This week: a drone films a tornado, and a life-threatening stunt!

• Staggering footage from the OTUS Project ("Observations of Tornadoes by UAV Systems"), who have both the skills and legal permission to fly a drone into a tornado!
   
• The BBC Archive's YouTube channel has been steadily uploading deep cuts from the corporation's archives, and Simon Groom's Death Slide is a doozy. It's a clip from a 1978 episode of Blue Peter, which is a children's magazine show that started in 1958 and is still produced (albeit in a much-reduced form) today.
  
  The early-90s version of Blue Peter is one of the bits of brain-tape that I will have subconsciously cribbed from when evolving the style of my YouTube channel. I'd seen enough presenters attempting pieces to camera while parachuting, or wingwalking, or bouncing on a trampoline, that it was a natural source to draw from. But I'd never seen this 1978 clip, and it's startled me because it's not just "dangerous" in a manufactured TV drama sense. It's genuinely life-endangering. There are very, very good reasons why we don't film things like this any more.
   
• Kirsten Dicksen tours, and interviews the owner of, a century-old, pie-wedge-shaped spite house in Seattle, which is now on sale!
   

• We now live in a world where "a 90-minute, score-settling, AI musical – in the style of Hamilton", about a retired footballer's legal battle with a scaffolding company and a small Wigan law firm, can be generated on a shoestring budget and used as what seems to be a staggeringly ill-conceived PR strategy. Yes, that's a ridiculous sentence. I strongly recommend reading the article, because, as it says: "the world's gone weird, not you". This Bluesky thread has a summary of the article along with some highlights and excerpts from the piece itself. Personally, I couldn't get through more than ten seconds of the music before cringing so hard I had to switch it off.
   
• Raymond Chen has been part of the development of Microsoft Windows for 30 years, and his blog, The Old New Thing, has a lot of fascinating stories about the historical development of Windows. One particular recent post punched me right in the nostalgia, though, and scratched a little knowledge-itch that I'd almost forgotten: what were the icons in moricons.dll actually for?
   
• Entertaining deep-dive research-hole of the week: the wrongest bird in movie history. (Occasional strong language.)

And finally: a duck flying at 52km/h has been caught by a Swiss speed camera. For the second time. Excellent title pun.

All the best,

— Tom