Back in the 1920s, a career as a “daredevil” was not unheard of. Newsreels showed people dancing on top of skyscrapers and balancing on the wings of airplanes. At the age of 46, Al Faussett from Monroe, Washington, decided that being a daredevil would be his next career. “Al’s wife had had enough of him and promptly divorced him when he decided his career was going to change and he was going to become a daredevil,” said Guy Faussett, Al’s great-grandson. Faussett was a slim man with a head full

It started out like any other underwater volunteer shift — scattering food for the salmon and perch, then diving down deeper to hand feed the rockfish, sturgeon and other species who make their home in the 400,000-gallon tank.

For four days this past week, Laura Calkins was up before the dawn, into the shop at Quigg Brothers Construction in Aberdeen, and hard at work putting more than 50,000 Christmas lights on a dump truck. Or, “only” 50,000, as Calkins is quick to point out. She’s gone as high as 250,000 lights before. The painstaking work was in preparation for the Montesano Festival of Lights. The annual three-day festival has been taking place in the Grays Harbor County seat for more than 30 years.

This week, stories of the unusual things we can’t get enough of. We meet a scientist who is also widely recognized as an artist who paints cats . A musician from Yugoslavia talks about making art during war time . A man makes a one person stand against those who think vaccinations are bad. A scientist finds herself being responsible for keeping a rare butterfly alive . Sound Effect is stories inspired by the place we live. The show is hosted by KNKX's Gabriel Spitzer . The full broadcast version

This story originally aired on Oct. 14, 2018. Craig Egan, who lives in Tacoma, stumbled into an obsession kind of by accident. It happened on FaceBook. “A friend of mine posted some graph that had an anti-vax slant to it. At that point I had no idea that this was a thing,” Craig remembers. "Anti-vax," as in people who believe that vaccinations are harmful and oppose giving them to kids. The thought of not vaccinating children in anathema to Craig. In online, anti-vaccination forums, Craig poked

What do gelatin, a wrestling ring, and feminism all have in common? Jello Underground. An all-female run jello wrestling tournament. Part performance, part competition, part declaration of female power and sex positivity. Jello Underground began as a Seattle-based burlesque troupe. According to the show’s producer, Gracie Garnet (that’s her stage name), the hustle it took to choreograph, produce, and run a burlesque show became too strenuous. So the troupe, still wanting to perform, took a step

As a kid, Agnes Bodor had a few unusual interests. “I was really crazy about books about illnesses, you know, images of skin rashes and things like that,” Agnes said. One day she spotted a small microscope in a store window, and longed to have it. That was unrealistic, considering that her family was poor and living under the Communist government in Hungary. But one day, a family friend with no children of his own stopped by Agnes’s house, and presented her with a small box. “So I got it for

Jenny Shrum is a National Park Biologist in one of the most beautiful places on Earth: San Juan Island. Before coming to the island, she worked on seasonal contracts for years at national parks all over the west. As a biologist, most of those jobs involved monitoring large animals. “I’ve worked with lynx in Colorado and wolverine in Idaho and grizzly bears in Montana, seals in Alaska, Hawksbill turtles in Hawaii,” said Shrum. But, In 2014, she got orders to come to the National Historical Park

This story originally aired Oct. 13, 2018. In the early 1990s, Gino Jevdjevic was living the typical life of a Yugoslavian popstar. He signed autographs and posed for pictures with fans. He wore his hair in a ponytail and crooned schmaltzy melodies. These days, Gino has a shaved head, a multitude of tattoos and a long, grey-streaked beard. He lives in Seattle, and his music is closer to metal or “Gypsy Punk” than it is to pop. To understand how he got from one version of Gino to Gino 2.0, you

To say Joe Petosa Jr. and his family are into accordions would not be doing them justice. The Petosa Accordion company goes back almost 100 years, when Carlo Petosa started hand crafting accordions in his Seattle basement. That tradition was passed down to Carlos’s son, Joe Petosa, then to his grandson, Joe Jr., and now onto his great grandson, Joe the third. The custom instruments they make are sought after all over the world. “So on a typical, full sized professional instrument, they range