Cool Weird Awesome with Brady Carlson

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...

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...