When 27-year-old business school graduate Mason Wartman quit his Wall Street job to sell $1 pizza slices, to many of his friends it seemed like the anticlimax of a brilliant career. But the man was simply trying to achieve a different sort of greatness with his no-frills pizza shop, Rosa’s Fresh Pizza, in Philadelphia’s Center City. In the past one year, the shop has served 8,500 free slices of pizza to homeless people, by harnessing the generosity of its patrons.

The shop operates by a ‘pay it forward’ system – customers who walk in to buy pizza can also sponsor a slice for a homeless person. In this way, about 30 to 40 homeless people are able to eat for free at Rosa’s every single day.

Even before the pay-it-forward scheme was implemented, Rosa’s Pizza, which is located on an almost vacant block, used to always give away free slices to hungry homeless people in the neighborhood. But one day last March, a customer asked if he could pay for the next homeless person who walked in. Wartman immediately agreed, and then put up a sticky note on the wall, just to keep track of the pre-paid slice.

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Kevin, a 27-year-old man from Chicago, has a very strange hobby – he wears body casts, even though he has no injuries! Kevin has been addicted to  plaster casts for the past 21 years, and he has spent over $50,000 on his bizarre fixation. Although he realizes it’s ridiculous, he has no idea how to stop.

On an episode of TLC’s popular My Strange Addiction show, Kevin explained that wearing the casts makes him feel snug and comfortable, and that the very act of putting one on gives him a rush. “It really gives me this high that I just can’t really get any other way. My blood starts pumping and I get really nervous. It’s just a rush.”

“I don’t have any broken bones, but I’m addicted to putting orthopedic casts on my body,” he said. “I’m perfectly fine, perfectly healthy. I like the feeling of the cast around me. I’ve done two full arm casts, two full leg casts. I’ve done two full leg casts and an arm cast. I’ve put on so many casts, it’s ridiculous.”

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Benjamin Bennett probably has the most bizarre YouTube channel. For the past six months, he has been sitting in front of a camera in zen-like silence, smiling, for hours on end! He’s put out at least 120 hours of footage of himself doing nothing but sitting, without offering any explanation whatsoever.

Ben’s videos made no noise at all – literally and figuratively – until he reached the middle of his 25th live stream. Once he started getting a decent number of views, everybody wanted to know what he was doing and why. Some thought it was art, while others speculated that he was meditating. A few were convinced that he was mentally ill.

The mystery was finally solved a few days back when Vice published an interview with the man himself. When asked why he was doing this, he was quite vague about it. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seemed like something the internet was lacking. It seemed like it needed to be done, and nobody else was going to do it.”

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Kindness is not always rewarded, as proven by Chinese officials who are punishing a 65-year-old woman for taking in abandoned children with physical and mental disabilities.

Kong Zhenian, from the rural village of Jiu Jiu in northern China’s Shanxi Province, has been caring for physically and mentally-challenged children for the past 40 years. “I found the first one on the side of the road,” she said. “She had just been left there and I felt so sorry for her I just had to do something.” So she took the child into her care and hasn’t stopped helping children since then.

“I have now raised 39 children,” she added. “All of them are regarded as having problems, either physically or mentally. But in fact, many of them were simply suffering from neglect. It costs a lot of money to care for them but we have managed.”

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A Los Angeles artist is on a mission to cover her entire body with tattoos. She’s offering herself up as a human billboard by tattooing people’s names and designs all over her body, for as low as $10.

Illma Gore, 22, said that the initiative is a part of her ‘absurd and beautiful’ project called A Hundred Tiny Stories. She was actually trying to raise $6,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, in order to cover the cost of 60 hours worth of tattooing. She actually managed to raise a whopping $11,000, until the campaign got suspended.

“It’s art,” she explained. “It will annoy people or make them happy or make them smile. Either way, that’s what art’s supposed to do.”

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Damien Preston-Booth is probably the smartest, most resourceful beggar in the world. Every week, the 37-year-old from Lancashire travels all the way to London’s Mayfair to accept donations from wealthy tourists – via credit card! He actually carries around a card reader to make sure he doesn’t miss out on contributions from rich people who don’t have cash on them.

Every Wednesday for the past five years, Booth has journeyed from his £300 a month rented apartment in Preston to London, where he pretends to be homeless, spending three days and nights sleeping rough and begging. He walks up to potential donors and tries appealing to their generosity. If they’re ready to contribute, he quickly whips out his mobile card reader that transfers all payments to his PayPal account. The reader is linked via Bluetooth to his smartphone, and the donor receives a receipt for his donation.

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Modern Cambodian hero Aki Ra has made it his life’s mission to rid his nation of land mines. The one-man army spends most of his day chopping vegetation in fields and delicately prodding the areas that set off his metal detector. More often than not, he uncovers hockey-puck sized antipersonnel land mines, and destroys them with a controlled explosion. “I want to make my country safe for my people,” he said.

There was a time when Cambodia was plagued by over six million land mines buried underground in paddy fields and lush jungles, ready to indiscriminately murder soldiers and innocent children alike. The devices were once used by the nation’s warring factions, including the notorious Khmer Rouge, to finish their enemies.

Aki Ra, who used to be a child soldier for Khmer Rouge, has spent over 22 years of his life single-handedly removing land mines that were left behind unexploded. Between 1992 and 2007, he was able to rid his homeland of a whopping 50,000 mines, armed with nothing but a pocket knife, pliers, a stick, and his bare hands.

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Once a heroin addict, young Michael Grant managed to turn his life around and become Philly Jesus, one of Philadelphia’s most iconic characters. Since April last year, the 28-year-old has been hanging out at LOVE park, in Center City, dressed as Jesus Christ. “I’m not the real Jesus,” he admits upfront. “I’m just a huge fan. I’m doing it as a walking billboard for the King of Kings.”

Every day, Grant walks seven miles to LOVE Park, carrying with him a 12-foot wooden cross with wheels at the bottom that he made himself. “This is my way of letting my light shine, by carrying a cross in the ‘hood’,” he explained. “This is my way of sharing Jesus without preaching a blow horn and condemning people. It’s like making a statement. When they look at me, I don’t want them to see Michael, I want them to see Jesus.”

Grant, who was raised in a Catholic family, is the older of two brothers. His mother says that he was always a creative child, did theater and loved drawing. He even went to a clown school, where he learned to juggle knives and torches. “He liked people’s reactions, so he always liked reaching people that way,” she said.

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New York resident Seth Cohen is on an epic quest to track down and meet every single one of his namesakes in the world. The project, he says, isn’t so much about meeting his namesakes as it is about the road less traveled, living in the world, not just on it, connecting with people he would never otherwise connect with, visiting places he would never otherwise visit and experiencing things he would never otherwise experience.

“I am on a mission to meet every Seth Cohen in the world, live life to its fullest and inspire others to do the same,” the globetrotter wrote on his website. “I don’t know what I will find, but I’m excited to find out…” The name ‘Seth Cohen’ is apparently quite common, a fact that Seth realized a couple of months ago. “My last birthday was in September,” he explained. “Everyone started posting on my [Facebook] wall, and this one woman that I barely knew said, ‘Seth, my favorite person in the world, have an amazing birthday.’ I was flattered, but I thought there is no way I am this woman’s most favorite person.”

So Seth snooped around and figured out that the woman, and four other friends, were connected with Seth Cohens on Facebook that weren’t him. He was so intrigued by this that he spent weeks trying to find out just how many Seth Cohens were out there. He spent time combing Google, social media websites, and online White Pages, and the results were mind-boggling – he found that there are at least 300 other Seth Cohens in the United States alone!

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26-year-old Luke Cameron has performed a good deed every day for an entire year, and he says that the exercise has completely transformed his life. The Cheltenham resident made the vow when a close friend died from cancer last year, and since then, he has been doing at least one nice thing every single day. He estimates that he has spent close to £3,000 ($4,700) on good deeds in the past year.

“In a world of taking selfies with your besties and Instagramming pictures of your new handbag and Rolex watch, we forget to think about anyone else but ourselves,” he said. “Our generation has forgotten to care about others, because we are too self-obsessed to even care what others are going through.”

Luke runs a website called TheGoodDeedDiary.com, on which he documents every single good deed or kind gesture – ranging from taking the trash out for his elderly neighbor, or baking cakes for his family and friends. He has also purchased meals for several people at McDonald’s, and even paid for a stranger’s petrol just because they stood next to him in the line. Luke now has over 12,000 followers on his corresponding Facebook page, and more than 6,000 followers on Twitter.

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Meet Jari “Bull” Mentula, a bodybuilder from Finland who looks a lot like the Marvel superhero The Thing, of the Fantastic Four. Not only is he muscular enough to fit the bill, but his head gets so abnormally wrinkly when he flexes his muscles that the resemblance becomes uncanny.

Jari has been a familiar face on the IFBB (International Federation of BodyBuilders) tour during the last 15 years, making a name for himself in competitions and even winning the European Bench Press Championships in 2002, 2004 and 2008. But he only became known to the general public last year, when a photo of him working out was posted on popular news sharing network Reddit. The image was captioned “I guess that’s the brain popping out, isn’t it?” And indeed, the bodybuilder’s head looked so incredibly wrinkly that it looked like his brain was about to burst through his scalp.

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Abulfazl Abbas Shakoory not only bears an uncanny resemblance to legendary martial arts master Bruce Lee, but he can also perform his incredible moves almost to perfection. Shakoory has become an internet celebrity of sorts, after putting up videos of his stunts on social media websites.

The 20-year-old Kabul resident, who calls himself “Bruce Hazara” has been practicing various types of martial arts ever since he was a child. He had always considered Bruce Lee his hero, and describes the ability of mastering his famous moves as his “only dream”. To accomplish his goal, Shakoory has also started practicing Wushu, a full-contact sport derived from Chinese martial arts. As fate would have it, his face resembles that of the great Chinese actor as well, and adopting his famous bowl haircut made “Bruce Hazara” an almost perfect doppelganger.

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Hu Juan, a 28-year-old mother of two from Hunan, China, suffers from a rare condition known as Cutis laxa which has caused the skin on her face and neck to age at an accelerated rate, leaving her looking like a woman in her 60s or 70s.

The young woman’s nightmare began 11 years ago, right after she gave birth to her eldest son. She started noticing that her appearance was changing fast and just six months after giving birth, her youthful looks had deteriorated drastically to the point where she could hardly recognize herself in the mirror. Hu Juan was diagnosed with Cutis laxa, an extremely rare connective tissue disorder that causes the skin to become loose, saggy and wrinkled at a very rapid speed due to loss of elasticity. It has only affected her face and neck, and several medical checkups over the years revealed that she is otherwise  in good health. Hu Juan is the only known Cutis laxa sufferer in China and one of ten worldwide. Read More »

In order to raise money for the treatment of his leukemia-stricken son, a man in China turned himself into a human punching bag, offering passers-by in Beijing the chance to hit him in exchange for 10 yuan ($1.6).

The young father was first spotted on the streets of Beijing on November 27, wearing a t-shirt that read ” human punching bag, 10 yuan per punch”. In front of him there was a donation box covered with hospital diagnosis certificates that proved his son was suffering from leukemia, so that people could that this crazy way of raising money was for a good cause, and not just a stupid prank.

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Togbe Ngoryifia Céphas Kosi Bansah, a.k.a King Bansah of the Hohoe, is a real African king who doesn’t believe in old-fashioned methods of governance. He prefers to live in Germany and rules his subjects via Skype! The 66-year-old king moved to Germany several years ago as a foreign exchange student – he fell in love with the country and decided to stay.

Interestingly, King Bansah was named successor to the crown in 1987, when his grandfather – the reigning king – died. He was chosen over his father and older brother, simply because they were left handed. The trait is apparently considered unclean and indicative of dishonesty in Hohoe.

The coronation ceremony took place in 1992, but King Bansah decided him being a king didn’t require moving back to Africa. He still lives in Ludwigshafen, near Frankfurt, with his German wife Gabriele, where he runs a car repair garage and also finds the time to govern the 200,000 Hohoe people in southeastern Ghana, through Skype and telephone calls. According to news reports, he even stays up late at night to rule on tribal disputes and makes sure to visit his kingdom at least six times a year.

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