29-year-old Kuang Zhengxuan is currently making waves on Chinese social media websites for his atrocious behavior – he’s actually suing his parents for not taking care of his financial needs. Despite his age, Kuang apparently expects his parents to continue ‘raising’ him, an attitude that has earned him the nickname ‘man-baby’.

Kuang is said to have quit school at a young age and studied woodworking and haircutting instead. He tried working for a while, but he says he was wrongly accused of stealing and beaten. That’s when he concluded that he has no real abilities, so he simply stopped working.

According to news reports, he lived a rather lazy lifestyle in his parents’ home. He spent all his time sleeping or playing with his cellphone. Fed up with his behavior, his parents recently asked him to leave home and fend for himself.

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It’s not easy to apologise, and most people would like to avoid it entirely if possible. Well, it turns out it is possible, if you happen to live in Japan. They have these ‘apology agencies’ through which you could simply pay someone to say sorry on your behalf.

I can see why these businesses are so successful – it’s really tough to face the person you’ve wronged and tell  them that you’re sorry. It’s a highly uncomfortable situation, especially if you’ve made someone angry or hurt their feelings.

By hiring an expert, not only do you get to avoid the discomfort, you also make sure that the person gets a proper apology. These agencies train their employees to handle things based on the gravity of the situation. These people are professionals, and it looks like they can get you out of all sorts of sticky situations.

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25-year-old Zilla van den Born managed to fool her friends and family into believing that she was on a five-week vacation in South-East Asia, when, in reality, she was at home in Amsterdam the whole time, clicking seemingly authentic holiday photographs and putting them up on Facebook to create the illusion!

Zilla devised the elaborate lie as a part of her University project through which she wanted to show how Facebook status messages and photographs are not accurate indicators of real life. “I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media,” she explained. “Thereby we create an online ideal world which reality can no longer meet. My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality.”

“Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives,” she added, wisely.

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Wang Zi-heng met his childhood sweetheart when he was only six years old, and the moment he set his eyes on her, he told his mother he was going to marry her. While most people would dismiss such emotions as childish fantasies, Wang never forgot his vow. It took him 18 years to fulfill his promise, but he actually married that same girl.

When he was just a six-year-old boy living with his parents in Zhengzhou City, China’s Henan, Wang Zi-heng happened to meet a pretty girl of the same age, in his neighborhood, and instantly fell in love with her. He even told his mother in all seriousness that he had met the woman of his dreams.

Wang and the girl went to the same kindergarten, played together every day and soon became inseparable. They even used to kiss secretly when they played house. The parents found the young couple so cute that they’d dressed them up in wedding clothes and clicked a picture on an old wooden bridge somewhere in the city. Soon after the picture was taken, however, Wang was forced to move away from the neighborhood to a different area, losing touch with his one true love.

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Late last month, German artist Michael Sailstorfer made a surprising announcement –  he said that he had buried 24-carat gold bars on the Outer Harbor beach in the town of Folkestone, in South East England, and that it was ‘finders-keepers’. In the wake of this unusual news, hundreds of people have been thronging the beach, hoping to uncover at least a small portion of the hidden fortune.

The eccentric artist said that the project was his contribution to the town’s art festival, The Folkestone Triennial, which began last Saturday. He named the installation ‘Folkestone Digs’, and described it as a unique project to get people involved in art. The event was funded by Bristol-based designers ‘Situations’.

As a part of the installation, Sailstorfer hid 30 gold bars of varying sizes – 10g and 20g – in the sands of Outer Harbor. It might not sound like much, but each bar could be worth hundreds of dollars, and people get to keep everything they find. Sailstorfer encouraged people to start their search a couple of days before the festival actually started. As expected, hundreds of diggers turned up at the beach with buckets and spades, hoping to strike gold.

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The Ardbeg Distillery is getting ready to test a drink that’s literally out of this world – the first whiskey to have ever been matured in outer space. After spending three years on the International Space Station, the vial of single malt is finally returning to Earth. It is expected to land on solid ground in Kazakhstan on September 12, before making its way to Houston.

The project is part of an experiment to study the impact of gravity on how alcohol matures. The whisky was launched into outer space in an unmanned cargo spacecraft in October 2011, along with particles of charred oak. The vial containing the alcoholic drink was specially designed for the mission, and has been orbiting the earth 15 times a day for 1,045 days, on the ISS.

When the vial returns, the alcohol won’t be consumed right away. It has to be tested by scientists first, and compared with regular whisky from another bottle that was corked around the same time. They plan to examine the interaction of the Ardbeg-crafted molecules with charred oak, to measure the differences between earth-whiskey and space-whiskey.

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Avtar Singh Mauni, from Punjab, India, is the proud owner of the world’s largest turban. The devout Sikh’s enormous headgear consists of no less than 645 meters of fabric, weighing 100 pounds. It took him a staggering 16 years to assemble, and he needs to spend six hours just to put it on. And you thought you had problems getting ready in the morning!

The 60-year-old is rather proud of his unusual, multi-colored turban; he declared that he will continue to wear it until he has no strength left in his limbs to carry it. “I don’t consider it a burden. I’m most happy when I wear it,” he explained.

In fact, Avtar Singh is so used to the turban that he finds it odd when he isn’t wearing it. “On the rare times I don’t have my turban on, I keep getting this feeling of being incomplete, that some part of me is missing,” he said. “I get afraid that I may fall and I keep wondering ‘have I lost something, where is my turban?’”

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When Krystina Butel was 15 years old, she went on a holiday and decided to get her caricature done. And then she fell in love with the drawing so much that she has spent the past 15 years and over $200,000 trying to look just like it.

Krystina, now 30, has gone through five boob jobs, lip injections, botox, teeth whitening and semi-permanent makeup just so that she could resemble the drawing of herself. “When I saw the caricature for the first time on holiday, I was jealous of it,” the salon-owner from West Yorkshire revealed. “She was so glamorous. She was everything that I wanted to be. It was like holding a carrot out to me, showing me what I could be.”

While most people would have chosen to simply keep the drawing as a souvenir, Krystina decided to actually make herself resemble it. So she spent a large fortune on beauty treatments and surgery to achieve her goal. And it appears that she is far from being done.

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A young couple from Orlando, Florida, have found the perfect way to organise their dream wedding without spending a penny. Courtney McKenzie and her fiancé Jamil Newell are opting for a corporate-sponsored ‘social’ wedding and honeymoon, which means their special moments will feature all sorts of product endorsements and ads.

Courtney, who works in social media and runs a marketing company, is the brains behind the idea. “I thought, why not couple my two loves: my soon to be husband Jamil and my love for marketing?” she said. Jamil isn’t complaining either – after all, who wouldn’t want an all-expense paid wedding and honeymoon?

The couple, who love traveling, will be getting married this winter at their dream wedding destination – Thailand. The wedding ceremony itself will take place on December 14, and they plan to spend the next 11 days traveling in South East Asia, doing exciting things like elephant trekking, scuba diving, and bamboo river rafting.

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UPDATE: Apparently, Noiva de Cordeiro isn’t exactly the bachelors’ paradise it was made out to be by Western media. According to a recent article in the Brazilian newspaper O Globo, the Belo Vale town isn’t that much different from any other rural settlement. Most of the women shown in the photos working in the field and doing chores are apparently happily married, and the population is made up of both men and women, in equal proportion. It’s just that the majority of men work in the city during weekdays, so they’re left tending to their homes and crops.

Unfortunately it’s been again confirmed that if something sounds too good to be true, it generally is. 

Noiva do Cordeiro, a picturesque Brazilian town in the hills near Belo Vale, is one of the very few all-female settlements in the world. Its 600-odd female residents are mostly between the ages of 20 and 35. They all live by a strict set of rules that allows only women to dominate society – but now they’ve extended an invitation to potential male suitors.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the men they choose are welcome to live with them. All men – including husbands and sons above the age of 18 – are banished from Noiva do Corderio. They have to work away from home and can only visit during the weekends. Girl-power rules in this rural community, and women are in charge of every aspect of life including farming, town planning and religion.

It’s a interesting way of life, but the residents of Noiva do Cordeiro believe that it’s the best way to live. “There are lots of things that women do better than men.” said resident Rosalee Fernandes, 49. “Our town is prettier, more organised, and far more harmonious than if men were in charge.”

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Mangetsu Man is a likable Japanese superhero whose only superpower is the determination to keep the streets of Tokyo clean, especially the Roppongi district, which locals say is always in need of a dust sweep. As you might have guessed, his arsenal of super-weapons consists of a broom and a dust pan.

Donning a purple suit and a big yellow ball for a head, Mangetsu Man – which translates as ‘Full Moon Man’ – spends a considerable amount of time sweeping the streets of Tokyo. He also puts on hilarious skits, recites Buddhist Prayers, and uses his amazing basketball skills to spread his message of joy, happiness and peace to the world

According to his official website, Mangetsu Man sprang into action in October last year, with a mission to ‘beautify Earth’. He also hopes his actions will inspire others into helping the greater good worldwide.

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Ravi Dalchand, senior brand manager at Bissell Canada, will stop at nothing to demonstrate just how great his company’s new steam vacuum cleaner is. Believe it or not,  he has actually eaten pasta off the floor of a busy subway station, after cleaning it with the vacuum.

The event in question took place at Toronto’s Bloor subway station (one of the busiest in the city), where Dalchand was present with the KBS+ Advertising creative team. At the station, the team shot a video while he used the Bissell Symphony All-in-One Vacuum and Steam Mop to scrub a single spot on the floor. After just a couple of minutes, the floor appeared nice and gleam.

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When millionaire Klaus Zapf passed away this week, the whole of Germany mourned his death. The eccentric tycoon, who always had millions at his disposal, actually lived a frugal life by choice. What endeared him most to the people of his nation was his generous nature – he gave most of his money away, while he lived on only $500 a month.

“I don’t need any money. It just makes us unequal,” Klaus once said. “There are just so many bloody idiots with money around, you don’t need another one.”

Zapf, 62, had made his fortune in the relocation business – he ran a company called Zapf Umzüge, which he often referred to as ‘West Berlin’s best removals collective’. His distinctive blue and yellow vans were quite well-known in city streets as they picked up and unloaded wares from across the country and the world.

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58-year-old oil investor Richard Gibson has one of the weirdest collections in the world. For the past 36 years, he has been religiously saving all his toenail clippings in a glass jar.

Collecting toenails is a strange hobby, but Richard says that he didn’t exactly plan for it – it sort of happened as a result of his curiosity, and he just never stopped. He happened to be clipping his nails one day in February, 1978, and instead of throwing them out, he just put them in a manicure box. He then started doing it repeatedly, just to see how long it would take to fill up the box. That didn’t take too long – only two years – and by then he was pretty much hooked. So he moved his collection to a large glass jar, which is what now uses to put the clippings in.

“I have no idea how many nails are in the jar,” Gibson admitted. “It’s well into the thousands.”

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Lillian Weber, from Iowa, is almost 100 years old, but she doesn’t let her age stand in the way of her life’s mission – helping those in need. She spends every single day making a dress from scratch, so that a child in need will have something to wear. She started the unique project in 2011, and she’s made over 840 dresses so far. Her goal is to  make 1,000.

Lillian, who was nominated for WQAD-TV’s ‘Pay It Forward’ award, gets started on a new dress every morning, takes a break at midday, and is finished by the afternoon. “It is just what I like to do,” she said. The dresses she makes are donated to Little Dresses for Africa, an organisation that distributes clothes to impoverished young girls in Africa and beyond.

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