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 it 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. 

When you think of child soldiers, you might think of certain African rebel militias, or about the youngsters who fought in the American Civil War. But boys too young to realize what they're doing managed to become fighters in World War II as well. Most of these enlistments were due to a volunteer lying about his age, and induction officers who turned a blind eye because they were desperate for recruits. Or they were members of partisan militias. That's how we managed to have a teenage bombing expert and a 15-year-old kamikaze pilot. There was even a 6-year-old in uniform (shown above), but he was a refugee under the care of a Soviet military unit and not an official soldier. 

The youngest World War II soldier in the US military was 12-year-old Calvin Graham, who forged documents that said he was 17 and had his parents' permission to enlist in the navy. He became a decorated war hero before he was found out. Read about five underage youngsters who fought in World War II at Mental Floss.    

Two adventurers, or looters if you will, separately seek the treasure of an ancient king and queen from a magical booby-trapped castle. Their names are Robin and Rayden, although which is which I cannot tell. The voice actors are named Darci and Parley, which doesn't help. Anyway, they don't know each other. She's tougher, but he has the instructions, so they need to team up to find and steal a huge gem hidden in the labrynthine palace. The plot is far from groundbreaking, but the animation is luscious, the action is invigorating, and there are some funny moments. 

Love & Gold is a student animation, written and directed by Connor Van Dyke and produced by Jaysen Duckworth of Brigham Young University's Media Arts program, although many others were involved. The film won the award for Best Animation  at the Television Academy Foundation’s 45th College Television Awards last week. You can read more about it at Kuriositas. 

Author Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to describe how online services tend to, over time, get stupidly worse. More generally, enshittification has become used to describe how products and services have become worse over time. Things are not built to last, but to break down almost immediately upon purchase. Contracts are not honored, trust is not nurtured, and providers of services take every opportunity to barely fulfill obligations.

It's what happens when a high trust society degenerates into a low trust society.

The Norwegian Consumer Council, a government organization ostensibly tasked with protecting consumers from enshittification, produced this humorous video describing a man whose job is to enshittify everything he can.

-via Kottke

NASA's Artemis II mission is on their way home after circling the moon. They are expected to splash down off the coast near San Diego on Saturday evening. They have set a record for the furthest any human has flown away from the earth, at 252,000 miles. While passing around the moon, they took lots of gorgeous photographs of the spaceship, the earth, and the moon, including the "dark side" we never get to see from earth. 

NASA photographs are in the public domain, and they are glad to share them with us all. Many of these high-resolution space photos have been sized to use for computer wallpapers and phone screens, and some have been altered for dramatic effect. You can find these at NASA and from those who have resized and reformatted them for your use, with various links found at kottke, where you'll also find some of his favorite such images. 

There are thousands of different snake species, and they all have a few things in common. They don't have legs, they are carnivorous, and humans are afraid of them. We have good reason to be scared, since snakes can be quite venomous, the better to disable prey and repel threats. But all these different kinds of snakes have a wide variety of techniques for killing. 

Some will eat another animal that's bigger than they are, and have developed some weird physiological tricks to get away with that. Despite one graphic in this TED-Ed video, we've never seen a case of a snake swallowing an elephant, but they have been known to consume an entire alligator or deer. Others specialize in one specific type of prey and have adapted both their anatomy and lifestyle to surviving off of it. There are reasons snakes have survived on earth so long, and why we are seemingly born to fear them.

In 1928, a you could buy a Chevrolet LM one-ton truck for $520. That was for a cab and chassis only, and then you got the cargo box custom-built for your needs. We don't know what this truck was originally used for, because it's undergone a lot of changes. Inside, it now has a V6 motor to pull it, automatic transmission, and and a wooden home in the back. This motor home is a steampunk dream. It's made of red oak, with a copper roof, Dutch doors, coach lamps, and 21 stained glass windows. Even the turn signals are stained glass! Inside, you'll find an all-wood kitchen and a leather couch, plus a bed. It has a stereo but alas, no bathroom or air conditioning. 

This custom coach only has 11,444 miles on it, and it's going up for auction on April 10th. Read more about it and see pictures at the Autopian. 

(Image credit: Mecum Auctions) 

The Utah Mammoth is a professional hockey team that formed in 2024. It's based in Salt Lake City. The team initially had a bear mascot but, in the past year, has adopted the woolly mammoth as its avatar. Quite appropriate for hockey, don't you think?

To promote this new team to potentially new fans, it recently converted its zamboni (once used in the 2002 Winter Olympics) into the visage of its own mammoth. They call it the Zammoth.

Fans will have to opportunity to ride it during games. Perhaps they will be permitted to gore fans of the opposing team on the tusks.

-via Super Punch

Drones have many uses, but let's not talk about war right now. For aerial entertainment, they are much safer than fireworks, and can light up the sky with intricate 3-dimensional images that are just breathtaking. It all depends on how many drones you have and how well they are programmed to work together. The biggest show yet happened in Hefei, Anhui, China, on February 3rd, 2026. The Chinese company Guangdong EHang Egret Media Technology Co., Ltd. launched 22,580 and set a new world record for the "most multirotor/drones airborne simultaneously from a single computer (outdoors)." Since they qualified that, you have to wonder how many more were ever launched inside a structure. That number beat the previous record by 7,000 drones! 

Still, there were twenty drones that failed to launch, possibly because they didn't have enough chargers.

Oh yeah, and unlike fireworks, these drones can be used again. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Intelligence, knowledge, and wisdom are very different things. It's been said that someone with knowledge will tell you that a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is not putting in a fruit salad. That's an example, not a definition. Someone once told me that wisdom is knowing the difference between what is important and what is not. I've always liked that. But wisdom is combination of several factors, like humility, compassion, objectivity, the ability to learn from experience, the ability to regulate one's emotions, and the ability to understand how someone else might see a situation differently. There are other elements, like the ability to adapt, question oneself, and predict the outcome of our actions. 

Philosophers have studied the meaning and value of wisdom since antiquity, and today scientists are trying to measure it. They've found that wisdom exists in all age groups, and even people who are considered wise aren't wise all the time. Can we teach wisdom? It appears that we can, at least somewhat, if the student is open to it. Read about the elements of wisdom and take a self-test of your own wisdom at Knowable magazine.  

The 2025 movie Avatar: Fire and Ash is the second sequel to Avatar (2009) following Avatar: The Way of Water (2022). The title sounds like the film takes place in a volcano, but that turned out to be a small part of the movie, which is focused on water like the previous film. Jake Sully and his family once again deal with the mostly evil humans who have invaded Pandora. They now have a human child, but the franchise seems to have forgotten how much taller the Na'vi are than humans. There seems to be some magical shenanigans that make the boy called Spider start to turn into a Na'vi. Who knows? 

Avatar: Fire and Ash was not as popular as The Way of Water, but it was hella successful. The budget was maybe $400 million, and it grossed $1.4 billion. When your only real competition is your previous work, what does "success" mean, anyway? Screen Junkies found Avatar: Fire and Ash to be a bit repetitive, but it still looks gorgeous. 

The Ocean City (New Jersey) Welcome Center is such a popular place for birds to nest that it has been designated as a rookery where the Audubon Society holds events. Jacqueline Burke was visiting from Pennsylvania with her camera in May of 2024 and said there were dozens of active nests. Underneath a ramp, she spied an egret's nest with three chicks, sporting punk plumes and attitude, under a parent's watchful supervision. The scene made for a good picture, and now it has won the grand prize in Smithsonian Magazine’s 23rd Annual Photography Contest. These chicks would now be adults and look like every other egret you've seen. 

The contest gathered over 17,000 submissions from 108 countries. There were winners in the categories of artistic, travel, people, American experience, wildlife, and drone photography, plus the reader's choice award, and you can see all eight images and read the stories behind them at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: Jacqui Burke)