Meet Shabani, a handsome male gorilla that has managed to steal the hearts of young women all over Japan. He is fondly known as ‘ikimen’, a Japanese term for ‘good-looking man’, and some have even hailed him as the animal-world equivalent of George Clooney or Hugh Jackman!

Shabani, who grew up in an Australian zoo, has been living at Higashiyama Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Nagoya, Japan, since 2007. The western lowland gorilla is blessed with a shiny black coat and a macho brooding expression that make him very photogenic. In fact, his photos have gone viral on Twitter, where fans have shared them thousands of times over with comments like: “he’s too handsome!”

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Popular whisky brand Johnnie Walker has launched a bizarre new product that they claim will enhance the taste of your drink. ‘The Johnnie Walker Boldest Wax’ collection is a flavored mustache wax that when applied generously makes every sip of whisky taste better!

Priced at about £7.99 ($12) a pot, the hand-mixed waxes are made of 100 percent natural beeswax. They come in three flavors – Piperine Pepper, Citrus Essence, and Ginger Root – and are designed to complement the Johnnie Walker and ginger cocktail serve. They supposedly carry a scent that “lingers beneath the nostrils.”

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A Russian man has surprised the medical community by claiming that a liver transplant from an African-American donor has made his skin darker!

It all started when 65-year-old Semen Gendler, an inventor from Krasnodar, was diagnosed with hepatitis C and cancer. He was told that his only hope of survival was a liver transplant, so he decided to fly to the United States for the procedure. “Doctors made it quite clear to me that if I didn’t have a liver transplant I would not live,” Gendler revealed.

“I do a lot of business in the US with partners in New York, and I asked him to help me arrange for the operation where if you have enough money it is possible to do it more quickly than in Russia,” he added. “Fortunately, I was able to afford the cost of the $500,000 operation. In Russia, I would have had to wait too long for a donor.” During the course of the operation, Gendler received the liver of a 38-year-old African-American man. He says that the transplant has saved his life, but then his friends and family began to notice something odd. As he recovered from his illness, his skin was turning darker.

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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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Justin and Jola Siezen are an unconventional family.  They have adopted a traveling lifestyle and are constantly on the move with their baby son Piko, in a mobile home. But that’s no ordinary mobile home – it’s a magical truck that transforms into a fantasy castle, complete with a kitchen, bedroom, turret bathrooms, and a rooftop bathtub!

The couple used to spend a lot of their time on the road, because of Jola’s job as an acrobat. “We were traveling around overseas and thought about coming back to New Zealand and where we were going to live,” Justin said. “I remembered living in a bus and I was thinking ‘that’s actually not a bad idea, that would be a good start when we get back until we decide on something else.”

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Icelandic artist Snorri Asmundsson recently made news headlines for a very bizarre request – he’s asking dying people to donate their corpses for his latest art project. He apparently plans to use corpses in a dance video, promising to return them to their families once he’s done.

Snorri first came up with the idea in 2008 – he received media attention back then for putting up a Facebook ad asking for people on their deathbeds to get in touch with him. “Looking for dead bodies in the name of art,” his ad read. “I need a few corpses for a video installation. If you are dying I would like to borrow your remains after you die. The bodies will be returned to the undertaker in the same condition.”

Understandably, the ad caused quite the controversy in the Nordic island. “It was in all the media in Iceland and I had strange articles written about me,” Snorri said. “Some people contacted vicars asking their opinion. People had decided that I was going to do something really unethical with those corpses. It’s nothing like that.” Read More »

A pastor from South Africa, who previously made headlines for praying for his congregation until they stripped, is now in the news again for turning a young woman’s hair into food and having his followers eat it straight from her head.

Pictures posted on The End Times Disciples Ministries’ Facebook page show the pastor, Prophet Penuel Mnguni, placing his hands on the woman. Other members of the congregation are seen holding her hair in their hands and actually attempting to eat it. The pictures are captioned: “Man of God held the head of a woman of God Thapelo from Mabopane and her hair turned into food for the sons and daughters of God to eat. Everything depends on what we say because we carry life in our tongue.”

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There are two things you need to have if you live on Baldwin Street, in the city of Dunedin, New Zealand – strong leg muscles and stamina! Locals claim that the 350-m long street holds the world record for the steepest in the world, and while this isn’t officially confirmed, it’s definitely believable – the street is so steep that it had to be laid with concrete, because asphalt would flow down the slope on a warm day.

Baldwin street has a maximum slope of 1:2.86, a 36% gradient. This means that for every 2.86 meters traveled horizontally, the street rises by one meter. That’s plenty of exercise for the residents of the residential suburb of North East Valley, where the street is located. The lower reaches are only moderately steep, but the upper reaches are hair-raisingly abrupt.

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After plastic rice, concrete-filled walnuts, and beef flavored pork, the latest food scandal in China involves expired meat that’s at least 30 to 40 years old!

Chinese food safety officials have seized over 100,000 tons of meat, worth 3 billion Yuan ($484 million), including pig trotters from the 1970s and chicken wings from the 1980s. As the news went viral online, netizens coined the term ‘zombie meat’ to refer to the expired, oxidized meat.

800 tons of illegal meat were seized from Hunan province alone, worth an eye-watering 10 million yuan – one of the largest food safety hauls in recent years. 20 illegal gangs have been cracked down on and 22 people arrested, including two ring leaders.

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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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Cashing in on people’s desperation to lose weight is a new device that’s pretty much the medical equivalent of bulimia. Its main function is to pump out the contents of a user’s stomach, right after a heavy meal.

The makers of ‘AspireAssist’ claim to have already helped hundreds of patients in the US shed copious amounts of fat, some dropping as much as a 100 pounds. The controversial product will also be available in the UK within a few months, but hundreds of critics are speaking up against the outrageous device, warning that it is a stop-gap measure that fails to address the real cause of obesity.

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Gary Ross Dahl, who died earlier this year at age 78, will always be remembered for inventing the ‘Pet Rock’, a 1970s novelty toy craze. The brilliant salesman essentially sold rocks for a living, and managed to make millions through his “ridiculously successful marketing scheme.”

Although he began his career as an advertising copywriter, Dahl quickly turned entrepreneur when his idea of selling rocks as pets took off. It all started one night in the mid-’70s, while having a drink at a local bar in Los Gatos, California. People around him were talking about pets, and about how difficult it was to feed, walk and clean up after them.

Struck by sudden inspiration, Dahl declared that he had no such trouble with his own pet. “I have a pet rock,” he told the crowd. And his response was so well received that he began to toy with the idea, eventually setting up a business around it.

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The Tarantula Hawk is a type of wasp with an excruciatingly painful sting that lasts only three minutes, but feels like a lifetime. The pain, rated four (highest) on the Schmidt sting pain index,  is best described as “fiercely electric”. Bug experts and people who have been stung claim the pain is a lot like getting electrocuted. And the best strategy to deal with it is – get this – to lie down and start screaming!

According to a report in the Journal of the Kansas Entomology Society, “Tarantula hawks produce large quantities of venom and their stings produce immediate, intense, excruciating short term pain in envenomed humans.” The report adds that “the instantaneous pain of a tarantula hawk sting is the greatest recorded for any stinging insect,” but “the venom itself lacks meaningful vertebrate toxicity.” In other words, the wasp’s sting isn’t deadly, but it’s so painful that it’ll make you want to die.

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When artist and musician Genesis P-Orridge met his future wife for the first time, in 1993, she dressed him up in her clothes, makeup, and a wig, transforming him into her lookalike. That, in essence, was his first step towards self-transformation, two decades in the making. To this day, even though his wife Jaye has passed on, Genesis continues their love affair by trying to become her.

Genesis, who was born Neil Megson, was already a controversial musician, artist, and a pioneer of modern body transformation in the ’70s and ’80s, long before he met his wife. His 1976 art collective COUM Transmissions, staged an exhibition called ‘Prostitution’, which featured pornographic photographs, sculptures made of used tampons, and transvestite security guards. He had his genitals pierced in the early ’80s, making it to the front page of many British publications.

But his highly unconventional life got even more bizarre after his first meeting with Jacqueline Breyer, a.k.a Lady Jaye. Genesis fell hard for the tall, blond registered nurse, who shared his passion for body modification.  “She told me she saw me as a mirror image of her, and that we were meant to be two halves of one,” Genesis recalls of that first meeting. Since then the two became inseparable.

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Rodrigo Duterte, the Mayor of Davao City, Philippines, is being hailed as ‘The Punisher’ for his controversial crime fighting strategies. Despite being a government official, Duterte allegedly uses vigilante methods that have elicited severe criticism across the world. But in Davao, he’s considered a hero. During his long mandate, he’s transformed the city once known as the murder capital of the Philippines into what many call “the most peaceful city in Southeast Asia”.

The Punisher is a comic book and movie character who will stop at nothing to keep criminals in check. He resorts to violence, torture and even murder in his war against wrongdoers. Some say Duterte isn’t very different. Although he has never openly admitted being involved in the kidnappings and executions of various crime lords in Davao, his controversial comments on crime and encouragement of vigilante activity have convinced a lot of people that he is indeed a real-life Punisher.

“If you are doing an illegal activity in my city, if you are a criminal or part of a syndicate that preys on the innocent people of the city, for as long as I am the mayor, you are a legitimate target of assassination,” Mr Duterte said in 2009. Three years later, during a press conference, he reportedly offered a $120,000 reward to whomever brought him the head of an alleged gang leader, and a $24,000 bonus if it was brought in a bag of ice, “so it won’t smell so bad”.

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