On Victoria Island in Northern Canada there is a series of long finger lakes. In one of the lakes there’s an island. Inside that smaller island, there’s a smaller lake, which contains a still smaller island about a fifth of a mile long. It is the largest known island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island. You can see it here. I like maps and islands. I like exclaves…

Three Fun Facts about West Virginia: The New River is actually one of the world’s oldest rivers and, unusually, flows south to north. The nickname and team mascot for Poca High School in Poca, WV is the Dots. West Virginia just adopted the most pro-business worker classification test in the nation. While I would love to write about the Poca Dots, I’m going to focus on the state’s new worker classification test, enacted March 11,…

Please hold. The past is calling. Source: LOC This weekend I watched The Call, a South Korean horror film (yes, subtitles) about a woman who receives a call from 20 years earlier. The past and present keep changing as the two callers interact over time. Oddly there were two movies released in 2020 named The Call. It’s this one. The past can affect the present, but not usually the way it did in the movie.…

Witness: The severed head of a sea slug. Image by Sakaya Mitoh, who performed this awesome experiment. Did you know that sea slugs have superpowers? According to researchers at the Nara Women’s University in Japan, if you sever the head of a certain type of slug, the slug can grow a new body, organs and all. I like that as the basis for a new Marvel character. Or maybe the slug is a distant…

Photo by Hectonichus and, yes, this fella is sticking his tongue out at you (but he can’t remember why). A Swedish study concluded that baboons, pig-tailed macaques, and squirrel monkeys have some of the worst short-term memories in the animal kingdom, barely exceeding that of bees. The point is, never ask a pig-tailed macaque where you left your car keys. Having a short memory can be a problem in some situations, but not it’s not…

The 1980 Double Fantasy album is meh, featuring alternating tracks by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. But there’s at least on gem on that album, and it’s the very first track: “(Just Like) Starting Over.” The song was originally titled “Starting Over” but the parenthetical was a late addition, reportedly inserted to make sure listeners knew this wasn’t Dolly Parton’s country music chart topper from the same year, “Starting Over Again.”…