(via Give Me a Sign)
Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Bobkitten
They aren't all that different from our house cats. You still don't want one in your house.
An Honest Trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu
Going into the Honest Trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu, I realized I didn't know anything about the movie because its promotion was kind of lackluster and after it opened, no one talked about it at all. Oh, it made money, because that's what Disney does, but it performed more poorly than any Star Wars movie since Disney bought the franchise. Critics were "meh."
Today I found out this movie continues resurrecting dead aliens by putting new characters in the their CGI suits, first with Grogu and now with Jabba the Hutt, whose offspring are both heroes and villains. Also, Grogu learns to speak English, a skill that Yoda never mastered. And, of course, there's a lot of killing with no blood. The Mandalorian and Grogu is now available for digital download, and goes on sale on home media August 25th.
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
The Temptations and the Supremes
This is a real treat! The Temptations and Diana Ross & The Supremes together on stage! But this isn't just a singalong. They sing each other's hits, in a back and forth medley. This is from The Ed Sullivan Show, recorded on November 19, 1967.
Thumbelina
In the wild, many gray squirrels die in infancy, and those who survive can live to about six years on average. Thumbelina almost died in infancy. She was only a couple of hours old when her nest was destroyed, but this family took her in. That was ten years ago. Thumbelina is well adjusted to being an indoor squirrel, but she's got some problems in her old age. She developed polycystic ovarian syndrome, which causes her to gain weight easily, and left her quite round. She has also lost teeth, which means her family has to not only strictly measure her food, but puree it as well.
How much effort is too much for a pet squirrel? Thumbelina's family doesn't seem to mind, even though they've gone to extraordinary lengths for her. She's got quite a personality and brings them joy. You can see more of Thumbelina at Instagram.
Weird Fast Food Items from Around the World
Fast food restaurants in the US gather together around interstate exits, and they offer variations on sandwiches, chicken pieces, pizza, burritos, and fried potatoes on the side. They taste the same from coast to coast. Those brands expanded to other countries where food cultures vary from the American model. You can't tell people in Italy that only American cheese is available, and you can't tell people in Thailand that chocolate doesn't belong on a hamburger. And even fast food outlets have to give customers what they want. You know, I could get on board with an edible coffee cup if it weren't for all the people who touched it before me.
Tom Blank, the original voice of Weird History, takes us on a tour of international fast food offerings that might gross you out, but might also make you want to travel to try them.
Cow Wins Horse Race
The annual St. Teresa's Charity Pantomime Horse Race pits teams of humans dressed as four-legged beasts against each other in a mercifully short race.
The St. Teresa’s Charity Pantomime Horse Race at the UK’s Catterick Racecourse raises funds for St. Teresa’s Hospice in Darlington. In its third annual running, the race welcomed four entrants: Heavy Brigade in the cow suit, racing for the Royal Dragoon Guards; Unicorn on the Cob in the unicorn suit, racing for marketing agency Purple Creative; #Professionals in the horse suit, a last-minute entry from Racing UK; and Wonky Donkey, racing for Lookers Volkswagen.Spectators will be forgiven for thinking that drinking may have been involved. (via Metafilter)
The Biggest Plot Hole In the Star Wars Prequels
In which Jhall and Andrew Bridgman at Dorkly explain why Darth gave up his entire reason for turning to the dark side. (via Geeks Are Sexy)
Monday, July 27, 2026
Shakir the Turkish Street Cat
Turkey is awash with stray cats, which can't really be called feral because they are friendly and people feed them. Of course, there's not enough kind people to support all of them. One kitten lucked out when a cashier at a shop let him in and informally adopted him. Shakir is there every morning for hte store opening, and keeps watch over everything from his perch on the checkout counter.
Get Ready for a Lack of Communication
Bill McClintock is at it again, with another unlikely rock/soul mashup. Eddie Kendricks never rocked so hard! This one features vocals from The Temptations's 1966 hit "Get Ready" and the music from "Lack of Communication" by Ratt from 1984. Despite being written and produced by Smokey Robinson, the Temptations' song did not do as well as was expected, and the remake by Rare Earth in 1970 was a bigger hit. Still, the Temptations version of "Get Ready" proved to be long lasting, and familiar even 60 years later. The Ratt song? Maybe you had to be a metalhead at the time to really know it.
And if you are such a metalhead, you might recognize Dimebag Darrell's guitar work from the 1994 Pantera song "I'm Broken" in this mix as well. Enjoy songs song three different decades in this masterful mashup.
Miss Cellania's Links
Man Tried to Rob a Bank With a Stolen Kitten. (via Strange Company)
Why American ambulance rides are so expensive. The unfortunately botched economics of emergency care. (via kottke)
Young solo pilot loses her front landing gear. Another pilot takes charge to get her down safely.
What Big Food Did to Ice Cream. The “encrapification” of the American pint — a chemist’s plain-language dissection. (via Fark)
“Weird Al” Yankovic Can’t Stop Landing On The Right Side Of History.
The Largest Intact Meteorite on Earth Is Still Exactly Where It Landed. But Why No Crater? (via Damn Interesting)
If you attack a rapper performing on the street, you might have to listen to him diss you as you wait for the ambulance. (via Metafilter)
The spiteful family feud behind one of New York’s oldest and most luxurious hotels. (via Strange Company)
Road Diets
Yeah, America is big, so we developed four lane roads to get us from town to town faster. Then four-lane roads were extended into town to alleviate traffic. But do we really need four-lane roads in a city? City streets are safer with traffic going slower. To achieve that, some cities are putting their streets on a diet, making them smaller and slower. So far, that's making street use easier for pedestrians and cyclists, while still not causing worse traffic for drivers -in most places. Your mileage may vary, no pun intended. (via Laughing Squid)
Sunday, July 26, 2026
Never My Love
The Association was a pop band who sang sweet love songs with many vocal harmonies. They were the first to record "Never My Love" in 1967, and made it a hit. It has been recorded many times since, most notably by The 5th Dimension in 1971 and by Blue Swede in 1974. This performance by The Association on The Ed Sullivan Show is from December of 1968.
Mr. Jambo
In this music video, musician Barry Bergen travels to Africa in the 1980s to glean the ancient wisdom of this magical land. Mr Jambo is an older man who must contain the wisdom Bergen is looking for, but he doesn't speak English. Indeed, the closed captions tell us that he is saying, "I don't speak English. Do you have a translator?" Meanwhile, Bergan mentions jambalaya and bears, as if they have anything to do with Africa. As silly as the premise is, the song is quite catchy.
There is no Barry Bergen; he's a creation of comedian Kyle Gordon who has has made a career of parodying songs from genres you may not be consciously aware of, but you'll recognize when you hear them. The song "Mr. Jambo" is a parody of the "white guy goes to Africa" genre that you know mostly from Paul Simon's album Graceland, although it's been done by others. It's from his third album Kyle Gordon Is Everywhere, to be released in October. (via Boing Boing)
What Made Darth Vader Visually Iconic
Darth Vader is at the top of many "greatest villain" lists, and near the top in the rest. Nerdwriter looks at the reasons why. (via Laughing Squid)
The Plant Queen
That's life, isn't it? Actually, that's life when you're young and just starting out. I've been growing plant for around 40 years, and there have been plenty of mass extinction events along the way, but you learn, you try again, and eventually you amass a decent garden, whether its houseplants, flowers, or vegetables -or all three! The real secret to convincing people you have a green thumb is to quickly get rid of the failures. Never speak of them. That way, all your friends and neighbors will see are your successes. This comic is from Sarah Andersen at Sarah's Scribbles.
Saturday, July 25, 2026
Terror from the Year 5000
Terror from the Year 5000 is a time travel horror film from 1958. Scientists build a time machine, and trade objects with someone in the year 5200. The objects from the future are radioactive, which should tell you something. They finally bring back a human from that era, but that's not a good idea. Critics said the movie has some good ideas that don't really go anywhere. The budget was low enough to create a "so bad it's good" film that was eventually featured on MST3K. YouTube commenters really like it. (Thanks, WTM!)
How Tonga Made $100 Million Renting Space in Outer Space
The smallest countries of Oceania, spread across the Pacific, aren't rich, but some of them make a surprising amount of money by getting creative and looking to the future. Vanuatu makes a ton of money by selling citizenship. Tuvalu prospers by leasing its .tv internet domain. And Tonga was fortunate enough to be the retirement home of a satellite expert, who saw a fortune in the starry skies above his new homeland. There's money to be made in selling, or in this case renting, what you have plenty of. For Tonga, that was its isolation, which gave them a large swath of the empty space overhead. Half as Interesting explains how Tonga leveraged its location and international pacts about the use of space to make millions of dollars passively. What happened to the money is another story. This video is only around five minutes- the rest is advertising.
Ebenezer
Oh look! It's July, and we have a trailer for a Christmas ghost story! The trailer says "The name you know, the story you don't." Hogwash. Everyone knows the story of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. There have been over a hundred movie and TV adaptations of it. Knowing the story doesn't keep us from watching it again and again. The 2026 version titled Ebenezer stars Johnny Depp in the title role, along with Rupert Grint as Bob Cratchit, Daisy Ridley as his wife, and Ian McKellen as Jacob Marley.
The trailer focuses on the star power of Depp and the many oddball characters he's played before. We can assume with this cast that the acting will be good. As far as I'm concerned, the success of Ebenezer will depend on how they portray the ghosts. Meanwhile, it is kind of nice to see scenes of falling snow while we swelter in the summer heat. Ebenezer opens on November 13th.
Cats Groovin' to the Oldies
There are lots more of these, but you'll have to continue reading to see them because quite a few people have complained about the number of cats seen on this blog.
The Two-Minute Wave
Pro surfer Koa Smith caught a wave off Namibia's Skeleton Bay that took him for a nearly a mile! He surfed a single wave for a distance of 1.5 kilometers for two minutes that took him through eight barrels. It was captured on video, both from a drone and from Smith's own GoPro POV. Both videos are mesmerizing.
My whole day surfing I try to InVision that one dream wave that I want to experience. I picture it clearly. What it will look like. How it will feel. The emotions pouring out of me when the wave is complete. Then this happen :)(via Laughing Squid)
Survival of the Fittest
A flying fish wins the Darwin award for bragging about years of evolution instead of generations of evolution. This is the latest from pleumier, a biologist who makes comics. (via Geeks Are Sexy)
Friday, July 24, 2026
It's A Man's Man's Man's World
Did you know that James Brown performed this as a duet with Luciano Pavarotti? Yes they did, but not in the same language. (via Nag on the Lake)
An Increasingly Tiny Mailbox
"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" is an informal motto of the US Postal Service. However, mail carriers are not obligated to deliver your mail when you're obviously messing with them.
Vlog Creations, a YouTube channel dedicated to non-harmful pranks, invested in a long series of mailboxes of varying sizes and heights, and gradually installed smaller and smaller ones to see how long it took for the mail carrier to notice. Yeah, he noticed, but he's more amused than annoyed. Then it became a battle of wits to see how small they could make the box and still get their mail picked up and/or delivered. My mail carrier will never pick up outgoing mail unless he has some to deliver. This carrier put up with ridiculous challenges all the way through.
You can see a much longer video detailing this prank here.
Miss Cellania's Links
This Indian Maharaja Saved Hundreds of Polish Orphans During World War II, Offering Them Refuge When No One Else Would.
People are watching the Reflecting Pool like reality TV. It's a microcosm of the Trump administration, at the junction of corruption and incompetence. (via Fark)
The Legend of a Lost Roman Legion in China.
A Plane Crash Killed 92 People—And Exposed a Major Government Secret. (via Damn Interesting)
Castlemap is an interactive map of the world's great castles and fortresses. (via Metafilter)
‘We were at their mercy’: inside the Amazon tactics that hiked prices across the internet.
An ad for high heeled shoes. I bet they had to pour the blood out when she finally took them off.
Feds have a new teen pregnancy prevention plan: Fertility and ‘reproductive goals.’ (via Fark)
Duck Plays Fetch
How do you train a duck to play fetch? He must enjoy it. The real question is, can he play Duck, Duck, Goose? (via Blame It On The Voices)
Thursday, July 23, 2026
The First Guy To Ever Be In Witness Protection
Authorities explain to Ryan George how he'll be protected by becoming someone else. The jokes are pretty rapid-fire here, so pay attention.
New X-Files LEGO Set
Watching someone open a box has never been my cup of tea, but what's inside this one is pretty cool. Gillian Anderson comes out of retirement to portray FBI Special Agent Dana Scully confronting a mysterious delivery. Inside is the new 1,478-piece LEGO set depicting The X-Files TV series! It was submitted to LEGO Ideas by Brent Waller of Brisbane as part of the LEGO Ideas ’90s Nostalgia Challenge. It has Fox Mulder’s office on the bottom, topped by an eerie forest scene, over which a UFO is hovering. It includes eight minifigs, both human and alien.
Kids won't be all that excited about this theme, since the show ran from 1993 to 2002. But adult fans will want to check out the set, and read more about its features here. (via Laughing Squid)
The Man Behind the Murder Castle
H. H. Holmes is often called "America's First Serial Killer," but if you say that, people will cite Albert Fish, Boone Helm, or the Bloody Benders as earlier examples. And there may have been others we don't know about. Be that as it may, Holmes was terrifying- once he got caught. That's when a building he owned became known as the Murder Castle.
We still don't know the extent of Homes' crimes. He confessed to 27 murders, but not all those people were even dead at the time. Some estimate the total to be in the hundreds, yet he was only convicted of one murder. Historians have since confirmed at least nine victims. Homes had plenty of other crimes in his history, too, and the part of his story that may be the most shocking is how many red flags were ignored before he was finally stopped. Weird History tells us what we now know about Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, which wasn't even his real name.
Life Looks Better on Super 8
Does life really look better in a movie shot on Super 8 film? I appears to. Maybe that's because it has an old, nostalgic look since Super 8 film ruled for several decades starting in 1965. I think it's more likely because when you shot motion pictures -or even still pictures- on film instead of a digital format, you only shot the good parts. It was way too expensive to film anything or everything like we can today. This short film is brought to you by the Royal Ocean Film Society. (via Digg)
Decisions
This comic from Lunarbaboon, found at Geeks Are Sexy, was posted at Neatorama in 2013. Yet it's still relevant today, as it was forty years ago.
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
Creature with the Atom Brain
Creature with the Atom Brain is a 1955 zombie film. A mobster forces a German scientist to reanimate dead bodies in order to control them and take revenge on his enemies. Of course, nuclear radiation is involved. The science is silly and the stereotypes are dated, but critics found the movie a lot of fun. (Thanks, WTM!)
Cat Thinks He's Mom's Emotional Support Boyfriend
Cats are more sociable than non-cat owners think. They need contact and attention from their roommate, especially if there are no other cats. Merlot gets plenty of attention and conversation from Sophie, who uses Merlot as her personal therapist. He's a good listener, even if he doesn't understand the nonsense she's talking about.
Lately the Dodo has been combining short videos, so this story is followed by footage of a family who found six kittens and took them all home, despite the fact that the house was already full of cats, dogs, and kids.
Can the Government Control How We Speak?
You can argue about the First Amendment and freedom of speech all day, but when it comes down to individual words and their spelling, we defer to linguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky. She's not a stickler for correct usage, but she does keep an eye on how it changes over time. Today, Brozovsky explains how certain governments have tried to standardize certain words, either to protect a language or even resurrect it.
Users of the English language, however, don't like to be told how to speak and write, which is why it has splintered into British English, American English, Australian English, etc. We have authorities, more from academia than from governments, that tell us the correct way to spell and use English words, but even they are aware of how language changes and evolves due to the way real people use it in everyday life.
Miss Cellania's Links
Cats are always helpful. Well, some cats are. (via Fark)
Resin Lenin presides over Antarctica's Pole of Inaccessibility. It's been there since 1958.
What happened in middle school today- gift potato, rank fart, and magic beard.
The 221-year-old company that reinvented itself — 4 times. It's an illustration in the role of flexibility in success.
The condition that causes people to get lost in their own home. (via Damn Interesting)
Too Much Shit In My Purse.
12 Boomer Cooking Habits People Are Ready To Ditch, According To Reddit. This Boomer ditched them 40 years ago.
Sleep Scientists Favor Year-Round Standard Time. That's not what we're getting.
Abduction As Romance
We might not realize how much of our pop culture stories involve taking women against their will. It's often dressed up as romance. It's an "old, a deeply troubling media convention." It's an outgrowth of the idea that women are passive participants in relationships, and the best ones are too virtuous to seek out sex, but men know best who belongs with who. We can be better than this. (via Boing Boing)
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