Ontario horse groomer Autumn Purdy plays music while she works in the stable. One quarterhorse mare really likes the music, and will bob her head and dance -but only to heavy metal tunes. She loves music by Rammstein, Motörhead, Of Virtue, Rob Zombie, Pantera, and Korn, but her absolute favorite music is by Slipknot. Purdy did a little music experiment, and the horse just turned her back when hearing country music! She bobbed a little to Tom Jones, but then soon lost interest. We don't know the horse's real name, but she's become famous as Rock Horse. Some of the bands have actually sent Purdy new songs for the horse to check out and give her opinion. You can see more of her head-banging joy at TikTok. -via Laughing Squid
La plus grande baguette du monde - record battu ! Elle mesure 140,53m et a été confectionnée à Suresnes @villedesuresnes pic.twitter.com/2uHY9g5Npn
— Colas Aura (@ColasAura) May 5, 2024
Charles De Gaulle once said of his homeland:
My mind assures me that France is not really herself unless she is in the front rank; that only vast enterprises are capable of counterbalancing the ferments of disintegration inherent in her people; that our country, as it is, surrounded by the others, as they are, must aim high and hold itself straight, on pain of mortal danger. In short, to my mind, France cannot be France without greatness.
De Gaulle rose to international attention at the moment of France's greatest humiliation. She needed De Gaulle and men like him to restore France to her natural station in the world. Five years ago, bakers in Italy produced a baguette--that icon of French cuisine--that was longer than any other in the world.
Now, The Globe and Mail reports, France has regained its title as the creator of the world's longest baguette. On Sunday, bakers at Suresnes baked one that was 140.53 meters (or approximiately 71 Charles De Gaulles laid end to end) long.
-via Dave Barry
Bob Knetzger of Boing Boing reports that, last year, Mattel teamed up with the National Federation of the Blind to produce a Hot Wheels toy car designed specifically for the visually impaired. The die cast car is covered with the raised bumps of Braille text to read "Hot Wheels Twin Mill."
This name is a reference to a concept car that was pioneered as a Hot Wheels design in 1969 before it was turned into a real car.
Mattel makes two of the Hot Wheels Braille Racer, both of which can be hunted on eBay by collectors eager for a rare piece.
This viral video of a provenance unknown to me shows a woman giving a preschool-age girl an unforgettable ride on a highly convincing roller coaster simulator. Sure, it just looks like an upturned chair, but when paired with a first-person point of view video of a ride, it's good enough to persuade the tyke that she's really at Six Flags.
-via TYWKIWDBI
The most common words to grace a cake are "Happy Birthday." Most people can spell "happy," but when it comes to "birthday," the danger of a brain fart increases. Jen Yates at Cake Wrecks has seen so many cases of bizarre spellings of that one word that she had to split a compilation into two posts, and the misspellings run the gamut of missing letters to completely different words to incoherent jumbles.
Having once worked in a supermarket, I know how this happens. Someone buys a blank cake and requests an inscription in icing. The bakery/deli department has as few people on duty as possible, and half of them are new, and the other half have avoided ever learning how to use icing. So a request goes out to the entire store for someone who's done it before, or is at least willing to try. Bob in the loading dock sees a chance to spend a few minutes in the air conditioning with no heavy lifting, and volunteers. And if any volunteer sees a misspelling, it is way easier to pretend not to see it than to fix it. The customer? They have a ready-made submission to Cake Wrecks.
See how people can can misspell "birthday" in ten ways here and eight more ways here.
Bernth, an Austrian guitarist who fills his YouTube channel with musical oddities, including using the worst rated guitar picks and amps and playing guitars made of LEGO pieces and an acoustic guitar that is partially submerged in water. Bernth also modifies extreme guitars, such as building one with an extremely long neck and another that has 24 strings.
Is it hard to play a 24-string guitar? Even that challenge was unsufficient for Berth, who most recently cobbled together guitars into a 109-string monstrosity that produces a lovely sound. It does, though, require a lot of coordination to play effectively.
-via The Awesomer
Welcome to Edgewood, BC
byu/robinnuber infunny
Redditor robinnuber make a promotional video for Edgewood, British Columbia. Despite the dry humor, it ends up being a place everyone wants to visit, or even live there. When you have a ribbon factory and more ostriches than people, you've got something to talk about. Edgewood has only a few hundred residents, but it has an extensive Wikipedia entry detailing the history of the town, with no mention of the population. That means that some Wikipedia member is pretty proud of their town. The reach of the internet means that commenters that are familiar with Edgewood came in to note that the general store and the gas station are, in fact, the same place. As if we couldn't tell.
A noticeable detail is the can-and-string microphone. It makes this video look comically pre-industrial, but it's a genius idea. The phone slipped inside the can records the narrative while being protected from wind noise. -via reddit
The phrase "missionary position" refers to a sexual position in which heterosexual partners lie down facing each other, with the man on top. It has also been called the "English-American position" and it has long been considered the most vanilla sexual position of all, so much that it was endorsed by the Catholic church in the medieval period. But where did the "missionary" part come from?
Dr. Alfred Kinsey used the term in his 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. He cited research that indigenous communities in Papua New Guinea made fun of missionaries for their sexual practices, and assumed that was where the term came from. When I first heard this story long ago, I couldn't believe that missionaries were trying to teach natives the "correct" to have sex -and that was a valid question. It turned out that Kinsey had interpreted the research wrong in several ways, and ended up coining the term himself without even realizing it. Read what Kinsey got wrong about the source of this term at Mental Floss.
Going to a wedding today. Instead of holding flowers, the bridesmaids have hatchets. They are not pagan as far as I know, but some of you might like it regardless. pic.twitter.com/MXKbV9QPDX
— sugar&ice Crystals (@WeirdCunning) May 4, 2024
Twitter user sugar&ice Crystals shares this story from a wedding. I like the idea of axes for bridesmaids.
It might also be an appropriate choice for the bride instead of a bouquet. Consider the tradition of the bride tossing the bouquet over her back to identify the next person to get married. Would axes be an improvement over flowers? Would the goal be to catch the axe or dodge it?
The best descriptions always come from the YouTube comments. One said that Trombone Nonsense was his favorite genre of music. Another said the trombone is perfect balance of beauty and comedy. But most lauded this video as a throwback to years ago when videos were clever and silly and original and didn't rely on effects.
Charis Dwire wrote this song, "Tug of War Duet", after her brother Nathan Dwire thought up the idea of trombones having a musical tug-of-war as if their slides has become entangled at the ends. It is performed here by Joseph Greene and Sam Robertson. You can download the sheet music here.
If you are intrigued by the idea of Trombone Nonsense, you should check out more videos: Cattle Call, Trombone Alpine Skiing, Flamethrower Trombone, Trombone Suicide, and This Is What Happens If You Sneeze Into a Trombone.
The Hugo Awards for great science fiction were named for Hugo Gernsback. He founded the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926 and went on to publish and edit several other magazines. Gernsback wrote extensively on technology, imagining the gadgets of the future, many that came to be in one way or another, and many that were possible, but that no one really wanted.
In the above image, Gernsback illustrated long distance medical care, in which the doctor can see and even feel a patient without making a house call. This was in 1925, before we even had television! Today we have telemedicine, in which a patient consults a doctor by internet, and also long-distance surgery in which a surgeon manipulates robotic instruments on a patient in another country. However, Gernsback also imagined devices to get more work out of employees, like a helmet that kept distractions away and an electric cage that would wake an office worker who started to doze off. You have to worry about the poor folks who worked on his magazines. Read about seven of Gernsback's weirdest visions of a technological future at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Science and Invention/Matt Novak)
Odin is a good boy. He's a Swiss shepherd who has learned to carry a camera as he zooms around and explores. This is an Insta360 camera, which gives the effect that Odin is a giant floating dog traipsing around the tiny globe wherever he is. And he's so happy doing it!
If you enjoyed that, there are plenty of videos of Odin and his 360 camera at TikTok. Odin has been to a lot of exotic places -and worn a lot of costumes- for his art. @odinswissshepherd -via Laughing Squid
The legendary Paris cafés where intellectuals met and tourists now flock haven't been there all that long in the grand scheme of things. There weren't many restaurants at all in Paris 150 years ago. But there were migrants from rural France who came to the city to make a living during the industrial revolution. When a railway was built, many of these migrants moved in from the Auvergne region. They settled in a small area of Paris together and were called Auvergnats. They got jobs doing the hard labor Parisians didn't want to do, but eventually settled on the coal and charcoal business. Auvergnats imported coal by rivers and canals and delivered it to city dwellers who increasingly lived in buildings that were heated.
To store the coal before it was sold to individuals, they had to have space, and they put up warehouses for that purpose. But the coal business was slow in summer, so the Auvergnats began to sell refreshments out of their warehouses during warm weather, which customers could enjoy at tables outside. In this roundabout way, the Paris café was invented. But there's a lot more to the story, which you can read at Messy Nessy Chic.
(Image credit: MARQUE FRANÇAISE)
An airline for dogs? It sounds like an April Fool joke, and the video makes the whole idea seem like a parody, but Bark Air is real. It was launched by the folks who bring us Bark Toys in Bark Boxes. For those who need to travel with their beloved dog, this is the ultimate in customer service. The dogs are treated better than any economy class passenger on a major airline.
But there are caveats. Bark Air does not operate its own planes. They use planes and pilots from other carriers, and take off from private airports. So far, there are only two routes, New York to London, and New York to Los Angeles. The London route costs $8,000 one way for one person and one dog. The LA route is $6,000. Still, it's a start, and Bark Air hopes to expand service and bring the cost down as they grow. That is, if there's enough demand for them to stay in business long enough to grow. -via Nag on the Lake
Believe it or not, Cabbage Patch Kids, the dolls that took the world by storm when they became the Christmas gift of 1983, are still a thing. One of their draws is that these dolls have a magical backstory. Each one is "born" at Babyland General Hospital, and the owner "adopts" the doll, with certificates and everything. Furthermore, Babyland General Hospital is a real place, and you can visit it in Cleveland, Georgia. Take a tour, visit the gift shop, and if you have the bucks, you can buy a doll that you can witness being born. If you don't have the bucks, you can watch someone else's doll being born.
The dolls are born from Mother Cabbage with the help of a costumed nurse who engages the crowd to help her through her labor pains. It's not clear whether Mother cabbage is a tree, a mound, or something hidden behind those things, but the ritual is the ultimate in kitsch, meant to engage a five-year-old but still a little beyond their understanding. Joshua Rigsby took his family to Babyland General Hospital and got to witness the birth of a Cabbage Patch Kid. His description of the bizarre ritual at Thrillist will make you want to visit just for the giggles. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Kelly Verdeck)
