A young Russian artist was recently sentenced to 11.5 years in prison for bringing home two small bottles of ayahuasca – a famous spiritual medicine prepared by indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin  – that he bought while visiting Peru.

Maxim Gert, a resident of Nizhny Tagil, a city in Russia’s Sverdlovsk Oblast, had no idea that a simple souvenir he bought on a business trip to Peru could land him behind bars for over a decade. Maxim had long been suffering from back pain, and while in the South American country, someone suggested he meet one of the local shamans and try ayahuasca, a traditional spiritual medicine with known psychoactive properties. It’s unclear whether he noticed an improvement while consuming the brew in Peru, but he did decide to continue his ayahuasca treatment at home, so he took two small bottles with him on the flight home. That turned out to be a huge mistake.

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Many smokers pick up the habit at an early age, but there are probably not many who started as early as Rapi Pamungkas. This Indonesian 2-year-old apparently started smoking by picking up discarded cigarette butts nearby his mother’s market stall, which older boys would then light for him, and now reportedly goes through 40 cigarettes a day.

Soon after starting smoking, Rapi became hooked and soon became famous in his native city of Sukabumi for harassing passers-by and pestering them for cigarettes. Many locals found his antics amusing and would give him cigarettes, laughing as he lit them up. Videos of the extremely young child started doing the round online, and his story recently went viral worldwide. In some of these videos, people can be seen trying to take the cigarette from Rapi; he responds by scowling and pulling the cigarette back.

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The Fuxi Mountain Skywalk, a glass, horseshoe-shaped glass bridge standing 360 meters above a canyon floor, was recently the scene of one of the most bizarre wedding proposals in human history.

Xiao Jing, a 23-year-old woman from Xinmi City, in China’s Henan province, decided to pop the big question to her boyfriend of three years on the beautiful glass bridge of Fuxi Mountain. While lovers arrange marriage proposals here all the time, Jing’s reasons were a bit unusual. You see, her boyfriend, Xiao Yu, had always had a fear of heights and she could never really get over his “cowardice”, so before she married him, she needed to make sure that he was strong enough to conquer his fear.

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You need an exceptional pair of lungs to inflate a tyre tube by blowing air into it through your mouth, but one Chinese man has recently set a new world record by inflating 12 tubes at the same time, with one nostril.

43-year-old Tang Feihu accomplished the impressive feat in just two and a half minutes, during a recent event held at Nanjiang Grand Canyon. The stuntman reportedly started off by inflating 10 tyre tubes with a diameter of over 60 cm, a feat that took him 2 minutes and 39 seconds to complete. After taking a 5-minute break to catch his breath, Tang upped the stakes, this time using one of his nostrils to push air into 12 tyre tubes at the same time. It took him only 2 minutes and 30 seconds to finish the job, a new world record.

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A 42-year old woman who thought her contact lens had fallen off when she was hit in the eye with a shuttlecock 28 years ago recently discovered that it had actually been lodged in her eyelid all this time.

Those of us who no longer have perfect vision understand just how amazing and convenient contact lenses can be, especially when it comes to an active lifestyle. But in some cases, instead of making our lives easier, they can cause annoyances. In very rare cases, those annoyances go beyond dry eyes or eye infections—they can actually become embedded in your eyelid, all without you knowing it.

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If you’re a vegetarian who is curious about or misses the taste of smoked ham, you’ll be pleased to learn that there’s an interesting substitute you can try.

Will Horowitz, owner of Ducks Eatery in East Village, NYC, has caused an Internet sensation with his new “smoked ham” which actually consists not of meat, but a whole watermelon. At first glance, Will’s creation looks entirely like meat, complete with scoring and charring. And even when you cut into it, the middle has red “flesh”, reminiscent of a rare steak. But the taste is something different; while the initial taste is a salty, meaty one, it quickly transforms into sweetness, especially as you get closer into the center of the faux ham.

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Eva N., from the Slovakian town of Štúrovo, was recently arrested after defying the Supreme Court’s decision to stop playing a four-minute aria from Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘La Traviata’ on loop every day from early in the morning until late at night.

It’s safe to say that Eva N.’s neighbors on Kossuth Street, in Štúrovo, know Verid’s La Traviata by heart. After all they’ve been forced to listen to it for 16 years, ever since the woman started playing it from loudspeakers on her balconies almost non-stop during the day. They’ve been trying to get her to stop for years, appealing to both local police and the justice system, but Eva just defied everyone and kept turning on Placido Domingo’s interpretation of La Traviata every morning at around 6 am, and only turned it off at around 10 at night. Luckily, after over a decade and a half of audio torture, Slovakia’s Supreme Court recently upheld the decision of a lower court that required Eva N. to stop playing her music at loud volume. She ignored the ruling as she did the previous ones, only this time, she got arrested.

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Pokemon GO may not be the phenomenon it was a couple of years ago, when virtually everyone was playing it, but the mobile game still has its share of die-hard fans. And 70-year-old Chen Sanyuan may just be the world’s most dedicated Pokemon GO player.

If you’ve checked out the Pokemon GO subreddit over the last couple of months, you may be familiar with the “hardcore pokemon hunter grandpa” from Taipei City, in Taiwan. Photos of him riding his customized pokemon-hunting bicycle have been doing the rounds on Reddit for a while, and every time a new one is posted, the bike appears to be getting crazier. Well, it’s not just appearances, Chen Sanyuan, the 70-year-old pokemon hunter is upgrading his bicycle every chance he gets. He currently has a whopping 9 smartphones – all connected to different Pokemon Go accounts – installed on the handlebar, as well as 9 power banks stored in a small basket, which allow him to hunt pokemons for around 20 hours at a time. Now that’s dedication!

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She may not look like one, but 96-year-old Inge Gingsberg is a rock star. She is the songwriter and lead vocalist of death metal group TritoneKings and is known as “Death-Metal Grandma”.

Inge has had quite a remarkable life. She grew up in Austria, but was forced to flee to Switzerland in the early days of World War 2, to avoid persecution. She spent years in a refugee camp, and after the war, she and her husband relocated to Hollywood, where they had to start their new life from scratch. Inge was able to begin a career in the music industry, composing songs for some of the most popular singers at the time, such as Nat King Cole, Doris Day, and Dean Martin. After a while, Inge started to get tired of Hollywood life, and decided to reinvent herself. Today, she is the vocalist of a death metal band.

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The term “stalker” first came into use in the 20th century, to describe the harassment of celebrities by obsessed strangers. The problem continues to this day, with public figures such as Queen Elizabeth II and Miley Cyrus suffering from stalking campaigns from captivated individuals. These stalkers are generally mentally unstable, yet highly resourceful.

With these high profile cases, the victims can take comfort in the fact that they have dedicated security who will work tirelessly to protect them from these volatile obsessives. But what if you’re just a normal person who becomes the target of a manic stalking?

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Most dog owners who lose their beloved pets try to convey just how much they want the returned in the flyers they post, but one Chinese man just let everyone know that if they find his runaway Husky, they can just keep him, because he’s tired of chasing after him.

Last Sunday, Wang Wei, a property agent from Chongqing, was walking his pet dog named Huazhu when the animal spotted another dog, slipped out of its leash and ran after the other canine. Wang ran after his pet, but lost sight of him at one point and just couldn’t find him after that. So he went home and drafted some unusual flyers that he later posted around the area where he lost Huazhu. They basically said that the dog was sort of a canine escape artist and that he was tired of having to constantly run after him, so whoever found him was welcome to keep him.

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A Chinese woman recently decided to have a stomach reduction operation after seven years of taking weight loss pills and actually putting on 100 pounds more than when she started taking them.

25-year-old Xiaoli (pseudonim) started taking weight loss pills seven years ago, after watching a convincing commercial on TV. She weighed around 100 pounds at the time, but felt like she needed to lose a bit of weight, and if some pills could help her do that, than why not? The young woman recalls that the results were encouraging at first, but as soon as she stopped taking the pills, she not only put on all the pounds she had lost but added a few extra as well. Little did she know that this was the beginning of a vicious cycle that would see her spend around 200,000 yuan ($30,000) on various weight loss pills and custom diet plans over the next 7 years, only to have her weight double during that time.

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A Florida-based conman who somehow managed to steal millions from wealthy investors all around the world by posing as a Saudi Arabian prince and diplomat was finally exposed after he made the mistake of eating bacon and other pork products at business meetings.

Anthony Gignac, a Columbian-born man who was adopted by a Michigan family as a child, started his grandiose swindling operation in 2015, by setting up a fraudulent investment company, Marden Williams International, to purportedly invest in business opportunities worldwide. Using various aliases, the con artist spent the next two years posing as a wealthy Saudi prince and stealing over $8 million from 26 victims all around the world. Gignac bought fake diplomatic license plates on eBay and put pompous words like “sultan” in the door nameplates of penthouses and mansions where he met with his victims. This was apparently enough to fool people into thinking that he was a real prince.

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Big sporting events like the World Cup are supposed to bring people together in support of their favorite teams and players, but for one Russian couple married for 14 years, the 2018 World Cup was reason for divorce.

40-year-old Arsen and his 37-year-old wife, Ludmyla, are both big football fans. In fact, they met in a Chelyabinsk sports bar during the 2002 World Cup, and they bonded over their mutual passion for the sport. The fact that they were fans of two rival Moscow football clubs, Spartak Moscow and CSKA Moskow, didn’t stop them from getting married, but last week, it was their love for the two biggest rivals in modern football history – Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo – that ended their 14-year marriage.

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Levon Arakelyan was 44 years old in 1985, when his wife asked him to dig a potato storage pit under their house in the village of Arinj, in Armenia’s Kotayk region. He obliged, but after finishing work on the pit, he just couldn’t stop chiselling, so he kept at it every day, for the next 23 years.

A builder by trade, Levon was drawn to the rock the moment he started hammering away at it with a chisel. His wife Tosya, who now runs his underground temple as a tourist attraction, says that he was motivated by a series of visions and dreams in which a mysterious voice told him to keep digging. It said that Levon was going to create a He listened, and worked a whopping 18 hours a day, every day, for 23 years. At first, progress was slow, as he had to chisel his way through solid black basalt, but a few meters below the surface, he reached softer volcanic stone which made his work much easier.

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