Sesame Street has changed a lot since I was a kid. The plots are grittier and the Muppets swear a lot more.

Bluesky user @pig'slaundry has lately watched the children's show on Tubi, a streaming service owned by Fox. They noticed that the automatically generated captions show the characters contemplating existential terror and considering brutal violence.

-via Super Punch

On Easter Sunday, an association of Christian churches in Korea banded together to stage an elaborate celebration called the 2026 Easter Parade in downtown Seoul. There was a procession, but also a dramatic recreation of scenes from the Old Testament, the life of Jesus, and the history of Christianity in Korea, spread across multiple stages. It is estimated that around 8,000 people were in attendance. 

One stage was dedicated to Jesus' ascension into heaven. The actor playing Jesus was supposed to be lifted into the sky to end the show. But the drama went on and on as the crane kept lifting him way beyond what was planned. He flew among the skyscrapers so long that the video is sped up in parts. It had to be terrifying, but since we now know that the actor is okay, it's also funny. The producers blamed the incident on a crane malfunction. -via Boing Boing 

Making fried chicken at home is one of those things that takes experience to get right. Your first few batches might be burned on the outside and undercooked on the inside. Adjust the temperature, and your next batch might be well-done, but the breading is kind of blah. These experiments are expensive, so it's no wonder most people ony get fried chicken at restaurants these days. 

So how do restaurants do it? We know Colonel Sanders turned to pressure-frying chicken because it was the only way to prepare fried chicken fast enough for waiting diners. Not all restaurants do that. What they do to make crispy fried chicken is to double fry it. Yes, the same tip that makes perfect french fries, although the process is a little different. Read how to double-fry your chicken at home for the perfect crispy coating at Serious Eats. You'll also learn a restaurant's secret for getting that chicken redy fast for a hungry clientele. 

(Image credit: Jiafei Slay Queen) 

In so many movies, the real drama or action happens to men, while women are there as tokens or window dressing, and are often the reward for the hero that "gets the girl" in the end. The notable exception are Disney fairy tales. While the source materials spend little time developing any characters, the Disney animated productions are centered around a young woman who goes through travails and gets her wealthy and handsome prince as a reward in the end. That brings an awful lot of little girls to the movies, and then they buy the costume, the DVD, and all the accessories so they can dream of finding their own prince.  

But who are these princes? In the older films, they have no personality at all. Sometimes they don't even have a name. They have no responsibilities, except for being handsome and waiting for the king to die. Their heroism in only in service to the real star of the show. In the song "Charming," three of them complain about their unimportance, which is a mirror of what a Bond Girl character might say.

Amy Stewart is an artist in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. She works heavily in stained and painted glass. Stewart (or "Amy in the Aether", as she also calls herself) frequently uses motifs from Mid-Century Modern American pop art, including camp, burlesque, and the playfully supernatural.

For around 50 years now, science fiction writers have considered the possibility of terraforming Mars, meaning changing the planet to be more like earth. Scientists have also looked at the idea, and have some plausible ideas. My first thought was water- you need a lot of water to make life work, but apparently Mars has a lot of underground frozen water, so the big challenge is warming it up. This can be done with strategic greenhouses, or putting something in the atmosphere that could cause a greenhouse effect.    

What could possibly go wrong? As of yet, these ideas aren't possible because the necessary materials haven't been developed. But we know they could be in the future. Read up on some of the ways we could change Mars to be more habitable. The more relevant question is "should we?" The time, technology, and money that such a project requires would dwarf the amount we could sink into making the planet we already have more habitable. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Philip James (University of Toledo), Steven Lee (University of Colorado), NASA) 

Conditions at the Attica Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, were so bad that when a fight between two inmates was broken up in 1971, it started a chain reaction that led to a riot. Critical errors in the guards' containment strategy enabled angry inmates to take control of most of the prison and hold prison guards as hostages. This led to a standoff, and the prisoners took the opportunity to organize, not only to negotiate with authorities, but to run the prison themselves. Their list of demands seemed to be fairly reasonable, and in fact most were reforms they had been requesting for some time and had been ignored. 

The standoff lasted four days and ended with a violent raid that left 43 people dead. The incident shocked America, and the results were a little bit of prison reform and a lot of Americans who learned about prison conditions for the very first time. Weird History explains what happened at Attica.  

Redditor Ok_Illustrator_8711 never met his grandmother, yet he got a glimpse of her personality from a diary she kept from the days when she married his grandpa. The entries are wonderful cartoons she drew of her life events. He shared a few pages from it that start with "Pre-Marital Chaos" as she planned their wedding. They honeymooned in Hot Springs, Arkansas. 



Further entries show us the young couple settling into a home and adjusting to married life, which had both joys and frustrations. 


But eventually, the chronicle takes a dark turn as Art is deployed to Europe in 1944. Grandma went to stay with her parents and cursed Hitler, and her diary entries involved other people and a longing for Art's return. Ok_Illustrator_8711 assures us he returned, and they lived happily ever after, until Grandma passed in 1977. Grandma could have been a comic illustrator, but it was just a hobby for her. See the diary pages at this reddit post, where you can click to enlarge the gallery. -via kottke 

The 911 emergency system was inaugurated in the 1960s, but its rollout was slow, and it took years for smaller towns to fund and implement it. We all knew it was a great idea. Then enhanced 911 came out, and they could locate your landline phone as soon as you called. What sorcery is this? But technology advances, and now cities with the most sophisticated 911 service can even locate the cell phone that made the call. 

We rely on the system, but few of us understand how it works now. Half as Interesting explains what happens when you make a 911 call. I have a bone to pick, though. Back in the day, you never had to dial a ten-digit number to get the local police. That would be a useless long-distance call. Local numbers are seven digits, or four digits if you go back far enough. This video is only 5:27; the rest is an ad. 

The game Star Fling has a really simple premise. You are orbiting a star. You can click and fling an inert ball at the planetary orbit of the next star, and if you hit it, you are then orbiting the second star and can fling at the third. How many stars can you hit? 

The caveat is that the game is over as soon as you miss, but you can start a new game quickly. And you will have to restart a few times before you figure it out. Yeah, a missed shot "falls" to the ground, but hey, it's just a game. I honestly hit eight stars once, but I can't prove it. Those who know say that it's slower and easier on a mobile device, and I was playing on a desktop. Also, I didn't want to play all day before I posted this, so rest assured that you can beat my score if you fool around with this for a while. I found that getting a screenshot of the action was impossible, so all I can show you is my score. I'd like to see the finished star pattern of someone who hit many more stars. -via Metafilter 

When you hear about a mob of wallabies in a nearby park, you might assume that this all takes place in Australia, but no. Lindsay Clarity runs Animal School in East Sussex, UK! It is a shelter for all kinds of rescued animals and also an educational institution where children can learn about nature. One of the odder residents is Blossom, an albino wallaby who was abandoned by her mother at a very young age. She was found at Leonardslee Gardens, an estate that has exotic animals on the grounds that were introduced more than 100 years ago.  

Clarity took Blossom in and had to learn everything about how wallaby mothers normally raise their babies, which includes carrying them around in their pouches until they are 18 months old! Yes, she did that for a year, and now she has a lifetime companion in the little Australian creature. See more from the Animal School at YouTube. 

My family went out of town to see the new movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Before it started, I studied the candy counter and saw something intriguing called Reese's Pieces that looked like M&Ms with peanut butter inside. The clerk said they were brand new and sold me some. I was munching those delicious morsels during the movie and saw Elliot clearly luring E.T. with Reece's Pieces. Now it all made sense- it was a promotional tie-in. And that's how we all learned about product placement. Reece's Pieces became a hit. It's happened with other movies, sometimes intentionally, but often accidentally, as in the adoption of Monty Python's "spam" as the perfect term for junk email. And dramatic stories sometimes unrealistically raise our expectations for the real thing. 

Life is rarely as neat and tidy as a one-hour plot. Read about 15 of the ways TV shows and movies have influenced the real world at Cracked. 

Have you ever had the feeling that every day is the same? Will had that feeling. His life was so mundane and predictable that it took him quite some time to figure out that he was stuck in a time loop. Yeah, you've seen it happen in the movie Groundhog Day, but this story is grungier and downright dismal. Every day is the same no matter what he does with it. And how can you stop a bedwetting problem if you don't know what led up to it? Will finally comes clean to Elise, who doesn't believe him. But she does help him to break his cycle and emerge from the time loop.

But is it really a flaw in the space/time continuum? There are clues throughout this video that things aren't exactly what they seem. You may have to watch it through twice to catch them. Even then, you might disagree with the person next to you about what is really happening. This video contains NSFW language.  -via the Awesomer 

In 1941, the SS Britannia was en route from the UK to Bombay when it was attacked by a German warship and sunk. Almost half the passengers and crew were lost. Several of the survivors were picked up five days later clinging to a raft. Among them was Second Lieutenant R.E.G. Cox of the Indian Army, who had some strange wounds. Were they a result of an attack by a giant squid? 

In 1960, Cox's story was published in the book Kingdom of the Octopus as a warning of the danger of cephalopod attacks. It was aired on TV in 1980 in an episode of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. And it has been retold as fact ever since. But giant squids don't come to the surface to feed. Historian Jonathan Dyer looked into the story, and traced it back to an account by Cox in 1960, in which he first identified the attacker as a giant squid. In a newspaper article from only seven months after the 1941 attack, Cox's story was quite lurid- he was attacked by a stinging octopus, while a shark bit another man clinging to the life raft, then that man was eaten by a manta ray. Another newspaper account told quite a different story. Read what really caused Cox's wounds, and how the tale grew bigger and stranger over the years, at the Public Domain Review. -via Strange Company 

John Williams composed "The Imperial March" from Star Wars as a military march because that's how Dart Vader enters a scene. The song is not only miitary, but downright evil. It's a tune that's been stuck in your head for almost 50 years now. Or at least in mine. But if you know a lot about music, you can do some odd things with a familiar theme.  

Swedish guitarist Lucas Brar turned "The Imperial March" into a fugue, which is a composition with a main theme plus bells and whistles that complement and compete with the main theme, but always comes back to it. Read a better explanation here. Johann Sebastian Bach was well known for his musical fugues. Brar was thinking of Bach when he dressed up the march in a way that make it sound a little less ominous, or at least least a little less military, and a lot more interesting.