TheScreamingFedora sharpened a joke more tamely made here.

Previously: Biggie Smalls the Tank Engine

In this video, a man partially immerses a praying mantis in water, thereby forcing the hairworms possessing it to leave. That the mantis also dies, according to one commenter, is not because the videomaker left it in the water to drown alongside the infestors. — Read the rest

The greatest break in snooker history is Ronnie O'Sullivan's legendary 147 at the 1997 World Championship. He not only sank every ball with unmatched grace and force, but did so in a record-breaking 5:20s, some two minutes faster than the previous record. — Read the rest

ZX Spectrum Next is more than just a cute retro-looking box or a glorified emulator. It is a new 8-bit computer, backwards-compatible with the 1980s' original, yet enhanced to provide a wealth of advanced features such as better graphics, SD card storage, and manufacturing quality control. — Read the rest

These smiling assassins enlisted as snipers when Germany invaded Russia in 1941. "We mowed down Hitlerites like ripe grain," said Lyudmila Pavlichenko aka Lady Death, one of many elite snipers whose photos were colorized by Olga Shirnina aka Klimbim.

Convenience always carries costs. In the case of e-commerce, the surge in residential deliveries is causing in urban gridlock. Citylab goes out on delivery routes for their interesting report:

In this really fantastic long-form essay published in the online magazine Strange Horizons, Erin Horáková digs into the weird way William Shatner's James T. Kirk has been collectively misremembered by popular culture. As she writes:

There is no other way to put this: essentially everything about Popular Consciousness Kirk is bullshit.

Justin Rhodes profiles an urban market gardener who leases other people's residential yards for planting produce, which he harvests and sells up and down the east coast of the United States. He makes over $5,000 a month.

Red Lava Toys is a Detroit-based startup that make super cool, low-cost custom Minecraft figs at a local makerspace: they CNC-milled their own injection molds for the body and joints, and have precision die-cut vinyl stickers that they print to order with long-lasting ink and cover with a clear adhesive coat, then place them on the body of the toy.

26 years ago.

The Book of Miracles (also known as the Augsburg Book of Miraculous Signs) is a compendium of beautiful 16th-century illustrations of cosmic anxiety and apocalyptic surrealism. The new edition from Taschen, edited by Till-Holger Borchert and Joshua P Waterman, is a perfect introduction to the Renaissance obsession with signs, portents and the damned weird.

Periodic Stats is a dead-easy web-based Periodic Table to click around, showing all the stats and the history of each element. The only thing missing are illustrations of each one! [via Reddit]

The Neural Parametric Singing Synthesizer is a voice synth with a difference: it soars! It's perfectly uncanny; any better and you'd not even suspect it might be a robot, any worse and it would just sound bad.

Previously: I feel fantastic.

I love Alex Schaefer impasto works depicting branches of Chase bank going up in flames in daytime. They were from a series by him called "Disaster Capitalism," and apparently the banks (and cops) would pretend he was planning acts of arson to try and make him stop painting. — Read the rest

Rancher Adrienne Ivey noticed her 150 heifers were all bunched together, and headed over to find them being herded by a "furry little beaver."

"It wasn't until we got to the very front of the herd, that we could see what all the commotion was about."

I don't play a lot of games, but my friend Craig loaned me his BioShock discs for Mac couple of years ago and I enjoyed it. The super creepy dystopian universe is a critique of Ayn Rand's simplistic political and economic ideas based on the concept of "rational self-interest." — Read the rest

A time-lapse radar loop from Regional and Mesoscale Meteorology Branch shows today's storms billowing like a fire dancing over gasoline. The image (and the storms) cover the U.S. from West Texas to Pennsylvania. [via]

I recently re-stumbled across John Hodgman's fantastic review of Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus from 2008, which appeared in the New York Times.

Kirby was known as the "King" of comics. He co-created Captain America in the 1940s, and went on to create or co-create the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, the original X-Men, Doctor Doom, Magneto, and Black Panther among others. — Read the rest

The fellow in Australia, who makes tools and shelters from his bare hands and natural materials, is back with a new video. This time, he made water-powered hammer. It's basically a log (hollowed out by fire) that pivots up and down when it receives and empties water from a stream. — Read the rest

Artist Brooke Barker uses her Instagram to document both sad animal facts and her delightful sense of humor. You can see some of my favorites below and learn more on her Sad Animal Facts website.