The best use for artificial intelligence, aside from the eventual enslavement of the human race, is the creation of entertainments that would not be practical to produce otherwise.

The YouTube channel Neural Derp is dedicated to this noble pursuit. In this video, we listen to a country song about the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation traveling from trailer park to trailer park in their warp-powered RV. They're a close-knit crew with each person contributing to the work, whether it's wrestling raccoons or using telepathic powers to cheat at poker. The bits about the foibles of Wesley Crusher are especially amusing.

-via The Awesomer

The Clark County Historical Society preserves and educates people about the history of the area around Springfield, Ohio. John Fritz, a member of the society, has been a dedicated volunteer and supporter for many years. The society has honored his tireless work for its mission by mounting an engraved plaque in his honor above a urinal in the men's room.

No disrespect is intended. For years, Fritz has joked that he wished to be honored for his work with a plaque above a urinal. The society has chosen to fulfill that specific wish. Visit the site and pay homage to his work.

-via Dave Barry

Ashcroft Fire Rescue in British Columbia responded to a brush fire last week and found locals already fighting the blaze. The fire was extinguished with no trouble, leaving a scorched area of about 60x90 meters. But what caused the fire? The answer is in the image above. The site is about three kilometers away from the nearest river. The firefighters determined that an osprey had taken the fish and then dropped it into power lines, causing falling embers that sparked the blaze. Ashcroft Fire Rescue had fun reporting the incident, using every pun they could think of. Here's a sample. 

We do suspect by the size of the fish and the heat of the day probably caused the rather tired bird to drop its catch. Or another suspicion could be that it’s tired of raw fish and wanted to give cooked a try. 

The local newspaper went all in on the alliteration potential for this story.  -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Ashcroft Fire Rescue) 

Eighty years ago today, the first nuclear bomb was deployed over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The bomb was dropped by the B-29 named Enola Gay, piloted by 30-year-old Col. Paul W. Tibbets. Six other planes participated for reconaissance, escort, scientific analysis, and photography. The mission commander was William Sterling Parsons, who worked with the Manhattan Project under Robert Oppenheimer. Parsons decided to join the mission on the Enola Gay to arm the nuclear bomb after takeoff to protect the US base on Tinian Island in the event of a crash during takeoff. 

The crew members of the various planes later described what the mission was like and their impressions of the nuclear explosion. Despite being miles away by the time the bomb detonated, they were rendered speechless. One crew member thought they had missed their target, because he couldn't see any city remaining. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, leading to Japan's surrender and the end of World War II.   

Although none of the Americans who participated in the mission are alive today, Garrett M. Graff compiled quotes from military archives, memoirs, speeches, and other sources for his new book The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb. Read an excerpt published today in the Washington Post.    -via Damn Interesting 

The Seattle Kraken is a professional hockey team that hails from Seattle. Its mascot is Buoy, a "sea-troll" indigenous to Puget Sound. Buoy and the team recently visited Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska for fly fishing during a high school hockey camp event in Anchorange.

During the fishing, a grizzly bear carefully watched the party. Then it charged Buoy, perhaps enticed by his unusual appearance. Was this creature a new, exotic delicacy?

Fortunately for the human inside the Buoy suit, the bear kept some distance and no one was injured.

-via Fox News

Japanese artist Nanako Kume produced this stylish and eye-catching lampshade that look like shavings from a giant pencil. That's because that's what she actually made. Kume produced a giant wooden pencil (minus the lead) and a scaled-up manual pencil sharpener. Then she cut the shavings off one by one to form shades for pendant lights.

-via Nag on the Lake

The small hamlet of Torrington, Alberta, (population 239) is proud of their history. You can learn about it at the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum, which boasts 82 dioramas illustrating events in Torrington history, populated by taxidermied gophers. The museum is operated by volunteers and is open daily in the summer and on weekends the rest of the year. Admission is by donation, because "We will never let finances get in your way of the joy of seeing dead gophers!"

The origin of the museum is quite a story. In the 1990s, Torrington received a small grant from the province to create a tourist attraction. At a brainstorming meeting, one woman suggested a museum of stuffed gophers. It was a joke, but it became real. Five people volunteered to learn taxidermy, and the whole town got involved in making the displays. PETA heard about it, so by the time the museum opened in 1996 it had become world famous. You can see a short video about the museum here, and see more pictures here. -via Fark 

Remote control LEGO vehicles can do some amazing stuff. Can they climb walls? You have to design them specifically for the task. In this video, the guys at Brick Technology start small, but then attempt to climb ever taller walls. For each LEGO wall, they begin with failure. But we see how they quickly identify the problem, and redesign the vehicle to fix it. Bigger wheels. Lower axles. Greater length. Adjustable weigh distribution. Success comes only when the vehicle climbs to the top and manages to land on the other side without toppling over, and be able to drive away. For each extra layer in the wall, the vehicle gets bigger and more elaborate, until the later models look more like robots than vehicles. The last version, challenged to climb a wall 40 bricks tall, might remind you of a medieval war machine. They had to pull out all the stops for that one! -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Pics or it didn't happen! It's always been that people tend not to believe something until they see it for themselves. In the 19th century, thousands of New York residents lived in overcrowded tenement slums with crumbling walls, dangerous staircases, and no plumbing. They did piece work in their homes, took in boarders for extra money, and raised so many children some had to sleep outside. Jacob Riis arrived in New York from Denmark in 1870 and had to deal with crushing poverty until he got a job as a journalist with for The New York Tribune. He covered the police beat, and described the conditions in the tenements as best he could, but reading about it wasn't nearly as effective as seeing it. That's why Riis incorporated photography into his reporting. He was a pioneer in flash photography because the tenement apartments were so dark inside. In 1890 he published his book How The Other Half Lives, full of pictures of the poor people of New York. 

The book made an impression on the public, but more importantly, on the city's Police Commissioner, a man named Theodore Roosevelt. That's when housing standards began to rise. Read about Jacob Riis and the photographs that brought poverty to light at Danny Dutch.  

Ekstremsportveko (Extreme Sports Week) 2025 was held in June in Voss, Norway. It is the world's largest extreme sports festival, taking advantage of the region's snowy mountains, wild rivers, lakes, and the high cliffs that loom over the fjords. Those cliffs are perfect for extreme BASE jumping. These adrenaline junkies had looked forward to Ekstremsportveko all year for the chance to soar through this beautiful natural world. Lifted by helicopter, they eagerly jumped off a cliff that you and I would be afraid to approach the edge of. I think there was a rule that they all had to have cameras attached. Some used parachutes, others used wing suits, and one guy did his jump suspended under another guy using a wing suit! I kept thinking "Don't let go! Don't let go!" And then he let go. But no one was hurt, and a good time was had by all. -via Kuriositas 

"Tradition," G.K. Chesterton wrote, "means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is a democracy of the dead." To embrace tradition means to recognize that our forebearers were not fools and may offer us lessons that we need not learn the hard way with each succeeding generation.

So it is fitting that, as The Wall Street Journal reports, Heather Schroering and Nick Phillips married at a Las Vegas chapel in a ceremony presided over by Manny Mayo, the mascot of the Hellmann's brand of mayonnaise. Unilever, the owner of the Hellmann's brand, paid for the event in exchange for using it to create commercials--as is tradition.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Hellmann's Mayonnaise

About 30 years ago, Hello Kitty rose from Japan and took over the world. But she was just one of a long line of pop culture cats from Japan. Japanese legends and folklore are full of cats, such as Maneki Neko, the lucky waving cat. And to our delight, Japanese art going back hundreds of years documents these folklore cats. Bakeneko are cats that change into human form, or they can remain cats but speak like humans. They can even kill and take the identity of their owner! Nekomata are cats who live to be very old, and then split their tails in two and walk around on two legs. 

There are also cat witches and cats who may steal a corpse from a funeral. Don't miss the very charming story of the boy who drew cats. A post at Hanashi by Curious Ordinary also has recommendations for books and movies if you want to explore more on Japanese cats. And it has lots of lovely artworks. -via Everlasting Blort 

I saw this Honest Trailer for Freaky Friday posted today, and couldn't figure out why Screen Junkies would do an Honest Trailer for a YA movie from 2003. It turns out that a sequel called Freakier Friday opens this weekend, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Lindsay Lohan, and Mark Harmon playing the same characters 22 years later. I guess there's an audience for this, since it's become an entire franchise.

Anyway, if you are going to see the new movie, you might want to go back to the original and refresh your memory first. Did I say original? There have actually been four movies with the title Freaky Friday, from 1976, 1995, 2003 and 2018. The Jamie Lee Curtis version was the biggest hit the the four, and the only one to warrant a sequel. The verdict from Screen Junkies: it's kind of dumb, and surprisingly racist for its time. Let's hope the geriatric version does better. 

Orville and Wilbur Wright are credited with the first sustained flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft that is powered by an engine in 1903. It can be argued, though, that Wilhelm Kress designed, built, and flew the first such vehicle in 1901. Much depends upon precise definitions.

The first few years of the Twentieth Century were filled with rapid technological innovation, so it should not come as a surprise that inventions developed almost simultaneously as humanity soared off into the heavens.

Similarly, The Takeout explains, we cannot be certain who invented the corn dog. But the era of maximal corn dog development was from 1937 to 1946, when several geniuses labored independently at the creation of this supreme food. George and Vera Boyington of the Pronto Pup brand are most commonly credited with the invention in 1941.

No matter who created the corn dog first, we can all be grateful for their efforts to advance the human adventure.

Photo: Flickr user Intangible Arts used under Creative Commons license

Communication between pilots and air traffic control for international flights is almost always conducted in English. It makes sense to use the most common second language for communication. But it doesn't always work, especially when no one involved speaks English as their first language. A TAP Air Portugal flight from Lisbon to Nice crossed into France with a little problem on board- all the toilets were non-functional. Aware of the passengers' potential for distress, the pilots contacted air traffic control in Nice to request expedited landing. They didn't want to circle waiting for earlier planes to land if they could get permission to skip the line. 

However, this divergence from protocol involved several messages among quite a few people. In a radio transmission, the word "toilet" got confused for the word "pilot." The pilot's not working? It must be a medical emergency. What, you have no pilots? Then when the plane's crew tried to clarify, the control tower crew got the idea that the auto-pilot was non-functional. They put Nice Airport in a state of alert for the jet landing. Read an edited transcript or listen to a video to hear what went down in Nice.  We assume that the plane was able to land and let the passengers do their business. 

(Image credit: Siyuan He)