The Rise and Fall of the Pet Rock Craze | August 05 2026, 00:55

Today I learned that the most successful Christmas product of 1975 was a rock. Just a regular rock. Gary Dahl, an advertiser from California, was sitting in a bar listening to his friends complain about their pets — feeding them, walking them, cleaning up after them — and jokingly said that he had the perfect pet: a rock. It doesn’t need to be fed, doesn’t poop, doesn’t die. What began as a joke that evening turned into a business plan. Dahl bought smooth pebbles from Rosarito Beach in Mexico for about a cent apiece and sold them for $3.95 each. Each rock came in a cardboard carrying case — with “breathing” holes and straw bedding inside. And here’s the main point: the product wasn’t the rock. The product was the accompanying 32-page care and training manual, written with a stone-faced (pardon the pun) seriousness: the commands “sit” and “stay” are learned instantaneously by the pet, “come here” and “fetch” not so much, and it performs the command “die” brilliantly.

In a few months, more than a million units were sold, Dahl became a millionaire, and he was written about in magazines and invited on television shows. By the beginning of 1976, it was all over, warehouses remained with unsold rocks, and attempts to repeat success with other novelty products failed. Dahl died in 2015, but the Pet Rock brand lives on: you can still buy a rock in its branded box today.

(How I found this out. I’m currently reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and came across the phrase “They were the Pet Rock of parenting.” – about Amy’s parents. I didn’t understand it and went to Google what this Pet Rock was.)

Navigating Translation Traps: A Dual-Language Reading of “Gone Girl” | August 04 2026, 03:14

Bought Gone Girl in English in Spain, very interesting, reading it. But I keep a Russian translation on my phone, so if anything difficult comes up, I don’t have to go to a dictionary, but to the translation. And after a third of the book read – blood from my eyes. I don’t know who can like the Russian translation – only those who haven’t seen the original.

Eng: I’m using this journal to get better: to hone my skills, to collect details and observations

Rus: Работа в журнале — временная, она нужна, чтобы оттачивать навыки, копить наблюдения…

Darn, journal – it’s a diary! If they meant “journal”, they use magazine.

Eng: Nick prides himself on his packing skills: He is (was) the loader of the dishwasher, the packer of the holiday bags.

Rus: Ник гордится своим умением укладывать вещи. Ведь он работал (как-то!) загрузчиком посудомоечной машины, собирал сумки для пикника.

Darn, worked as a dishwasher loader… Nick is Amy’s husband, he just helped around the kitchen at home.

Eng: Amy’s cell was being monitored

Rus: Банковская ячейка Эми под наблюдением

Darn, translator, cell [phone] – it’s a phone!

Eng: dropped out of college and moved to Manhattan

Rus: в конце девяностых закончила колледж и перебралась в Манхэттен

Translator, dropped out means she left college halfway through. Not graduated from college.

Eng: I have a dash of ADD, and I’ve always found my wife a bit dazzling

Rus: Хотя у меня есть такой грешок — все преувеличивать

The translator clearly didn’t catch what ADD is 😉 It’s Attention Deficit Disorder

Eng: We have a cold-cut tray if you want, sweetheart

Rus: Там есть лоток с колотым льдом. Если хочешь, бери, дорогой

Cold cuts – that’s sliced meat. The curiosity is intensified by the fact that a page later Nick himself says: “we mainly live on cold cuts” – the translator translated the same word correctly, failing to notice the connection.

Eng: The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime!

Rus: Обыденный механический процесс. Как будто фокусник распахнул черный ящик. Только что мир окутывала тьма, и вдруг — бац! — свет

Actually, spooky ventriloquist-dummy translates as creepy ventriloquist, and lids – it’s the doll’s eyelids. What’s with the magician darn.

Eng: My life was alarmless

Rus: У меня вообще беспорядочная жизнь

Actually, the author plays with the word alarm (alarm/clock, alarm). Nick means a life without alarm clocks and alarms (alarmless). The translator, however, delivered an abstract “disordered life,” completely losing the author’s irony.

Eng: Greedy journalists with knowing smirks and hollow legs, getting the free buzz before they go somewhere better.

Rus: Жадные журналисты усмехаются и

переминаются с ноги на ногу в ожидании халявного хавчика и бухла — напьются-нажрутся и свалят куда-нибудь еще.

Let’s put aside hollow legs – it’s actually an idiom, meaning the ability to drink a ton of alcohol without showing signs of intoxication, but darn where does shifting from foot to foot come from?

Eng: I was a writer who wrote about TV and movies and books

Rus: Я привык зарабатывать писательским трудом, сочинять романы, сценарии для кинофильмов и телевизионных программ

AAA! Nick wrote about movies and books — he’s a journalist, a pop culture critic. In translation, he became a novelist and screenwriter, which directly contradicts all further text (he himself tells the police: “journalism, pop culture”).

Eng: So there it came, out of nowhere, as Rand begged for his daughter’s return: a killer smile

Rus: Вот она, откуда ни возьмись, улыбка, о которой просил Ранд. Улыбка, так необходимая для его дочери. Улыбка убийцы

Rand didn’t ask for any smile 🙂 he was pleading for his daughter’s return, and at that very moment Nick flashed a smile. The translator invented “Rand’s request,” ruining a key scene of the first part. Plus, the wordplay is lost: a killer smile — primarily “a knockout smile” (see urban dictionary), and the ambiguity here is Flynn’s entire trick.

Eng: …people whose brains don’t work quick enough to blog or link or tweet…

Rus: …недостаточно гибкие, чтобы уйти в блогеры и городить всякую чепуху…

Is this because Twitter got blocked? 🙂

Eng: You guys not close?’ she asked. ‘We are the definition of not close.

Rus: — Ну, парни, не пора ли закругляться? — спросила детектив. — По-моему, пора

It seems the translator got carried away with creativity 🙂

Eng: A number of women – friends of my mom’s, friends of Go’s – had invited Amy to book clubs and Amway parties and girls’ nights at Chili’s.

Rus: Кое-кто — подруги моей мамы, друзья Го — приглашали Эми то в книжный клуб, то на заседание общества «Американский путь», то на вечерний девичник в «Чилиз гриль-бар».

For the translator’s information, Amway is a cosmetics company, which nobody translates into Russian as “American Way” 🙂 And Chili’s is indeed formally known as Chili’s Grill & Bar, although it seems no one knows it by its full name. It’s just a roadside restaurant chain.

And so – the whole book. This is just what I’m listing next to where I decided to make notes with a pencil, and only then, when I looked at “how interesting this was translated.” When I realized that such good stuff comprised half the book, I stopped marking it.

Exploring Science and Myth through the Engineering Zen Group | August 03 2026, 15:37

I remind you that I have a group called Engineering Zen on Facebook and Telegram. Recently, there have been posts about:

– How for half a century science condescendingly explained to grandmothers that colds are caused by viruses, not drafts, — and in 2022, it found a mechanism by which grandmothers were partly right.

– People who are currently walking around with plutonium in their chests. Legally, registered with the nuclear regulator, with the instruction “to be returned to the state after death.” The capsule was seriously tested: cremation, plane crash, shotgun blast. It wasn’t radiation that killed the technology.

– Old sailors who poured oil overboard during storms. Not superstition, but working physics — and from it emerged, it seems, the first measurement of the size of a molecule in history. A teaspoon of oil, a pond under London, and Benjamin Franklin. Today, the same effect captures oil spills from satellites.

– Why almost all blue in the animal world is a deception: there’s no pigment at all. Neither in the wings of the morpho butterfly, nor in the feathers of a peacock, nor in your blue eyes. Mammals do not have any blue pigment. But it’s the opposite in plants.

– How the ocean floor is mapped… by looking at its surface from space. Underwater mountains betray themselves through “bumps” on the water — it turns out the sea is not flat at all. Only about a quarter of the sea floor has been measured with a sonar to this day.

– The MRI magnet, which is turned on only once in a lifetime — and then it circles current through a ring for years, without any socket. Even at night, when the clinic is closed. But if the cooling fails — a “quench” occurs, and tons of helium burst out through the pipe to the roof within seconds.

– The theorem by which a sphere can be cut into pieces and assembled into two identical spheres. Not a trick or sophistry — honest mathematics. The catch is that these “pieces” have no volume. At all. Like the coast of Britain has no length.

– Why in a language with three words for colors, the third is always red, and blue appears last. No need to know the language — just count. And why the go signal on Japanese traffic lights is legally “blue.”

– A rescue operation going on in space right now: a robot trying to catch a falling telescope, which has neither handles nor a docking unit — it was built in an era when no one thought of such things. Racing against the atmosphere.

– Lunar dust — the main nightmare of lunar bases. Microscopic sharp glass shards that eat away space suits within hours, stick to everything due to static, and — surprisingly — smell like gunpowder.

– A hypothesis that lasted 85 years and fell during the World Cup final — from a single line on Twitter. A counterexample is verified by a student in a minute, and it’s unclear why it wasn’t found earlier.

– The illusion of “stopped clocks,” which everyone has experienced: you shift your gaze to the second hand — and it has stopped. It turns out, the brain blinds you several times a second — and then edits time retrospectively.

– Ice that does not melt at +300°C — found trapped inside diamonds from the Earth’s mantle. And its even more strange black superheated relative seems to make up the interiors of Uranus and Neptune.

– Why the ads on the stadium boards, which you see on television, physically do not exist — viewers in Brazil, Germany, and Japan see three different sponsors at the same moment.

– A piece of wire mesh that tames fire where it is bound to explode — and on which the entire century of mining labor stood. The inventor gave it to the world for free.

– And for dessert — why a giant NASA rocket is transported not on asphalt, but on river pebbles. They tried asphalt — it went “in waves, like the sea.” Personally verified, I spent an hour looking at that gravel out the window.

Join us to not miss much more interesting stuff.

Engineering Zen

P.S. There is also a group in Telegram with the same name, but there the audience has stopped growing at all and stands at about 100 people, and until I figure out how to manage this, I am temporarily giving up on it.

Exploring Forgotten Wilderness: Venturing Where Few Dare | August 02 2026, 21:44

In my childhood, it seemed there wasn’t a place where the foot of some teenager hadn’t trodden in the last seven days. If no one had clambered into someplace for more than a week, it became the most enticing part of plans for the following week. We climbed everywhere – secured territories, garages, forests, basements, attics.

Around me, where I live, there is a forest park area. There, foxes, deer, and ticks live. This area is a minute’s walk from home and you can walk there for half an hour (or even an hour – if you “guess” the direction) without encountering any signs of civilization.

So, there are virtually never any people there. And it seems almost never to be. I say almost because I have walked there after all. But there are no paths, except for those trodden by deer. There are abandoned houses that seem to be from the mid-last century, rusty remains of cars, and four years ago I even stumbled upon a relatively recent jeep, oddly covered with plywood sheets (no signs of life. Reported it to the police).

It’s uninteresting to walk there, plus there are definitely a lot of ticks. You have to dress specially appropriately. So, there are places like this in the USA – probably 99% of the territory. That is, if someone dumps a body there, if they find it, it will be in about 10 years. Along the roads, no one ever parks cars – apart from the fact that it’s not allowed, there’s also no need. Forests along the roads are quite common.

That means, really, 90% of the territory is just unknown to people. Nobody ever goes there, and if there’s anything interesting there, it’s almost certainly not going to be noticed for years. Perhaps, if people disappear, someone ends up there, but that’s only speculation.

If some homeless person sets up a tent there, no one will ever notice for sure. Mainly because a typical forest isn’t visible from 15-20 meters away due to the abundance of vegetation.

Effectively, it’s the territory of wild animals. People don’t belong there. And that’s not a bad thing. Deer, foxes, skunks, raccoons, squirrels, and many others.

It was very unusual for me. Now I’m used to it.

Grandmothers Partially Right: The Cold Truth About Catching Colds | August 02 2026, 21:03

HEY, for half a century, science condescendingly explained to grandmothers that a cold is caused by a virus, not a draft, and in 2022 found the mechanism by which the grandmothers were right after all (partly).

Background: Salisbury, 1946-1990, Common Cold Unit, 20,000 people went through it – they were infected with cold viruses and frozen (cold baths, drafts, wet swimsuits). They did not get sick more often. Next – Douglas’s work in 1968. There were 44 people, all given rhinovirus, one group sat at 4°C. No difference was found, and the article was titled “Failure to demonstrate effect”. The conclusion spread through popular books – cold has no relation to getting a cold, period.

New: In December 2022, they published the mechanism. In short. The nasal mucosa has a frontline (only discovered in 2018). Sensing a pathogen, cells throw extracellular vesicles into the nasal mucus – the authors describe this as “kicking a wasp nest”. These vesicles feature the same receptors that the virus latches onto, denser than on the cells themselves – it sticks to the dummy and doesn’t reach the cell. Then the experiment – 15 minutes at 4.4°C – and the temperature inside the nose drops by 5°C. On tissue cooled just the same, nearly 42% fewer vesicles are thrown, antiviral microRNAs in each are halved, and up to 70% fewer receptors.

Conclusion: “getting a cold from cold” is wrong, but “easier to get infected in the cold if there is someone to catch it from” is very much so. The most interesting part is what they want to make out of this. Since the swarm can be summoned, the authors discuss a spray that commands the mucosa to “kick the wasp nest” in advance.

The Invisible Merchants of Spain: The Manteros of Top Manta | July 31 2026, 18:59

Here in Spain, they are called manteros (mantas sellers)—from the Spanish word manta (blanket or cover). And the process of such illegal street vending is called top manta.

Since their activity is illegal, they have developed a rigorous system of alerts. As soon as one of the vendors spots the police, they signal (often yelling the code word “Agua!”—water). After this, all the manteros on the street in a split second gather their blankets into bags and melt into the crowd. If someone had managed to give them money – apparently, they will run together with them.

The vast majority of manteros are migrants from sub-Saharan African countries (most often from Senegal, Gambia, and Mali). They are not doing this for an easy profit: most of them are status sin papeles (without documents), making legal employment in Spain impossible.

In Spain, the police fight not only the supply but also the demand. By law, if the police catch you in the act of buying a bag or sunglasses from such a blanket, you, as a buyer, can be fined up to several hundred euros.

In Barcelona, the vendors have united into the “Union of Street Vendors” (Sindicato Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes) and made a brilliant marketing move. They registered their own legal brand of clothing and footwear, calling it Top Manta. Now they produce quality sneakers and T-shirts, giving migrants the opportunity to leave the streets and work legally.

Absurdist Reactions to Government Promises in Crisis | July 30 2026, 16:20

“Once on TV appeared a deathly pale Finance Minister and declared:

— The financial crisis will not affect us. Because. I am telling you for sure.

The population, knowing the nature of official statements, silently swore and went to stock up on salt, matches, and sugar.

The next day, an utterly bewildered Minister of Trade appeared on TV and said:

— The stocks of bread and basic necessities allow us to proudly state, that there is no threat of hunger or shortages. Here are the figures.

— Oh! – said the population and bought even more flour and cereals.

The Minister of Agriculture, for emphasis, danced on the podium and joyfully announced:

— Unprecedented harvest! Hopes for export! We are reviving! The storerooms are bursting!

— Really now! – the population was horrified and ran to convert their savings into foreign currency.

— Real estate prices will fall! A penthouse for every student! In the near future! – declared the Minister of Construction, unflinchingly.

— What’s happening, huh? – the population wailed and rushed to purchase kerosene, kerosene lamps, wood, and coal.

— A modern army on a contractual basis. As early as tomorrow. And grenades of a new system. The likes of which the world has not yet seen. – stated the Minister of Defense solemnly. – Well, why not? We have plenty of money. Reserves, supplies, and a surplus in general.

— Mom!… the population squeaked and began digging dugouts.

Everything is AWE-SOME! Do you understand? AWE-SOME!! – the President insisted. – We could have built communism today. The only thing stopping us is there’d be nothing left for us to do. So, you can sleep peacefully! It doesn’t get more stable than this! Pensioners are buying caviar by the bucket! I foresee a qualitative leap and bound. And quantitatively – it’s simply a run! Taking seven-league steps towards prosperity and abundance. The Caribbean is getting closer. From here we shall threaten the world. One hundred and thirty tons of roses from each flowerbed. We will even have to reduce dairy production. The cows cannot carry the udders. The population is outraged by the cheapness. South America is asking to join us as a state farm. Hurrah!

— What on earth are you cooking up, you beasts?! – the population screamed and just in case, changed into all their clean clothes…”

Zhvanetsky. Link in comments

The Art of Beauty Marks in Historical European Portraiture | July 28 2026, 06:34

It is interesting that the artist did not hesitate to place a black beauty spot on the temple of the hawthorn seller in this painting. At that time, it was a very typical accessory. They were applied to cover skin defects and quickly became an essential element of makeup. The black color of the beauty spot fabric created a strong contrast, visually emphasizing the aristocratic paleness and whiteness of the face, and also drawing attention to the eyes. In Europe (including Spain, where Lorenzo Tiepolo worked), there was a complex “language of beauty spots”. Depending on where the piece of fabric was attached, it conveyed a specific message to suitors.

But they probably would not have understood piercings and tattoos 🙂