What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Rev. Rye]

Three facts, two bizarre, one more mundane.

1) There is a cartoon called John Dillermand. It's a stop-motion cartoon about a man with a giant, prehensile penis. You might think it's just one of Adult Swim's worse shows. But it's actually made for children. In Denmark.




2) Our modern knowledge of how bird migration works is actually surprisingly recent. Not even on a level of "how do they know exactly where to roost in the winter." Europeans didn't even know where some birds went in the winter until 1822. They only found out when a stork arrived from a winter in South Africa... with an African arrow its neck. It still made it back to Europe in time to be killed by a hunter.




There were still several theories, but my favourite was that they wintered... on the fucking moon. No, I'm not kidding. Weirdly, people even argued that it was supported by Jeremiah 8:7.

3) There's this scene from Bluey:



Until recently, I just assumed it was one of the most random bowdlerisations Disney made of the show, like they didn't want kids to know France was a thing, but it turned out there was actually a reason. Apparently, the Argentine and the Frenchdog were currently working on the strawberry farm where the Russells found them, but someone pointed out that having a Latin American working as a farm labourer had some... racial connotations, so they decided that to have the Frenchdog explain that they were backpackers to eliminate those implications. Even though there’s no backpacks in sight.

Even though, from what I understand, when Argentinians emigrate to the US, they tend to be far less likely to be the desperate, huddled masses that farmers are willing to exploit for cheap labour.