Two big announcements! good documentaries! and Yorkshire Gaga.

• First up: the best opening ten seconds of a video I've seen for a long while. The other ten minutes are interesting too, as Hainbach bounces samples of his voice, musical instruments, and a lot of other sounds off the actual moon with a radio telescope — but what a way to get people hooked for the rest of the video!
   
• A fascinating pair of videos: an oral history of being "on the dust", and the history of London's trash collection. These are astonishingly high-quality for a school project: produced by a Year 6 class collaborating with "digital-works", professional documentarians and archivists. They're interviewing folks who've been dustmen (the traditional British term for waste collectors) all their lives. I didn't expect to watch these all the way through, but I did, in one sitting: these are incredibly well edited, engaging interviews. I haven't explored the rest of the channel yet, but there looks to be more like this.
   
• I was reminded this week of the Not So Late Show's UK Garage Horse Racing sketch from 2016, and how it's a great joke that's published in the wrong medium. It's two minutes of slow build-up, with a load of name jokes that require a bit of knowledge of 90s garage music, and then a frenetic one-minute quickfire series of punchlines. If this aired in the 90s on a television sketch show, it would have been the highlight of the evening. Plus, audiences tuning in for a half-hour show would have the patience to stick with it. But uploaded to YouTube, it couldn't be clickbaited, and there's no way to tell the audience "give it time, the payoff is worth it". So instead, it had the final minute or so ripped off by the bottom-feeding scum of the internet, and most people saw that minute out of context and uncredited, perhaps forwarded on WhatsApp or randomly on some zero-effort freebooting account.
  
  (Of course, if it was on television in the 90s, the Not So Late Show would have had to copyright-clear both the horse racing footage and the music; I can't reasonably talk about this sketch being ripped off without pointing out that — unless they have a much higher budget than I thought — some of its constituent elements were likely ripped off in turn.)
   

• How I Got My Laser Eye Injury is a well-told anecdote that's done the rounds this week. Like most anecdotes, it's no doubt had its edges worn down by time, but it's well worth a read.
   
• Just one swimming world record has fallen at the Paris Olympics. Is the pool to blame?
   
• A friend recommended this insect bite healer to me, and I had a chance to use it in anger this week. (Amazon affiliate link; I get a cut.) I wouldn't normally recommend products here, but I can only describe it as magic. As long as you apply it within a few minutes of the initial bite, it massively reduces the itching. Although it does hurt for about six seconds as it almost, but not quite, burns you. Read the manual and warning labels, of course, but I hope it works as well for you as it did for me.

And finally, Lady Gaga songs sound better in a broad Yorkshire accent.

All the best,

— Tom