A 30-year-old man from Guidonia, a town on the outskirts of Rome, found living at home with his wife so intolerable that he begged police to put him in prison.

Staff on duty at the Tenenza Carabinieri barracks in Guidonia thought they were the target of a prank on October 23, when a man casually walked in and confessed to breaking house arrest on purpose, so he could be thrown in jail. The unnamed Albanian man had apparently been fighting with his wife and decided that rather than living in the same house as her, he’d be better off behind bars.

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A new Japanese service is drawing attention for allowing both individuals and companies to rent out “fat people” for 2,000 yen ($18) per hour.

Renting people for various purposes isn’t anything new in Japan. From renting someone to befriend your cheating partner’s lover and convince them to back off, to renting middle-aged men for company, the offers vary a lot, and starting this month you can add another option to the list – renting fat people. Called “Debucari”, the new service allows virtually anyone to rent a fat person by the hour. Apparently, fat people – over 100 kilograms – are somewhat of a rarity in Japan, so the entrepreneur behind the service thought that making them available via an online service would be a great business opportunity.

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A tech-savvy Japanese youtuber recently unveiled a special grill that requires users to actually burn some calories to power up the device and cook the meat.

Japanese youtuber Bomb_tamio specializes in wacky inventions that put a smile on viewers faces, but his latest creations actually intrigued a lot of people, especially those looking for creative ways to lose weight. In a video posted last month, the young inventor can be seen preparing to cook strips of bacon on an electric grill, only instead of turning it on via its knob, he starts running in place with one foot over a yellow pad. It’s this fast movement that powers the grill, so the user needs to keep moving until the meat is cooked.

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Videos shot during a wedding in Pingdingshan, China’s Henan Province, have gone viral on social media, because of the three bridesmaids and their unusual gender.

The role of bridesmaid is traditionally reserved for women, but what happens if the bride doesn’t have any female friends, or if none of her friends can make it to the wedding? Desperate times call for desperate measures, and one woman in Pingdingshan, China, recently managed to surprise everyone in attendance at her wedding with three very unusual bridesmaids, all men. You couldn’t really tell at first glance, as they were all wearing pink sleeveless dresses, long-haired wigs and even makeup, but a closer look revealed clear manly features.

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After having the road to his home blocked by heavy snowfalls, a Ukrainian man decided to call police and confess to a fictitious murder, in hopes that they would clear the road in order to reach him.

According to police sources, on Saturday, February 13 an unnamed man from the village of Grybova Rudnya, in Ukraine’s Chernihiv region, phoned the national emergency number and confessed to a gruesome murder. He said that he and his stepfather had gotten into an argument, and he had ended up stabbing the elderly man repeatedly in the chest with a knife. The victim had collapsed, and was not breathing. The self-confessed attacker added that he was willing to turn himself in, if police could reach his home.

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A UK man who had spent around £300 on vet bills after his pet dog started limping, learned that there was nothing wrong with the animal, and that he was allegedly only limping out of sympathy for him.

Russell Jones was left unable to walk without limping after breaking his ankle in an accident last year. One day, while out on a walk with his dog Billy, Russel noticed that the canine was limping as well. On another occasion, as he was limping around the house, his partner Michelle noticed that Billy was sort of copying him, so they called a vet to have the dog checked out. Only after paying around £300 ($410)  for X-rays and checkups, did he learn that Billy was only imitating his gait out of sympathy.

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A giant puddle in Russia’s Far East city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk is being described as “invincible”, after it somehow survived unfixed for over a quarter of a century. It now has its own Instagram page and over 16,000 followers.

As it often happens in Russia and other eastern European countries, what started out as a small pothole gradually grew to become a giant puddle. It attained that rank in 1994, and locals have been trying to get local authorities to fix it ever since. So far it has proven a futile endeavor, as scheduled repairs have been postponed repeatedly. In the meantime, a frustrated local known only as Nikolay decided that the 25-year-old pothole was old enough to have its own Instagram page, and created one for it in September. The witty sarcastic posts created in first-person quickly went viral and got the local government to act.

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A Scottish football club may regret its decision to replace human cameramen for an AI-operated camera system, after it hilariously kept mistaking a linesman’s bald head for the ball, thus denying viewers of the action on the pitch.

Last month Inverness Caledonian Thistle Football Club, commonly known as Caley Thistle or Caley Jags, which competes in the Scottish Championship, the second echelon of the Scottish Professional Football League, proudly announced that it had installed the AI-powered Pixellot camera system at its Caledonian Stadium. The system was designed to replace human cameramen with artificial intelligence-controlled cameras designed to follow the ball on the football field. Only the plan to automate live broadcasts of its home games went awry last week, when Pixellot managed to annoy viewers by constantly mistaking a linesman’s bald head for the ball during a game with Ayr United.

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There is a whole world to discover past YouTube’s recommendation feature, and venturing down the proverbial rabbit hole will help you discover colorful and delightfully weird characters like Georgette Spelvin, the ‘Opossum Lady’.

For the past 10 years, the MEpearlA YouTube channel has constantly been putting up delightful videos featuring a glamorous lady that looks like a combination of Jackie O and Audrey Hepburn and a host of opossums that act surprisingly tame around their human handler. These videos range from how-to lessons on how to treat and deal with the large rodents, to eclectic theatrical pieces tackling topics like politics and religion. They all feature opossums though, as they are the main theme of MEpearlA. Aside from a dead squirrel that achieved enlightenment and became the center of a pseudo-religion, that is…

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A Swiss couple has named their baby daughter Twifia after Internet start-up Twifi and won themselves 18 years of free wi-fi internet.

The young couple responded to a Facebook ad from Twifi, a Swiss Internet provider, which dared parents to name their newborn Twifus (if it was a boy) or Twifia (if it was a girl) in exchange for 18 years of free internet. The parents, aged 30 and 35, ultimately decided that Twifia wasn’t that bad of a name, and the thought of getting free internet for 18 years and putting that money in a savings account for their daughter was appealing. So after thinking it over, they decided to make it official, putting down ‘Twifia’ as their daughter’s middle name on her birth certificate.

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‘Kissing the Coronavirus’ is a steamy 16-page e-book that’s as wacky and funny as it is disturbing. It’s basically about a female doctor who ends up falling in love with the Coronavirus after a vaccine trial gone wrong.

The 16-page e-book, which launched on Amazon on April 22, tells the story of Dr. Alexa Ashingtonford, a scientist tasked with finding a cure for the Coronavirus who ends up falling for the enemy. When a trial vaccine is injected into a fellow scientist, he dies and becomes the virus in human form, leaving the good doctor overcome with desire. The book cover features a woman kissing a green-colored man who isn’t the Hulk, but – you guessed it – the Coronavirus, and if that doesn’t get people’s attention, the short description certainly will: “She was supposed to cure the Coronavirus. Instead… she fell in love with it”.

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Forget wish-granting goldfish and genies in a bottle, you can now own your very own magical cat and have all your wishes fulfilled for the modest price of 10 million rubles ($127,000).

A Novosibirsk woman recently posted a bizarre ad on Russian classified ad platform Avito, asking people to pay a small fortune for her pet cat, a Scottish Fold named Vincent I, or Vinsik, for short. The woman, known only as Elena, told Russian journalists that she discovered her cat’s wish-granting powers by accident, but has since tested its effectiveness three times, to impressive results. She now wants to share its magic with others, but is asking for a considerable fee as reward for her kindness.

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While most Instagram users strive to take the most stunning photos possible to impress their friends and followers, one man has been using the popular social network to post snaps of his forehead…

Georgios Schieich, a 25-year old Greek man living in Malta, has one of the most intriguing profiles on Instagram. That’s not because he posts the most impressive photos, but because the vast majority of his pics are of his forehead or parts of it. I’m pretty sure Georgios’ is not the only offbeat Instagram page out there, but what’re really surprising is that he’s been at it for six years and has no intention of stopping until he hits the 10 year mark, at least.

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With tourism at an all-time low, a struggling Japanese railway operator is trying to avoid going under by selling canned stones from its railway tracks.

Founded in 1923, the Choshi Electric Railway company, in Japan’s Chiba Prefecture, had to overcome adversity several times during its 97-year history, but the situation has never been more dire than it is now. The railway operator relies on tourism to support its operations, but with the novel Coronavirus wreaking havoc all over the world, business has never been worse, so management had to come up with alternative ways of generating income. Among these, starting a YouTube channel and selling canned stones have been proving unusually successful.

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A family from Phoenix, Arizona came up with an original way of punishing their 14-year-old son after he was caught by police speeding in the family car: they made him give away all his possessions.

14-year-old Angel Martinez’s parents were celebrating their anniversary in Las Vegas earlier this month when they received a call from police about their teenage son. He had taken the family’s Range Rover out for a spin and had disrupted the neighbors. The couple were forced to cut their anniversary celebration short and go home, but they made sure to let Angel know just how “happy” they were about it. They pretty much emptied the boy’s room, put all his stuff in the driveway and made him give it all away personally as punishment.

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