News
Wombat zoomies!
Since you liked the adorable goat hops and I also recall a connection to wombats, I present to you: wombat zoomies. The little barrel roll sliding stop is my favorite. In addition to having square poop, I have also discovered that wombats have plate armor on their butts (under the skin) and they use their butts as weapons to basically just sit on foxes or other unwanted visitors to their burrows and squash them.
Butterflies remember a mountain that hasn't existed for millennia
The perfect combo of things you love: monarch butterflies + Lake Superior! With cool/weird science about DNA memory and all the attendant implications, there is also a guy named Dr. Andre Green at the University of Michigan Biological Station now who is doing CRISPR research with monarchs and modifying specific genes to see how it influences (if at all) their migration patterns and success rates.
"No one can figure out how eels have sex"
We're running with an animal theme this time, apparently. This is just one of those things that seems like we should have been able to figure out by now given all the technology we've got these days, and yet freshwater eels remain a total mystery. As far as I can tell there is at least more knowledge about mating in ocean eel species, but even that was incredibly recent. Semi-related, I was also reading about a species of fish called the Devil's Hole Pupfish that only exists in the Devil's Hole cave in Nevada. They just recently hit a population high for the last 25 years of 191 specimens, they were down to 35 in 2013 and scientists were trying to create artificial Devil's Hole environments in an attempt to preserve the species, but they had no luck. Fortunately (?) Hurricane Hilary last year swept a bunch of silt and material into Devil's Hole which seems to have boosted algae growth and contributed to the upswing in population, so silver linings I guess?
Totally bizarre facts about the star-nosed mole
This came about because of my comments in the last newsletter about the origins of rabbit hole as a phrase. I'd been trying to think of all possible animals that burrow and might have been applicable substitutes for rabbits, then thought of moles, then realized I didn't know a huge amount about moles, so promptly began googling. The star-nosed moles seem like one of the coolest varieties based on my initial research, so they're the ones getting highlighted lol.
The Origin of the Phrase ‘Live, Laugh, Love’
The "Live, Laugh, Weep Uncontrollably" subheading made me audibly snort. Also please tell me why when I went to google for an image to attach and I typed in "Live, Love--" the autofill skipped over "Live, Love, Laugh" and went straight to "Live, Laugh, Toaster Bath" 💀
Exclamation Marx!
It's supposedly Karl Marx's great-great-grandson doing parkour. That's it. That's the whole thing. Tbh the video is mid, but the sheer novelty of the premise was amusing. Naturally I did a bunch of digging to see if it was legit and in spite of a bunch of news sites reporting it as true, it seemed unlikely since A) Karl Marx apparently only had three of his seven children survive to adulthood and they were all daughters (all named Jenny, which is a whole other weird tangent....), plus only one of them had children since the other two committed suicide pre-kids, and the one who had kids took her husband's last name of Longuet so none of her descendants would be likely to have the last name Marx, and B) Setting aside the possibility of any completely undocumented bastard children/grandchildren/great-grandchildren, the kid claiming to be Marx's great-great-grandson was a teen at the time of the video and just doing the math his parents (one of whom theoretically would be Marx's great-grandchild) would have had to have him when the great-grandchild was ~70, which is not strictly impossible if it was the dad, but seems highly unlikely. Annnnd then after sorting through all that there was another site I found trying to debunk the claims where the guy in the videos (apparently) popped up in the comments and said he never even claimed to be related to Karl Marx, that was just fabricated by the outlet that originally ran an article about him to try to generate more clicks. Oh, the internet.
Bread Stamps and Their Uses
But like, big cast iron ones that you use to mark the bread before it's baked, not like postage stamps with bread on them or ration stamps to get bread from a store (both of which were thoughts I had ahead of processing what it was actually referring to, I also would 100% buy postage stamps with nice bread art on them). There was a brief exchange in Thelma (the old lady action movie) about the importance of bread and how it has lessened over the years so naturally I made a mental note to poke around and see what new bread knowledge I could learn, and thus: bread stamps!
Mr. Rogers Narrating How Crayons are Made
It's so soothing. A wonderful calm little orderly examination of how crayons are made that may also scratch your color-coding itch for how neatly they're arranged by the machines. The sort of video that is nice when you just need at least one small thing to make sense and be predictable for a bit.
The “Gay” Bomb; Yes…Really…
I have no explanation for how I got here aside from somehow I was looking up weird Cold War possibilities that were drafted up and proposed but never pursued (kickstarted by an initial reference I read to the US contemplating dropping XL condoms labeled "medium" in the USSR to try to intimidate or demoralize them), and eventually stumbled across the gay bomb. Honestly my first thought after reading what they were actually proposing was "The US military is responsible for originating sex pollen/fuck or die as a smut trope, I hope they're happy" and I stand by that.
Paper Forest (In The Afterglow of Rapture)
I was going through old songs and must have been in a really particular headspace back then without realizing it because like 5 songs in a row were all somehow connected to the idea of maps. This is sort of a melancholy hope vibe if you don't know the song? So I would say less if you want a strict pick-me-up and more if you just want to be in the feels for 3 minutes and 41 seconds (approximately).