A sausage sandwich replica to lounge upon

From Japan: Mos Burger has an unusual treat for lovers of its autumnal Tsukimi (‘Moon-Viewing’) Focaccia sausage sandwich.  As reported on the SoraNews24 website:

They’re calling it the Tsukimi Dekaccha, a play on words with “focaccia” and “dekai,” meaning “huge.” This gigantic interior decoration is sized for an adult to lounge on, and faithfully recreates the ingredients of the Tsukimi Focaccia, with a foldable focaccia cushion, soft-boiled egg cushion (which can be worn like a dress or long shirt), curved sausage cushion, barbecue sauce blanket, and shredded cabbage cushion.

The various parts aren’t sewed together into a single piece, either. Each can be removed or stacked however you want for maximum comfort/surrealism.

This is what the sandwich looks like;

This is what the replica looks like:

Squirrels on a Train

A rush hour train service in the UK had to be cancelled after a couple of squirrels boarded the train and one of them “refused to leave”.  A spokesperson for the railway was quoted by Reuters saying this:

We can confirm that the 0854 Reading to Gatwick was terminated at Redhill after a couple of squirrels boarded the train at Gomshall without tickets, breaching railway byeclaws.

We attempted to remove them at Redhill, but one refused to leave and was returned to Reading to bring an end to this nutty tail.

What 210 km/hour feels like

From Norway: a new spot for Flytoget Oslo Airport Express train service.

Link to video

Porsche Cayenne — bottled as hot sauce

It wasn’t too long ago that Subaru Canada compared driving its BRZ car to the intense experience of having chilli sauce.  It even distributed a batch of ‘BRZ hot sauce’ via dealerships. 

Well, Canadian car lovers, who also like hot sauce, have another reason to rejoice.  Porsche Canada is offering a range of limited-edition hot sauces that are crafted “to capture the essence of the Porsche Cayenne”.  To quote from the press release:

The “Original” sauce mirrors the versatility of the Cayenne with a sweet flavour and a garlicky, yet spicy finish. “Cayenne S” is a nod to the performance factor of its namesake with a spicier cayenne pepper kick adding to a combination of mangos and pineapple. Two E-Hybrid inspired sauces feature apples and green cayenne peppers as well as ginger with green jalapeño. Finally, the “GTS” and “Turbo GT” sauces are inspired by the sportiness and luxurious performance of their top-range sportscar counterparts. Black cherries and three different peppers are the main stars of the “GTS” recipe, whereas “Turbo GT” is performance and exhilaration in a bottle with the smokiness of chipotle and the boldness of red ghost peppers.

These confections were inspired by an event that Porsche recently held, named the Cayenne Taste Drive. Guests participated in a custom skills course that tested their driving prowess, navigating tight slaloms, sudden braking, side inclines, hill descents, and course obstacles.

Throughout each driving exercise, participants were guided by Porsche-certified instructors and scored based on the execution of the skills course as well as their overall experience. Porsche then calculated a personalized Scoville ranking for each guest, which was used to create bespoke hot sauces, with higher scores resulting in spicier recipes.

Pepsi Chases Pizzas

Last week, Pepsi was offering free pizzas to its customers to further its pitch that pizza tastes “better with Pepsi”.  But it was the accompanying stunt campaign that really stood out in the way it audaciously imagined what chasing a pizza with a Pepsi might literally look like.

Link to video

Animal Sex Exhibition Opens in Japan

Excerpts from a SoraNews24 report:

Tokyo’s Sunshine Aquarium, located inside the Sunshine City complex in the Ikebukuro neighborhood, is a facility dedicated to spreading knowledge and appreciation of aquatic life. Right now, though, that missions is being extended to include aquatic sex life too.

As of September 6, Sunshine Aquarium is proud to once again be hosting the Full of Sex Exhibition. This will be the fourth iteration of the event since its original one in 2019. It’ also the first since 2021, making it the first post-pandemic Full of Sex Exhibition, which the aquarium feels will have a renewed sense of relevance as lifestyles, including romance and expressions of physical affection, return to normal following the removal of social distancing concerns.

The aquarium switches over to Full of Sex Exhibition-mode nightly from 6:15 to 9 p.m., with explanatory panels put out explaining the sex lives of various residents of the facility, such as the spotted garden eel, a type of eel whose Japanese name, chin anago, and shape often make people think of chinchin (the Japanese slang term for “dick” or “wiener”).

But it’s the physical sensations of sex, of course, that allow species to continue, and so the Full of Sex Exhibition also has hands-on exhibits. One of them is the Touching Box, which invites guests to stick their hands inside a box and “touch the animal’s 〇〇.”

▼ It should be noted that the symbols 〇〇 are commonly used in Japanese to show something has been censored, so they don’t necessarily mean testicles here, but it’s clear that the parts or facsimiles inside are somehow part of the mating process.

There’s also the Squeezy Squeezy Box, which is more upfront and promises “You can experience the feel of animal boobs to your heart’s content.”

Finally, the Peeping Room offers peepholes through which you can “see animals doing ‘that.’”

Of course, this wouldn’t be a proper Japanese event without some special food and merch, would it? So after you’ve had you fill of feeling aquatic dongs and boobs, you can head on over to the aquarium’s cafe, where they’ll be serving special latte art cocoa with adorable depictions of tiger sharks and penguins getting it on.

Man arrested for silently phone-stalking his wife

From Japan: a man has been arrested for making up to 100 silent phone calls a day to his wife, masking his phone number while doing so.  As explained in one news report:

Every time she answered, the caller would stay completely silent until she hung up, before calling her again just moments later.

As the number was withheld by the mysterious caller, she was unable to track down or block the perpetrator.

For weeks the woman grappled with her mysterious stalker, until slowly but surely a pattern started to emerge.

First of all, she realised the phone calls only ever occurred during the day and never at night, when she and her husband were asleep. In an unusual twist, she also noticed that she never received any calls when she borrowed her husband’s phone to play mobile games.

Eventually, she came to a startling revelation – the only time the calls stopped coming was when her husband did not have access to his phone.

Growing increasingly suspicious of her husband, she enlisted the police to keep tabs on him, and following an investigation he was arrested for violating anti-stalking laws.

As to the husband’s motive, as per the SoraNews24 website:

The whole thing gets even weirder when you factor in that the couple doesn’t appear to have had any pre-existing marital strife, and that when asked about his motives, the man said “I love my wife, and made phone calls to her without saying anything.”

2024 Ig Nobels

A few of the winner citations:

Peace Prize
“for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles.”

Anatomy Prize
“for studying whether the hair on the heads of most people in the Northern Hemisphere swirls in the same direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise?) as hair on the heads of most people in the Southern Hemisphere.”

Medicine Prize
“for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side effects.”

Physiology Prize
“for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus.”

Biology Prize
“for exploding a paper bag next to a cat standing on the back of a cow to explore how and when cows spew their milk.”

Link to full report

Martin Scorsese is ‘The Artist’

The director stars in a new collaboration between fashion brands Kith and Giorgio Armani, that also features Pierce Brosnan and LaKeith Stanfield.  What’s more, he gets to show off his acting chops as well.

Link to video

Groomed for everything

From India: a new spot for on-demand delivery service Swiggy Instamart.

Link to video

RIP James Earl Jones

From AFI Movie Club: On being the voice of Darth Vader

The Sandlot (1993)
  - Ball trade

From his Letterman appearances: Top 10 effects of Y2K

Single signals — not just pineapples

From Spain: as news desks report about the trend of finding love in the aisles of supermarket chain Mercadona, it seems there is more to it than just pineapples.  According to a piece in The Olive Press, pineapple signalling is just the start.

The first step is placing a pineapple upside down in one of the two corners of your cart that are closest to you.

Then head to the wine aisle to find others with upside down pineapples.

If one of them takes your fancy, then bump your trolley against theirs, indicating that you’d like to chat with them. If the feeling is mutual, they can bump back, or just start talking.

But beware, other items placed in someone’s trolley will provide other clues of their intentions.

For example, if you see chocolates or sweets, that means they are looking for long term relationships or something more serious.

But of you see legumes or lettuce, this means they are looking for something more casual.

Additionally, carrying keys in your hand and making them jingle is another sign you are taking part in the trend.

Another signal that someone likes you is if they place a jar of gazpacho in your trolley ‘by accident’.

And this from a piece in The Telegraph by a lady writer who decided to gain some first-hand experience:

For context, it’s not just pineapples singles are using to indicate that they’re looking for more than just groceries. I did some research and curated my own personal shopping list on the basis of the signals.

Olive oil = “looking for a rich man”. Tick.

Lentils = “looking for something long term” (owing to their impressive shelf-life).

Confectionery = “sweet summer fling”. Tick.

Two cucumbers = “dtf, basically” (if you need me to translate, this is not for you).

I’m a tourist. I’m not looking for anything long-term, realistically.

Trump on… child care legislation?

Well, that’s what he was asked about.  His response, in the words of the questioner, was “incomprehensible at best”.

Q: If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable? And if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?

A: Well, I would do that, and we're sitting down, you know, I was somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It's a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that  I'm talking about that, because the child care is child care, couldn't, you know, there's something you have to have it in this country, you have to have it, but when  you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I'm talking  about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they're not used to, but they'll get used  to it very quickly, and it's not going to stop them from doing business with us, but  they'll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we're talking about, including child care, that it's going to take care we're going to have, I look forward to having  no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I'm  talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that, I just that, I just told you about, we're going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and  as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking,  not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we'll be taking in. We're going  to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we'll worry about the rest of the world. Let's help other people, but we're going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. Its about make  America great again. We have to do it because right now we're a failing nation, so we'll take care of it. Thank you, very good question. Thank you.

Link to video

Transcript and punctuation credit: @BGrueskin

Red Reaction

A new spot for Nando’s mild peri-ketchup is 15 seconds worth of terrific reaction shots, and gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘seeing red’.

Link to video

Free for Everyone

Streaming service Tubi treads a fine line between being cheeky and politically incorrect in a couple of new spots that make you wonder if ‘free for all’ might be a more apt description.

Spot 1: Small Business Owners

Spot 2: Proud to be Free

Gary Oldman — in character

For fans of Slow Horses: ahead of the start of the fourth season, someone had the brilliant idea of putting out this delightful spot.

Link to video

When a Brexiteer is educated on ‘taking back control’

UK Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, responding to Reform UK MP, Richard Tice.

Link to video

Why ‘resignation experts’ are sought after in Japan

Excerpts from a CNN report, quoting one such expert:

“Some people come to us after having their resignation letter ripped three times and employers not letting them quit even when they kneel down to the ground to bow.”

“We sometimes get calls from people crying, asking us if they can quit their job based on XYZ. We tell them that it is okay, and that quitting their job is a labor right.”

Monday morning blues, as you’ve never felt them

From Norway: online marketplace Finn.no is promoting its job listing services with a pretty twisted interpretation of how bad your Mondays could be, and how toxic a work environment can be.

Spot 1: Push Push

Spot 2: Last Email

Woman set fires ‘to watch firefighters and flirt’

To quote from a news report out of Greece:

In an unprecedented incident of arson in Tripoli, a city in the central part of the Peloponnese in Greece, a 44-year-old Greek woman set fires because “she enjoyed watching firefighters and flirting with them.”