Reposted from 2013 to add updated incredible numbers (see embed above) for this morning's weather.
In 2013 I added this video of Lady Gaga and Joseph Gordon-Levitt reversing the traditional male-female stereotypes for the song when they performed it for a holiday special with the Muppets:
Compare that modern version with the original from the musical romantic comedy "Neptune's Daughter" from 1949, where the heavy-handed seduction of Esther Williams by Ricardo Montalban is almost painful to watch:
And I'll close with a shout-out to young Lucas, who lives across the street. At 9:30 last night after he finished his activities at school, he braved sub-zero temps to clear our driveway to facilitate our travel to a medical appointment this morning:
Mad Hatter Day is 10/6. The date was chosen from the illustrations by
John Tenniel in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, wherein the Mad
Hatter is always seen wearing a hat bearing a slip of paper with the
notation "In this style 10/6". We take this as inspiration to behave
in the style of the Mad Hatter on 10/6 (which is October 6 here,
although in Britain Mad Hatter Day occurs on June 10...but I digress...)
Mad Hatter Day began in Boulder, CO, in 1986, among some computer folk
who had nothing better to do. It was immediately recognized as
valuable because they caused less damage than if they'd been doing
their jobs.
As I searched this topic on the 'net today, it was interesting to see how many observers misinterpret the 10/6 on his hat as being either a style number ("The Mad Hatter’s top hat, according to Lewis Carroll, was of the 10/6 style") or worse ("my birthdate (10/6) is on his hat although I think that is his hat size!"). The correct interpretation, of course, is that "the paper in the Mad Hatter's
Hat was really an order to make a hat in the style shown, to cost ten
shillings sixpence."
The lamp is a glass jar full of all the things that my mom found in
my pockets when doing my laundry as a child. I was born in 1986, and you
can tell from a lot of the items in it.
It started off with mostly sticks, rocks, and marbles. But over time
it ended up having all sorts of items ranging from Pogs, a Gameboy game
(Super Mario Land), a Magic School Bus McDonald's toy, yo-yos, and Laser
Quest scorecards. There are also plenty of sticks, springs,
rubber-bands, and twist-ties because I went through a phase where I
remember telling my parents I was going to build a robot with just those
items.
I will admit that there are a few items in there from my early 20s
too, as like any lazy college student, I let my mom wash my clothes
while staying at home from college between semesters. And clearly, my
mom was still collecting my things.
Growing up, whenever I left something in my pockets and put them in
the dirty laundry, before she would wash things, she checked my pockets,
and if she found anything, she put it in a glass jar on the top shelf
in the laundry room. I remember as a kid, wishing soooo hard that I
could get some of the items back, but it was forbidden to even go near
the jar.
By the time I was old enough to be sneaky about it and get into
it, I had just learned to accept that that was how it worked and I
wouldn't get those things back.
Years went by and I had completely forgotten about it, until this
last May. I got married, and at our rehearsal dinner, when my mom and
dad stood up to give their thank you speech, my mom pulled a large gift
bag out from under the table. She started by giving a short speech
explaining that over the years she had collected stuff from my pockets,
and it was in that moment that I thought, "I'm gonna get the jar!" I
started tearing up before she had finished talking. When she did, I
opened the bag and found that not only was I getting the jar, I was
getting it back in the form of a lamp (and yes, she has sealed the top
of the lamp to it so that I still CANNOT open it).
This has definitely been the best gift I've ever received.
What a wonderful and thoughtful personalized gift. Closeup photos here.
Instagram influencers are promoting "perineum sunning" as a health practice.
“In a mere 30 seconds of sunlight on your butthole, you will receive
more energy from this electric node than you would in an entire day
being outside with your clothes on,” says an influencer, who goes by Ra
of Earth. In a viral video
that has racked up more than 35,000 views, he gestures toward the sun
as three naked men lie down, point their backsides to the sky and make
sounds of pleasure.
“[Thirty] seconds of direct sunlight injection to the anal orifice is equivalent to being outside in the sun all day!”
But now she's Queen of Denmark. Her story is told in the New York Times.
...when Mary Donaldson, then a 28-year-old from Tasmania working in real estate, met “Fred” — also known as Frederik, Crown Prince of Denmark — at the Slip Inn in September 2000, she was suddenly plunged into an entirely different fairy tale...
But toward Mary, who is seen as relatable and down-to-earth, that republican bent does not apply. “Mary’s relentless abjuration of drama, her enthusiastic commitment to causes in the public interest and her truly rare championing of the LGBTQ+ community in Denmark and beyond” appeal even to fervent anti-monarchists...
And then there is the improbable back story. When Mary and Frederik met, Frederik was visiting Sydney for the Olympic Games. One of the people with him asked an Australian friend to join them at the pub. The friend brought her sister, who brought her own friend who brought his roommate, Mary...
She attended public school, rode horses, played sports and had an otherwise unremarkable upbringing, before studying law and commerce in college and moving to Melbourne and then Sydney to pursue a career in advertising.
“I don’t recall wishing that one day I would be a princess,” she told reporters shortly after the couple became engaged in 2003. “I wanted to be a veterinarian.”
More on the Danish "bicycle monarchy" (no crown except on a coffin, grandchildren stripped of prince and princess status, king/queen as servants of the people, not the other way around) in the Washington Post.
Here are some comments from the Plumbing subreddit:
Tell her the people that sell them say they're flushable. The people that repair plumbing say they're not. Who would you believe?
I mean, they are literally flushable so they aren’t lying. So are 18 golf balls and flip phones.
Had hammers, hockey pucks, hot wheels.. This is all in a retirement trailer park. Unsure how the hammer got to the pumping station...
There was a prison I used to inspect that had a major drug problem. Turned out visitors were flushing them down the visitors bathroom toilet, which was outside the secured visitors area. Drugs would wash up on the screens at the WWTP out back and the inmates that worked there would retrieve them. That was the end of inmates working in the plant.
I lived in a condo complex with 2 buildings and a central sewer line down the middle. The sewer line backed up and flooded the lane to our porches. The city came to rotor the line. One neighbor had flushed a dead 18” spider plant. It made it through the neighbors line but blocked up the central 6” line.
I first discovered and blogged about a drainage ditch with duck decoys back in 2018, then wrote a followup post in 2019. After a pandemic year interval, I headed north again, and found a huge increase in the number of painted decoys (photo above).
There was no town nearby in which to make inquiries, so I had to wait until getting back from my vacation - but then I was rewarded with the discovery of a Minnesota television station's report on this phenomenon. The video is done in the style of Steve Hartman's "On the Road" segments for CBS News. This turns out not to be an "art installation" - let's just call it a "whimsy."
I invite you to take 3 minutes to watch this video report. I guarantee it will be the most cheerful item you encounter on the internet today.
Addendum 2021: I stopped to visit the ditch ducks on my way north last week. Looks like there are a couple more than last year -
It's one of the high points on my trip, and a cheerful sight - especially when you know the backstory in the video.
Addendum 2023: The ducks are still there -
- although the stress of migration appears to have been too much for one of them:
And I see the site is now well-documented on Google Maps:
Lots of photos [better than mine] at the Google Maps site. Visitors should note that there is crude, off-road, parking several hundred yards north of the ditch - much safer than parking on the shoulder of the highway.
Image cropped slightly for size from the original at the New York Times, which reports that the recent torrential rains in California have been a boon for gold prospectors, who nowadays sometimes don wetsuits rather than panning the gravel.
Elon Musk's unmanned SpaceX Starship experienced a failure today:
SpaceX’s engineers are still sorting through exactly what went wrong with the uncrewed vehicle. Mid-climb, a few of the 33 Raptor engines appeared to flame out. Within three minutes of liftoff, the Super Heavy booster was supposed to separate, but that never occurred. Instead Starship began to spin wildly, tumbling through the sky. Then, the vehicle exploded, which SpaceX later said was triggered on purpose with flight-termination commands sent to both the rocket and booster.
SpaceX expressed it this way:
“Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation.”
Addendum: Explanation in one of the Comments. But it reminds me of this old skit:
As a synecdoche for the tragedy of our historical moment, consider a news item about the murder of nineteen schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas. One victim, ten-year-old Maite Rodriguez, was identifiable only by the green Converse sneakers she wore. She had drawn a heart on her right shoe. After the actor Matthew McConaughey, for some reason delivering a press briefing at the White House, made this detail known to the public, the shoes sold out as appalled consumers ordered them online.
It is impossible to understand a society whose response to the slaughter of children is to purchase green Converse sneakers as anything other than psychotic. It is impossible, I believe, to wish for such a society to continue—a society that is also bent on murdering as many other forms of life as possible, driving entire species extinct, rendering the planet uninhabitable.
Excerpted from Apocalypse Nowish in the December 2022 issue of Harper's. Embedded image via NPR.
I will 100% guarantee that the device was placed in the newborn's hands by delivery room personnel, perhaps just for laughs or maybe for publicity/social commentary, as is clearly pointed out in the comments at Jezebel, where the editorial staff properly used the term "appears" in the article's title.
Somehow I missed this announcement three months ago:
According to findings of the 2022 Original Tooth Fairy Poll® released by Delta Dental, the Tooth Fairy visited 79% of homes across the country with children ages 6-12 who have lost teeth. Most kids are demonstrating patience for the Tooth Fairy’s visit, with more than half of parents (61%) reporting that their child waited for their loose tooth to fall out, unlike 18% of their children that pulled their own tooth...
$7.36 — The Northeast: Continues to lead U.S. regions in highest average monetary gift for a lost tooth, rocketing $2 above the national average and marking a $1.64 gain over the previous year’s results.
$5.77 — The South: Continues to track most closely to the overall U.S. average and shows a $1.32 increase.
$4.27 — The Midwest: Although lower than the national average, up 61 cents.
$4.08 — The West: Represents the only U.S. region with a downward giving trend, with the average monetary gift for a lost tooth plunging by $1.46.
The blurb embedded at the right was sent to me by a non-blog friend. It's typical of the "viral" items that circulate via email and social media - wryly humorous, but commonly exaggerated, skewed, or totally fabricated.
I'm familiar with The Andy Griffith Show, but never watched it because it was popular when I was in high school (no time) and college (no TV set). The assertion about no marriages is quite striking, so I decided to check the accuracy of the statement. I found an article devoted to that very topic.
BTW, younger readers of TYWKIWDBI may find it hard to conceive of a college experience devoid of television. IIRC, we had access to a television in a "commons room" somewhere, but went there only for events like the World Series or those first two Super Bowls.
Astronomers are reporting that there’s a chance that a “meteor storm” could occur on the night of Memorial Day. It probably won’t happen, but if it does, the display could be absolutely otherworldly... Meteor storms result when Earth enters an unusually dense and intense clustering of interplanetary debris — akin to driving through a swarm of bugs on the highway...
Meteor rates could range between one and 1,000 meteors per hour. If a meteor storm occurs, it would only last for perhaps an hour or two, and probably less... Astronomers have pinpointed the most likely time for the peak of whatever display may or may not transpire to be around 1 a.m. Eastern time Monday night/Tuesday morning. The shower’s “radiant” point, or the part of the sky from which meteors appear to emanate, will be high in the sky over North America at that time, so there’s no specific place in the sky to look...
A meteor storm came in 1966, igniting an equally splendid fireworks show in the United States. Eyewitness Christine Downing, who drove north of Mojave, Calif., saw a couple of shooting stars every five minutes, which “at the time … seemed extraordinary.” At 12:30 a.m., it began “raining stars,” and by 2 a.m. “it was a ‘blizzard.’ ”
Her description, which can be read in full on a NASA Web page, is one of many from that night. “There was the unnerving feeling that the mountains were being set on fire,” Downing wrote. “Falling stars filled the entire sky to the horizon, yet it was silent.”
Here in the Upper Midwest, one of the rites of spring is to hook up the garden hose and wash away all the crap that has built up on the floor under the car during the winter months. When I got ready to do so last week, I was startled to see four or five yellow spots. The embed above may not do the color intensity justice; they weren't just yellow - they seemed to be of neon brightness.
I immediately popped the hood of my car to check the brake fluid, and to my delight and surprise, the reservoir was totally full. The position of the spots was midline, not near the debris from the tires and wheelwells, and not near the axles.
So I asked Mr. Google, and discovered that these stains result when road salt gets up onto the hot components of the exhaust system. Those components often are coated with zinc as an antioxidant, and the road salt can catalyze a reaction resulting in the formation of a yellow zinc oxide, which is most often spotted in the snow under cars parked outdoors.
I had my Subaru in today for its 11-year checkup, and the staff confirmed that the exhaust system shows no evidence of corrosion. So this was just an incidental finding. Good to know.
The television special in 1964 was off my radar as I headed off to college that year, but an article by Caitlyn Flanagan in The Atlantic whets my interest:
There’s a lot in Rudolph that people don’t seem to remember. At one point, the Abominable Snowmonster tries to murder Rudolph in front of his parents by smashing a giant stalactite on his head. As our gentle hero lies facedown, concussed and unresponsive, his own girlfriend—the beautiful, long-lashed Clarice—wonders aloud why the snowman won’t put the little reindeer out of his misery: “Why doesn’t he get it over with?” This was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, not The Third Man. Meanwhile, back at Santa’s workshop—a phrase that should connote only the jolliest of associations—a dark tale is unfolding. Santa, it turns out, presides over a nonunion shop where underproducing elves are deprived of breaks and humiliated; they dream not of Christmas, but of escape. Poorly constructed toys are thrown onto a bare and frozen island, where they cry and wander. How long have they been there? A year? A thousand years? One of the toys, A Dolly for Sue, looks perfectly fine—why has she been stuck with the misfits? Rankin finally admitted the nature of Dolly’s flaw in 2005, when he revealed that she suffered from “psychiatric problems.” The Island of Misfit Toys, it turns out, is but another atoll in the gulag archipelago.
Interesting. She didn't even include that one of the elves did a full-mouth extraction on the snowmonster. I've placed a request with my library for the DVD to find out what I've been missing for the past six decades.
