Cool Weird Awesome with Brady Carlson

This week in 2005, Kyle MacDonald of Montreal had a red paperclip. This week in 2006, MacDonald had traded away the paperclip, and, after a few more trades, ended up with a house. Plus: over in the UK, some small towns have traded out the phones in some of their big red phone boxes for a new use.  Paperclip Cottage Cafe (Tourism Saskatchewan) From paper-clip to house in 14 trades (CBC) How Sm...

A multi-country research team has found ways to turn polyethylene, a key ingredient in single-use plastic bags, into lightweight fabric. So those bags that we don't want to throw out but can't always easily recycle? We might end up wearing them. Plus: many of us spend a lot of our waking hours typing, but James Cook turns his typing into art. Plastic Bags Could Be Recycled Into Wearable Fabrics, S...

Today in 2006, the largest photograph ever taken was released to the world. It’s known today as The Great Picture: 31 feet tall, 107 feet wide. Here's how it was taken. Plus: in Tokyo, a giant 3D screen outside a train station is featuring a giant 3D calico cat that stares down at the people several stories below. Big picture thinking! World’s largest photograph measuring 31ft high and 107ft wide...

Today in 1929, the then-territory of Alaska flew its flag for the first time. That flag, which is still used today, was designed by a 13 year old of Aleutian descent, Benny Benson. Plus: it was this day in 1872 that John F. Blondel of Maine made pastry history.  Benny Benson: An Alaska Kid Who Made History (Alaska Historical Society) The Hole Truth: Celebrating a Huge Day in Doughnut History...

There was a story recently about how NASA was partnering with Tide laundry detergent to work on a way to do laundry in space. Which means we don’t already do laundry in space, and there are some pretty big reasons why. Plus: the Royal Mail delivers a letter addressed to a woman who’d been on TV, only the writer didn't exactly have the woman's address.  NASA and Tide team up to do laundry in s...

Today in 1928, the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri began publicly selling something new: bread that had been sliced by a multi-bladed machine, and the world gained a new way to measure greatness. Plus: today in 2017, a meteor found a way to use Earth as a “slingshot” so alter its orbit and eventually orbit Jupiter. ‘Home of Sliced Bread’: A small Missouri town champions its greatest thing (...

Today is the birthday of Roger Babson, who once hired stonecutters to carve giant motivational slogans into a series of boulders in Massachusetts during the Great Depression. Plus: a research team from Harvard and MIT has announced a new high-tech face mask with disease-spotting biosensors. It can spot germs more or less in real time!  Babson’s Boulders: A Millionaire’s Odd Dogtown Legacy (Ne...

When most of us get wrong number phone calls, we get off the line pretty quickly. But new research finds Maasai herders in Tanzania often strike up a conversation, and get to know the person who accidentally called them. Plus: on this day in 1294, the cardinals of the Catholic Church respond to a letter from a hermit monk in a way that may have made the monk wish he hadn't written them at all.&nbs...

The new book “Hyphens and Hashtags” looks at where all our punctuation marks have come from. Some of them, like the highly versatile asterisk, have been around for thousands of years. Plus: if you've had a week that made you want to scream, Japan has a Screambulance that may help.  A Star Is Born (Lapham's Quarterly) Japan’s Screambulance, is a haunted house delivery service that scares you a...

Today in 1963, the US Postal Service officially started using ZIP codes as a way to quickly sort huge amounts of mail and get it to where it needed to go. How did they get Americans to adopt ZIP codes? A mascot named Mr. Zip and a jingle sung by Broadway legend Ethel Merman. Plus: for Canada Day, the story of a runner in Ontario who ran a moose-shaped route through downtown Toronto.  The ZIP...

Our high-tech devices are amazing but also kind of fragile. But a team at Virginia Tech has a solution: “soft electronics” that can not only keep working when they’re damaged, they can heal themselves. Plus: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech have been using high-altitude balloons to measure seismic activity, and they're hoping to send those balloons someday to monitor Venusquakes! ...

Today was the birthday of Ray Harryhausen, a pioneer of special effects in movies in the days before computers. And while special effects are more high tech now than in his day, his influence is still all over the world of movies in our time. Plus: a veteran flier from World War II gets to take another flight, some 75 years later.  Ray Harryhausen: The Father of Stop-Motion Animation - The Sp...

It's the birthday of the guy who took two sports and fused them into one: Ed Headrick, known today as the Father of Disc Golf. Here's some of his story. Plus: it's Pride Day, part of Pride Month, and there's still time to see the original rainbow Pride Flag at San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society Museum. The Father of Disc Golf (Disc Golf Association) History of disc golf (part 1): the early da...

This week we're replaying some of our favorite episodes about our favorite TV shows. In this episode from September 2020, we marked the 60th  anniversary of the first broadcast of that landmark cartoon show from the town of Bedrock, which aired in the 1960s, stayed on in reruns for  decades, and continues to sell cereal and vitamins to this day. Plus: a man in England gets so lonely he s...

This week we're replaying some of our favorite episodes about our favorite TV shows. In this episode from November 2019, we look at an episode of the Twilight Zone that proved the show was a dimension not only of sight and sound but of canned laughter?!? Plus: anybody want to fly in an airplane where the whole interior looks like a giant window? Dimensions Behind the Twilight Zone: A Backstage Tri...

This week we're replaying some of our favorite episodes about our favorite TV shows. In this episode from September 2019, we marked the day in 1975 that the BBC aired the first episode of “Fawlty Towers,” a landmark comedy series that was - amazingly - received about as poorly  by TV executive and the public as Basil Fawlty’s appalling attitude was received by guests at his hotel. How did it...

This week we're replaying some of our favorite episodes about our favorite TV shows. In this episode from January 2021, we marked the anniversary of the premiere of one of the most memorable sitcoms in TV history, “Sanford and Son," by sharing a few facts about the show and its star, Redd Foxx. Plus: photographer Mike Mayou went out with a drone-mounted camera in  Minnesota to catch the sunse...

This week we're replaying some of our favorite episodes about our favorite TV shows. In this episode from September 2019, we mark the 50th anniversary of the premiere of “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?” Originally the show was going to be VERY different. Plus: Lake Lure, NC hosted the Dirty Dancing Festival. If you went, I hope you had the time of your life. “Like, yeah. We’ve been teenagers forever:”...

It's National Go Fishing Day, though the fish in today’s story aren’t exactly the ones you’d expect to catch. They’re robotic fish called Charlie and Charlene, and they were developed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Plus: tomorrow is National Surfing Day, and one place you might mark the occasion is the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum in California. Meet Catfish Charlie, the CIA’s Robotic Spy (IEEE...

It's the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drough, so it's a good time to check in on the Great Green Wall, a multi-country project in and around Africa’s Sahel region to re-green areas that have turned to desert because of overuse, expanding desert and climate change. Plus: a retired couple in China's Gobi Desert have been running their own regreening project for nearly 20 years, planting t...

Summer in California can mean drought, so every drop of water counts. A research project there says putting solar panels over the state's many miles of water canals could save tens of billions of gallons of water a year. Plus: a museum in Rochester, New York is going to host the National Archives of Game Show History... if the price is right.  Solar canals create renewable energy and save wat...

The man now known as “First Guide & Explorer of Mammoth Cave," had been enslaved in the 19th century and sent to explore what was becoming a hot tourist site. He set the bar for every guide who came after him. Plus: today in 1976, a baseball game at the Houston Astrodome was called off... due to weather?!? Enslaved Tour Guide Stephen Bishop Made Mammoth Cave the Must-See Destination It Is Toda...

For Flag Day, we present the story of Superflag, a 505 foot long, 255 foot tall American flag that was once flown over Hoover Dam (because they don't make flagpoles that large). Plus: a Durham University study finds people can use click-based echolocation effectively in the real world after just 10 weeks of practice!  Was the World’s Largest U.S. Flag Displayed at Hoover Dam? (Snopes) Echoloc...

The event has been cancelled for 2021, but this was supposed to be the time when some adventurous types headed to Switzerland to take part in a race like no other: a run up a world record staircase known as the Niesen Stairway Run. Plus: a lot of us have been doing video calls and meetings more than ever, but the technology isn't totally new. In fact, Sony made a video phone back in the late 1980s...

The National Geographic Society has recognized a fifth ocean, the Southern Ocean, on earth. How the oceans got their names - and why we don't think of them as one big ocean, which is what it is - is a long and fascinating story. Plus: a designer in South Korea has invented a "third eye" to warn people looking at their phones while walking before they collide with someone or something (or, maybe, t...