• Compilations of Weird, Funny & Cool Japanese Commercials
  1, 2, 3 and many more.
  
  
• Enter that previous or any string into Tube to experience stripped-down, minimalist YouTube access.
  
  
• At the NY Times, Bulletproof, Slow and Full of Wine: Kim Jong-un's Mystery Train.
  
  
• And at the BBC, the Jewellery of the Jazz Age.

• Pick a country and a decade at radiooooo.com (that's 'radio' with five oh's) and be amazed (that is, if you ike old music.) Zooming, too.
  
  
• In Rolling Stone, Pink Floyd's 'Dark Side of the Moon': 10 Things You Didn't Know for #3 ('Brain Damage' starts at 36:20) and #8; and for the Merriweather Post Pavillion pic at #7.
  
  
• In Medium: California experiences the future earlier than other parts of the country. By Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira, part 2 of 4, California is the Future!

• CBS slideshow: 142 people who died in 2017.
  
  
• And one who died in 2018: Joe Frank Signs Off, his last interview, in Slate.
  
  
• Video: in 1949, MGM threw a 25th Anniversary party, and all the stars were there. See 'em eating! Also, Toto's "Africa" on the Floppotron, an assembly of old floppy drives, scanners, etc.

• 100 years of the map of Europa
  
  
• Rome2Rio.com is a site which generates up-to-date info for all available modes of public transport between any two city pairs entered, not just flights.

• Incredible -- Flags of Russia. It's a blog, so maybe start at the beginning with the atom-splitting bear of Zheleznogorsk.
  
  
• Back in July I was railing against autoplay on News pages; the Firefox about:config solution involves changing the image.animation_mode and media.autoplay.enabled settings.
  
  
• Great new pic of Jupiter from Juno's Perijove 09. Also, the Great Red Spot from Perijove 07.
  
  
• Two new buses -- the Volkner Mobil's Performance S, a private, luxury coach which can carry its own auxilliary car. And I might like to try the new Cabin 'boutique' sleeper bus which runs overnight between San Francisco and LA. It has two levals of capsule-hotel style pods the weary traveler can stretch out in. A short video review of the experience.

• Oddly compelling, amazingly detailed simulations of a variety of empty vehicles encountering 10 guard rails in a row, straight on, at speed. Also, 100 speed bumps, and there's several more of the latter available, scroll down.
  
  
• American Football in Decline -- we can only hope. Some high schools are disbanding their teams due to lack of interest.
  
  
• RSOE EDIS World Map showing the current emergencies, in real time.

• Wonderful -- The Tokyoiter. Cover samples if Tokyo had something like The New Yorker. That title's awful ungainly, however -- I'd go with the more accurately native "Tokyo Hito". Here's one more cover, animated.
  
  
• PG County Metrobus stop loses to Tampa for sorriest bus stop in America.
  
  
• An investigation: In search of Jughead's hat. What is that crownish lid he's always wearing?
  
  
• At Bored Panda, Trees that refuse to give up.
  
  
• In Finland, girls apparently participate in a 'sport' they call hobbyhorse. The very definition of hinky (as they say, babyish and embarassing), this is what can happen if there aren't enough boys around.
  
  
• How the ampersand was formed.

• Where'd the Spanish tilde over the 'n' come from?
  
  
• About that photo of a gamer duct-taped to a ceiling beam.
  
  
• Asmara, Eritrea, has a collection of beautiful Modernist buildings from the Italian occupation.
  
  
• Pivot to video, a revolting new trend. Perhaps in direct response, my laptop's taken to freezing up periodically, seemingly whenever called upon to display a video.
  
  
• Simulation: quadcopters destroy an air force, and an aircraft carrrier. (Yt)

Imagery from the heavily-shielded Juno probe, compiled from its Perijove 05 and Perijove 06 passes over Jupiter. It's all kinda twitchy because the spacecraft's rotating at about at about 3/min.

• A former run-down slum in Central Java, Indonesia has received a dazzling makeover!
  
  
• The Five Nicest and the Five Most Annoying Sounds of Japan. Also, more audio, unrelated: a half-hour of ambient 'Bladerunner'.
  
  
• At Jalopnik, How Pixar screwed up cartoon cars for a generation of kids. I've never seen a 'Cars' movie but I'm intrigued by the new one. Also, Gorgeous cars from the Art Deco era.

• According to The Telegraph, the world's coolest passports are apparently issued in Scandinavia and Canada. Also shows some interesting entry stamps, like Easter Island's.
  
  
• Concerning two million-dollar 'face' gold coins -- a 221-pound Canadian Maple Leaf, and Australia's One Tonne Gold Coin. One of the Canadians (apparently, about twenty were minted) was recently stolen from a museum in Berlin.
  
  
• Ah, 'Fantasia' -- "a new form of musical entertainment," according to our host, Deems Taylor. Saw it in the theater at least three times in the 70s (once, at Radio City Music Hall), and I'm now in possesion of the original 'Disney Classics' restored version, with its aggresively stereo Fantasound soundtrack. My favorite sequences are the abstract Bach at the beginning, and the mythological Beethoven. Also wondering about what was cut in the latter, this side-by-side comparison with & w/o Sunflower shows all. Plus another, related YouTube, the movie's original Claire de Lune, initially cut but surfacing a little later with some version of 'Blue Bayou' for the music; don't care to know which.

• At Bored Panda, Honest Pictures of Russia -- photos by Alexander Petrosyan. Also, David Burdeny's photos of Moscow subway stations -- after hours, so no people.
  
  
• The USGS and the National Geographic have teamed up so you can use the interactive map to find your TOPO and print out its PDF.
  
  
• Beautiful neighborhood Korean convenience store pictures by Me Kyeoung Lee. And finally, Umbrellas in Japan.

• Illustrated -- What Your Poop Can Tell You About Your Health, posted here as a public service.
  
  
• Found a wiki devoted to Boy Scout merit badges. Its Discontinued merit badges might be an interesting starting point, although each badge also has a page.
  
  
• The Soviet future of 2017 as imagined in 1960, for a filmstrip. Also, Car ads of the Soviet Union.
  
  
• I've mentioned this science fiction cover artist from the 1950s here a couple times, but I keep forgetting his name. Searching again, I found his entry in something amazing called the Internet SF DataBase. For more, here's another Richard M. Powers site somebody's got on Tumblr.
  
  
• Donald D. Markstein's Vast Repository of Toonological Knowledge has entries for almost every comic book and cartoon.

• It's Boxing Day but didja know it's also Mao's 123rd birthday? Here's a soulful new pop version of The East is Red to commemorate the occasion.
  
  
• A few more Chirstmas links: in Collectors Weekly, A Wonderful Life: How Postwar Christmas Embraced Spaceships, Nukes, & Cellophane which traces the development and evolution of the American holiday; Honest Trailers reviews the ever-perplexing Rankin/Bass 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' (note that Wikipedia explains the miner licking his pick-axe: a deleted scene involving a peppermint mine); and Mental Floss explains 10 British Christmas traditions which confuse Americans.
  
  
• Only saw a couple episodes of 'MythBusters' but I'm absorbing its collected conclusions which are summarized at mythresults.com.
  
  
• Another didja know -- the buyer of a new Rolls-Royce can specify many custom features, one of which is a fiber-optics laced headliner, which simulates the night sky.
  
  
• And at NewStatesman, a fascinating article about false memories of a non-existent movie called 'Shazaam' which some are convinced they saw in the early 90s.

• Here's a company, Supernova, which sells a blue taillight for bicycles. Since this isn't legal in many jurisdictions, they've posted a handy state-by-state list of blue light laws. I'm now wondering about green, and purple -- the latter may be too close to law enforcement's special blue wavelengths. Speaking of green, there's a new Wal*Mart-supported initiative which surfaced around Veteran's Day -- replace one of your porch-lights to "support the troops." There's several in my neighborhood (one house even has four) but at first I guessed these were simply devout Muslims, green being the color of Islam and emerald lights, a common night-time indicator of mosques.
  
  
• Someone is stealing sunken WWII battleships (possibly for their low background steel).

• Syrian refugees are peddling through a loophole to cross the Russia-Norway frontier.
  
  
• One of those two-page Cracked listicles which are pretty good -- Seven Types of Violence They Get Wrong in Action Movies, especially that hand-cutting thing of #4. Clearly "they"ve never had a badly cut palm.
  
  
• Two unrelated videos: an art installation in Montréal, 21 Swings; and Psychedelic Pink, the Pink Panther cartoon they showed before "Yellow Submarine" when it was new in early 1969. In 2008 the kids were watching this cartoon when I checked into a family-run guesthouse in Jodhpur, India.

• History of Waffles. Pearl sugar apparently the secret ingredient of true NYWF Belgian waffles.
  
  
• Beautiful Old Batteries
  
  
• Rocket with internal combustion engine -- a straight six, in Space!
  
  
• Garrison Keillor just retired; here he is at the beginning, in 1979.

• A Map of the World's Most Superlative Trees
  
  
• United had Men-Only Flights up until 1970
  
  
• Barton Bernstein - American conservatives are the forgotten critics of the atomic bombing of Japan. Sounds a little out of character now.

've been unable to post for a while, links accumulating as wunderland.com transitioned to a different server.

• Over at Bored Panda, an architectural phenomenon I first saw in a dance sequence in The Fall -- Stepwells of India. More at the wikipedia Stepwell page.
  
  
• In The Atlantic, The Curious Case of Men and Women's Buttons.
  
  
• Helium Dreams in the New Yorker -- a new generation of airships is born. "So this... this is what happened."
  MeFi

• James Fallows has declared war on the two-stroke engine, specifically the Leafblower Menace.
  
  
• The Food Lab: The Science of the Best Yorkshire Puddings aka Popovers.
  
  
• Consumer Reports Video: Chevrolet Crash Test -- 2009 vs 1959. Automobile accidents must've been horrible in the Fabulous Fifties.
  
  
• All your germaphobic habits are pretty much useless.

• RIP David Bowie -- the 70s-80s soundtrack of my life incomplete w/o your music. Pushing Ahead of the Dame is an amazing reference, has an in-depth post about every song. And don't miss the twitchy "Blackstar" video.
  
  

From The Commercial Zen of Muji by Silvia Killingsworth, in the New Yorker:
• The colors, patterns, and materials are generic, but everything, from toothbrush holders to storage boxes, comes in pleasing shapes.
• [Their] compact all-white appliances are described by a display sign as having "a square shape tinged with mellow roundness."
• Its advertising conveys the sense that life without logos, loud colors, and sharp edges is peaceful and free of distraction and excess.