Dylan and Wal, both incarcerated in New Zealand for methamphetamine production and related crimes, languished behind prison walls. Inside his cell, Wal watches the TV show The River Cottage, a program about old fashioned cooking. The episode airing is about making yoghurt from scratch. Wal gets excited and invites Dylan to their next racket. Tomorrow, he says, they're going to cook.

Peter Jackson's The Two Towers, which was released in 2002, includes a scene in which Merry and Pippin, who are Hobbits, meet the Ents. In a recent television interview, actor Billy Boyd, who played Pippin, revealed that an early version of the script included both Hobbits getting naked. Screen Rant reports:

Here’s the thing. There was almost nudity in the movies,” said Boyd. “[Screenwriter] Philippa Boyens…she wrote a scene, because we’d been doing some kind of gags and winding people up…[and] she said, ‘Oh, it’s a new scene we’re filming next week, with the Ents. When Merry and Pippin are up Treebeard, he gets afraid and shakes his branches, which makes you guys fall, and as you hit all the branches on the way down, by the time you hit the ground, you’re naked. And Merry turns to Pippin and says, ‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’ And Pippin says, ‘Hold me, Merry.’

Emphasis added. This certainly would have spiced up the movie.

Strictly speaking, I think that it was a nude scene. The Ents weren't wearing clothes, were they?

-via Dave Barry | Image: New Line Cinema

This is the GyroJogger. The first hands free way to watch your shows while on a run. pic.twitter.com/6v2kvIJaZT

— Unnecessary Inventions (@mattyxb) July 1, 2021

Matt Benedetto, the genius behind Unnecessary Inventions, calls his new device the GyroJogger. This 3D printed head-mounted bracket solves the challenge of watching videos while running. The heads-up display provides a gyroscopically-mounted holder for a cellphone while ensuring that the user is still looking up and forwards.

We Texans know how to respond to bad weather: with a smile and alcohol. On April 28 of this year, there was a hailstorm outside of San Antonio. The National Weather Service has confirmed that this hailstone, which measures 6.4 inches across, is officially the largest hailstone in Texas history.

That's officially the largest hailstone.

But it's probably not the biggest. Residents of the town of Hondo claim to have found a hailstone from the same storm measuring 6.57 inches across. They could have waited for the National Weather Service to measure and verify their claim. But, the San Antonio Express-News reports, the owners broke up the ice to make margaritas.

-via Super Punch | Photo: National Weather Service

How did the bag of cocaine get there? The defendant, according to the Belfast Telegraph, claimed:

[...] that a bag containing cocaine that was found between his buttocks had been put there by someone else without his knowledge.

Police arrested the man after he fled from them outside of a bar in Limavady, Northern Ireland.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Pixabay

Karma is a ցӀìէçհ pic.twitter.com/0G20aDezO8

— Silent Rocco (@silentrocco) June 17, 2021

Silent Rocco is a master mime artist. Watch his videos to see astonishingly precise displays of physical movement that appear to defy gravity and reality. This video, which Rocco posted on reddit, demonstrates how he can perfectly balance himself so that unreal objects appear to become tangible.

Dr. Crom, an archaeologist and classicist, explains that this ivory tessera (a flat object inlaid in a mosaic), illustrates the hand symbol for the Roman numeral IV--that is, four. Fingers make the V-symbol and the thumb forms the vertical prefix. It's located in the National Library of France, which is where you will need to go to rock out with it.

-via Marilyn Terrell

The distance between a bear's eyes and its nose tends to vary and reflect individual differences among them. So that means that software can reliably identify specific bears by their faces. Three years ago, researchers in the United States and Canada developed the technology. Now conservationists are using it to track wild bears in northern Japan. The Mainichi reports:

The South Shiretoko Brown Bear Information Center, a nonprofit organization based in Shibetsu, is taking photos and accumulating data by installing automatic cameras at two locations on animal trails that brown bears use, and is accumulating data. However, taking photos from the front has proven unexpectedly difficult, and the organization has succeeded in taking only about 20 photos that can be used to recognize the bears' faces. Nonetheless, they were still able to identify four individual bears.

-via Super Punch | Photo: South Shiretoko Brown Bear Information Center

Every author has at least one awkward story of getting asked to perform an authorly duty at an opportune time.

This is mine: pic.twitter.com/siQsSbn7Ik

— Jarrett J. Krosoczka (@StudioJJK) June 29, 2021

Jarrett J. Krosoczka is a children's book author and illustrator. He's most famous for his Lunch Lady series. Perhaps he's a bit too famous, as he learned when he went to a funeral home to pick up the cremated remains of his late mother. Krosoczka tells the story and tells it masterfully. Be sure to stay for the punchline.

-via Aaron Starmer

This video of uncertain provenance shows an ingenious method to eliminate a rat infestation inside a wall. Just cut a hole through the drywall and feed a snake inside. The panicking rats flee through the hole. Amazingly, the snake, once it has completed the task, slides right out, too. That's helpful, because I wouldn't want to have to put a larger animal, like a honey badger or an eagle, into the wall to get rid of the snake.

-via Dave Barry

Brazilian musician Johnatha Bastos was born with limited arms, but that doesn't limit his musical ability. He can masterfully play a guitar with just his feet. In this video, he takes on the iconic Guns N' Roses song "Sweet Child O' Mine."

-via The Awesomer

(Last Place Comics/Zach Cranor)

I've just discovered the comics of Zach Cranor. They have a common theme: something innocent turns into hell and something familiar becomes freakishly alien. They're wonderful, as Cinderella is discovering as she prepares for the ball and/or prison.

Chickfly pants are designed for women who want to enjoy the great outdoors without the need to pull down their pants every few hours to void their bladder and/or bowels. Claire Barber, a writer for Outside magazine, wrote about her practical tests of this invention:

I hung in a climbing harness and let my friend and belayer laugh as I awkwardly grabbed at my crotch and attempted to pee midair. I squatted in various locations, including beside dirt roads and in a snowy canyon. [...]

Once you’ve practiced using the fly, the process is the same as any time you pee outdoors—find a comfortable place, squat, and go—but takes half the time. And the major win here is for privacy. You don’t need to pull the pants all the way down to go, and if you’re opening them from the front, your back and sides will be fully covered. When you’re done, the stretchy fabric springs back into place so you never feel exposed for long. Granted, you’re still peeing outside, so privacy is relative, but you avoid the hassle of hoisting your pants back up and mooning other outdoor patrons.

-via TYWKIWDBI | Photo: Chickfly

It makes perfect sense to me. A running joke among carpenters is that Home Depot wood is terrible. It would be prudent to remove the demonic forces that warp it so much.

I don't know if that was the motivation behind the people who visited the Home Depot in Dickerson, Pennsylvania to perform an exorcism in the lumber aisle. We'll likely never know, as employees called police, who removed the customers from the store without incident.

-via Dave Barry | Unrelated photo by Mike Mozart

A few weeks ago, Core77 introduced me to the book Prisoners' Inventions, which is a book published in 2001 about how inmates in California prisons adapted their limited physical environments to suit their needs. The author, whom we know only as "Angelo", illustrated the many amazing inventions that he had seen prisoners create with whatever they could find.

I requested the book through interlibrary loan and scanned a few pages.

Angelo's acquaintances were capable of astonishing ingenuity, such as this means of communicating between floors using a toilet.