At one time, every ad for a car that you saw on TV showed a shiny vehicle being driven by a happy motorist, maybe highlighting some of its features, with onlookers admiring it. Then Volkswagen came along and had to get creative in explaining the joys of its unassuming Beetle. So Guillaume Martin's list of the best car ads ever is heavy with old (and recent) Volkswagen commercials, interspersed with more modern ads that are just as creative. And modern doesn't necessarily mean better, as the #1 television ad is 60 years old. You'll remember many of these -some of them are works of art. You can easily play the videos in the Threadreader version, or see them somewhat smaller at the original Twitter thread, where the responses have suggestions for honorable mentions. -via Kottke

They look like movie pirates, but these are electric toothbrushes dressed as pirates, performing "He's a Pirate" from Pirates of the Caribbean. Googly eyes can look unnervingly lifelike when attached to a machine that vibrates. YouTuber Device Orchestra makes music videos with toothbrushes, adding machines, and credit card readers. I haven't found an explanation of how he makes a toothbrush produce even one note, much less a range of notes, but you can find links to plenty of other toothbrush songs at the YouTube page. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Last year, the town of Fair Haven, Vermont, elected a goat as their mayor. Lincoln, a female Nubian goat, is the town's first mayor, as Fair Haven is run by a city manager. The election was a promotion to raise funds for a playground. But Lincoln's term is only one year, so she is up for election again, and is being challenged by a police dog.

After he had to clean up the mayor's crap, literally, during her inauguration last year, Police Chief Bill Humphries is hoping for a change in leadership on Town Meeting Day.

Lincoln the Goat, who won Fair Haven's first mayoral election ever by a landslide in 2019 has her first challenger: K-9 Officer Sammy.

And Officer Sammy promises to cut the crap.  

Sammy, a female German Shepherd, boasts a distinguished career with the Fair Haven Police Department. However, a third party has entered the race, with a kinder, gentler, background as a therapy dog. The election will take place during a town meeting in March. Read up on the race at the Burlington Free Press. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Town of Fair Haven)

Ze Frank takes another sideways turn from his True Facts series and presents a test to determine if you are in fact, human, and you have retained your humanity in spite of a dull office job. He released this as the weekend approached, in order to cause minimum depression. This video contains a more-than-a-minute ad in the middle, but it's easy to skip. I learned a couple things from this. I learned that some ball-point pens come with a plastic guard, which I have never seen in my life. I am also reminded once again of how fortunate I am to be able to work from home.  

By 2007, the NFL had tried all kinds of over-the-top productions for the Super Bowl halftime show, but rarely did the television audience feel engaged, much less impressed. But that year, they had booked Prince. Prince had his own ideas about the 12-minute show. He skipped some of his own hits to play covers. He didn't want to do interviews. And he didn't want to have a backup plan. And then game day came with rain, which had never happened in Miami on Super Bowl Sunday.

[Vocalist] Shelby J.: Not just a drizzle. Not just a light rain. It was like a monsoon.

[Prince's manager/assistant Ruth] Arzate: I was like, “Oh shit.”

Shelby J.: We’re thinking, “Are we gonna change some stuff? … Are we gonna wear tennis shoes now?” Prince was like, “Don’t change nothing.” And that was part of him teaching us and me personally to be fearless.

Arzate: I knew that the executives were concerned about the rain and about electrocution and they were like, “We can always pretend that you’re singing” and have everything off and just play the track. And Prince was like, “I’m Prince, I’m gonna play live.”

The rain continued through halftime, and the result was the greatest Super Bowl halftime show ever. Read the story of that show, from the people who were involved, at the Ringer. -via Metafilter

Between 2005 and 2010, George Lucas worked to develop a TV series in the Star Wars universe. Star Wars: Underworld was shelved in 2010 because of the production costs, but 50 episodes were written. According to Wookieepedia:

Star Wars: Underworld is said to be set primarily in the Coruscant underworld (which was briefly glimpsed during Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones), in the time period between Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope.[11] It is during this period that the Galactic Empire rises to ultimate power throughout the galaxy.[12] In 2005, George Lucas told Celebration III audiences that the show would not focus on any characters from the films, but that some of them could appear;[13] "A lot of the issues from the films are connected, but you won't necessarily see a lot of the people that are connected."[14] He later described the show as "bare-bones" and "action-heavy,"[15] and explained that it would depict what the inhabitants of the Star Wars galaxy do for entertainment.[16]

The five-minute scene above, which is following by some behind-the-scenes clips, is enough to make me rather curious about what else still exists on film. -via Digg

Secret Bay, off the coast of Mabini in the Philippines, has a secret that you have to dive way down to find. Bayani Cardenas, a hydrologist at the University of Texas at Austin’s Jackson School of Geosciences, took a dive when he heard the water was bubbling. The bubbles at the top were nothing compared to what he encountered at the sea floor.

Some bubbles came a few at a time, in little hiccups, while others twirled like streamers. “At first, you see maybe a bubble spring every 50 feet or something, and then 150 feet down, you see a whole curtain from a distance,” Cardenas says. In some patches, he adds, the bubbles were “just gushing.” The researchers went down nearly 200 feet.

Cardenas and his team named the area Soda Springs. Read what causes all that effervescence, and see videos at Atlas Obscura. 
 
(Image credit: University of Texas Jackson School of Geosciences)

Who knew Bikini Bottom was such a dangerous place? YouTuber Carnage-Boy mixed the audio from the 1917 trailer with video footage from Spongebob Squarepants to create this masterpiece. If you want to compare the two trailers, they are together here. The movie 1917 is up for ten Oscars. -via reddit

Joseph Pilates was always into fitness, as were his parents. But the athlete and bodybuilder didn't come up with the fitness regimen named after him until World War I, when he was living in England. As a German national, he was interned in a camp on the Isle of Man, along with ten of thousands of other foreigners. Due to the German blockade, they were starving. Pilates wanted to do something, and was inspired by observing cats.

“Though they were nothing but skin and bones — even the most animal-loving prisoners could hardly spare them anything from their own pitiful rations when their own children were begging to be fed — they were lithe and springy and terribly efficient as they aimed for their prey,” waxed Sports Illustrated journalist Robert Wernick in a 1962 interview with Pilates. The answer, apparently, was stretching: Pilates observed the cats constantly stretching and limbering up, and used that to inspire and refine the poses of his own exercise system. Pilates would later boast that when the 1918 flu pandemic — which killed approximately 50 million people worldwide — hit the camp, none of the men practicing his exercises got sick.

Read about Joseph Pilates and the exercises he developed at Ozy.

(Image credit: Keiichi Yasu)

This is even better than the collision of shapes implied in the title. Tadashi Tokieda passes a round coaster through a square hole that is much smaller than the coaster's diameter! The simple explanation is that he folded the paper in a way that made a slot as long as two sides of the square. He has a more detailed explanation in this video from Numberphile. This will make a great parlor trick to impress your kids. -via Damn Interesting

Show your Valentine some extra love by sending a Valentine card featuring their favorite pop culture character! Artist PJ McQuade has you covered, as always. He has designed four new Valentines for 2020, featuring Larry David, Keanu Reeves, old school Pennywise (the scariest Valentine ever) and badass Ellen Ripley!

Those are in addition to McQuade's 17 classic Valentine cards with romantic messages from the characters of Star Wars, Games of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and more.  

If you have a lot of sweethearts (lucky you), you can order all 21 Valentines in a combo pack! See all these Valentines, plus stickers, magnets, and cards for other occasions at Castle McQuade.

Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket! Real estate developer Nile Niami spent seven years building a house that is ready to go on the market. The asking price is $500 million, which would make it the most expensive home ever sold in the US. Now, three acres in Los Angeles will bring a pretty penny, but most of the cost comes from the 100,000-square-foot structure.

Replete with a nightclub, four swimming pools, bowling alley and 360-degree vistas of sun-dappled Southern California,  the symbol of America’s latest gilded age has generated a flood of media coverage since the price was announced in 2015.

Is it worth that much? As with anything, this home is worth exactly as much as someone is willing to pay for it. Niami says he has interested parties, but the number of potential buyers is relatively small. If you had a half a billion to spend on a home, wouldn't you prefer to have it built to your own tastes? And if you were a real estate developer, wouldn't it be more prudent to build 500 homes to sell for a million dollars each? Read about the nation's most expensive home at Bloomberg. -via Digg

(Image credit: Michael Leonard/The Society Group)

Unicode has approved a set of new emoji icons you can use to dress up your text messages and social media posts. They include animals, people, food, household objects, and symbols. Some are thoroughly modern, like the transgender flag, bubble tea, and a protest sign. One seems a little anachronistic: fondue. What? Is the 1970s dinner fad coming back? Or will the emoji be used to signal that something is very old or passé? But what really stuck out to me was this one:

Not because it's odd. What struck me as odd was the description: "disguised face  disguise | disguised face | face | glasses | incognito | nose."  Does no one call these Groucho glasses anymore? Does knowing whose face the "disguise" is modeled on mean I am ancient? See all the new emoji here. -via Kottke

In the beleaguered region of Kashmir, high in the Himalayas, people drink a unique green tea that's a fairly bright pink. Kashmiri chai contains tea, salt, baking soda, spices, and milk, and is often served topped with crushed nuts. There's nothing pink in that ingredient list, but the particular way it is made caused it to turn pink. It's an acquired taste.

Charles von Hügel, an Austrian explorer who wrote an extensive account of his travels in Kashmir during the 1830s, was one of the first westerners to give the world his unvarnished opinion of pink tea. “The taste is like that of a strong soup made out of scorched flour,” he wrote. Even Kashmiris acknowledge that salty tea is an acquired taste. Journalist Scaachi Koul joked that the tea is “one of our worst culinary contributions to the world and we should be ashamed.”

However, the recipe changes at lower altitudes, and the Kashmiri chai offered at your local cafe contains little to no salt. Read about this unique tea and how it gets that pink color at Atlas Obscura.

Supposedly, this stray cat had been trapped inside a wall for two years, while one of the building residents had been feeding her through a small hole. Her rescue is heartwarming story, but I suspect that the cat had another exit somewhere and chose to live in the wall because it's a warm enclosed space with an occasional rodent -and cat food. If she were really trapped, she would have walked out of the hole he was feeding her through. Still, it's good that she has a proper home now. -via Digg