(Thanks, WTM!)
Sunday, April 12, 2026
The President Makes Phone Calls
There was way too much news this week. Should SNL open the show with him threatening Iran, or Melania's unhinged press appearance, or the peace negotiations? They all make an appearance, as well as Tiger Woods, when Trump took some time to catch up on phone calls.
Saturday, April 11, 2026
Move On Up
"Move On Up" by Curtis Mayfield is one of those songs you hear all the time, but usually as an instrumental, because the horns are just so awesome. When you do, you think "I know that song! What's the name of it?"
The 1950s Sitcoms Never Showed Real American Family Life
This interview with Steve Allen was recorded in 1989, before the world wide web and long before smart phones, but it holds up.
The Imperial Fugue
John Williams composed "The Imperial March" from Star Wars as a military march because that's how Dart Vader enters a scene. It's a tune that's been stuck in your head for almost 50 years now. Or at least in mine.
Swedish guitarist Lucas Brar turned "The Imperial March" into a fugue, which is a composition with a main theme plus bells and whistles that complement and compete with the main theme but always comes back to it. Read a better explanation here. Johann Sebastian Bach was well known for his musical fugues. Brar was thinking of Back when he dressed up the march in a way that make it sound a little less ominous, or at least least a little less military, and a lot more interesting.
Musical World Map
We've seen before how people turned art into music by playing it through a midi program. John Keats did that with a map of the world, and the results are surprisingly pleasant. Well, maybe it shouldn't be too surprising, since a talented programmer/musician would adjust those pixels to avoid the most dissonant notes. But it's nice to see our world sounding this good!
Keats' musical map of Europe is way more discordant, his musical map of Africa is more dramatic, and his musical map of France is experimental, since he used the sounds of different musical instruments. You can see more of Keats' musical midi maps at YouTube. (via b3ta)
Friday, April 10, 2026
This Dance Will Make You Hurt
Ukrainians are hardcore. Maxim Mitinsky of the Pavlo Virsky National Ensemble in Kyiv shows us how it's done. The best dancers you know might be able to keep this up for a few seconds, but he just keeps going and going. I think the algorithm showed me this video because I spend too much time at YouTube and need to get up and exercise.
Found Wallet
He found the wallet on Saturday. This is genius. There's an odd number of phone number digits because this was in Finland, where IDs don't have addresses on them. (via reddit)
What He Does For Fun
It's strange how a mundane question can turn nonsensical and then into a slowly unfolding horror story. You won't see what's coming for a while, and by the end, you'll wonder what kind of mind dreamed this up. That would be Chris Barnett.
Love & Gold
Two adventurers, or looters if you will, separately seek the treasure of an ancient king and queen from a magical booby-trapped castle. Their names are Robin and Rayden, although which is which I cannot tell. The voice actors are named Darci and Parley, which doesn't help. Anyway, they don't know each other. She's tougher, but he has the instructions, so they need to team up to find and steal a huge gem. The plot is far from groundbreaking, but the animation is luscious, the action is invigorating, and there are some funny moments.
Love & Gold is a student animation, written and directed by Connor Van Dyke and produced by Jaysen Duckworth of Brigham Young University's Media Arts program, although many others were involved. The film won the award for Best Animation at the Television Academy Foundation’s 45th College Television Awards last week. You can read more about it at Kuriositas.
Miss Cellania's Links
The most memorable moon movies aren't even about space.
Rachel Waters gave morphine to her dying mother to ease her in her final hours. Then came the murder charge. (via Damn Interesting)
The man who watches Trump all day, every day. Aaron Rupar spends up to 80 hours a week following the US president, from meandering speeches to impromptu press conferences. He says it’s ‘pretty bleak.’ (via Fark)
Someone Turned This 98-Year-Old Chevy Truck Into One Of The Coolest Custom Motorhomes You’ll See In A While.
Give Dementia Donnie his pudding, you crazy bastards! The latest from Tom the Dancing Bug.
Even orangutans can become cat ladies.
5 Children Who Became Soldiers During World War II.
A Blast from the Past (2013): The Mystery of Ann Bassett and Etta Place.
How to Speak Meerkat
In this segment from the BBC Earth series Natural World, Dr. Marta Manser studies the language meerkats use to communicate with each other. Yes, she's scaring them with a fake jackal. Sir David Attenborough makes it sound wonderfully dramatic. (via Tastefully Offensive)
Thursday, April 09, 2026
Tang
Neil Cicierega took a bunch of nonsensical Tang ads from the '90s and made them even more nonsensical. Were any apes harmed in the making of this? Well, not THIS video, but who can say about the original ads? (via Metafilter)
Gas Sign
The comments at reddit are mostly about the gas situation. No shortage of gas this time, because the US produces plenty of gasoline. The rest of the world, however, is having trouble getting theirs at all. Still, I looked at it as more of the effects of the tacos they sell.
How Snakes Swallow Prey Bigger Than Themselves
There are thousands of different snake species, and they all have a few things in common. They don't have legs, they are carnivorous, and humans are afraid of them. We have good reason to be scare, sine snakes can be quite venomous, the better to disable prey and vanquish threats. But all these different kinds of snakes have a wide variety of techniques for killing.
Some will eat another animal that's bigger than they are, and have developed some weird physiological tricks to get away with that. Despite one graphic in this TED-Ed video, we've never seen a case of a snake swallowing an elephant, but they have been known to consume an entire alligator or deer. Others specialize in one specific type of prey and have adapted both their anatomy and lifestyle to surviving off of it. There are reasons snakes have survived on earth so long, and why we are seemingly born to fear them.
Drone Light Show Sets Record
Drones have many uses, but let's not talk about war right now. For aerial entertainment, they are much safer than fireworks, and can light up the sky with intricate 3-dimensional images that are just breathtaking. The biggest show yet happened in Hefei, Anhui, China, on February 3rd, 2026. The Chinese company Guangdong EHang Egret Media Technology Co., Ltd. launched 22,580 and set a new world record for the "most multirotor/drones airborne simultaneously from a single computer (outdoors)." Since they qualified that, you have to wonder how many more were ever launched inside a structure.
Oh yeah, and unlike fireworks, these drones can be used again. (via Geeks Are Sexy)
A Cat Walks Into a Deli...
A cat walked into the deli-cat-tessen and admired the items on display at the meat counter. The clerk, who may be the butcher as well, went into his sales spiel and gave the cat a better look at a variety of offerings until the cat indicated what he most wanted. The cat probably thought he'd get away with not paying, but the deli got a viral video out of it.
Crisis
Well, I don't know about "solved." Iran is in a better position now than before Trump started the war, and the rest of the world is paying for it.Stable Genius Crisis Manager.
— Daniel Boris (@danboriscreates.bsky.social) April 7, 2026 at 8:40 PM
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Wednesday, April 08, 2026
Joan Crawford Slaps
Joan Crawford was a lousy mom but a great actress. She managed to land so many parts that harnessed her anger, and in that era of Hollywood, that meant physical anger. This is a compilation of Joan Crawford slapping people. Or getting slapped. Or punched. There's a moment in the middle that will make you laugh at all of it.
An Honest Trailer for Avatar: Fire and Ash
The 2025 movie Avatar: Fire and Ash is the second sequel to Avatar. Jake Sully and his family once again deal with the mostly evil humans who have invaded Pandora. Avatar: Fire and Ash was not as popular as Avatar: The Way of Water in 2022, but it was hella successful. The budget was maybe $400 million, and it grossed $1.4 billion. When your only competition is your previous movies, what does "success" mean, anyway? Screen Junkies found Avatar: Fire and Ash to be a bit repetitive, but it still looks gorgeous.
Miss Cellania's Links
Not What They're Paid For. Randy Rainbow's latest song parody takes on the entire Trump administration.
“Cognitive surrender” leads AI users to abandon logical thinking, research finds. Experiments show large majorities uncritically accepting “faulty” AI answers.
The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood.
The unseen challenges of life on the Moon. (via Damn Interesting)
Roller skating can be art and comedy.
News you may have missed: Trump administration orders dismantling of the U.S. Forest Service. (via Metafilter)
10 Famous Science Concepts That Most People Massively Misunderstand.
What is wisdom, and can it be taught? Scientists are trying to name the qualities that make someone wise and figure out how to cultivate them
Aie Rama Rama
Every once in a while, it's good to take a Bollywood break and enjoy an over-the-top production number with joyous music and more dancers than Hollywood can afford. (via Everlasting Blort)
Tuesday, April 07, 2026
Salsa Dances
We've seen plenty of canine freestyle in videos posted here, but it's been a while. The judges and the audience at Britain's Got Talent weren't at all familiar with the art. And Salsa did a lovely job.
Restrooms
Okay, does this designate shoulders vs. butt, or boobs vs.balls? Choose carefully. (via Give Me a Sign)
Roxanne Works Hard for the Money
It's always a treat to get a mashup of two (or more) familiar songs from Bill McClintock. Usually, they are shockingly different songs that meld in a surprising way. This time, the two main songs are thematically similar- they are about working women.
Donna Summer's 1983 hit "She Works Hard for the Money" was inspired by a tired restroom attendant she met at a Grammy afterparty. It's a song about all blue-collar women. On the other hand, the 1978 song "Roxanne," the first hit by The Police, is definitely about a sex worker. Together, the two songs seem to be about a really hard-working prostitute.
Musically, McClintock shows his skill at making disparate rhythms work together better than they should. There are also snippets of "Never Enough" by L.A. Guns and "Round and Round: by Ratt in this mashup.
The Lost Voice Guy
Lee Ridley is a standup comic who doesn't speak. He has cerebral palsy and performs under the name Lost Voice Guy, even though he apparently never had one. Ridley's disability-themed routine is delivered by a synthetic voice machine. The machine itself, called a Lightwriter, is the focus for some of his jokes as he performed on Britain's Got Talent. (via Boing Boing)
Our World
Artemis II sent a pic of the beautiful garden planet we are too greedy, lazy, short-sighted, and ungrateful not to destroy:
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@mrsbettybowers.bsky.social) April 3, 2026 at 12:41 PM
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Monday, April 06, 2026
Giving This Cat a Bath is a Pleasure
We've all seen the viral instructions for bathing a cat, which mainly consists of retrieving the cat from another part of the house and tending to your wounds. There's the easier alternate method, too. Cats are famously hydrophobic (which does not means rabies in this case). They will loudly proclaim they are self-cleaning, but sometimes they require extra help. I have always considered bathing a cat to be a two-person task.
Ash is an outlier. He is the kind of cat we all wish we had, because he loves taking a bath. Here we see how eager he is, and how calm he stays during the procedure. In return, his owner makes a big production out of it, basically giving Ash a spa day to keep him clean and happy. If I had such an amenable cat, I would bathe him more than once a month, just for a fun of it. See more of Ash at Instagram.
Everyday Objects That Are Secretly Making You Sick
We clean our kitchens and we clean our toilets, because that's where the germs are, right? Sure, but bacteria, viruses, fungi, and even insects are more universal than our cleaning habits are. During the pandemic, we learned to clean our doorknobs and wash our hands correctly. But you can't get those nasty little germs off everything. Chill Dude Explains might ruin your day by looking at the things that never get washed in our homes and revealing how nasty and cruddy they can get. He explains how you can mitigate the germ infestations on some of these, but not all of them. It's a good thing we have immune systems, right?
You might check off your lifestyle habits as the list goes on. I, for example, am now thankful that I don't wear makeup, buy meat, or have an ice maker. I'm surprised that a keyboard isn't included in this list, because I touch that more than anything, and it rarely gets washed.
Miss Cellania's Links
Sex test used in IOC’s new transgender ban more likely to exclude from Olympics intersex women who were assigned female at birth.
Texas Rangers’ new 2026 ballpark foods include 3 head-scratchers. Would you eat — yes, eat — a sombrero? And would you pay $40 for it? (via Metafilter)
How we used to get internet.
The busiest place you’ve never seen. What life looks like on the world’s most remote inhabited island. (via Nag on the Lake)
Trump's Easter message. War crimes, profanity, and religious trolling from our president.
The ultimate shoe shine. (via Everlasting Blort)
The Horrifying Vampire Rabbit of Newcastle Upon Tyne. (via Strange Company)
A Blast from the Past (2008): Blue People.
A Spring Drive in Nepal
Springtime in Nepal means that snow and ice are melting in certain elevations of the Himalayas, and the runoff will not be stopped by mere roads, even the infamously dangerous Besisahar-Chamé Road. The cascading water can take out what few guardrails there are. Meanwhile, people have places they gotta be, so a driver powers on through the treacherous path while a passenger films. Grab your armrests for this sequence. (via Laughing Squid)
Sunday, April 05, 2026
A Mirror in the Australian Wild
Epic Aussie Encounters set up a mirror near one of their trail cameras. It looks pretty natural for a mirror. Each critter is identified in the lower left corner when it first appears. Some were frightened, some were curious, and some took the reflection as a challenge. Some of the encounters are at night, and I wondered how well they actually saw the reflection. The Brushtail possum certainly does- look at the size of his eyes! They all seemed to see pretty well, except for the echidna, which is known for bad eyesight and obliviousness. The mother duck tried to ignore the mirror, because it told her she
suddenly has twice as many babies, but one duckling was fascinated. The grey strike thrush tried to impress its reflection, but who knows if it's a greeting, a warning, or a mating dance? One kangaroo was smart enough to look behind the mirror, and checked out the camera as well. You have to wonder what's going on in these animals' heads.
NCAA Post Game Show
Charles Barkley said something that's not about basketball and it became a meme. That's taken to ridiculous lengths in the opening skit for Saturday Night Live last night. And this is how I found out who's playing in the championship game tomorrow.
Saturday, April 04, 2026
"The Apple Man" and Other Songs by a 3-year-old Lyricist
Little kids love stories. When they learn they can make up their own stories, magic can happen. It doesn't matter whether they make any sense, because it's the imagination that matters. The joy a child takes in their own creativity is touching. Composer and music theory professor Stephen Spencer has a three-year-old daughter who loves to make up and tell stories. He takes her lyrics and makes songs out of them.
They don't rhyme, but Spencer takes that as a challenge. It's no barrier to a hit song, as long as the song makes you feel good. After going viral, he's released many of the songs on Spotify. You can also find them at TikTok and YouTube. (via Memo of the Air)
Send In The Flying Monkeys
Adventures in Sacred Cows brings us a song about a wannabe despot bent on ruining the world.
"I’m a total sweetheart, not some monster..." or so the story goes. Dive into this rock parody that explores the "heroic" narratives and Machiavellian twists of an exhausting regime.The lyrics are at the YouTube page. (via Nag on the Lake)
Yup, Adventures In Sacred Cows is taking a satirical look at the misguided confidence, outrageous power, and the 'toxic cocktails' brewing in the corridors of power. From 'benevolent dictating sweeties' to those infamous Epstein files—all delivered in a visual style that blends the 'crayon box' chaos of Hieronymus Bosch and Terry Gilliam with a splash of Home Alone and Edvard Munch.
Levittown
William Levitt did more than anyone else to invent the nightmare we know as suburbia. There was a housing shortage after World war II, so he used the conveyor-belt method to build thousands of identical houses in planned communities in Long Island and an event bigger one in Pennsylvania. Levitt retained the commercial centers, and sold the houses at an affordable price to veterans who wanted their own home to raise their families in. There were HOA-type rules, and severe redlining. Levitt wouldn't sell to any family that wasn't white. The first black family, William and Daisy Myers, bought a house from a Levittown resident in 1957. Riots ensued, but the Myers stayed for several years.
The suburban ideal caught on and spread across America. The connection between work, family, and community was severed as fathers commuted miles to work in the city every day, while housewives stayed home, drank, scrubbed their perfect suburban houses, made Jell-O salads, and played bridge with each other. The soul-sucking conformity of living in such a community inspired The Stepford Wives, The Feminine Mystique, and Suburbicon.
The above clip is a condensed version of the 1957 documentary Crisis in Levittown, PA. Here is the full version. It contains some disturbing language. It is only a half-hour long, then clips are repeated.
Read more about Levittown at Messy Nessy Chic.
Friday, April 03, 2026
The Antarctic Accent
People pick up accents from the people around them, and also from the media they consume. It was once thought that the development of a distinguishable accent took a long time, but an accidental experiment shows that it can happen pretty fast, if the population is small enough, and they talk to each other a lot. That happened with a group of people from all over who spent the winter together in Antarctica when a linguist asked them to record their conversations. But the accent they developed in just a few months didn't last, because they all went back home, and other crews took their place.
Fat Thumping Girls
Make the dance beat match, and fiddle with the tuning just a little, and you can make any two songs sound good together. But you have to know what you're doing. That's the job of DJ Cummerbund. His latest mashup combines the 1997 hit "Tubthumping" by Chumbawamba and the 1978 classic "Fat Bottomed Girls" by Queen.
Oh, but that's just the two main tunes. Cummerbund invites everyone, so this song also incorporates music by Sade, Madonna, and John Mayer, plus a special contribution by the Shake Weight® ad we all remember. And as usual, an appearance by Randy “Macho Man” Savage. Cummerbund released this for April Fool's Day, but it's more of a treat. (via Laughing Squid)
Dance Your PhD 2026
Dancer and physicist Sofia Papa of the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies’s Biorobotics Institute in Pisa, Italy, is the 2026 winner of Science magazine's annual Dance Your PhD competition. Her choreographed production number titled "Piezodance" illustrates piezoelectricity, the electric charge that accumulates in solid materials under stress. Papa began studying physics in high school because she liked how the science related to art.
There are winners in the categories of physics, biology, chemistry, social sciences, and a new category this year for artificial intelligence research. I particularly enjoyed the winner in chemistry, Dina Haddad of the University of Cambridge, who rapped about a new method of detecting cancer cells in urine by using magnetic nanoparticles to capture DNA. It's a complex test, but would be so much easier o patients than biopsies. The song and dance titled "Magnetic Flow" features pole dancers and toilets.
You can see the winners in all the categories at Science. (via Ars Technica)
Miss Cellania's Links
Randall Munroe's April Fool's Day comic at xkcd can be read in different modes. I like airplane mode and space opera mode. (via Metafilter)
30 of the Dumbest Criminals of All Time.
Trump risks falling in to the ‘asymmetric resolve’ trap in Iran − just as presidents before him did elsewhere. Well, duh, war is different when you're defending your homeland from invaders.
6 Rare Easter Eggs Worth a Nest Egg. These Fabergé eggs make for the most expensive Easter egg hunt in history, with prices reaching into the millions.
53 Cats Who Decided To Sit In Random Things.
Dementia Donnie's ballroom and war. The latest from Tom the Dancing Bug.
Dumb wedding trend #546: Forever hold your piece.
On Becoming A Cat. There are five distinct steps. (via Metafilter)
The Differences Between the U.S. and New Zealand
Jordan Watson gave us two lessons on the difference between Australia and New Zealand, because he is from New Zealand and people thought he was from Australia. He must have gotten some feedback from Americans. Probably confused Americans. So now he brings us a lesson on the differences between the States and New Zealand, as if we needed that. But he is, as always, entertaining. I honestly saw "Howdy" coming a mile away, and then expected him to go from "chilly bin" to the "chili bun," which is a Southern US thing. (via Tastefully Offensive)
Bondi
Bondi spotted leaving her office. 🤣😊🗂️🗂️ #USDemocracy #Voices4Victory
— TommasinaResist⚜️🦋🐈⬛🇺🇦🍁 (@tommasinaresist.bsky.social) April 2, 2026 at 4:42 PM
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Thursday, April 02, 2026
"Gangnam Style" by The Cleverlys
A Korean pop song from a bluegrass band. Right up my alley. The Cleverlys had 14 years to get the Korean right, and it sounds like they did a fairly good job.
Dave Still Suffers
Life is so unfair. This is the fifth installment of the many reasons why dave suffers so, and you can see them all at his family's YouTube account.
Geckos, Masters of Physics
Geckos decided they were going to be different from all other lizards by developing specialized features that gave them a leg up in the survival business. These include eyes that can see in low light, hydrophobic skin, and detachable tails, not to mention feet that have velcro on the ends.
Most of those powers required some explanation of physics, which geckos have mastered. It's no wonder they are often studied by scientists. These studies include putting geckos in a wind tunnel, which may seem cruel, but it's also quite funny, and the geckos didn't seem to come out any worse for wear. Ze Frank gives geckos his usual "educational with some snarky giggles" treatment in this video in his True Facts series.
Birthright Citizenship: What's the Worst That Could Happen?
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Just after he was inaugurated in 2025, Donald Trump issued an executive order that denied citizenship to persons born from a mother who was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. Since these two documents are in opposition, it went to the courts, and is now in front of the Supreme Court.
Trump issued the order to make it easier to deport people, but the implications go much further. If a birth certificate doesn't guarantee citizenship, what does? This opens up an avenue for questioning the rights of anyone you want. Imagine someone made Trump mad (as often happens). An investigation can be opened on their right to live in the US.
Are you an American citizen? Yes, I was born here.
But were both your parents American citizens? Yes, they were born here, too.
But were they born to American citizens? Yes, my grandparents were all born here.
How about your great-grandparents? They immigrated from Europe and became American citizens.
They legally became American citizens? Prove it.
Anyone who immigrated to the US before 1906 may have a hard time proving it, especially if their citizenship was derived by relation to a head of household. And citizenship documents were rarely archived for posterity anyway. The 14th Amendment is there for a reason. If it is not upheld, we could theoretically turn half our citizens into stateless people. Only immigrants who were naturalized or those who had ancestors with acceptable documentation (and possibly Native Americans) would have the right to vote.
Cerberus
(via Everlasting Blort)A kinder and gentler avatar of Cerberus.
— JohnC (@ironist-jc.bsky.social) March 17, 2026 at 7:49 PM
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Wednesday, April 01, 2026
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