After being served an official notice asking why he had only been present at work 16 times in the last 8 months, an engineer from the Indian state of Gujarat replied that he was the 10th incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, and had been too busy with divine work to focus on his job.

Rameshchandra Fefar, an engineer at Gujarat government’s Sardar Sarovar Punarvasvat Agency (SSPA), claims he first got an indication of his “divine greatness” in August of 1999, from the newspaper horoscope. He felt his body being detached from his being and getting filled with ‘divya anand’ (divine happiness), but didn’t know exactly what had happened until his wife read the daily horoscope. It mentioned that he would become a leader of men and be supremely intelligent.

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A 71-year-old woman from Mazatlan, Mexico, claims that she is six-months pregnant and will soon give birth to a beautiful girl. This would make her the oldest mother in history.

Maria de la Luz says that she first suspected she was pregnant three months ago, when she started feeling tired and experienced symptoms like dizziness and vomiting. She went to a private clinic for an ultrasound which revealed that she was going to become a mother for the ninth time. The 71-year-old woman admits that doctors at the clinic were even more surprised than she was and claims to have had a total of 10 ultrasounds in the last three months, just to be sure.

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Joe Quililan, a young snake catcher from the Philippines, has been dubbed “Venom Man” for his unusual habit of allowing poisonous snakes to bite him every week and even injecting small quantities of venom into his body in order to boost his resistance to it.

31-year-old Quililan, from Cagayan de Oro City, caught his first Northern Philippine Cobra when he was only 14-years-old. Back then, he didn’t have much experience handling snakes, so one day the cobra bit him, only instead of going to the hospital, the teen just brushed it off and got on with his day as if nothing had happened. Most people would have experience severe breathing problems soon after being bitten, followed by a loss of consciousness and then death, but not Joe. He claims that that first snake bite made him realize that he had an unusual resistance to cobra venom, and spent the following years trying to become completely immune to it.

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69-year-old Xia Boyu recently became the oldest double amputee to conquer Mount Everest. That alone is an amazing achievement, but even more impressive is the fact that he did it on his fifth attempt, the first of which had caused him the loss of both his feet as a result of severe frostbite.

Xia Boyu’s first tried to reach the top of Mount Everest in 1975, as part of an expedition backed by the Chinese Government. With only 250 meters to go from reaching the summit, the team was pinned down by bad weather which didn’t let up for two days and three nights. The long wait took its toll on the climbers, and to make sure that everyone made it back alive, the team decided to turn back and fulfil their dream another time. During the descent, Xia gave his sleeping bag to one of his colleagues who was in a worse shape than him. Unfortunately, this selfless act would cause him to lose both his feet to frostbite.

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Authorities in Hejiang county, China’s Sichuan province, have come up with a controversial method of convincing borrowers to pay up their debts – showing their faces and names during short clips played in cinemas before the main movie starts.

Called “Reel of Shame”, the clip features an animated character who tells the audience “Come look at these laolai” before showing the borrowers’ faces, names and other details on the big screen. The derogatory term ‘laolai’ refers to borrowers who fail to pay their debts on time. To maximize the technique’s effectiveness, authorities show the borrowers’ faces in cinemas in their local area.

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A Mexican mayor who incurred the wrath of his constituents by not fulfilling his campaign promises was recently detained in the town hall until he agreed to pay a considerable ransom.

Alfonso Hernández Montiel, the mayor of Chichiquila, had only five months left from his mandate to fulfil the promises he had made during his electoral campaign. However, dissatisfied locals decided they weren’t going to sit around and wait for his term to end while he continued to lead them on with more empty promises. On Sunday, a large number of Chichiquila residents staged a massive protest in front of the city hall, demanding that he deliver on all the things he promised during his campaign, including the construction of an important bridge.

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A Swedish mother of two whose tattoo artist misspelled her son’s name decided that it was easier and a lot less painful to legally change the boy’s name rather than go through several painful laser removal sessions.

30-year-old Johanna Giselhäll Sandström, from Kyrkhult, Sweden, wanted to show her devotion to her two children, Nova and Kevin, by having their names tattooed on her arm. She visited a local tattoo shop, told one of the tattooists there what she wanted and gave him her children’s name. He never asked anything about the spelling and instead just went to work on her arm. The woman didn’t notice anything strange about the tattoo at first, but when she got home and had a closer look at it, her heart sank. Instead of ‘Kevin’ the artist had misspelled it ‘Kelvin’.

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It’s perfectly normal for someone to laugh uncontrollably when tickled, although some of us are more ticklish than others, but researchers at the University of California, San Diego, recently reported the unusual case of a woman who would burst into laughter when seeing other people being tickled.

Referred to only as TC, the woman was apparently seeking help for her bizarre condition – whenever she saw someone getting tickled, she could feel the sensation on her own skin and would start to laugh uncontrollably as if she was the one getting tickled. Researchers conducted a series of experiments to explore the bizarre phenomenon further and concluded that the woman suffered from a rare condition known as mirror-touch synaesthesia. It is believed to be caused by mirror neurons, connectors in the brain that react the same way when an event is experienced or when it’s simply observed.

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A 25-year-old Dallas man posed as a freshman high-school student for nine months so he could once again relive his glory days as a teen basketball player.

Sidney Bouvier Gilstrap-Portley enrolled at the Skyline High School last year, claiming to be a Hurricane Harvey refugee named Rashun Richardson. At the time, Dallas high-schools had opened their doors to hurricane evacuees, and Gilstrap-Portley was savvy enough to take advantage of that. In October, he transferred to Hillcrest High School, where he again claimed to be a homeless hurricane evacuee. He joined the school’s basketball team, became its star player and was voted the District 11-5A offensive player of the year for the 2017-2018 season. Unfortunately for Sidney, his love for basketball proved to be his undoing.

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Two Singaporean women recently contacted police after being conned out of $S1,450 ($1,080) by a man who sold them nine small bottles of “holy water” which he claimed could cure their bad luck and solve all their problems.

We’ve all heard of cunning snake oil salesmen using their power of persuasion to sell fake cures to gullible people, but it takes a special kind of talent to sell a small quantity of water for a small fortune. Well, either that or you need to find potential customers naive enough to fall for your lies. In retrospect, 30-year-old Ms. Yang, from Singapore, admits that she and her sister probably should have thought twice before spending a total of $S1,450 on nine small bottles of water just because the seller told them it was capable of turning their luck.

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The Creeping Devil is a rare and fascinating species of cactus that is not only capable of cloning itself to survive, but also of detaching from its major shoot to move through the desert over time.

Also known by its scientific name, Stenocereus eruca, this unusual species of cactus is endemic to the northwestern Mexican state of Baja California Sur, and is the only known moving cactus in the world. Unlike most other species of cactus, which typically grow vertically, toward the sky, the creeping devil is different – it lies flat on the ground with only its tip slightly raised. This plays a major role in the plant’s survival in isolation, but also in its unique capacity to migrate along the desert over long periods of time.

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A woman  who recently gave birth at a clinic in Miso, Japan, recently posted a series of photos of the food she was served there, and they make it look like she had her baby in a Michelin star restaurant.

When talking about hospital food, most people use phrases like “barely edible” or “tasteless” or “hard to stomach”, but Japan is proof that hospital food doesn’t have to be disgusting. Imgur user jenkinsinjapan, who  was recently checked into a small OB-GYN clinic in Miso for childbirth, shared some photos of the various dishes she had to put up with there and they look mouthwatering.

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A French family barely escaped with their lives after exiting their car not once but twice to photograph the full-grown cheetahs at a safari park in the Netherlands.

The first thing visitors are told when visiting a drive-through safari park is to never, under any circumstances, leave their vehicles. Failing to follow this most important rule can lead to serious injury or even death from the wild predators roaming the grounds. But that risk was apparently not considerable enough to deter a French family visiting the Beekse Bergen safari park, in southern Netherlands, from getting out of their car with their small children, just so they could snap better pictures of the cheetahs roaming around.

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A family in Yunan Province, China, recently had to give up the pet puppy they had bought two years ago after it grew into a 250lbs black bear.

Su Yun, who lives near the city of Kunming, bought the animal two years ago, while on vacation. At the time, she thought she had paid for a Tibetan Mastiff puppy, one of the most highly-regarded dog breeds in China, and didn’t much care that it was sold by a random man on the side of the road. The price was good and the puppy certainly looked like it was going to grow up to be an impressive specimen. Little did she know that the “puppy” would exceed all her expectations, at least in terms of size.

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Risa Hirako is a charismatic Japanese fashion model whose age-defying looks have become a hot topic among beauty bloggers and people looking for an anti-aging regimen that works. She is 47-years old, but looks better than most women in their 20s.

A successful model, fashion entrepreneur and the former wife of actor Eisaku Yoshida, Risa Hirako has been a celebrity in Japan for a relatively long time. However, her Instagram profile attracted a considerable number of western fans as well, many of whom started following her after falling in love with her youthful looks and charming personality. They just assumed that she was a young up-and-coming Instagram influencer, but then, a couple of years ago, someone shared a Wikipedia entry on Risa Hirako which mentioned that she was born in February of 1971.

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