Fox 4 News in the Dallas/Fort Worth area reports that on November 25, police in Little Elm, Texas received a report of a goat "aggressively snacking" by the side of a road. Without backup, an officer detained the goat. There was some resistance, but the goat eventually complied and sat in the back of the police cruiser while the officer read him his Miranda rights.
The police department asked the owners to come to their station to get their goat before "he eats the report."
Macaulay Macaulay Culkin Culkin (no typo; that's his legal name) is most famous for his role in the 1990 Christmas film Home Alone. Recently, he's been on a touring series called A Nostalgic Night with Macaulay Culkin, which includes a screening of the movie and an interview with him.
Variety reports that, during one of these interviews, Culkin shared his idea for a sequel to Home Alone. Culkin, now 45 years old, would play an adult Kevin McCallister who is either divorced or windowed. He is trying to, like the Wet Bandits, break into a home with a vulnerable child:
I’m raising a kid and all that stuff. I’m working really hard and I’m not really paying enough attention and the kid is kind of getting miffed at me and then I get locked out. [Kevin’s son] won’t let me in… and he’s the one setting traps for me.
Would you watch it?
-via Discussing Film | Photo: zuko1312
In 1934, two teenagers in Baltimore dug into the dirt floor of their apartment house basement. About a foot down, they unearthed a $20 gold coin. Digging further, they discovered a literal pot of gold- a cache of pre-Civil War gold coins in a copper pot! The two boys, not fully understanding what they had found, were going to cash the coins in at the bank, but were stopped by a brother-in-law.
When the news got out, anyone and everyone who had a relative with a connection to the house stepped forward to claim the stash as their own, and the case was tied up in court for years. The value of their discovery changed greatly during the account of what happened afterward. First it rose due to the composition and rarity of the coins, further digging, and the fact that some coins had been re-stashed elsewhere, plus the inflation estimates. Then it went down due to court costs, lawyer's fees, and taxes. But the fight over the gold uncovered some interesting stories about the property going back almost a hundred years. Read the tale of this buried treasure at Strange Company.
Electrostatic attraction is not a mating strategy, but as you know, Ze Frank will take any opportunity for a double entendre. This video starts off telling us about nematodes, which are weird enough, but eventually gets to the subject matter: how they harness the tiny electrical charges in the atmosphere for their own ends. For nematodes, it's how parasitic species target flying insects to invade. For bees and other pollinating insects, electric fields offer a strategy for collecting plenty of pollen. That benefits the plants, too. Spiders use electrostatic charges to weaponize their webs into more powerful insect traps. And newly-hatched spiders use the power of electrons to spread their silky parachutes and fly. The concept of parasitic nematodes and flying baby spiders might be icky, so instead just think about how these tiny creatures understand the physics of the world around them better than you do. There's a 75-second ad at 4:22.
There are elephant enclosures in various zoos throughout Europe. But the non-profit organization Pangea plans to open an expansive sanctuary for captive elephants that will stretch over 850 acres. That's 200 times larger than the elephant enclosure at the Tierpark zoo in Berlin.
The Resident, an English-language newspaper in Portugal, reports that the site is located in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal. This area is among the most suitable in Europe for elephant habitation.
Construction should finish in December and thirty elephants will arrive in the spring of next year. They will be able to roam freely over the site while still having access to veterinary care.
-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: E-roxo
There is an entire repertoire of songs that we only hear for one month out of the year, because they are associated with Christmas. This might be because we hear them so much during that one month that we can no longer stand them after the New Year holiday. But some of them got lumped into the Christmas category because they were about cold weather and snow. They would be appropriate up until March, but we don't hear them after Christmas at all.
Then there are Christmas songs that started out as something completely different, like the song that was written for a Soviet comedy film in 1934. One familiar carol is actually about the second coming of Christ, which you can understand once you know that and go over the lyrics in your head. And then there's one song that was originally about an unfaithful lover, but was changed over hundreds of years and translations. Read about these five Christmas songs and what they originally meant at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Charles E. Beckett)
December is the darkest month of the year, so candles, once necessary, are now associated with Christmas. You are liable to light a few yourself, so you may as well learn the science behind what makes them dangerous. See, what actually burns in a candle flame is not the solid or liquid wax, nor the wick, but the vapor of the wax.
James Orgill of the Action Lab (previously at Neatorama) starts this video with a spectacular reaction you may not see coming. Maybe we should have noticed that he's using a long stick to keep it far away. Apparently this reaction is internet fodder, yet is rarely explained accurately. It's not really new, either, as one commenter relates.
This looks dangerous, but it's a phenomena that would rarely happen in everyday life. Don't try to replicate this stunt, and you'll just need to follow the safety rules we all know about burning candles. The video has a two minute skippable ad at 2:30. -via Damn Interesting
It seems simple: people who evolved near the equator have dark skin to protect their bodies from the sun, while people who settled closer to the poles lost melanin to take advantage of scarce sunlight. It's not quite that simple. New research shows that most European people, who settled there 45,000 years ago, had dark skin up into the Iron Age, about 3,000 years ago, when the number of pale-skinned people became the majority. Even more surprising, the genes for lighter skin didn't proliferate from mutations in northern Europe- they migrated in from what is now Turkey.
These findings come from genetic studies on individual Europeans, such as Cheddar Man, who lived 10,000 years ago, and Ötzi the Iceman, who lived 5,300 years ago, plus others even older now that we have tools to analyze degraded DNA. You might also be surprised to learn that blue eyes became common in Europe long before pale skin and hair. Read about the genetic studies that revealed what ancient Europeans looked like at ZME Science. -via Real Clear Science
Tomorrow is the first day of Advent--the countdown to the birth of Jesus in the Western Christian tradition. Advent calendars marking out these individual days are popular. In the past, we've seen Advent calendars inspired by Die Hard, filled with whisky, and one using a Dalek as its shape.
The Czech firm of Podnikovka offers this Advent sausage. Slice off a piece each day in preparation for Christmas.
-via Messy Nessy Chic
The iconic "Hotel California" by the Eagles has been covered in many different genres, including bluegrass, and instruments, such as bagpipes. It remixes well and calls to people from different cultures and generations.
So it is proper that Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox ("Today's hits yesterday") would put the 1977 classic into a prior era. In this case, that's midcentury Cuban jazz. Actor and musician Rogelio Douglas, Jr. performs it. It's beautiful and, as one commenter puts it, authentic:
In a world where everyone and their mother are using AI to do genre-bending covers, PMJ still stands head and shoulders above the rest with real talent and incredible singers and performers.
-via The Awesomer
in my friend’s apartment, there is a subway LED banner with live updates of when the trains by him depart
— whizwang (@whizwang) November 14, 2025
I NEED ONE IMMEDIATELY pic.twitter.com/Z16zElnx5E
When does the next train on the red line depart from the station nearest your home? It might be helpful to have an up to date banner sign within sight so that you always know by just turning your head.
Nook Woodworking in Brooklyn makes this LED sign for, specifically, New York City. It stays synced in real time with your preferred MTA lines. Hopefully, they'll offer it for other cities in the future.
-via Super Punch
The purpose of a tree, as far as the tree is concerned, is to gather sunlight and water. The fact that a tree magically converts those things into building material and fuel is the purpose of a tree as far as humans are concerned. But first, trees had to compete with all other plants to get that sunlight, so they grew tall, and had to come up with a system to gather and utilize water over distances.
That system relies on physics that are hard for humans to replicate. It also depends on a form of cellular suicide. The upshot is that even when a tree is healthy and functioning, a majority of it is dead. The dead parts form a strong scaffold for the tree to grow tall and to protect it from the dangers of the world around it.
Kurzgesagt explains what's happening on the inside of a tree in a way that will make you respect these plants more than you already do. This video is less than ten minutes long (they promise a part two); the rest is promotional. -via Nag on the Lake
The blessing of getting old is that you survived long enough to do it. Randall Munroe of What If? and xkcd didn't put much of his personal life into his comics when he first started out, but we all knew when he fell in love. Then in 2010, Munroe's fiancée (now wife) was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. He related some of his emotional journey in his webcomic xkcd. We learned how profoundly hardcore the treatment is, and how precarious the prognosis is even after treatment. But the couple made sure to stuff a lot of experiences into the time they have.
Munroe posted updates every so often, like the two year "biopsy-versary" and the seven year mark. Now it's been 15 years since the diagnosis that changed their lives, and Munroe has commemorated it with another comic. The panel above is only a small snippet; you need to go see it in a larger size (and there is a hover text, too). The past is in lighter ink to bring us up to new material, in bolder drawings. -via Metafilter
You know that song about Rudolph, you love it, but you've never heard it like this. It's just the thing for someone who is not at all serious about the Christmas season. All kinds of singers and bands have recorded Christmas songs, but they usually keep the original tune, if not the original style. In this version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," the tune is changed as well as the style, to that of "Higher" by Creed. The vocals are not Scott Stapp, but rather Dustin Ballard of There I Ruined it (previously at Neatorama).
Creed's version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is from the new There I Ruined It album titled A Very Ruined Christmas, featuring "99 Problems:Christmas Edition" and "Rap God: Christmas Edition." Alas, it is only available to Patreon members. Still, its existence hints that we may have more Christmas songs from There I ruined It coming soon.
Kate Wagner has discovered a home for sale in Alvin, Texas (near Houston), that she says really should be in Florida, I guess because it's blue and it has portholes. Now, I'm not averse to houses coming in unconventional colors, having one such house myself, but I can't imagine using the same color scheme in every room. This 8-bedroom, 10-bathroom home takes blue to the extreme. But it's not just the color; it's the oversized everything and the rococo decorating that make this place as ugly as you can make a nearly $3 million home.
You can try to be kind and say that the person who had this built had a clear vision of what their personal dream home would be, and made sure it happened. But then you see it was built in 2023! That means that the person with the dream saw the finished product and said, "Naw. I don't want this." Or else the landowner was confident that someone in the area with plenty of money would really want a house with so much blue you can't do much about it. Read Wagner's takedown at McMansion Hell.
