Dustin Ballard's There I Ruined It project continues to enchant audiences with its inventive juxtopositions of musicians with radically different themes and genres. In this video, Ozzy Osbourne's Black Sabbath mixes it up with the wholesomeness associated with the late folk singer John Denver.

"War Pigs" is a vigorously anti-war song from 1970, the same time that Denver's career was beginning its ascent. Black Sabbath was vaguely referring to the Vietnam War, of which the UK was not a participant. Denver was largely silent about Vietnam, but he was an enthusiastic supporter of detente between the US and the USSR. So this musical synthesis isn't too far from reality.

Instagram user @nn.hcafe prepares astonishing meals that look almost too good to eat. They're true works of art that wow our senses with their surreal forms.

This cake, which resembles a piece of skyline, is one of her more exemplary pieces. Both the clouds and the outside atmosphere are made of coconut-flavored gelatins. She makes the clouds first, then adds them to the transluscent gelatin as it hardens. You can see a video and how-to video here.

-via Totally Gourmet

YouTuber DemonFlyingFox is an AI artist who creates videos that bring pop culture figures to zenith of their narrative purposes. That's why this song imagines Harry Potter as an American redneck. He's still a wizard and fights Voldemud, but time with a mullet. Watch and learn how your favorite characters from the Harry Potter universe live in the trailer park by the swamp.

Redneck adaptations are a recurring theme with DemonFlyingFox lately. Be sure to also watch his music videos for rural versions of Star Wars, which includes the startling detail of a pair of siblings kissing, and Breaking Bad, which imagines rednecks cooking crystal meth in a camper.

-via Educatëd Hillbilly

Adult Swim has released this bumper for Rick and Morty by animator and director Aaron Fromm. It adapts images, ambiance, and music from the famous opening to Bruce Timm's Batman: The Animated Series. Compare it with the source material:

We clearly need a full half-hour episode of Rick and Morty developing this aesthetic.

-via Discussing Film

Tião e os Bravos is a Brazilian band that clearly takes its inspiration from American bluegrass music. Or the members at least have a hillbilly aesthetic. The use of a banjo, an upright bass, and a washboard certainly reflect a American folkways take on "All Star" by Smash Mouth.

Many of their vocal tracks are in Portuguese, as you would expect from a Brazilian band. Fortunately for the monolingualists among us, American classics such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana and "Times Like These" by the Foo Fighters are presented in English.

-via The Awesomer

I've tried to source this claim by the always-interesting X account Traces of Texas. The histiography is a bit sketchy. But it's not unreasonable for North Street in Nacogdoches, Texas to claim the title of the oldest public road in the United States.

The Spanish explorers and early settlers referred to the route as La Calle Real del Norte. It stretched across eastern texas, serving as a trade out between a variety of indegenous peoples, most notably the Nacogdoche and Nansoni.

A historical marker in Nacogdoches, one of the oldest settlements in Texas, notes the possible beginning of the route.

Image: Google Maps 

This map of the United States isn't missing any of the 50 states. It just reminds people, from an Alaskan point of view, of their relative importance.

The Lower 48, as Alaskans are fond of calling the beleaguered 48 contiguous states, fit into a neat box that contains the essential geographic features of that region, including Pike's Peak and the Mississippi River.

It's all to scale. Oh, perhaps not to a geographic scale. But it is an accurate reflection of the importance of each region of the United States. The chart, which contrasts Alaska and the other 49 states, provides data to support the visuals.

-via Terrible Maps

The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine two-part episode "Past Tense," which aired in January of 1995, presents Sisko, Dax, and Bashir being accidentally transported to the San Francisco of 2024. It's a city that, like the rest of the United States and much of the world, is wracked by poverty, crime, and tyranny.

Robert Reinhardt, the owner of the Roberto Confectionary in Tatabanya, Hungary mixes traditional Hungarian cuisine into his ice cream flavors available to hungry Hungarians experiencing the summer heat.

France 24 reports that his shop has become wildly popular since he began offering ice cream that tastes like paprika chicken, cabbage stew, and meat pancakes. Additionally, Reinhardt helps his customers experience foreign cuisines with ice cream flavored as spaghetti Bolognese or bacon and eggs.

It's cheap, too, at about $1.41 USD a scoop. If I were in Hungary, I'd spend an afternoon and twenty bucks experimenting with the different flavors available.

-via Dave Barry

You want to go into the water? That's a bad idea unless you have a boat so large that sharks don't even consider you to be below them on the food chain.

Jayden Grace and Joe Cook were recently fishing off the coast of Mooloolaba, Queensland when a Great White Shark approximately 16 feet long charged and bit into their metal boat. Grace, whose voice you can hear in the video, expresses astonishment and fear at the shark's bold attack.

-via Dave Barry

Redditor /u/reddituser0346 shares photos of ice cream treats being sold at a movie theater in Australia. The carefully shaped ice cream held in place by a chocolate shell resembles the facehugger stage of the xenomorph's life cycle. So it's as dangerous as much of that continent's wildlife.

The original poster suggests eating the ice cream after first mounting it in the mouth of the famous Dune sandworm popcorn bucket.

-via Totally Gourmet

Etsy seller Lisbanoe Leather Craft in the UK offers precisely rendered leather goods, including this impressively realistic backpack that looks like the shell of a tortoise. The preparation, she says, is "very labor intensive", taking four weeks of work for each backpack. But the result is an astonishingly detailed work of painted leather.

The Associated Press reports that a men's prison in northeastern Ohio recently offered a 5-course gourmet meal to 60 selected guests. All of the food was prepared and served by prisoners who are training for culinary careers after their release. Many of the ingredients were grown in the prison's on-site garden.

This is a project of EDWINS, a gourmet restaurant and culinary school in Cleveland which organizes culinary classes in hundreds of prisons around the United States. Graduates are able to leave prison with the skills and certifications necessary to land jobs in the food service industry.

-via Nag on the Lake

BBC News passes along a story from Italian news sources about a foiled home burglary. The would-be thief broke into a house in Rome and was looting the place when he was distracted by a copy of The Gods at Six O'Clock, which is a retelling of Homer's Illiad from the perspective of the Greek gods by Giovanni Nucci.

The burglar was reading the book when the homeowner woke up and discovered the break-in. The thief fled, but was caught by police.

When author Nucci learned of this event, he offered to send a copy of his novel to the thief so that he could finish reading it.

-via Dylan O'Sullivan

A press release from the sheriff's office of Santa Barbara County, California describes how a woman tracked down two people who were regularly stealing her mail.

The unnamed woman suspected that her mail was being stolen, so she mailed herself a package that included an AirTag tracking device. When that package was stolen, she located the AirTag's signal and called the police. The sheriff's deputies then found the device in the home of two suspects, who also had mail allegedly stolen from a dozen other people.

Police arrested the couple for a variety of fraud-related criminal allegations.

-via Instapundit | Photo: Wikimedia user KKPCW