Including this Wikipedia article mostly because it's the only Wikipedia article I've seen to include the phrase "knee slapper." I also enjoy that whoever wrote this section explicitly calls this joke not very funny, with citation.

All tell a similar story: a slow-witted New York farmer is outfoxed by his (presumed urban) boarders; after they complain about the poor food being served, the farmer discounts the complaint by claiming he "kin eat anything", and the boarders wonder if he can eat a crow. "I kin eat a crow!" the farmer says. The boarders take him up on the challenge but also secretly spike the crow with Scotch snuff. The story ends with the farmer saying: "I kin eat a crow, but I be darned if I hanker after it." Although the humor might produce only a weak smile today, it was probably a knee slapper by 19th-century standards, guaranteeing the story would be often retold in print and word of mouth, thus explaining, in part, the idiom's origin.

The Beginner's Guide is a well-known metafictional game that was released by Davey Wreden in 2015. A big part of the experience of the game is that it features running commentary audio throughout in which the creator of the game provides his thoughts and interpretations of things that happen in the game. (If you haven't played the game before, I do recommend it; it's not very long and it's worth it to go into it without knowing anything about it.)

This is the first in a series of videos in which two people play through the game with the sound on mute -- one of them has played the game before and gives some minimal context, but the other person hasn't played the game before and interprets it without hearing the narration the first time through. They then play through the game again with the sound on. Not all of the conclusions they come to necessarily make sense, but it's still a very interesting watch.

A blog talking about uses of homing pigeons as messengers in war throughout history going back to antiquity. What a wonderfully specific and interesting blog topic! Seems to be actively updated at time of posting.

I am especially enamoured with the story of Spike, a homing pigeon who flew 52 missions in World War I supposedly without a single injury and was hailed as a huge hero at the end of the war (and enjoyed a blissful retirement in "a special Army loft for distinguished military pigeons.")

Once, when the secrets of science were the jealously guarded property of a small priesthood, the common man had no hope of mastering their arcane complexities. Years of study in musty classrooms were prerequisite to obtaining even a dim, incoherent knowledge of science.

Today, all that has changed: a dim, incoherent knowledge of science is available to anyone. Popular science books, magazines and computer programs - with their simple, fatuous and misleading prose, their garish illustrations, their flimsy modern production values - have brought science within the reach of anyone who can afford their inflated prices or who can mooch off someone else.

Indeed, today a myriad of sources are available to explain science facts that science itself has never dreamed of.

This web site is one of them.

I especially enjoy their discussion of particle physics.

Full versions of the book as pdf etc here (with permission).

Online collection of love poetry submitted by readers, operating continuously since 1997. It seems like they don't get nearly as many submissions as they used to, so if you've written a love poem lately, maybe send it in! <3

Short silly joke blog post. I'm not a mathematician but I'm mathematician-adjacent and a bit of a casual math enjoyer, and this post lives rent free in my head. I always remember it whenever someone goes "oh you like math? that's cool, I hate math"

What if, instead of the hour hand and the minute hand both going around the center of the clock, the minute hand went around the tip of the hour hand?

Back before people realized the earth orbited the sun, this type of shape was also used to calculate the positions of the planets in the sky at any given time.

Don't forget to check the button in the bottom right of the page to enable the second hand as well, which adds another layer of craziness.

They Might Be Giants have this series of very short song snippets on their album Apollo 18. This person has gone through and paired up each short snippet with a clip from Jurassic Park. I don't know why they chose to do this specific thing, but some of their pairing choices are quite clever!

See also: "I Left My Body" by They Might Be Giants

Hey remember when computers worked right and did everything the way you wanted them to? Yeah, me neither.

Love the creative use of the very silly ".technology" domain here.

See also: grumpy.website (this thing with the Android alarm has gotten me so many times I've gone back to using an old-fashioned alarm clock radio)

In 1991, Jaleco of America released an NES game called Totally Rad. It was a fairly decent late-generation platformer, but it was perhaps most memorable for its oddly relentless '80s-surfer-dude dialogue, which even at the time had started to sound dated. I played it at least once around the time of its release, but I had mostly forgotten about it until one day I happened upon a Japanese game from 1990 called Magic John.

It was Totally Rad. And yet it was not.

It turns out the iconic surfer-dude lingo of this game was a complete invention of the American translators. They also redrew a bunch of the graphics to be more Radical™. This series of pages goes through all the game text and compares the original Japanese text/graphics to the English 'tude-ified version. It's amazing. Honestly, in the end, it seems like the '80s version ended up being a lot more memorable than the original.

This is actually a link to a mirrored/rehosted version of the original page, which seems to be sadly defunct. Be sure to check the hidden hover-text on the images! See also: Kid Radd