Bill McClintock is a genius music mixer. Most of his mashups have been clever combinations of two main songs from completely different musical genres with a random guitar solo thrown in. His last mashup experimented with using more songs that are somewhat related to each other. This time he's gone all in on moody, even apocalyptic, songs from the past 50 years, with a mix he calls "Killing in the Name of a Terrible Holy Lie." No, it's not sunshine and roses, but as far as I can tell, it's SFW. The selected tunes are rock, various kinds of metal, pop, and even rap, but they all mesh so well you'll only know the transitions if you know the songs. Here are the songs he used:

Nine Inch Nails - Terrible Lie
Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name
Dio - Holy Diver
Soundgarden - Outshined
Judas Priest - Hot Rockin'
KISS - All Hell's Breakin' Loose
Pantera - 5 Minutes Alone
Black Sabbath - Into the Void
Billy Squier - The Stroke
Judas Priest - You've Got Another Thing Comin'
Alice in Chains - Them Bones
Metallica - Sad But True 

Check out McClintock's previous music mashups at Neatorama. 

Kenji Abe, a product designer, offers this concept for a beer bottle for the beach environment. Although a flat bottom is suitable for resting on the table, a rounded one is superior for plunging into the sand for stable grounding. Alternatively, simply drink the entire bottle in one go and forgo the need to set it down anywhere.

The design is simple and superb. But an ER doctor, apparently sharing the experiences of other ER personnel, warns:

Hi, ER Doc here.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but do NOT even think about it. https://t.co/4GarlA9Jyw

— Sam Ghali, M.D. (@EM_RESUS) July 20, 2025

-via Instapundit

For some people, carousels are carnival rides for kids. For others, they are a object of nostalgia for their childhood, or a glimpse into the world of a hundred years ago. But for quite a few, they are works of art. That group includes those who are still designing and carving the creatures that inhabit a carousel. Sure, there are beautiful horses, which is a perfectly normal thing to ride, but there are ornate and artful carousels operating with octopuses, insects, robots, boats, exotic wild animals, and mythological creatures, like a sea-horse, not to be confused with a seahorse (although you can ride those, too). The carousel shown above is the steampunk Carrousel des Mondes Marins in Nantes, France. The most beautiful carousels are public artworks, or community projects, or even private labors of love. See nine of the most beautiful and fanciful carousels in existence at My One Beautiful Thing.  -via Memo of the Air 

(Image credit: Jordiferrer) 

H-E-B is a grocery store chain in Texas and Mexico. It's one of the iconic businesses, along with Buc-ee's and Whataburger, that are associated with Texas.

Texans know what this image represents. H-E-B makes superb flour tortillas that my family buys weekly. If you time your purchase right, they're still warm. These tortillas are the basis for the quesadillas that are my standard supper.

Texas Monthly reports that, a few weeks ago, a viral TikTok video depicted a woman traveling through an airport with 200 H-E-B tortillas in her backpack. H-E-B took advantage of the publicity to produce a TSA-compliant bag wrapped to resemble its famous tortillas and distribute 5,000 fresh tortillas to travelers at the main airport of San Antonio.

Gordon Ramsay's TV series Kitchen Nightmares aired in the US from 2007 to 2014, then after a few other similar shows had short runs, was resurrected in 2023. The show is currently in its ninth season on the Fox television network. In the UK, Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares was just one of a dozen or so series in which Ramsay cooked while bringing plenty of drama to the kitchen. The US version of Kitchen Nightmares was way more about drama than food, which appealed to the American audience. Every episode featured either a fight or something terribly embarrassing. That said, you may be shocked, shocked to find out that not everything you have seen on the show was real. Okay, maybe you weren't shocked at all, but if you'd like to find out what was real and was wasn't all that real on Kitchen Nightmares, Tom Blank of Weird History Food is happy to explain it to us. 

Illustrator Charles Dana Gibson created the iconic image of what came to be called the Gibson Girl in 1898. The image appeared in magazines and advertising for years, showing people what the perfect woman looked like. Camille Clifford was only three years old when the first Gibson Girl image was drawn, but she grew up to display the sweet face, perfect hair, and hourglass figure that recalled Gibson's fantasy images. Clifford was an actress for a while, but found her claim to fame as a model for her resemblance to Gibson's ideal woman. She became an icon of style and beauty in the early years of the 20th century. However, styles and fashions change, and in later pictures, we can see how much of Clifford's earlier hourglass figure was due to the heavy constructions underneath those fabulous dresses.

Read about Camille Clifford's heyday as the epitome of femininity and see plenty of pictures at Vintage Everyday. -via Nag on the Lake 

Fefe is a strange-looking Goffin's cockatoo. But she's not a fledgling bird just getting her feathers- she's twenty years old! Nor is she molting. Her lack of feathers is from stress and boredom, which causes birds to pluck out their own feathers. At least, that's what they think happened to Fefe before she was relinquished to the Parrot Outreach Society. She was most likely kept in a small cage. But Eve and Charlie took her in and made her a part of the family, with freedom to roam the house and plenty of interaction. Fefe has developed a bedtime routine with Charlie, in which he spoils her every way he can to entice her to settle down for the night. You might suspect that's it's just a period of fun for both of them. Fefe knows she has her humans wrapped around her, uh, wing. You can see more of Fefe at Instagram. 

The Codex Gigas is the biggest medieval manuscript in the world. This Bible is 36 inches tall and weighs 165 pounds. And it's not just a Bible- it also contains medical text, some apocryphal works, a confession, and some spells and incantations. Is that why the Codex Gigas is called "the devil's Bible?" No, that's because of the great big drawing of the devil right in the middle of the Bible. 

Experts believe the entire book was hand written by one man, possibly known as Herman the hermit (really), which would have taken up to 30 years. Legend has it that the devil wrote it himself in one night, and how that happened is a wild story. What we do know is that the Codex Gigas has been connected with some great tragedies in its history. Considering that spans 800 years, it's not so unbelievable, but who knows. Learn the lore behind the Codex Gigas at Atlas Obscura, in a podcast that's also available in text.

(Image credit: Herman the Recluse of the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice) 

Even the most mundane objects, like plain old nails, can be imbued with personality in the hands of a patient and talented animator. There's no need for dialogue in this film, because the movement and the music tell a story. Or several stories.  

Nail is a 1972 stop-motion short by Estonian animator Heino Pars. Since we tend to think that all nails look the same, the YouTube description makes it clear that the film is a series of unrelated sequences involving different nails, so you shouldn't even try to discern a plot that connects them. The first is a love story, followed by a work story, and then a drunken street brawl leading to a magnetic arrest. 

You can see a few other, longer Heino Pars projects as shown on Soviet television at YouTube: Balls, Jack and the Robot, Väike motoroller (Small Scooter) and Operaator Kõps seeneriigis (Operator Kops in the Mushroom Kingdom). -via Boing Boing 

Humans are so competitive they will design a contest around anything -or nothing. In 2014, Korean artist Woopsyang launched the Space-Out competition. The contestants do nothing at all. You can be disqualified for talking, looking at your phone, or falling asleep. If you make it through 90 minutes, the winner is determined by your heart rate, which is measured every 15 minutes, plus the opinions of the spectators, which often rely on the posted motivation for each contestant and the costume they wear. What does a costume have to do with spacing out? Nothing, but it draws publicity and spectators. 

The 2025 Space-out Competition was held last month in Melbourne. The winner was Amelia Lumley, pictured above, wearing a working fountain as a costume. She said her strategy was to imagine herself as a sea sponge, but later she admitted that the running water was designed to make other contestants feel the need to pee. Read about the Space-Out contest at the Guardian.  -via Metafilter 

Jakob Grosse-Ophoff is an artist in Rostock, Germany who uses a variety of media, including paint, but has become famous on the internet for his kinetic sculptures. These mixed media pieces amuse audiences while simultaneously commenting about human societies.

I'm especially taken with the broadly-named Humanity, which pokes fun at our tendency to destroy ourselves needlessly. Like most of Grosse-Ophoff's sculptures, the human form is rendered in roughly-hewn wood. I take this choice to present a timelessness to the human condition.

-via Massimo

Music is much more than just sound. The proof of that is in the time Helen Keller, who was both blind and deaf, experienced Beethoven's Ninth Symphony performed by the New York Symphony Orchestra and broadcast on radio. It was in February of 1924. She placed her hand lightly on the speaker, and was so moved that she wrote a letter to the symphony to describe what she felt. Her words are beyond poetic, and will make you want to listen to that symphony again, maybe with your own hands on the speakers. The letter is also a heartfelt thank you to the musicians who made that joyful experience possible.

Now we all get to experience what Keller felt, as Gillian Anderson reads that letter as part of the Letters Live series. Anderson's comment about Keller being disappointed with her own voice saddened me. Every time I've heard Keller speak, I was impressed at how well she learned to do so, even thought speaking wasn't necessary for her to communicate. -via Laughing Squid 

Many species of birds perform elaborate mating dances to impress females. Some species have dedicated places where they gather to perform such dances, so that many females watch as the males compete for their attention. These "arenas" are called leks. You might be surprised to learn that some dinosaurs also did mating dances, and they sometimes gathered in their own, much larger leks. 

The world's largest dinosaur lek yet discovered is just west of Denver, Colorado, at a place called Dinosaur Ridge. The plateau is full of fossils, and by state law it is forbidden to walk on them. So when paleontologists identified some claw scratches from 100 million years ago on the sloping side of Dinosaur Ridge, they turned to drone imagery to investigate the rest of the site. By studying the aerial photographs, they found 35 more scratches made by moving dinosaurs. They could even tell what kind of movement produce those scratches, such as a back kick or a turn. Read about the ancient dinosaur dance floor on Dinosaur Ridge at Smithsonian. 

(Unrelated image credit: Michael Stokes) 

What? An Honest Trailer for The Naked Gun? How did I miss the movie at my local theater? I'm not losing it; this movie doesn't open until August first. It appears that Screen Junkies has really arrived, because the producers of The Naked Gun approached them about making an Honest Trailer ahead of time. 

The Naked Gun is the fourth movie in The Naked Gun franchise, which are all sequels of the 1982 TV series Police Squad! It is the first to be made without Leslie Nielsen playing the main character Lieutenant Frank Drebin. Instead, Liam Neeson plays his son, Frank Drebin Jr. If you've never thought of Neeson as a comedic actor, well, no one thought of Leslie Nielsen as a comedic actor until he starred in Airplane! either. The Naked Gun appears to be a collection of rapid-fire dumb jokes like the earlier Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker films, ensuring that you have to watch it twice to catch them all. Does Screen Junkies like the movie? Considering how they got early access, you can foresee that they do.   

The premise of Zillow Gone Wild is that there will always be eccentrically-designed homes for sale. That's why it keeps browsing for gems like this 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom home in central Tennessee.

No, it's not a leftover from the Cold War or the Y2K scare. In fact, this bunker complex was built this year.