Bernth, an Austrian guitarist who fills his YouTube channel with musical oddities, including using the worst rated guitar picks and amps and playing guitars made of LEGO pieces and an acoustic guitar that is partially submerged in water. Bernth also modifies extreme guitars, such as building one with an extremely long neck and another that has 24 strings.

Is it hard to play a 24-string guitar? Even that challenge was unsufficient for Berth, who most recently cobbled together guitars into a 109-string monstrosity that produces a lovely sound. It does, though, require a lot of coordination to play effectively.

-via The Awesomer

Going to a wedding today. Instead of holding flowers, the bridesmaids have hatchets. They are not pagan as far as I know, but some of you might like it regardless. pic.twitter.com/MXKbV9QPDX

— sugar&ice Crystals (@WeirdCunning) May 4, 2024

Twitter user sugar&ice Crystals shares this story from a wedding. I like the idea of axes for bridesmaids.

It might also be an appropriate choice for the bride instead of a bouquet. Consider the tradition of the bride tossing the bouquet over her back to identify the next person to get married. Would axes be an improvement over flowers? Would the goal be to catch the axe or dodge it?

Today I learned that the US Navy traditionally allows the infant children of crew members to be baptized in the upturned ship's bell. A 2021 Navy press release about such a baptism onboard the USS Kearsarge says that this tradition was borrowed from the Royal Navy which permitted the such rites in foreign ports either in or under the bell.

A webpage created the National Bell Festival, a non-profit organization that supports the restoration of historic bells, says that the practice is also followed by the US Coast Guard, the Royal Australian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Navy.

This video from 2017 shows a baptism performed in the bell of the USS Gerald R. Ford.

Photo: US Naval Institute

パッカーン！でも、ドレスドでもない
ちょっと変わった卵の包み方🍳

【無慈悲】生まれたてのひよこオムライス🐣 pic.twitter.com/t2MBs6u1qU

— テイストメイド ジャパン (@Tastemade_japan) April 24, 2024

Twitter* user @Tastemade_japan shows this clever omurice dish that begins with rice balls decorated to resemble chicks, then fried into a gentle nest made of the flesh of their lost siblings. Next, it is devoured whole by feckless gods who laugh at the terror of the birds. The rice birds realize all too late that the only purpose of their existence was to be consumed.

-via The Best

*None of this "X" nonsense. If the name "Twitter" was good enough for our forefathers, it's good enough for ourselves and our posterity.

Redditor /u/ChangsManagement compiled this map with the Interactive ArcGIS tool and birthplace data from Hockey Reference. It shows all of the birthplaces of the National Hockey League within North America. It looks like the birthplaces concentrate heavily along Canada's own population, as well as a strip from Boston to Philadelphia.

As a patriotic Texan, I looked up the stats for my own state. 12 NHL players were born in Texas, 3 of from Arlington, a suburb of Dallas.

A worldwide map would also be interesting. It would appears that NHL players also hail from decidedly non-icy countries such as Brazil, the Bahamas, and Taiwan. An vastly disproportionate number were born in the former Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union.

-via Flowing Data

The Nakizumo Crying Baby Festival is an annual ritual conducted in Shinto shrines across Japan. Sumo wrestlers carry babies into a dohyo (a sumo ring). Then priests put on bird demon masks and taunt the babies. The first baby in a pairing to cry wins. If both cry at the same time, the baby that cries the loudest is the winner.

Why do Japanese families do this? Traditionally, an innocent baby's cry is thought to ward off evil spirits. But the mothers interviewed for this video seem to be participating just to have a good time. They attended the festival in the city of Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo, which is so popular that babies have to enter a lottery for the chance to participate.

-via Dave Barry

The runway model did not pee his pants.

Well, actually, that's possible. We don't know for certain. But the pants that he's wearing are made to look like he peed his pants. So it's possible he went ahead and peed in them anyway because, well, he's got nothing to lose at this point.

The revered journalistic outlet TMZ reports that the elite Jordanluca fashion house offers these luxuriously pre-stained (or pre-peed) jeans for a whopping $608--or it did until the jeans sold out of stock.

Fox 9 News reports that last week, a car crashed through a guardrail on I-94 in St. Paul, Minnesota and caught on fire. The driver was conscious, but also injured and trapped inside. Several motorists stopped and rushed in to save him.

As this dramatic video shows, they bravely struggled with the doors, which could not open because of the guardrail. Eventually, a highway worker used a tool to smash the window. The heroic rescuers then pulled the victim out of the burning car just before the flames reached the front of the cabin.

The driver escaped serious injuries but was taken to a hospital for evaluation.

-via David Thompson

If you've been holding your breath, anxiously awaiting the results of the world seagull screeching championships, you can now relax and collect your winnings with the bookie. The Guardian reports that the winner of the under-16 category is a 9-year old British boy named Cooper Wallace.

As I noted last year, thoughtful people admire this most noble beast of the sea. Admirers of the majestic seagull gathered in De Panne, Belgium for the fourth year to imitate the seagull's melodious screech. In this video, you can watch some of the top performances.

Notice that, in this video, the performances take place under a banana. Why? I'm fully capable of jumping to preposterous conclusions based on no evidence whatsoever. Specifically, Belgium is home the the world's largest collection of bananas and Belgium is, of course, a grotesque obscenity. Hanging a banana from the ceiling is a traditional Belgian way of summoning a blessing from the gods.

-via Super Punch

Tippy is the digital mascot of modern tipping culture. He's here to shake you down for extra cash with his weapons of surprise and guilt. Yes, you will be asked to tip for the most absurd reasons by businesses that have no justification to ask for a tip, such as utility companies and library reference desks.

Kurtis Scott created this cartoon showing Tippy interacting with a meat-based lifeform in an effort to extract valuable resources. He's not really persuasive. But like a lot of hustlers, he profits from people being unwilling to stand up for themselves in the face of emotional bullying.

-via Laughing Squid

Most ordinary distance runners prefer water, but Tom Gilbey is anything but ordinary. He's an expert on wines put his knowledge to the test during the recent London Marathon. He hid two wine glasses in his belt and, at each mile maker, he guessed the identity of each wine given to him by colleagues.

Of the 25 wines, Gilbey got 7 completely correct, 14 mostly correctly, and 4 wrong by the metrics of year, origin, and type. The 52-year old tells BBC News that he didn't do any serious training for this event and hadn't run a marathon since 1996.

By committing to this act of extreme athleticism, he raised over £10,000 for a hospice. You can watch his compilation video of each stop here.

-via Dave Barry

Buoy tenders are ships that maintain buoys in harbors, lakes, rivers, and the open sea to serve as aids to navigation. The US Coast Guard maintains several classes of buoy tenders, which also provide maritime law enforcement and search and rescue services.

The men and women who serve on the buoy tenders take pride in fulfilling the challenges of their work. Slinging around the multi-ton steel buoys while maintaining and deploying them is physically demanding work. The coasties occasionally compete against each other in the key skills of buoy tending in the Buoy Tender Olympics.

Last August, the crews of seven buoy tenders competed to see who could straighten huge chains and drive red hot rivets the fastest, among other coastie sports.

Okay, this sounds ridiculous. Who would be scared to driver over a bridge? Who would pay $40 to have someone else drive them across this bridge? I mean aside from the whole ship-crashing-into-bridge thing going on lately.

But maybe not. The bridge bisecting Chesapeake Bay is six and a half miles long and has two lanes of traffic each way with no shoulder. Some redditors say that it's actually hard to drive because the design of the bridge messes with the depth perception of some drivers.

The Washingtonian reports that the Kent Island Express company drives about 12-15 people per day. Many wear sleep masks to block the sight of the bridge and the disorienting effects that some people experience from seeing it. Since the bridge collapse in Baltimore, the business is up 10-15% due to riders who have only more reason to fear bridge crossings.

-via Chris Koerner | Photos: Kent Island Express, Library of Congress

Redditor /u/SustainEuphoria asks on the always-intriguing subreddit What Is It? about this tattoo. They say that their grandmother was forced to get it as a child. What could it mean? A possible answer is below the fold.

The 1950s and 60s saw a vast proliferation of educational films on a wide variety of purely interpersonal topics. The Baby Boomers were still quite young and thus it was necessary to inform them of how to interact with others as they grew up and explored American society.

Although some of these films seem a bit odd by modern standards, a few stand out as immediately useful. This one, for example, by filmmaker James Parris, helps people learn how to use that technological marvel that still causes confusion: the sidewalk.

What should you do if you are walking along the middle of a sidewalk and someone else is doing likewise, but approaching you? Do not knock them over. There's a better and safer way to use a sidewalk.

These procedures apply to other ambulatory locations, too, such as the aisles of grocery stores and even the hallways of a house. Watch and learn.

-via The Awesomer