Sora News 24 tells us about the opening of a new hotel outside of Osaka. The Hoshinoya Nara Prison is a beautiful historic penitentiary that now serves more voluntary guests and provides conditions that previous residents would envy.

The Blind Pelican is a seafood restaurant in Holly Springs, North Carolina. On the southwestern edge of Raleigh, it's quite far from the Atlantic Ocean. But guests can still enjoy massive quantities of seafood.

The eatery is locally famous for its cocktails. Each one is a meal--probably for four people. The margaritas come with food items on skewers, often more than just appetizers. Why not stick a whole lobster in the drink? And why not then add a Alaska King Crab? Put in some onion rings and a steak so that it's a balanced meal. Make the drink so large that it takes two people just to bring it to the table.

Sometimes school yearbooks request baby photos from graduating students. It appears that one prankster decided to submit a photo of Adolf Hitler as a baby instead of him/herself.

The New York Post reports that East Brook Middle School in Paramus, New Jersey has recalled all copies of the yearbook and apologized for the oversight in a letter sent to parents of all the students. The principal then condemned both the prank and Adolf Hitler.

-via Wade Stotts, who quips, "The school apologized saying, 'If we could go back in time to prevent this from happening, we would.'"

Photos: Josef Franz Klinger/Google Street view

Mel Books, the great comic filmmaker, was born 100 years ago today as Melvin James Kiminsky to a poor family in Brooklyn. Brooks was a prodigious comedic talent even as a child. That early career was interrupted by the war, in which Brooks served as a combat engineer in the US Army at the Battle of the Bulge.

Brooks worked hard to develop his skills and entertainment appeal. In 1967, he won an Academy Award for The Producers--the first film that he directed. In the 70s and 80s, Brooks produced original masterpieces, including Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety, and Spaceballs.

He's worked continuously in filmmaking for several decades. His hand prints in front of the TCL Chinese Theatre, notable for having a sixth finger, is well-earned. People magazine tells us more about Brooks's astonishing life and work.

Photo: Nehrams2020

Oddity Central tells us about a new and fresh take on ice cream from Iwate Prefecture in northeastern Honshu. It combines the Japanese love of seafood and creamy soft serve ice cream. Imagine the clamminess of, well, shellfish, the tang of soy sauce and the sweetness of the ice cream. Combinations of sweet and savory tend to do well, so I'd like to try it.

Danny Fonfeder is a musician and craftsman in Montreal. His shop, dubbed Blueberry Guitars, offers uniquely beautiful works that are a delight to both the eyes and the ears.

Among them is this lovely instrument made of Balinese rosewood. He's carved and painted into its surface characters from the original series, Enterprise, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine. Check out Fonfeder's gallery for other masterpieces.

Joseph McGrail-Bateup, an honorary town crier in Australia's Canberra, has been recognized as the world’s loudest person. Guinness World Records acknowledged the 58-year-old recorded the loudest ever shout by an individual. He yelled ‘now’ at 122.4 decibels. pic.twitter.com/NyQFWgDjrf

— The Associated Press (@AP) June 23, 2026

Joseph McGrail-Bateup is an HVAC professional in Canberra, the capital of Australia, as well as the town crier of that city. It's an honorary position, but he's definitely up for proclaiming the news across the entire metropolis if necessary.

McGrail-Bateup has secured a Guinness World Record for having the loudest voice. At 122.4 decibels, he's louder than a chainsaw or a rock concert.

Miwa Ito is a glassblowing artist in Japan. She's made sculptures of many animals and characters, but much of her recent work focuses on remarkably realistic depictions of food. She calls them itadakimasu, which is the phrase that Japanese people traditionally speak before beginning their meals.

Yes, soft serve ice cream is delicious and we are grateful for the food service workers who provide it to us. But perhaps we, the public, are not appreciative of what people can do with soft serve ice cream when it's approached as not a menial task, but as a challenge of structural engineering.

If you really push the limits and get inventive, what extreme heights can you reach with mere wheat flower cones and melting, liquid ice cream? Arman Javeed, The Cone Maker on YouTube, shows us in a series of enticing short videos of expert pours from the pump handle.

CRABS Historical Fencing is an organization in Truro, New Glasgow, and Halifax, Nova Scotia that teaches traditional European swordsmanship. If you want to learn how to practically defend yourself with a broadsword, this is the place to go.

Do you anticipate being attacked with a sword while roller skating? Perhaps not, but it's best to be prepared. Here's a brief video of two of their practitioners at work on the roller rink.

A folded map on the passenger seat is from the past and narrated driving directions by a computer is the present. In between came various gadgets designed to help drivers get to where they were going. Among them is Iter Auto, an Italian invention from the 1930s. It consists of a paper scroll identifying waymarkers along a popular driving route.

Place the appropriate scroll in a machine which is hooked into the car's speedometer. It scrolled automatically to match the pace of the car.

I found this information on Tangible Media, a marvelous online museum of various forms of historic physical media organized according to a well considered taxonomy.

-via David Thompson

Demi Remick is one of the world's foremost tap dancers. In addition to traditional tap, she can express her creative interpretations of famous musical themes on the tap board.

Remick is now on tour with Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox, where she is dancing to jazzy renditions of famous science fiction musical compositions.

You can tab through this compilation to see her tap out to the music of Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, The X Files, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, Star Wars, and, most importantly, Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's an amazing display of her creative refashioning of old and familiar music.

Matt Thompson is a master "creator of mostly ridiculous and unncessary things", usually with wood as a source material. He has a model railroad that runs along the fence-line of his backyard. In the winter, he hooks a snowplow locomotive to the front to clear off the harsh winter precipitation on the tracks.

The train provides Thompson with endless opportunities for creative fun. Most recently, he added a model DeLorean DMC-12 to the front of his train. It is, specifically, a model of Doc Brown's time-traveling DeLorean from the Back to the Future film franchise.

Thompson reenacts the climactic scene from that film in which Marty McFly attempts to travel back to the future--if his car can reach 88 miles per hour.

-via The Awesomer

In early television history, tapes were sometimes recorded over or preserved in slipshod conditions, which is why, for example, many early episodes of Doctor Who are missing. Their rediscovery is a source of joy to fans.

This is the equivalent experience for medievalists.

St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) lived during the twilight of the Western Roman Empire, dying as the Vandals were literally at the gates of the city where he lived. He was a classically trained Roman intellectual who synthesized Platonic philosophy and Christian theology to a greater degree than previously accomplished.

Many but far from all of his voluminous written works survive to this day. But it was in only 2024 that Latin scholar Christian Tornau at University of Würzburg translated a manuscript discovered in Poland that contained six sermons by Augustine. Two of them were previously unknown.

Both sermons, which are concerned with the Witch of Endor, are confirmed to be very much in Augustine's style and thought, so Tornau is convinced that they are genuine. You can read more about this discovery at the webpage of University of Würzburg.

-via David Hines

Homer is the poet who defines classical Greece as a culture. Plough magazine asks:

If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who do we have? Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity?

The article authors suggest Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Herman Melville, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, among other writers.

There is much conversation today on X on the subject. I've seen proposals of Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote, and, quite cleverly, Walt Disney or Uncle Remus as America's definitive narrative author.

This, of course, assumes that America has a Homer. Within the Plough article, Jane Clark Scharl argues that there is no American national epic equivalent to Homer yet.

But if I had to decide, I'd go with T. Greer's response:

This is the only correct response.

The closest thing American culture ever had to a text like the Odyssey and Iliad… was the King James Bible. https://t.co/xUxuCwkjCi

— T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) June 17, 2026

The language of this text that was commonplace in American homes has shaped the American English language more than, I think, any other book.

How would you answer the question? Who do you think is America's equivalent or approximate Homer?

Image: Kelly Library