Princess Leia's Stolen Death Star Plans

I found some serious catnip that will be playing all evening long while I work. It's a mashup of the Beatles and Star Wars. To be specific, the album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is used to tell the saga of Luke, Leia, Han, and the droids as they battle Darth Vader and the Empire. Dan Amrich and Jude Kelley of Palette-Swap Ninja redid the entire Sgt. Pepper album in Star Wars lyrics. You can hear the whole thing in this playlist. If you don't listen to anything else from the album, you've got to hear the last track, "Reprise/A Day in the Life of Red Five." (via Metafilter)

Feelings

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— Jymbo (Smurfmaster from the place that shall not be named) (@smurfmasterjym.bsky.social) April 30, 2026 at 1:44 AM

They saw the picture and went with it. (via Bad Newspaper)

Ducks

The award-winning animated short film Ducks starts out cute with a baby observing a normal day in the park, and gets cuter- for a little while. And then nightmare fuel starts creeping in. Don't let that stop you; there's no real horror here, just a throwback to the bizarre cartoons of the early internet. The first thing we learn is that not all ducks are the same. They can vary in surprising ways. They don't appear to be completely nefarious, but you get a sneaking suspicion that they could be. This film is by AJ Jeffries, who has an extensive catalog of cartoons you might want to check out.  

Drive Through

(via Give Me a Sign)

Family of Cougars Caught on Camera

This trail cam footage shows a mother cougar with three half-grown cubs visiting a stash of deer meat. And purring and squeaking. They look healthy and well-fed. But the surprise is where this happened. It was near Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota! We think of cougars as residents of the American West, but they once roamed the entire country. Over the last couple of decades, there have been some sightings in Minnesota, mostly on trail cams, of solitary cougars, but this sighting is the first of cubs in Minnesota in more than a century. 

When an electronically-tagged deer died in March, it was found covered in leaves, raising suspicions that a cougar may have killed it. Researchers planted cameras near the carcass, hoping that the cats would return to feast again. They were surprised to see four cougars return to the site, meaning that cougars are once again reproducing in Minnesota instead of just passing through. Read more about this discovery at MPR. (via Metafilter)  

Watermelon

(via Buzzfeed)

Press Conference

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and FBI Director Kash Patel answer questions from the press in the opening skit from last night's Saturday Night Live. Alcohol may have been involved. 

Thin Mints

(via Fark)

Why Everyone Should Have a Cat

Simon Tofield of Simon's cat has a guest star- Anna Akana tells of the many reasons you should consider having your own cat.

Population Distribution

The world divided into 4 equal parts [🗾 justforstev24] Original post

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— Massimo (mirror) (@rainmaker1973-m.bsky.social) April 30, 2026 at 6:06 AM

I looked at this and said, India doesn't have two billion people! India has 1.4 billion, but this map includes Pakistan, Bangladesh, and a couple other countries in that quadrant.

When Idioms Attack

(via Bad Menu)

Kronos

The 1957 film Kronos was also marketed as Kronos, Destroyer of the Universe and Kronos, Ravager of Planets. It was made in two weeks on a budget of $130,000. Kronos is an alien robot that comes to earth to steal energy, so it attacks power plants, after stealing the mind of a scientist. The more energy the robot gathers, the larger it gets. The special effects were fairly good for its time, and the subject of limited energy supplies was prescient. WTM says it might be the first movie he ever watched. This colorized version is only 1:16:35 long; after that, it's someone's home movie, as if this was ripped from a VHS tape. (Thanks, WTM!) 

Doctor

(via reddit)

James Bond 003 (years old)

This guy makes movies with his three-year-old son. Here, the child is Bond, James Bond. (via reddit) 

Grizzly Bear

(via Bored Panda)

Royal Inbreeding

Somewhere along the lines, a long time ago, ruling families got the idea that their blood was better than everyone else's, so they wanted keep reproduction in the family, so to speak. This was also a convenient way to keep inherited wealth from being divided. But inbreeding will catch up with you sooner or later, as more and more harmful genes get doubled up. The case we are most familiar with is that of Charles II of Spain, whose family tree was not only a wreath, but even more like an Euler diagram. 

But he was far from the only victim of royal inbreeding. It's been pretty common in Europe. Loony Throne takes us through ten royals in which inbreeding made a lasting mark on history. 

Car Story

The only time I ever bought a new car was in 1983. I was looking for a used car, but everything available seemed awful. It was the end of the model year, so I got a deal on a stripped down new Plymouth Champ. It didn't even have an FM radio. I told Mom I might call it "Bullet" because it was silver and sloped in the front. She said I should name it "Little Old Lady" because it was small, gray, and didn't go very fast. I drove Little Old Lady for about ten years. 

The fall of 1983 was a weird time to buy a car. One dealer tried to sell me a new '82 DeLorean. There was no way I could afford even a deeply-discounted DeLorean, but I humored him a while. I asked where I would be able to get it serviced. He said, "Right here! Until I get these four sold." We both laughed at that. 

Since then, I've sometimes wondered about that dealer. If he held onto those four cars until that movie came out in 1985, he would have made a killing. But it was more likely he took a loss. 

Skip ahead twenty years or so, and I wrote an article for Mental Floss on cars as metaphors. In a list of about ten vehicles, I used the DeLorean as a symbol of "hubris and failure" because of John DeLorean's story. I got my first lesson in being an out-of-touch Boomer when I was raked over the coals in the comments. The DeLorean was a metaphor for "time machine"! Yeah, I saw the movie, in which the DeLorean was used as a joke (and a good one at the time). But I didn't realize how much that film meant to the Gen X kids who saw it. I learned my lesson about how things change.   

(Image credit: dave_7) 

Sneeze

(via reddit)

The Dancing Movies

Diego Carrera made an extremely pleasant music video that uses well-edited dancing clips from movies you've seen. Or at least most of them. They run the gamut from Al Jolson to Emma Stone -and it ends with a clip from 1896. (via Digg)