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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Tateyama Bay, in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, is the meeting place of two very unlikely friends – local diver Hiroyuki Arakawa and an Asian sheepshead wrasse by the name of Yoriko. The pair met 25 years ago and have been visiting each other ever since.

Arakawa has been looking after an underwater Shinto shrine located in Tateyama Bay for over a quarter of a century, also acting as a guide for tourist who want to visit it. During that time, he has become unusually close with a giant friendly fish who comes to greet him whenever he calls. All he has to do is call – by knocking with a hammer on a piece of metal – and the fish shows up. They’ve been friends for 25 years now, and Hiroyuki has even named the fish Yoriko.

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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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45-year-old Rakesh Shukla is a talented software engineer and CEO of a successful tech company, but among India’s animal lovers he is known as “The Dog Father”, an exceptional man who founded the country’s most advanced dog rescue center and who personally takes care of 735 abandoned pooches that nobody else wants.

10 years ago, Rakesh and his wife founded The Writers Block, a technical communication outsourcing company which today works with some of the biggest names in the tech industry – Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.. The Bangalore-based company quickly became successful, and over the next few years the software engineer got to travel the world, buy expensive cars and lead the fancy lifestyle he always thought he wanted. But he still didn’t feel happy and fulfilled. It wasn’t until 2009, when Kavya, a beautiful Golden Retriever, came into his life that he truly felt that his life had meaning.

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Otona Maki, or ‘adult wrapping’, is a Japanese therapeutic method of correcting posture and alleviating body stiffness by wrapping the human body in a large piece of cloth that emulates the comfortable feel of a mother’s womb.

Well-known for their long work hours, many Japanese people develop posture problems and body stiffness. For a long time, getting massages and stretching have been the most popular ways of dealing with these issues, but now someone claims to have come up with an even better solution. Otona Maki is a new and intriguing way of improving posture and making your body more flexible than ever, while at the same time helping practitioners relax by recreating the comfortable feel of a mother’s womb.

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A 6-months-pregnant Florida student has found a very simple yet highly controversial way of paying her college fees – selling positive pregnancy tests online for $30 a piece.

“Very self explanatory: I am 6 months and I am providing a product in which the consumer is able to purchase positive pregnancy tests or urine for your own use,” the woman’s Craiglist ad states. “Whether you are using it for your own amusement such as a prank, or to blackmail the CEO of Apple who you are having an affair with I DON’T CARE AT ALL.” As if it wasn’t clear enough already, the woman assures potential clients that this is an “absolutely no questions asked type of deal”.

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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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From the outside, Thomas Jeromin’s house, in Rinteln, Germany, doesn’t look at all out of the ordinary, but as they say, ‘it’s what’s inside that matters’, and in this case the inside is nothing short of spectacular – a forest of artificial Christmas trees, 110 to be exact, decorated with a whopping 16,000 baubles.

Up until five years ago, Thomas Jeromin decorated a single Christmas tree for his house, just like the rest of the world. However in 2012, he decided to get more of them just to spread the Christmas spirit throughout his home. The idea turned out so well that the next year he upped the number of Christmas trees to 20, then 45, 80 and finally this year he got his epic collection to a whopping 110 trees. They are literally everywhere, from the living room and halls to the kitchen and even the bathroom. The only no-tree zone of the house is the master bedroom, at his wife Susanne’s request.

As you can imagine, installing and decorated over 100 Christmas trees takes a while, and Jeromin confirms that this year he has needed eight weeks to get his house ready for the winter holidays. He began in October, and spent a whole week just bringing the artificial trees down from the attic. It then took him another seven weeks working from morning until evening decorating them with over 16,000 Christmas baubles, hundreds of LED light installations, garlands and wreaths. It was all worth it, though.

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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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As if Nutella wasn’t versatile enough already, it turns out that you can also use it as a temporary hair dye for delicious-looking caramel locks.

Having your hair smeared with a mix of Nutella and condensed milk sounds downright nuts, but as an Instagram video recently gone viral proves, the delicious combination can actually be used a temporary hair dye.

Shot by beauty blogger Huda Kattan at Dubai-based hair salon Abed & Samer, the bizarre video shows a young woman having her blonde hair smothered with dollops of Nutella hazelnut spread and drizzled with condensed milk. The hair-stylist then covers her locks with tin foil to let the delicious mixture work its magic on the hair, before washing it all off in the sink. At the end of the video, the woman sports a natural-looking caramel hair color.

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‘Mistress killer’, ‘China’s top ladies’ detective’ or ‘Terminator of extramarital affairs’ are just some of the nicknames that Zhang Yufen has earned during the 15 years she has dedicated to helping cheated wives gather evidence on their husbands’ affairs and helping them exact revenge on their mistresses.

Zhang Yufen’s war on adultery is fueled by her personal experience. During the late 90’s her husband, who worked in the district taxation bureau in the city of Xi’an, started having an affair and eventually told her that he was seeing someone else and didn’t want her anymore. He took their most valuable possessions, cleaned out their joint bank account and he was gone. The news was devastating and Zhang remembers curling up on the couch and crying for a week. But after the news finally sunk in, she decided that the only way to receive justice was to track down her husband and his mistress and gather evidence about their affair. Little did she know that she would spend the rest of her life doing the same thing for other cheated wives.

Zhang spent five long years tracking down her husband multiple times, as he moved to different locations every time he caught her snooping around. But in 2007, after gathering enough evidence about his infidelity, she was finally granted a divorce and became entitled to a payout from her former spouse. At that point, she had already made a name for herself as a detective helping other wives expose their cheating husbands and their mistresses.

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On December 9th, 2011, champion rock-climber Lai Chi-wai suffered a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down. On the same day, five years later, he climbed Hong Kong’s iconic Lion Rock once again, this time in a wheelchair.

33-year-old Lai Chi-wai is a four-time winner of the Asian Rock Climbing Championships, but on a faithful day, five years ago, his promising athletic career seemed to be over, following a devastating motorcycle accident. “When I woke up, I was already in the hospital and had been operated on. The staff told me … I was paralyzed from the waist down and would be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life,” the young rock climber recalls.

For his family and friends, the tragic outcome of the accident meant that he could no longer do the one thing that truly gave him a feeling of fulfillment – climbing heights. But despite losing the use of his legs, Lai Chi-wai wasn’t ready to give up on his passion. After recovering from the accident, he took up wheelchair boxing, a relatively new sport that he claims improves mental focus and physical fitness of paraplegics and increases their confidence, but he also continued to train with his old mountain climber friends.

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Ajay Munot, a rich businessman in Maharashtra, India, has recently built and donated 90 houses to the poor, instead of spending the money on a lavish wedding for his daughter.

Munot had been planning to spend Rs 70-80 lakh ($115,000) on his daughter Shreya’s wedding, but after consulting with a local politician, he decided there was a better way to spend all that money. Apparently, the grains and cloth trader realized that investing in a one day event, including booking hotel rooms for all the guests was unnecessary, especially with all the poor people in need of real help. So he asked Prakash Bamb, a family friend and member of the Legislative Assembly for advice on how best to spend that money.

They both agreed that providing slum dwellers of their town with their own houses was the best idea. Munot began constructing 108 houses on two acres of land, with the goal of completing them by the day of his daughter’s wedding. He only managed to finish 90 of them by the big day, and the bride and groom, who were very supportive of the businessman’s initiative, were the ones who handed the keys to the carefully selected beneficiaries.

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After seeing many of their loved ones kidnapped by a ruthless drug cartel, the people of Totolapan, a small town in Mexico’s Guerrero state decided it was time to fight fire with fire, so they kidnapped the drug boss’ mother.

For years, Totolapan has been under the control of a gang known as “Los Tequillero”, led by Raybel Jacobo de Almonte, better known as “El Tequillero”. Things had gotten considerably worse for the locals in recent months, as the Tequilleros had become involved in a turf war with other gangs, and started abducting people whom they suspected were supporting their rivals. Sick of living under the constant terror of having their loved ones taken from them, the townsfolk decided to fight back.

On Monday, a few dozen masked men appeared in the streets of Totolapan waving rifles and shotguns, and calling for action against El Tequillero. They identified themselves as a “self-defense” force, as Mexican vigilantes usually call themselves, and demanded the release of kidnapping victims taken by the gang.

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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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