This story’s a little old, but for some reason it didn’t get much media attention in the States, and it just seemed like the kind of wacky news we like so much here on Oddity Central, so we decided to share it.

Tony Traconi, a U.S. paratrooper stationed in the Italian province of Padova, had a commendable but complex wish – for his first son to be born on Texas soil. But with just a month before his first child was due to come into the world, he was thousands of miles away from his home state, with no chance of getting home and back before the big day. But then an idea sprouted in his head: he would ask his parents to fill a Tupperware container with Texas dirt and ship it to him. The end goal – to hide it under his wife’s hospital bed, so his son would technically be born on Texas soil.

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An Ecuadorian man was allegedly caught red handed cheating on his partner with another woman, when the half-time kiss cam showed them kissing in the stands during a soccer match.

Last Saturday, Barcelona of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s very own Barcelona soccer club, made its traditional yearly presentation during a friendly match against rivals Delfin, one of last season’s revelations. It was a good game, but it was surprisingly overshadowed by something that occurred during the half-time break. The kiss-cam showed a young couple making out in the stands, but things got weird when the man saw himself on one of the jumbo screens. He immediately removed his arm from around the young lady, his smile went away instantly, and the two just started looking in opposite directions, like they didn’t know each other.

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A tailoring shop in the Spanish city of Bilbao has sparked a heated debate online after it was reported that it started charging people 15 euros ($16.7) just for trying on clothes.

Camino Azula Pascual, co-owner of the Pascual Bilbao tailoring shop in downtown Bilbao, has been making custom men’s suits and tuxedos for 40 years, so she doesn’t even need a measuring tape anymore. As soon as someone walks through the door, she knows their measurements, and, if they’re in a hurry, she can even recommend something that would suit the special occasion perfectly. But this is a skill that she and her brother Carlos have  honed over four long decades, and wasting it all on people who don’t even want to buy anything is no longer acceptable. That’s why starting this year, Pascual Bilbao has implemented a 15 euro tax for everyone looking to try on suits in the shop.

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In a news story you would expect to read on websites like The Onion, a Ugandan holy man was suspended from his duties as imam, after it was discovered that he had unknowingly wed a fellow man.

27-year-old Sheikh Mohammed Mutumba, was recently suspended from his duties as a cleric at the Kyampisi Masjid Noor mosque in Kayunga, after his wife of two weeks was caught stealing a TV from a neighbour. The theft wasn’t what caused the imam’s suspension, but the shocking revelation that his wife, Swabullah Nabukeera, was actually a man. Mutumba is said to have been totally oblivious to his wife’s real gender, and was devastated by the news. His superiors at the mosque still decided to suspend him in order to ‘preserve the integrity of their faith.’

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A Kansas man made international news this week after it was revealed that he asked an Iowa court to approve a trial by combat so she could meet his ex-wife and/or her attorney on the field of battle.

David Ostrom, a 40-year-old man from Paola, in Kansas, asked the Iowa District Court in Shelby County to give him 12 weeks lead time to forge his own Japanese katana and wakizashi swords, so could he meet his ex-wife and her attorney “on the field of battle where (he) will rend their souls from their corporal bodies.” Ostrom, who doesn’t have any experience in sword fighting, told reporters that even though he doesn’t anticipate a favorable response from the court, he still wants an answer to his request.

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45-year-old Theresa Furrer, a lifelong knitter and crocheter, is helping pet owners keep their beloved animals close to their hearts by knitting their hair into garments and accessories they can wear.

Theresa is part of a community of artists that specialize in a form of yarn spinning known as “chiengora”  – ‘chien’, the French word for dog, and ‘angora’, from the yarn spun from the soft belly fur of the angora rabbit. They basically take dog and cat hair and spin it into yarn that can subsequently be used to make soft clothing or accessories for grieving pet owners. The 45-year-old Pittsburgh woman says that she understands how some people might find her craft somewhat creepy or even gross, but she is not fazed by it at all.

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Tirer of her husband’s drinking habit, a Mexican woman decided to make him think he had become allergic to booze by lacing his beers with natural laxatives like castor oil and plum extract.

After consulting various internet pages and forums, Michel N., a young woman from Sinaloa, devised a plan to make her husband, José Brayan, quit drinking. She managed to get a hold on a mixture of castor oil and plum extract and started putting a few drops of it into his beer bottles, to achieve a mild, gradual laxative effect. José later told police that he found it a bit strange when his wife offered to pop open his beer and bring it to him whenever he needed one, but he simply “let himself be loved and pampered”.

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There’s a hilarious trend sweeping Chinese social media these days and people can’t get enough of it. Videos of people sneaking in their own raw ingredients into hotpot restaurant and dropping them into bowls of simmering broth have been going viral since December.

If you’re ever been to a Chinese restaurant, you probably know all about the hotpot. A staple of Chinese cuisine, it basically consists of a simmering pot of soup stock and a selection of raw ingredients that patrons drop into the stock to be cooked right at their table. Hotpot restaurants are all the rage in China, and they usually offer all the raw ingredients you need for a delicious meal, but a new trend has people sneaking in their own ingredients, which range from mushrooms and herbs to whole chickens and fish.

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A Moscow man made national news headlines this week for putting a drawing he made when he was only six-years-old on sale online for no less than 140 million rubles ($2.3 million).

41-year-old journalist Vladimir Mkrtchyan placed the ad for his old childhood drawing on Russian classifieds site Avito on Monday, and it quickly went viral due to its exorbitant price. 140 million rubles seems kind of steep for a childish drawing, but the seller considers it’s worth twice that much, because it reflects the realities of the Soviet era through the innocent eyes of a six-year-old boy.

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The Thammasat Khlongluang Wittayakom School, in Pathum Thani, Thailand was forced to stop using decibel meters to measure students’ loudness while singing the national anthem, after getting some serious backlash online.

Singing the national anthem as loudly as possible in front of the flagpole every morning is apparently a big deal at Thai schools, so one learning institution got the bright idea to track the loudness of the students using a decibel measuring mobile app. If the students’ singing registered at over 85 decibels, they would be given the green light and be dismissed to head to their classrooms. However, if their singing was only between 80 and 84 decibels, they would have to sing the anthem again two more times, as punishment. If the loudness was under 80 decibels, they would have to sing the anthem three more times. The measure was supposed to instil discipline in students, but it only sparked outrage in everyone who learned about it.

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It’s hard saying goodbye to your favorite pair of jeans, even when they’re way beyond wearable, but English artist Ian Berry has found a way to avoid throwing away denim, by using it to create beautiful works of art.

Netherton-born artist Ian Berry, aka Denimu, has made quite a name for himself after his unique art took the art world by storm. It’s hard to believe the idea of using old denim as medium for his art came after a call from his mother, Christine, asking him to clean out his room.: “It was about six or seven years ago my mum was clearing out my old room and she wanted me to go through my things. I found loads of old jeans and denims and I noticed the different colors and shades. I kept hold of them but it was only about 18 months later I began to do something with them.” Little did he know his experiment would soon make him and his denim art famous all over the world.

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A 35-year old Spanish man was recently arrested after ramming his SUV through the wooden doors of a church so he could gain access inside, claiming it was the only place where he could take shelter from his demonic “possession”.

On January 8th,the unnamed man reportedly drove up to the large doors of the San Juan Evangelista church, in the Spanish town of Sonseca, and started ramming his Jeep into it. At first passers-by didn’t really understand what was going on, and one woman, who thought the driver had been involved in an accident, walked up to the car to see if he was alright only to be scared away by having obscenities shouted at her.

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If you thought Coca Cola Vanilla was weird soft drink, the flavors developed by Shizuoka Prefecture-based company Kimura Beverage will probably blow your mind.

When it comes to new and completely unexplored soft drink flavors, Kimura Beverage is considered somewhat of a pioneer in Japan. Remember, this is the same country where limited edition flavors for popular soft drinks – like sakura Pepsi or Coca Cola Apple – are pretty much the norm. What sets Kimura apart from any other drinks company is the originality of their flavors, which range from pickled plums to fish eggs and potato chips.

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At just seven years of age, Mikail Akar is already a well-known name in the art world. His paintings sell for thousands of dollars all over the world, and he has already been given the nickname “Preschool Picasso”.

Born in Germany, Mikail’s talent for painting was discovered by mistake, three years ago. His parents bought him a canvas and some handprint paint and let him get creative with them. They has already bought him plenty of toys and action figures, so they thought they’d get him something different, but they definitely weren’t expecting him to paint a masterpiece. But Mikhail did such a good job with his first canvas that his father thought his wife had painted it.

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When two farmers in China’s Hubei province decided to let their neighbors take a bag or two of their newly-grown white radishes, they had no idea it would cost them their entire 500 tonne harvest, or about $42,000 in cash.

Xu Jiuge, one of the farmers who suffered the shocking loss last month, told the Chutian Metropolis Daily newspaper that he and his partners decided to let their neighbors take a few radishes for home consumption after some of them praised their produce, saying that it tasted great in their winter soups. After all, they only had a few neighbors, and if each took a bag or two of radishes, it didn’t really affect their hundreds of tonnes harvest. But what the farmers didn’t expect was for their neighborly courtesy to turn into a free-for-all that not even the police could stop.

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