Amber arrows! slapstick! and bird news.

• Thanks to Zach for pointing me to Justin Davies' channel, which combines woodworking and baking in increasingly improbable ways. If you'd like to get straight to the point, he has a wide range of YouTube Shorts, but for my money the strongest videos are the slower, discursive ones. You already know the answer to the title of "I turned this banned tree root into ice cream, but will it poison me?" — but the video is definitely more about the journey. A really fun, tree-flavoured-ice-cream journey.
   
• In a similar vein to last week's bus video, Bryn Buck asks: why are there so many amber arrows on traffic lights in Blackburn? This is a small channel, named "Show Me A Sign, Bryn", and if you remember and like some of my early videos, you'll probably like this as well.
   
• Archive newsreel footage from 1911, of the opening of the Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge, shows just how much a century changes the attitude to health and safety: at 14 seconds in, much to one man's misfortune, there is what must be one of the greatest accidental slapstick gags ever committed to film. Don't worry, he's hauled back up at the end of the clip, he only fell a very short way to the ground, apparently with nothing more than an injury to his pride.
   

• Bird news! Magpies and crows are using "anti-bird spikes" to make their nests. More bird news: 
   
• "New York’s skyscrapers soar above a century-old steam network that still warms the city. While the rest of the world moved to hot water, Manhattanites still buy steam by the megapound."
   
• McDonald's corporate headquarters used to have a suede waterbed think tank.

And finally, on TikTok, a great example of the Doppler effect: the harmonimortar, and the good dog that fetches it. (Alternate link; 3D print file.)

All the best,

— Tom