(via She Who Seeks)
Monday, June 29, 2026
The Soviet Night Witches
The Night Witches was a name given to the World War II pilots of the Soviet Union's all-woman 588th Night Bomber Regiment. They flew multiple missions every night to bomb German units on the Eastern Front, in tiny obsolete planes that flew low and almost silently. The pilots were young (as young as 17), fearless, and patriotic, like the kamikazes Japan deployed in the Pacific. The difference is that the Night Witches often survived their dangerous raids, while understanding that the odds against them were serious.
Their story, as brought to us by Weird History, begins as if the Soviet Union only joined the war in 1941. The part they left out was that the USSR had a pact with Germany to divide the nations of Eastern Europe between them, and the Soviets invaded some of them themselves. Once Germany double-crossed them, the Soviets joined the Allies, and only afterward did women aviators lobby to serve.
The funniest part of this video is the machine-generated captions. The algorithm has no idea what to do with Russian names, and cannot cope at all with the airplanes called Po-2s.
Miss Cellania's Links
The wedding that inspired “Save the Last Dance for Me.” (via Metafilter)
Peruvians say they were promised jobs in Russia, but landed on the front lines in Ukraine. (via Damn Interesting)
Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself. (via Strange Company)
The U.S. Ghost Town That Periodically Rises Out of a Lake. The tale of a town that would not stay sunken.
The Operating Room Where Anesthesia Was First Demonstrated Is Now a Landmark. But for the Men Who Claimed Credit, There Was Much Misery.
Jump rope is hard enough, but this guy gives it style. (via Everlasting Blort)
In 1980, Eastern Airlines flight attendants began to sweat drops of red. Mysteriously, this only happened to the flight attendants. (via Nag on the Lake)
Trump’s Most Sinister Legacy: He’s Brought Out the Worst in America. (via Fark)
The Dinosaur and the Missing Link
The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy was created by Willis O'Brien in 1915, released by Edison Studios in 1917. The stop-motion animated tale concerns a courtship among prehistoric cave people, an ape-creature (the missing link), and a dinosaur. The real comedy comes in the intertitles, which would be quite at home in an Edwardian romantic comedy. I found this in an interesting article about the evolution of dinosaurs in movies at Vulture.
The Plot
I'm sick of these movies being so on the nose.
— GodlessPrimate (@godlessprimate.bsky.social) June 27, 2026 at 9:44 AM
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Sunday, June 28, 2026
Able Mabel
The first half of this 1966 ad is to promote a household robot that was expected to be available by 1976. She's not quite as smooth or as quick as Rosie from The Jetsons, but she seemed awesome for the time. The second half is a more honest assessment of how far the robot had to go at that time, hosted by a roboticist in great s]need of some Brylcreem. What really happened is that we made improvements for each task separately. A Roomba is much smaller. A Ring doorbell is tiny and stays in one place. And no one irons because we just improved fabric to not need it. (via Nag on the Lake)
Ferrets and the Plague
We once thought that black-footed ferrrets were extict, but when a few specimens were later found, the rush was on to bring them back from the brink, which included breeding them in captivity. Releasing these kitten snakes into the wild is dangerous, though, because they eat prairie dogs, which have fleas, which carry plague. The evolution of the plague bacteria went through some real changes in order to become as virulent as it is, involving flea anatomy, and then follows a disgusting chain of infection that can give us all bubonic plague. In this video, Ze Frank takes us from a Yersinia pestis bacterium named Patricia through a chain of critters that aren't named, up to a black-footed ferret named Kenny. There are ways that people are trying to protect the ferrets from the plague that may look silly, but are important. And we have adorable ferret footage to make it all seem less grim.
Calorie Sources and How They've Changed
Through most of civilization, people have been getting the majority of their calories from whatever carbohydrates were available: bread, potatoes, rice, or yams depending on location. But in the last couple hundred years, food technology and culture has upended that. This video from Data is Beautiful tracks the source of caloric intake among Americans aged 20-39 from 1930 to 2026. Keep in mind this does not take into account the total amount of food consumed; just a comparison of the calorie source. That's why fruits and vegetables stay so low- you can eat an awful lot of those and still get few calories.
Bread stays at the top during the Great Depression. Then when World War II vets came home, they continued to eat red meat every day like they did in the military, and their families did, too. Then the rise of fast food took over, and soda pop became an everyday drink. Late in the 20th century, red meat became less popular and more expensive. You'll spot more trends on a second watch that can be linked to prices, trends, and health concerns. (via Born in Space)
Never Bet Against a Raccoon
Think you're going to outsmart a hungry raccoon with your silly technology? Watch this trash panda foil a critter-proof bird feeder! You get the idea that it's not the first time he's seen this kind of setup. While the folks inside admit defeat, they are impressed with both the raccoon's intelligence and his dexterity. (via Tastefully Offensive)
Saturday, June 27, 2026
The Undying Monster
The Undying Monster is a 1942 horror mystery based on a 1922 novel. The residents of a family estate in England are being killed one by one, but is it a supernatural monster, or is one of them a killer? (Thanks, WTM!)
The Great Dismal Swamp
My family has spent vacations at the Outer Banks of North Carolina for at least four generations now. You let the kids think it is for fun in the sun, but they learn a lot of history, too. The Lost Colony. Blackbeard's pirate base, The Wright Brothers' first flight. And getting there, you pass through the Great Dismal Swamp, over engineered roads that weren't possible a couple hundred years ago. Full of mosquitos, snakes, choking vegetation, and unstable ground, the inhospitable swamp was a refuge for enslaved people who escaped and hid out for generations.
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