For around 75 years, the USSR isolated itself from the decadent capitalist nations of the West. Some Western influences snuck in, but they were altered in order to be made appropriate for a communist society. In 1939, the Soviet Union got a translation of The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, called The Wizard of the Emerald City. The translation by Aleksandr Melentievich Volkov was pretty faithful to the original, with fifteen pages of new material. In the 1950s, Volkov completely rewrote the story, changing the characters' names and motivations and adding a few new scenes, like the one in which the main character, named Elli instead of Dorothy, gets kidnapped by a cannibal.

In this book, the land of Oz became Magic Land, the Tin Man becomes Iron Man, and Elli's return home is contingent on her helping make three people's dreams come true instead of bringing back the witch's broom. Baum's magical fantasy became infused with the important tenets of Soviet-style communism, particularly collective action and a devotion to hard work. Read how the Soviet version of The Wizard of Oz reflected that society at Jstor Daily. -via Strange Company

The region called Bougainville is made of several islands in the Pacific Ocean. Geographically, they are part of the Solomon Islands archipelago, but during colonial times, Bougainville was lumped in with Papua New Guinea. The Bougainvillians have little in common with the rest of Papua New Guinea, however, and fought their own war for independence, which by treaty is supposed to be accomplished in 2027. But a man named Noah Musingku appears to be throwing a wrench into the plans, since he has declared himself king of his home village of Tonu, which he calls the Kingdom of Papaala. Musingku has a lot of local support, since he is able to provide services that the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) could not afford.

Musingku is able to do that because of the Ponzi scheme he ran in the 1990s, called U-Vistract, which was a combination get-rich-quick investment scheme and prosperity gospel cult. He made at least $232 million from U-Vistract before he retreated to Bougainville and declared himself king. Musingku has been in seclusion in his heavily-secured compound since he was shot in 2006, but has been busy consolidating his power by issuing his own currency and promoting himself as a religious leader. But the story is much more bizarre in the details, since the people of Bougainville have never been treated fairly by any governing authorities. Read about Noah Musingku, who goes by His Majesty King David Peii Upeii 2nd, at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Daniel Liévano)

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his assistant Beaker of Muppet Labs not only explain gravity, but perform field experiments that mainly consist of dropping things that satisfyingly smash to pieces. And who better to assist with such experiments than Adam Savage? They are trying to recreate Galileo's Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment, more or less, and make their point in the first half of the video. That involves dropping a tugboat on Beaker, but it's an animated sequence, so he wasn't hurt- that time. The rest is nonsense, but a lot of fun, as the three TV scientists channel David Letterman and come up with more and more things that are just fun to drop and smash. What else could you want in a science show? Savage even tries to hire Beaker away from Honeydew, which sets up more mayhem. You might not learn anything about gravity that you didn't already know, but you will enjoy the glorious mess they make.

 

YouTuber Generic Entertainment illustrates formal and informal logical fallacies who are busy attempting to organize a meeting and then the leadership of their group. He plays all roles with improvised costumes, such as No True Scotsman with a bagpipe made of a plaid shirt and painter's tape as blue facepaint.

Their argument persists until the supreme fallacy arrives on the scene to aggressively arbitrate what he sees as a petty, meaningless, and ultimately fallacious dispute. Be sure to read the comments at the YouTube video, which are filled with appropriate jokes about the fallacies that did not attend the meeting.

-Thanks, Bruce!

Zillow Gone Wild tells us about a home in Scottsdale, Arizona, that's on the market for $19.5 million. The interior living space is 21,410 square feet, with five bedrooms and 16 bathrooms in the main house, plus a guest house with another two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The number and size of the rooms make it seem more like a facility than a home to me, but we're just getting started.

The main feature is a full-size gym built underground. The listing tells us of famous NBA players who have played in it. It has a professional scoreboard and a locker room featuring five bathrooms. There's also a museum holding a collection of 290 pairs of Michael Jordan sneakers. There's a golf practice range, a nine-hole putting green, and a golf simulator. There's a jogging track around the perimeter of the property. Yeah, there's also a pool, theater, pickleball court, and spa. And it was only built in 2017. I wondered if it belonged to some NBA team owner or maybe a basketball player, so I did some digging.   

The owner is entrepreneur Brett Hardt, who is a huge basketball fan. He built this house to incorporate the dreams of all his family members, and the gym was the first thing built. Word got around about the luxurious underground gym in a private home, and it became a getaway for NBA stars. The size of the home and the amenities make it perfect for hosting guests. But now it's for sale, furnishings included, and if you have a few million to put into a sports dream house, you'll find the particulars at Zillow.

What we have here is an electric bicycle driven by artificial intelligence. In other words, it's a robot. Developed by the Robotics and AI Institute, it's called the Ultra Mobile Vehicle, or UMV. It's a marvel of balance, and it can do tricks! So it's high in entertainment value, but wouldn't it be more fun to actually ride the bike yourself? Oh well, that requires some effort, so we may as well have a robot do it for us. Besides the tricks, there's a sequence at the end that shows how this robot avoids obstacles like a dog and the ball he is carrying, but it comes across as showing us how the robot doesn't like to play with dogs.  

What RAI built this for, besides to impress us with a viral video, is to demonstrate how the UMV learns by feedback. Children learn to balance on a bicycle by feeling what it's like to get it right, and also experiencing what it feels like to lose their balance. On the YouTube page, this learning technique is called reinforcement, which is a psychological term for rewarding desired behavior. You have to wonder what kind of reward works with an AI algorithm. Still, cool robot. -via Born in Space

The Crazy Way 1950s Truckers Fit 5 Cars On Short 35-Foot Car-Haulers https://t.co/6CCK7h1bXz

— The Autopian (@the_autopian) March 6, 2025

In the early history of automobile sales, cars were delivered by train or by driving them from the factory to the buyer, depending on whether there was a road to use. After World War I, cars began to be delivered by truck to preserve the newness of a new car, since they had to be delivered from a train station anyway. However, this wasn't so easy everywhere. In the 1920s, many states enacted new laws restricting the weight, width, and length of trucks using their roads. The most restrictive length was in Illinois, where truck couldn't be more than 35 feet long. That's half the length of today'a car-hauling trucks! Trucking companies were challenged to find a way to get enough cars onto a truck to make the trip worthwhile.

Believe it or not, there were trucks specially designed to fit five new autos onto a 35-foot truck. The patent sketch above from Donald Mettetal, Jr. is for the DeArco car carrier. Your eyes do not deceive you- the truck cab was lifted high above the drive train on the front of the truck, so that a car could be shoved into that space! Despite filing for a patent in 1950, it wasn't granted until years later, and other trucking companies used the same scheme to carry more cars in a shorter truck. Read the history of car carriers and the weird things those restrictions led to, with lots of pictures, at The Autopian.

Krapong was a young stray dog in Thailand who got herself into real trouble when she stuck her head into a cookie jar and couldn't get it out. Someone reported her to Michael Baines, also known as The Man That Rescues Dogs. The organization named for Baines went out and found Krapong and got her to a veterinary clinic. They estimated that she'd been stuck in that jar for several days, since she was severely dehydrated.

Krapong made a full recovery and was sent to a TMTRD shelter. While she may never be socialized enough to be adopted, she has a home at the shelter as long as she is there, and steady meals that she never had as a stray. So her misadventure in a cookie jar may have ended up saving her life. You can see  more of TMTRD's work in Thailand, particularly with disabled dogs, at Instagram.

In most cases, the scientist who publishes a description of a new species in a respected journal gets the honor of naming that species. Often, this description comes from the scientist that discovered the species. This may be a shock to you, but a lot of scientists are also huge nerds. We've seen an awful lot of species named after Star Wars characters and Star Trek characters, but there are almost as many that are named after the familiar faces of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

There's a species called Smaug giganteus. What kind of animal would you suspect that would be? A dragon, of course, although this one is technically a big lizard. Could you guess what kind of creature would be named Gollum attenuatus or Psylla frodobagginsi? (Hint: one of them is pictured above.) Could you imagine what kind of story went into naming Pseudophallus galadrielae? It's a fish, and that story is not nearly as dirty as you might think. Read up on 10 animal species named after Lord of the Rings characters and why the name fits them, at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Grey Smith)

Every once in a while, you want to hear some familiar metal music, but in a easy-listening, jazzy kind of tone. Who am I kidding? You had no thought at all for any such thing, but once you get it, you'll enjoy it.

Master mashup artist Bill McClintock's latest masterpiece features the fictional band he calls Spinsrÿche. The progressive metal band Queensrÿche had some heavy licks, but Geoff Tate's vocals on the 1991 song "Jet City Woman" were smooth and melodic when separated from the instruments. It fits just perfectly into the laid-back dance song "I'll Be Around" by The Spinners. Once again, McClintock shows there is really no difference between metal and disco, since good music is good music. He always throws a bonus or two in his mashups, too. This time, it's a piece of "Do It Again" from Steely Dan for the bridge sequence. The result is a downright pleasant love song that you can dance to. 

HOUS is a Korean design firm that offers fresh, modern designs for home furnishings. Its product lineup includes a table that looks like a goofy monster and a mirror that frames the user within the perspective of a digital camera.

The firm's most recent design is a set of four stools that, when stacked on top of each other, resemble a hamburger.

I'll sit on one of the buns, each of which is cushioned.

-via Fairy Club

The Church of God with Signs Following is one of the few churches left in the US that practices venomous snake handling as a statement of faith, and also incorporates the practice of drinking poison, usually strychnine. The belief stems from a literal interpretation of Mark 16: 18 which says, in part, "They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them." The snake handling is a small part of a worship service, and comes after singing preaching, and speaking in tongues as many Pentecostal churches do. Churches who still practice snake handling are mostly limited to Appalachia, and are most common in East Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. People have died from the practice of handling snakes, which is prohibited by law in most states. When that happens, church members blame the death on a lack of faith.

The use of venomous snakes for worship in Appalachia is usually attributed to George Went Hensley. Hensley did not invent snake handling, but he certainly promoted its use in Pentecostal churches across the South in the early 20th century (he died of a snake bite in 1955). While it is believed that snake handling is dying out, it's hard to know for sure because the churches who do this are extremely secretive, especially since laws against it were passed. Read about the churches who still use venomous snakes as part of their worship at Danny Dutch.

(Image credit: Russell Lee)

Lascelles, Victoria, Australia, has a population of 93. There were about the same number of residents in 1917, or at least human residents. But there were also an estimated 100 million mice! The mouse population boomed after an abnormally warm winter, and every nook and cranny of the small town was full of mice. The residents of Lascelles buried 40-gallon drums to trap the mice, until they had killed 1500 tons of mice. You can imagine what a horror that year was, because a rodent infestation is a tried-and-true horror film plot and gave us the Black Plague, too.

But the story of Lascelles is just one story. There was also the time 11 million birds decided to roost in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and that wasn't all that long ago. Or the dust storm that was so thick it brought the temperature down 30 degrees in just minutes in Dodge City, Kansas. Or the historical shower of rocks from the sky that killed 10,000 people in China (that wasn't a small town, but it was still bizarre). Or the Michigan town that was swallowed by sand dunes. Read what happened in all these disasters at Cracked.

We all know its important to teach children how to use the emergency phone number, 911 in the US. However, it's hard to convey what an emergency is to a kid who's never experienced one, and it's hard to get very young children to take anything seriously. A toddler named Bennett in Moore, Oklahoma, who looks to be about three years old, was playing with an old cell phone. It had no service provider, but still had some battery life left, which meant it could call 911. What kind of emergency did he report? Emergency donuts!

The very patient dispatcher played along with Bennet, and may have eventually been able to talk to his mother. The Moore Police Department posted the video because it was so cute. They then went into action responding to the call, with a delivery of emergency donuts. You can see from that followup video that Bennett may have had some encouragement ("egging on") from his older brother. A good time was had by all. -via Boing Boing

Turkish delight was once a familiar term for a familiar candy that originated in Turkey. Its popularity has dropped in the past few decades as children now have an amazing variety of candies in different textures and artificial flavors to choose from. Many people are only familiar with the name from the C.S. Lewis book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But there are specialty stores that sell genuine Turkish delight, often with fancy additions like nuts, coconut, or chocolate coatings.

The original Turkish delight is a very sweet and somewhat gummy candy that can sport all manner of flavors. The main ingredients are sugar, cornstarch, water, and flavoring. It's the cooking technique that makes it authentic, and that includes 45 minutes of stirring. So while it may seem like a lot of work, the fresh homemade candy in your favorite flavors will be a worthwhile experiment. Read up on the delights of Turkish delight at Atlas Obscura, and bookmark the included recipe. If you make it, be sure to let us know how it turns out.