Cool Weird Awesome with Brady Carlson

Trailblazing journalist Nellie Bly once feigned severe mental illness to expose abuses at an asylum from the inside. New York City is now putting up a monument in her honor on the site where the asylum once stood. Plus: today is the birthday of the Trans-Canada Highway, which runs from St. John’s Newfoundland to Victoria, British Columbia. If my math is right, you could listen to like 1,600 episod...

Last week the organizers of the 2020 Olympic Games revealed that 100 percent of the gold, silver and bronze used to create the Olympic medals is recycled - the metal comes from used cell phones. But the ancient Olympians got olive branches as prizes. Why is it that we have Olympic medals in the first place? Plus: today,  Louisville, Kentucky hosts the World Championship Dainty Contest! ...

The National Postal Museum in Washington, DC, has an exhibit telling the story of Owney, the dog who loved the mail so much that he helped deliver it all over the world.  Plus: Freeman, South Dakota is holding its annual Chislic Festival, a two day celebration of cubed meat on a stick. (Sorry, dogs aren't allowed.)  The National Postal Museum tells the history of America through moon mai...

Whenever a new Prime Minister takes office in the UK, the first question many people ask is: what happens to the cat living at the official residence at 10 Downing Street? We'll look at some of the most famous felines to ever hold the title  Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. Plus: for reasons only known to mascots, the New Jersey Devil ran out of a game of parachute at a kid's birthday part...

There’s a quadcopter drone that uses spring-loaded arms and a process called "rapid aerial morphing" to fold itself up as it flies. So we’re a step closer to real-life Transformers. Plus: the story of the all-robot band Compressorhead, whose members twist and turn their mechanical parts so they can ROCK! Spring-Loaded Drone Collapses Mid-Flight to Zip Through Windows (IEEE Spectrum)  Compress...

Lots of parents multitask but Cynthia Arnold is completely off the charts, having just run the Missoula Marathon while pushing a triple stroller containing her three kids. Meanwhile, Tony Fisher bought some salami and did the only logical thing with it: construct a 2x2x2 Rubik’s Cube out of it. Hooray for marathon and/or meat-based puzzle achievers! Mom Runs 3:11 Marathon With a Triple Stroller Wh...

The website and book Sad Topographies teaches us that our planet is home to some unusually-named places, like Gloomy Lake in Ontario, Divorce Beach in Mexico, New Jersey’s Shades of Death Road (!) and a spot in Washington state known as Point No Point. Plus:  the annual World Santa Claus Congress is getting underway in Denmark. Watch for some serious Santa-to-Santa networking. 21 Of The Sadde...

50 years ago, the BBC brought in the band known for playing space rock to improvise on-air for its coverage of the Apollo 11 mission. Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour said, accurately, that  “the programming was a little looser in those days.” Plus: it's been 25 years since the time that Pizza Hut produced an ad for UK television in which all the dialogue was in Klingon.   My moon-land...

On this day in 1912, the birth of the greatest athlete you might never have heard of - Olympic silver medalist and community advocate Mack Robinson. His brother, Jackie, is better known, but there's a reason their hometown of Pasadena, California installed bronze busts of both brothers outside City Hall. Plus, a new study out of Harvard asks the important question: do runners actually go faster by...

Veggies are good for us - but some households can’t buy them, and others don’t want to. What is it that will get eaters more interested in buying and eating their vegetables? One answer may be: the color black. Plus: the Vent Haven International Ventriloquist Convention is getting underway today in Erlanger, Kentucky.  Backed in Black: How to get people to buy more produce (Brigham Young Univ...

A growing number of people are heading to the airport not to catch flights, but just to hang out at the airport itself. And why not, given how many cool amenities airports have added over the years? Plus: a top destination for Instagram travelers is maybe not quite what it appears to be.  Airports Open Up to Terminal Tourists Who Just Want to Hang Out (Bloomberg Quint)  Nine weird and wo...

Going over Niagara Falls with or without a barrel is a bad idea and you shouldn't do it. It’s safer, easier and a lot more fun to cross over the bridge between Niagara Falls, New York and Niagara Falls, Ontario - or, if you’re a daredevil, to cross the falls themselves on a tightrope, as Nik Wallenda did in 2012. Plus: the story of the time 50 years ago that Niagara Falls stopped falling. Man who...

Coffee grounds can be recycled in all kinds of ways, including lots of products. And the most meta product of all is from KaffeeForm, which uses coffee grounds to make coffee cups. Plus: if you can't wait a couple years for the Little Mermaid remake, why not head to Sacramento for the California Mermaid Festival?  6 Amazing products made (almost) entirely from recycled coffee grounds (Inhabit...

Wisconsin’s most fearsome folk monster been in Harry Potter and tangled with the Scooby Gang, but the Hodag is beloved in the community of Rhinelander, where it's the high school team mascot and there are many Hodags to find around town. Plus: it's  a big day in the community of Joensuu, Finland: the first-ever World Heavy Metal Knitting Championships!   The Legend Of The Hodag (Wisconsi...

Patrouille Swiss is the official aerial acrobatics team for Switzerland. Last weekend they were in fine form as they flew over the community of Langenbruck for a festival honoring a local aviation hero... except for one thing: they weren’t actually over Langenbruck. Plus: New York City is now home to  Poster House, the first American museum that’s fully about posters and their history.  ...

In Japan, there's a little white robot swimming through rice fields, imitating a duck! It's actually helping to grow the rice by aerating the water and stopping weeds from growing. Plus: if you prefer non-robotic ducks, then you’ve got some options with the World’s Largest Rubber Duck, which is on tour this summer. Nissan Builds Robot Duck To Help Rice Farmers Keep Weeds Out Of Their Paddies (Desi...

 Taco Bell says it’s been dealing with a tortilla shortage. Those craving inexpensive tacos and burritos at odd hours are bearing the brunt of this crisis, but it’s affecting all of us - after all, tortillas have been a part of our culinary lives for thousands of years. Plus: the story of a man who brought a great deal of change to Phoenix, Arizona - literally. Taco Bell restaurants hit by to...

It’s day one of the Roswell UFO Festival in New Mexico. Whatever happened there in 1947, the incident put Roswell on the map - and other towns that have their own UFO stories have been increasingly playing up those stories, including through historic markers. Plus: this weekend, Sheboygan, Wisconsin will race thousands of rubber ducks down the Sheboygan River in the Ducktona 500.  Roswell UFO...

It's the 243rd birthday of the United States, and we've done a lot of celebrating over those years. But what were people doing on the Fourth of July before American independence? One of the most interesting stories is from July 4, 1054 - in China. Plus: check out  a different kind of July 4th celebration - the Sidewalk Egg Frying Challenge in Oatman, Arizona!  Supernova 1054 - Creation o...

Smart glasses are a thing! Not augmented reality, but an actual pair of glasses that can sense what we're trying to look at and make it easier to see it clearly as our eyes age and lose some of their ability to focus.  Plus:  the National Paper Doll Convention begins today with the theme of “Mystery, Murder and Mayhem.” I'd like to know what kind of mayhem a convention full of paper doll...

On this day in 1982, a dude named Larry Walters entered aviation history as the pilot of a craft called Inspiration I - which was a lawn chair attached to 42 large weather balloons. Plus:  the story of some high school students in Toronto, Ontario, who used a weather balloon to launch a Lego figure into near space.  Up, Up, and Away! Did Larry Walters soar above Los Angeles in a lawn cha...

Researchers at Rutgers University have developed a system to unprint the printing on standard printer paper, in a way that uses less energy and material than the conventional paper recycling process.  Plus: the new Medi-Teddy aims to make a trip to the hospital a little more fun - or at least a little less scary - for kids, and the inventor is a kid herself.  New Unprinting Method Can He...

A team at Technion–Israel Institute of Technology developed a way to use medical glue to bind human tissue together instead of stitches and medical pins. They heat it up using, essentially, a hot glue gun - one that they hopefully don't leave in with their craft supplies. Plus:  the World Egg Throwing Championship is back in the UK community of Swaton, Lincolnshire!   Technion team devel...

I'm traveling to Buffalo, New York for a book event today, so I thought I'd celebrate one of the city's beloved foods: sponge candy. Meanwhile, an ice cream shop in Buffalo has done what you might expect an ice cream shop in Buffalo to do: add Buffalo sauce to the ice cream.   Buffalo sponge candy (Atlas Obscura) A treat with heat: Lake Effect Ice Cream unveils wing-sauce flavor (Buffalo News...

Mildred "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias could do it all - she was an Olympic gold medalist, champion golfer, basketball and baseball player, vaudeville performer, celebrity and more. Once she won the US national track and field championships by herself - as in, she was a team of one and beat teams that had over a dozen athletes. Plus:  check out the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence Race, a footrace t...