To save you some time, it's not that kind of proposal. (via Bad Newspaper)
Monday, March 31, 2025
Tastes Like Almonds
This is not all that uncommon with scientists. But the simpler explanation is that the site contains cyanide. (via Slow Robot)
Cockatoo Yanks Eyeglasses
Sid the cockatoo must consider it his job to remove Dave's glasses. He hates the eyeglasses! No, wait, Sid thinks it's loads of fun. He's quite proud of himself! You won't be able to help but laugh at this prankster. (via Tastefully Offensive)
Sunday, March 30, 2025
America's Panhandles
Laurence Brown of Lost in the Pond takes a look at the US map and addresses the quirks of state boundaries, namely those dangling rectangles that we call panhandles. These are even stranger than the squiggly lines of those borders, because they don't have much of anything to do with natural geography like mountains or rivers. Every one of these panhandles has a story behind it, or what he calls a "ridiculously complex history." Some have to do with the military conquests between England, Spain, and France for American territory as the US was formed. Others are due to political machinations during the time the borders were drawn, because there have always been competition between states, for one reason or another. Or between countries, in the case of Alaska's panhandle. Some of these disputes are still going on the in the 21st century! There's a 45-second skippable ad at 2:47.
Killers on TV
The explosion of channels that came with cable TV more than 40 years ago meant that suddenly there were hundreds and hundreds of people on TV every day, working to fill those channels with 24/7 content. It only stands to reason that some of those folks would end up being arrested for murder., even multiple murders. In some cases, it was only after they were arrested that their TV appearances were discovered in the archives and took on a whole new aura. No, you didn't know there was something suspicious about that fellow when you saw him on a game show- you just think that now that we know the truth. The implication is that any one of those people you see on TV on any given day could be harboring secrets that would give you the willies. Weird History tells us the stories of seven killers who had previously been on TV, mostly for something completely different. Strangely, a couple of these appearances are not only available, but have also been recreated for later movies or TV shows.
Group Chat
The skits write themselves these days. In the opening the last night's Saturday Night Live, three high school girls are inadvertently added to a government group chat where material that should be classified is discussed openly, with a lot of emojis. I suspect Matt Gaetz may be the nexus that explains this.
R2-D2 is Sad Obi-Wan Doesn't Remember Him
Obi-wan doesn't remember R2D2, but the droid remembers, and those memories are painful. But you have to remember that Obi-wan in his old age fed Luke a lot of other BS, too. And then he wanted to
Saturday, March 29, 2025
The Man Who Mends Things
A lovely animated story by artist Ann Farley. The man who mends things helped so many people that they came together to help him in the end. That's the way kindness works. (via Nag on the Lake)
Thomas the Tank Engine Beatbox
The human mouth is the most versatile musical instrument, even without lyrics. (via Everlasting Blort)
Winner!
(via Tacky Raccoons)
Believe it or not, the first picture is a pretty good likeness of one particular dog. (Thanks, Anonymous!)
Where the Easter Bunny Came From
An interspecies relationship leads to a child who feels like she doesn't fit in. She can't take the bullying anymore and decides to leave it all behind. It's a common story, but well done here. Grab a hankie just in case. This ad is from the German supermarket chain Netto Marken-Discount, who earlier brought us the Grocery-Shopping Cats. (via Metafilter)
Friday, March 28, 2025
The Murderous Medieval King That Inspired Macbeth
Many people don't realize that William Shakespeare's play The Tragedy of Macbeth was inspired by a real king named Macbeth, or formally Macbethad mac Findláech. He was a Scottish king from 1040 until 1057. Anyone unfamiliar with the real Macbeth can be forgiven, since that was 1000 years ago and there have been a lot of kings in a lot of countries since then. Shakespeare obviously fictionalized the story, adding the prophesy of three witches that eventually came true. They aren't the only witches in the play, and there are also ghosts and prophetic visions. Five hundred years after the fact, Shakespeare made a really tragic and compelling story out of Macbeth's reign. In this TED-Ed lesson, Benjamin Hudson explains the many reasons Shakespeare had for crafting the tale of Macbeth the way he did.
World Record Longest Cat Tail
Pugsley Addams, a Maine coon cat from Mound, Minnesota drags around a feather duster that can't be topped! Pugsley belongs to the Cameron family, who has four Maine coon cats: Pugsley, Gomez, Winnie, and Duchess. They knew Pugsley had an exceptional tail, but only when his veterinarian expressed amazement did they think about a world record. The existing record for a tail on a living domestic cat was 16 inches, and Pugsley's was longer. Guinness World Record officials determined Pugsley's tail is 18.5 inches (46.99 centimeters) long!
But he may beat his own record in time. Pugsley is only two years old, and Maine coon cats often don't reach their full size until they are four or five years old. Read more about this long-tailed cat and how he and his brother Gomez resemble their Addams Family namesakes at the Guinness site. (via Boing Boing)
What if Studio Ghibli Produced Lord of the Rings?
PJ Ace used artificial intelligence to render the trailer for The Fellowship of the Ring in the style of a Studio Ghibli film. Hayao Miyazaki would hate it, as he hates the very concept of artificial intelligence.(via Neatorama)
Miss Cellania's Links
New map of landscape beneath Antarctica unveiled. https://www.bas.ac.uk/media-post/new-map-of-landscape-beneath-antarctica-unveiled/ (via Real Clear Science) https://www.realclearscience.com/
Imagining the Menu at Elon Musk’s Forthcoming Restaurant. (via Nag on the Lake)
How a destroyer won a World War II battle with potatoes. Thanks, WTM!)
How Far Did Neolithic Britons Carry Stonehenge’s Most Famous Boulder? In a find that provides insights into the remarkable abilities of these ancient humans, new research studying the chemical footprint of the rock identified the source to be more than 400 miles away
Do You Know What A Squircle Is?
Lest We Forget the Horrors: An Unending Catalog of Trump’s Cruelties, Collusions, Corruptions, and Crimes. This will be updated monthly for the next four years. (via kottke)
One Last Ride for Antarctica’s Ivan the Terra Bus. After more than 30 years as an iconic fixture of the polar research station, this beloved bus is bidding farewell to the southern continent.
What Archaeologists Are Uncovering About the Buddha in His Legendary Nepali Hometown.
Dolphin Enjoys Floor Show
Bonnie Anna "MissChief" from FunDipped Productions (a circus theater company) visited an aquarium and did a few tumbles. One dolphin was particularly impressed. (via Bits and Pieces)
Thursday, March 27, 2025
How to Move a 100-year-old Church
This is still my favorite YouTube video, which I've posted every few years since 2007. For the second season of the TV show Monster Moves, the production followed Trinity Lutheran Church in Lincoln Township, Iowa, that was moved nine miles to its new home in Manning, Iowa. Daniel Pemberton wrote a song for the occasion, sung by the Manning Chorus. Even the stained glass survived the move intact!
Every Frame is 3D Printed
When I read how this animated sequence was made, I was impressed. But is the finished product any good? Yeah, it's the story of a miniature man who must save his miniature puppy from an evil Roomba. Now for the technical stuff. Wren from Corridor Digital acted out the part wearing motion capture equipment that digitized his moves. Then our hero's figure was rendered in plastic parts for every necessary movement by a 3D printer and assembled for each frame! Finally, each figure was photographed individually to create the film. They printed up more than 2,000 parts for this sequence, and the assembly and frame-by-frame photography took a lot of time. But they proved it could be done. If you're interested in the process of making this type of animation, there's a 23-minute behind the scenes video. (via The Awesomer)
Ceiling Cat Goes to School
It can be annoying when non-students drop in unannounced. This happened at the University for Peace in Costa Rica. (via Buzzfeed)
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Ten Different Types of Cat Forts
One of the great things about having children or pets is that they give you an excuse to play with toys and build things. Making videos for YouTube is another great excuse. Half-Asleep Chris takes full advantage of this situation to have fun building forts for his two cats Ralph and Bella. For this video, he build ten forts from ten different materials, and then recorded the cats' reactions to see which they liked the best. The result is that we get to vicariously enjoy watching the construction of the forts plus cats. This might even be worthing getting a cat for. For Chris, it was a project that meant he had to buy a lot of toys, which are tax deductible, I'm sure. (via Laughing Squid)
How Could Time Travelers Avoid Diseases?
When we go to another country, we often get recommendations for vaccinations that will protect us from diseases we don't worry about at home. It would be the same for time travelers, depending on what era of history they are going to. For example, I might be able to travel to a time where smallpox was rampant, but my children would not, since they never got the smallpox vaccine. In the 21st century, we don't worry about the plague or leprosy because they are treatable, but going to the past means you also go back to when we didn't have antibiotics, so you'd better take some. If you travel to the future, you may find yourself in the middle of a sigma flu epidemic, and you are the only one in town who hasn't had a sigma flu shot -because you've never heard of sigma flu. Hank Green gives us some perspective on that one aspect of time travel that science fiction writers never think of.
Tuesday, March 25, 2025
He Lied on His Resume
This dog was supposed to be an emotional support animals and help her with her anxiety. Maybe it will work; her own worries won't seem so bad now. (via Fark)
Mario Kart in Real Life
Joseph Hersher of Joseph's Machines is known for making super elaborate contraptions that do everyday things. This one is quite elaborate, but there's no "everyday" about it. He got one of the larger LEGO Super Mario Kart sets (no doubt because of a sponsorship deal) and not only built the karts, but designed a track that replicates the odd effects of the game! Watch the racetrack move to thwart the drivers. Watch cars get smashed flat. Watch a turtle zig zag across the course. Watch a kart on a bridge leap-frog across another kart. First you have to watch to see what he came up with, then you have to watch again to figure out how he did it. (via Boing Boing)
Recreating History
When Hollywood does history, they often go to great lengths to portray an iconic moment accurately, especially when there is film or photographs of the original event. They get pretty darn close, as this comparison from Vugar Efendi shows us. For most of these, I am more familiar with the actual film or photographs than I am with the movies. I'm impressed at how well they copied the existing archives. Then again, if a movie didn't resemble the real history, it wouldn't have made it into this video. If you have trouble reading the captions, try it in fullscreen mode. (via Laughing Squid)
Monday, March 24, 2025
Miss Cellania's Links
Vivian Jenna Wilson on Being Elon Musk’s Estranged Daughter, Protecting Trans Youth and Taking on the Right Online.
The Hidden Heroine of WWI: How Anna Coleman Ladd Restored Faces and Lives. (via Strange Company)
The Business Cards of American Psycho. They weren't all that good. (via Metafilter)
Terrorizing our fellow Americans. Russ Vought promised to traumatize Federal workers, and it's happening (via Fark)
Humans have a superpower that makes us uniquely capable of controlling the world: our ability to understand cause and effect. (via Damn Interesting)
What Happens If You Shoot a Gun in Space?
Learn the World Map. When you've learned enough, try the daily challenge. (via Nag on the Lake)
Are You Lost In The World Like Me?
The music video for "Are You Lost In The World Like Me?" by Moby and the Void Pacific Choir. Animation by Steve Cutts. (via Everlasting Blort)
Sunday, March 23, 2025
The Miracle Liquid Known as WD-40
You've heard the advice about taking care of your household stuff: If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape. If it doesn't move and it should, use WD-40. That's why every home has both. Do you know what's in that familiar blue spray can? No, you don't, because the exact formula is a well-guarded secret. Do you know what WD stands for? You might, but if not, you'll learn it in this video. I already had plenty of respect for the product, but I also learned a few new uses that never occurred to me before, way beyond making things move that should. (via The Awesomer)
Puffer Fish Courtship
The Japanese puffer fish goes through a week of craziness to impress lady puffer fish. Wait until you see what he's working on! This clip is from the BBS Earth series Life Story. (via reddit)
Scat Time!
Watch on TikTokA TikTokker named dearly blossom uses a Muppet-like puppet to lip-sync jazz solos like she's doing scat. It's adorable! (via Everlasting Blort)
Saturday, March 22, 2025
Sharktopus?
Yes, the sharktopus is a ridiculous fantasy creature from the movies, but strange things can happen between two very different species in real life, too. Do you recall the picture of a weasel riding on the back of a flying woodpecker? That was ten years ago, before we blamed everything on artificial intelligence. Well, now we have a video of an octopus riding on the back of a shark!
This footage was captured in 2023 in the Hauraki Gulf near Kawau Island, New Zealand. The scientists from the University of Auckland saw something unusual on a make shark and launched a GpPro in the water and a drone overhead to investigate. They tracked the two animals for ten minutes. The sighting was quite a surprise, as octopuses rarely come close to the water's surface. And that's about as close to a sharktopus as we're going to get in real life. (via Damn Interesting)
The Economics of Airline Class
Wendover Productions goes deep into the economics of airlines and the tickets we buy. In case you want to see the previous video he referred to, it is here. (via mental_floss)
Friday, March 21, 2025
Your Brain Creates Your Reality
Perception is the way we experience the world. It's made up of the signals that come into our bodies through our eyes, ears, and other sensory organs, but is also made up of our brain's interpretation of those signals. We know that the way light comes into our eyes should be upside-down, but our brains unscramble those signals to match the world around us. That's just the beginning of the ways our brains change the incoming signals to be useful instead of confusing and overwhelming. The brain uses present signals to predict the future, so quickly that we never notice what we are doing. Kurzgesagt explains some of the chores your brain does at the microsecond scale, which is a lot, and it makes us wonder how we ever have time and brain power left over to just think (as we think of it) and make conscious decisions. This video is about 9:40- the rest is promotional. (via Geeks Are Sexy)
Jareth the Amorous Rooster
Jareth was found wandering, abandoned, and came into the care of Life With Pigs Farm Animal Sanctuary. He proved to be, shall we say, hormonally blessed. Ryan and Malory took him in, but he quickly decided that Mallory should be his mate. Not gonna happen, so the couple introduced Jareth to their hen. Jareth was all for that, but the hen didn't want to have anything to do with Jareth. You have to wonder whether the rooster's over-eager behavior was the reason he was abandoned in the first place. Twice shot down, Jareth then made friends with another rooster named Billy, and they were very happy until Billy died. Poor lonely Jareth was then brought in the house, where he could sleep with the three pigs. Over time, though, Jareth built a new relationship with a rooster named Sebastian, and we hope that he's happy. You can keep up with Jareth and the other sanctuary animals at the Life With Pigs Instagram page.
What Drinking Seawater Will Do To You
Water, water everywhere, and nary a drop to drink. That's the ocean, and it's pretty big. Even if you're stranded out in the middle of the sea, you can't drink seawater, because it's so salty that it can poison your body. Most of the water on earth is seawater, and with climate change, fresh water is getting somewhat scarce in places where people need it. That's why there are more and more desalination plants every year, working to provide fresh drinking water but also contributing to the problem by using fossil fuels. Meanwhile, if you ever find yourself stranded out at sea, this TED-Ed lesson has a few tips on how to obtain fresh water, either from rain or dew, or from the blood and organs of certain sea creatures. To the person who doesn't have it, fresh water is more valuable than anything.
Miss Cellania's Links
What You're Getting Wrong When Ordering At Subway.
Inside the World’s Largest Two-Headed Calf Collection.
Seven Failed Sitcom Pilots Too Weird to Be Believed. All have video evidence of one kind or another.
Trump and Musk Are Running a Disinformation Campaign on Social Security. Why are they telling so many lies about this program? (via Fark)
On the Origin of the Pork Taboo. Exploring ancient people’s shifting beliefs about rearing and eating pigs. (via Metafilter)
Why Did Vincent van Gogh Paint 26 Portraits of a Postman and His Family While Staying in the South of France?
The Legend Behind One of the Oldest Burger Restaurants in America. White Mana owner Mario Costa managed Mike Tyson, takes care of his racing pigeons, and is the unofficial mayor of a corner of Jersey City.
Vasari Corridor: Privileged The World's Largest Disability Ramp? (via Metafilter)
Social Security Cards Explained
Social Security numbers are confusing. The SSA tells you to never give your number out except to your employer and the government, but then the bank, the utility office, schools, and every store you visit want to know yours. And what do those numbers mean, anyway? CGP Grey explains social security numbers from their beginning to us in a way we can all understand, which is what he's good at. The part about the program's security has certainly changed since this video was made, because there's no security in government right now. (via reddit)
Cats in Outlines
There's something about the cats fitting into the outlines with the music that is strangely gratifyingI don't know what you'd call this technique, but it just feels neat. (via Everlasting Blort)
byu/katxwoods inoddlysatisfying
Thursday, March 20, 2025
Get Together
I was sad to hear of the death of Jesse Colin Young earlier this week. Here he is with his group The Youngbloods singing their 1967 song "Get Together." (via Everlasting Blort)
A Tribute to John Cleese
And now for something completely different! Special effects artist Peter Quinn collaborated with Monty Python's John Cleese to create a semi-animated tribute to Cleese's career. I don't know if this had anything to do with the 50th anniversary of the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail coming up on April 3rd, but the wealth of references to that movie makes me believe it was at least a valid excuse to make this video. Holy Grail fans will laugh at just the hint of the scenes featuring the French Taunter, Tim the Enchanter, and of course, the Black Knight. Monty Python fans will recognize bits from other eras, too, including an obviously dead parrot and that big foot. For the few who have no idea who John Cleese nor Monty Python are, this collage of nonsense will still be funny, in a violent Three Stooges kind of way. (via Laughing Squid)
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