

The bizarre idea is actually an experiment in partnership with advertising agency The Cyranos McCann – it was set up in response to increased government taxes on theatrical performances from 8% to 21%, which led to a 30% drop in audience members in just one year. So Teatreneu decided to look at the situation with humor, and that’s how pay-per-laugh was born. Each seat is fitted with a facial recognition system that detects the smiles of the person seated behind. Entrance is free, and if the show produces no laughs, customers don’t pay anything. But if they do, each smile is charged 0.30 euros with an upper cap of 24 euros.

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Winter, a 42-year-old coffee fanatic from Houston, Texas, is on a mission to have coffee at every Starbucks coffee-shop in the world. Given that Starbucks operates on almost every corner of every street of every city in America, not to mention thousands of shops around the world, Winter seems to have set himself an impossible goal. Yet, he’s already been to 11,676 Starbucks branches, and he won’t rest until he’s been to each and every one in the world – that’s at least 10,000 more to go.

Born Rafael Lozano, he legally changed his name to ‘Winter’ because he didn’t want his credit history confused with his father’s. Over the years, Winter, a computer programmer, has spent over $160,000 on Starbucks coffee and on traveling to cafes across 38 different countries – including shops in London, New York, Paris, Egypt, Kuwait, Turkey, Japan, and Lebanon. That’s about 25 percent of his earnings and three months of travel a year on coffee runs.

He’s a self-proclaimed caffeine addict, who at one point, used to guzzle 29 cups of coffee a day. Interestingly, he actually prefers artisanal coffee from independent stores, but he appreciates that Starbucks tastes the same everywhere. His first visit was in 1997, and he almost immediately decided that he had to go see all the branches in the world. “It was a completely random idea that came to me when I was in Plano, Texas while discussing the growth of Starbucks in the greater Dallas area,” he said.

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This heartwarming rags-to-riches story is guaranteed to restore your faith in humanity. A Chinese businessman who was once helped off the streets by a passerby, is now repaying the kindness by offering his benefactor a whopping one million yuan (over $160,000).

This story began in 1993, when 17-year-old He Rongfeng was forced to beg on the streets of Taizhou city in China’s Zhejiang province, to support his poor family. “Two friends and I had gone to Taizhou looking for work, but we were unsuccessful and ended up roaming the streets, penniless, starving, and without even shoes,” Rongfeng recalled. “We were in the pits and couldn’t see a way out, and then this young woman turned up.”

The woman was Dai Xingfen, who ran a local noodle shop with her husband. She took Rongfeng and his friends back to her modest one-room apartment and offered them food and a place to sleep. She gave them hot water to soothe their blistered feet, and then called a few acquaintances to find work for the boys in another city. Before they parted, she even gave them money for the train fare.

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A homeowner in Detroit, Michigan, recently put his property up on the market – and when he failed to make a sale, he decided settle for a trade. He is now after Apple’s latest product offering – the iPhone 6. And if he can’t have that, he’s willing to settle for a 32-gigabyte iPad or an Android in exchange for the house.

Understandably, the three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bathroom brick house isn’t exactly in the best condition. It does have a finished basement and a plush garden, but neighbors strongly believe that it needs to be torn down. The bungalow was initially listed for $5,000, but there weren’t any takers. So the current price is down to $3,000 or an iPhone 6.

“It’s a real listing,” insisted realtor Larry Else. “My client is overseas and he told me he would be willing to trade the property for an iPhone 6. It sounds to me like he wants the Plus version, but I think he’s willing to negotiate.”

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Chinese businessman Qian Fenglei is the kind of friend everyone would want. This real-life Richie Rich has recently gifted specially embossed gold iPhone 6 smartphones to all his former high school classmates, at a reunion dinner. The inscription on the phones reads: ‘Class of 1992, Maoshan Middle School’.

Qian is the chairman of Universal International Holdings (Hong Kong) Limited, and is quite well known for his generosity. He was previously in the news for donating two million yuan towards relief work after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. And he also gave all his former classmates an iPhone 5 during a previous reunion. Guess they know what they’ll be getting when Apple launches their new generation of phones.

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38-year-old Abe Calimag is so hooked on the Broadway musical Rock of Ages that he’s seen it 500 times in the past five years. His obsession has taken him to six different countries, just to watch various productions of the same show. And he’s spent a whopping $25,000 along the way.

Abe, a business consultant from Virginia, bought his first Rock of Ages ticket in 2009 because his favorite actress Amy Spanger was supposed to be in it. He later realised that she wasn’t in the cast anymore, but he decided to go see the show anyway. It turned out to be the experience of a lifetime, and thus began Abe’s love affair. During the last five years, he has traveled to London, Toronto, Australia, Manila and to several states in the US, and even taken a few cruises just to watch the production over and over again.

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Nothing compares to the warm hug of a real person, but when there’s no one else around, this nifty little Japanese invention can do the job quite well. It’s called the ‘tranquility chair’ – its back is shaped like a giant human doll with a friendly face and long arms that can wrap around you in an affectionate embrace.

The chair is the brainchild of Japanese company UniCare – they’re selling the product for 46,000 yen ($ 419) at the International Home Care and Rehabilitation Exhibition in Tokyo. “It makes you feel safe,” said a UniCare spokesperson. “Anyone can use it, but it is designed for older people.”

Given that a quarter of Japan’s population is currently over the age of 65, and the number is expected to rise to 40 percent in coming decades, the tranquility chair is really quite apt for the Japanese market. The company has come up with a host of similar products, like ‘Life Rhythm Dolls’ that are programmed to remind owners to take their medicine or go to the toilet.

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