THE SUN. THE SUN. THE SUN.

*checks wiki*

fun fact: for decades children were beaten for speaking welsh in school, even in areas where english was barely spoken, because the government decided in 1847 that the language made people lazy and immoral

fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet - just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know - and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time

Also everyone: When there's a hurricane you should never drive through water more than six inches deep, water that's a high as your ankle is enough to sweep you away.

"Don't you people have storm drains?"

Yes.

The noble suitors, who have never sewn a thing in their lives, sabotage themselves by their own ambitions: they choose difficult fabrics to work with and cut huge, elaborate patterns and select gems and pearls and beads to sew onto it, and snip such long bits of thread that they lose time detangling their stitches, and ultimately resort to pinning bits together as they run out of time, so that their offerings initially look beautiful and flashy, but when the princess tries them on they stick her with pin ends and fall apart as she moves.

The humble protagonist uses a very simple pattern without embellishments and sews using short lengths of thread (snipped off and threaded for him by little birds of course) which don't tangle and therefore save time. His dress is plain by contrast, but holds together and the princess is able to move freely in it, and so he wins the contest and her hand.

I particularly think about the bit about threading the needle with shorter lengths of thread, needing to tie off more often but avoiding tangles and thereby saving time.

See, bridge records make a distrinction between “height off the ground” and “structural tallness”.

The Millau Viaduc was one of the highest off the ground at the time of construction (2001-2004) (top 2 when it was started, top 4 when it was finished) and is still the highest in Europe. But now in 2026, it is the 57th highest bridge in the world (53 are in China, 1 in Papua New Guinea, 1 in Mexico, 1 in India, 1 in the Usa).

There are also other cable-stayed bridges that are higher, in fact the second highest bridge in the world is a cable-stayed one, the Duge Bridge in China (which is still between one’s house and their mom’s, I presume)…

…but it doesn’t have the separate pillars :

(and it means the Millau Viaduct also has one single set of cables in the middle instead of two on each side.)

BUT, as you might have noticed, the Duge Bridge doesn’t have a pillar going down in the canyon, while de Millau Viaduc does. Which means it is higher off the ground, but not taller structurally.

And the Millau Viaduc is tall indeed. His tallest pillar is 343 m (1,125 ft).

It was built in 2004. The tallest bridge in the world, as of 2026, is the Changtai Yangtze River Bridge, and it was built in 2025.

For 21 years, the tallest bridge in the world was the Viaduc Millau.

It was started in 2001. No smartphones. Only cathodic screens. Internet was starting : it was long before any site we use today, before youtube, the same year as Wikipedia was lauched. Ten years after the fall of the URSS. Reagan died the year it was finished. So did the Bigdil. It was a Big Deal.

Still now, 21 years later, it is still in second place.