Piezo, polka, and privacy!

• Heating a metal dish scrubber on two piezo contact mics is a very strange audio experience: noises that sound like they come from a foundry or a scrapyard, but are actually from a tiny thing barely moving. The best analogy I can think of for this video is: like a microscope, but for sound. (Thanks Tanner for the suggestion!)
   
• If I say "the first new Weird Al track in ten years is a polka medley of the last decade of pop", that may mean a lot to you... or, perhaps, you didn't grow up in quite the same nerdy internet circles that I did. As someone who knows several of those polkas by heart, I'd encourage you to listen to it the way it was meant to be heard — pirated from Napster over a dial-up internet connection. But if you can't do that, I'd listen to the audio-only link above, and only then add in the perhaps too-distracting collaborative animation music video later.
   
• A fascinating bit of documentary footage from 1977: the last "wash house" in the East Midlands, possibly in Britain, was about to shut its doors. A public laundry, but still manual, getting less and less use after the popularisation of modern, at-home, automatic laundry machines. The past is a foreign country, and this is a postcard from there. I just wish there was more context in the description.
   

• Fancy taking an old bus into an abandoned village in the middle of a normally-sealed military firing range? Imberbus is next month.
   
• Early photographers would sell their subjects' photos for advertising, and there wasn't much those subjects could do about it: how the rise of the camera led to privacy laws. (Thanks to Heidi for suggesting this.)
   
• Excellent pictures of Tokyo's oldest train line.

And finally: accessible sausage rolls! (Thanks Will for sending this over.)

All the best,

— Tom