Cool Weird Awesome with Brady Carlson

There are lots of good options for takeout these days, but along with all that deliciousness comes a lot of waste. A company called GO Box is sending out food orders in reusable plastic containers to keep all the single-use stuff out of the garbage. Plus: kudos to Cinotti’s Bakery in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, which has been selling Hurricane Dorian-themed doughnuts ahead of the big storm. With...

Summer is through, which means the start of our annual time to consume and/or complain about products flavored with pumpkin spice. It was in the mid-90s that this blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and cloves started its rise to power, and there's no stopping it now, really. Plus: did you know that hundreds of years ago pumpkin spice may have given us New York City?  The origins of p...

The roadside diner is a staple of American travel. And some restaurants make the food a kind of roadside attraction, often by creating meals that are too big to be believed, and often too big to be consumed in one sitting. Plus: the Traveler Restaurant in Connecticut serves food for thought as well as actual food, by giving out books with every meal.  The 18 Most Insane Food Challenges Ever (...

There are hotels, motels, friends with fold-out couches, house rentals, B&Bs and, in Idaho, a giant potato you can rent. Or, technically, a 28 foot long, 12 foot wide structure built in the shape of a potato. Plus: a man from the UK traveling through Amsterdam learns that an Airbnb listing for a "clean room with a private bathroom" can technically refer to a shipping container next to a port-a...

There's an unusual train station in southwest Japan to which you can take a train, but you can’t enter the platform from outside; nor can you leave.  Plus: the story of an eight year old in Russia who decided it was time to set out on his own and see the world.  Japanese train station with no stops, entrances or exits (Sora News) Boy, 8, found after leaving home to 'travel the world' (BB...

Randal S. Olson developed a computer algorithm to find the shortest, most efficient way to drive through all 48 contiguous United States - 13,699 miles and around 224 hours of driving. Plus: the Race Across America is a more than 3,000 mile road race from Los Angeles to New York on bicycles. Computing the optimal road trip across the U.S. (Randal S. Olson) Race Across America The most efficient wa...

Dean Nicholson left his job and started a bike trip across the world. While riding through Bosnia, he heard a “desperate meow." So, instead of riding solo, he decided the cat would come along. Plus: if a continental bike trip with a cat isn’t your cup of tea, how about a boat trip with a chicken? Cat travels the world on a bicycle after backpacker adopts the stray kitten and customises bike to tak...

The Derry, New Hampshire library had a time capsule that was sealed 50 years ago. When they took a look inside it contained... absolutely nothing. Why? We don’t know. But we do know that time capsules can get weird. Plus: today in Finland is the 2019 AIr Guitar World Championships! America’s Oldest Known Time Capsule Was Made by Paul Revere and Samuel Adams (History.com) 9 Historically Disappointi...

An enslaved woman in 18th century Massachusetts overheard all the talk about freedom and equality and decided it should be put to the test.  On August 22, 1781, a court found the woman known as Mum Bett, later as Elizabeth Freeman, could not be the property of another human being and therefore was free and equal.  Plus: someone in Sheffield, England, is stapling bread to trees, because i...

Little sauce packets. We hang onto them because they’re too small to notice much, or because we don’t want to throw them out if they haven’t been used. But at some point they have to spoil, right? We now have a pretty definitive answer on their shelf lives. Plus: today's the start of the annual Corn Palace Festival in Mitchell, South Dakota.  What's the Shelf Life of a Ketchup Packet? (HowStu...

The app what3words breaks down all the spaces on earth into 3 meter by 3 meter squares and assigns each of those squares a unique set of three words. Anyone who knows the three words for a square can pinpoint it with GPS - just ask the group of lost hikers in a UK forest who got help in about a minute thanks to the system. Plus: the great state of Wisconsin is home to a 45 X 90 monument - the cent...

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have been looking at the unusual immune system of alpacas. Their antibodies are not only effective, they’re also easier to harvest than most other animals’ antibodies, so they could help develop ways to treat or regulate some rare but serious diseases in humans. Plus: alpaca herds aren't just going to help us stay healthy, they're helping us de-stress, thanks t...

It's National Rollercoaster Day, and while there have probably been thrill rides since humans first figured out the concept of ramps, the roller coaster as we know it has a direct ancestor that dates back to 15th century Russia. Plus: a RollerCoaster Tycoon player devises the longest, most diabolical virtual coaster of all time.  From Death Traps to Disneyland: The 600-Year History of the Rol...

Richie Havens wasn't supposed to be the first act at the Woodstock festival, which started 50 years ago today. But like so much of Woodstock, what was supposed to happen was very different than what actually took place. Oh, also, there were cows there!  Woodstock Remembered: Richie Havens on Opening the Fest of ‘People Just Being People’   Don't take the brown acid. DO back Cool Weird Aw...

It’s the 100th anniversary of a time that roosters built a bridge. Ok, not literally, but an auction of roosters donated by the most prominent people in the world helped raise the money needed for a bridge over the Tombigbee River in western Alabama, a span known as Rooster Bridge. Plus: it's day one of the Telluride Mushroom Festival in Colorado! The Rooster Bridge: How one man’s vision paved the...

The online plant store Patch is offering to take care of the house plants for you while you’re on holiday, in what it’s calling the world’s first plant hotel. Plus: meet the  Social Escape Dress, which tracks your stress and activates built-in fog machines if the moment gets to be too much for the wearer.  Hotel for plants takes care of your greenery while you're gone (CNet)  Urban...

When a cougar started walking toward her on a logging trail in British Columbia, Dee Gallant used the power of rock to protect herself. Plus:  in a move that might make heavy metal even heavier, guitarist Takamizawa Toshihiko designs a guitar shaped like Godzilla. Metallica responds to B.C. woman who fended off wild cougar with the band’s music (GlobalNews.ca) A Very Resourceful Woman Scared...

Elvis Week is getting underway in Memphis, Tennessee, and while I can't be there, I can still celebrate, because my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin is where the King once broke up a fight at a gas station in the middle of the night. Plus: Hastings, Nebraska is kicking off the annual Kool-Aid Days.  About Elvis Week (Graceland)  Neglected marker shows where Elvis Presley in a karate stance...

It's day one of the Iowa State Fair, and what would that fair be without its centerpiece - the butter cow! The most bovine of butter sculptures made its debut in 1911, but the long and interesting history of butter-based art goes back even further. Plus:  Minnesotans are heading to the community of Darwin this weekend to celebrate the Biggest Ball of Twine.  The surprisingly lofty histor...

Later this month tens of thousands of people will head to Buñol, Spain for La Tomatina, otherwise known as the world’s largest tomato throwing festival.  Also, today is day one of the World Yo Yo Contest in Cleveland, Ohio.  But most of all, it's Cool Weird Awesome's 100th episode! Thanks for listening and supporting the show!  Tomatina History (Tomatina.es)  World Yo Yo Contes...

If you were a royal back several hundred years ago, this might be a time when you’d pack up and leave the castle for one of your other castles. This wasn't just because that’s what you do when you’re wealthy; it was because the castle staff needed everyone out so they could clean out all the filth!  Plus: to balance out all the dirty stuff, let's hear about how companies are launching just-ad...

It was a hard, hard weekend - so we thought it would be a good day to just take the few minutes we share together and have a little fun, before we have to go back out into the world. So here's an Instagram account called Homesickdotcom, which shares photos of the hilarious letters kids at camp send their parents when they maybe don’t want to be at camp. Plus: two brothers on their way to the Twins...

There’s a new cafe in the Indian city of Ambikapur known as a "garbage cafe." It aims to help very poor people by offering them meals and/or shelter in exchange for the trash they often pick up and try to sell - and it uses the reclaimed plastic to build new roads. Plus: this weekend in Twinsburg, Ohio, near Cleveland, the annual Twins Days festival is getting underway.  Bring Plastic Waste A...

The Lee Maxwell Washing Machine Museum in Eaton, Colorado, is facing an uncertain future. Its namesake wants to pass on his collection of some 1,600 machines to the next generation. Hopefully someone takes him up on that offer, because there’s a lot of history here. Plus: the Lumberjack World Championships begin in Hayward, Wisconsin, and we go for the obvious Monty Python reference in describing...

Someday, smart speakers might be able to sound off if we don’t sound quite ourselves. Researchers at the University of Alberta have been working on a way for AI to detect depression through voice recordings. Plus: Today in 1989 is when Nintendo brought the US the Game Boy, the landmark portable video game system that made black and green displays cool again.   Sound mind: Detecting depression...