A 15-foot-tall statue of the head of the Sopranos family greets passengers at a train station in southeastern Lithuania. https://t.co/vR4kYSGoJL

— Atlas Obscura (@atlasobscura) July 31, 2023

In a famous scene in The Sopranos, Tony Soprano, wearing slippers, boxer shorts, an undershirt, and a bathrobe, waddles out of his home to pick up the morning newspaper left in front of his house.

Now the people of Vilnius, Lithuania can reflect on the majesty of this moment whenever they take a train. This is the right and proper order of things.

Why does this monumental sculpture of Tony Soprano grace this particular train station? Atlas Obscura explains that Lithuanian artist Donatas Jankauskas made it in 2009 for a show appropriately called "Unexpected Places." Jankauskas is noted for his playful use of pop culture figures. After traveling extensively, the 15-foot tall statue found its final home at a train station in the city where Jankauskas first conceived of the premise.

The above image is a particular street in the village of Bauné in western France. The presence of the many painted lines is entirely intentional. Mayor Jean-Charles Prono explains to Euro News that the speed limit is 20 KPH, but drivers frequently reach speeds of 50 KPH. The idea is to make it difficult for drivers to figure out where they're supposed to drive, thus forcing them to slow down.

Some residents are not fond of this paint scheme and say that it makes pedestrian travel more dangerous rather than less. The mayor says that this is not a final design. It was an emergency measure to provide an immediate response to the danger.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Alerte Info Trafic 49

Major League Baseball has a formal and precise definition of a home run that includes all possible means of accomplishing the goal. It's not necessary for the batter to hit the ball over the fence. But, practically speaking, this is almost always how the batter is able to score.

A baseball field is a precisely laid out area, but the fence that separates it from the stands is not. That obstacle varies from stadium to stadium. The Washington Post has a helpful tool that lets us compare the fence lines of different stadia. Pictured above is Minute Maid Park in Houston and Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.

-via Flowing Data

The company and its product are both named 18 Wheels. Unlike its counterparts with tracks or large pneumatic tires, this design from Finland uses 18 small solid wheels, each of which is independently powered with its own motor on flexible suspension arms. Together, they're able to traverse high obstacles, including ones 8 inches high, without losing speed.

The designers mean for it to be environmentally friendly, which is why the unit is made of recycled materials and electrically powered.

18 Wheels unveiled its prototype last year and, according to this video, had planned to demonstrate an improved model this summer.

-via The Awesomer

ViralHog shares this compilation of footage from security cameras around one home in Gardena, California. The resident had ordered a package from Amazon and a delivery driver dutifully brought it. The order had come with specific delivery instructions: the driver was welcome to go for a swim if s/he wished to.

It apparently didn't take long for the driver, sweating in the hot summer sun, to make a decision about the offer. He emptied his pockets onto a handy table and executed a clean dive into the pool. Then he went straight back to work, presumably while soaking wet, but also cool.

Most library job descriptions include the term "and other duties as assigned" and we librarians often share jokes based on real-life experiences about what that generic statement can include.

The public library system of Arapahoe County, Colorado offers a position that includes that caveat (more or less), but is based upon a core duty seldom found in library services positions: barista.

Yes, some public libraries have in-house cafes or even bars, but these are usually separated from the conventional library services end of the business. This job posting is not for a barista who works in a library, but a person who offers paraprofessional library services and makes coffee.

A master's degree in library science is not required, so it is not, strictly speaking, a librarian position. But the detailed list of job requirements includes core library services.

-via Jessamyn West

Eric Carr is a master percussionist. At his YouTube channel EMC Productions, he teaches the world how to play drums and not how to play drums, as well as inventively uses drums for unconventional purposes. In the latter category, Carr recently compiled a few dozen drums into a mostly QWERTY-arranged keyboard.

In this video, Carr never speaks a word. He instead dictates his narration into his drum kit as he describes the project, tells a percussion joke, and performs songs, the most challenging of which is "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" from Mary Poppins.

In the comments, Carr notes that the hardest words for him to spell were "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and, a YouTuber's favorite, "subscribe".

-via The Awesomer

Twitter user @WSBChairman made this map using data from Google Trends. Huge crowds are going to see the new movie about Barbie as well as the biopic of Robert Oppenheimer. There's crossover marketing involved as people blend the two movies. Many people are going to see both films.

But, ultimately, you have to choose which movie to see first even if you are going to watch both. These data might suggest which movie holds dominance in different states. Right now, New Mexico is going hard for the site of Oppenheimer's most famous project. Mississippi, which has never experienced an atomic detonation, is bright pink for Barbie.

-via Terrible Maps

Stockholm Syndrome is the name given to the psychological phenomenon of captives emotionally bonding with their captors. It's named after a particular bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden in 1973. During and after their captivity, the hostages criticized police and supported the robbers.

Stockholm Syndrome is not the only psychological condition named after a city. At Atlas Obscura, Frank Jacobs lists other conditions named after Detroit, Boston, Lima, London, Brooklyn, Paris, Florence, Venice, Amsterdam, and Jerusalem.

Paris, Florence, and Venice have peculiar conditions experienced by tourists. Lima Syndrome, which refers to the 1996 hostage crisis at the Japanese ambassadorial residence, is the opposite of Stockholm Syndrome in that the captors become too sympathetic with their captives.

The most interesting on the list is, perhaps, Brooklyn Syndrome. It refers to being argumentative and obstinate with other people, a trait identified with people from Brooklyn, New York.

Photo of the Lima hostage crisis by César Astudillo.

If you're traveling back in time to Sixteenth Century London, where are you most likely to be murdered? It's a good idea to know before you make the trip. Fortunately, the University of Cambridge's Violence Research Centre has an interactive guide for that time period, as well as the Thirteenth Century.

Each pin on the map represents a recorded murder. Click on one (at the site, not here) to read details about the case. You can sort results by the gender of the victim, the type of weapon used (quarterstaffs were surprisingly common), and the year of the murder.

-via David Thompson

It's called the Bumpair. We receive a history of the development of this invention at Core 77. An early version was paired with a scooter rental company that stored one of these self-inflating helmets with each bike. Checking out a scooter on an app triggered the helmet's inflation.

The new version is available for individual consumers. You can inflate it by mouth or hand pump when needed. I realize that it sounds like you're wearing a pool float on your head, but the Bumpair 2.0 passes Europe's official safety standards for bike helmets. And, of course, it looks really cool.

Photos: Bumpair

"Well, I deserved that."

This warrior is a master archer. She's shooting perhaps 100 feet from across her backyard through a ring that is about an inch wide. She nails three shots, one right after another. A victory dance ensues after each. Her phone records the hits to great visual effect due to its proximity to the target.

Then, with her final shot for the night, she nails her phone itself. The rest of the video (after the decisive blow at the 2:10 mark) shows her laments and attempts at repair.

Content warning: foul language. You'd swear, too, if you just shot your phone.

-via Born in Space

I decided today that I’m going to see if I can find the restaurant with the highest number of brothers. I am on strike and have nothing better to do with my time. Please join me. pic.twitter.com/BGY3r04PyX

— Dan Amira (@DanAmira) July 17, 2023

Dan Amira, a humor writer for The Daily Show and modern-day Renaissance man, recently decided to expand our knowledge of the human condition by locating the largest number of brothers attributed to any restaurant in the world.

The resulting Twitter thread shows an escalating number of brothers that either founded, worked at, or serve as mascots for eateries. Okay, so two brothers can start a pizzeria. That's fine. But let's add another brother and another until it's brothers all the way down. The vast number of brothers eventually stops looking like a family and more closely resembles a clone army.

Rob Worling is an extreme ice skater who likes to push winter sports to their limits and beyond. It's not enough for him to just play hockey in the winter and tennis in the summer. He has to combine them by setting up a tennis court on an ice rink. I find it amusing, but also compelling because I can see it thriving as a competitive sport.

Worling's other adventures on ice include playing ice basketball, ice football, and ice soccer. The last of these adapted sports looks particularly demanding because of the need to dribble the ball and skate simultaneously without falling over.

-via @Figensport

Why do teeth decay? In our modern, enlightened times, we know that tooth decay is caused by acids created by bacteria that live in the mouth. But in Ancient and Medieval Europe, dentistry attributed tooth decay to worms that resided inside teeth and ate at them from the inside out.

Geraldine Gnych, a British scholar who holds a doctorate in history from Swansea University, wrote a blog post in 2017 describing the myth of tooth worms. The idea dates back to at least the First Century A.D. in the Roman Empire. Treatments included the use of henbane, a poison, in order to kill the worms. In small amounts, henbane acts as a sedative to ease the pain in the tooth without—hopefully—killing the patient.

Pictured above is a replica of an Eighteenth Century sculpture from France fancifully illustrating the tooth worms at work.

-via Museum of Curiosities | Photo: Michael Kowalski