Ordering a bag of herbal tea on the internet sounds harmless enough, but, as one young Russian man learned a couple of years ago, it can sometimes land you in prison for a very long time.

Alexei Novikov’s incredibly sad story began in September of 2015. The 34-year-old man was going to pick up his wife and daughter, who were living in Russia’s Samara region at the time, and decided to hitchhike instead of taking the bus. To cut his trip short, Novikov decided to cut through neighboring Kazakhstan, and in order to avoid any unnecessary trouble, he headed to the Isikul Road border post. Once there, he asked the border guards if he could cross the border on foot, but before answering him, they demanded that he present his backpack for inspection. And that’s when everything started going downhill for Novikov.

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After being served an official notice asking why he had only been present at work 16 times in the last 8 months, an engineer from the Indian state of Gujarat replied that he was the 10th incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, and had been too busy with divine work to focus on his job.

Rameshchandra Fefar, an engineer at Gujarat government’s Sardar Sarovar Punarvasvat Agency (SSPA), claims he first got an indication of his “divine greatness” in August of 1999, from the newspaper horoscope. He felt his body being detached from his being and getting filled with ‘divya anand’ (divine happiness), but didn’t know exactly what had happened until his wife read the daily horoscope. It mentioned that he would become a leader of men and be supremely intelligent.

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Joe Quililan, a young snake catcher from the Philippines, has been dubbed “Venom Man” for his unusual habit of allowing poisonous snakes to bite him every week and even injecting small quantities of venom into his body in order to boost his resistance to it.

31-year-old Quililan, from Cagayan de Oro City, caught his first Northern Philippine Cobra when he was only 14-years-old. Back then, he didn’t have much experience handling snakes, so one day the cobra bit him, only instead of going to the hospital, the teen just brushed it off and got on with his day as if nothing had happened. Most people would have experience severe breathing problems soon after being bitten, followed by a loss of consciousness and then death, but not Joe. He claims that that first snake bite made him realize that he had an unusual resistance to cobra venom, and spent the following years trying to become completely immune to it.

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A French street artist has found a way to bring Bitcoin to the art world. By incorporating QR codes in his murals, he is able to receive donations directly from passers-by who appreciate his artworks.

Pascal ‘PBOY’ Boyart started adding Bitcoin QR codes to his street murals in November 2017, and he has so far received over $1,000 in cryptocurrency donations from people who just wanted to show their appreciation and support for his art. The donation system is extremely simple and fast – anyone with a smartphone and a Bitcoin wallet can just scan the QR code in the mural and transfer funds directly to the artist. Boyart isn’t sure if he is the first artist to use this system, but he definitely sees others relying on decentralised currencies going forward, as it cuts the middlemen – art galleries or crowdfunding platforms – allowing artists to directly connect to their audience.

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There are only a handful of glass beaches in the whole world, and it’s their rarity that makes them so popular. However, Japan is home to a beautiful glass beach that is so obscure it doesn’t even have a name.

Unlike California’s famous glass beach, or the one in Ussuri Bay, on Russia’s Pacific shoreline, where nature had to work hard to erode truckloads of sharp glass and porcelain shards dumped as trash into rounded pebbles that you can safely walk on, the colored glass grains of this nameless Japanese beach, in Omura City, were actually recycled beforehand. I guess the Japanese thought they’d give Mother Nature a break for a change and did the work for her.

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Whether you’re a celebrity or a famous author who spends a lot of time giving autographs, or just a busy businessman who doesn’t have time to sign mountains of documents,  you can now spend $365,000 on a state of the art Signing Machine, and it’ll do it for you.

I bet you didn’t even know portable signing machines existed, did you? Well, technically they didn’t, until recently. Swiss watchmaker Jaquet Droz finally unveiled its impressive Signing Machine last month, at the Baselworld Watch Show, after reportedly working on it for the last four years. It showcases the company’s mechanical clockwork technology, only instead of doing it by accurately telling time, it replicates your signature to perfection.

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In what the local community has named a ‘catastrophe’, a museum in Elne, Southern France, dedicated to the work of painter Etienne Terrus recently discovered that at least 82 of its 140 artworks were actually fakes.

The Terrus museum in Elne had bought the paintings, drawings and watercolors over a period of 20 years, for a total price of around 160,000 euros ($193,000), but concerns regarding their authenticity were raised only recently. Art historian Eric Forcada, who was entrusted with overseeing the entire Terrus collection while the small museum was being renovated, apparently noticed that some of the buildings depicted in the artworks had been built after the artist’s death, so they couldn’t possibly have been painted by him. But the buildings that weren’t supposed to appear in Terrus artworks led the historian to more unusual discoveries.

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From stain remover to mouthwash replacement, saltwater has many uses in our everyday lives, and thanks to Japanese self-taught artist Mai Hirashima, we can also add ‘art medium’ to the list as well.

Mai Hirashima uses saltwater as paint, carefully applying it on black paper canvases, using small brushes and thin bamboo skewers, and then applying heat to cause the water to evaporate and the salt crystallize in the desired shape. It’s a laborious and time-consuming process, but the results are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

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Tired of ketchup dripping all over your favorite clothes? Had enough of soggy, ketchup-filled burger buns? Well, one company seems to have come up with the perfect answer to your problems – ketchup slices.

Emily Williams, co-founder of Bo’s Fine Foods, the company behind ketchup slices, came up with the idea for this revolutionary way of enjoying the world’s most popular red sauce while fiddling around with one of her father’s barbecue sauce recipes. It required the braising of large quantities of vegetables that were afterward discarded, but seeing as food waste is currently one of the world’s main economic and environmental problems, she decided to take a different approach. Little did she know it would result in a completely new way to enjoy ketchup.

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Africa is full of so-called prophets who have found fame and fortune by performing miracles in the name of God, but few are as popular and as wealthy as Shepherd Bushiri, a 30-something superstar from Malawi. But then again, few pastors can pull off the kinds of miracles that Bushiri is famous for – walking on air, curing virtually any disease or disability and even communicating with angels.

Known as “Major One”, Shepherd Bushiri has come a long way since his humble beginnings, growing up in Mzuzu, a city in northern Malawi. He is now regarded as one of the hottest Christian evangelical preachers in the world, sells out entire stadiums wherever he goes and isn’t ashamed to capitalize on his fame. In fact, he claims that being successful and rich is actually an inspiration to his followers, a sign that if God can make it happen for him, He can definitely do it for them as well.

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We’ve seen artists use all sorts of canvases in the past, from paper towels, to butterfly wings or fallen leaves, but never their own carpets. Well, thank to the genius of Japanese Twitter user @agito0219, we can now add carpets to the list of unusual things to create exceptional art on.

@agito0219’s art is as simple as it is impressive. If you’ve ever vacuumed a carpet, you probably already know they usually have two sides. Brush the fibers one way and you reveal one side, but brush them again against the grain and you can see patterns of a slightly or completely different color, depending on the rug. It’s this double-sided nature of her carpets that the mysterious @agito0219 exploits to create her intricate yet ephemeral works of art.

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A 30-year-old woman in Egypt recently filed for divorce from her 32-year-old husband after only 40 days of marriage on grounds that he is so stingy that he refused to buy her a shawarma sandwich on their first and only outing as a married couple.

Speaking before the Family Court in Zananiri, the young woman, known only as Sameeha, said that the shawarma incident was the straw that broke the camel’s back. She had married Ahmed, a teacher, after only knowing him for two months, which apparently wasn’t long enough for her to realize how incredibly stingy he was. However, his frugal nature became very obvious right after their traditional wedding. On their first day of marriage, Ahmed allegedly told his wife that he hated going out because he viewed it as a waste of money. She didn’t pay much attention to his words then, but things got worse with each passing day.

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Can you imagine going a whole month without taking a dump? One suspected drug dealer in Harlow, England has gone a record-breaking 34 days without passing stools for fear of providing police with evidence after allegedly swallowing drugs right before his arrest last month.

24-year-old Lamarr Chambers was arrested on January 17, after failing to stop his car when police put their lights on. Officers claim that during the chase, the suspect was “moving his head towards his hand and his hand towards his head as if he was eating something”, but when he finally pulled over, Chambers casually told them that he had been eating fried chicken. Police have reason to believe that he actually swallowed crack cocaine and heroin that he intended to sell around Harlow, so they have been holding him in custody and waiting for him to take a number two. But he simply refuses to do it.

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Every year, the Nikola-Lenivets art park, near Moscow, Russia, burns a wooden structure to celebrate Maslevitsa, the oldest surviving Slavic holiday. This year, founder Nikolay Polissky burned the largest structure yet – a 30-meter-high Gothic cathedral made of wooden branches.

On February 17, 2018, art lovers gathered at the Nikola-Lenivets art park witnessed one of the largest bonfires in recent history – a wooden cathedral built for the sole purpose of being raised to the ground. A team of around 20 workers had laboured for three months under the guidance of famous Russian artist Nikolay Polissky, assembling the dry tree branches into the impressive 30-meter Gothic edifice, only to see it eaten up by the flames in a matter of minutes. It was an impressive display indeed, but a controversial one as well.

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It was 1997 when Muhammad Iwan, 41, saw some children playing with a newborn estuarine crocodile that fisherman had recently caught at Pangandaran Beach, in West Java. He bought the reptile for just 25,000 Indonesian Rupiah ($1.8), named it Kojek, and welcomed it into his family home in Sempur Sub-District, West Java, as a pet.

Fast forward two decades, that tiny crocodile has grown into a massive 200kg gentle giant that Muhammad claims would never hurt him and his family. It’s this gentle side of Kojek that has made him a star in Indonesia, with people traveling to Sempur from all corners of the archipelago just to see him interact with his human family . His already immense fame has recently reached new heights, thanks to social media. Amazing photographs  showing Muhammad bathing the large 2.7m (8ft, 8in) apex predator in his front yard just meters away from his small children aged 2 and 10, went viral last week, sparking all kinds of reactions.

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