A mountain of mannequins, and some final friendly lies.

3rd January 2022

Heads up! This newsletter is more than three years old. Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed. Please handle with care.

Hello!

In this week's video, I investigate a metres-high mountain of mannequins in the Midlands. And for the final time, as least for now, Two Of These People Are Lying!

Elsewhere on YouTube this week, I've found:

Matt Parker's video about his programmable Christmas tree is a lovely 40-minute diversion about patents, code problems, and inventing a whole new file format.
Two Trenchcoats In A Kid is an incredible bit of physical comedy... but it'll only make sense if you've seen the old comedy trope of "two kids in a trenchcoat". (Note: while that video's suitable for all, other videos from that channel definitely aren't!)
Allen Pan redeems an old, failed Kickstarter by making an actual air umbrella. Or at least, trying to.
Techmoan demonstrates open-ended interviews: I thought I had a good knowledge of old TV/radio archive material but I'd never heard of this before. Bonus points for the radio DJ voice.

And around the rest of the internet:

If you're not playing each daily Wordle, I think you're missing out. It's the old game Mastermind, but with words: each seems to be perfectly balanced so that each day's puzzle is just possible, and really rewarding when you finally crack it.
A forgotten product: the East German glass that was too durable. I'm skeptical of the easy narrative here that "the product was abandoned for being too good", but it's fascinating to dig into. (Thanks to Martin for sending this one in.)
A kid asked Alexa for a challenge. It suggested she short a plug socket and cause sparks, because auto-generated content is really really difficult to work with. (Here's the original tweet that story's based on!)
And finally, the Yoghurt Mafia is a wonderful long-read from Radio NZ: how a British cooking show inspired New Zealand prisoners, the point where yoghurt culture was smuggled between prisons.

Well, here we go into 2022. I think that's about six months of running this newsletter, and I've got no regrets: it's been really nice to send out links each week, and to be using what's now fairly retro technology to write in longer form. Thanks for being a part of it.

At this rate, I'll end up doing ham radio next.

All the best,

— Tom

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