Cameron Roh hilariously rated how people walk on the sidewalks of New York City on a scale of 1 to 10. Roh judged each walker on their speed, their placement on the sidewalk, and their ability to navigate.

bring back sidewalk etiquette

He also called out walkers he considered inconsiderate, specifically by not keeping to the right and walking side by side in what he referred to as “double-wides” and “triple-wides”

Yeah, this double-wide in the middle of the sidewalk is just inconsiderate. We’re going to have to shift over to the right and go single file to allow the oncoming traffic to pass. 1 out of 10.  You …know what? This double-wide is actually making their way. They’re going single file when they need to. They’re keeping a good pace, making their way down the sidewalk quite swiftly. I can appreciate this. 8 out of 10. Triple-wides are just always inconsiderate. Zero out of 10. Just slowly drifting down the sidewalk like this is some casual stroll here.

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The post Rating How People Walk on New York City Sidewalks was originally published on Laughing Squid.

While making a guest appearance on Late Show with David Letterman in 1995, Dolly Parton, from Dollywood, shared her Top Ten pet peeves with a charming sense of self-deprecation and humor. The list included high-maintenance hair and fingernails, celebrity encounters, and jokes about her famous appearance.

Find out what really gets under Dolly’s skin when she presents a special Top Ten from Dollywood. (Air date: 4/21/95)

Dolly Parton Sings ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer’

The Best of Dolly Parton on Letterman

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Brandon Hardesty of The Back Focus looked at how Tim Curry’s over-the-top theatrical flair made him a perfect match for the role of Long John Silver in the 1996 musical comedy Muppet Treasure Island, and how he regarded the Muppets as fellow actors.

There’s a popular idea that Michael Caine treated the Muppets like real actors, while Tim Curry treated himself like a fellow Muppet. But according to Curry himself, that isn’t quite right. He didn’t see Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Rizzo, or the rest of the Muppet crew as props or puppets. He treated them as fully formed characters with their own personalities, timing, and emotional lives. That may be the key to why his performance feels so alive.

Hardesty also explored Curry’s history as an actor, noting how he brought so much of himself to his work.

We also look at how the Muppet performers stayed in character, how Curry approached the songs and comedy, why the “A Professional Pirate” number works so well, and how one surprisingly heartfelt scene with Jim Hawkins revealed a more vulnerable side of Curry’s acting.

Behind the Scenes of ‘Muppet Treasure Island’

Tim Curry as the Pirate King in ‘The Pirates of Penzance’

The Origins of Long John Silver’s Swashbuckling Accent

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Documentarian Joshua Charow visited Thomas Lupo at American Wood Column Corp. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a small business that has specialized in traditional architectural woodworking since 1916 and maintains a collection of historic molds. It is the last of its kind in New York City.

I made a documentary about New York City’s last remaining column factory, American Wood Column Corp. The film tells the story of its third-generation owner, Thomas Lupo. 

Lupo fondly reflected on a century of generational craftsmanship, the shop’s woodwork for productions such as The Godfather and Saturday Night Live, the shop’s unchanging nature, and the challenges of sustaining a specialized family trade amid its decline.

People who come here the first time go, “Oh, wow. It’s like stepping into old New York.” And people who were here were, “Oh, wow. I haven’t been here for 30 years. It still looks the same.” …You know, a lot of people might say they would want to do it, or this is great or whatever like that, but it’s, you know, that’s a quirky type of business now. I don’t know of many people that are doing it. There’s just nobody going into these trades anymore. They will die.

Sadly, American Wood Column is closing its doors after 110 years in business.

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DJI partnered with Chinese spaceflight company LandSpace to mount 12 unmodified Osmo Action 6 action cameras at different positions on its Zhuque-3 reusable rocket. The cameras survived the orbital launch and intense heat of re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere while capturing continuous footage from liftoff through a precision vertical landing.

The DJI Osmo Action 6 rode a rocket — ignition, high into the atmosphere, all the way back down to a precision vertical landing. Liftoff to touchdown. One continuous first-person view.

A GoPro Camera Attached to a Rocket

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The great Tim Curry visited the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills in 2025, where he and library staff explored archival materials from his long and illustrious career.

Actor Tim Curry shares behind the scenes stories about his iconic roles at The Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library as he’s shown one-of-a- kind, original artifacts from ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show,’ ‘Clue,’ ‘Annie’ and more films from his legendary career.

This retrospective highlighted archival production photos, casting notes, and Curry’s personal and amusing anecdotes about his iconic roles in projects such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Clue, Annie, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Stephen King’s It, and Muppet Treasure Island.

Rest in peace, sir. We will always remember doing the “Time Warp” with you.

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The post Tim Curry Breaks Down His Most Iconic Roles was originally published on Laughing Squid.

Talented light artist Darren Pearson documented his collection of dinosaur light paintings from the past 15 years and shared them in a single montage.

Here’s what 15 years of light painting dinosaurs looks like

Other Light Painting Montages

How to Paint With Light

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Global Data created a massive 3D animation that compares the sizes of 150 titans, giants, kaiju, and mythical beasts from anime, video games, movies, television shows, and other works of pop culture.

From tiny creatures to universe-sized titans, see how they truly scale against each other in full 3D!

The smallest is Sackboy from the LittleBigPlanet video game series. The largest are the Super Tengen Toppa Giga Drill Break and Anti-Spiral Giga Drill Break, both shown in the animation as 10.45 trillion light-years long.

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Dolly Parton and Kermit the Frog performed a lovely duet of the classic Sly and the Family Stone song “Everyday People” on a 1987 episode of Parton’s ABC variety show Dolly. The song, which is about diversity and acceptance, was a perfect fit for the two.

The YouTube uploader described the extended remix:

This version features bright 80s synths, playful drums, and a whimsical vibe, making it a charming reinterpretation of the classic track. Kermit adds his signature personality to this lighthearted duet, bringing extra warmth and fun to the performance.

Dolly visited Miss Piggy‘s tour bus in a 1988 episode of the same series.

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The British Army’s Band of the Coldstream Guards performed the classic movie theme “9 to 5” in tribute to the late, great Dolly Parton and her enduring status as “Queen of Country”. This poignant performance, a testament to her global popularity, took place during the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace in London on August 26, 2026.

A special tribute to the Queen of Country, Dolly Parton From her many friends, fans and admirers across the pond.

The Guard Previously Paid Tribute to Ozzy Osbourne

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Henry van Dyck of Veritasium investigated the remarkable tensile strength and elasticity of spider silk to see if it was stronger than steel. He visited The Blackledge Lab at the University of Akron, where he tested garden spider silk without harming the spiders and compared it with silk from a Darwin’s Bark Spider, whose silk is the toughest known biomaterial. The video also covered the complex protein structure of silk and the challenges scientists face in farming spiders or replicating their silk fibers.

Real spider silk, the fiber that makes up a spider’s web…It’s reportedly stronger than steel. It’s pretty strong. …And 10 times tougher than Kevlar.

Van Dyck also visited Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, where he observed the company’s recombinant (engineered) spider silk operations. He later dared Derek Muller to swing from the material like Spider-Man at a local climbing gym.

Can you really swing from spider silk?

Darwin’s Bark Spider

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The post Testing Spider Silk to See If It’s Stronger Than Steel was originally published on Laughing Squid.

The Process examined the long history of sour cream, tracing naturally fermented dairy traditions from Central Asia to the cultured cream produced today.

No one invented fermented dairy. It invented itself. Leave cream outside and wild bacteria colonize it.

Sour cream became a traditional ingredient across Central and Eastern Europe, including smetana, and was later brought to the United States by immigrants from the region. It eventually became widely available through brands such as Breakstone’s and Daisy.

The technique drifted westward. Russia. Poland. Ukraine. Smetana became the backbone of borscht, stroganoff, pierogies. A culture built on cultured cream. Then it crossed the Atlantic. Eastern European Jewish immigrants, New York’s Lower East Side.

The modern process remains relatively simple, using pasteurization, homogenization, and starter cultures to produce the familiar thick, tangy cream.

The cream is standardized to eighteen to twenty percent milkfat — enough to build body, not so much that it turns to butter. Then everything alive gets killed. Pasteurization. 85° to 95° Celsius for up to thirty minutes. …Heat denatures whey proteins. Those unfolded proteins bind to fat globules, trapping moisture and building structure. …Now it does something that sounds like sabotage. It pumps bacteria back in.

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Beat maker SPVIDZ takes classic rock songs and runs them through a Roland SP-404MKII to pitch-shift and rearrange them, resulting in highly danceable hip-hop beats, some with “grimy dark vibes”.

Songs he has flipped include “Eleanor Rigby” by The Beatles, “The End” by The Doors, “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath, and “Paint It Black” by The Rolling Stones.

After the success of my Rolling Stones flip I got a lot of requests to try The Doors, The End. It has a similar feel and ended up working really well too.

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Afar TV captured absolutely stunning, if not heartbreaking, footage of a colossal iceberg collapsing and then flipping over in the waters right outside of Ilulissat, Greenland. This incredible event, which happened over the course of an hour, was turned into a ten-minute timelapse.

This event occurred beside Ilulissat on Greenland’s west coast, near the entrance to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Ilulissat Icefjord.

As large sections broke away, the iceberg’s shape and balance changed until it became unstable and rolled over.

IcIebergs float in a balance between their weight and the buoyant force of the surrounding seawater, with most of their mass below the surface. Melting, erosion and the loss of large sections can shift an iceberg’s centre of gravity. When its existing position is no longer stable, the iceberg may suddenly rotate into a new orientation. The resulting capsize can displace a large volume of water and produce powerful local waves.

The Original Footage

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Jazz band Ulysses Owens Jr. & Generation Y, in partnership with Musora, performed several amazing jazz covers of classic 1990s grunge songs from their latest album, Kind of Grunge. The band previously performed Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box” on the spot, and several of these covers were created the same way.

This performance is featured on Kind Of Grunge, the band’s new album that reimagines the Seattle sound through the lens of jazz. Along the way, they explore the surprising musical connections between grunge and jazz, the influences that shaped their sound, and why jazz remains one of the world’s most collaborative musical languages.

These covers include the traditional folk song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, famously performed by Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Disarm”, Stone Temple Pilots’ “Interstate Love Song”, Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow”, and Soundgarden’s “Spoonman”. Each version captures the true spirit of the original song, even though it is performed in a completely different musical genre.

Why They Cover Grunge Songs

via The Awesomer

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The post Jazz Band Reimagines Classic 1990s Grunge Songs was originally published on Laughing Squid.

Taylor Frey-Baker, a mechanical engineer at Boston Dynamics, shared why their all-electric Atlas robot, unveiled in 2024, has a head, contrasting it with the previous hydraulic version, which didn’t need one.

Hydraulic Atlas didn’t have a head mainly because it was a research platform. It was doing a lot of acrobatic and athletic work. It really only needed to see directly in front of it so that it could tell what terrain it was on. …So Electric Atlas has a head because it’s going to be working around other people. And so it’s important for Electric Atlas to have a better sense of the environment around it, to have a wider field of view.

Frey-Baker also explained how the modular head makes upgrades easier, allowing Boston Dynamics to keep up with advances in compute technology.

So the head itself can swap onto and off of robots very easily. And then the compute core inside of the head comes in and out of the head like a video game cartridge. So what modularity does for us is let us keep up with the pace of advancement in compute technology. So if there’s some new technology, we don’t have to redesign the entire robot from the ground up.

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The post Why Boston Dynamics Gave Their Atlas Robot a Head was originally published on Laughing Squid.

Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas explores the enduring value placed on physical beauty through his long-running Physical Culture project, which uses sculptural replicas as functional gym weights.

The Western ideal of beauty — athletic, harmonious, and balanced — can be traced back to ancient Greece, where sculpture celebrated the human form as a symbol of both physical and moral excellence. 

Serapinas further explained that, while the context surrounding beauty has changed, those ideals have endured for thousands of years.

For ancient Greeks, temples were built as spaces to honor the gods, but they also stood as monuments to human order, balance, and aspiration. Today’s gyms serve as temples of the body, where ideals of strength and discipline are pursued, repeated, and displayed.

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Mind Flicker HQ explained what pigeons are actually doing when they appear to bob their heads while walking. They hold their heads still to stabilize their vision while their bodies move forward, then rapidly thrust their heads ahead to repeat the cycle.

When a pigeon moves, its body moves forward but the head briefly stays locked in place, still for a fraction of a second and then its head shoots forward into a new position, freezes again and the body catches up…that pause gives the bird a stable image of the ground, the food, the threat, the world.

Why Birds ‘Bob’ Their Heads

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While visiting New York City, the very talented soprano Chloëbeth gave an impromptu performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the building’s incredible acoustics carried her beautiful voice and silenced the normally chatty museum-goers.

I was very nervous doing this – it was kinda random and I hadn’t warmed up my voice at all. But the reception was wonderful nevertheless.

Chloëbeth also reflected on how rewarding it felt to successfully do something so nerve-racking.

It always feels good after doing a nerve wracking thing successfully. What do you need to do which feels scary but you know you’ll be glad after? 

Unfortunately, a museum manager asked her to stop singing. Chloëbeth complied; however, she questioned why speaking was permitted, but singing was not.

When the manager told me I wasn’t allowed to sing I replied “oh so everyone is allowed to speak in here but not sing”? And he was like “yeah”. This confused me a bit cos it’s like we are allowed to use our voices but just not in a Devine way. Anyways whatever I left after that because I didn’t wanna be somewhere where I felt unwelcome and like I was committing a crime…

Other ‘Unexpected’ Performances

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A little green parrot named Pickle gleefully rode a toy train around a colorful track, posing adorably for the camera while on his ride.

When the train starts moving… and suddenly Pickko thinks he’s the star of a music video.

Pickle also doesn’t mind sharing the train with a few special avian friends.

Date Night. Pickle brought his girlfriend on a train ride! Because every good boyfriend knows… romance starts with a train ticket!

POV: When he finally gets a girlfriend, she gets the VIP train experience. 

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