The police force of Westlake, Ohio maintain a program called Are You Okay? It provides welfare checks on elderly people living alone. Every day, they call the person. If no one answers, police go to the home for a face-to-face check of wellbeing.
A few days ago, officers went to the home of a 91-year old woman who had not answered her daily call. They feared for the worst. Instead, WABI 5 News reports, they found the woman alive and well. She had a good reason for not answering her phone: she was attempting to beat her high score on a video game.
East Germany erected the Berlin Wall in 1961 to keep residents from fleeing to the west. They kept fleeing, and many (estimated between 138 and 200) died in their attempt, most of them shot by East German authorities. In 1979, two families managed to escape in a homemade balloon, but a later attempt ended in tragedy.
Winfried Freudenberg and his wife Sabine surreptitiously gathered materials and built their own balloon, but instead of hot air they planned to use natural gas to avoid detection of a flame. Sadly, they were seen as they were filling the balloon. As police approached, Winfried untethered the half-filled balloon solo. With little gas and without the weight of Sabine, his flight plans were useless, and the erratic flight ended in Freudenberg's gory death. The kicker was that this all happened in March of 1989, only a month before East Germany began allowing crossings into the west. The Berlin Wall was completely defunct only a few months later. Read the story of Winfried Freudenberg at Amusing Planet.
Orange cats have a lot of features in common. Most (but not all) are large, a bit dense, very much food-motivated, and have an inflated sense of themselves. They can be adorably goofy. Orange cats also tend to be more vocal than other cats, and most of their vocalizations seem to be complaints. None more so than Dave. Dave looks like a cross between my Apollo and Marmalade of Cole and Marmalade fame, and he's a typical orange cat. And he suffers so.
Dave lives with Kat and Jackson, plus his mother Natilla (who was rescued in Costa Rica while pregnant) and his sister Gandalf, who all treat him terribly. Poor Dave! Has any cat ever had to deal with such indignities? His wretched life is chronicled in a series called The Suffering of Dave. This is entry six, and you will find all the other episodes at YouTube. You can see more of Dave and his entire family at Instagram.
A mondegreen is a word for misheard lyrics. The term came about in 1954, when American writer Sylvia Wright reminisced about hearing the song "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray" and getting a line very wrong. It was "They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / And laid him on the green," but Wright was a child and heard it as a double murder because she thought the last line was "and Lady Mondegreen."
It happens all the time. The most famous are Elton John singing "Hold me closer, Tony Danza" and Jimi Hendrix singing "'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy." There are a ton of them recalled from personal experience in a post at the GenX subreddit. Some of my favorites are:
Big Ol'Jebediah we goin’ to Carolina we gonna tear that line up Big Old Jed had a light on
Two buckets of parasites, grab a spoon we’ll eat tonight Two chickens to paralyze, pack your bags, we’ll leave tonight Two ticks and a pair of lice, back your bags we leave tonight
Okay, we know that when tectonic plates collide, they can push up huge mountains. We know this because it's still happening in the Himalayas. Hundreds of millions of years ago, this happened on an even bigger scale, producing enormous "supermountain" ranges. The way they figured this out is pretty neat, involving the radioactive decay of the uranium contained in zircon. This happened somewhere around 650 million years ago, before there was life on land. These mountains eventually eroded away over a long time, which coincided with the Cambrian Explosion, and may have even sparked it.
This theory came about as scientists worked backwards to explain the effects. Now, in science, we want experiments to be replicable, and that's not really possible in geology. But as complicated as the story is, they found that this wasn't the first time it happened in earth's history. And that's what replication is in geology. -via Damn Interesting
The US produces more oil than any other country, but our oil reserves are tiny compared to the Persian Gulf region, which is split into many countries. The gulf itself wasn't there before major flooding at the end of the last ice age, but people of the region were already using found bitumen for adhesion and waterproofing. Oil as a modern fuel was discovered there in 1908, and drilling for it has fueled our machines ever since. But those massive oil reserves have a history going back 35 million years.
The abundance of hydrocarbons in the Middle East has to do with the collision of two major tectonic plates. We know that the Himalayas were formed when the Indian Plate crashed into Asia, forcing the mountains to rise. In the Middle East, however, the collision of the Arabian Plate and the Eurasian Plate is (yes, it's still happening) caused mayhem underground instead, bending and breaking rock plates. How this creates oil and gas and room for it to collect is explained in geologic terms at the Conversation.
The sculpture known as The Thinker by Auguste Rodin is familiar to everyone. Even if you've never been to France and never studied art, you've seen memes of the statue, often on a toilet. But what inspired this muscle-bound intellectual and his contemplation? Who was he? And what's he thinking about, anyway?
Rodin had a hard road to artistic acclaim. First his sculptures were not good enough, then they were too good and were thought to be a fraud. After finally securing his reputation in the art world, Rodin took on a project that consumed him, and even though it was ultimately for naught, it inspired The Thinker. It began as just one of many sculptures for the project, but became the dominant element. And although Rodin used professional live models, it is supposed to be a particular person that you know of. This TED-Ed video explain how The Thinker came about.
We sometimes hear about products that were developed for some other purpose, but eventually became toys (Play-Doh and Silly Putty come to mind). That was the story of the Slinky, which Richard T. James developed to be used as a spring for naval ships. It worked much better as a toy. But did you know that success drove its inventor to leave his wife and children and join a cult? Fabulous wealth can often be a curse. Maybe you also didn't know that the first Barbie was based on a pornographic doll, and that the design of Cabbage Patch Kids was stolen. And there are also cases of not finding out how innapropriate or dangerous a toy is until after it became quite popular.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit came out in 1988, making the movie 38 years old. Usually when Screen Junkies goes back to do an Honest Trailer for an older film, there's a reason, like a sequel or a remake coming out. In this case, there's no reason at all besides they wanted to. Maybe they wanted to play with clips of Jessica Rabbit.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a film noir in a world where people and 'toons lived side by side. It was a comedy that showcased special effects never seen before, melding live action with animation. It won four Oscars and became the second-highest grossing film of 1988. It was also notable for including both Disney and Warner Bros cartoons, so it was the first time we saw Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny interacting. Disney was leery of the movie's violence and adult themes that were standard in old Warner Bros. cartoons, and released Who Framed Roger Rabbit through their Touchstone Pictures studio instead of Disney. Kids loved the film as well as a adults, but the movie might have a hard time getting made today.
The premise of this movie list is to rank space movies from the least to the most scientifically accurate. By "space movies," they mean movies about astronauts traveling from earth in the current timeline or the not-too-distant future, so there are no Star Trek or Star Wars films, or anything that could be classified as space fantasy. What surprised me is that, while it starts with a movie that has a ridiculous and implausible plot, it quickly shifts into the "more accurate than you'd think" movies. The last twenty years or so have given us a bunch of space films with advanced special effects, so there's no reason to talk about "artificial gravity." And they have real scientists as consultants, which tells us that accuracy is important to the producers.
That said, I immediately (and correctly) guessed what movie would be number one. You probably can, too. Read about 12 space films and how accurate they are at Cracked.
Sesame Street has changed a lot since I was a kid. The plots are grittier and the Muppets swear a lot more.
Bluesky user @pig'slaundry has lately watched the children's show on Tubi, a streaming service owned by Fox. They noticed that the error-filled automatically generated captions show the characters contemplating existential terror and considering brutal violence.
On Easter Sunday, an association of Christian churches in Korea banded together to stage an elaborate celebration called the 2026 Easter Parade in downtown Seoul. There was a procession, but also a dramatic recreation of scenes from the Old Testament, the life of Jesus, and the history of Christianity in Korea, spread across multiple stages. It is estimated that around 8,000 people were in attendance.
One stage was dedicated to Jesus' ascension into heaven. The actor playing Jesus was supposed to be lifted into the sky to end the show. But the drama went on and on as the crane kept lifting him way beyond what was planned. He flew among the skyscrapers so long that the video is sped up in parts. It had to be terrifying, but since we now know that the actor is okay, it's also funny. The producers blamed the incident on a crane malfunction. -via Boing Boing
Making fried chicken at home is one of those things that takes experience to get right. Your first few batches might be burned on the outside and undercooked on the inside. Adjust the temperature, and your next batch might be well-done, but the breading is kind of blah. These experiments are expensive, so it's no wonder most people only get fried chicken at restaurants these days.
So how do restaurants do it? We know Colonel Sanders turned to pressure-frying chicken because it was the only way to prepare fried chicken fast enough for waiting diners. Not all restaurants do that. What they do to make crispy fried chicken is to double fry it. Yes, it's the same tip that makes perfect french fries, although the process is a little different. Read how to double-fry your chicken at home for the perfect crispy coating at Serious Eats. You'll also learn a restaurant's secret for getting that chicken ready fast for a hungry clientele.
In so many movies, the real drama or action happens to men, while women are there as tokens or window dressing, and are often the reward for the hero who "gets the girl" in the end. The notable exception are Disney fairy tales. While the source materials spend little time developing any characters, the Disney animated productions are centered around a young woman who goes through travails and gets her wealthy and handsome prince as a reward in the end. That brings an awful lot of little girls to the movies, and then they buy the costume, the DVD, and all the accessories so they can dream of finding their own prince.
But who are these princes? In the older films, they have no personality at all. Sometimes they don't even have a name. They have no responsibilities, except for being handsome and waiting for the king to die. Their heroism is only in service to the real star of the show. In the song "Charming," three of them complain about their unimportance, which is a mirror of what a Bond Girl character might say.
Amy Stewart is an artist in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. She works heavily in stained and painted glass. Stewart (or "Amy in the Aether", as she also calls herself) frequently uses motifs from Mid-Century Modern American pop art, including camp, burlesque, and the playfully supernatural.
