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.
— T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) June 17, 2026
The closest thing American culture ever had to a text like the Odyssey and Iliad… was the King James Bible. https://t.co/xUxuCwkjCi
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
This coffee pot and milk jug are so cute! They look like a pair of penguins on the march.
Various websites indicate that they are of Soviet origin--specifically the Oktyabrsky Porcelain Factory in what is now the Bashkortostan republic within Russia during the 1960s. They can sometimes be found with matching cups and saucers.
-via Soviet Visuals
American stands at two hundred and fifty years since its independence. There are those who say that our best days are behind us; that we cannot accomplish great things anymore. Where is the next moon landing, atomic bomb, or squatty potty?
Dennis Lee, a patriot and writer for The Takeout, reassures us of our innately Promethean spirit. He tested the lore that one can produce blue hot dogs by boiling them in blue-colored (and presumably Smurf-flavored) Gatorade. Some experimentation was necessary, as hot dogs float and thus must be continuously rotated during boiling to produce a smooth coloration.
But the discovery works.
Two Australian paddleboarders rescued a stranded wallaby after it was swept out to sea pic.twitter.com/PyPe9Ql3S9
— Antidepressant Content (@depressionlesss) June 15, 2026
Nine News in Australia reports that two men were paddelboarding off the coast of East Grippsland in Victoria when they spotted a small furry creature struggling in the water. They were about 300 meters (176 Quarks stood end-to-end) off the beach, so it was an unusual sighting.
Huwan Medcalf and Harrison Mog found that the animal was a wallaby, which is a marsupial species native to Australia and New Guinea. They placed it on a board and brought it back to shore where it lay stunned for a while before starting to move on its own.
The Guardian reports that during a recent staging of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, an orange cat wandered on stage, seeking attention from the actors playing the lead roles. Given the physical actions on stage, I think it's during Act 5, Scene 3 in which the star-crossed lovers die. To his credit, the actor who played Romeo remained still after death (the character, not the actor) even as the cat played with his hair.
At the conclusion of this performance in Izmir, Turkey, the cast from the Imperial Russian Ballet Company came on stage to make their bows. The cat joined them.
-via Dailymeow
Alexander Mercieca is a high school principal, weightlifter, and certified CrossFit trainer in Huntsville, Alabama. He loves listening to and playing hip-hop, hard rock, and heavy metal music. He's a multitasker (the quality probably comes from being a principal), so Mercieca sometimes performs heavy lifts while playing music. Here, for example, he plays "Girls" by the Beastie Boys with one hand while benchpressing a barbell with the other.
