When his planet and all his family and friends are destroyed, an alien comes to earth because he's tired of being sad. Well, you'd be sad, too, if your entire species was wiped out you had to venture into foreign territory to do something about it. He has an artifact that tells him that Earthlings have the secret to happiness. The little boy he contacts is only happy to help him out. And that's how we learn what "Fun Kitai Furai Dei" is. It's also the name of the new song from Jazz Emu, the alter ego of comedian Archie Henderson. This animated video is funny and ridiculously weird, but also bittersweet and somewhat touching. (via Metafilter)
Saturday, May 03, 2025
Fun Kitai Furai Dei
The Trouble With Time Travel Stories
The more time travel movies we see, the more it becomes clear that the future is too close. In the 1989 film Back to the Future Part II, our hero zipped from 1985 to 2015 and found technology to be quite advanced 30 years into the future. Yet that date is now ten years in the past and we still don't have flying cars. Quite a few other movies set in the future have already been lapped without interplanetary travel or dystopian collapse -not to mention time travel itself. Those who follow such things have a sense of how long major technological advances can take. Plus, we still watch movies that are 50 years old. Chris and Jack leverage that knowledge to judge whether they've really been visited by a time traveler. (via Geeks Are Sexy)
Coke Habit
Mike was addicted to Coca Cola and didn't even know it until the went through withdrawal. When his mother quit buying Coke to save his teeth, he suffered from two weeks of migraines. That was a long time ago, and he still can't drink caffeine. He finally made a cartoon about it. You can read more about the video here. (Thanks, Nick!)
Friday, May 02, 2025
Butt Band
This weird old postcard from Germany is undated, but seems to be about 100 years old. Weird Vintage dug up some information about the joke.
Apparently this is some fancy wordplay which makes a whole lot more sense when you’re in on the joke. User laurentbelkacem explained “About La Fanfare d'Écublens postcard - Écublens is a little town in Canton Vaud, Switzerland. The name of this town is pronounced in a way that in French sounds exactly, in this sentence, like “La Fanfare des culs blancs”, literaly “White butts brass band”.I'm sure you can come up with more punch lines.
Hot and Cold: The Dance Your PhD Winner for 2025
Production values have soared since the Dance Your PhD competition was launched in 2008, but we still get a kick out of doctoral students attempting to explain the subject of their dissertation through interpretive dance. Dr. Sulo Roukka of the University of Helsinki sang and danced his way to the top of the heap this year with a production number about chemesthesis, or the way people react to extreme taste compounds such as hot peppers and menthol. His dissertation is titled Insights into oral chemesthetic perception : A focus on food-related behavior. Besides the overall prize, Roukka won the chemistry division. There are also winners in the categories of biology, physics and AI, and social sciences. See them all at Ars Technica.
Miss Cellania's Links
The kerning on the pope’s tomb is a travesty. (via kottke)
When a Historian Saw This Haunting Photograph of a Nameless Native Girl, She Decided She Had to Identify Her.
Q-Nuts welcome the arrival of the Great Pumpkin. The latest from Tom the Dancing Bug.
In 1822, a stork shot in Germany inadvertently proved birds didn’t fly to the moon or hibernate underwater. (via Metafilter)
Trump’s First 100 Days: Destroying America Was The Plan All Along. (via Fark)
The Kauri Gum Diggers of New Zealand.
The South Vietnamese who fled the fall of Saigon – and those who returned.
What happens when you follow the Bible literally for a whole year?
George Washington's favorite dessert was Great Cake, which required 40 eggs and four pounds of butter. If you prefer a normal-sized cake, use an adapted recipe from Mount Vernon.
Voice Swap
Two ventriloquists, RudiRok and Sari Aalto, get together and use each other as a dummy. This is quite clever, and they both are quite talented. (via Neatorama)
Thursday, May 01, 2025
British vs. American Memes
Laurence Brown of Lost in the Pond gives his opinions on the jokes we make abut the difference between Britain and America. More accurately, he judges their accuracy. As you might guess, they are all exaggerated. There's a one-minute skippable ad at 3:00.
The Snowy Owls of Logan Airport
Birds are dangerous for planes, and vice versa. Up until the last decade or so, most airports killed owls and other birds that took up residence near airports. But not Boston's Logan Airport. In 1981, Norman Smith began trapping and relocating the owls instead of exterminating them. He's been doing this ever since, and the idea has spread to other airports, especially for birds that are threatened or endangered. Logan Airport has relocated more than 900 snowy owls since Smith came on the scene, and he vows to continue saving these birds as well as the planes for as long as he can. (via Nag on the Lake)
The Lake Where Hundreds of People Died… Twice
If you knew about an isolated mountain lake that was ringed with a whole bunch of human skeletons that no one had retrieved, you might think about avoiding that area, lest you become one of them. But that's not quite the case at Roopkund Lake, also called Mystery Lake or Skeleton Lake, at 16,470 feet of elevation in northern India. Plenty of Himalayan hikers have visited the site, and rearranged the skulls and bones found there.
An ancient tale tells of a royal entourage on a pilgrimage that was caught in a hailstorm near the lake and were all killed. But scientists have found evidence that whatever disaster befell those people happened more than once, and hundreds of years apart. Not only that, the dead of Roopkund Lake came from different corners of the earth! What happened to them? And where were they going? Savannah Geary of SciShow tells us what we now know and what we don't know about the Roopkund Lake skeletons. There's a 45-second skippable ad at 4:05.
I've Got Faith ~ Canine Freestyle Routine
We've seen amazing canine freestyle routines before, but this is a delight. Sara carson and her dog Hero come up with more amazing moves for every section of the song. Do not miss the grand finale. That's a good dog! The song is "Faith" by Stevie Wonder and Ariana Grand. (via Boing Boing)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)