I travelled at 275kph, and played a game in a pub.

20th September 2021

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Hello!

In this week's video, I visited the German toll road that's also a racetrack; and over on Tom Scott plus, I played a non-extreme perfectly normal $0,000 game of Skull with some friends.

(Before we get to the YouTube links for this week, a quick reminder: please don't leave comments like "here from Tom Scott" or similar. It just looks like spam to the recipient, and it's not helpful. If you're going to leave a comment, make it friendly, insightful, and about the video itself!)

Other things I've found on YouTube this week:

City Beautiful asks: why did cities build downtown malls?
These Parrots Raid Rubbish Bins (and it's my fault) is a brilliant title for a video from Maker's Muse that's actually about setting puzzles for cockatoos — and the cockatoos solving them.
In 1991, British TV challenge show You Bet! featured a challenge with a man climbing across the studio ceiling. It's the epitome of big shiny-floor-studio television. Looking back on it thirty years later, I'm amazed at a few things:
- first, four minutes with almost no speech, presented as-live! It'd never air today, it'd be deemed too boring, but it's not: the last thirty seconds are genuinely tense and they wouldn't be without the build-up.
- second: how good is that tension music? It never got a commercial release, but it's just a constant series of ratcheting key changes.
- and third: how there's no big prize, just a trophy. It's an arbitrary challenge for an arbitrary prize, and they're not afraid to show that. I'm not saying this is better than modern media, not at all, but I am saying it's amazing to see how much things have changed over three decades.

And on the rest of the internet:

The British county of Devon has its own colour-coded signage system that most people seem to have forgotten about.
When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's passport number: the writing's a bit overwrought at time, but this is a fun journey to go on.
And finally, we need to start talking about concrete.

The next few weeks of videos on the main channel will be, in short, the Tour of Unusual German Infrastructure. It's good to be out on the road again: I'll see you on the internet!

All the best,

— Tom

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