I fucked up my fingers prying open a Yankee Candle too hard the other day. At least it was my off hand. Anyway. Links!

• The Missourian town which was overrun by deadly cobras [29 minutes]
• If “American Idiot” was a bro-country song — truly, truly cursed in the best way
• The Ordnance Survey’s favourite maps of 2021 — some good taste from the boys in the newsroom
• The quest for an artificial womb
• Books set in hyperbolic space, where parallel lines curve away and never meet back up
• The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art, & Natural History, a division of the Last Tuesday Society — straight onto the bucket list
• Bin∞cular shot — a gallery of inaccurate binocular shots in films. Once you see it, you can never unsee it

• Starting us off straight into things you shouldn’t watch if someone else is peeking over your shoulder, weird-internet-history connoisseur Justin Whang brings us the stories of the men with knobs on their arms. [14′]
• Early English editions of Euclid’s Elements used pop-ups to illustrate 3D proofs.
• T.i.l. about the “quasiquote”, a punctuation mark used in early fan zines to indicate ‘paraphrased or inexact quotes’.
• Two nice stories to end the day:
  • A deaf Californian gridiron team is absolutely steamrolling its opponents
  • The Dutch immigrant businessman building a giant scale model of Canada in Toronto

I figure over time dates will get ambiguous — it’s time to start numbering these bad boys, from the top. Five for your perusal this time around…

• The New Republic on the claimed devolution of Thom Yorke’s songwriting — well-argued, but them’s fighting words!
• Monkeytype, a ridiculously customisable words-per-minute type-tester — clearly someone’s passion project… With proper punctuation turned on, I get around 127 w.p.m, which is apparently four times as fast as the average? 😅
• Seinfeld, but it’s a Don Bluth cartoon from the ’90s — shockingly well done
• Newton’s fractal — maths nerds only; the plot twist at the end will shock you
• Some fun Ascii calendars