Benedict Jebakumar is a man on a mission. Ever since 2012 he has dedicated his free time to sweeping Bangalore’s Outer Ring Road of metal nails deliberately put there by nearby tire puncture shops to boost their profits. In the last five years, the Indian engineer claims to have collected over 50 kilograms of metal nails from the road.

It all started when Benedict Jebakumar realized that he would often have to deal with a punctured car tire when taking the Outer Ring Road from his home in Banashankari to his office, or vice-versa. He didn’t think much of it at first, but then he noticed the many tire repair shops lining the roads, most of which were often busy fixing the tires of seemingly unlucky motorists. It didn’t take long for him to figure out that whenever he got a flat tire it would always be because of metal nails conveniently located close to one of these puncture repair shops. He went to the local authorities to report his findings and ask them to take action, but they didn’t seem to eager to help. That’s when he decided it was up to him to keep the roads clean for himself and other drivers.

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A 50-year-old woman has apparently been living in Changi Airport, Singapore, for the last eight years, despite owning her own three-room apartment, which she rents out for about $1,000 a month.

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, told Singapore newspaper Lianhe Wanbao that she moved into Changi Airport in 2008, after being hit hard by the global financial crisis. “At the time, I was stuck in a rut and had no other choice,” she said, adding that in the beginning she was terrified by the idea of living in an airport, and only planned to do it for a short period of time, until she got back on her feet. She rented out her three-room apartment and leaned to survive in an environment that she quickly learned provides a person with pretty much everything they need. She apparently became quite comfortable with her new home, as those few nights she originally planned for turned into eight years.

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For the past four decades, billy barr – he insists his name be written with lower case letters only – has been living by himself in Gothic, Colorado, a ghost town deserted since the 1920s, passing the time by recording all sorts of data, from daily snowfalls, temperatures, snow melting, animal sightings, etc.. He never imagined that the results of his 40-year hobby would one day help scientists better understand global warming and earn him a cool superhero name – The Snow Guardian.

billy bar first came to Gothic in 1972 as a Rutgers University environmental science student doing water chemistry research. He liked the quiet life here so much that he completed his semester to get his degree and became a permanent resident of the mountainous ghost town. He had grown up in New Jersey, but never really liked being surrounded by so many people, so moving to this secluded ghost town was a chance to get away from social pressure. “I grew up in the city. It was too much for me,” he says.

barr began the winter of 1974 camping in a tent, which is not exactly ideal in a place where snow reaches twenty-five feet a year. Luckily, the owner of an abandoned mining shack was kind enough to let billy move in, to keep him from freezing to death. It became his home for the next eight years, and also the place where he started his impressive database on snow. The modern-day hermit claims that the sole goal behind his epic journal was to fight boredom. There’s not a lot to do in a ghost town in winter time, so he just started monitoring things like daily snowfalls, snow density, temperature, and anything else he could measure. “I didn’t have anything else to do. It was simple curiosity,” billy says.

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A great-grandmother from Brazil has accidentally been praying to a figurine of Elrond, and elf from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, after mistaking it for Saint Anthony, the late Portuguese priest and patron saint of lost things.

Gabriela Brandão, a make-up artist from Florianópolis, Brazil, made this hilarious discovery last week, posting a series of photos of the Elrond figurine on Facebook. “My daughter’s great-grandmother prays to this figure of Saint Anthony every day, but looking more closely…,” she wrote. She had noticed that something wasn’t right about the figurine, so she started doing some online research. She managed to find an exact replica on an online store, which listed it as Elrond, an Elven character from The Lord of the Rings fantasy universe. She called it the “funniest discovery of 2016.”

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A Thai woman living in Virgina was recently convicted for masterminding an elaborate designer purse scheme that involved buying hundreds of authentic accessories online and returning Chinese knock-offs for full refunds. She would then sell the originals on sites like eBay, for about $2,000 each.

Over a number of years, 41-year-old Praepitcha Smatsorabudh, a preschool teacher in Arlington County, used an ingenious scam to supplement her day-job paycheck. She would buy high end bags like Gucci, Burberry and Fendi online, and then return fake ones she had specially made in China and Hong Kong. Court documents revealed that in order to cover her trail, she traveled to over 60 T.J. Maxx stores in 12 states, to return the bags, and used 16 different credit cards when making new purchases. Smatsorabudh’s scheme was so incredibly successful that at one point she was T.J. Maxx’s number one online client in the world.

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Two Indian sisters recently got the shock of their lives after their 82-year-old mother showed up at their doorstep 40 years after they had laid her body to rest on the Ganges river, following a cobra bite.

It all started on a summer day in 1976, when 42-year-old Vilasa, a woman from Bidhoo village, India’s Kanpur district, went out into the fields to collect fodder for the family animals, as she had done countless time before. Only this time, she unknowingly got to close to a black cobra snake, and got bit. Upon returning home, her family immediately took her to a traditional healer, but his methods failed to alleviate the effects of the venom, and Vilasa soon lost consciousness.

Thinking she had died, her family wrapped the woman’s body in cloth, placed it on a wooden float and released into the sacred Ganges river, hoping it would bring her to life. Open-air cremation is practiced by millions of Indian Hindus, with the ashes of their loved-ones then scattered in holy bodies of water, but in the case of snake bites, some believe that the sacred river can wash away the poison from the body and bring the person back to life. It wasn’t something Vilasa’s family actually expected, though.

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Despite living under the same roof and raising their three children together, a Japanese husband hasn’t spoken a single word to his wife in the last 20 years.

No marriage is perfect, and spouses sometimes give each other the silent treatment when they’re upset. But either they go their separate ways or try to patch things up and move on. But not Okou Katayama. For the past two decades he has only answered his wife Yumi’s attempts at making conversation with occasional nods and grunts. Their unusual relationship was revealed by their 18-year-old son Yoshiki, who appealed to a Japanese TV show to help him fix things, as he had never heard his parents talk to each other.

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The Onomichi Denim Project, a chic boutique in Onomichi, Japan’s Hiroshima Prefecture, is a popular destination for denim enthusiasts looking for a pair of truly special jeans. The shop is well-known around Japan and even abroad for selling premium jeans that have been worn by select members of the local community for at least one year.

Selling used jeans, or any other type of clothing for that matter, is not exactly a new business model, but Onomichi Denim Project is not your average second-hand denim retailer. Created in 2013, as a collaborative effort between local designer Yoshiyuki Hayashi, textile expert Yukinobu Danjo, and Discoverlink Setouchi, an organization that aims to supports local industry, the minimalist boutique aims to draw attention to the city’s top-quality craftsmanship and its people in a unique way. Plus, while used denim is generally sold at a discount, these particular jeans actually get about twice as a expensive after being worn by somebody almost daily, for at least a year.

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After failing to deliver on the contract he had signed with Russian online gift store Pich Shop, a 21-year-old entrepreneur agreed to be auctioned off to the highest bidder and marry a complete stranger for at least one year, in order to avoid being sued.

A week ago, a strange listing showed up on PichShop.ru – a young man named Aleksandr Kramarenko available for marriage, with a 1 year warranty. The “product” was listed as “in stock” and featured a detailed description – including age, height, weight, zodiac sign and interests – and photos (both dressed and topless). The listing mentioned that Aleksandr was going to be auctioned off to be married to the highest bidder, and invited women no older than 35 to bid for the chance to become his wife for at least one year. The minimum bid was set at 10,000 rubles.

This all sounds a bit too corny to be true, and, to be fair, such pranks are not exactly uncommon around the holidays. Some of them are actually pretty elaborate and end up attracting a lot of media attention, which translates into free publicity for companies, but this particular story seems legit.

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It’s not unusual for youth nowadays to speak more than one language, but 32-year-old Muhamed Mešić is not your typical polyglot. He can communicate fluently in 56 different languages and claims to understand over 70 of them.

Ever since he was a little boy growing up in Tuzla, an industrial city in the former Yugoslavia (currently in Bosnia Herzegovina), Muhamed Mešić was fascinated by languages. His exceptional talent for quickly learning to communicate in different languages was discovered by chance, when he was just 5-years-old. He was on vacation with his family, in Greece, and recalls being able to listen to their local neighbor speaking Greek and figuring out what he was saying from the situation they were in.

“This was the first time I met people whose language I couldn’t recognize,” Muhamed remembers. “I could listen to our neighbors talking and then figure out the meaning from the situation. At the end of the vacation, I was able to help my father to communicate with a local mechanic who repaired our car. My parents were shocked.”

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If you’re in need of some emotional advice, but have neither the time or the money to waste on a qualified therapist, this 11-year-old kid has you covered. Ciro Ortiz has set up shop in a New York subway station, and for a measly $2, he offers five-minute “emotional advice” sessions.

Every Sunday, Ciro Ortiz spends about two hours at the Bedford L subway station, sitting at a folding table with a cardboard sign that reads “emotional advice $2”. Believe it or not, people actually do stop by for some pearls of wisdom from the “emotional advice kid”. They ask him about all sorts of things, from relationships and career advice, to Donald Trump, and he does his best to help them find the answer to their problems.

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Pepper Bomb Your Mom is a new online service that allows you to send chocolate-covered Carolina Reaper peppers – the world’s hottest peppers – to your friends/enemies anonymously, for just $9.99.

This past summer, 18-year-old friends Lizzy and Sabrina shot to internet fame after filming themselves doing the world’s hottest pepper challenge and posting the footage on YouTube. 2.2 million Scoville units on the hotness scale proved too much to handle for these girls and they experienced all kinds of nasty symptoms, from the classic burning sensation and panic attacks to nausea and asthma. The extreme experience got them over 8 million views on YouTube and inspired them to launch an unusual business which basically allows people to inflict the same kind of pain they went through by sending them chocolate-covered Carolina Reaper peppers.

“Want to prank someone you love/hate for $9.99? What better way than to send them chocolates with Carolina Reaper peppers on the inside. No, these aren’t your Grandma’s chocolate in the mail. This chocolate is filled with the Guinness World Records ‘Hottest Pepper,” their website states.

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You’re never too old to follow your dreams, and this 68-year-old woman who recently launched her career as a grindcore lead singer is the only proof you’ll ever need.

Hailing from from Windsor, Ontario, The Grindmother started unleashing her hardcore vocal talents in 2014, when her son – who goes by the name Rain Forest – and his friend invited her to join their grindcore band, Corrupt Leaders. They had been looking for just the right voice for their music, and decided to give her a shot as well. “We were recording an EP… and we had her come over and do a guest vocal scream,” Rain Forest said. “As soon as we did the first screams on the video I could see that she had the rage behind it.”

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Emma Tapping, a mother-of-three from the Isle of Man, U.K, first made headlines last year, when she was accused of spoiling her children by getting them 87 Christmas presents each. That didn’t seem to bother her too much, as this year she bought even more gifts for them – 96 each.

After Emma posted a picture of her Christmas Tree buried in a mountain of presents, last year, it went viral and made the rounds online with the caption “Nearly time for all the materialistic parents to compete and broadcast how many presents their kids have on Facebook! Just remember there’s some children’ who don’t get much.” After being approached by various news sites and TV shows about her Christmas shopping habit and the effect it has on her kids, the woman said that she only spoils them on Christmas, because she loves seeing the joy on their faces when they’re opening presents.

“If you ask me if I spoil my kids, I say at Christmas yes I do but I don’t throughout the year. They get the necessities, the school uniform, the things they need but we don’t go on holidays abroad or big shopping sprees,” she said. “Anything they want, they get for Christmas.”

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The staff at a dog shelter in Downey, California, recently had to go through one of the most heartbreaking experiences of their lives – watching a rescued dog get all excited after seeing its family walk through the door, only to learn that they weren’t there to take the pooch home, but pick out another dog.

Zuzu, a 2-year-old German Shepherd mix had been brought to the Downey Animal Care Center after being picked up from someone’s yard. Shelter staff thought she was a stray, but they showed her the same love and affection they do all their canine residents. Still, despite their best efforts, they could tell that Zuzu was miserable, for some reason. “She is a friendly girl but I sensed sadness and confusion,” volunteer Desi Lara said. “Most dogs zoom around the yard. She treaded softly, nervous to look around.” But her attitude suddenly changed one day, when a family came through the gates. As they walked by her enclosure, Zuzu was wagging her tail, barking and looked overjoyed. At the same time, these people began to pet her and talk to her through the fence. You could tell they knew each other very well.

“With her fast wagging tail seeing her owners Zuzu lit up like a Christmas Tree. She looked like the happiest dog. Yeah, she’s going home,” Desi Lara wrote on Facebook. “But no. Talking to her owners they told me they were not here to reclaim her, they were getting another dog.”

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