This week: a bizarre pencil, and a train hits 18 fishtanks of guacamole.

• J.J. McCullough is interested in countries: in the weird countries of the Victorian era he looks through ten old charts of "the countries of the world", from a time when the world hadn't decided on what a country was. Going in, I thought I knew most of this stuff, and then I got surprised by several nations I'd never heard of.
   
• Woźniakowski went too far with smear frames. This is an incredible 45 seconds of 3D animation, taking a pencil and turning it into many odd and often-organic things. I found it almost uncomfortable to watch at times, and I mean that as a compliment.
   
• I stumbled on this 1990 piece from a US late-night show: "David Letterman runs over stuff with a locomotive". What surprised me -- other than the phrase "18 fish tanks filled with guacamole" -- was: this feels like a YouTube bit! Use a modern camera, replace the audience reaction mic with a few friends watching and reacting, and this could sit quite happily amidst the many similar modern YouTube creators who make a living from smashing stuff. (Even down to the dodgy edit to make the host look far closer to a crash than he actually was.)
   

• There's a saying that "safety regulations are written in blood", and this article is a good example of why. "One of the fittest men on Earth drowned during a race in Fort Worth. How did it happen?"
   
• Thanks to Will for sending over "the missing 11th of the month": figuring out a mystery from an xkcd comic in 2012. The answer, in hindsight, is blindingly obvious -- but I didn't figure it out before it was revealed in the post.
   
• Following on from last week's Steak Bake Spider, two sites that do the same thing to create surprisingly different visualisations: the Pret-a-Spider and, thanks to Fraser, the Pub Crawler. Excellent pun.

And finally: a swan, rescued.

All the best,

— Tom