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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Okiku, aka “The Haunted Doll of Hokkaido” is a creepy old Japanese doll residing at a temple in Iwamizawa Temple that allegedly grows human hair. Obviously, it’s also said to be haunted by the spirit of a little girl.

There are various legends regarding Okiku, but the most popular one speaks of a traditional Japanese doll bought by Eikichi Suzuki, a seventeen-year-old boy from Hokkaido, who bought it for his little sister, in 1918. It is said that the tree-year-old girl, called Kikuko, loved the doll very much, took it everywhere with her, and slept with it every night. But, as is often the case in these creepy legends, young Kikuko died one day after catching a cold, and that’s when things started getting strange.

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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 20-year-old man from the Japanese city of Himeji has been hailed as a modern-day ninja, after managing to live unnoticed in an elderly woman’s house for half a year.

The young squatter’s incredible run came to an end earlier this week, when his 90-year-old host’s son came to visit and cook her dinner. During his time there, the man heard some strange noises coming from the second floor of the house, and walked up the stairs to investigate. When he opened the door to one of the upstairs bedrooms, he was shocked to find a young man sleeping on a futon. Instead of losing his composure and confronting the intruder, he kept his composure, simply closing the door very slowly and going back downstairs to ask his mother if she new anything about someone else living in her house. The 90-year-old woman had no idea what her son was talking about, so the man called 110 (emergency number) to report the trespassing.

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The Angry River is a short interactive film that uses eye-tracking technology and artificial intelligence to gauge who the viewer looks at and where their eyes linger most on screen. The film then edits itself into one of five possible storylines, to suit the viewer’s interest.

The Angry River is basically a film with the interactivity of a multiple-ending video game, only instead of using a controller or a keyboard to make choices that impact the storyline, you do it with your eyes instead. Armen Perian, the filmmaker behind this groundbreaking project says that he was inspired by something one of the members of his editing team said three years ago. It sounded crazy at the time, but a seed was planted in Perian’s head, and with the advancement in artificial intelligence, that crazy idea became reality.

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After having its written payment notifications ignored by a client, a utility company in Russia came up with an ingenious way of coercing the debtor to pay his dues – it dumped a three-tonne concrete pyramid in front of his luxurious villa.

Samara Utility Systems Ltd. had long been trying to get the unnamed resident of Zubchaninovka village, in Russia’s Samara region, to pay his 50,000 ruble ($810) debt for unpaid water bills. The company had sent him several written notifications, had contacted him by phone, and even sent people to reason with him in person, but to no avail. So management decided to try something new. They commissioned a 3-tonne-heavy, 1.5-meter-tall concrete pyramid, plastered it with shameful slogans and dumped it in front of his home, to serve as a reminder that he had a debt to bay.

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Paul Gonzales is not the first and probably not the last man to ditch a new date and leave her with the restaurant bill, but he is definitely the most notorious and prolific dine-and-dash dater in recent history. According to news reports, the Pasadena man has been leaving his dates with the bill for over three years.

Gonzales first made headlines in March of last year, after ditching two women on separate dates in Pasadena, California, and leaving them with expensive restaurant bills. One of victims told news reporters that she had checked online and had discovered stories of at least two other women conned by the same man, going back one year. The bad publicity he got last year, following extensive media coverage of his exploits, doesn’t seem to have bothered the dine-and-dash dater too much, as just a few days ago two more women came forward to complain about being left with the bill.

One of Gonzales’ most recent victims, who preferred to remain anonymous, told CNN affiliate KCAL that she had met the man on a dating app and agreed to go on a date with him. After enjoying a scrumptious dinner and two cups of coffee, the man reportedly started talking about his sick aunt and how worried he was about her. Then he excused himself to get the charger for his phone from the car, but never came back, leaving her to cover the $130 bill.

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Having your blood tested, getting a nutritional breakdown of every piece of food you out in your mouth and talking about high cholesterol and vitamin deficiencies sound more like a hospital visit than an enjoyable dinner party, but they are at the core of a new trend among health freaks – health optimization parties.

Keeping track of your calorie intake, drinking kale smoothies and eating quinoa salads are all fine and dandy, but if you’re really serious about your health, you’ll want to take things to the next level. That’s where health optimization parties come in. These social events allow health conscious friends and family to get an in-depth analysis of their actual health, while enjoying healthy foods and drinks and talking about the things that really matter, like cholesterol, vitamins and fitness routines.

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A woman in Norwich, UK, was recently banned from singing and playing loud music in her apartment, after neighbors complained that her screeching sounded like “a drowning cat”.

48-year-old Heather Webb has reportedly terrorized neighbors in her apartment building with her singing for at least four years. In 2014, her neighbors filled anti-social behavior forms and sent them to the local council, but she only received a community protection warning from the police. Then, in 2016, neighbors again complained to the council about her loud, disturbing singing, but no action was taken against the woman. Finally, in December of last year, a judge issued Webb a Criminal Behavior Order which legally banned her from singing in her apartment. But she didn’t let that stop her.

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Iranian actors dressed as Islamic State fighters recently stormed a shopping mall in Teheran, in an attempt to promote a new film about a father and son who travel to Syria to deliver humanitarian supplies but end up kidnapped by ISIS. Unfortunately, their performance was a bit too good, and caused some shoppers to run for their lives.

It was supposed to be a harmless publicity stunt for Iranian director Ebrahim Hatamikia’s new film, ‘Damascus Time’, with actors dressed as ISIS militants peacefully visiting the Kourosh Complex shopping mall and cinema, in Teheran, and posing for pictures. However, the actors decided to show off their acting skills, and really got into their characters, storming the shopping complex and shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ while waving their fake firearms and machetes around. One of them actually rode through the mall on a horse, while another pretended to connect the wires on a fake bomb.

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In what can only be described as one of the dumbest ideas by a criminal ever, a young Russian thief covered his face with green paint to make himself harder to recognize by potential witnesses. Spoilers – it didn’t work.

Last weekend, police in the Russian city of Krasnodar arrested a 23-year-old man accused of stealing a woman’s purse at a local train station. According to a statement by the Krasnodar office of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, the victim notified police that her purse had been snatched while she was waiting at the train station, and a team was dispatched to investigate. Upon arriving at the scene, police officers started questioning eyewitnesses about the perpetrator and learned that he had a very distinctive, albeit unusual trait – his face was completely green.

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Wallace Leatherwood , a beekeeper from North Carolina, went through what most people would consider a living nightmare and came out unscathed. He drove 40 miles with thousands of bees loose in the cabin of his truck, and didn’t get a single sting.

Last Tuesday, Leatherwood bought about 18,000 bees from Wild Mountain Bees in Weaverville, and put them in the back of his truck. But before driving back home to Waynesville, he went to look at a job and then stopped at a local diner to get some lunch. Because he didn’t have anywhere shady to put the bees, he grabbed three of the boxes from the bed of his truck and moved them into the cabin. Only Wallace didn’t notice that one of them wasn’t as securely closed as he had thought, so when he came back from the restaurant, he found the cabin crawling with around 3,000 bees.

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Unravel Project, a non-conformist luxury fashion brand created by French designer Ben Taverniti, is taking the ‘less is more’ concept to a whole new level with a deconstructed blazer that consists of half an actual blazer. Luckily, what this intriguing garments lacks in fabric, it more than makes up in price, costing a whopping $1,450.

The term ‘deconstructed blazer’ isn’t exactly new in the world of fashion, it was just never used to describe half a blazer. Instead, the term suggests peeling layers off the construction of a regular blazer, like the canvas interlining that gives it that characteristic stiffness or the shoulder pads, so that the sleeves fall naturally. But Unravel Project decided to give the term a more literal meaning, by just doing away with half the blazer.

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A Beverly Hills teenager recently dragged her mother on the Dr. Phil show to complain that she has to live like a peasant, after her monthly allowance was cut from $5,000 to just $1,000.

Ever since she was born, 15-year-old Nicolette has been given everything she ever wanted, including a nanny, personal driver and trainers, shopping sessions on Rodeo Drive and a bag collection that would make most women jealous. As a teenager, she would spend between $5,000 and $10,000 on designer clothes, accessories and other things most kids her age can only dream of. However, her mother Nina decided she couldn’t keep up with Nicolette’s spending, so she cut her allowance to “only” $1,000 a month. The self-described “spoiled brat” could’t accept that, so she asked the famous Dr. Phil to straighten things out.

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