Welcome to Asakusa in Tokyo, Japan – home of the Crying Sumo Baby Festival. Yes, you read that right. Crying sumo babies. The rules are simple: two sumo wrestlers face off in a ring and each is handed a baby. The babies are raised and whichever baby cries the loudest, wins. Brilliant!
This photo was taken by Flickr user Vyxle at the 2008 Crying Sumo Baby Festival. If you’re headed to Tokyo, this Asakusa guide lists the festival to be in ‘late April’, so keep an eye (and ear) out for the shrill sound of infant waterworks.
Click through below for a video from a Crying Sumo Baby Festival – a picture may be worth a thousand words, but there’s nothing like watching this cuteness in action.
If you have photos from an equally obscure festival, we want to see them! Join Flickr, submit them to the Gadling Pool, and it could be our next Photo of the Day!
Bald-headed and brazen, Andrew Zimmern takes culinary risk-taking to new heights on his Travel Channel show, Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. Zimmern has traveled the streets of Nicaragua to the state fairs of Minnesota to find the craziest edibles on earth. We cringe when we see him chowing down on iguana eggs, reindeer pizza and pig stomach tacos — but he does it with such zeal that we keep tuning in. With the show’s fourth season premiering on April 26, it’s a great time to revisit some of Andrew’s strangest meals. Put down that sandwich and check out these eight clips below.
Squirrel Brains
When Zimmern visited Appalachia, he knew he was in for some down-home oddities. But at a restaurant as fancy as Ember in Snowshoe, West Virginia, the ultimate comfort food is chicken-fried squirrel.
Live Soup
In South Korea, Zimmern digs into a soup that wiggles until the last second. Talk about fresh!
Cow Urine
That’s right, cow urine. This short and, well, not-so-sweet clip shows Zimmern knocking back a glass of the stuff in Goa.
Spleen Sandwich
When you think Italian, you think spaghetti and meatballs — but probably not Spleen. But in Sicily, Zimmern sprinkles his spleen sandwich with cheese.
Baby Piglet
This clip from a Los Angeles restaurant might make you go vegetarian. Zimmern raves about the taste, but all we can see is a whole cooked piglet on the table.
Fish Eye
No cooking necessary when Zimmern visits Samoa. Just tear the fish’s eye from the socket, and enjoy.
Shark Meat
In Iceland, taking a bite out of Jaws is nothing new. Zimmern says the meat “smells like ammonia,” but tastes “sweet” and “nutty.”
Mystery Meat
Sometimes, the fear of the unknown can be worse than eating the strangest dish. Despite the “putrid, foul stench” Zimmern notes while eating “K’Lia” in Morocco, he still suffers through.
Looking for more Andrew Zimmern and Bizarre Foods on Gadling? Check out interviews with Andrew HERE and HERE.
An Indonesian 737 operated by Merpati Nusantara Airlines skidded off of a runway in the eastern Paupa province early yesterday, coming to rest over a canal and subsequently breaking in two right through the fuselage.
Initial reports indicate that the incident was weather related and had nothing to do with the aircraft or its operator.
Miraculously, nobody was killed during the incident although scores were injured. The crash does, however, bring the safety records for many Indonesian carriers back into the limelight, many of which have been recently scrutinized for being below international standard. MSNBC has footage from the crash site below:
Writer, cartoonist and good-guy-all around David Horsey’s most recent installment from his Escape into America series is up at MSNBC. This week, Horsey visits the Grand Canyon, not as a tourist telling stories about his vapid, two dimensional travels but rather as a visitor profiling the characters and the landscapes around one of the nation’s proudest national parks. The resulting slide show and audio is a warming look into America’s heartland. Take a look at the excellent piece below.
This week’s video of the week, called Sandpit, is from Sam O’Hare who wanted to use a tilt-shift lens to turn a New York City scene into something that looks like a tiny model. But he discovered he could improve the look and feel by shooting the video with a normal lens and then blur the background and foreground after it was produced.
Tilt-shift videos of cites are nothing new, but Sam took it to a new level.
Sam explained the process of making Sandpit in an interesting interview by Aero Film if you need to know how it was created.
The effects are amazing. Coupled with the music from Human, you may find yourself hypnotized in no time.
Do you have a great travel related suggestion for our Video of the Week? Fill out this form or just include my twitter handle @veryjr in your tweet about it. Maybe we’ll use it as next week’s Video.