This map by Ian Wright at Brilliant Maps shows us the ten largest cities in Europe by population. Moscow is no surprise, and the others are plausible, but then... Ruhr? With 5.3 million people? I had to look it up, since I wasn't familiar with this city.

As with any project of this sort, you have to establish rules for your list. Do you go by population within the city limits, or the metropolitan area? That's difficult, as metropolitan areas can contain other cities. Wright decided to measure population from a city center to a circle 30 kilometers from that point. Totals are therefore understandably different from various official accounts, as each country calculates population counts differently. But then there's Ruhr, an area in Germany bordered by three rivers which contains several large cities that spread so much that they butt up against each other. Placing a circle with a 30 kilometer radius to encompass the highest population gives us 5.3 million.

You could also quibble about Istanbul if you wanted to, since 35% of the city's population lives in Asia, but why would you want to? Read more about the biggest cities in Europe, including those outside the top ten, at Brilliant Maps.  -via Nag on the Lake  

(Image credit: Frierfjord1)

Years ago, when my mother got a new car, I got her old gray Camry. Suddenly I became aware of how many gray Camrys there are. Once in a parking lot, I spotted four parked side-by-side. How did I never notice that before? At the same time, my mother said, "Have you ever noticed how many red cars there are on the road?" No I hadn't, because she was the one driving a new red car. This is called the frequency illusion, and Minute Earth explains it with a much more interesting example. There aren't suddenly more cars of your kind on the road, it's the fact that you never paid attention to that particular model before. This can happen with any new thing you encounter, like headless goat hockey, which we have covered before, although it's been a long time. This video is only 3:20; the rest is promotional.

Everyone's heard of the annual 24 Hours of Le Mans, the prestigious endurance race in Le Mans, France. But you have a much better chance of seeing the 24 Hours of Lemons, since there are a couple of dozen such events across the US every year. The real difference is that this race is restricted to cars that cost $500 or less. Safety equipment can be extra. Drivers come from across the country to compete in the 24 Hours of Lemons races, not so much to win fabulous prizes, but for the fun. Winning the race takes a back seat to the goal of finishing the race, but even that is less important than the comaraderie and laughs.

Cars show up with outrageous paint jobs and decorations, and teams often wear costumes. The cars are sorted into classes, ranging from "strong and reliable" to "more personality than power." The judges can be bribed. The races are spread out over two days, and a lot of time is spent on repairs. The winners get prizes, but there are also prizes for such things as the worst brakes. It's not that unusual to see cars being pushed over the finish line. Read about the 24 Hours of Lemons races at NPR. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Jcordle)

Screen Junkies has gotten into the habit of going back and producing an Honest Trailer for older movies that are still relevant, but I don't believe they've ever done one for a movie that is 50 years old! However, Monty Python and the Holy Grail recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, and people are still watching -and quoting- the film. So what do modern irreverent film critics have to say about Monty Python and the Holy Grail? They pretty much think it is a silly place and then fart in your general direction. Meanwhile, we get to relive the best parts of the movie in a series of clips, plus learn some trivia and see some easter eggs that only become clear after multiple viewings. Oh, we also catch a glimpse of the pop culture juggernaut that movie became years later, and catch up with what the Pythons have been doing in the 50 years since.

Album cover art may be a dying medium, but we still recall the covers that became classics. Digital artist Steven Lear, who goes by WhyTheLongPlayFace online, uses the album covers we know best in his pop culture mashups. They are more than just mashups, though, as many of them are puns connecting the cover/title/musical act with some other piece of pop culture. Anyone who has ever looked into long play albums recognizes the image above, even after Lear turned a prism into the Death Star.

Because not all classic album covers are so instantly recognizable by everyone, Moss and Fog celebrated Star Wars Day by posting a gallery of Lear's Star Wars mashups alongside the original album cover art, so you can see how far he's taken the concept... to be exact, he's taken them into a galaxy far, far away. See more of Lear's album cover mashups (they're not all Star Wars) at Instagram.

The 2008 action film Taken offers Liam Neeson as an ex-CIA operative who puts his professional skills to work when his daughter is kidnapped by Albanian human traffickers. The scene in which Neeson's character calmly threatens to find and kill the criminals shows the actor's ability to play intimidating roles.

It would be terrifying to be on the other end of the phone, as Neeson once demonstrated on Jimmy Kimmel's show.

Dustin Ballard's There I Ruined It project presents the scene in musical format. Neeson's threat is light and playful, melodiously singing a casual conversation that suggests that the threat is only a joke.

Emily and Shawn adopted a dog that was rescued by the organization We Love Satos from the woods in Ponce, Puerto Rico. The long distance adoption was because Nina is a special needs dog. Her eyelids do not cover her eyes, her mouth doesn't cover her snaggleteeth, and she has very little hair. Her eyelids, or lack thereof, require regular care, but otherwise, Nina is a happy and well-adjusted dog. She just looks like a chupacabra.

They had Nina's DNA checked, and the test came back with a long list of breeds that she may have in her ancestry. She looks a lot like a xoloitzcuintle to me, which is a rare breed that can be hairless and is known for dental abnormalities. Veterinarians believe Nina has a chromosomal defect, but she is living her best life with Emily and Shawn. You can see more of Nina and her family at Instagram.

The Instagram account Ode to German Words introduces us to compound words and idioms that convey modern situations and feelings we can all relate to. They range from expressions of joy to scathing insults, all illustrated in cute graphics with further explanations and fun facts in the initial comment. Treppenwitz is both a situation and a feeling that we've all had, but also have had to use way too many words to describe it.  



Oh, English has a rather short phrase for "I don't care," but this one is much more colorful. Continue reading to see some more highlights.

Sora News 24 tours a convenience store in Chikusei, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan that offers rental showers.

Here in the United States, it's possible to get showers at truck stops, which is handy for long-haul tractor trailer drivers. But I've never heard of getting a shower in a convenience store. It's apparently rare in Japan, too.

Sora News 24 found their showering experience quite inexpensive. A mere ¥200, which is about $1.40 USD, purchases 10 minutes of hot water. That fee also provides free soap, shampoo, and towels so that it's not necessary to arrive with those supplies.

It might be interesting (in all possible meanings of that word) if American convenience stores provided showers.

During the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, there were so many atrocities committed that you will be forgiven if you aren't familiar with The Jameson Affair. In fact, most of the horrific events of those years were never documented. James Sligo Jameson, a naturalist and heir to the Jameson Whiskey fortune, went on an expedition to the Congo in 1887 and died there a year later. The expedition suffered from supply issues and lack of support from the locals because of Jameson's relationship with a slave trader. Jameson was known to have been fascinated with the tales of cannibalism in Africa. After Jameson's death in 1888 in the Congo, excerpts from his diary and accounts from eyewitnesses tell of the day Jameson purchased a 10-year-old girl in order to witness her ritual murder and the consumption of her flesh. If you want more details after watching this video from Weird History, check out Jameson's entry at Wikipedia.

 

In 1946, renowned author Lin Yutang filed a patent for a typewriter that printed Chinese characters. This is the MingKwai typewriter, with a reasonable number of keys. By pressing two keys, eight characters from thousands in the machine's mechanical hard drive would appear in the typewriter's "magic eye" window. Pressing a third key would select from those and print the character. It was the first Chinese typewriter with a workable keyboard. Lin sank his life savings into producing a prototype in the United States, but the typewriter did not appear to be a profit-making venture, and was never mass produced. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Revolution happened. Lin moved from China to Taiwan in 1966. The prototype MingKwai typewriter remained in New York and became lost.

Fast-forward to January of 2025, and Nelson Felix was cleaning out his wife's grandfather's basement. He found a strange typewriter with Chinese characters and posted it to the Facebook group What’s My Typewriter Worth? The comment section exploded with information about the historical significance of the find and offers to buy it. There were also pleas to donate the typewriter to museums in China or Taiwan. The typewriter ultimately ended up at Stanford University. Read the story of Lin, his typewriter, and how it stayed in a basement in Queens for decades, at Made in China. -via Metafilter

Get a closer look at the typewriter in this video.

Thirteenth Century Gothic cathedrals expressed a golden age of stained glass. Film photography, some historians argue, reached its zenith in the 1930s through the 1950s. For every medium, there is a time when human creativity surges. Now, in the 2020s, the great artists of the age are pouring their magic into designing the best popcorn buckets.

We've seen this phenomenon with buckets designed for Dune 2, Despicable Me 4, and Gladiator 2. Now that the horror classic Jaws has reached its fiftieth anniversary and return to theaters, Alamo Drafthouse has released images of its custom popcorn bucket for the event. It mimicks the most famous poster for that film.

-via Discussing Film

Fast Company reports on an epoch-defining technological development: the self-propelled zipper. YKK, the Japanese firm that is the largest zipper manufacturer in the world with possession of about 40% of the global market, is experimenting with motorized zipper pulls.

The product will mostly likely begin with large tents that normally require the use of ladders to assemble. These new zipper pulls can join sections 16 feet long in a mere 40 seconds. This invention is obviously useful for people assembling tents. But it's also clear that smaller versions could be helpful in alleviating people of the laborious task of getting dressed.

-via Book of Joe

I just learned about Pub Choir from an unrelated video at kottke. Pub Choir is an Australian project led by Astrid Jorgensen where people go and learn to sing popular songs in three-part harmony. They describe it as an "ENTIRELY improvised, comedy music lesson." It's somewhat similar to the Toronto-based Choir! Choir! Choir! You don't have to be a singer to join the fun, and in fact non-singers are encouraged to participate because many voices make it much easier for shy people to belt out a tune.

At every Pub Choir show since 2022, one of the things they did was record all the participants singing at least one line from Queen's operatic anthem "Bohemian Rhapsody" for a project almost three years in the making. Now all those shows have been compiled into one video. The participants totaled more than a hundred thousand singers! See more Pub Choir videos at their site.   

The German magazine Stern had a journalist who was an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia. Gerd Heidemann was so avid that he once bought Hermann Göring's yacht and restored it. During that project he dated Göring's daughter and met a lot of former Nazis. So when Heidemann managed to get his hands on 60 volumes in Hitler's handwriting, his bosses were inclined to believe these were diaries Hitler kept from 1932 to 1945. A renowned historian examined the diaries and their provenance and believed they were genuine. So Stern paid an enormous amount of money for the volumes in 1983. As word got around, Rupert Murdoch paid for the right to publish the dairies in his British newspaper The Sunday Times.

But as The Sunday Times announced their world exclusive, a day before Stern published the story of the diaries' discovery, doubt were starting to add up about the authenticity of the books. Find out how the fake diaries was unearthed and who actually wrote them at BBC Culture. -via Strange Company