Rhiannon Brooksbank–Jones of Beeston, UK, loves the Korean language and plans to study it in college. But she found that some sounds are hard for her to duplicate. So she's taking a surgical solution:

Her parents agreed to her having a lingual frenectomy, a 15–minute operation under local anaesthetic that involved an incision in the flap of skin. Rhiannon admitted that it was "agony at first" but her tongue is now about 1cm longer and she can say words that were impossible before.

"I'd been learning Korean for about two years, and my speaking level was high, but I was really struggling with particular sounds," she said.

"It became apparent after a little while that I was having trouble with the Korean letter 'L', which is very frequent and comes from a slightly higher place in the mouth than the English 'L', and that my tongue was too short.

"The surgical procedure was my only option. My pronunciation was very 'foreign', but now I can speak with a native Korean accent."

Link | Photo: Paul Tonge

This is a bronze sculpture by Sukhi Barber. That is possible to make such an object self-supporting is mind-blowing.

One of Barber's major themes is "the transcendence of our limiting view of a solid reality." So, appropriately, this sculpture is entitled "Appearance/Emptiness."

Artist's Website -via Colossal

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The Frisian language is spoken by about half a million people in the Netherlands and Germany. It is the closet surviving relative of Old English, the tongue of Anglo-Saxon England. How mutually intelligible are the two languages? In this clip from the documentary series Mongel Nation, Eddie Izzard, speaking only Old English, tries to buy a cow from a Frisian-speaking farmer. -via Ace of Spades HQ

Shane Waltener creates elaborate installations around his lace doilies, such as this one entitled Auntie Peggy Has Departed. To him, doilies represent dreamcatchers that make a moment in the past accessible for the present.

Another rather striking work that I found at his website is a doily spider web meant to be viewed in front of a chandelier by glass artist Dale Chihuly. The juxtaposition of Waltener's white lines and Chihuly's colored spheres is quite lovely.

Link -via Craft | Chihuly Doily

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YouTube user trpchaki made this amazing puppet that looks like Wheatley from Portal 2. She took many in-progress photos showing the amazing skill and inventiveness that went into building it -- especially the controls, the sound system, and the movable parts. Link -via Geekologie

This sculpture by Olaf Mooji, appropriately dubbed "Braincar", expresses his belief in "the nearly psychological connection between drivers and their cars." There's a projection system inside that permits Mooji to put weirdly psychedelic or clear, coherent images to people watching it drive by. At the link, you can find a video of the car as well as photos of its construction.

Link -via DVICE | Artist's Website | Photo: Gé Hirdes

Windoodles is a new Tumblr blog that compiles doodles that people have put on windows with dry erase markers so that the images project onto the scenery outside. This one is by a MTV employee named Gusto.

Link -via Blame It on the Voices

If your gopher problem is getting out of hand, you may need to acquire one of Shawn Thorsson's decidedly robust garden gnomes. He casts his riflegnomes from scratch and offers them in standing, kneeling, and prone positions. Link -via Make

This brilliant print, inspired by a scene in The Princess Bride, was made by an artist named Rakka. He writes "like i had any choice as to what to make inigo out of." Well done, sir. Well done. Link -via reddit

Niue, an autonomous island nation and dependency of New Zealand, will mint coins bearing the images of Star Wars characters. They will be fully legal tender there:

A set of 40 coins is being produced by the New Zealand Mint.

As legal tender, the coins will have a face value of NZ$2 (£1), but the silver content in each is worth considerably more than that.

Link -via Ace of Spades HQ | Photo: Daily Telegraph

Laika was the first living creature from Earth in space. She rode into orbit in Sputnik 2 and died there -- as the Soviets knew she would. Nick Abadzis has created a graphic novel which depicts alternate scenarios for Laika. It looks like the Soviet space program may come to an early end. Link -via Nerdcore | Graphic Novel

A Chilean company called Monarch has developed a new type of underwear that, it claims, makes you cleaner:

It's like this: copper is merged with polyamide and the result is a type of oil that's then turned into a wire. Machines take these wires and weave them inside the undie fabric so that the processed metal stays in contact with the user's skin. This, as you can imagine, provides the user with day-long germ-killing delicates.

So it will no longer be necessary to change your underpants every week. Hooray!

http://guanabee.com/2011/08/chilean-company-creates-fungi-resistant-undies-out-copper/ -via Gizmodo | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user Michelle loves Severus used under Creative Commons license

Are your shoes plain, but comfortable? Etsy seller pcbcreations has a solution to both of those problems. These sandals, like the other inventive works in his gallery, are made from printed circuit boards. Link -via DVICE

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This German-language video shows Ronny Wechselberger breaking the world record for parallel parking -- that's sliding into position quickly with as little clearance as possible. He set a new record at 26 cm.

The notes at the video link state this record was set in April. Since that time, Zhang Hua of China broke it at 24 cm.-via Doobybrain

deviantART member Mari Rosa Archambault, inspired by ukiyo-e prints, depicted Nintendo video game stars in feudal Japan. It took me a minute out to figure out that the figure on the right is Mega Man. Link -via Uniblog