The Nakizumo Crying Baby Festival is an annual ritual conducted in Shinto shrines across Japan. Sumo wrestlers carry babies into a dohyo (a sumo ring). Priests put on bird demon masks and taunt the babies. The first baby in a pairing to cry wins. If both cry at the same time, the baby that cries the loudest is the winner.

Why do Japanese families do this? Traditionally, an innocent baby's cry is thought to ward off evil spirits. But the mothers interviewed for this video seem to be participating just to have a good time. They attended the festival in the city of Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo, which is so popular that babies have to enter a lottery for the chance to participate.

-via Dave Barry

The runway model did not pee his pants.

Well, actually, that's possible. We don't know for certain. But the pants that he's wearing are made to look like he peed his pants. So it's possible he went ahead and peed in them anyway because, well, he's got nothing to lose at this point.

The revered journalistic outlet TMZ reports that the elite Jordanluca fashion house offers these luxuriously pre-stained (or pre-peed) jeans for a whopping $608--or it did until the jeans sold out of stock.

Fox 9 News reports that last week, a car crashed through a guardrail on I-94 in St. Paul, Minnesota and caught on fire. The driver was conscious, but also injured and trapped inside. Several motorists stopped and rushed in to save him.

As this dramatic video shows, they bravely struggled with the doors, which could not open because of the guardrail. Eventually, a highway worker used a tool to smash the window. The heroic rescuers then pulled the victim out of the burning car just before the flames reached the front of the cabin.

The driver escaped serious injuries but was taken to a hospital for evaluation.

-via David Thompson

If you've been holding your breath, anxiously awaiting the results of the world seagull screeching championships, you can now relax and collect your winnings with the bookie. The Guardian reports that the winner of the under-16 category is a 9-year old British boy named Cooper Wallace.

As I noted last year, thoughtful people admire this most noble beast of the sea. Admirers of the majestic seagull gathered in De Panne, Belgium for the fourth year to imitate the seagull's melodious screech. In this video, you can watch some of the top performances.

Notice that, in this video, the performances take place under a banana. Why? I'm fully capable of jumping to preposterous conclusions based on no evidence whatsoever. Specifically, Belgium is home the the world's largest collection of bananas and Belgium is, of course, a grotesque obscenity. Hanging a banana from the ceiling is a traditional Belgian way of summoning a blessing from the gods.

-via Super Punch

Tippy is the digital mascot of modern tipping culture. He's here to shake you down for extra cash with his weapons of surprise and guilt. Yes, you will be asked to tip for the most absurd reasons by businesses that have no justification to ask for a tip, such as utility companies and library reference desks.

Kurtis Scott created this cartoon showing Tippy interacting with a meat-based lifeform in an effort to extract valuable resources. He's not really persuasive. But like a lot of hustlers, he profits from people being unwilling to stand up for themselves in the face of emotional bullying.

-via Laughing Squid

Most ordinary distance runners prefer water, but Tom Gilbey is anything but ordinary. He's an expert on wines put his knowledge to the test during the recent London Marathon. He hid two wine glasses in his belt and, at each mile maker, he guessed the identity of each wine given to him by colleagues.

Of the 25 wines, Gilbey got 7 completely correct, 14 mostly correctly, and 4 wrong by the metrics of year, origin, and type. The 52-year old tells BBC News that he didn't do any serious training for this event and hadn't run a marathon since 1996.

By committing to this act of extreme athleticism, he raised over £10,000 for a hospice. You can watch his compilation video of each stop here.

-via Dave Barry

Buoy tenders are ships that maintain buoys in harbors, lakes, rivers, and the open sea to serve as aids to navigation. The US Coast Guard maintains several classes of buoy tenders, which also provide maritime law enforcement and search and rescue services.

The men and women who serve on the buoy tenders take pride in fulfilling the challenges of their work. Slinging around the multi-ton steel buoys while maintaining and deploying them is physically demanding work. The coasties occasionally compete against each other in the key skills of buoy tending in the Buoy Tender Olympics.

Last August, the crews of seven buoy tenders competed to see who could straighten huge chains and drive red hot rivets the fastest, among other coastie sports.

Okay, this sounds ridiculous. Who would be scared to driver over a bridge? Who would pay $40 to have someone else drive them across this bridge? I mean aside from the whole ship-crashing-into-bridge thing going on lately.

But maybe not. The bridge bisecting Chesapeake Bay is six and a half miles long and has two lanes of traffic each way with no shoulder. Some redditors say that it's actually hard to drive because the design of the bridge messes with the depth perception of some drivers.

The Washingtonian reports that the Kent Island Express company drives about 12-15 people per day. Many wear sleep masks to block the sight of the bridge and the disorienting effects that some people experience from seeing it. Since the bridge collapse in Baltimore, the business is up 10-15% due to riders who have only more reason to fear bridge crossings.

-via Chris Koerner | Photos: Kent Island Express, Library of Congress

Redditor /u/SustainEuphoria asks on the always-intriguing subreddit What Is It? about this tattoo. They say that their grandmother was forced to get it as a child. What could it mean? A possible answer is below the fold.

The 1950s and 60s saw a vast proliferation of educational films on a wide variety of purely interpersonal topics. The Baby Boomers were still quite young and thus it was necessary to inform them of how to interact with others as they grew up and explored American society.

Although some of these films seem a bit odd by modern standards, a few stand out as immediately useful. This one, for example, by filmmaker James Parris, helps people learn how to use that technological marvel that still causes confusion: the sidewalk.

What should you do if you are walking along the middle of a sidewalk and someone else is doing likewise, but approaching you? Do not knock them over. There's a better and safer way to use a sidewalk.

These procedures apply to other ambulatory locations, too, such as the aisles of grocery stores and even the hallways of a house. Watch and learn.

-via The Awesomer

In 1985, the British pop rock band Tears for Fears debuted their single "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," which soared to the top of the charts across much of the world. It made heavy use of synthesizers and other electronic instruments, unlike the lower tech of the bluegrass cover band named Greenwood Rye.

This quintet includes the quintessential bluegrass instruments of the banjo, mandolin, and the fiddle. An acoustic guitar and upright bass fill the gaps to provide very convincing covers of a-ha's "Take on Me", Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al", and Led Zeppelin's"Good Times Bad Times".

-via Timothy Imholt

It's Barbiecue sauce! Get it?

The Mattel and Heinz companies have secretly developed a Barbie-themed sauce in honor of the doll's 65th anniversary "after a huge public demand." It's a vegan mayonnaise that is tainted with beetroot juice to match the official Barbie shade of pink (hex code #e0218a).

Fortunately, Heinz is only releasing its product in the UK and Spain, and the United States is thankfully outside of the blast radius. My condolences to the Europeans, though. The trauma begins today at Tesco stores in Britain.

-via Fast Company, which calls upon the end of Barbie product collaborations for humanitarian reasons.

Photo: Heinz UK

Al Condominio, a restaurant that opened last month in Verona, Italy, would like for its patrons to fully enjoy the social aspects of public dining. This requires putting away phones and, hopefully, talking to other human beings who are physically present.

The Guardian reports that to encourage socializing, the restaurant encourages patrons to lock their phones in boxes. Once seated at a table, the patron hands the box key to a waiter, who provides free wine. So far, about 90% of patrons participate in this program.

Patrons can also write reviews and leave them in their phone boxes as they exit. Patrons who write the most positive reviews will receive free meals the next time that they visit. 

-via Messy Nessy Chic | Photos: Al Condominio

Would you like to smell like McDonald's French fries? The company clearly thinks so and is marketing its smell broadly, including, most recently, branded perfume. It's also counting on the smell of its food to be so recognizable that people will identify it without any other data aside from the company's particular shade of red.

Ads of the World reports that these billboards in the Netherlands are set about 200 meters (that's about 112.5 DeForest Kelleys stacked end to end) from McDonald's restaurants. The company hopes that the smell will trigger cravings for the actual food products.

"It's the first billboard where the smell becomes the ad." I wonder what other products, brands, or companies could market themselves this way successfully. Perhaps comic book and gaming stores, as they usually have a noticeable aroma.

-via Marginal Revolution

In the early 1960s, an American adventurer named Burt Kerr Todd fell in love the with the isolated and impoverished Himalayan nation of Bhutan. He wanted to help the nation economically develop and so proposed that the kingdom produce highly unusual and therefore collectible postage stamps.

Among these innovative stamps were tiny yet completely functional vinyl records that shared information about and music from Bhutan, such as the above recording of the national anthem. Others provide basic information about the nation to international audiences that might have never have even heard of Bhutan.

The Vinyl Factory reports that Bhutan issued a set of seven stamps in 1972 in both English and Dzongkha.

-via Nag on the Lake