29-year-old Ren Lu You is so fed up of trying to find his soul mate that he’s actually outsourcing the job. The young man from Alabama has created his own dating website which explicitly states: “Find me a girlfriend and I’ll pay you $10,000. Seriously.”

Ren, a Harvard Business School graduate, moved to Birmingham last year for work. He spent the last 12 months going on a lot of dates, “some interesting, some dull, and a few utterly bizarre” ones. But then he felt like he was wasting too much time, so he decided to cut to the chase by offering money in exchange for connections. “If you introduce me to a girl and I date her for more than 6 months, I’ll pay you $10,000,” his website states. There’s a catch, though: if a woman submits her own name, she isn’t eligible for the reward.

Ren’s dating strategy is unconventional, and also a bit weird, but he offers an explanation: “Look at it this way: if you work 12 hours/day, how would you want to spend the few waking hours you have left?” he writes. “Probably not standing around in a bar with your fingers crossed. This way is more fun for me.” And he told Business Insider that he thinks $10,000 is a pretty reasonable fee for such a service, given the importance of meeting someone you may end up marrying.

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With his online experiment, Reddit user Justin Foley is demonstrating the power exclusivity. He’s proving how people will fall for pretty much anything – or nothing – by merely tagging it ‘exclusive’.

Foley set up a portal called ‘mostexclusivewebsite.com’, consisting of just a few lines of text and a counter. Access is granted to only one person at a 60-second interval. With the click of a button, you will be added to a virtual line of over 2,500 people (at the time of this writing), waiting to gain access. If you close the website window, the ticket is lost.

“The internet was designed to be open and accessible; what if I made a design that was the antithesis of one of the defining qualities of the internet?” Foley told The Washington Post. He added that about one in nine people are making it inside the website – the rest leave before their number is called. And Wired.co.uk explaines why: “The website is simple, and the concept both alluring and incredibly frustrating.”

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Sick of listening to women constantly complain about having to wear high heels, one man challenged himself to wear high heels for a whole day to prove “that girls are huge complainers.” It didn’t go exactly as he planned…

As any woman will tell you, high heels can make your legs look sexy, but wearing them for long periods of time is no picnic on your feet. Even single-sole pumps and platforms will prove painful if you stand or walk in them long enough, but Brandon Cohen, a video correspondent with BroBible.com, actually went for the worst possible option – full-fledged stilettos. He meant to spend a whole day in them, doing all kinds of activities to prove his point, but only managed to keep them on from 8:30 a.m. to 7:15 p.m, most of which he spent sitting, because he couldn’t stand anymore.

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For nearly four decades, Mark Gubin has been playing an epic prank on people flying into his hometown. As aircrafts descend into Milwaukee’s Mitchell International airport, passengers are greeted with a warm, welcoming sign: ‘Welcome to Cleveland’!

Gubin says that the sign – painted on the roof of his apartment in six-foot letters – has always succeeded at giving flyers a good scare. “There’s no real purpose for having this here except madness,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2005. “Which I tend to be pretty good at.”

The retired photographer revealed that he first got the idea for the sign from his assistant, when he was having lunch with her up on his roof in 1978. She had noticed all the low-flying planes in the area, and told him it would be nice to make a sign to welcome people to Milwaukee. But then Gubin came up with an even better idea – a sign welcoming them to the wrong city.

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If you’re passionate about breaking high-tech stuff, we may have found the job of your dreams. Believe it or not, a UK-based cell phone comparison website currently has a vacancy for ‘Mobile Phone Destruction Tester’, a part time position that pays £36,500 (nearly $55,00) a year!

The ideal candidate for the job would be someone who loves mobile tech, and has a “long history of destruction, particularly in the field of mobile phones,” the listing on TigerMobiles.com mentions. “We want you to take the latest smartphones and put them through their paces in real world scenarios. Drop them in the bath, stomp them in the mosh pit, accidentally dip them in your Chicken Vindaloo.”

However, candidates would also have to be good with written and spoken English, and familiar with using computers, because “there has to be some boring part to the job.”

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A lovestruck 20-year-old recently made headlines after he was caught sneaking into an examination hall dressed like a girl. When questioned, Ayan Zhademov confessed that he was trying to take the exam on behalf of his 17-year-old girlfriend!

Ayan revealed that his lady friend was totally stressed over the Unified National Testing, an exam used for college admissions in Kazakhstan. He tried to calm her down and encourage her, but positive talk didn’t work. So he decided to impersonate her and take the exam in her place.

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If you happen to visit shops, commercial establishments, and even police stations in Japan, you might be baffled to discover bright orange baseball-sized orbs, generally placed next to the cash register. But they won’t be for sale, because believe it or not, they’re actually anti-crime devices!

The balls, locally known as bohan yu kara boru, derive their bright hue from the orange paint that fills them. In the event of a theft or robbery, store employees are supposed to fling the balls at the perpetrator. When the balls hit the thief, they will burst, marking him with orange paint and making it easy for the police to identify and apprehend him.

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In a bid to improve sales, a Chinese restaurant recently ran a special promotion – they offered discounts to female customers based on the length of their skirts. The shorter the skirt, the heavier the discount! The amount of skin-show upwards of the knee was measured upon arrival, and the discount percentage was determined accordingly.

The promotion, which ran all of last week at Yang Jia Hot Pot restaurant in Jinan, was a huge success. Hordes of women lined up outside the establishment, waiting to have their skirts measured. The highest hemline recorded was 13 inches above the knee, attracting a huge 90-percent discount. The lowest was at three inches, earning a 20 percent saving.

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Mexican politician Renato Tronco Gomez has turned to social media to reduce his workload – he’s currently running a competition on Facebook to find a lookalike willing to attend official engagements in his stead. He’s offering the winner a prize of 40,000 pesos (US $2,700), apart from the obvious media attention the position will bring. Four people have entered the contest so far.

Gomez, an independent deputy in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz, plans to thoroughly train the winner on speaking and acting like him, and taking care of his ‘many obligations’. The double will be on the payroll as his assistant, but some duties will remain off-limits, like official responsibilities and spending time with Gomez’s family.

“My double will not be able to attend sessions of parliament, because you vote with your fingerprint and I’m not going to cut off my finger to give it to my double,” Gomez joked. “There is going to be an agreement that he can’t sleep with my wife, nor live in my house, nor be father to my children.”

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Entrepreneurs in Japan really do manage to come up with the most eccentric ideas for their customers, right from cat cafés to Godzilla hotels. Continuing the tradition is the Mitsui Garden Yotsuya hotel in Shinjuku, with specially allocated ‘crying rooms’ for female guests!

The hotel offers women looking to release tension or overcome emotional issues special accommodations designed for crying. They are stocked with luxury tissues that can be used to ‘gently wipe away tears’, as well as a steam eye mask to ‘avoid swollen eyes’ the following morning. A selection of sentimental manga comic books and films are also provided, including tear-jerkers such as Forrest Gump and South Korean film A Moment to Remember.

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In a sheer stroke of advertising genius, Salta Beer has given three rugby players who lost teeth in action ‘Beer Tooth Implants’ – metal implants that double as bottle openers! And yeah, they actually work.

“We decided to give rugby players back the teeth they had lost in battle,” Salta Beer explained. “But we weren’t going to give them a simple tooth back, we developed a unique dental implant; a specially designed tooth to open beer.” Three rugby players were selected for the unique procedure and were featured in a commercial created in collaboration with Ogilvy Argentina.

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A bizarre new dog grooming trend in Taiwan has dog owners giving their pet pooches square or round haircuts. Canine hairdressers all over Taipei are up to date on the special technique required for these eccentric makeovers.

“It came about because people were always looking for more impressive haircuts, and somebody came up with the idea of shaping the dog like a hedge,” parlour owner Tain Yeh says. It started with a few people opting for these haircuts and sharing their pets’ photographs online, after which the trend caught on. Thousands of pet owners are now approaching salons, asking for their dogs’ hair to be cut in geometric patterns. Some are actually doing it simply to gain more likes and shares!

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While the rest of the world relies on petitions to get in touch with elected officials, it seems that things are done differently in Venezuela. A woman recently got quick results on a housing issue after she got the president’s attention by hitting him on the head with a mango!

The incident occurred last week, in the state of Aragua. President Nicolas Maduro, a former bus driver, was driving a bus through a crowd when, out of nowhere, a ripe mango hurtled towards him, aimed straight at his head. The 52-year-old Venezuelan president managed to duck in time, but his ear took the blow. He then casually picked up the mango and displayed it to the crowd.

Upon closer inspection, the mango revealed a message, “If you can, call me,” along with a name and phone number. It turns out that the mango was thrown by a local woman named Marleny Olivo, who had been facing housing problems for a long time. Tired of filing endless petitions with the government, she decided to adopt a more ‘direct’ approach.

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In a bid to achieve pouty lips à la Kylie Jenner, teens all over the world are engaging in a bizarre DIY lip job challenge called the #kyliejennerchallenge. It involves blowing up their lips to comically large proportions by sucking on a glass or a jar.

The method is reportedly rather painful – participants need to place their lips in the opening of any narrow vessel and suck in all the air, causing a vacuum. The lips will eventually swell due to increased blood flow, creating an effect that teens hope will resemble the 17-year-old Kardashian clan member’s highly coveted pout.

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When a woman from Nanjing, China, read that chewing gum could help her lose weight, she decided to give the technique a try. Unfortunately, she seems to have taken it a bit too far. After incessantly chewing gum every single day for the past six months, the technique backfired on her – not only did she fail to lose weight, her jaw actually bulked up from all the exercise!

The woman, who is going by the pseudonym Gao, said that it all started when she and her friends read an article about the benefits of chewing gum. The report reasoned that chewing gum burns up to 60 calories per hour, while jumping rope burns only 10. If you do the math, it adds up to losing 5 kg of weight a month just by chewing gum all day long. It also explained that chewing gum could lead to a feeling of satiety, making a person consume less food.

Convinced by the story, Gao started chewing gum morning to night, every single day. She kept it up for about six months, but her extra pounds didn’t seem too affected by the daily ritual. Instead, her colleagues began to point out changes to her face! They started to notice that her previously pointed face had now developed a rather masculine, square shape.

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