Cable cars! a screaming eagle! and jingles!

• Hank Green's video about his new mohawk is emotional and different that I expected — although, given it's from Hank Green, perhaps I should have known that. If chemotherapy's going to cost you your hair, you might as well fulfil a childhood dream.
   
• Stick with me here: the new series of Love Island has started in the UK. They have one of the most interesting accessibility hacks I've seen in a while: YouTube videos where the contestants audio describe themselves, such as André and Jessica. (Revealing swimwear; probably not something you want folks seeing over your shoulder.) It conveys contextual information that you can't get if you're blind or partially sighted — voiced by the contestants themselves! One of the downsides of audio description is that there often isn't enough time to get across details, so having this as an optional extra is clever. Well done to the production team, and apologies if watching these destroys your YouTube recommendations.
   
• For years, the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board has put out high-production-value CG reconstruction videos of large-scale industrial accidents. Ostensibly they're for the industry, to teach lessons from other people's mistakes: but they've amassed a bit of a following on YouTube. If nothing else, please watch the first 50 seconds of their new video, for the incredibly bombastic introduction featuring a screaming eagle magically constructing a chemical plant.
   
• Dime Store Adventures continues to be one of the most underrated channels on YouTube. Incredibly detailed research, diving into century-old newspapers to pull out details, and then weaving them into a story. Have you got two hours? Hear the story of the "inhuman and senseless" six-day roller-skating race. Something quicker? A much more brief update on the Block Island Wreckers, which you might remember from a few newsletters back.

• Another daily puzzle! Dadagrams is a simple question: can you get a better Scrabble (but for legal reasons not Scrabble) score than the author's father, who plays each puzzle one day earlier? It's sometimes unsatisfying if "Dad" gets the maximum score available, which means you can only tie — and also, you don't get 50 bonus points for using all your letters — but as gimmicks go, it's a lovely one.
   
• Radio has moved on since the 1980s... but Duncan Newmarch hasn't. A full, hour-long audio show, produced to sound exactly like it came from an over-the-top Kenny Everett-style DJ in December 1989. I'm just about old enough to remember shows like this: if you're younger, you should know that listening to radio shows could be the only way to hear new, interesting music. (Full disclosure: I could only get a few minutes into this before I found the parody just too accurate, got annoyed at the DJ shtick, and couldn't listen any more. Which, hopefully, is a compliment. I assume the rest of it is just as well-produced; it's worth at least trying it out!)
   
• Off the back of that, I wondered how Duncan got his own jingle sung for the start of "We Built This City". The answer: JAM Creative Productions, who still make jingles the old-fashioned way; have a listen to their samples, or perhaps some other Starship jingles that have been uploaded. And it turns out that things like this still happen today: Lady Gaga recorded custom versions of "You and I", swapping out the lyric 'Nebraska' for various radio station locations!
   
• A single Beyoncé concert affected Swedish inflation statistics by around 0.2%.

And finally: here's that one song everyone plays on piano. Stick around for at least 30 seconds.

Huh. I've written a lot of words this week, haven't I? Next week, this newsletter will be entirely in emoji. (That's probably not true, but I'm not ruling it out.)

All the best,

— Tom