In 1966, when Star Trek first graced our TV screens, the writers of the space drama set hundreds of years in the future were free to construct a historical timeline that led to intergalactic travel and the United Federation of Planets that spawned Starfleet. They had no clue that the franchise would last into the 21st century. After all, TV itself wasn't much of a thing a mere 20 years earlier. So they explained away, and when Star Trek returned in the 1980s and beyond, they stuck to the historical canon established by the original series, just filling in more details. And now we have eclipsed part of that constructed history already, making it into a fictional "alternative history." 

In the Star Trek universe, 2026 was the year that World War III began. This 45-year war led to a loss of 30% of the human population, and the extinction of 600,000 plant and animal species. Yes, it was a nuclear war that wiped out many of earth's major cities. But it didn't just spring up suddenly. Before World War III, there was the Eugenics War and the Second American Civil War. Check out the details of Star Trek's World War III at Memory Alpha plus some more details on the year 2026 at the not-totally-canonical Memory Beta. 

Let's say that snow rarely hits your region but it's snowing anyway. You want to go sledding, right? But with no sled, you might have to improvise.

Daniel LaBelle is a physical comedian who makes us laugh by risking his safety. In the past, we've seen him play the floor is lava with his entire house and being physically aggressive all the time.

In this video, LaBelle finds ways to slide down an optimal sledding hill on a frying pan, a suitcase, bubblewrap, a pair of baking sheets, rollerblades, and more. His use of a laundry basket is probably ideal.

-via Born in Space

Dr. Justin McDaniel teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. One popular class that he teaches is called Existential Despair. In this class, 13 students arrive at his apartment where they are given copies of a short novel. When Vulture magazine visited his class, that novel was Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome.

The students silently read for a few hours. They are forbidden to talk or use their phones. They may not take notes. That's because they're not studying the novel--they're experiencing it.

McDaniel then conducts a discussion of what they've read with an inevitable emphasis on the despair of the characters and themselves. McDaniel, 53 and recently divorced, is intimately familiar with despair. He tells his students:

I always say, ‘I’m not concerned with their 19-year-old self.’ I have no interest in their 19-year-old self. They’re hopeful. They have their life ahead of them. I’m 53. I’m worried about their 53-year-old self. I’m worried about the midlife crisis. I’m worried about the divorce.

McDaniel is, fittingly, composing a book about the literature of despair titled This Will Destroy You: How Literature Teaches Us to Flourish in the Face of Existential Despair.

Photo: University of Pennsylvania

In American history classes, we only learn the big things: Columbus, the American Eevolution, the Louisiana Purchase, the Civil War, and oops, better skip ahead to World War II or the school year will run out. In all these eras and in between, other important things were happening that shaped what America is today, but you wouldn't know about them unless you studied on your own.

Before and after the revolution, various factions in the colonies had their own grievances and drama. In western North Carolina, the Regulators, under the leadership of Herman Husband, rebelled against excessive taxation and predatory land speculators. Husband went on to lead other rebellions in other colonies and later states, siding with the working class against the rich and powerful. These rebellions had little to do with the American Revolution, technically, but they showed the independent spirit of the people who became Americans. PBS Origins tells the story.

American children learn about the Salem Witch Trials, in which 25 people killed, but in Europe, between 40,000 and 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft in a 350-year period. A striking number of these trials happened in Finnmark, a rural Norwegian county in the Arctic circle with a population of only 3,000 people. Between 1620 and 1693, 91 people were executed for witchcraft in Finnmark, which was about a third of all those executed for witchcraft in all of Norway's history. 

It all began with a sudden storm on Christmas Eve in 1617 that killed 40 fishermen, the majority of the men of the village of Vardø. Witchcraft was the only explanation for the storm. King  Christian IV of Denmark and Norway was a zealous witch hunter, and the people of the far north were already suspected of demonic tendencies. The first accused were the indigenous Sami, but suspicions quickly spread. Accused witches were tortured into confession, and into naming other witches. The trials took place at Vardøhus Fortress, shown above, where the accused could be held -and tortured- for months before execution. Only ten of 111 accused escaped being burned at the stake. Read about the Finnmark Witch Trials at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Timo Noko) 

Do you find that, every once in a while, you just stop paying attention? Some people call this daydreaming, others call it zoning out, and some call it boredom, or just a little break from all that stimulation. You've been told that this is bad, and you've trained yourself to never do it while driving. But you shouldn't feel guilty about zoning out, because science has found that your brain is actually performing necessary tasks while you aren't thinking about anything in particular. It appears to be a major clean out time. 

The latest research finds that zoning out behavior in your brain resembles what happens during deep sleep, and it happens more when you don't get enough sleep. There are physiological processes that occur during those times that result in a kind of biological hygiene. And since zoning out can be beneficial, maybe we should reserve some time to give in to those urges and let our brains rest. AsapSCIENCE explains further. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

The producers of the television show The Addams Family knew the audience would be familiar with the work of Charles Addams, who drew the family in cartoons for The New Yorker. Still, they wanted to go in their own direction and tell a story from the point of view of the family's butler, Lurch. John Astin would play the role. That's, of course, not how things turned out. Astin was perfect in the role of Gomez Addams, but casting calls went out for all the other roles. Plenty of people wanted to be in The Addams Family, and from the perspective of 60+ years later, they found the perfect actors. 

But you have to wonder about the other actors in the running. Vintage Everyday tells us about the 1964 casting process for the TV series, and gives us a gallery of those who tried out for the various parts. They threw their hearts into getting those roles, but all seem quite wrong to us now, especially the also-rans who didn't get the role of Lurch. -via Memo of the Air 

(Image credit: ABC Television) 

Henry Brown took the "photo a day" idea and made it speak. Every day during 2025, he talked to the camera, and then compiled it into a coherent essay about the passage of time in 365 video clips. The clips are not all in sequential order, but you can follow the times of the year mostly by the length of his hair and the background weather. In some places, there is more than one word for the day. Whatever you think of the finished product, you have to admire his dedication to the project. 

In one spot, Brown challenges you to recall what you were doing exactly five years ago. That would be difficult if it were any day but today- we all remember January 6, 2021, and we were all watching TV. If the effect of the video obscure what he actually said, you'll find a transcript at Laughing Squid. 

Imagine you discovered an ancient wall, 120 meters (394 feet) long, two meters (6.6 feet) tall, and averaging 20 meters (66 feet) wide? That's an enormous construction. On top of that, you found it nine meters (30 feet) underwater! That would be the only way it could have escaped detection all those years. How many years? Somewhere between 7300 and 7800 years. That makes it older than Stonehenge. 

The wall was found with LIDAR technology off the coast of France. Closer exploration found that the wall was built with 60 huge granite stones set into the bedrock in pairs, filled in with smaller stones between them. This all raises questions about how and why it was built. The sea level was lower then, so the wall now called TAF1 could have been a seawall, or possibly a fish catching device, depending on what conditions were like at the time. There is speculation that it could be a remnant of the legendary sunken city of Ys. The stories of Ys are fantastical, involving star-crossed lovers, supernatural floodgates, and even a mermaid. But that doesn't mean it wasn't based on some ancient event. Read about the Mesolithic underwater wall at Big Think.  -via Real Clear Science 

(Image credit: Yves Fouquet, et. al./International Journal of Nautical Archaeology)

In 1904, J.M. Barrie produced a hit play about Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. Disney made it into a children's animated adventure in 1953. But the real story behind the story is anything but charming. In this video, it is told in three chapters. First, there is the tragedy of Barrie's own childhood, which left him with a serious case of arrested development. Then, it explores his relationship with the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Davies, who inspired Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Barrie became their guardian after their parents' deaths, and they all suffered from Barrie's immature handling of the family and from the fame that Peter Pan brought them. Two of them ultimately committed suicide. Lastly, we get a deeper look into the darker side of the protagonist in the original Peter Pan stories before they were Disneyfied, and how they reflect Barrie's own psychological problems. 

The original Star Trek ran from 1966-69, but only grew more popular in syndicated reruns during the 1970s. Paramount noticed, and drew up plans for a new series, called Star Trek: Phase II under the supervision of Gene Roddenberry. Sets were built and writers were enlisted. Most of the original Star Trek cast were rehired, with the exception of Leonard Nimoy, and actors were hired to portray new crew members. But one thing led to another, and ultimately Star Trek: Phase II was scrapped in favor of a feature film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released in 1979. The script for the Phase II pilot was reworked into that of the motion picture. But there were plans for 19 TV episodes, many of them with scripts ready to go. Whatever happened to those stories?

A couple of those scripts were reused in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which launched in 1987. Some of the ideas and elements found their way into later Star Trek movies and series. And some make you wish you could have seen them on TV. Woman's World has the synopses and notes from all 19 episodes of Star Trek: Phase II for your intergalactic fantasies of what could have been. -via Damn Interesting 

Watergate is the short-hand name for the political controversy that brought down the Nixon Administration. This Watergate is a card game from 1973 in which two to six players accuse each other of malfeasance and try to deceive each other. Bribery is not only permissible but encouraged. Everyone loses, but some players lose more than others.

The key to success in this game, as in so many other dimensions of life, is to lie persuasively.

In this video, Board Game Archaeology unpacks and plays this game.

Photo: eBay user Treasures Gallery

Elisa Rogers found these unique stained glass sculptures at an estate sale. The late artist, she learned from the daughter, made "ridiculous beautiful things" that sold well enough to pay for trips to Italy. Rogers was so inspired by them that she began making stained glass herself.

-via The Husky

Fox 13 News in Salt Lake City reports that the police department of Heber City has lately been using artificial intelligences to accelerate the report-writing process. These applications are called Draft One and Code Four. They transcribe the audio recordings from police body cameras.

Recently, during one investigation, an officer's recording picked up audio from the Disney film The Princess and the Frog. The AIs interpreted this information to indicate that the officer had transformed into a frog.

Fortunately, the transformation was temporary. The officer got better.

The AI tools save time. Sgt. Keel says that it shaves off about 6-8 hours a week of work. But attorney Steve Lehto says that defense attorneys could exploit these errors during trials.

Photo by Sarah Deer used under Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Cormac McCarthy is known for prose as terse as Coolidge's and punctuation as minimal as a bikini. William Faulkner, on the other hand, took his time to express his thoughts with great verbosity. In this video, comedian Jerry Wayne Longmire plays both writers arguing about the proper density of language in narrative prose.

"The dictionary ought to charge you rent." I'm with McCarthy on this one.

This video is one of Longmire's many parodies of Faulkner, my favorite of which is his Faulknerian reading of his home electric bill. Longmire has also offered 90s rap by Faulkner, a Fourth of July celebration, discount whiskey, responding to a HOA notice, complaining about Comcast customer service, and a complaint about a clogged toilet in a hotel room.