🧀 Canadian 🇨🇦 Delaney Irving won’t remember much of winning the Woman’s race at #cheeserolling.

After being knocked out on her way down, she was unconscious for a period of time but told us it was all worth it.

⚠️ WARNING: Contains graphic images pic.twitter.com/yxwk0YaGUE

— Greatest Hits Radio Gloucester (@GHRGloucester) May 29, 2023

For at least two hundred years, people in Gloucester, UK have been chasing wheels of cheese down Cooper's Hill. One slope of that hill is quite steep for 200 yards. In this traditional sport, a wheel of Double Gloucester cheese is rolled down the hill. After a one-second head start, the runners pursue it, often by just rolling down the hill. It is, perhaps, the purest of sports as it requires courage, stamina, and agility.

Yesterday, Delaney Irving won after arriving at the finish line first. But her tumble down the hill knocked her unconscious. The Guardian reports that she didn't even know that she had won until she woke up after the race in a medical care tent.

-via Dave Barry

In Greek mythology, the god Prometheus surreptitiously gave the gift of fire to humanity, thus sparking civilization and upsetting his fellow gods for altering the power differential between themselves and we lowly mortals. As punishment, he was chained to a rock for eternity. An eagle ate his liver, which continuously regenerated, thus sparing him from death but not agony.

The French makers of these liver pills from the 1930s imply that Prometheus would have benefited from their product. It's a rather brutal celebrity endorsement and classicist Edith Hall of Durham University, who shares this image on Twitter, says that she can think of a better advertising strategy.

-via Super Punch

As Disco Stu of The Simpsons points out, disco music is only trending upward in popularity. So it's fitting that musicians of all sorts are getting with it to stay trendy with the young people.

Radio Télévision Suisse, a Swiss public broadcasting service, has created a YouTube playlist of "Swiss Covers"--traditional Swiss takes on more modern music. This playlist includes an organ performance of "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees. Vincent Thévenaz plays the pipes at the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, a Calvinist church in Geneva.

As I watched the video, I noticed that Thévenaz wears unusual shoes. It appears that organ players often wear shoes made for the specific purpose of managing the many pedals on the instrument. He should probably change them, though, before hitting the floor of the discothèque.

-via The Awesomer

Cheung Chau is a small island off the coast of Hong Kong. Yahoo News reports that, prior to the pandemic, it would host an annual week-long festival to celebrate the Buddha's birthday. Now that the Chinese government has loosened COVID-related restrictions, that public celebration has resumed. The festivities include a contest to climb a 60-foot tall tower of buns.

As far as I can tell, the object of this competition is to climb to the top of tower and collect as many buns as possible within a minute.

You can see more photos of this festival at the New York Daily News.

-via Dave Barry

It's a good idea to be prepared for a variety of natural disasters that could suddenly strike your life, such as fires, floods, and glaciers. Are you at risk to experience an earthquake? If you live in the United States, consult this interactive map at CNN that compiles data from the US Geological Survey.

The lowest risk areas are marked in blue and the highest risk areas are marked in red. The entire West Coast and Alaska are obviously risky places, but so are the Big Island of Hawaii, the Ozarks, and the coast of South Carolina. Lubbock, Texas is, though completely safe and offers better barbeque.

-via Nag on the Lake

Perhaps you're looking for the perfect Fathers' Day Gift. Perhaps you want to reenact the Willem Dafoe film The Lighthouse with a friend. Either way, you have a great opportunity coming up. The Associated Press reports that the US government is selling four historic lighthouses.

The US Coast Guard (which asborbed the US Lighthouse Service in 1939) maintains aids to navigation that use technologies more modern than lighthouses and no longer has a use for these historic structures. But the General Services Administration wants to make sure that they are preserved. So the GSA is selling these buildings to local governments and non-profit organizations that will maintain them.

These lighthouses include the Cleveland Harbor West Pierhead Light, which offers a scenic view of the Cleveland skyline, which I assume is lovely, especially when the river is on fire. It's also accessible only by boat, offering a secure shelter in uncertain times.

The auction begins at the end of June, so start pulling up couch cushions for the money that you'll need.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Mtbangert

The New Indian Express describes a terrifying incident from the village of Pandarpadh in the Jashpur district of the state of Chhattisgarh. An 8-year old boy named Deepak was playing in the backyard of his home when a cobra wrapped itself around his arm and bit him. He tried to shake it off, but the snake remained firmly attached. Finally, he bit the snake twice.

The snake fell off Deepak and died. The boy's parents raced him to a medical facility, where he was treated with anti-venom drugs. Fortunately, it appears that the cobra engaged in a "dry bite"--a bite that injects no venom. The boy went home after a day.

-via Dave Barry | Unrelated photo by Keshav Mukund Kandhadai

Without gravity, the human body suffers atrophy in a variety of ways. To prepare for long term human travel through low or zero gravity environments, we humans need to know what to expect. Accordingly, the European Space Agency has recruited volunteers to spend 60 days in bed to simulate the effects of microgravity on the human body.

A press release describes the study. An experimental group of 12 people will lie in beds that are inverted at 6°. They must keep at least one shoulder in contact with their bed for 60 straight days. Eating, bathing, and toileting must be conducted with these constraints.

Another group of subjects in the study will have access to exercise bicycles which they will be able to use while still in bed. A third group will cycle while inside a centrifuge. Researchers say that they will compare the health of the participants at the end of the study in order to plan for future human missions beyond Earth.

What would you have to receive in order to be willing to participate in a study like this one?

-via Gizmodo | Photo: ESA

Guy Dupont, a computer programmer and tinkerer, received a request from a friend to develop pants that send the user a notification when the fly is down. This invention will hopefully save us needless embarrassment when we discover at the end of the day that our pants were open the whole time.

Dupont used hot glue and safety pins to attach a sensor to the fly, which he then wired to a microcontroller in his pocket. If the sensor detects that the fly is open, after a few seconds, the microcontroller pushes a notification to the Pushover app on Dupont's Android phone.

-via Hack A Day

British artist Ernest Howard Shepard became internationally famous for his illustrations included in the first edition of A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh.

In 1966, Britain commemorated the nine hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which was recorded for future generations in the 230-foot long Bayeux Tapestry. It was also, Victoria Botkin informs us, the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Winnie-the-Pooh. Shepard marked the occasion by designing a Pooh version of the Bayeux Tapestry, which you can see below:

But that was just on paper. Kate Jarman shares on Twitter that her mother has used her embroidery skills to turn Shepard's illustration into an actual piece of fabric art.

-via Marilyn Terrell

The odds of an exoplanet being Earth-like in the sense that it could be successfully inhabited by humans are, well, astronomical. Many specific environmental qualities must be in place.

But a recently-discovered planet about 86 light years away from our solar system ticks off some of the essential factors. LP-791-18 b orbits a red dwarf star. It doesn't rotate, so one side is always facing its sun and the other is always away from its sun. But, NASA reports, it's volcanically active, so it could have water condensation on the dark side.

CalTech says that  planet is about 1.46 times the size of Earth, so the gravity might be acceptable to humans. It orbits its star at a Goldilocks distance--not to hot and not too cold. These are essential characteristics of planet that could at least hope to serve as a refuge for humans.

-via Marginal Revolution | Artist's visualization courtesy of NASA

These two street signs face each other, about 5 metres apart, and are in scholarly dispute about apostrophe placement pic.twitter.com/jAnu8clKHM

— M@ (@mattfromlondon) May 12, 2023

I'm a stickler for apostrophe usage, but it's hard to say if either of these signs is incorrect. It all depends on whether King Charles III has many scholars or just one scholar. Google Maps suggests a plurality of scholars, but I think that we need a headcount.

Matt Brown, an editor for the Londonist, snapped these photos. He appears to be a published expert on London geography and the Twitter thread shares other examples of British locales with disputed place names.

-via David Thompson

Expeditionary campers are travel trailers and motorhomes designed for camping away from the amenities of a campground. They're for something more akin to wilderness environments. Mammoth Overland, a manufacturer of such travel trailers, goes further with its ELE trailer.

Gear Junkie explains that ELE stands for "Extinction-Level Event". This trailer is thoroughly zombie-proof. Oh, the company says that it's designed to withstand a bear attack, but we know what it's really communicating. The walls and windows are bullet-proof, there are controls inside for bear spray emitters, and there's an air purification system that can last for up to 6 months of use.

The interior includes a combat information center that allows the user to observe the surrounding area with a nightvision camera mounted on a boom, launch a drone, or monitor radiation with a Geiger counter.

The system is pricey at $67,000. But isn't survival worth the expense?

-via Homecrux

Hemlock Public Schools in Hemlock, Michigan recently issued a press release in hope of quashing a rumor of an impending alien invasion. This rumor spread on social media, led parents to contact the school district for information, and finally resulted in the necessity of the Superintendent speaking out on the subject. In short: the aliens have not arrived.

The school district has investigated the rumor and determined that it began with one student who wished to create a distraction that would allow him to avoid taking a math test.

The press release urges members of the school district to verify information claims before believing them, let alone spreading them online.*

This warning stresses the importance of information literacy, which is, as a librarian, the most important thing that I teach to my students. An outrageous rumor on campus is a good teaching opportunity.

I've toyed around with the idea of creating an information literacy game that begins with intentionally starting a wild and false rumor on campus that inductively leads students toward evaluating the veracity of the rumor. But the project proved to be too complex to practically execute.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Hemlock Public Schools

*Assuming that the press release is accurate, which I am unable to verify at this time.

I've come across A LOT of good 17th- and 18th-century Quaker names over the past 3.5 years, as I've worked on my thesis. Now that my thesis is done and submission is near, it's time to share the more than 90 wildest early Quaker names I've found (in alphabetical order): pic.twitter.com/Qj18jPELMI

— Isabella Rosner (@IsabellaRosner) May 16, 2023

Are you searching for the right baby name for your little bundle of joy? Picking the wrong name can result in a /r/Tragedeigh. So let us turn toward the noble and dignified names of Quakers during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.

Isabella Rosner is a doctoral student at King's College in London who studies the material cultures of Britain from the 1600s to the 1800s. She's an expert on women's needlework during that period.

She examines an era when Quaker sects of Protestant Christianity were enormously popular in England. As a result, she's run across a lot of names that were normal by standards of that culture and time, but would be considered a bit eccentric today.

Personally, I think that "Love Beer" would be an excellent choice for an adult. "Experience Cuppage", though, sounds a bit naughty.