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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An Indian mother got the shock of a lifetime this week when she sent her son out to get groceries and he came back with a woman he claimed was his wife.

The unnamed woman from Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad city told India’s ANI news agency that she had sent her son out to buy groceries, but instead he came back with a strange woman he said was his wife. The teary-eyed woman said the shock was too much for her and she was unable to accept their union.

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A luckless Chinese man who reportedly spent almost two months in his home after being quarantined three times in a row became a trending topic on Chinese social media this week.

Mr Xiong, from the city of Jining, in East China’s Shandong Province, spent almost the whole month of February and half of March cooped up in his home in an unlucky triple quarantine that the media hilariously dubbed “buy one, get two free”. The first time Xiong was confined to his apartment was when Jining went into lockdown on February 8th, two days after returning from the Philippines. He was forbidden from leaving his home for 14 days, which was tough, but not as tough as spending 50 days inside…

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A Filipino father came up with an ingenious way of keeping his young boy in the house during the recently issued lockdown due to the rapidly spreading Covid-19 pandemic.

The novel coronavirus continues to spread around the world, and the Philippines is no exception. As in most other places, the Government has enforced a social distancing program that requires citizens to isolate themselves in their own homes and go out as little as possible. However, enforcing this type of lockdown isn’t as simple as you might think, especially when dealing with young children used to spending most if their time playing outside with their friends. But, to their credit, some parents are coming up with some creative solutions…

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This Thursday, the NT News, a local newspaper in Australia’s Northern Territory, printed an extra eight blank pages for readers to use in a pinch, as a way to mock the pointless toilet paper hoarding caused by the spread of the coronavirus.

“Run out of loo paper? The NT News cares,” the front page of the special edition newspaper read. “That’s why we’ve printed an eight-page special liftout inside, complete with handy cut lines, for you to use in an emergency. Get your limited edition one-ply toilet newspaper sheets.”

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Lithuanian media recently reported the bizarre case of a man who locked his wife in the bathroom and refused to let her out, because she may have been infected with the dreaded coronavirus wreaking havoc around the world.

On Wednesday, February 26th,  at around 8:35pm, police in Vilnius, Lithuania, received a distress call from a woman in the city’s Antakalnis upscale neighborhood, who claimed to have been locked in her home bathroom by her husband and two adult sons. A police crew was directed to the location of the call, but when they arrived on the scene, they quickly realized that this wasn’t the domestic dispute… The husband casually told police that he had indeed locked his wife in the bathroom, but only to prevent getting infected with the coronavirus.

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A California stay-at-home mom recently got her five minutes of online fame after taking to Facebook to reveal that the potted plant she had been watering and looking after for the last two years was actually made of plastic.

On February 28, Caelie Wilkes shared a very funny revelation with her Facebook friends. While attempting to relocate the succulent she had been looking after for two years in a larger pot, she was shocked to learn that the plant was artificial. The old pot broke, revealing a very thin layer of sand at the top, and a big block of Styrofoam at the bottom, where the plant’s roots should have been. She had been watering it regularly and making sure that it had all the right condition, only to learn that all her efforts had been in vain. Needless to say Wilkes felt like the last two years of her life have been a lie.

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A Peruvian politician recently took to social media to ask people for his car keys back, after giving them away by mistake while handing out keychains on the campaign trail.

In a video posted on his Facebook page, Jovino Huerta, a congressional candidate for the Peruvian district of Huánuco, repeatedly asked his supporters to help him retrieve the keys to his pickup truck, adding that it was a vital part of his effort to win a Congress seat as without it he can’t run a proper campaign. Huerta isn’t the first person to lose their car keys or plead with whoever found them to retrieve them, but it’s how he lost the keys that makes this story interesting…

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This story’s a little old, but for some reason it didn’t get much media attention in the States, and it just seemed like the kind of wacky news we like so much here on Oddity Central, so we decided to share it.

Tony Traconi, a U.S. paratrooper stationed in the Italian province of Padova, had a commendable but complex wish – for his first son to be born on Texas soil. But with just a month before his first child was due to come into the world, he was thousands of miles away from his home state, with no chance of getting home and back before the big day. But then an idea sprouted in his head: he would ask his parents to fill a Tupperware container with Texas dirt and ship it to him. The end goal – to hide it under his wife’s hospital bed, so his son would technically be born on Texas soil.

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An unnamed woman was recently mocked on social media after one of her co-workers shared a poorly edited photo of a flat tire that she had allegedly used to justify being late for work to her boss.

Twitter user Sydney Whitson, from Oklahoma posted the hilarious photo that her colleague allegedly sent her boss last week, and it quickly went viral, getting almost 250,000 likes and 46,000 retweets. That’s fairly unusual for a picture of what appears to be a car tire with a nail sticking out of it. But if you take Sydney’s advice and take a closer look, you’ll realize that there’s something not quite right about the nail. It looks very cartoonish, and the tire it seems to be stuck into appears heavily edited as well. Unfortunately for the anonymous woman, her boss was quick to notice too, and apparently shared the photo with the rest of the workplace.

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