This is nothing groundbreaking or hilarious, but it is cute, and it will be stuck in your head for a while. (via reddit)
Sunday, July 19, 2026
Bock Bock Bock Bock Chicken
"Occasional" Sports Fans
Have you noticed that people who never talk about or even think about soccer (also known as football) are suddenly fans, or maybe even experts? This is particularly true of Americans, because North America is hosting the World Cup. There are also those who are sports fans once every four years, when the World Cup happens elsewhere. Or the Olympics, when you find yourself wrapped up in women's gymnastics for a short time, but then switch to speed skating two years later. Meanwhile, you haven't paid attention to anything outside of baseball. Or maybe not even that. So many people only care about football for one weekend in February, or horse racing on the first Sunday in May. If you don't keep up the rest of the time, it might be difficult to bluff your way through, as Ryan George demonstrates here.
In case you aren't even trying, the 2026 World Cup comes to an end today when Spain and Argentina play at 3 Eastern Time. (via Geeks Are Sexy)
A Mime’s Silent Resistance Against Nazi Forces
The most famous mime ever was Marcel Marceau. Let's face it, he's the only mime you know by name. But the French performer had more on his resume than his stage act. During World War II, Marceau harnessed his acting talent to aid the French Resistance. Great Big Story lets us in on a bit of Marceau's wartime activities. (via Laughing Squid)
Saturday, July 18, 2026
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
The 1954 Disney film 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea was based on the 1870 Jules Verne novel. The star-studded movie was nominated for three Oscars and won two. Seventy years later, it has a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (Thanks, WTM!)
A Record-Breaking Domino Fall
A team of first class domino experts got together as a team to break a Guinness World Record. And they did, on June 20th, when they toppled a 3D pyramid containing 29,193 dominoes. But would you believe that is about the least interesting part of this sequence? This 123,456-piece domino fall takes up a whole gym, and it's quite entertaining.
There are lots of mind bending side quests, while the main line continues in a back-and-forth manner intended to give you enough time to enjoy the side quest without losing the point of progress. I had to go back and watch the pair of gummy bears to figure out how they made them fall twice. There are a couple of places where an art piece did not entirely fall. That seems a shame, but maybe they were just setting the viewer up for the surprise duck. In between sequences, there are non-domino transitions that make this a truly Rube Goldberg contraption, and they often don't work the way you expect them to. After all that, the record-breaking pyramid didn't seem all that important, but overall, it's quite a ride. (via Born in Space)
On The Far Side
You loved Gary Larson's comic The Far Side; we all did, where we learned about Thagomizers, Anatidaephobia, and that tramp Jane Goodall. But do you actually know anything about Larson, the man? Probably not much, but his life outside of The Far Side has been pretty interesting. He plays the banjo, and almost had a career in jazz (go figure). He keeps exotic animals. And there's more, all in this video from Today I Found Out.
Remember
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— Alt National Park Service (@altnps.bsky.social) July 16, 2026 at 10:32 AM
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Friday, July 17, 2026
Is Gen Z Dumb?
It's common that people who are older and have more experience look at young people as clueless. It's always been that way, because 60 years of learning about the world will beat twenty years of learning on average. For an objective measurement, national IQ scores are starting to fall. But it's not the kids' fault- it's their environment, meaning technology, education, and the broader culture that results. Yeah, that means it's our fault.
You can find hundreds of ways we have let young people down. People who were raised by the TV end up knowing little about parenting their own kids. Fractured media choices lead to the option of ignoring what's going on the real world. Helicopter parents shield children from life's hard lessons. Participation trophies lead to an inflated sense of self. Fractured families lead to a loss of generational knowledge. And more than anything else, income equality leads to people who have to work too hard to even feed their children, much less spend time with them. Of course, we would never want to go back to the days of beating kids into compliance. I believe that instilling a lifetime love of learning into very young children is crucial, and that takes a lot of effort. But it pays off.
Kitsune
Foxes re known for being cute and intelligent, so clever that it was easy to ascribe superpowers to them, which is exactly what happened in ancient Japan. The supernatural fox, called Kitsune, could be a mischievous prankster, a shapeshifter, a blessing, or a spirit that possessed humans, depending on the time and place. They are rarely 100% malevolent, but they can ruin your life in order to teach you a lesson. Kitsune can take a form of a beautiful woman, and in some cases even reproduce with humans to provide hybrids or some form of Kitsune ancestry.
Dr. Emily Zarka explain Kitsune, from ancient tales (with many tails) to modern depictions in pop culture, including a bizarre plan for weaponing Kitsune against the Japanese during World War II.
Where Time Doesn't Act Right
We think of time as a constant, sometimes the only constant, in our lives. It's true that time seems to pass much more quickly as we get older, but that's just a matter of human perception. The way we measure time varies from place to place and from culture to culture, so we manage to confuse ourselves about it. Human perception of time can't always be trusted. But objective time isn't always constant, either. Ot's mind boggling how time itself can vary once you get away from the earth, whether it's merely on a mountaintop or in outer space. Chill Dude Explains gives us a list of ten anomalies in time, from the mundane and easily understood to the cosmic. There are no time machines here, just real examples of time distortion, or at least distortions in the way we understand time. The mispronounced word in the this video is Byzantine.
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