29-year-old Ren Lu You is so fed up of trying to find his soul mate that he’s actually outsourcing the job. The young man from Alabama has created his own dating website which explicitly states: “Find me a girlfriend and I’ll pay you $10,000. Seriously.”

Ren, a Harvard Business School graduate, moved to Birmingham last year for work. He spent the last 12 months going on a lot of dates, “some interesting, some dull, and a few utterly bizarre” ones. But then he felt like he was wasting too much time, so he decided to cut to the chase by offering money in exchange for connections. “If you introduce me to a girl and I date her for more than 6 months, I’ll pay you $10,000,” his website states. There’s a catch, though: if a woman submits her own name, she isn’t eligible for the reward.

Ren’s dating strategy is unconventional, and also a bit weird, but he offers an explanation: “Look at it this way: if you work 12 hours/day, how would you want to spend the few waking hours you have left?” he writes. “Probably not standing around in a bar with your fingers crossed. This way is more fun for me.” And he told Business Insider that he thinks $10,000 is a pretty reasonable fee for such a service, given the importance of meeting someone you may end up marrying.

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Pamela Jacobs, a dusky beauty from the UK, doesn’t look a day over 25. But you’ll be shocked to learn that the woman is actually 52, and has a 21 year old son! In fact, she appears so young that she is often offered student rail fares and no one believes her when she reveals her real age.

“Men do comment on my looks and say things like ‘I don’t believe you’ or ‘You must be lying,’” she said. “ I always say, what woman would actually add years on?” Her son is mortified with all the attention she receives though, because people often think she’s his girlfriend. “A while ago, someone my son knows thought I was his girlfriend,” Jacobs laughed. “And some people I know have thought the same in reverse.”

“It’s flattering, but I prefer men of a similar age to me,” she quickly added.

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Meet Somchai Nitimongkolchai, Bangkok’s biggest Batman fan. The 43-year-old has been investing in Batman memorabilia for the past decade – his vast collection now consists of a whopping 50,000 pieces, including a LEGO Gotham City. And it’s all on display at his very own ‘Batcat Museum & Toys Thailand’.

Somchai, a self-confessed superhero geek, became obsessed with the Dark Knight ever since the 2005 film Batman Begins. He was blown away by Christian Bale’s performance as Batman. “I saw Batman Begins and was really impressed by how smart and brave Bruce Wayne was,” he said. He felt like Batman was an ‘approachable hero’ for the real world. “Anyone could just put on a mask and be Batman.”

Somchai, who ran an event-organising company at the time, had never collected anything until then. But the film inspired him to purchase his first collectible – a ceramic Batman piggy bank – for his office desk. Since then, he has combed every flea market and garage sale in Bangkok, looking for stuff related to his favorite superhero. “I started shopping on eBay and then learned more about how collectibles are marketed,” he said.

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Lata 65 is a highly unusual urban art workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, that teaches elderly women the basics of street art. Although graffiti is generally perceived as a part of youth culture, the workshop has introduced the quirky art form to over 100 senior citizens around the city. It gives groups of elderly women the chance to team up with prominent street artists and literally paint the town red. They bring color and charm to otherwise neglected and run-down neighborhoods, by making their own stencils and creating their own street tags.

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Women in Tokyo, Japan, recently got the opportunity to enjoy a visual treat at their very own Hooters-style café. The pop-up venue, called Macho Café, featured muscled men clad in tight vests, serving food to visibly flustered female customers.

According to Macho Café’s official website, the owners asked themselves a very puzzling question” “why are there cafes that offer coffee from carefully selected beans, but no cafes that offer carefully selected macho men?” So they decided to rectify the situation by offering “finest quality premium roast” handpicked bodybuilders to their female clientele.

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A man in Beijing, China, is so obsessed with Friends that he’s transformed his entire life to mirror the iconic ’90s sitcom. He legally changed his name to Gunther, married a woman named Rachel (yay!), and named his son Joey. His apartment is decorated just like Joey and Chandler’s, he owns a real-life Central Perk cafe and even has a pet named Smelly Cat!

Beijing-based Gunther said that he first discovered Friends while going through a rough break-up. “My first love had left me,” he said. “Every day I was almost crying. One of my friends told me, ‘You have to watch Friends.’” So he ended up binge-watching the episodes, and it helped him get past the difficult time.

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Meet Shinri Tezuka, a highly skilled artisan candy maker whose masterpieces make animal crackers look crude. Using a 500-year-old Japanese art-form called ‘amezaiku’, Tezuka creates detailed animal-shaped lollipops that look incredibly lifelike.

Tezuka, 26, owns a small shop in Tokyo’s Asakusa district called ‘Ameshin’ – one of Japan’s only two stores specializing in amezaiku. The self-taught artist works in front of his customers, crafting exquisite pieces of glass-like candy. “There are no schools, I had to learn it myself,” he told Japanese TV show Moshimoshi Nippon. “It’s a small market, so it’s easier to innovate. There is no limit to this craft.” He got into the unique art form right after high school, fascinated by the amazing pieces of candy he could create.

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A California therapist is helping couples resolve their relationship issues in the most unusual way – by having them assemble IKEA furniture. The experience, she believes, is so frustrating that it might actually bring couples closer to each other!

“The store literally becomes a map of a relationship nightmare,” licensed psychologist Ramani Durvasula explained. “Walking through the kitchens brings up touchy subjects, like who does most of the cooking. Then you get to the children’s section, which opens up another set of issues. And that’s before you’ve even tried to assemble anything.”

“I would laugh with my ex-husband about it,” she added. “I saw what a pressure cooker it was. In the end, we hired someone to put the furniture together.”

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Cheap, eco-friendly machines, made from discarded bicycle parts and powered by pedalling, are all the rage in rural Guatemala. They’re called ‘bicimaquinas’, and they are used for various purposes in the community – right from simple food processing to making shampoos and soaps.

The unique device is the brainchild of ‘Maya Pedal’, a locally-run non-profit in the rural town of San Adrés Itzapa. Founded in 1997 as a collaboration between Canadian organisation ‘Pedal’ and local mechanic Carlos Marroquín, the organisation is credited with the invention of several devices that make use of spare parts from bikes and harness the power of human energy.

Each bicimaquina (bike-machine) is handcrafted at the Maya Pedal workshop, using a combination of old bikes, concrete, wood, and metal. Their designs are 100 percent original, and are both functional and economical. Priced at about $40 apiece, the machines come in several variations for different purposes.

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German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is undoubtedly a rich man, but here’s a shocker – even his cat Choupette is richer than most people. The furry white feline managed to earn over three million dollars from just two days of modelling work. She is now believed to be the world’s most pampered cat – she has two maids, enjoys First Class travel around the world and even has her own Instagram account with hundreds of thousands of followers.

According to 81-year-old Lagerfeld, creative director of Chanel and Fendi, Choupette did two modelling assignments last year – one for Japanese cosmetics brand Shu Uemura, and the other for a Opel Corsa car calendar. Collectively, the two jobs earned her a whopping three million euro – a figure that professional supermodels might probably get paid for a much harder year’s work.

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28-year-old Guillaume Dumas is a strong critic of the higher education system. In an attempt to make a political statement about how universities exclude people who cannot afford them, he spent four long years as a wandering scholar. He hopped campuses across North America, attending lectures and seminars for free, as an unregistered student. And although he didn’t receive a degree at the end, Dumas has used his education to start a successful online dating business in Montreal.

Dumas, who hails from Quebec, said that he first started campus hopping because it was fun. His parents didn’t even want him to attend college. “My mother got it in her head that I should become a butcher,” he said. “Her friend’s son was a butcher’s apprentice and he seemed to make good money. My father thought I should become a lumberjack in rural Quebec.”

But Dumas had other ideas. He applied to LaSalle College in Montreal and got in. And although he started college like any other 18-year-old, he soon got restless and was unsure of what he wanted to do with his life. He liked psychology, physics and philosophy, so he couldn’t decide on a major. He was spending $4,000 a year on his education, which he felt was a colossal waste. So he dropped out of LaSalle and started attending a few classes at the nearby McGill University. “It was so easy to look at the course listing and them show up for a class,” he recalled. “I thought, why couldn’t I do this at other schools?”

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In the the past 40 years, New Jersey resident Bill Bresnan has written over 10,000 love letters, notes and cards to his wife Kirsten – that’s almost one for each night of their marriage. The couple’s unique love story was recently covered by the media, and Bill and Kirsten, both 74, spoke about the secrets of their successful marriage.

The couple met when Bill was teaching a class back in 1974, and Kirsten happened to be his student. “She was this beautiful Northern European woman who struck me like a bolt of lightning,” Bill said in an interview with ABC News.

“Not long after meeting in class Kirsten and I began commuting to and from Long Island, together, on the Long Island Railroad.” And that’s when the practice of writing notes began. “We exchanged notes, drawings, and little scribblings on paper napkins over coffee on the train.”

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When South Korean café owner Lee Kwang-ho decided to add a couple of sheep to his payroll, it was the best business move of his life. Since 2011, the fluffy employees at Nature Café have been attracting hordes of animal lovers and tourists. The shop serves all the café staples such as coffee, tea, and cake, but it all seems sort of extra-special when enjoyed in the company of a couple of fluffy sheep.

According to Lee, the café’s popularity has spiked recently because according to the lunar calendar 2015 is the Year of the Sheep. So lots of people want to see sheep, and the café is more convenient than seeking them out on a ranch. 21-year-old Lee Hyeon-ji agreed: “We were planning to go to a sheep ranch , but it’s too far and we didn’t have enough time to go there. Then we heard about this place where we can see sheep in Seoul and came to this sheep cafe.”

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Shanghai-based artist ‘Red’ Hong Yi has made a name for herself in the art world by creating larger-than-life portraits of celebrities using unconventional materials. For her latest masterpiece Red used 20,000 teabags to depict a tea maker practicing his trade.

To create the incredibly complex portrait, Hong Yi stained the tea bags individually by steeping them in hot water, to create 10 different shades of brown. Hong managed to achieve this level of color variation by changing the boiling temperature for every teabag and the amount of water used. For the really dark tones, she used food dyes. Once the tea bags were ready, she carefully arranged them to form the portrait, then stapled and attached them to wiremesh before hanging them from a wooden frame.

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After their highly successful 2013 product Sprayable Energy, Silicon Valley startup Sprayable are back with a new product involving transdermal technology – ‘Sprayable Sleep’. It is the world’s first topical melatonin spray that helps you fall asleep naturally and wake up refreshed.

While melatonin pills have long since been used to treat sleep related disorders, the makers of Sprayable Sleep claim it has several benefits over the pills. Ben Yu, 22, and his partner Devan Soni, 35, say that the effectiveness of the hormone in the pill form could be lost to the digestive process, but this doesn’t happen with the spray.

“Sprayable gives you the exact level of melatonin you need (often 30 times less than you ingest with pills) and delivers it gradually over time – mimicking how your body naturally produces and uses melatonin,” the creators said. “Sprayable Sleep puts you in control of your sleep. Whether you’re traveling and have jet lag or are working the night shift, Sprayable will help you get sleep when you want so you’re refreshed and alert when you need it most.”

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