A drone films a tornado, and a life-threatening stunt!

Hello! Here's some good stuff I've found on the internet this week.

This week on Lateral, it's the welcome return of the Answer in Progress crew, facing questions about sage sayings, suspicious swatters and shrill sounds. And: tickets for the Lateral live show are now on general sale! October 12th, back at the Clapham Grand, as part of the Cheerful Earful podcast festival.

Some things you might enjoy in the world of video:

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!

Away from the world of video:

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