This is pretty good!

I've been on a deep dive on the topic for a while now and I'm kinda amazed I missed Chris's video when it came out.

There's a lot of good info in here and it largely jibes with everything I've learned (or lived through.)

Here Comes the Flood

We're fine here in SoBro, but the White River's gonna crest here in north Marion county early this afternoon.

Ravenswood is gonna flood, but Ravenswood floods all the time. They're closing the gates in the flood wall here in Broad Ripple up on 67th Street. This is a novelty to me. I’ve been here close to twenty years now and this is the first time I remember the flood gates getting closed. We'll be fine (they're a bit more than a mile north of us) but the Arts Center is fixin' to get wet.

The big loser is going to be the quaint little neighborhood of Rocky Ripple. Nestled in between the White River and the canal, over by Butler University, it's surrounded by a levee built in 1937 after the historic flood of 1913.

The White River is gonna get higher than it did in 1913 and may overtop the levee by as much as a foot, which will wipe out the parts of the structure that are in poor shape. If that happens, bye-bye Rocky Ripple.

.

In today's episode of "The Internet Was A Mistake"...

What is this I can't even

Done GIFfrom Done GIFs

Zoom Zoom!

You want a little vicarious zooming around Italy's Amalfi Coast in a rental Mazda MX-5? Here you go!

.

To Boldly Nerd Like No One Has Nerded Before

Any kid in my neighborhood when I was in elementary school would have cheerfully murdered people in their beds to get their hands on this USS Enterprise bridge playset.

.

Bonnie Tyler has left the building.

Like everyone else who secretly loved the shit out of the song "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and its bizarro video but was too cool to admit it, I am saddened by this news.

In tribute, the best spoof video of all time:

Brain Buckets

Danish PSA's go pretty hard.

.

Tankity!

Interesting video on the Sheridan, the Army's last light tank.

Prince's Gate

It's been forty six years and... *glances at watch* ...two weeks since Operation Nimrod, so I've settled in to watch The Final Option via Amazon Prime Video.

"You Have 60 Days"

You'll note that the video was published on April 8th.

Like clockwork, comes this AutoZone memo...

How very Teutonic.

"Klaus, what if we made something that resulted in the same outcome as an airbag, but it had a whole bunch of moving parts and also effectively totals the car when it goes off?"

To all who celebrate...

Happy Perfect Date!

Great Cats of Science...

Here's an interesting bit of trivia: That mind-blowing high definition video stream we've been receiving from the Artemis II mission is being transmitted back to Earth using a laser communications system first tested with a video of a cat named Taters.

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.

.

Top. Men.

Info is coming out around the lawsuit regarding the DOGE cuts to National Endowment for the Humanities grants and... wow. 

Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were “related to DEI.”

That’s what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE actually decided which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill.

Apparently this posse of barely post-pubertal broccoli-haired incels were just feeding grant text into an LLM and asking "Chat, is this DEI?" 

Which, I guess, made sense since this merry band of Einsteins seems unclear on what "DEI" even is. I could only take a minute or two of this guy talking in circles in his deposition video trying to avoid admitting he has no idea what he's talking about.

This is how Indianapolis lost a federal grant to restore urban trees. See, if the trees in your city are, like, mostly elms or ash and Dutch elm disease or ash borers come through, that would be bad. So biodiversity in your city's trees is good... but whoops! The word "biodiversity" contains the word "diversity", and Chat-GPT says that's a no-no.

Or say you're at Duke University and you have a federal grant to study, oh, something involving disease transmission or transgenic genetic material... well, all the LLM sees is "trans" and bye bye disease research! 

.

Rivalries

Got a pretty great advertisement out of the Winter Olympics this time around.

Like a Commie Mobile Home in Space

After Skylab and Salyut, but before the ISS and Tiangong, there was Mir, which is Russian for "Peace" but might as well have meant "Hot Mess"...

That's probably being a little harsh, but a lot of what makes the ISS possible was learned via trial and error on Mir.

.

Tab Clearing...

• I had somehow made it this far in life without ever stumbling across the etymology of "dungarees".


• Gallup organization ends nine decades of monthly presidential approval rating polling.


• Ring's expensive Super Bowl ad inadvertently woke a lot of Americans up to the realization that they'd paid to build an Orwellian surveillance network to spy on themselves.

A historical take...

"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