Kevin, a 27-year-old man from Chicago, has a very strange hobby – he wears body casts, even though he has no injuries! Kevin has been addicted to  plaster casts for the past 21 years, and he has spent over $50,000 on his bizarre fixation. Although he realizes it’s ridiculous, he has no idea how to stop.

On an episode of TLC’s popular My Strange Addiction show, Kevin explained that wearing the casts makes him feel snug and comfortable, and that the very act of putting one on gives him a rush. “It really gives me this high that I just can’t really get any other way. My blood starts pumping and I get really nervous. It’s just a rush.”

“I don’t have any broken bones, but I’m addicted to putting orthopedic casts on my body,” he said. “I’m perfectly fine, perfectly healthy. I like the feeling of the cast around me. I’ve done two full arm casts, two full leg casts. I’ve done two full leg casts and an arm cast. I’ve put on so many casts, it’s ridiculous.”

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68-year-old Ekaterina Bilyik is fondly known as ‘The Punisher’ in her home town of Zhidaev, Ukraine. Contrary to her appearance, the frail-looking grandmother is a total badass – she recently completed a gruelling military training alongside army cadets four decades younger than her.

The amount of energy and enthusiasm that she displayed during training is quite awe-inspiring. Footage from the training camp shows her rolling over snow-covered fields, leaping high, and firing assault rifles along with all the young men in her troop. And believe it or not, she is now training to take part in the raging battle in eastern Ukraine.

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Japanese women are blessed with beautiful skin, which is mainly attributed to their fresh diet and great genes. While those might be legit reasons, it turns out they also have a little known beauty secret – shaving their faces! The trend was pioneered by beauty salons in Japan, and many women now believe that it is the real reason for younger-looking skin.

While men generally shave the areas of the face with the thickest hair growth, Japanese women get rid of their facial fuzz all over. This supposedly creates a silky smooth, porcelain texture that’s highly desirable among the Japanese. The beauty treatment has become so popular that almost all salons offer a shave as a part of their regular services. Some women do it once every season along with a common facial, others once a month, and there are even those who shave at home every day with their own blades. Some prefer to shave their entire bodies, and some go as far as shaving off their eyebrows because they feel that real hair is an unrefined feature of the face.

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Anthropology sophomore Van Truong recently combined art and biology in an effort to ace her final exam in December. While most of her college mates used lists and flashcards to memorize stuff, Van used a whiteboard to write out all her notes in the form of ‘Starry Night’, Van Gogh’s famous masterpiece.

“I knew I had to study for this exam, and I knew I’d be writing on this whiteboard for hours,” she said. “So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if I did it in a form where people didn’t know how to feel about it?’”

So when she got to Smathers Library on the University of Florida’s Gainesville campus, she started to write down all her notes with the words forming a replica of Van Gogh’s iconic painting. Three hours later, the masterpiece was complete.

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Kindness is not always rewarded, as proven by Chinese officials who are punishing a 65-year-old woman for taking in abandoned children with physical and mental disabilities.

Kong Zhenian, from the rural village of Jiu Jiu in northern China’s Shanxi Province, has been caring for physically and mentally-challenged children for the past 40 years. “I found the first one on the side of the road,” she said. “She had just been left there and I felt so sorry for her I just had to do something.” So she took the child into her care and hasn’t stopped helping children since then.

“I have now raised 39 children,” she added. “All of them are regarded as having problems, either physically or mentally. But in fact, many of them were simply suffering from neglect. It costs a lot of money to care for them but we have managed.”

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A Los Angeles artist is on a mission to cover her entire body with tattoos. She’s offering herself up as a human billboard by tattooing people’s names and designs all over her body, for as low as $10.

Illma Gore, 22, said that the initiative is a part of her ‘absurd and beautiful’ project called A Hundred Tiny Stories. She was actually trying to raise $6,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, in order to cover the cost of 60 hours worth of tattooing. She actually managed to raise a whopping $11,000, until the campaign got suspended.

“It’s art,” she explained. “It will annoy people or make them happy or make them smile. Either way, that’s what art’s supposed to do.”

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Believe it or not, North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, is actually a big fan of K-pop music. In fact, he’s so passionate about it that he hand-picked every member of the girl group ‘Moranbong Band’ – his country’s answer to the Spice Girls.

As a result of Kim Jong-un’s endorsement, the band has been playing sell-out gigs across the country. Their first concert was so popular that the streets of Pyongyang were apparently deserted during the broadcast. Often dressed in conservatively sexy attire – with skirts cut well above the knee and hair clipped short – the Moranbong girls have received good reviews from local critics as well.

Although the band has been around for a few years, they appeared to have fallen out of favor in late 2013. But after a six-month hiatus, they were back to performing in April 2014 to rave reviews from Korean media, thus reclaiming their status as queens of North Korea’s pop scene, and the darlings of primetime TV. Their comeback concert featured ‘colorful numbers’ such as ‘O My Motherland Full of Hope’, ‘Our Father’, and ‘We Think of the Marshall Day and Night’.

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Damien Preston-Booth is probably the smartest, most resourceful beggar in the world. Every week, the 37-year-old from Lancashire travels all the way to London’s Mayfair to accept donations from wealthy tourists – via credit card! He actually carries around a card reader to make sure he doesn’t miss out on contributions from rich people who don’t have cash on them.

Every Wednesday for the past five years, Booth has journeyed from his £300 a month rented apartment in Preston to London, where he pretends to be homeless, spending three days and nights sleeping rough and begging. He walks up to potential donors and tries appealing to their generosity. If they’re ready to contribute, he quickly whips out his mobile card reader that transfers all payments to his PayPal account. The reader is linked via Bluetooth to his smartphone, and the donor receives a receipt for his donation.

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Believe it or not, there’s a village in India where none of the 300-odd buildings – homes, educational institutions, and even banks – have doors. Cash is stored in unlocked containers, as are valuable pieces of gold jewellery.

Even most of the public toilets in Shani Shingnapur village square have no doors. “For reasons of privacy and following requests by women, we recently agreed to put a thin curtain near the entrance, but not doors because that would go against our belief,” said village shopkeeper Parmeshwar Mane.

Some villagers do put up loose door panels against their door frames, but this is done only at night, to keep out wild animals and stray dogs. The only problem with the lack of doors is that there’s nothing to knock on to announce your arrival. But the villagers have a solution for this, too. “Just shout out and somebody will come to the door,’’ one of the villagers, Rani, explained.

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We’ve seen some pretty weird things done with beer in the past – zombie beer brewed with smoked goat brains, garlic-flavored beer, and even a beer-based breakfast spread. But this Icelandic beer has got to be the most outrageous beverage we’ve ever come across. Believe it or not, it’s flavored with fin whale testicles smoked in sheep poop!

The special edition beer is a product of Icelandic microbrewery Steðji – they came up with the blend for the country’s mid-winter festival Thorrablot, which starts next week. Named Hvalur 2, the drink has an alcohol content of 5.2 percent. “We smoke the testicle by the old Icelandic way, with dried Sheep shit, and this method gives the beer a really unique smoke flavor,” said Steðji co-owner Dagbjartur Arilíusson. “At Thorrablot, we eat ram’s testicles, rotten shark, soured whale fat, etc, as we did in the old days. We think this product will suit the festival really well.”

Interestingly, Hvlaur 2 is actually the second whale-flavored beer from the brewery. Last year they teamed up with whale hunting firm Hvalur to make a beer out of whale meal, a byproduct of processing whale meat. That beer was temporarily banned by public health authorities. This year though, the brewery claims that they have all the necessary permits to sell Hvalur 2.

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Once a heroin addict, young Michael Grant managed to turn his life around and become Philly Jesus, one of Philadelphia’s most iconic characters. Since April last year, the 28-year-old has been hanging out at LOVE park, in Center City, dressed as Jesus Christ. “I’m not the real Jesus,” he admits upfront. “I’m just a huge fan. I’m doing it as a walking billboard for the King of Kings.”

Every day, Grant walks seven miles to LOVE Park, carrying with him a 12-foot wooden cross with wheels at the bottom that he made himself. “This is my way of letting my light shine, by carrying a cross in the ‘hood’,” he explained. “This is my way of sharing Jesus without preaching a blow horn and condemning people. It’s like making a statement. When they look at me, I don’t want them to see Michael, I want them to see Jesus.”

Grant, who was raised in a Catholic family, is the older of two brothers. His mother says that he was always a creative child, did theater and loved drawing. He even went to a clown school, where he learned to juggle knives and torches. “He liked people’s reactions, so he always liked reaching people that way,” she said.

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When 26-year-old Alex Noble realied that his job in finance was taking the life out of him, he decided to quit and pursue a career with the undead. The horror fan from Cardiff now works as a professional zombie – in case you’re wondering, that is a real job.

Alex explained that he has always been interested in zombies. For five years, he worked as a zombie extra in films, TV, and games. He mostly worked for free, but the experience finally paid off when he was offered a position at Slingshot, the company that runs the zombie chase game ‘2.8 Hours Later’.

“People started noticing me, because I was doing things differently,” he said. “I had a niche look and I was doing the movements and noises differently.”

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In a highly impressive display of mental prowess, young South Asian children are able to solve complex math calculations within seconds simply by flicking their fingers through thin air. Their secret tool –  an imaginary abacus.

News reports on the Mind Mathlon 2014 program held at the Robotics Lab of the Karachi Institute of Technology and Entrepreneurship in March described young children raising and flicking their fingers to keep track of long series of numbers and solve calculations with mind-blowing accuracy.  They were apparently taught to use their hands as the beads of an abacus – an ancient calculating tool – to add and subtract at the speed of a calculator.

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It’s easy to assume that there’s only one way to view the world, but in reality, different species perceive their surroundings very differently, based on the shape of their heads and the positioning of their eyes. We may never know if they see things that we can’t, but with this new range of immersive helmets, humans can finally get a glimpse of what it’s like to be in an animal’s shoes. Or head!

The fascinating aluminium helmets were created by Irish artists Anne Cleary and Dennis Connolly, from the architecture firm Cleary Connolly. Inspired by the pioneering experiments of psychologist George Malcolm Stratton in the early twentieth century, the duo spent several years trying to invent a device that could explore ‘the mysteries of visual perception’.

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50-year-old Sayagh Jacques has a rather unusual hobby for a homeless man – bodybuilding. Although he’s been living on the streets of Paris for years, he hasn’t let his homeless status stop him from training harder than most people, and maintaining his six pack abs. I suppose it goes to show that if you’re really passionate about something, you can make it happen under any circumstances.

Jacques has no qualms about working out right in the middle of the street. When people give him money, he doesn’t use it to smoke or drink. Instead, he tries to eat specific foods that will help him gain muscle. He’s also managed to procure a few pieces of makeshift equipment – a cable and a few ropes – that he ties to lamp poles and park fences. He uses these to do basic bodyweight exercises like pull ups, push ups, pullovers and rows.

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