At 35-year-old, Robert Paulat is practically a pensioner in the world of male modelling, but somehow he is still signed with Vanity Fair, one of the most prestigious agencies in Europe, and getting plenty of lucrative contracts. He says it’s all thanks to his uncanny likeness to a Ken doll, the result of over 40 plastic surgeries he’s had done throughout his career.

Botox, plasma treatments, and operations to change his nose and mouth – Paulat has been through them all. And he’s not ashamed to admit that it was these procedures that helped him maintain a youthful, photogenic look for so long. “I am obsessed with the idea of raising people’s self-confidence through improving one’s appearance,” he said. “I think that proves I am not narcissistic because there is always something I’m not happy with.”

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Long eyelashes are generally considered beautiful, but this Ukrainian man’s extra-long lashes are just plain creepy. 58-year-old Valery Smagliy, from Kiev, believes that he has the world’s bushiest eyelashes, a trait that he attributes to a secret ingredient in his diet.

Valery said that he started eating something, and noticed that it made his eyelashes grow really long and thick. And when he realized that it made women jealous, he decided to keep the ingredient a secret in order to market it later. “Women would stop me in the street and ask me what the secret was, they can see that they are real and not fake,” he said. “And whether it’s man or woman, most people don’t seem to pay much attention when I’m talking to them because they’re always looking at my eyelashes.”

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People often believe that female bodybuilders have to compromise on their feminine charm in order to lift heavy and win competitions, but Japanese bodybuilder Tomoko Kanda is proving them wrong. The 48-year-old has dedicated her life to bodybuilding and weight training, but also managed to retain her feminine beauty.

Tomoko, who lives in Abeno-Ku, Osaka, was introduced to the world of bodybuilding during her years working for the Department of Defense at Yokota Air Base. “I got fat very easily because of my body type, so a soldier there told me about weight training,” she recalled. “I first did it to lose weight. I was 23 at the time, a late bloomer.”

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15-year-old New Yorker Noa Mintz is one of the youngest people in the world to own a successful start-up. The teen entrepreneur is the founder of ‘Nannies by Noa’, a popular baby sitting agency that she started after a number of bad personal experiences with babysitters, but because she is still in school she needed someone to handle business for her. So she just hired a CEO.

Although Mintz agency was doing well, she simply couldn’t find time to handle the ‘excruciating hours’ and ‘hundreds of emails’ along with homework. So she decided to delegate the responsibility of running the business, and her decision has paid off. The agency now serves almost 200 clients in the tri-state area, providing them with baby sitters as well as full-time nannies.

It all started three years ago, when Mintz, a sixth-grader, spent the first half of her summer vacation interning at a nonprofit. Subsequently, she spent the second half brainstorming for her nanny agency. It stemmed from the fact that Mintz, the eldest of four, always found flaws with her own babysitters. She realized that there must be a better way of pairing families with the right caregivers. “For what you’re paying, your kids should be more stimulated,” she explained. “At seven, I would tell my mom, ‘You need to get more bang for your buck.’ It would drive me insane.” So Mintz accepted a challenge from her mother to find a better babysitter for their family, and succeeded. Soon, she started helping out her mother’s friends too.

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Lauren Singer is a sustainability-conscious entrepreneur who has produced almost no waste in the past two years, proving that a trash-free lifestyle is indeed possible.

Lauren majored in environmental science at NYU, and it was during her student years that she began working towards a ‘Zero Waste’ goal. Today, the New Yorker does several things on a daily basis to reduce waste, including making her own toothpaste, deodorant and laundry detergent. She also founded her own eco-friendly company, ‘The Simply Co’, through which she plans to sell her homemade products.

Lauren regularly writes about her experiences of a Zero Waste life on her blog ‘Trash is for Tossers’. “There were two moments that brought me to a trash-free, waste-free lifestyle,” she revealed. “The first was my senior year of college when my professor Jeffrey Hollender emphasized the importance of living of living your values, and made me think about my own personal environmental impact.”

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In the the past 40 years, New Jersey resident Bill Bresnan has written over 10,000 love letters, notes and cards to his wife Kirsten – that’s almost one for each night of their marriage. The couple’s unique love story was recently covered by the media, and Bill and Kirsten, both 74, spoke about the secrets of their successful marriage.

The couple met when Bill was teaching a class back in 1974, and Kirsten happened to be his student. “She was this beautiful Northern European woman who struck me like a bolt of lightning,” Bill said in an interview with ABC News.

“Not long after meeting in class Kirsten and I began commuting to and from Long Island, together, on the Long Island Railroad.” And that’s when the practice of writing notes began. “We exchanged notes, drawings, and little scribblings on paper napkins over coffee on the train.”

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Saying 19-year-old Alecia Pennington is suffering an identity crisis would be an understatement. Having grown up in a homeschooling Christian household, she never got a birth certificate or social security number, so from an identification point of view, she doesn’t exist.

Alecia is one of the nine Pennington siblings – children of James and Lisa Pennington, group leaders of the Texas Home School Coalition (THSC) and members of the Hill Country Home School Association. In a YouTube video Alecia posted on February 9, she claims that following her home-birth, her parents failed to file a birth certificate or record of any kind. She also alleges that they never got her a Social Security Number, have no school records or hospital records simply because she was never taken to a school or a hospital.

“This leaves me with nothing to prove my citizenship,” she explained in the video. “I am now 19 years old and unable to get a driver’s license, get a job, go to college, get on a plane, get a bank account, vote.”

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If you’ve been complaining about having to drive long hours to and from work, wait till you hear about this Detroit worker’s commute. For the past 10 years, James Robertson has been walking 21 miles a day, just to get to work. What’s even more remarkable is that he hasn’t missed a single day of work so far.

For five days a week, 56-year-old Robertson walks from his home in Detroit to the factory where he works in Rochester Hills, Michigan. He began the arduous commute ever since his 1988 Honda Accord conked out over 10 years ago. He claims that his $10.55-an-hour wage is not sufficient for him to buy another car, and there’s no decent bus service either. So he just covers the 21-mile round trip to and from work on foot.

“I set our attendance standard by this man,” said Robertson’s boss Todd Wilson, a plant manager at Schain Mold & Engineering. “I say, if this man can get here, walking all those miles through snow and rain, well, I’ll tell you, I have people in Pontiac 10 minutes away and they say they can’t get here. He’s never missed. I’ve seen him come in here wringing wet.”

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While a lot of women resort to expensive plastic surgery to get rid of wrinkles, this woman just decided to nip the problem in the bud by not smiling. Believe it or not, 50-year-old Tess Christian claims she hasn’t smiled, laughed or giggled in the past 40 years!

Although Tess insists that she has a sense of humor, she said that she made a conscious decision not to laugh or smile – not even when her daughter was born – in order to maintain her youthful appearance. Admittedly, the technique seems to have worked in her favor.

“I don’t have wrinkles because I have trained myself to control my facial muscles,” she said. “Everyone asks if I’ve had Botox, but I haven’t, and I know that it’s thanks to the fact that I haven’t laughed or smiled since I was a teenager. My dedication has paid off, I don’t have a single line on my face.”

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Fearless daredevil Al the Jumper really lives up to his name – he actually jumps over speeding cars and motorcycles that are headed straight towards him at high speeds, and to make the experience more thrilling, he only leaps when the vehicle is about to run him over.

The Swedish stuntman,whose real name is Ousseyni Issa Gobitaca, has leaped over a variety of vehicles, including a Lamborghini supercar traveling at 80mph! You’ve got to watch the clip for yourself to realize how close Al comes to death before eluding it at the last possible moment. He explained that it’s all in the head – he prepares himself by picturing the moment and calculating everything in advance. “I see a picture of how everything will look before I leap and if I can do it in my head, I can do it in real life.”

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A Kosovan Hitler lookalike is making news for claiming to be the reincarnation of the infamous German dictator. Emin Djinovci regularly stuns locals by walking around the town of Mitrovica, in the partially recognised state of Kosovo, with a toothbrush moustache and jet black hair brushed over to one side.

Mitrovica is a city of simmering ethnic tensions and political instability. Emin moved there from Germany in 1998, to join the fight of the Kosovan Albanians for secession from Serbia. But it wasn’t until he returned to Germany for a surgery to treat multiple war wounds, that he realized he could make a living by dressing himself up as Hitler.

“It was when I was there for my operation that I was forced to grow out part of my mustache. The doctors would come into my room and just look at me,” he recalled. So he realized the potential for profit, and when he got back to Kosovo, he started to impersonating Hitler and charging for photographs. Read More »

When 27-year-old business school graduate Mason Wartman quit his Wall Street job to sell $1 pizza slices, to many of his friends it seemed like the anticlimax of a brilliant career. But the man was simply trying to achieve a different sort of greatness with his no-frills pizza shop, Rosa’s Fresh Pizza, in Philadelphia’s Center City. In the past one year, the shop has served 8,500 free slices of pizza to homeless people, by harnessing the generosity of its patrons.

The shop operates by a ‘pay it forward’ system – customers who walk in to buy pizza can also sponsor a slice for a homeless person. In this way, about 30 to 40 homeless people are able to eat for free at Rosa’s every single day.

Even before the pay-it-forward scheme was implemented, Rosa’s Pizza, which is located on an almost vacant block, used to always give away free slices to hungry homeless people in the neighborhood. But one day last March, a customer asked if he could pay for the next homeless person who walked in. Wartman immediately agreed, and then put up a sticky note on the wall, just to keep track of the pre-paid slice.

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Kevin, a 27-year-old man from Chicago, has a very strange hobby – he wears body casts, even though he has no injuries! Kevin has been addicted to  plaster casts for the past 21 years, and he has spent over $50,000 on his bizarre fixation. Although he realizes it’s ridiculous, he has no idea how to stop.

On an episode of TLC’s popular My Strange Addiction show, Kevin explained that wearing the casts makes him feel snug and comfortable, and that the very act of putting one on gives him a rush. “It really gives me this high that I just can’t really get any other way. My blood starts pumping and I get really nervous. It’s just a rush.”

“I don’t have any broken bones, but I’m addicted to putting orthopedic casts on my body,” he said. “I’m perfectly fine, perfectly healthy. I like the feeling of the cast around me. I’ve done two full arm casts, two full leg casts. I’ve done two full leg casts and an arm cast. I’ve put on so many casts, it’s ridiculous.”

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Benjamin Bennett probably has the most bizarre YouTube channel. For the past six months, he has been sitting in front of a camera in zen-like silence, smiling, for hours on end! He’s put out at least 120 hours of footage of himself doing nothing but sitting, without offering any explanation whatsoever.

Ben’s videos made no noise at all – literally and figuratively – until he reached the middle of his 25th live stream. Once he started getting a decent number of views, everybody wanted to know what he was doing and why. Some thought it was art, while others speculated that he was meditating. A few were convinced that he was mentally ill.

The mystery was finally solved a few days back when Vice published an interview with the man himself. When asked why he was doing this, he was quite vague about it. “I don’t know,” he said. “It seemed like something the internet was lacking. It seemed like it needed to be done, and nobody else was going to do it.”

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Kindness is not always rewarded, as proven by Chinese officials who are punishing a 65-year-old woman for taking in abandoned children with physical and mental disabilities.

Kong Zhenian, from the rural village of Jiu Jiu in northern China’s Shanxi Province, has been caring for physically and mentally-challenged children for the past 40 years. “I found the first one on the side of the road,” she said. “She had just been left there and I felt so sorry for her I just had to do something.” So she took the child into her care and hasn’t stopped helping children since then.

“I have now raised 39 children,” she added. “All of them are regarded as having problems, either physically or mentally. But in fact, many of them were simply suffering from neglect. It costs a lot of money to care for them but we have managed.”

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