Is it hot wnough for you? This will only add fuel to the fire. As the US is experiencing a rare and dangerous June heatwave this week, master mixer Bill McClintock has been busy mixing songs. He calls this mashup "Hotter Than a Highway to Hell With the Devil." Most of it is a mix of "To Hell With the Devil" by Stryper, AC/DC's "Highway to Hell," and "Hotter Than Hell" by KISS. There are also appearances by Pantera, Mötley Crüe , Dokken, Def Leppard, Vixen, Blue Oyster Cult, Twisted Sister, Judas Priest, Van Halen, and another song ("Hell's Bells") from AC/DC. McClintock said he got carried away after someone requested two of the songs and couldn't stop adding more. There's a list of them at the YouTube page. You'll no doubt notice that all the songs reference fire, burning, hell, and/or the devil. And to think some folks say climate change isn't real.
Marvel Studios has unveiled a limited edition souvenir popcorn bucket available at theaters during the run of The Fantastic Four: First Steps. This one features Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, played by Pedro Pascal in the movie. Mr. Fantastic's super power is the ability to stretch his appendages to great lengths. Um, which appendage is he stretching here to wrap around the bucket?
His right arm, of course! I should have said, "limb" instead of "appendage," but your dirty mind would have gone there anyway. You have to wonder why they used this particular angle as a publicity photo. My bet is that they knew exactly what they were doing.
New look at the Reed Richards popcorn bucket for ‘THE FANTASTIC FOUR: FIRST STEPS’
— Fantastic Four Updates (@F4Update) June 18, 2025
It will cost $39.99. pic.twitter.com/cqiKmMjPEs
The Reed Richards popcorn bucket will cost you almost $40, but it will include popcorn. Presumably enough so that you will have to stretch your tummy to consume it all. The Fantastic Four: First Steps will be released nationwide on July 25th. -via Geeks Are Sexy
See also: Other over-the-top souvenir popcorn buckets.
On May 22, 2025, a person using the screen name MetsNomad flew from Istanbul to New York City in the economy class of Turkish Airlines. They were served this robust and reportedly tasty meal that helpfully came with metal utensils.
I found it on Airline Meals, an online archive of food served on commercial airlines. It includes all classes, from first class to human cargo. There are also photos of meals from the 50s through the 80s, amenities kits, printed menus, and the meals served in airport lounges. Users can create accounts and share photos of their own on-board dining experiences.
-via Book of Joe
First We Feast tells us about the unique donuts available from I'm Donut, a Japanese gourmet donut chain. It's famous for its savory donuts, which include the pastries filled with freshly-cooked scrambled eggs and the ingredients of a BLT sandwich.
This video shows chef Karen Fodere introducing us to these nama-style donuts at a recent pop-up event in New York City.
Being lost at sea is not at all like Gilligan's Island. When you're out at sea on a boat, there's always the danger that the boat capsizes, crashes, or quits working. You might then be swimming, or if you're lucky, find yourself on a life raft. All you can see around you is sea, and even if you have navigational skills, you probably have no real means of propulsion. It's still happening today. Weird History has a dozen stories of people who were lost at sea relatively recently. Some made it to a desert island and others were rescued at sea. Some succumbed quickly, while others survived weeks or months before being found. Some were found dead, and some were never seen again. At least one is suspected of being a murder victim. Even if you are no longer afraid of sharks, these stories are enough to make you want to stay safely on dry land.
The first widely publicized case of alien abduction was that of Betty and Barney Hill in 1967. Their supposed memories of the incident were uncovered by hypnosis. It took a while for other cases to come forward, but in the 1980s and '90s, psychologists had their hands full of people seeking to explain their nagging anxieties by regressive hypnosis to retrieve experiences of alien abduction. However, the phenomena pretty much died out by the turn of the 21st century.
This was the period that also brought us the satanic ritual panic, which was also discovered through repressed memories brought out under hypnosis or other therapies, aided by the power of suggestion over vulnerable witnesses such as children. But the common alien abduction story was less stigmatizing and certainly more entertaining, giving us movies such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Communion (1989), not to mention the X-Files TV series. It also gave us one great lamp. Read about the rise and fall of alien abduction experiences at Aeon. -via Nag on the Lake
Everyone wants to be part of the Rebel Alliance, but not everyone can be an X-wing pilot or a Jedi warrior. There are plenty of other jobs for those without extraordinary talents. How would you like to be assigned as a tower guard on Yavin 4? If you don't make your way into the Rebellion, you might end up being Jabba the Hutt's masseuse. It's the same for those everyday guys who are caught in the employment of the Empire. Some jobs, even on the Death Star, are quite specialized and therefore boring.
In an animation made with Unreal Engine, we get a glimpse at what we might be doing in the Star Wars universe. AFK brings us this short as part of their For the Empire series (previously at Neatorama). You can see all the videos in this series in a playlist. This video is only 2:40 long, the rest is an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Child film star and later United States Ambassador Shirley Temple Black (1928-2014) was a huge celebrity from the age of 3 and the release of her first film, Bright Eyes. She inspired the creation of the Shirley Temple mocktail (non-alcoholic cocktail) in the 1930s. To make one, you need ginger ale, grenadine syrup, and a maraschino cherry.
The Takeout reports that Black herself was not fond of the drink. Before her death a decade ago, she told an interviewer that she found it far too sweet. When, in 1988, a beverage company tried to market a drink with her name, she successfully sued to stop them.
Photos: 20th Century Fox, Jodie Wilson
Over the last hundred years or so, zoos have evolved from animals in small cages to large parks that give animals space to roam and environmental elements to mimic their natural habitats, while paying customers are more likely to be confined as they observe. While it's not freedom, it's often less dangerous than their shrinking home territories. This innovation is largely the work of German businessman Carl Hagenbeck, who opened the modern Tierpark Hagenbeck in Hamburg in 1907. It took a lot of time and money for his idea to spread to cities across the globe, and they are still not universal. But before you laud Hagenbeck for his humane thinking, you should know how he got there.
Hagenbeck's father was an animal trader who had a private menagerie that people could pay to see. Hagenbeck grew his father's business and founded zoological gardens all over. In 1874, he enhanced a display of Scandinavian reindeer by expanding their enclosure and importing Sami reindeer herders to live with and take care of them. Yes, this was the beginning of "human zoos," in which visitors could observe indigenous people from all over on display with their traditional homes and livestock. He repeated these displays with native people from Africa, North America, South America, and Asia.
The idea of human zoos is repugnant to us now, but Hagenbeck's human displays were actually a step up from what had gone on before. Read about Carl Hageneck and the evolution of zoos at Smithsonian.
(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
A group of friends in California grew up watching the original Star Trek in reruns and cosplayed as the starship Enterprise crew. As college students in 1985, they made a Star Trek fan film, years before such things became common on the internet. Stan Woo had always admired the character Lieutenant Sulu for bringing Asian representation to TV, and decided to shoot the moon and ask actor George Takei to appear in their movie. Takei agreed! We don't know (yet) why the film wasn't seen for so many years, but the 24-minute film Yorktown: A Time to Heal was finally released in 2022. You can see it at YouTube.
The story of how Yorktown: A Time to Heal came about 40 years ago and took so long to be seen is the subject of a new feature documentary, featuring Eugene Roddenberry, Jr. as executive producer. Beam Me Up, Sulu will premiere at the Raindance Film Festival on June 25th and then will play in select theaters.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835, but the name Mark Twain didn't exist until years later. After working as a printer, typesetter, riverboat pilot, and a miner, Clemens got a job at a newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1862. The newspaper was influential and the staff was young and daring. They often wrote stories that played hard and loose with the facts and rubbed readers the wrong way. Later in life, Clemens made up stories to make a point, but printing hoaxes in a newspaper made him enemies.
Authors often work under a pseudonym to keep their professional and private lives separate. We don't know if this was the reasoning behind Clemens using the name Mark Twain, but it happened while he was at the Territorial Enterprise. It didn't work, as people hated what Twain published as much as they hated what Clemens wrote, and he was pretty well known on sight. By 1864, an exchange of insults with a rival publisher led Twain to challenge the man to a duel. Read about those days, and how Twain left Virginia City in disgrace, at The American Mind. As an aside, don't get discouraged by the first two paragraphs, which are incomprehensible compared to the rest of the article. -via Strange Company
Three girlfriends are checking their baggage. At an airport? Well, it looks like an airport, but things are not at all ordinary here. The people in line for inspection are warned to dispose of all bottles, but one woman has a bottle hidden deep inside that she'd honestly be better off without. We tend to cling to what is familiar, even when it holds us back. This wordless story seems scary, but in the end, what is exposed and discarded leaves the characters in a better place. I'm not going to reveal any more of the plot, but do read the signs and small print as you watch this.
Baggage is a stop-motion short written and directed by Lucy Davidson at The Aardman Animation Studio Academy. After a round of film festivals, which won this short some awards, the rest of us finally get to see it. -via Nag on the Lake
The movie Jaws opened on June 20, 1975. Directed by 27-year-old Steven Spielberg, Jaws was filmed on location at Martha's Vineyard, Edgartown, Chilmark, and Menensha, all in Massachusetts. The 50th anniversary is bringing tourists to all those places, with a huge celebration taking place in Martha's Vineyard. Hotels and events for this weekend are sold out, but events will continue through the summer.
Unlike other films at the time, Jaws opened nationwide in 409 theaters at once and made $7 million in its first weekend. It was the first movie to reach $100 million at the box office, and that only took 59 days. Jaws' success is often attributed to the fact that the monster shark wasn't actually seen for most of the movie, raising the suspense factor. That was because the mechanical shark prop rarely worked, forcing Spielberg to work around the problem. A lot of credit must also be given to John Williams' musical score featuring that familiar two-note motif.
Jaws was based on the novel by Peter Benchley, who came to regret writing the book because of the shark frenzy that it sparked. Great white sharks were not only feared, but mercilessly hunted. Benchley spent the rest of his life advocating for sharks and for other marine conservation projects. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Roger Kastel)
We read about TikTok challenges in which everyone tries to outdo each other in something outrageous and sometimes dangerous. But that's not really new, because children have been doing this kind of thing forever. I remember when kids were dared to chew on cinnamon toothpicks. In the 1990s, it was Warheads. It seems that Warheads were the result of a candy manufacturing challenge to make the sourest candy on earth, since those types of candy were growing more popular all the time. Warheads lent themselves readily to a schoolyard dare. How many could you eat before they burned a hole in your tongue? No one found out, because you gave up before that happened. But are Warheads really as dangerous as they are rumored to be? Tom Blank of Weird History Food explains how Warheads came about, what they are made of, the controversies they sparked, and why kids are both attracted to and frightened by them. -via Geeks Are Sexy
These lovely handmade glass vessels get their distinctive color from crushed quagga mussel shells. Quagga mussels are an invasive species in the US and most of Europe, having originated in Ukraine. The mussels tend to clog pipes and must be removed, but they aren't fit to be eaten, so they end up in landfills by the ton.
Glass artist Lulu Harrison has spent years studying and experimenting with waste products in order to turn them into beautiful new objects. Her Thames Glass project uses artifacts removed from pipes in and out of the River Thames such as quagga shells, local sand, wood, and metal to make glassware and tiles. She collaborated with glass blowers Sacha Delabre and Rosie Power to make the Thames Glass collection, which will be shown at the Design Museum in London June 24th through August 25th. The museum has recently awarded Harrison the Ralph Saltzman Prize for the project.
See more of the Thames Glass project at Harrison's website and at Instagram. -via Nag on the Lake
