(via Give Me a Sign)
Monday, July 13, 2026
Long Legged Larry
Long Legged Larry is a bullfrog with a talent for jumping high. Follow along with this song from Aesop Rock as Larry saves the day over and over. (via Laughing Squid)
The Trojan Horse
You know the story of the Trojan Horse, of course, because you've read Homer's Iliad, the epic poem about the Trojan War, right? No, because you haven't read it, and also because the Trojan Horse isn't in the Iliad. But you know the story of how the Greeks won the war against the city of Troy after ten years by leaving a gift of a massive wooden horse behind, which the Trojans accepted and brought into the city gates, not realizing it was full of Greek soldiers. It only makes sense the Trojans would do that, despite the horse's odd weight, without looking to see what was inside.
Is there any truth at all to the story? We once thought that the city of Troy was itself fictional, until Heinrich Schliemann found it in Turkey (and dug right through the layer that would have existed at the relevant time). But that doesn't mean there was a ten-year war. And while the tale of the Trojan Horse was layered with supernatural deeds by Greek gods, that was normal for both historical and fictional accounts in ancient Greece. Weird History looks at the story of the Trojan Horse, and reveals some theories about how it could have happened, whether it did or not.
Miss Cellania's Links
The Loop is a game of pictogram logic. The goal is to arrange 12 images in order so that each image is somehow connected to the next, even when the circle reconnects at the top. (via Metafilter)
The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents. (via Fark)
5 Historical Figures Who Didn’t Actually Exist.
Down the Tube: A History of Short YouTube Horror Films. (via Nag on the Lake)
6 surprising lessons on how to stay hydrated, according to science. (via Real Clear Science)
The new foods at the Minnesota State Fair and the Iowa State Fair.
The history of our future. Lisa L. Hannett tells her scary birth story while looking at motherhood in science fiction. (via Metafilter)
The Real Story of Will West and William West, the Leavenworth Look-Alikes.
CDC Stopped Monitoring Parasite Now Causing Explosive Diarrhea Across The Country. (via Fark)
Is Everything Okay Up There?
Trolling at its finest, from Zack Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Sunday, July 12, 2026
Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur
In the 1939 short Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur, a caveman does a Jack Benny impersonation as he and his dinosaur named Fido look for a delicious duck dinner. That's Daffy. This is the first Daffy Duck cartoon drected by Chuck Jones. (Thanks, WTM!)
The Experimental "Sex Raft"
In 1973, Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés put 11 young adults, including himself, on a raft sailing from the Canary Islands across the Atlantic for three months to Cozumel island, Mexico. He expected to document the power struggles, sexual jealousy, and violence that would inevitably overwhelm the group. Kind of like a reality TV show. But you know what they say about assumptions.
I had heard about the Acali raft experiment, but didn't know a lot about it until I watched a video today. It was interesting, but with an AI-generated narration and images, I didn't want to post it. Then I saw a video from three years ago with the exact same title, and it has most of the same narration and actual footage of the event. The newer AI video has an update about a reunion of the surviving participants, who had a wonderful time meeting up with each other 45 years later.
Nature’s Most Brutal Predators
Killer turtles with poison spears! Invaders of the slime glass fortress! The ballistic torpedo shark! These creatures sound like they came from a B-movie, but they are real, and they are dangerous. We humans simply ignore them, because we can't see them and barely know about them. These are protists, mostly single-celled organisms that are neither animal, plant, bacteria, or virus, but are the ancestors of them all. Now they feed on their descendants, with an amazing variety of weapons that are hard to believe come from a single cell. The prey they feed on are also quite small, and some protists are even beneficial to humans by controlling the species they eat. Kurzgesagt introduces us to three of the weirdest predatory protists to show what an amazing world lies underneath us while we don't pay attention. This video contains a sponsor message from 3:47 to 5:04, and the last minute is promotional. (via the Awesomer)
Saturday, July 11, 2026
It! The Terror From Beyond Space
The 1958 movie It! The Terror From Beyond Space has been cited as the inspiration for the 1979 movie Alien. Set in 1973, a mission to Mars aims to rescue the astronauts of the first mission, but there's only one survivor. The crew suspects he murdered the others, but he insists that a Martian monster killed them. They take off, not realizing that the Martian has stowed away on their spacecraft. Yeah, that sounds familiar.
Wikipedia has a hilarious account of why the monster looks the way it does. As a cheap movie with a killer premise, it has a 74% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. (Thanks, WTM!)
Rules and Regulations
Before we go any further, "pengering" means dryer, and "rambut" means hair in Indonesia. The warning says this public hair dryer is only to be used on your head. (via reddit)
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