Fetch the Geritol...

Here's a website designed to help you feel old...

Just keep pushing the "Another" button until your bursitis acts up.

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A River Runs Through It...

Here's a neat online tool sponsored by Mapbox and, I think, built off Google Maps where you can plop a raindrop anywhere on the map and trace its path as it flows to the ocean (or wherever its final destination may be.)

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To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before

There are currently ten toilets in space:

• International Space Station: 4
• Crew Dragon Docked at ISS: 1
• Soyuz Docked at ISS: 1
• Tiangong Space Station: 2
• Shenzhou Docked at TSS: 1
• Artemis II on way around Moon: 1

This will be the first time a toilet has left low earth orbit, and the toilet on Artemis II will venture further from earth than any crapper in history. It had a spot of trouble, but the crew and Mission Control successfully fixed it.

They also had trouble with the capsule's computers running two instances of Microsoft Outlook. A lot of talk is made of NASA's SLS rocket using Shuttle-era solid rocket boosters, but it's also worth noting that Microsoft Outlook was first released 25 years after the final Apollo moon mission… …and 29 years before Artemis II.

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When you negotiate with terrorists...

...all you do is teach the monkeys to steal.

They're going to advance to kidnapping for banana ransoms, mark my words.

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"Wake up babe, new role model just dropped."

Our curators are lowkey rizzlers. So they teamed up with our intern to make this video. pic.twitter.com/5SFyexRO7y

— National Gallery of Art (@ngadc) December 19, 2025

Tab Clearing...

• The 1878 bridge over Loughery Creek in Ohio and Dearborn Counties in Indiana is the last one of its design in the world


• The Suicide Song of the 2nd Lanai


• Practically Tactical

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Tab Clearing...

• The coolest work-from-home commute...


• Totally normal administration, guys. Nothing to worry about. Everything’s under control. Top men.


• China is exporting the Great Firewall.

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Tab Clearing...

• A neat web tool that allows you so select various countries, states, and provinces and drag them around a Mercator projection map to see how their perceived size is affected by the distance from the equator: True Size.


• The Two Mearsheimers


• The dilemma of the rural NPR station.

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They say there's a day for everyone...

Well, actually I have no idea if they say that or not, but it sounds good.

Anyway, there's apparently a day for me, because January 2nd is World Introvert Day!

Now I think I'll go read a book quietly someplace.

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For the nerd in your life...

A twee little retro-looking "television" that'll store ten hours of video (but only has a 2-hour battery). It even has a speaker, so presumably the volume knob is an actual volume knob!

Just in time for stocking stuffing!

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Floating Home

So I'm tooling around the satellite view in Google Maps, as one does, and I'm scrutinizing Presque Isle up there in Erie, Pennsylvania and I see what look like a bunch of cottages in the middle of Horseshoe Pond.

"Huh," say I, "I wonder what's up with these?"

So I grab my little Street View dude and drop him on the Coast Guard Road that runs alongside the pond and sure enough, those are houses on pilings or floating homes of some sort.

Quick! To the Google!

And there I found this neat little story...

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Sunrise, Sunset

It's a bit of a puff piece, but this WaPo bit on the solar shenanigans in American's northernmost decent-sized town, Utqiagvik (née Barrow) in Alaska, is full of interesting bits of triviata. 

Meanwhile here in Hoosieropolis, sunset tonight will be at 5:27. Fortunately, though, it will rise again about 7:30 tomorrow morning, rather than in frickin' 2025.

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Important Safety Tip...

Don't piss off a crow. They hold grudges.

Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.

They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.

On the other hand, get on a crow's good side and they will express gratitude.

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Robot Pot

Things I didn't know I needed until just now: A robotic self-propelled flowerpot.

Think of it as a prosthetic for a brown thumb.

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Torn...

Some dude has put together a book of a bunch of Army uniform photos from Natick Soldier Systems Center dating from the early Seventies to about the Gulf War, and the nerd in me wants to buy it, but I'm not sure I want to buy it this badly...

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Unicorn Sighting

Here's a thing you don't see every day: A genuine, honest-to-Rollie Vincent Black Shadow just tooling down your street.

These things were legends. The mystique surrounding them means that, depending on the particular year model or variation, prices can easily exceed a hundred grand for a nice one... and that one sure looks nice.

That dude has got to have a regular Garage-Mahal of glorious scooters.

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Future stuff...

I just can't get over how the price on tech stuff has just plummeted. It wasn't that long ago that a 4K 55" TV was a science fiction movie prop. Now BezosMart is blowing the things out for $299 on Prime Day...

You can spend a ton on tablets or smartphones if you want, but you can get a pretty decent one for very reasonable dough if you don't have to have the most memory or megapixels.

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Okay, this is cool...

The original cast of The Avengers assembled again... to dub their lines in the Lakota language.

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Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

I was today years old the first time I heard about this website. Someone went and dropped a reference to this wonderfully off-kilter web page and I've been stuck in the mystery flesh pit all morning.

Careful! It's deep!

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Muck Raker

I've seen a lot of things in the canal up in Broad Ripple Village proper since I first moved here years ago: bicycles, lawn furniture, a picnic table, ducks, electric scooters, drunk fratbros, Indianapolis Colts punters (but I repeat myself), but this was a first...

The big tracked excavator in the background, the one atop the pile of rock, was scooping up loads of rock and dumping it into this tracked dump truck. (Googling around says this is technically a "crawler carrier" with a "dump chute", I guess?)

The dump truck would then trundle its load along the canal to the other tracked excavator, which would scoop it out and use it to reline the banks. It'd drop a couple scoops and then use its bucket to... WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! ...smoosh the rocks it had just dropped into the bank of the canal.