1/22/26 - Vote For CMOG, Exploding Trees, and Academy Awards
- bribriny
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
Thursday 1/22/26
Celebrate:
Answer Your Cat's Questions Day
Celebration of Life Day
Clashing Clothes Day
Come in From the Cold Day
Dance of the Seven Veils Day
National Blonde Brownie Day
National Hot Sauce Day
National Polka Dot Day
National Southern Food Day
Roe Vs. Wade Day
Women's Healthy Weight Day
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Captain America, Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four are uniting for one common cause: cookies.
Mondelēz and Disney have partnered to release Marvel Oreo Stuf of Legends Cookies, limited-edition cookies that celebrate the vast Marvel universe. The collection of original-flavored cookies features 32 different embossments of beloved Marvel heroes and villains. The Oreos come in collectible packaging, designed by Marvel comic book artist Todd Nauck.
The Oreos also feature an interactive element. In the Marvel Oreo canon, three packs of cookies have made it to store shelves but Marvel villains are blocking the fourth pack's way. By scanning a QR code on the Marvel Oreo Stuf of Legends Cookie packaging, participants can vote on which route a truck should take to avoid the villains. Each vote earns an entry into a sweepstakes drawing for a $1,400 check, $500 Disney.com gift card and $100 Oreo digital code.
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January may be the month to make a resolution to lose weight, but March is when most people actually try to follow through on it. March is the peak dieting month, with 26 percent of adults saying they’re on one vs. 23 percent in January. The reason is March’s proximity to swimsuit season. While January isn’t tops for dieting, it is the month when the most new health club memberships come in, accounting for 12 percent of total new membership sales.
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USAToday is having people vote on the 10 best small town museums. And they picked The Corning Museum of Glass as one of the contenders!
They say-
For lovers of glass art, there’s no better museum to visit than the Corning, the largest space in the world dedicated to this beautiful-albeit-fragile art form. Their permanent collection spans from ancient Egypt to today. They also have an exhibition dedicated to innovations in glass and how this material has changed society indefinitely.
Corning Museum of Glass is currently ranked #3 of 20 for Best Small Town Museum.
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The Academy Award Nominations are today around 8:30am (details here), and Buzzfeed has an article about actors who won an Oscar for less than 30 minutes of Screentime.
The champ is Beatrice Straight from 1977's Network. She was on screen for 5 minutes and 2 seconds.
Dame Judy Dench had 5 minutes and 52 seconds in 1999's Shakespeare in Love
1972 - Ben Johnson, The Last Picture Show - 9 minutes and 54 seconds.
1992 - Jack Palance, 1992 City Slickers, 12 minutes and 24 seconds
2009 - Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, 12 minutes and 29 seconds
Most were for supporting roles but,
1992 Anthony Hopkins, Best Actor for Silence of the Lambs, 24 minutes 52 seconds
1976 Louise Fletcher won Best Actress in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 22 minutes and 27 seconds.
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Saw this post on Facebook in the group Meanwhile in Wisconsin.
There’s a chance of EXPLODING TREES on Friday and Saturday in the Midwest as Temps are supposed to get to -20°.
Wait...is that a thing???
Turns out..Yes, sort of.
Trees have evolved amazing strategies to withstand extreme cold, but sometimes sudden temperature changes still prove to be too much for them to handle, according to the National Forest Foundation.
"During spells of extreme cold or when trees haven’t had time to acclimate, the life-sustaining sap inside a tree can begin to freeze. Sap contains water, so it expands when frozen, putting pressure on the bark, which can break and create an explosion."
While it's true the trees can crack, they're not going to shatter in a million pieces. (which, sorry trees, would be often!
West Texas A&M University Associate Professor of Physics Christopher Baird said the sound of the explosion may sound violent, but the process doesn't tend to actually be dangerous for nearby people.
"The crackling sound or gunshot pop you hear in the forest in the winter is the sound of trees freezing and bursting," Baird said on a university website. "A tree has hundreds to tens of thousands of these fluid channels. If one bursts, the tree has plenty of other ones to rely on. Furthermore, each channel is small, so that an individual channel bursting does not do much damage."
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A new gadget called the "Lollipop Star" debuted today, using bone conduction to play music through your teeth while you eat a candy. For about $9, you can literally taste your favorite song, proving that 2026 is the year of "sensory overload" tech.
I saw this on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.
I've always wondered about the bone conduction headphones and if they are any good.
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Home prices in the U.S. continue to hover near record highs, with the median price of homes sold coming in at $410,800 during the 2025 second quarter.
Property Shark analyzed median sales prices across the country to determine the 100 most expensive ZIP code, with a focus on residential transactions that closed between Jan. 1, 2025, and Sept. 30, 2025.
Los Altos, California 94022 (2025 median sale price: $5,100,000)
Newport Beach, California 92662, 92657, and 92661
Stinson Beach, California 94970
Santa Barbara, California 93108
Water Mill, New York 11976
Sagaponack, New York 11962
Atherton, California 94027
Miami Beach, Florida 33109
I'm not seeing 14901, 14830, 18840, 14892 on the list
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AI chatbots don't interrupt and aren't judgmental – so what can they teach us about deep listening?
Harvard Business Review research shows that in 2025 therapy and companionship were the single most common use of generative AI through the family of tools like ChatGPT, which can carry out a conversation much like a person.
Strikingly, studies show AI-generated text responses are now rated as more compassionate than those written by humans – even when those humans are trained responders from crisis hotlines.
This isn't because AI is genuinely more compassionate, but rather a sobering indictment of how rarely we listen in a non-judgmental way.
Perhaps the most fundamental lesson from AI is simply allowing others to speak without interruption. Humans interrupt for countless reasons: fear of an awkward silence, attempts to "help" find words, saving time with our "superior" responses or sub-consciously asserting dominance.
It can serve a valuable resource, if there are appropriate safeguards in place, for those who have no one to turn to.
Read the full article here for a deeper dive.
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Today's Useless Fact of the Day - On January 22, 1997, a woman named Lottie Williams became the first (and so far only) person in history known to have been hit by a piece of man-made space debris.
While walking in a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she felt a tap on her shoulder. It turned out to be a 6-inch piece of charred metal from a Delta II rocket that had launched in 1996.
The piece was so light (comparable to a piece of an empty soda can) that she wasn't injured.
(I told you they are going to de-orbit the space station in a few years..so here's still hope for you.)
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