Minecraft lovers, get your cash ready as a new Minecraft-based board game is now ready for purchase! The board game is called Minecraft: Builders & Biomes, where players can explore the Overworld, build structures, and mine resources. The game is designed for two to four players, and according to IGN, take 30-60 minutes to play. Well, that beats the number of hours some spend building a city in the original game! 

image credit: via Amazon

What will we do with radioactive waste? The stuff is dangerous, so we bury it. But mere burial is not enough, since the earth moves, and someday, someone may actually dig that stuff up. In Finland, an island is being prepared to bury nuclear waste very, very deep, to keep it safely away from us. Tom Scott visited Onkalo, on the isle of Olkiluoto, to show us.

Tom refers to a 1993 report about marking nuclear waste sites. You can read some of the ideas generated here.

'My Mom Is Going To Yell At Me!': Kade Lovell, 9, Wins Sartell 10K Race By Accident https://t.co/g7W0vIBUcg pic.twitter.com/IyVIkud92G

— WCCO - CBS Minnesota (@WCCO) October 1, 2019

Heather Lovell was starting to panic. She has seen her nine-year-old son Kade start off in the St. Francis Franny Flyer 5K race in Sartell, Minnesota, but he was not among the runners at the finish line. She drove the route, and asked others to help look for Kade. Then she heard he may have been running the 10K route by mistake.

Kade said he realized his mistake when he saw the sign for the 10K turnaround.

"I thought, 'Mom is going to yell at me,'" he said.

So when Kade finally appeared near the end of the route, he was by himself. Lovell thought he was in last place. But she didn't care; he was safe.

Then a race coordinator told Lovell that Kade finished first.

Yes, Kade won the race overall, not just for his age group. He was a minute ahead of the second place finisher. That's how fast you can run when you think your mom is going to yell at you. Read the whole story at the St. Cloud Times.

Crazy event at ORD. Heads up safety move by a ramp worker! pic.twitter.com/SQi5zB0Ooz

— Kevin Klauer DO, EJD (@Emergidoc) September 30, 2019

A utility cart got away from its driver at Chicago O'Hare International Airport on Monday. It careened around in circles while American Airlines ramp workers calculated the odds of jumping on it. But those circles got closer and closer to the airplane, and could cause major damage. Dr. Kevin Klauer recorded the mayhem from the terminal.

"Everyone was actually really quietly watching this unfold," Klauer said. "When it ended, the whole gatehouse erupted in applause."

American Airlines said in a statement that preliminary reports showed the cart's accelerator got stuck and caused the cart to lose control.

"No American Airlines team members were injured and the incident resulted in one 10-minute flight delay," American Airlines said in a statement. "We appreciate the quick action of our team member who stopped the vehicle."

While the plane was unharmed, it appears that the drinks for the flight were a total loss. The remix with music is here, although "Yakety Sax" would have been more appropriate. Read the whole story at CNN.

We have video surveillance of them grabbing as many penises as they can and taking off!

Be on the lookout for the couple photographed above. According to a Facebook post published by Pet Zone, a pet store in St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada, they stole hundreds of dollars of bull penises and ran off. They then tried to pull a similar robbery at another Pet Zone, but failed.

Why does a pet store sell bull penises? I'm disappointed that you have to ask. But here it is: these are "pizzles," which is a slang term for rawhide chews that dogs use. The word originally comes from the Old English word for penis.

You're welcome.

-via Dave Barry

Italian Artist Maurizio Savini creates different sculptures, from a man hanging on a ledge to a crocodile out of bubblegum. That might sound ridiculous or interesting (depending on your take on bubblegum), but the process involved in the creation of these bright pink and white sculptures takes more than chewing the gum he needs, as the Emmanuel Fremin Gallery details: 

With a process as unique as his aesthetic, Maurizio and his two assistants unwrap then apply heat to thousands of half white, half bright pink bubble gum squares without chewing a single piece, so they can easily be manipulated, cut with a knife, and applied to plaster mold like traditional clay. Maurizio notes, “The mold is crucial” – without it, his tacky sculptures would be far too unstable. After molding the chewing gum into his desired shapes, Maurizio fixes and preserves his sculptures with a mixture of formaldehyde and antibiotics, so his works will be in tact for generations of Romans to come. This labor-intensive process at times calls for nearly 3,000 individual pieces of bubble gum per sculpture.

(via The Jealous Curator)

image credit: via the Emmanuel Fremin Gallery

The Reykjavik Confessions is an old case where six people testified to being guilty of crimes that the police have no evidence for whatsoever. Buzzfeed Unsolved cracks the details of the case that makes the whole event suspicious. The Icelandic police arrested six different people (with some really guilty of doing other crimes) for the murders of two missing people, making them confess to the crimes by placing them in solitary confinement, with one spending a whopping 741 days in solitary confinement. 

The Dutch police arrested a man and his pet bird for shoplifting. The bird, who was on his owner's shoulder during the arrest, was placed in a jail cell with bread and water. Interestingly enough, when the media reported the arrest, they placed a little black bar over the bird’s face to protect its identity! Maybe the media thought  they’ll be swarmed with protests from the bird’s friends if they didn’t protect the bird’s identity. 

(via CampbellxEmma on Twitter)



image credit: via CampbellxEmma on Twitter

Halloween will be here in only a month, which means it's the perfect time to start decorating -and you can either go cutesy or creepy when it comes to Halloween. If you lean towards the scary side of things, you'll want to check out this great post on Rue The Day with some truly horrific decorations like the guy escaping from his grave above.

You can make most of the decorations yourself, but if you don't have the time, there are also a few cool Etsy designs you can purchase, like this nightmarish corpsified cat skeleton.

Hope your neighborhood kids are brave if you actually incorporate these kinds of decorations in your yard or you might not end up giving out any candy at all!

Zach of Extra Fabulous Comics need not worry about the impact that he has had on the world. Some webcomic artists waste only dozens of lives. But, like the Phaethon of Greek myth, he strove for greater things. What he has done to his readers is his eternal monument.

Graz, a maker on YouTube, turned an old circular saw blade into this polished metal pizza cutter that is as elegant and refined as the Wu-Tang Clan that inspired it.

The video is worthy watching in full. Not only is it funny with sound effects and scripting like a comedy sketch, it is also highly educational. I was impressed with how much went into heating, cooling, and tempering the steel so that it became a vicious weapon against all pizzas that it encounters.

-via Geekologie

It's so easy for a faulty accusation to brand a person for life due to a mugshot circulating the internet. So I'm glad that, when RTV Utrecht reported on this parakeet's arrest by the local police, they placed a bar over his eyes to obscure his identity.

In this case, the police arrested a man for shoplifting who, at the time, had the bird on his shoulder. Not knowing what to do with the bird, they locked him in a holding cell and gave him some bread while processing him. You can read the German report here or what Google Translate offers in English.

-via Nag on the Lake

Newel offers for sale these unusual chairs that date back to 19th Century Italy. Such lovely and fantastic furniture was fashionable in elite circles at the time. They're gilt with silver and gold. The smallest of the three opens and closes like an actual hinged shell. They're yours for a mere $7,250.

-via Messy Nessy Chic

Machias Seal Island off the coast of Maine is the last piece of disputed territory between the United States and Canada. The wording of treaties defining the two countries give both a claim to the 15-acre island. However, the US and Canada have been reluctant to fight over it. It makes a difference to locals, because the nations have different laws about wildlife conservation and lobster fishing. And then there are the tourists who want to visit Machias Seal Island to see the sea birds. The island was claimed by Tall Barney Beal, who lived there to avoid the Civil War draft. Tall Barney bequeathed the island to the first descendant named after him, who was his great-grandson Barna Norton. Norton spent his entire life defending his claim to the island, which he declared to be US territory.  

He would also tell—many, many times—a particular story. “I own the island,” went the simplest version. “It was given to me.”

This story conflicts with the official stances of two powerful nations. It flies in the face of the Canadian lighthouse that has stood on the island for nearly two centuries. It also complicates the United States’s position, which is to claim the disputed island as American territory without making too much of a fuss. But Norton never gave up on his story. In a time when the last thing most people want is another border controversy, I decided to try to find out why.

Tall Barney Beal and Barna Norton were both colorful characters. Norton took tourists to the island daily, and used its disputed status to smuggle liquor, but defended the seabirds who lived there. Read their stories, and that of Machias Seal Island, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Greta Rybus)

Katmai National Park in Alaska is celebrating Fat Bear Week with their annual competition to crown the fattest bear. Bears emerge from their dens in the spring fairly skinny, and then spend all summer packing on the pounds to keep them going through the winter. Voting on individual bears will run October 2 through 8 at Facebook. 

Katmai's bears, home to one of the densest concentration of bears on Earth, appeared on the explore.org webcams in June as relatively skinny, sometimes gaunt looking, animals. But by September, the brown bears put on hundreds of pounds — some with bellies that nearly scrape the ground.

"It's been amazing to once again watch the bears' transformation from lean animals to the roly-poly giants they have become," marveled Mike Fitz, a former park ranger at Katmai National Park and currently a resident naturalist for explore.org.

There are 12 plump bears in the park's 2019 Fat Bear Week bracket. But this year, unlike many years, there are a number of top, formidable contenders.

Mashable has posted profiles of the four bears who have the best chance of winning. Personally, I'm pulling for the one named "Chunk."

(Image credit: Katmai National Park & Preserve)