Visitors to Kyrgzstan can observe the World Nomad Games, which is an annual international competition of sports that originated in the practical needs of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. These include physical combat, feats of strength, and competitions familiar outside of the region, such as tug-of-war. A large number of events take place on horseback, including kok-boru, which is something like horseback soccer, except the competitors use a goat carcass instead of a ball.

Reuters reports that athletes from 105 nations are registered to participate, including the US and UK. You can see photos from this grand event here.

-via @samat_awa

Alors que la tapisserie de Bayeux s’apprête à faire son entrée ce 2 septembre au British Museum de Londres, le musée britannique s’est amusé à recréer quelques scènes de la tapisserie représentant la bataille de Hastings → https://t.co/yisKQ0UkpV pic.twitter.com/x7OeYQBj4h

— Le Figaro (@Le_Figaro) September 2, 2026

For the nearly thousand years since its creation, the Bayeux Tapestry has fascinated people--and not just for its 93 penises. It's one of the greatest masterpieces of Medieval European art that has survived to the present day. 

France recently loaned it to Britain. It goes on display at the British Museum in London on September 10 through July 11. To promote this invasion across the Channel, the museum had performers dressed as Norman soldiers reenact scenes from the 1066 battle.

The 36th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony was held today at Kongresshaus Zürich in Zurich, Switzerland. For 35 years, the ceremony has been held in Cambridge, Massachusetts (with a couple held online only during the pandemic), but this year the decision was made to move the festivities to Zurich because many of the winners, participants, and guests found it difficult or unsafe to travel to the US. The advantage for the rest of us is that we have the results hours earlier than usual. 

The Ig Nobel prizes are brought to us by the publication The Annals of Improbable Research and are emceed by founder Marc Abraham. They are designed to honor scientific research that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think. See, science advances in small increments, and while research studies and experiments may seem silly in the surface, they all come together to contribute to our body of knowledge. But you might find yourself stepping on snakes over and over for that research.

The theme of this year's awards ceremony was "fungi." It included original musical numbers illustrating the theme. Four actual Nobel Prize winners attended, and found themselves helping out by blowing their noses and handling rubber snakes. Of course, there was yodeling. Each winner took home a trophy (shown above) and a cash prize of ten trillion Zimbabwe dollars.  Continue reading for the ten winners.

A bag of potato chips is mostly a bag of air. I'm not complaining, mind you. The air keeps the chips from breaking easily. No, the air is helpful. It helps the bag float. A bag of potato chips can float in water.

How many such bags would you need to float on the surface of a pool? J-Bao, a Taiwanese YouTuber, decided to find out.

-via The Awesomer

I'm recommending this activity for the next company team-building day.

Banger Zone Wrestling is a professional wrestling organization that either invented or is promoting this new venue for wrestling: a ring floating on a swimming pool. Competitors must combat not only their opponents, but the shifting platform that rocks in the water. Or, from another point of view, they can exploit this complication to throw off the balance of their opponents. The organization calls this approach Watermania.

The action is reminiscent of the sports anime Keijo!!!!!!!! (that's 8 exclamation marks when spelled properly), which depicts a somewhat similar sport, but for women exclusively.

-via Super Punch

The annual Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo took place during most of the month of August. I watched a video of the final march out that ended the show on August 26th, trying to identify the nationalities of the various groups, and then the massed pipe and drums brought up the rear, playing "Scotland the Brave." Everyone's attention went to the magnificent drum major with a 10/10 beard and a tartan turban. The brilliant fashion combination of a Scottish kilt and a Sikh turban belongs to Sukhvinder “Suki” Singh Sunger, who is from neither Scotland nor South Asia. He was representing that beacon of multiculturalism, Canada. 

Sunger is a police constable in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he has served since 2002. A few years ago, he became the first person of color to join the Vancouver Police Pipe Band, playing a tenor drum and then the Punjabi dhol. He was then elevated to drum major. Sunger is the first turbaned Sikh drum major to lead the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo.   

In 1933, the Great Smoky Mountains Park Commission was busy buying up land in East Tennessee and western North Carolina for a national park. Most residents were desperate during the Great Depression and took the offer. But the commission met its match when they tried to buy up 120 acres owned and operated by the Walker Sisters. The five sisters (originally six) had lived there since they were born in the 1870s and 1880s, and they weren't suffering for cash because they'd always been self-sufficient. They raised sheep and plowed their own fields to grow corn and cotton. They preserved their own food, spun their own cotton and wool, and hunted game, as they always had. Their parents had eleven children and left the land and the cabin their father built to the ones who were unmarried. The Walker Sisters fought the government for years, and although they didn't "win," they managed to stay in their home for the rest of their lives, the last sister dying in 1964. And the cabin itself survives today.

To determine the oldest living things in the world, first you have to define "living thing" and then you have to have some way to determine their age. I have wondered about bacteria and other single-celled organisms that reproduce by splitting, but apparently scientists consider those new organisms. For the purpose of this list, we should also add "that we know about," since we may discover even older living things that have remained hidden- and good for them. 

The oldest plants are trees that are clonal colonies. They reproduce by growing new trees from the living roots while the original tree trunk dies, yet they are still the same organism and are still connected. The oldest known is a colony of quaking aspens in Utah called Pando that dates back over a million years. A colony of fungus can live for thousands of years. We know of several single trees that have lived for around 5,000 years. Germany has a rose bush (pictured above) that is documented at least 700 years old, and may be much older. And it still blooms! As far as animals go, a volcano sponge in Antarctica is estimated to be 15,000 years old. Read about all these organisms and more at Atlas Obscura.  

(Image credit: Stefan Schäfer, Lich) 

The original Toy Story came out in 1995, featuring a collection of Baby Boomer toys that were already feeling their age. More than thirty years later, it's hard to believe that those toys are still functioning at all, and don't even look raggedy. However, the franchise is still making money, and Toy Story 5 has made over a billion dollars since it premiered in June. You can bet those were overwhelmingly adult tickets. 

Not only does Toy Story 5 seem to be aimed at adults who loved the original Toy Story as children, but it also appears to be about educating parents on technology, specifically about the pros and cons of screens for their children. I haven't seen the movie, so I can't say how realistic or effective those lessons are, but Screen Junkies takes us through what to expect from Toy Story 5. The movie begins streaming on Disney+ on September 23rd.  

This Saturday would have been Freddie Mercury's 80th birthday. His longtime love, Mary Austin, is now 75. Mercury's London home Garden Lodge has been on the market for two years, but no one has come up with the £30 million asking price. Austin has finally gone through four chests of Mercury's personal treasures that include original song lyrics, or, more accurately, she had her two sons go through them, and has written a new book titled Freddie Mercury: A Life in Lyrics. Some of those private treasures and song lyrics will be going up for auction.  

Austin also granted an interview to the Guardian about her life with Mercury, details about his estate, and her long journey of coming to grips with it all since Mercury's death in 1991. She comes across as private and solitary as ever, even when it comes to sharing her memories with her two sons. Read the interview here. -via Damn Interesting 

When the image above flowed into my Instagram feed, I figured that it was probably Photoshop or AI. but, no, it's real.

Rodney Dangerfield was a famous comedian and comic actor noted for his self-deprecating routines in which he was routinely disrespected by the people in his life, most often a fictional wife. This Boardgame Geek entry describes this Milton Bradley game from the 80s (when Dangerfield was near the zenith of his fame).

The game mechanics are complex enough to be interesting without being overwhelming. It does, though, appear to have nothing to do with Rodney Dangerfield. I respect the effort, though.

Photo: Sam Register

We've been to enough movies to know that the likelihood of a character dying quickly is inversely correlated with how much the movie stars are paid. In Westerns, extras and minor characters will be shot quickly and never seen again, while the higher-billed actors will have a drawn-out dramatic demise. When rivals confront each other in a Western shootout, we sometimes aren't sure who's actually been shot, and neither do the characters, until they themselves become aware of their injuries. You may have never noticed this consciously, but you know it happens. 

But what if the characters become aware of this cinematic convention? If you don't look down and notice the bullet wound, have you really been shot? If a fatal gunshot only becomes reality when it is observed, then refusing to observe the wound keeps the character in a state of quantum uncertainty. Or at least it should. -via Geeks Are Sexy

If you ever wondered what the internet can really be good for, you need to check out the Be My Eyes program. It offers round the clock support for those with blindness or low vision. Over ten million volunteers are available for over a million blind people. They can call the app, and find someone to look through their phone camera and help them select an outfit for the day, find something in a store, or read signs, along with a variety of other tasks for which they could use a little assistance. The free program is offered in over 180 languages. For each blind user, there are  around eleven volunteers, making it easy to contact someone who is available and speaks their language when needed. Each contact is anonymous. Be My Eyes also has a community forum, podcasts, and a gallery of stories about how blind people use the app to navigate the world. 

Found via a comment at reddit, under a funny video from a blind content creator. 

I once knew a woman who owned a small grocery. When the food expired, she would take it home to eat, and it could be moldy by the time she consumed it. I never ate at her house, but she lived to almost 90.

If you see food in your home that shows evidence of mold, should you throw it out? If the answer is always "yes," then you are privileged to be able to pay for a replacement. Not everyone is in that position. Mold can cause health problems, depending on the type of mold, that may show up immediately or way down the line. But the answer to the question is "usually." There are some foods that can be salvaged even if there is evidence of mold. 

On the other hand, if you discover a loaf of bread that has been in your cabinet for six months and still shows no signs of mold whatsoever, you may want to reevaluate what's really in the food you're buying.  

Coin or card operated pay-per-use elevators is used in countries like China, Italy and Georgia, some with a fairly long history. It seems more like a way to slow down or make more costly the access of outsiders. Like a vertical road toll.

The three inventions that made tall… pic.twitter.com/SVBRyi9YS1

— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) August 31, 2026

Japanese architecture and culture writer @WrathOfGnon informs us about something I didn't know existed: elevators that one pays for one ride at a time.

At Yahoo! News, Annemarije de Boer tells us more. These are not legacy products from the past, but an emerging trend, especially in China where building residents pay by scanning cards. They're not too expensive at the equivalent of 2¢ per ride.