This gentleman on the Chinese video hosting app Bilibili plays the erhu--a two-stringed bowed instrument. It produces excellent fiddle music as aptly demonstrated with the American folk song "Dixie." The erhu's vibrant notes transport us to a land of cotton for old times there are not forgotten.

-via Orikron, who imagines the song as authentically Chinese had the Ming dynasty had not closed off private maritime trade in 1371.

Can I tell you how to get to Sesame Street? Yes, but I assure you that you should go as a tourist. You do not want to actually live there. The residents are freaks. And I don't mean just their physical features, but also their behaviors. Comedian Ross Snow depicts life as a normal person on The Street.

This is Snow's schtick. He's also depicted an insurance adjuster on Stranger Things, what Gordon Ramsey would be like as a child, and a realtor trying to sell your Sims house. Perhaps we're all better off on this side of our screens instead of these fantasies.

The Awesomer properly labels this familiar if unsettling movement: like a life-size living bobblehead doll.

Callytrappy is a trap dancer. He moves his body rhythmically and robotically to the music deep in the uncanny valley between a human and an android.

I'm especially impressed with his capacity to refrain from blinking, sometimes for entire videos. The visual effect is like an animation glitch.

It looks like a storefront in a stripmall in suburban America, but Big Iowa BBQ is in Tokyo.

Like all morally decent and right-thinking people, I enjoy pineapple on pizza. But that's not the only fruit that can do well on pizza. The Takeout has a list of 10 others, including pears. Pictured above is a pizza photographed by Flickr user Edsel Little. It is topped with caramelized pears, field, greens, onions, mozzarella, and fontina. The Takeout recommends crisp pears because they're unlikely to go soggy while baked and their soft flavors will accent rather than overwhelm the cheese.

What other fruits work? The Takeout suggests apricots, apples, berries, pomegranate seeds, plums, melon, mango, melons and dates. Which have you tried on pizza?

In 1862, John Gilleland was a 53-year old carpenter in Athens, Georgia. He was too old to serve in the Confederate Army, but he was a private in a home guard unit. Determined to find some way to counteract the Union's massive manpower advantage, he devised this cannon to fire chain shot.

Chain shot--a length of chain between two cannon balls--had been used for centuries for anti-personnel purposes or, in naval applications, to destroy rigging. But such shells were usually loaded into a single cannon.

Gilleland's innovation, according to a 1996 article by military historian Lonnie R. Speer, was to cast a cannon with two barrels side by side. The barrels were pointed 3 degrees away from each other so that the chain would fan out and sweep through the bodies of Union soldiers.

Test firings revealed many technical problems. The chains would break apart and the balls would scatter wildly--a problem exacerbated when the firing of each barrel was not precisely simultaneous.

Gilleland's cannon was used in battle only once in August 1864 outside of Athens. I have no information about the utility of the cannon in that battle, but the Confederate forces were compelled to withdraw despite its use.

This unusual weapon resurfaced in the 1890s and, in 1957, was put on public display in Athens.

-via Michael Brasher | Photo: Jud McCranie

Yes, the base of this table is exactly what you think it is. Papaya Studios is an antique store and design studio in Thailand. In fact, it's the largest antique store in that nation. The size allows for a variety of unusual items, such as this coffee table that is definitely a conversation piece for your next home gathering.

Housekeeping is not a prestigious profession, but any job takes skill and, given enough time, consideration, and determination, a person can demonstrate a mastery of that occupation that can astound outsiders.

The International Sanitary Supply Association is a professional organization for the people who keep our environments clean, safe, and orderly. Each year for 35 years, the ISSA conducts a championship competition of core housekeeping skills. Teams from the top hotels of Las Vegas converge in an arena to prove which is the best at vacuum cleaning, mopping, floor scrubber driving, and more.

Fox 5 Vegas News reports that, last December, teams from Resorts World, Aria, and V-dara claimed the top prizes. Watch them in action.

-via David Thompson

Redditor /u/hjrrockies shares a picture of a page from their copy of the first volume Foundations of Applied Mathematics. It quotes Sauron, a villain from The Lord of the Rings, saying:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

It's an advanced math textbook, so the authors correctly assume that readers will be familiar with Black Speech, which is the tongue of Mordor. This particular passage is famously inscribed on the One Ring in the Elvish Tengwar script.

-via Math Lady Hazel

Let's say that snow rarely hits your region but it's snowing anyway. You want to go sledding, right? But with no sled, you might have to improvise.

Daniel LaBelle is a physical comedian who makes us laugh by risking his safety. In the past, we've seen him play the floor is lava with his entire house and being physically aggressive all the time.

In this video, LaBelle finds ways to slide down an optimal sledding hill on a frying pan, a suitcase, bubblewrap, a pair of baking sheets, rollerblades, and more. His use of a laundry basket is probably ideal.

-via Born in Space

Dr. Justin McDaniel teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. One popular class that he teaches is called Existential Despair. In this class, 13 students arrive at his apartment where they are given copies of a short novel. When Vulture magazine visited his class, that novel was Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome.

The students silently read for a few hours. They are forbidden to talk or use their phones. They may not take notes. That's because they're not studying the novel--they're experiencing it.

McDaniel then conducts a discussion of what they've read with an inevitable emphasis on the despair of the characters and themselves. McDaniel, 53 and recently divorced, is intimately familiar with despair. He tells his students:

I always say, ‘I’m not concerned with their 19-year-old self.’ I have no interest in their 19-year-old self. They’re hopeful. They have their life ahead of them. I’m 53. I’m worried about their 53-year-old self. I’m worried about the midlife crisis. I’m worried about the divorce.

McDaniel is, fittingly, composing a book about the literature of despair titled This Will Destroy You: How Literature Teaches Us to Flourish in the Face of Existential Despair.

Photo: University of Pennsylvania

Watergate is the short-hand name for the political controversy that brought down the Nixon Administration. This Watergate is a card game from 1973 in which two to six players accuse each other of malfeasance and try to deceive each other. Bribery is not only permissible but encouraged. Everyone loses, but some players lose more than others.

The key to success in this game, as in so many other dimensions of life, is to lie persuasively.

In this video, Board Game Archaeology unpacks and plays this game.

Photo: eBay user Treasures Gallery

Elisa Rogers found these unique stained glass sculptures at an estate sale. The late artist, she learned from the daughter, made "ridiculous beautiful things" that sold well enough to pay for trips to Italy. Rogers was so inspired by them that she began making stained glass herself.

-via The Husky

Fox 13 News in Salt Lake City reports that the police department of Heber City has lately been using artificial intelligences to accelerate the report-writing process. These applications are called Draft One and Code Four. They transcribe the audio recordings from police body cameras.

Recently, during one investigation, an officer's recording picked up audio from the Disney film The Princess and the Frog. The AIs interpreted this information to indicate that the officer had transformed into a frog.

Fortunately, the transformation was temporary. The officer got better.

The AI tools save time. Sgt. Keel says that it shaves off about 6-8 hours a week of work. But attorney Steve Lehto says that defense attorneys could exploit these errors during trials.

Photo by Sarah Deer used under Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Cormac McCarthy is known for prose as terse as Coolidge's and punctuation as minimal as a bikini. William Faulkner, on the other hand, took his time to express his thoughts with great verbosity. In this video, comedian Jerry Wayne Longmire plays both writers arguing about the proper density of language in narrative prose.

"The dictionary ought to charge you rent." I'm with McCarthy on this one.

This video is one of Longmire's many parodies of Faulkner, my favorite of which is his Faulknerian reading of his home electric bill. Longmire has also offered 90s rap by Faulkner, a Fourth of July celebration, discount whiskey, responding to a HOA notice, complaining about Comcast customer service, and a complaint about a clogged toilet in a hotel room.