A folded map in the passenger seat is from the past and narrated driving directions by a computer is the present. In between came various gadgets designed to help drivers get to where they were going. Among them was Iter Auto, an Italian invention from the 1930s. It consists of a paper scroll identifying waymarkers along a popular driving route.

Place the appropriate scroll in a machine which is hooked into the car's speedometer. It scrolled automatically to match the pace of the car.

I found this information on Tangible Media, a marvelous online museum of various forms of historic physical media organized according to a well considered taxonomy.

-via David Thompson

The US goes all out for historical anniversaries, but the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in Philadelphia to celebrate 150 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence left a bad taste in many mouths. Called the Sesqui for short, the world's fair opened in May of 1926 while still under construction and closed on December 31st with a whimper instead of a bang. Early visitors were not impressed, and word of mouth kept crowds away the rest of the year. The project nearly bankrupted the city of Philadelphia. 

What went wrong? World's fairs usually take ten years of planning, but this time it was delayed by World War I. Federal money was allocated, but it was not nearly enough. Philadelphia itself was wracked by political corruption at the time, and taxpayers did not line up to support the venture. The original site proved to be inadequate, and the second site had problems that drove up costs and delayed construction. Philadelphia's political boss refused to delay the Sesqui because he needed the fair timed for an election. There were other factors that went into the failure of the Sesqui, too, which you can read about at Smithsonian. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: John D. Cardinell/The Free Library of Philadelphia) 

Demi Remick is one of the world's foremost tap dancers. In addition to traditional tap, she can express her creative interpretations of famous musical themes on the stage.

Remick is now on tour with Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox, where she is dancing to jazzy renditions of famous science fiction musical compositions.

You can tab through this compilation to see her tap out to the music of Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, The X Files, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, Star Wars, and, most importantly, Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's an amazing display of her creative refashioning of old and familiar music.

You look at your income, your rent, and your grocery bill, and you think you should be able to make it work, despite the rising costs of rent, gas, and groceries. So why are you still broke? 

The modern world of internet apps makes everything simple and convenient, particularly spending money. When all you have to do is push one virtual button to buy something, the price doesn't hit you nearly as hard as handing over cash. That price may look small now, but when it's multiplied over time, you'd be shocked by the total. Automatic payments often go ignored, but the effect on your bank balance adds up, and suddenly you're broke and you don't even know how it happened. Chill Dude Explains goes over ten ways your money is disappearing while you don't even notice. Not all of them are due to the convenience of the internet, but all are easy to miss if you aren't paying close attention. 

Matt Thompson is a master "creator of mostly ridiculous and unncessary things", usually with wood as a source material. He has a model railroad that runs along the fence-line of his backyard. In the winter, he hooks a snowplow locomotive to the front to clear off the harsh winter precipitation on the tracks.

The train provides Thompson with endless opportunities for creative fun. Most recently, he added a model DeLorean DMC-12 to the front of his train. It is, specifically, a model of Doc Brown's time-traveling DeLorean from the Back to the Future film franchise.

Thompson reenacts the climactic scene from that film in which Marty McFly attempts to travel back to the future--if his car can reach 88 miles per hour.

-via The Awesomer

In early television history, tapes were sometimes recorded over or preserved in slipshod conditions, which is why, for example, many early episodes of Doctor Who are missing. Their rediscovery is a source of joy to fans.

This is the equivalent experience for medievalists.

St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) lived during the twilight of the Western Roman Empire, dying as the Vandals were literally at the gates of the city where he lived. He was a classically trained Roman intellectual who synthesized Platonic philosophy and Christian theology to a greater degree than previously accomplished.

Many but far from all of his voluminous written works survive to this day. But it was in only 2024 that Latin scholar Christian Tornau at University of Würzburg translated a manuscript discovered in Poland that contained six sermons by Augustine. Two of them were previously unknown.

Both sermons, which are concerned with the Witch of Endor, are confirmed to be very much in Augustine's style and thought, so Tornau is convinced that they are genuine. You can read more about this discovery at the webpage of University of Würzburg.

-via David Hines

(Image credit: WindyMover) 

Ingenuity can flourish anywhere, and folks in Missoula, Montana, know that if you want a cake that your party guests will be talking about for years, you go to the Walmart on Brooks Street. There are two cake decorators there who produce what has become known as "unhinged cakes." These are cakes or iced cookies with jokes and pop culture references that can be used for any occasion.  

(Image credit: stemmedflowers)

In the Missoula subreddit, the two decorators at this Walmart go by the names WindyMover and cakesbyzoey. They haven't been publicly identified or interviewed because of Walmart's policies. But locals buy their cakes out every day, and come back continuously to see what else they've dreamed up. Recent hits include Salad Fingers and musical lyrics paired with clever images. Where else would you find a cake inscribed with "I could tear up a Chinese buffet right now," or "I hope you like weird girl energy because that's all I got" ?

(Image credit: Freya_Firestar-27) 

Sure, they will take custom orders, but the random ideas these two decorators come up with are what make them so popular. Read about the unhinged cakes of Missoula at the Pulp. There are more cakes linked in the article, plus you can see pictures at the Missoula subreddit. -via Fark 

The United States is pretty unique, as soccer fans from around the world are discovering while they gather for the World Cup games. But the US is also very big, so our culture differs across the various parts of the nation. If you're traveling to Dallas, Houston, or Atlanta for the games, your experience will be quite different from those heading to the west coast or New England. And oh yes, your experience will be different from the movies you've seen.

The American South is, first of all, hot, and getting hotter every day, and it's far from a dry heat. The people are friendly, but not always fully understandable. The English they speak is different from what you learned. The trains do not go everywhere. And if you clean your plate, you'll gain weight. Matt Mitchell has a guide to get international visitors up to snuff for their stay in the South. 

This Sunday is Father's Day, but it's also the summer solstice, with the longest daylight of the year. Weather holidays were never a big thing in tropical climates, and the US is partly tropical and made up of a mixture of cultures. But in European countries where warm weather is a treat, many ancient festivals revolve around the annual movement of the sun. Midsummer is the most joyous -and longest- of those celebrations. 

When Christianity reached those northern areas, such festivals were renamed to move away from their pagan roots. The summer solstice became St. John the Baptist's feast day on June 24th, according to the tradition that he was born six months earlier than Jesus. But even with a new name and a new date, the ancient traditions lingered on, like dancing, building bonfires, and maypoles. The festival goes by different names in different languages, but they all celebrate the zenith of the sun. Read about the various solstice celebrations at the Conversation. 

(Image credit: Ivo Kruusamägi) 

Homer is the poet who defines classical Greece as a culture. Plough magazine asks:

If England has Shakespeare, Spain has Cervantes, Italy has Dante, and Russia has Pushkin, then who do we have? Do we have a great poet who captures the American spirit, the American story, the American identity?

The article authors suggest Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Herman Melville, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, among other writers.

There is much conversation today on X on the subject. I've seen proposals of Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote, and, quite cleverly, Walt Disney or Uncle Remus as America's definitive narrative author.

This, of course, assumes that America has a Homer. Within the Plough article, Jane Clark Scharl argues that there is no American national epic equivalent to Homer yet.

But if I had to decide, I'd go with T. Greer's response:

This is the only correct response.

The closest thing American culture ever had to a text like the Odyssey and Iliad… was the King James Bible. https://t.co/xUxuCwkjCi

— T. Greer (@Scholars_Stage) June 17, 2026

The language of this text that was commonplace in American homes has shaped the American English language more than, I think, any other book.

How would you answer the question? Who do you think is America's equivalent or approximate Homer?

Image: Kelly Library

This coffee pot and milk jug are so cute! They look like a pair of penguins on the march.

Various websites indicate that they are of Soviet origin--specifically the Oktyabrsky Porcelain Factory in what is now the Bashkortostan republic within Russia during the 1960s. They can sometimes be found with matching cups and saucers.

-via Soviet Visuals

The What If? series by xkcd's Randall Munroe and Henry Reich of MinutePhysics (previously at Neatorama) takes on hypothetical questions no matter how dumb they are. Many of the answers end with "we'd all die," and that explains why this one is so short. The question is, "What if everything was antimatter, EXCEPT Earth?"

Now, antimatter is a difficult concept which they do not try to explain to us, otherwise the video would be hours long and no one would watch it. I don't understand antimatter, either, but if we just fall back on science fiction involving a mirror universe or an alternate reality in which everything is backwards, we can follow the video. You probably won't understand antimatter any better afterward, besides learning it's not a good thing for earth. But listen carefully, and you'll glean some neat stuff, like how at dawn we are facing the direction the earth is moving. We also learn that Munroe, a former NASA engineer, would really like to see another space telescope.

Last year, we brought you a video about how Red Lobster became famous for their endless shrimp offer until it almost bankrupted them. There have been rumors lately that Red Lobster may be bringing endless shrimp back- rumors promoted endlessly by the chain itself. Now we know what they are talking about. It's a sweepstakes.

There won't be endless shrimp for everyone, nor will it be available at all Red Lobster restaurants. Rather, one person will win an endless shrimp dinner once a month for the next 25 years. The prize also includes a year of jujitsu classes. But hey, somebody has to win, and if you're a real shrimp fan, you have only through tomorrow to enter. Get the instructions for doing that at Foodbeast. I don't know who dreamed up this promotion, but when you have one person enjoying all the benefits and thousands of losers, how is that going to make people go back to Red Lobster?  

It's become a tradition for parents to give their child the Dr. Seuss book Oh, The Places You'll Go! when they graduate from high school. It's a sentimental gesture for students who grew up reading Dr. Seuss books, and it's supposed to be inspirational. But we know the world is a really scary place, so it might be more realistic if the book were written by Stephen King. In this parody of the Dr. Seuss book, we get a tour of all the terrible places King reveals in his novels, called Oh, The Places You Should Not Go! If you've not read the books, you have at least seen the movies, and will recognize them as they turn up. This video is a gift to the class of 2026 from the Stephen King Book Club. If this were turned into a real book, it could easily become a best seller.

Machines that harness the energy of the wind are nothing new, and have been used to pump water or grind grain for more than a thousand years. But in 1868, French engineer Ernest Sylvain Bollée had a few ideas to improve on the standard windmill. His turbine, called the Éolienne Bollée, had two sets of blades. The blades facing the wind did not move, but funneled the wind efficiently onto a second set of blades that turned. A few years later, Bollée added an outer funnel to the design to concentrate more wind into the turbine. 

For even more efficiency, a weather vane below the turbine was added that determined wind direction and moved the entire turbine around to face oncoming wind! All this happened automatically, without outside power or human interaction. The Éolienne Bollée was not only a great innovation in efficiently generating power, the metal turbines were steampunk works of art. You can still find them today, some in working order. You would think this design would have been widely adopted outside of France, but either the company that held the patents couldn't produce enough of them, or they were too expensive. Read about the Éolienne Bollée and see plenty of pictures at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: Olvr)