A Pole-Sitting Champ Finds Out It’s Lonely At The Top (Cool Weird Awesome 136)
Richard "Dixie" Blandy called himself the greatest flagpole sitter of all time - they say he spent more time atop flagpoles than most flags.
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09, 2019
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09, 2019
Our Long History Of Crashing Stuff Into The Moon (Cool Weird Awesome 133)
We always celebrate great space achievements, why not also commemorate some great space screwups? This month marks 60 years since the first time a spacecraft tried to land on the moon but crashed instead.
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09, 2019
Bah Gawd It’s A Smart Cane (Cool Weird Awesome 132)
The weWALK is a smart cane for blind pedestrians, with ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles ahead and Google Maps connections to navigate through and describe the surrounding area. Plus: if you like pickles, the Big Dill festival is back this weekend in Baltimore.
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09, 2019
Scooby-Doo And Those Meddling Kids Started Solving Groovy Mysteries 50 Years Ago (Cool Weird Awesome 127)
It's the 50th anniversary of the premiere of “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?” That’s right, the Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby have been setting traps, being danger prone, dropping glasses, making gigantic sandwiches and solving mysteries for a half-century. But originally the show was going to be very different.
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09, 2019
How About We Put Shade Plants Under Solar Panels? (Cool Weird Awesome 126)
There's work out of the University of Arizona that says solar arrays can be even more efficient if you grow food underneath the panels. And no, the panels don't block the plants from growing by taking all the sun. Plus: Chandler, Arizona is hosting the Rockin' Taco Street Fest, which finally combines the goodness of tacos with lucha libre pro wrestling.
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09, 2019
The Kansas Town Where Even Popeye Got His Spinach (Cool Weird Awesome 122)
It’s Spinach Festival weekend in Lenexa, Kansas, a time for games, crafts, music, the world’s largest spinach salad and a visit from noted cartoon spinach addict Popeye the sailor. That’s fitting, since it was Popeye’s popularity that helped make Lenexa’s spinach famous in the first place.
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08, 2019
Ketchup Packets Last Somewhere Between Nine Months And Forever (Cool Weird Awesome 110)
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.
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08, 2019
Elvis Almost Threw Down At A Wisconsin Gas Station (Cool Weird Awesome 102)
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.
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08, 2019
The Festival That’s Mostly People Throwing Tomatoes At Each Other (Cool Weird Awesome 100)
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!
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07, 2019
Meet Owney, The Legendary Postal Dog (Cool Weird Awesome 92)
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.