From aircraft-eating madmen to posing as a reggae boy band, we count 10 Bizarre Ways
People Became Famous
10 – Monsieur Mangetout • If you translate the name Monsieur Mangetout,
it means ‘Mister consume-everything’ which is why it is such a fitting name for this
bizarre guy.
• His real name was Michel Lotito and he was famous for eating giant non-edible things
like glass, rubber and even metal.
During his career as a professional thing-eater, Mangetout ate entire bicycles, computers and
even a goddamn Cessna 150 airplane.
He ate the entire plane over a two-year period and could stomach up to two pounds of hard
material every single day.
• Surprisingly, the only food that made this guy sick was bananas and hard boiled
eggs.
9 – Ryan Beitz • What originally started out as a casual
joke at Christmas, turned into Ryan Beitz going on a mission to buy thousands of VHS
tapes.
• Apparently Beitz decided one holiday to gift each of his family members with an identical
copy of 1994 film ‘Speed’ featuring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves.
He then found thirty more VHS copies at a thrift store and bought the lot for $3.10.
• Beitz’s kickstarter campaign to have his car painted exactly like the vehicle from
the movie was successful and now he travels around the country in it on an endless search
for more Speed VHS tapes.
8 – Eric Nakagawa • One quiet day in Hawaii, a young man took
a picture of a cat and added words to it and changed his life forever.
• Eric Nakagawa is the original creator of one of the most famous memes on the internet,
the cheezburger cat.
After the image became hugely famous on the internet, Nakagawa started a website called
LolCats, and recently sold the domain for a crazy two million dollars.
• He even went on to publish a book that became a New York Times Best Seller.
7 – Zeddie Little • A chance photo at a marathon in 2012 made
this guy an overnight internet sensation.
• Zeddie Little was participating in the Cooper River Bridge Run in South Carolina
when he smiled at a random photographer.
The other runners in the photo look exhausted, tired and sweaty, but Little looks like he’s
in a supermodel photo-shoot.
The internet dubbed him ‘Ridiculously Photogenic Guy’.
• Women of the world were devastated when his identity was revealed and it was reported
that he was in a long, committed relationship.
Damn.
6 – Gary Dahl • One of the most bizarrely successful marketing
campaigns ever belonged to a man called Gary Dahl.
• One night in 1975, Dahl was in a bar talking about how traditional pets are such a hassle
to feed and walk all the time, and came up with a crazy idea: pet rocks.
He went and bought hundreds of rocks for about a penny a piece and sold them in little carboard
houses for $3.95 each.
Astoundingly, Dahl sold so many that he practically became a millionaire overnight.
• Dahl became an advertising legend and you can read all about in the book he wrote
called ‘Advertising for Dummies’. 5 – Tan Mom
• Not all of the reasons people get famous are positive, and this woman found fame in
a really, really questionable way.
• A woman with a horrendously dangerous obsession with tanning beds was accused of
burning her five-year-old daughter in a tanning accident, though the mother claimed her daughter’s
tan burns were regular old sunburn.
Tanning beds are a huge cause of skin cancer and are illegal in many countries.
For some reason, the world wanted more of this crazy woman and she became known as the
famous Tan Mom.
• Recently Tan Mom has apparently swapped her tan-bed obsession for a more “healthy”
Botox obsession. 4 – Stephen Perkins
• If you’ve ever made a questionable life choice while you’ve been drunk, at least
you didn’t accidentally cost a company $10 million dollars like this guy.
• Steve Perkins was completely wasted when he turned up for his shift at Oil Futures.
Instead of his normal work, Perkins decided to drunkenly buy 7 million barrels of oil
with the company’s money.
This unauthorised transaction was so serious that it increased the cost of oil in every
country in the world.
• Needless to say, his inebriated shenanigans got him fired from the company and fined 72,000
pounds.
3 – Adam Pacitti • A desperate last-ditch attempt to get
a job was the reason this guy became a total internet sensation.
• Adam Pacitti was unemployed and facing the drastic reality of not being able to find
a job when he had a risky but genius idea.
He spent every last dollar he had on a billboard pleading for someone to give him a job.
His website ‘Employ Adam’ received over 1.5 million hits and up to 100 job offers
were emailed to the brash young man.
• Adam now has a great job at an award-winning company and even posted a second billboard
saying thank you for all the job offers.
2 – Rosario Dawson • You might know Rosario Dawson from Hollywood
blockbusters, but you’d be pretty surprised to learn how she was discovered.
• When Dawson was just 15 years old she was sitting on her porch, hanging out doing
typical teenager things when a screenwriter walked down the sidewalk and decided she was
the perfect part for her upcoming project.
Dawson had no prior acting experience but went for the audition and ended landed her
first role in the movie The Kids.
• Since that fateful audition, Dawson has featured in movies such as Men in Black, Sin
City and Unstoppable. 1 – Marina and the Diamonds
• If you get a chance to impress a record producer, you do it: even if it means pretending
to be in a reggae boy band.
• Marina Diamondis, more famously as Marina and the Diamonds was struggling to get her
name out in London when she found out about an opportunity to impress some Virgin Music
record executives.
The catch was that she had to pretend to be a reggae voice singer in a boy band.
Apparently they weren’t too interested in the band but they called Marina back the following
week.
• It just goes to show that if you’re desperate enough, you can
get the world’s attention any way you try.