(Photo: Adhara Caamaño)

This is a hórreo. It's a structure that can be found throughout western and southern Europe, but is most common in Spain. It's a building built on stone columns. Some have stood for 2,000 years.

Why did people build these architectural oddities?

(Photo: alamanos)

They were barns where farmers kept harvested crops. Here's one of a few hórreos still in use. Originally, a farmer would use only the top portion to store food. The stone columns kept crops out of the reach of many rodents.

(Photo: Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez)

The origin of the hórreo is uncertain, but it dates back to at least Roman times. Many are well-preserved.

(Photo: juantiagues)

The hórreo is an architectural icon of Spain with an influence still seen in modern design.

You can learn more about hórreos and view more photos at Kuriositas.

The USS Yorktown (CV-10) is an Essex-class aircraft carrier launched in 1943. It's now a museum ship in Charleston, South Carolina. The Yorktown is berthed near the USS Clagamore and USS Laffey, a World War II era submarine and destroyer, respectively. Together, the three vessels host KentaiCon, an annual anime convention.

The filmmakers of Beat Down Boogie were on site last weekend to film some of the impressive works of cosplay. Attack on Titan cosplayers were asked to man the wall cannons to guard con-goers against titans.

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-via Ace of Spades HQ

Pictured above is a replica of an airport security checkpoint. It's at a museum, not an airport. Roxy Paine is currently exhibiting it at the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York City. His exhibit, which is entitled, "The Denuded Lens," consists of three replicas of complex machines made with wood. Paine finds machines fascinating because they represent, to him, both control and a lack of it. In an interview with It's Nice That, he explains:

Machines act as industrial agents, but also as a physical manifestation of a mechanism of control. My machines utilise and contradict rules and norms of the factory and mass production. All of them seek to locate the moment in time and the place where control becomes non-control and where control becomes randomness. They also seek to find the place where sameness and uniqueness blur and become indistinct. Establishing a systematic language composed of certain fixed absolutes and certain variable entities.

Click on Continue reading to view another incredible work by Paine entitled The Machine of Indeterminacy. His craftsmanship is amazing.

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The video Star S'Mores is supposed to teach children the concept of self control. But we all need to learn that, so it's appropriate that the story parodies a movie older than some of the kids' parents.

In five pun-packed minutes, Flan Solo (Cookie Monster) tries to learn to control his urge to eat his partner, Chewie the Cookie, a chocolate chip cookie. Only One Cannoli, Master Groda, Darth Baker, Princess Parfaia, and Luke Piewalker help Flan Solo learn to control his impulses by using The Four.

-via Gizmodo

(Photos: Akai Tento)

Akai Tento no Koohii Ten's grubs are so realistic that you probably wouldn't be surprised to see them crawl around your plate. But be prepared for disappointment: they're actually just fruit-filled gummy worms. 

The coffee shop operates from a market stall in a small seaside town in Japan. But it has a national reputation for its production of gummy larvae that look completely real. Like real grubs, it's the soft guts which taste really good. But these are filled with blueberry jam instead of insect entrails.

Do you look like an IKEA product? You might with the right costume. IKEA's Malyasian division held a cosplay contest which invited customers to dress up like the products that the company sells. The grand prize winner got a gift card worth about $250. That craftsmanship of some of these costumes is definitely worth that. But the participants had better make sure that they don't wear their costumes to the store or someone will try to buy them.

Danish golfer Karsten Maas can not only heft his custom-built club, but swing it, hit the ball, and make it land where he wants it to go. There may be longer golf clubs in the world, but Maas can reliably use his 14.5-foot wood to send a ball 540 feet.

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Hitting the ball properly requires a special stroke that Maas has developed. His backswing keeps going, around and around his body until the club has lost momentum.

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Maas can do a lot more than just swing this massive club around. He's a trick shot artist. In this video, you can see him hit two balls at once, bounce a ball on a club, hit one like a baseball, drive elevated balls, hit balls with two clubs swinging at the same time, and drive with a club bent over backwards.

-via Technabob

How do you get a 4-year old to sleep? With great difficulty.

But Riley, the daughter of Casey Carey-Brown of of Boston, found a way. Her little girl, who goes by the nickname "Roozle," likes to color herself to sleep. Give her some paper, crayons, and markers, and she'll quietly doodle and fill in coloring pages until she falls asleep, sometimes with the drawing instruments still in her hands. Carey-Brown felt inspired to capture these precious moments. She explained to the Huffington Post:

Just as making paper pictures has become a bedtime habit for Roozle, capturing the scenes on camera has become one for mom.

"I've always gone in to check on her before I go to bed, but these days with a very active 4-year-old, I find that capturing a moment of sleeping Roozle helps me as a parent too," Carey-Brown said. "Time slows down, just for a moment, in the midst of all the chaos."

Redditor ejara80 writes that this costume worn by his friend's dog won third place at a Petco Star Wars contest. It's fantastic! I'm curious about what costumes could have beaten a dog who naturally looks like a Wookiee.

Perhaps, like Chewbacca with the Rebel Alliance, Petco has a rule: no pants, no medal. That's dangerous for the company because Wookiees are known to pull people's arms out of their sockets when they lose.

-via Tastefully Offensive

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The Fairmont Hot Springs Resort in British Columbia is in bear country. Recently four bears hung out at a putting green. A cub among them played with the flagstick, trying to climb it, then pull it down. A man with a camera recorded the scene and added his commentary.

Eventually, baby bear wandered off with "Pascal's ball"--the golf ball then being used by Pascal van Dijk, CEO of the resort. Then, at the end of the video, you can see how dangerously close these onlookers were. Those are wild bears! What were you thinking?

-via Twisted Sifter

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Regular readers know that I am awed by the skills of good excavator drivers. In the past, we've seen one load a digger into a truck without a ramp, serve as the engine of a truck, row a boat, and light a cigarette.

In this video, the excavator is at the bottom of a deep ditch. That worries the driver not a bit. He moves his digger out so cleverly and smoothly that you'd swear that he had planned it that way from the beginning. And I suspect that he did.

-via Nothing to Do with Aborath

Troqman, the "Cartoonbomber," is an illustrator and art director in Paris. He's traveled across the world, drawing cartoons and putting them in funny places to add stories to them. You can see them all on his Instagram page.

Greg Krueger of St. James, Minnesota loves cats so much that over the past 15 years, he's built catwalks into his house. He's built so many that all together, they're about 100 yards long.

Cats are his passion and Krueger has the carpentry skills to turn his home into a wonderland for them. Inside his home are cozy hiding spots with cat-shaped entrances, padded beds, and interior lighting.

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Krueger was recently diagnosed Asperger's syndrome. He attributes his interest and dedication to his cats to that affliction. CBS Minnesota quotes him:

“Obviously, my house would not be like this if I didn’t have Asperger’s,” he said. “If it takes a long time, I don’t care because if I like what I’m doing, I almost don’t want to finish what I’m doing.”

He’s doing it for those who’ve always seemed to understand him, from the time he was a boy.

“It’s been said that all cats have Asperger Syndrome,” he said. “So I think that might be one reason why I really love cats is that I kind of think that I can understand their personality really well.”

-via Oddity Central

Redditor LurkerMcLurkerton says that his daughter's first grade classroom has desks that have bicycle pedals. I love this idea! It would be a great way to help kids who are a bit too energetic to calm down.

Other redditors point out that all of this energy is wasted. The school administrators clearly haven't seen the movie Conan the Barbarian, or else they wouldn't have let this educational opportunity pass by.

-via TYWKIWDBI

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After the terrorist attacks in the United States 13 years ago, all television programming went to news coverage and commentary 24 hours a day.

But it couldn't remain that way forever. Eventually, we all had to go back to our daily lives and resume our work.

For comedians and talk show hosts, that work was making us laugh. But how do you make people laugh after what happened? Should you make people laugh? These are questions that comedy providers had to answer thoughtfully and tastefully, sensitive to the raw feelings of their audiences.

Carol Hartsell of the Huffington Post rounded up the immediate responses of America's comedians after they went back to work. Her list includes videos from Jon Stewart and David Letterman and links to articles that appeared in The Onion.

I was especially impressed with Conan O'Brien's address to his audience. I've never met him, but O'Brien has long struck me as a decent and well-grounded person. This video demonstrates his ability and willingness to be both caring and professional.