It wasn't a bivalve inside, but a completely different type of mollusk. While fishing in Suruga Bay, Japan, Twitter user Ai Miura caught an octopus inside an empty shell. She didn't catch it for long, though.

-via Super Punch

It looks like an actual praying mantis, right? But it's not. Artist Tina Kraus is such a master of her craft that she can re-create nearly perfect replicas of insects using crepe paper.

Finland, the most metal of all nations (there is approximately 1 metal band per 2,000 people), held a competition among the greatest headbanging knitters of the world. With guitars, drums, needles, and yarn, these metalheads tapped into the dark river that flows through every human soul. Stuff reports:

With stage names such as Woolfumes, Bunny Bandit and 9'' Needles, the participants shared a simple goal: to showcase their knitting skills while dancing to heavy metal music in the most outlandish way possible. [...]

"It's a great release,'' said Elise Schut, a 35-year-old nurse from Michigan who performed with her 71-year-old mother and 64-year-old family friend, Beth Everson, who added that "knitting is such a meditative activity but now it's energetic and heart pumping".

I can't believe that 25 years have passed since this amazing 30-second commercial appeared on the air and this is the first time that I've seen it!

The UK division of Pizza Hut pitches the value of its product (warning: the gagh is, to put it mildly, sub-par) directly at a Klingon-speaking audience. The British accents make it a bit hard to understand, but I suppose that's just my American perspective.

-via Geekologie

This tweet warms my librarian heart. It's always a good idea to keep emergency books around. Hurricane season is upon us here in Texas, and I'm always careful to keep a supply of print books to enjoy if the power goes out for a few days.

(More seriously, I have expressed to my library director that, as a matter of collection development policy, it should be possible to rebuild human civilization from the print collection of any library. This saved some unread volumes from disposal.)

During World War II, pianos and other musical instruments, in the hands of skilled users, were vital moral boosters. Piano maker Steinway & Sons, in order to secure government contracts during this time of a constrained civilian market, designed and built an upright piano that could be packed into a crate and delivered by, if necessary, parachute to American troops. Amusing Planet writes:

By June 1942, Steinway’s workers had designed a small upright piano, no more than forty inches wide and weighing 455 pounds—light enough to be carried by four soldiers. Each piano was treated with special anti-termite and anti-insect solution and sealed with water-resistant glue to withstand dampness. Ivory keys were coated with white celluloid to protect them tropical climates, and soft iron was used instead of copper for windings on the bass strings. The best part was— the piano used only 33 pounds of metal, about a tenth as much as a typical grand piano.

It was called the "Victory Vertical." The design was ideal for rough conditions, to which the civilian market also responded:

By the time the war ended, Steinway had shipped some 5,000 instruments, but not all went to the military. Roughly half were sold to the United States armed forces, and the rest were bought by religious organizations, educational institutions, hotels and other places of public gatherings.

-via VA Viper | Photos: Steinway & Sons

Yes, it's not just a tire with odd treads. There's a truck in this photo.

Okay, look at the door handle at the top off the image.

Now do you see the truck?

-via TYWKIWDBI | Photo: redditor IrfanMirza

Some enterprising drug smugglers get their products into the United States by building semi-submersible craft that are barely visible from the surface.

On June 18, while patrolling off the coast of Colombia and Ecuador, the US Coast Guard cutter Munro (named after the only Coastie to be awarded the Medal of Honor) spotted a semi-submersible. It dispatched two fast interceptor boats to capture it.

In this amazing video, two Coasties actually jump on board the moving submarine and knock on the hatch for attention. The Washington Post reports:

Inside was more than 17,000 pounds of cocaine worth an estimated $232 million, said Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Brickey, a spokesman for U.S. Coast Guard Pacific Area.

“They’re like the White Whale,” Brickey told The Washington Post on Thursday, describing narco-subs. “They’re pretty rare. For us to get one, it’s a significant event.”

The Pacific region monitored by the Coast Guard is about the size of the continental United States, Brickey said, likening the mission to a pair of police cars patrolling the country.

Brickey said patrols may encounter a narco-sub once a year or so. Boarding them can be “hairy,” he said — smugglers can be armed, and when caught, they typically open a valve to quickly fill the vessel with water, sending all the drugs and evidence to the ocean floor.

But the crew was unable to scuttle their submarine, so the Coast Guard sank it after removing the contraband and arresting the crew.

-via reddit

Some offices maintain comfort pets--cuddly animals that make the workplace a friendly, welcoming, and happy place to work. Someone has to be responsible for these pets. At a large corporation, that can mean a lot of animals. That's why a "growth strategist" on LinkedIn named John James wants to hire a Chief Comfort Pet Officer:

Comfort pets are becoming an increasingly popular mandatory requirement for many of our staff who depend upon their pet for significant emotional and physical support. Life is dark and full of terror. Comfort pets allow our employees to feel safe and at ease while diligently going about their work.

[...]

As the Chief Comfort Pet Officer, you will need to deep-dive into the role with two (gloved) hands. You should be comfortable handling, walking, feeding and tending to animals such as; cats, dogs, rabbits, gerbils, hamsters, miniature goats, pygmy pigs, peacocks, bonsai buffalo, Mexican walking fish, ortolans (pre-armagnac submersion), pheasants and miniature unicorns.

Ortolans are birds that are sometimes eaten after they are soaked in armagnac, a type of brandy. If you get a job interview, you may want to keep that in mind.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: 7th Groove

The scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think if they should.

Well, it's too late now. Tatiana Vishnivetskaya, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, apparently decided that nothing could possibly go wrong from thawing out a worm species that had been thought long dead. She found them locked in ice in Siberia, then decided that leaving well enough alone wasn't enough. The Sun reports:

Nematode expert Gaetan Borgonie, from Extreme Life Isyensya in Gentbrugge, Belgium, said the nematodes are well equipped to survive millennia of being locked in permafrost.

She said: "These buggers survive just about everything.”

Yeah, that's the problem.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: BAS/P. Boelen

To be more precise, most cars in Russia have steering wheels on the left side and drive on the right side of the road, just like in the United States.

Siberia and, specifically, the city of Vladivostok are an exception. Many cars in the largest city in Russia's far east have their steering wheels on the right side of the car, even though Russian drivers drive on the right side of the road.

This phenomenon has its origin in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russians wanted cars, especially tough, reliable cars that could withstand Siberia's brutal climates. They purchased cheap, second-hand cars from Japan.

Japanese automakers produce left-side cars for export markets. But most Japanese cars made for domestic markets have their steering wheels on the right. Russian customers didn't care, though, and eagerly purchased the old cars, getting over the awkwardness of driving from the right side of the car on the right side of the road.

Many of these old imports are still on the road and are the focus of a thriving subculture of aficionados in Vladivostok. You read more about it and these odd cars at Jalopnik.

Photo: Misha Lanin

Dutch artist Natalie Circcoricco has lately been embroidering wheels of colored threads into landscape photos. These color swatches condense each image into a single circle of hues.

70-year old Chen San-yuan of Taiwan isn't fooling around. When we last saw him, he was roaming the streets hunting his prey with an 11-phone rig. Now, he has stepped up his game with this setup that lets him play with 30 separate phones. With a battery charging the phones, Chen is an unstoppable predator. You can watch a video of him at Geekologie.

There are hundreds of islands in the archipelago around Stockholm, Sweden. Many of them are inhabited. To provide library services to them, the bokbåten makes its rounds.

This floating library has been sailing since 1953. Library patrons can board the ship, browse the collection of about 3,000 books, and check out their selections. Literary Hub reports:

The Stockholm county library boat (or bokbåten), visits 23 islands, including Möja, in the Stockholm archipelago, for one week twice a year. It carries around 3,000 books and a rotating staff of three to four librarians.

When it docks, island residents have about one-and-a-half glorious hours to come aboard the motor ship, browse its treasures, and borrow anything they’d like. Each island has one library card and, in a delightful detail, there are no penalties if a book isn’t returned six months later.

-via Super Punch | Photos: Anjie Zheng

The Mercator projection is useful if you want to place a global map on a cylinder. But it gets very limited the further one looks away from the Equator, as the relative sizes of areas get distorted.

That's why Twitter user @neilrkaye created this animated .gif. It shows the nations closer to the poles shrinking to their true sizes relative to the equatorial nations.

-via Nag on the Lake