Oddity Central tells us about Estância Silvânia, a cheese factory outside of São Paulo, Brazil. Camila Almeida developed a cheese that she calls "Taiada Silvania." This recipe adds to the mixture toasted Içá leafcutter ants, which are a local food staple. One food critic calls this novel cheese "Brazilian caviar." It flavor has "notes of almonds and chestnuts, a slight fennel flavor, and the unmistakable crunch of ants."

Estância Silvânia created the cheese to enter into the 2021 Mondial du Fromage  et de Produits Laitiers in Tours, France. It won the bronze medal in this international cheese competition and has attracted an international appeal.

Anything heavy built in Antarctica, unless it's on bare ground, will eventually sink into the ice. Germany's Neumayer Station III on the northern coast of Antarctica, built in 2009, sits on 16 hydraulic legs that keep the structure 6 meters off the ice.

It is necessary to periodically lift up a leg, shovel snow under it, and then lower the leg so that the station is not devoured by the icy abyss. Eventually, though, the station will fall off into the sea. The Alfred Wegener Institute explains that the ice sheet moves 40 centimeters toward the sea each year. Eventually, the section of ice on which the station rests will become an iceberg.

-via Massimo

I don't mean this specific fish; I mean the species. I don't know by which name this fellow prefers to be called.

The Boops boops has been known to the Ancient Greeks since at least the Fourth Century B.C. and was identified by the great taxonomer Carl Linneaus, who gave the species its Latin name, deriving it from the Greek for "ox-eyed". In English, it's most commonly called a bogue.

It lives in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. Boops boops apparently good eating. At about a foot long, you probably need a few of them to make a meal.

-via Respectful Memes | Photo: Wikimedia user Roberto Pillon

Design Boom tells us about an amazingly dynamic sculpture at the Puy de Fou amusement park in Les Epesses, France. It's made by the engineering firm Leva that specializes in creating large-scale three-dimensional moving surfaces.

This castle animates with the face of Morgane, a villainess from Authurian legend, as actors fight in dramatic performances in front of awed crowds. The face covers 12 square meters of the tower and shifts with stone blocks moving forwards and backward. The movement is very fluid and, when matched with a voice, creates an almost magical impression that the audience has entered an age of sword and sorcery.

In a second season scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Dr. Pulaski mispronounces Data's name with a soft vowel in the first syllable.

There's actually some backstory in the exact pronunciation of Data's name. Slash Film explains that no one had determined how to pronounce Data before the first table-reading of a scene with Brent Spiner (Data) and Patrick Stewart (Jean-Luc Picard). Gene Roddenberry has present at this event.

Stewart pronounced Data with a hard vowel, which came as a surprise to Spiner. Roddenberry immediately accepted it as a canonical decision. Furthermore, he established that on Star Trek: The Next Generation, whichever actor says a name first determines its pronunciation.

-via reddit

Redditor /u/Yolka17 shares this photo from her neighborhood in Seattle, Washington. I'm not sure of the precise location of this Little Free Library--the directory indicates that these institutions are numerous in the city.

The design is from Eric Carle's classic picture book The Very Hungry Caterpillar. What happens to this caterpillar? In the light of the moon, a little egg lay on a leaf. When he hatched, he started looking for some books to read. With each passing day for a full week, he found more and more books to read at his local Little Free Library, which he devoured in his cocoon.

Chris-Rachael Oseland is a professional chef in Columbus, Ohio. She has a long-established track record as a geek who prepares artistically perfect foods inspired by her pop culture interests, leading to the publication of several cookbooks with dishes inspired by True Blood, Doctor Who, and The Settlers of Catan.

When the first Deadpool film came out, she made these startling brownies that look like Wade Wilson's mask. The recipe is detailed, measured, precise, and orderly--quite unlike the antihero that inspires them. Oseland made the eyes from Oreo cookies and then sliced them midway to produce the sharp impact of Deadpool's vision.

Ian Falconer published the first of the Olivia picture books in 2000, which secured a Caldecott Honor the next year and launched a popular media franchise that included a 40-episode cartoon. Falconer passed away in 2023.

Falconer named the piglet character after his niece, Olivia Falconer Crane. Dan Kois recently interviewed her for Slate.

Crane tells Kois that she was five years old when the first Olivia book came out. She had a close relationship with her uncle, who gave her many gifts, including illustrations of her as a piglet. The characters in the books, including the pets, were all real people and animals that Olivia grew up with.

Despite her fictional appearances in the books, Crane's mother made a point of telling the young Olivia that she was not the character and vice versa. Crane grew up with a healthy separation from Olivia the piglet.

Image: Amazon

The Columbo story aired from 1971 to 2003 with a total of 69 episodes. It was tremendously popular, especially during the 1970s, leading to merchandising efforts. Those projects included this board game published in 1973.

Board Game Geek says that it is structured identically to a 1958 game inspired by the works of Alfred Hitchcock. It has cards for weapons, suspects, and clues, but, sadly, no "Just one more thing" cards. Copies are available for sale on eBay, although they are pricey.

Notice that Columbo is facing away from the players. Internet rumor holds that choice is because the designers did not have permission to use Peter Falk's likeness.

-via Super Punch

Canonically, the Riker Maneuver is a tactical maneuver completed in the movie Star Trek: Insurrection, which is the last of the Next Generation films. But in trekkie parlance, the Riker Maneuver refers to the way that Jonathan Frakes would swing his leg over a chair to sit down--a practice that the actor didn't know was notable until years after the end of the series.

In this AI-generated video by NetDystopiaMusic, Captain Picard summons Commander Riker to a private meeting in the captain's ready room to address complains about how members of the crew are experiencing these close encounters with Riker's masculinity.

-via Holodeck Four

West of Bakersfield is the town of Taft. It has a population of 8,546 people. It developed in the late 1800s and was known as Moron.

Stories vary as to how it got its name. Either the residents chose it on their own or the Southern Pacific Railroad decided to change its name from Moro to Moron so as to distinguish it from the town of Morro Bay.

Either way, Moron was at the center of the 1909 California oil boom. The next year, residents decided to change the name of the town to Taft in honor of then-President William Howard Taft.

-via Super Punch | Photo: LA Dork

Open Reel Ensemble comically refers to their apparati as "traditional folk instruments." These are electronic instruments that involve pulling and releasing magnetic tape with bamboo rods. When accompanied by keyboards, the resulting techno music is mesmerizing and, I find, reminiscent of 70s-era science fiction. 

The band members do not restrict themselves to these bowed instruments. They also sing in front of live audiences. I don't know what this song is about, but I heard the words "America" and "San Francisco." This electronic piece has no vocals, but it does use the magnetic reels as turntables and percussion instruments. It's impressive how Open Reel Ensemble can find so many uses for these antiques.

-via David Thompson

Historically, gravedigging has not been considered a respectable profession. Because of their association with death, gravediggers are sometimes thought to be at least ritually unclean if not physically dirty.

But it's a serious job that requires athleticism. Oddity Central reports that gravediggers from around the world assembled in Hungary to discover which of teams of two men could dig a complete grave the fastest and most precisely. A finished grave is 2 meters long, 0.8 meters wide, and 1.6 meters deep.

A Hungarian team won first place for the second year in a row. László Kiss and Robert Nagy completed their grave in 1 hour, 33 minutes, and 20 seconds.

Ball pits--a staple of indoor playgrounds--were invented in 1970 as a children's play area inside an Ikea store in Sweden. They became very popular, despite a reputation as being unhygenic. Adults may cringe at the bodily excretions that may be present in ball pits, but children don't know better or don't care.

One must be very careful to keep one's balls clean. It's not just good business; it's also good manners. Easyfun is one manufacturer of a ball cleaning machine that vigorously brushes, disinfects, and dries balls. They're sucked in through one tube and shot out the other. Although the process may take a few hours, it's a lot faster than cleaning balls by hand. You can see more images of this process at Core 77.

Instagram user and master chef etn.co_mam shared photos of her latest project--lovely pastries that are instantly recognizable as inspired by Edvard Munch's 1893 painting The Scream.

Well, Instagram's automatic translator rendered the Japanese as "wind gas", but I understood what it meant.

The face is made of cheese and the body of cocoa and chocolate. How does it taste? I'll guess it's reminiscent of existential terror.