If you tell people they cannot do something, particularly if it involves free expression, they will move heaven and earth to find a way around the regulations. Take, for example, the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, historically caught between Denmark and Germany. The kingdom or country ruling over each duchy changed over hundreds of years through complicated trades and treaties. In 1864, these regions were ceded to joint rule by Prussia and Austria, which is complicated enough, and the residents were forbidden to fly the Danish flag.  

Danish farmers in the region then embarked on a project to breed pigs that resembled the Danish flag, which is red with a white cross. They got the vertical white stripe on a red-haired pig with a new breed called the Husum Red Pied (Husumer Rotbunte). Others loyal to Denmark would recognized what the pigs meant while the farmers maintained plausible deniability. Now 150 years later, that region is split between Germany and Denmark, and the Husum Red Pied breed is almost extinct. Read of the rise and fall of the political pig at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: Axel Krampe)

Analog Society is a British vocal group that performs covers and original songs, but has become known for their clever musical mashups, when they combine two songs that may be from different decades but sound good together. The video above has them mashing up "Somebody That I used to Know" from Gotye and "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac. Continue reading for more.

'It was chaos': The week when cannons shot 250,000 bouncy balls down San Francisco hills https://t.co/yXyxWkgiEL

— SFGATE (@SFGate) March 10, 2025

Twenty years ago, a film crew dropped a quarter-million bouncy balls down the hilly streets of San Francisco to advertise Sony Bravia color TVs. Today, that stunt would be done with special effects, but everything was real in the finished ad that won numerous awards and is still being watched on YouTube all these years later. The Sony Bravia Bouncy Balls ad is legendary, but it certainly wasn't easy to film. 

Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig had to get permission from the city, notify everyone in the area, and promise to repair any damage. Then he had to round up 250,000 bouncy balls, which temporarily wiped out the US supply. Then the crew had to invent cannons to launch those balls, which destroyed quite a few of them. And people were hired to retrieve those balls after they bounced down the hills- day after day for a week. At one point, extra people were hired to sort the balls by color! When the filming was through, the bill just for broken windows was $74,000. Bouncy balls were found miles from the set, and continued to be found for years. Read the story behind the filming of this legendary television ad that never even aired in the US at SFGate. -via Damn Interesting

On the marvelously curious subreddit /r/DiWHY, redditor /u/carrieminaj asks why this door is shaped this way. One potential answer lies beneath the fold.

Remember when you were a kid, you saw a lot of fireflies, or lightning bugs as they are sometimes called. Now if you go out on a summer's evening, you have to deliberately look to see any fireflies at all. Sure, scientists have noticed this, but in order to do anything about it, they need hard data, and that's really hard to get when you're talking about many different species of a bug that's really hard to see when they're not flashing their shiny hineys. But new photography techniques are getting better at sorting out the little sparkly butts so we can count them. Still, this endeavor needs lots of photographers, and you can help.

Ze Frank doesn't make a lot of jokes about fireflies in this video, because his main concern is getting everyone on board for their conservation. Every species has its niche in the ecosystem, and it's up to us to protect them. You can get involved through the Xerces Society by joining a project or by making a donation.  

On March 4, a 4-year old boy in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin called 911 with an urgent problem: his mom was being bad and he needed the police to take her to jail. Specifically, the villainous mother had eaten his ice cream.

People magazine reports that when officers arrived on the scene, the boy had changed his mind. He was okay with them not taking his mother to jail so as long as he got ice cream. The negotiations were productive for all parties involved. The next day, Officers Gardinier and Ostergaard brought the child ice cream.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Mount Pleasant Police Department

Major League Baseball has unveiled a new line of hats for their teams from New Era. These are called "overlap" hats because of the way they were designed. Every year, they hope to create collector's items with new hat designs, and this year will probably be a banner year. But it won't be because they are great. The general idea was to take the team's logo and lay it overtop the team name or the city. But most of those logos are initials, and you should never overlap letters with other letters, because it changes the word. When the human eye sees these hats, they will read them as the Tetas Rangers, Houston Ashos, Seattle Masers, Los Angeles Anaels, Bobon Red Sox, Mmmi Marlins, and the Washington Nawals. SB Nation has a few things to say about these hats. The Texas Rangers hats have already been pulled from stores.  

But was it truly a careless mistake or a marketing ploy? The whole league seems to have taken a page out of last year's Oakland A's hat design disaster that became collector's items. Some of the new hats look fine because the overlaid team logo is a pictures instead of a letter. You can buy them here. -via Metafilter

If you loved Parasite and are looking forward to (or have already seen) Mickey 17, you know how good a movie written and directed by Bong Joon-ho can be. That's why Screen Junkies went back to make an Honest Trailer for Bong's first English language feature film, 2013's Snowpiercer. Like all of Bong's biggest films, Snowpiercer explores the themes of class and privilege while telling a story that will allow you to think you are ignoring those themes- until the story demands that you pay attention.

Snowpiercer is dystopian science fiction, so its success depends on the viewer finding the premise believable, no matter how ridiculous. And this one is quite ridiculous, as this Honest Trailer makes clear. Yet the movie is enjoyable and thought-provoking, causing you to buy into it, so you might be surprised to confront how weird the elements really are. Yeah, that's if you've seen the movie. If you haven't, rest assured that all this weirdness comes together to tell a thrilling story and make a point as well.   

Much equipment should be purchased prior to the arrival of a baby in a home. A stroller is essential for parents on the go. And if you really want to set your baby apart from slower children, consider this luxurious, high-performance stroller by Italian supercar manufacturer Lamborghini.

Fast Company tells us about the Reef AL Arancio on sale from babycare product designer Silver Cross. Only 500 of these superstrollers will be made for only the most discriminating infants. It features a polycarbonate carry cot, precisely engineered suspension wheels, a handlebar finished by hand, and a brake pedal modeled after those on Lamboghini's own cars.

This is how you tell the world that your child is going places.

Mexican illustrator José Guadalupe Posada became well-known for his satirical and political drawings featuring calaveras, or skulls, around the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, Posada is one of the reasons that decorated skulls became associated with Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. But Posada had interests beyond those calaveras.

Posada illustrated newspapers and magazines that would be referred to as tabloids today- literature aimed at entertaining the general public, and the more sensational a story, the better. When a photograph wasn't available, or wasn't as exciting as an illustration, Posada would draw a picture and create an engraving. Among those were many stories of unusual births, often referred to as monsters or freaks in those days. These included children with extra limbs, conjoined twins, and stories that are hard to swallow. The illustration above accompanied a story of a woman who gave birth to three children and four animals. See more of Posada's illustrations of what were called "freaks of nature" at the Public Domain Review. -via Nag on the Lake

When we explain pollen as "plant sperm," that's just a simple shortcut to saying it's part of the sexual reproduction process of plants; specifically, it's the part that moves. So you might be surprised to learn that pollen is not like sperm at all in the way it works. And that could be a relief to those who have to deal with the side effects of getting pollen in your nasal cavities, at least psychologically. No, pollen is way weirder than that, and so is the female side of plant reproduction. It's true we rarely talk about a plant's embryo sac, the female side of the reproductive process, and that's because it doesn't cause hay fever or cover our cars with dust the way pollen does. While it's easy to say that plants and animals are just way different, MinuteEarth goes into detail to explain how plants really reproduce and why. Keep in mind that there are exceptions, because there always are.

If you venture out to Dolores Park in San Francisco in the evening, you are liable to encounter a dinosaur that looks like Jurassic Park crashed into the movie Tron. Resembling a T. rex, the dino glows a neon blue-green color and makes odd sounds like a meow, a fart, or a musical interlude. Kids love it. Check out the dinosaur dancing at Burning Man in this video. Underneath the seven-foot-long costume is artist and lawyer Trevor Mead.

Mead was into costumes and building art long before he became a lawyer- in fact, he went to law school as a way of financing his hobbies. He began building the dinosaur costume two years ago, and later added electroluminescent wire for the lights, and then sounds to calm fearful children and make them laugh. The action is controlled from inside by a steering wheel, levers, and a couple of old cell phones. Now Mead makes his way out to Dolores Park as the creature called the Doloresaurus at least a couple of times a week, during daytime as well as the evenings. Read how the Doloresaurus came out. -via Everlasting Blort

(Image credit: Trevor Mead)

It has come to my attention that we haven't posted the annual Minnesota State High School All Hockey Hair Team for the last couple of years. We're going to correct that oversight right now. The unnamed YouTuber that once went by Game On Minnesota is now called Pulltab Hockey, and he has selected the Minnesota high school players with the most glorious flow from the season that just ended. These students take hockey seriously, but they also take their hair seriously. After all, they're going to be on TV and any of them have a chance to be in the annual video, which is seen by people who've never been to Minnesota and who don't care about hockey. Everyone can admire a great head of hair!  

This year's video sports the theme of Hollywood and the Oscars, but what really stands out is that the players' hair isn't all that long, but it's often fluffy and comes in many colors. The team is introduced in the first six minutes, then we hear about the organization this video supports, and then from about the seven-minute mark, it's all highlights from Minnesota high school hockey season. -via Metafilter

See the all-hockey hair teams from previous years.

The game 368 Chickens sounds really simple. All you have to do is place chickens on a grid and line up three matching chickens in a row (horizontally or vertically, but not diagonally) so they will disappear, over and over, until you've placed 368 chickens. And there's only four kinds of chickens! When I first read the instructions, I thought it might be like Stack the Cats, but no. It's easier because there's no time limit, but it's harder because you cannot change the orientation of the two chickens you must place together. When there is no room left to match up chickens, you've lost the game.

It's honestly easier to try it out than to explain the game. Move the two chickens from the bottom of the screen up to the grid, and it will soon be clear that 368 Chickens is a lot of chickens, and it is not all that easy to sort them. You have to wonder if anyone has ever won this game. -via Boing Boing

In Act 5, Scene 1 of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the eponymous character ponders mortality while holding the skull of Yorick, the late jester to the king.

David Tennant, who was the Tenth Doctor (not the tenth actor to play the Doctor) on Doctor Who, is a classically trained actor who has played Hamlet in the past. He would like to benefit future generations of actors once he has shuffled off this mortal coil. The Daily Mail reports that Tennant would like to donate his skull so that he can play Yorick in future productions of Hamlet.

Tennant is following a great Shakespearean tradition. Polish musician André Tchaikowsky donated his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company to serve as Yorick and Tennant himself has used that skull on the stage.

-via @azirascrowley