Wednesday Overnight Open Thread - Sept 24, 2025 [Gangster of Love Rex]

Good evening Horde. The time has come for mid-week shenanigans of the overnight variety.

Welcome to the Wednesday night ONTwhich means another random assortment of interweb debris. Pull up a chair and sit a spell. Be nice to your fellow commenters and AoS contributors.

Thank you for indulging the musings of Philosopher Rex the prior two Wednesdays. (Who was that guy?) He's off thinking more big thoughts and may return at some point. You never know. Such are the whims of the ONT.

[Random top photo: Seattle]

Wouldn't be the same with only a modest amount of love, would it?

Who is Maurice? and what does "pompatus" mean?

Wednesday ONT natural science department:

The Math Says Life Shouldn't Exist: New Study Challenges Origins Theories

By applying information theory and algorithmic complexity, Endres analyzed what it would take for the earliest living cell, known as a protocell, to self-assemble from simple chemical components. This mathematical perspective demonstrates how improbable such a process would be if left to chance under natural conditions.

If only there was some explanation...

Livin' it up while I'm goin' down:

Tell 'em Huey:

Rumor is October 6 for the next SpaceX Starship launch (Flight 11).

SpaceX's lesson from last Starship flight? "We need to seal the tiles."

The tile story is interesting, but these two nuggets are notable:

A little more than an hour after liftoff, the Starship guided itself to a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. The ship came within 10 feet (3 meters) of its targeted splashdown point, near an inflatable buoy in position to record its final descent.

SpaceX engineers noticed the booster's performance on descent in flight doesn't match predictions from computer models or wind tunnel tests. In ground experiments, the booster encounters unstable buffeting as it slows below the speed of sound. Based on those results, "[we] should not be able to do what we do with our maneuver coming back with a booster, but we've been able to essentially show through flight that we have more stability than either CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) or the wind tunnels show that we have," Gerstenmaier said.

So....eels should not exist, life should not exist and a Starship Booster should not be able to fly. And yet... Wonder what Philosopher Rex would make of that.

I've had the blues, the reds and the pinks
One thing for sure, love stinks

Patricia Mae Andrzejewski:

This Gloriously Weird Fish Has Teeth on Its Forehead for Sex

The spotted ratfish is a two-foot-long fish with a big head and a long, skinny tail that lives in the northeastern Pacific Ocean. It belongs to a group of fish called chimaeras that are closely related to sharks. (Chimaeras are sometimes called ghost sharks.) Like most vertebrate creatures, it has teeth in its mouth. Unlike other vertebrates it also has teeth in another location: its forehead. It uses these forehead teeth for sex.

The ratfish's extra teeth line a cartilaginous appendage called a tenaculum that in males can be erected and deployed to grasp a female during mating. Many fish have clasping appendages near the pelvis that they use to hold their mate close during the deed. The spotted ratfish has the tenaculum in addition to pelvic claspers.

It takes something special to prevent "ghost sharks" from being the strangest part of the story.

Halloween costume. Just add baseball. Look for a nearby child that happens to have one and take theirs.

Apologies to the Twitter challenged, but this was worth adding in place of the other irreverent silliness that was in the earlier ONT draft:

Interesting Dire Straits origin story from Jack Sonni - the "other" guitarist in Dire Straits:

Morgan Wallen meets General Neyland:

A double helping of The Pittsburgh Police Scanner: The Pittsburgh police scanner keeps giving. Thank you people of Pittsburgh!

And the grand finale:

The Darkness for the big ONT finish:

Definitely a candidate for the list of all-time weird videos.

Written correspondence can be sent to moronhobbies at protonmail dot com. Are you lurking ?? Thank you for your attention to this matter.

posted by Open Blogger at 10:00 PM

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