WOTC News tells us about Sylvester Franklin, a man in Savannah, Georgia, who ordered a drill from the online store AliExpress, a subsidiary of AliBaba, which is the "Amazon of China." Instead he received a photo of a drill. Frankllin also ordered a pressure washer and received a bit driver.
AliExpress has so far refused to refund his money. WOTC News reports that the company has a reputation for poor customer service, such as providing fake tracking numbers, as well as a history of counterfeiting.
Ben Ashton is a British artist who is classically trained as a realistic painter. He can perfectly render portraits in the style of Old Masters and reflecting the highest standards of the Academic tradition.
Then he adds a twist. His images are not digital renderings with glitches, but are actually painted to look like that.
Every year, the company Meat & Livestock Australia puts their heart and soul into an ad campaign to get people eating local lamb meat. The ads over the last few years have been both funny and relatable, and the 2025 campaign is no exception. It's a live-action recreation of the internet, complete with comment sections represented by people in bleachers enjoying the show. Everyone's got something to say, but no one has anything to say that you haven't already heard. First, people disagree about whether the thing they've just seen is any good. Then they disagree about whether it's even real. Then they throw derogatory names and insults at each other. And those comments are floating among ads, unrelated jokes, and single emojis, which are not even worth logging in for. It's obvious that if real life were like the internet, we'd have to invent some alternate world to get away from it. The point is that no one agrees on anything, except the wonderful allure of grilled Australian lamb.
Many of us grew up on Warner Bros. cartoons that contained a lot of sexual innuendo, but that was because they were written for adults, back in the days when all ages watched the same movies and animation wasn't specifically aimed at kids. Pee-wee's Playhouse, on the other hand, was a Saturday morning show written for children. However, Paul Reubens, the artist behind Pee-wee, wasn't above some suggestive double entendres, which flew over the heads of little children, but delighted their parents and other adults.
These jokes walked a fine line, since Pee-wee's Playhouse avidly promoted good behavior such as friendship and sharing, but also acknowledged the silly side of life. When Pee-wee or the other characters "went there," they had a thick layer of plausible deniability for anyone who might complain, but if you knew what they were alluding to, you just knew. The exceptions are a couple of instances of Pee-wee looking up someone's dress, which all children of the 80s knew was just naughty enough to be funny. Don't expect anything shocking in a list of eight Pee-wee's Playhouse scenes that could be classified as dirty jokes, but you will be impressed by their cleverness in being something that could be blamed on your dirty mind instead of the writers having a good time.
The bigger the boy, the bigger the toy -or at least more of them. YouTuber Brutal Menace has plenty of Hot Wheels tracks, and he makes good use of them. He's turned his entire house into a track, complete with speed boosters! What's even better, he rigged a car with a camera so we can get a thrill from the point of view of the hypothetical tiny driver. Watch as this car zips around the house at different levels, loops the loop, and enters dark tunnels. Then it goes outside for a wild ride through the back yard which includes a fire tunnel and more loop-the-loops, through pipes and all the way across the street before the track runs out. The effect is like watching a roller coaster POV video, but it also makes you want to try something like this yourself, which a roller coaster video doesn't do, for me at least. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union went on for around 45 years. The people of the two nuclear powers watched for signs of an attack constantly. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, no one was really sure how to wind down a Cold War. Would the US take advantage of the situation? Would Russia be as belligerent as the USSR once was? Meanwhile, people kept doing their jobs, some better than others. In 1995, when Norway planned to launch a rocket for scientific study, the government notified all its neighbors and allies, including Russia, but the word didn't get to the actual Russian radio technicians in the field. They were Soviet-trained to look for incoming nuclear missiles and determine the level of danger within ten minutes. This rocket looked like a nuclear missile, and traveled like a nuclear missile. They made the call to take the "nuclear suitcase," which contained the codes for a nuclear attack against the US, to Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Of course, we know the incident did not lead to a Russian nuclear attack, because it if had, we either wouldn't be here or we would have remembered that day. But as it was, the 1995 nuclear scare is said to have been the closest we've ever come to nuclear war, despite very few people knowing what really happened. Read the story yourself at Smithsonian.
Instagram user @g0nghua is a food artist who creates conceptual and inventive products at Who Eats Art. Her recent work includes experiments with tea eggs, which are a food originating in China. Boil an egg, crack it, then boil it again in tea to brew tea flavors into your egg.
@g0nghua says that her grandmother would disown her if she discovers that she's been doing this to pigeon eggs. I assume that she used molds to shape the semi-cooked eggs into dice. This was part of an exhibition of edible art that invited guests to sample the works on display.
You know those movies where a relationship is on a slow simmer for years and years? The one that comes to mind is When Harry Met Sally. That's sort of the way that Marmy came into Ariel Harris' life. Marmy is short for Orange Marmalade, and it's hard to believe that this fluffy orange cat was feral. Maybe he would be better described as a long term stray, since he wanted to be her cat from the very start. Ariel was accommodating to the cat that constantly hung around her house. Marmy was shy but persistent, waiting six years for just the right moment to make that step inside and become a house cat. That moment finally came when Marmy was suffering and wasn't able to avoid contact with Ariel and her husband. But he adjusted well to domestic life, and is devoted to his humans. You can follow Marmy's adventures at Instagram.
A new line of research involves attaching tiny QR codes to individual honeybees, which interact with a sensor at the entrance to the hive. Each bee has a unique code, so that its behavior can be analyzed in fine detail. The system is akin to employees wearing badges into office buildings that record what time they arrive and leave. The tags are tiny and do not interfere with the bees' everyday activities. This invasion of the bees' privacy has already yielded results, such as the fact that beed live about twice as long as previously thought- two months as opposed to one month. The main goal is to determine how far bees travel to forage for nectar.
You might be impressed with this use of modern technology, or you may be repelled by the idea of bees being treated like this. But my mind went straight to the plight of the poor graduate students who were tasked with attaching 32,000 QR tags to individual bees. You have to wonder how many stings they had to deal with. Read more about the research and what we've learned about bees from it at Gizmodo.
We've been told over and over again how smart crows are, but they still astonish us now and then. Logically, we know that flying should be more thrilling than anything humans can do, but we all know in our hearts how much fun it is to slide down a snowy hill. This crow has commandeered a piece of trash to act as a sled! Or, more accurately, a snowboard since he stands up on it. He flies up to the top of the snow bank, then slides down on his snowboard. When the snowboard gets away, he chases after it before some other crow can get it.
Give them a little time, and the entire flock (or murder) will be raiding the garbage for flat pieces of plastic. Then they'll organize their own X games to compete with each other. After all, crows are pretty smart. -via Nag on the Lake
Cats normally look dignified and downright majestic in their luxurious fur coats. But occasionally, a cat needs to be shaved for medical reasons, like surgery or a skin condition. That's when we get to see the fat, wrinkles, and lumps that a fur coat hides. Or in some cases, a really skinny cat is revealed underneath all that fluff. I once had a cat I thought was big until she was shaved, and then realized that she was 90% hair. In these seven images, exposed skin can make a cat look like he forgot to put his pants on, or rolled up his sleeves for some reason. They are blissfully unaware of how funny they look to us, except for cat number seven who is daring us to say anything about his condition. Or maybe he looks at his humans that way all the time. Let's hope these kitties recover from whatever caused this outrage and that their fur grows back to normal soon. -via Boing Boing
Most of my life, I assumed that the way you could tell alligators from crocodiles is that alligators lived in Florida and crocodiles lived in other countries. But there are crocodiles in Florida, and in fact there were once a lot of Florida crocodiles. The crocodile population has declined a lot in comparison to alligators, mainly because of encroaching human development on the seashore. But crocodiles still hang on in Florida, with most of the remaining animals living in the canals near the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant south of Miami. The cooling canals transfer heat away from the power plant, and the warm waters created a whole new ecosystem. This warm, salty water with no humans living on the shores is the perfect place for crocodiles and the creatures they feed on.
Ans now that we know about these crocodiles living near a nuclear facility, how long will it be until we get a movie about killer mutant Florida crocodiles? That won't be any good for the crocs' survival.
In the hands of a skilled mixologist, a flaming drink can be a floor show in itself. Making and serving such drinks are a ritual, a ceremony in honor of the person who ordered it. But besides that, cocktails that have been kissed with fire are more than the sum of their parts. After the pyrotechnics, the drink is warm and has a certain caramelized flavor that it wouldn't have otherwise.
If your experience with fiery drinks is limited to flaming shots, you are in for a treat. Atlas Obscura takes a good look at several classic flaming cocktail recipes, including Charles Dickens' punch, which is like a boozy lemonade that's been cooked just enough to make it special. Then there's the hot ale flip, which doesn't exactly involve flame, but cooking a drink with a hot poker fresh from the fire is, uh, flamboyant enough. Or consider the show-stopping Blue Blazer, mixed cup to cup while on fire, and the decadent flaming coffee drink café brûlot. Read about all these, plus the real secret behind getting alcohol to stay lit at Atlas Obscura.
It's a scary operation, and you may have even tried it yourself at one time or another. It's the kitty transplant. Cats don't always want to go to the place you want them to be, so the transplant has to be done very carefully. Specifically, the cat must be kept in the same position as it is being transplanted. Will the cat take root where it is transplanted? There's no way to predict, and the odds are against it. Adverse reactions range from a violent action during hte procedure to merely wandering off afterward. But if you're lucky, the cat will flourish in its new spot. In this recreation, Abram Engle turns to an expert for advice about getting his orange cat Kurt to relax in bed instead of his usual cat basket. Let's listen in as they attempt a kitty transplant, and sweat it out waiting to see if the operation was a success. (via Nag on the Lake)
