News
Bats sing love songs!
Since we were on a brief bat tangent, I was looking up more about certain species just out of general curiosity, and I learned that there are now two documented bat species in North America that sing love songs to woo their mates! There's a whole elaborate science to figuring out what constitutes a proper song and not just repeated sounds/calls or echolocation, but since I figured you were probably less invested in that I decided to just send a clip of one of the songs lol. They first realized Mexican free-tailed bats sang love songs, and then later caught silver-haired bats singing too (and there are a ton of species in Europe that sing). Their songs aren't technically audible to human ears, but in the vid they've slowed it down so human ears can hear it.
People from all over the world are sending emails to Melbourne's trees
Literally just scroll through the letters if you want to feel a little happy. Sometimes humans are pretty okay.
Did Faeries Ride Welsh Corgis?
Since you have a corgi bud, I thought you might enjoy this. It's sort of another myth-busting rabbit hole though, because most of the internet will tell you about faeries riding corgis in welsh legends, except if you actually try to source those legends they don't exist. Instead, you will find the first real mention of faeries riding corgis to be this poem in 1946, which was shortly after Pembroke and Cardigan Welsh Corgis became two distinct breeds. Many Pembrokes have a saddle marking that is pretty distinctive, and the woman who wrote the poem just so happens to have been a super influential Pembroke Welsh Corgi breeder, sooooo it's probably more likely she thought it was just a cool idea and then it worked its way into the general consciousness rather than corgis ever having been referenced as faerie steeds in Welsh mythology (actually they are mostly depicted as riding horses lol).
Le Palais Idéal
I was looking up architecture things and stumbled across this. Idk why but the idea of this man just picking up cool rocks on his mail route every day for 34 and then eventually assembling them into his ideal weird palace with zero architectural training just makes me smile. It's very sweet somehow? And it does look very cool.
Manatees Are The Floaty Potatoes Of The Sea World
This is included solely because "floaty potatoes" is such an incredible combo of words. The article also refers to them as "floating loaves," and I had no idea that manatees inspired such eloquent nicknames.
Frank Farian: Boney M’s mastermind was one of pop’s greatest oddballs
So this one was kickstarted after the Marx debacle when I started wondering about descendants of other famous figures. So then I started looking up Rasputin's descendants (he has a great-granddaughter and great-great-granddaughter still alive today, plus at least one potential illegitimate great-grandson) and then remembered this fascinating deep-dive I read a few years ago about Boney M and some of the behind-the-scenes drama with them, and I couldn't find the original article I read but I did find this one that also draws the connections between the guy who was behind them and his other ventures, which included Milli Vanilli (who I also deep-dived at some point). It also has the link to the random song he put out via Boney M about the Troubles, in keeping with his apparent penchant for taking historical events and making them disco.
La historia de Salvador Dalí y el logotipo de Chupa Chups
Two for one! A little history of Chupa Chups (I didn't know they were the first "candy on a stick" purveyors) plus Salvador Dali doing brand design, of all things.
Jon Snow's Cape is an Ikea Rug
Similar to foley artists, costuming is another perpetual rabbit hole. The number of things I've watched on making historical attire using only period-accurate tools and techniques is...significant. But it's also fun to see the non-historically-accurate approaches like this and just the sheer creativity that goes into seeing something and going "Huh, I bet I could transform that into this totally different thing and have it look flawless."
Noodled goats!
Did you know that they sometimes put pool noodles over goat horns to help prevent them from doing any actual damage to each other/people? Usually they trim the noodles to the length of the horns, but here you can see the excellence that results if you just stick full-length pool noodles over the horns and let the goats go wild.