A 1928 Truck Converted Into a Motorhome is a Work of Art

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


Hockey Team's Zamboni Looks Like a Mammoth

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, for the past few years, 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


New World Record Set for a Drone Light Show

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 


Can We Teach People Wisdom?

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.  


An Honest Trailer for Avatar: Fire and Ash

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. 


Egret Baby Picture Wins the Annual Smithsonian Photography Competition

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 choie award, and you can see all eight images and read the stories behind them at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: Jacqui Burke


Bill McClintock Brings Us "Roxanne Works Hard for the Money"

It's always a treat to get a mashup of two (or more) familiar songs from Bill McClintock. Usually, they are shockingly different songs that meld in a surprising way. This time, the two main songs are thematically similar- they are about a working woman.

Donna Summer's 1983 hit "She Works Hard for the Money" was inspired by a tired restroom attendant she met at a Grammy afterparty. The song is about all blue-collar women. On the other hand, the 1978 song "Roxanne," the first hit by The Police, is definitely about a sex worker. Together, the two songs seem to be about a really hard-working prostitute. You can also appreciate a 1970s disco singer with an '80s hit mashed up with an '80s band's song from the 1970s. 

Musically, McClintock shows his skill at making disparate rhythms work together better than they should. There are also snippets of "Never Enough" by L.A. Guns and "Round and Round: by Ratt in this mashup.   


Kermitsune Miku

Professional cosplay photographer David "DTJAAAAM" Ngo attended the recent MegaCon in Orlando and snapped images of the best cosplayers. Among them was this young lady who adds Kermit the Frog to the hairstyle and wardrobe of Hatsune Miku, a vocaloid and virtual idol singer. It's not easy being blue, but she does it with style.


Outsourcing Our Logical Thinking to Artificial Intelligence

Humans spent thousands of years looking for ways to make life easier. We turned from hunting and gathering to agriculture, then we invented machines to help with labor. Now we have artificial intelligence so we don't have to bother thinking anymore. Recent research has identified what is called "cognitive surrender," when critical reasoning is abandoned to trust in external reasoning from algorithms.  

The experiments used Cognitive Reflection Tests, which are designed to separate people who make decisions on a quick, intuitive basis and those who slowly deliberate the details to come to different conclusions. In other words, the tasks are designed to be somewhat confusing on the surface. The option to consult AI was added (except for a control group), with the AI programmed to give the correct solution only half of the time. While many people took the option to consult AI, some double-checked the algorithm's advice and others blithely accepted what the algorithm told them.   

Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time. 

Significantly, those who trusted artificial intelligence with their answers were more confident about their decisions, no matter how correct they were or weren't. And adding a time limit only increased the number who trusted AI. Read more about this research at Ars Technica. 


10 Parts of Modern Life that Are Gross and Disgusting

We clean our kitchens and we clean our toilets, because that's where the germs are, right? Sure, but bacteria, viruses, fungi, and even insects are more universal than our cleaning habits are. During the pandemic, we learned to clean our doorknobs and wash our hands correctly. But you can't get those nasty little germs off everything. Chill Dude Explains might ruin your day by looking at the things that never get washed in our homes and revealing how nasty they can get. He explains how you can mitigate the germ infestations on some of these, but not all of them. It's a good thing we have immune systems, right? 

You might check off your lifestyle habits as the list goes on. I, for example, am now thankful that I don't wear makeup, buy meat, or have an ice maker. I'm surprised that a keyboard isn't included in this list, because I touch that more than anything, and it rarely gets washed. 


Everyday Life in the World's Most Remote Town

If you've been following Neatorama for a while, you are familiar with Tristan da Cunha, a tiny island in the middle of the widest part of the Atlantic Ocean. The British territory is 38 square miles and has one town, Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, with about 250 residents. There is no airstrip, and ships arrive only about once a month or so. The island has a school, a doctor, and internet access. 

On such a remote island with a small population, you'd think that life would be slow and bucolic, but nothing is further from the truth. There are so many tasks necessary for community life that everyone learns to pitch in and multi-task. Residents fish, process seafood, care for livestock, tend to gardens, repair homes, help out at the school, and run the government. When a ship arrives with supplies and a limited number of tourists, everyone knows what their job is. NPR has a lovely multi-media presentation that shows us what everyday life is like for the few dozen residents of Tristan da Cunha. That life is not for everyone. -via Nag on the Lake 

(Image credit: The Official CTBTO Photostream


Giving a Cat a Bath All Depends on the Cat

We've all seen the viral instructions for bathing a cat, which mainly consists of retrieving the cat from another part of the house and tending to your wounds. There's the easier alternate method, too. Cats are famously hydrophobic (which does not means rabies in this case). They will loudly proclaim they are self-cleaning, but sometimes they require extra help. I have always considered bathing a cat to be a two-person task. 

Ash is an outlier. He is the kind of cat we all wish we had, because he loves taking a bath. Here we see how eager he is, and how calm he stays during the procedure. In return, his owner makes a big production out of it, basically giving Ash a spa day to keep him clean and happy. If I had such an amenable cat, I would bathe him more than once a month, just for a fun of it. See more of Ash at Instagram. 


Beware the Horrifying Vampire Rabbit of Newcastle Upon Tyne

Bunny rabbits are a sign of spring renewal, and are everywhere around Easter, in our yards and our Easter baskets. They are also seen as the most harmless of all wildlife, which is why we find it amusing to make them into monsters, from the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog to Bunnicula. That joke is not altogether new, either, as seen in the murderous bunnies of medieval marginalia.  

A town in England has its own killer rabbit, perched atop the back door of the Cathedral Buildings, which is one building and not a cathedral. The black bunny with its bulging eyes and red mouth and claws is no medieval gargoyle- the building was erected in 1901. But there was no explanation for it then, and indeed the rabbit went mostly unnoticed for a hundred years. In the last couple of decades, legends have grown up around it and people go out of their way to see the "vampire rabbit." So what's the real story? Lenora at The Haunted Palace Blog takes us through the history of fictional killer bunnies and digs to the bottom of Newcastle upon Tyne's bad bunny.  -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Mike Quinn


Australians Animals Encounter a Mirror in the Wild

Epic Aussie Encounters set up a mirror near one of their trail cameras. It looks pretty natural for a mirror. Each critter is identified in the lower left corner when it first appears. Some were frightened, some were curious, and some took the reflection as a challenge. Some of the encounters are at night, and I wondered how well they actually saw their reflection. The Brushtail possum certainly does- look at the size of his eyes! They all seemed to see pretty well, except for the echidna, which is known for bad eyesight and obliviousness. The grey strike thrush tried to impress its reflection, but who knows if it's a greeting, a warning, or a mating dance? The mother duck tried to ignore the mirror, because it told her she suddenly has twice as many babies, but one duckling was fascinated. One kangaroo was smart enough to look behind the mirror, and checked out the camera as well. You have to wonder what's going on in these animals' heads.


This Summer, You Can Eat Your Hat with the Texas Rangers

They say everything's bigger in Texas, and that includes ballpark food. The Texas Rangers have led the way with bigger and more ridiculous treats to nosh on during home games, and this year they've upped the ante by serving food in hats. Or serving hats as food. The biggest innovation for 2026 is the 9th Inning Rally Sombrero. It starts with a 26-inch diameter tortilla shaped somewhat like a sombrero, filled with nachos and a nine-layer dip. You can literally eat your hat. Helpfully, the snack is supported by a paper tray. And it will only cost you $39.99. 

Other new concessions at Globe Life Field in 2026 will include a dozen chicken tenders with fries served in a batter's helmet, and a churro sundae served in a plastic baseball cap. These are just the hat foods; there's an entire list of new over-the-top meals you'll be able to get at the game. Looking at the prices, you'll probably decide to eat before the game, and pray there are no extra innings. -via Metafilter 


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