(Image credit: Skvader) 

Today we are embarking on a strange four-day string of "holidays." The only one with a long history is St. Patrick's Day on the 17th. Before that, we have Friday the 13th today, a day associated with bad luck that comes around at least a couple of times every year. Saturday the 14th is Pi Day, because the date is 3/14. Sunday, March 15th is the Ides of March, remembered as the date that Julius Caesar was assassinated. And Monday, March 16th is Saint Urho's Day. What is Saint Urho's Day?

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Saint Urho of Finland was known for drinking sour milk and eating fish soup, which gave him an unusually loud voice. This talent made him a hero when he shouted and drove an infestation of grasshoppers (or possibly frogs) out of Finland, thereby saving the nation's grape crop. The statue of Saint Urho shown up top was erected in Menahga, Minnesota, to commemorate the deed. Saint Urho's day is celebrated in Minnesota and surrounding areas, where there are many Finnish descendants. The colors of the holiday are green (to represent the grasshoppers/frogs) and purple (to represent the grapes). 

(Image credit: Lorie Shaull) 

Except the story told is complete bunk. Saint Urho was created by Richard Mattson of Virginia, Minnesota, in 1956. He and Gene McCavic wrote a poem about Saint Urho and his deeds. Now there's a holiday of sorts in Minnesota on March 16th designed to extend the St. Patrick's Day parties for another day and give some attention to Finland. Read the hilarious account of Saint Urho's Day, its history, and its celebrations at Wikipedia. -via TYWKIWDBI 

A new movie about aliens making contact with us? That happens all the time. It hits different when you say it's a new movie by Steven Spielberg about aliens making contact with us. Indeed, some of the images in this trailer for Disclosure Day will remind you of Close Encounters of the Third Kind from 1977 or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial from 1982. Just how much has Spielberg thought about alien contact in those 40+ years? After the Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones series, he has nothing he needs to prove, and after his personal passion projects Schindler's List and The Fabelmans, he is free to return to what he does best. 

The new film Disclosure Day was written by Spielberg, based on an original idea by Spielberg, and is produced and directed by Spielberg. John Williams does the music. The trailer gives us little actual plot (good), and more of a feel for what we're in store for. Disclosure Day opens nationwide on June 12. 

You might recall the scene in the 1983 movie A Christmas Story where a young boy puts his tongue on a frozen metal pole and becomes stuck. This has been a dare among kids for as long as anyone can remember, and is called "tundra tongue." Norwegian graduate student Anders Hagen Jarmund remembers when he did it, along with many of his friends. It was such a common experience that Norway outlawed bare metal on playgrounds in 1998.

Jarmund turned his experience into a scientific study that resulted in two papers. One was a review of the literature abut such cases. They found newspaper stories of tundra tongue going back to 1845, with cases ranging from the mundane to the terrifying, and the various methods used to get tongues un-stuck. 

The second paper came from an experiment to determine what happens when a tongue comes in contact with frozen metal. What's the most likely temperature to induce freezing? How much force does it take to detach it? And how much damage is done? You'll be glad to know that they didn't use their own tongues, or anyone else's. They used tongues from recently-slaughtered pigs. Read what they found at Ars Technica. -via Metafilter 

Pro skater Andy Anderson (previously at Neatorama) is known for his work promoting skateboarding worldwide and for his emphasis on safety. In the video The Shape of Paris, he takes a tour of (duh) Paris. That description seems way too straightforward. He's very good at what he does, yet this is no mere skating video. Sure, Anderson is impressive, and finds infinite opportunities for complex tricks in the city, but besides that Paris has never looked so beautiful. Brett Novak's cinematography is off the charts and will make you want to book your tickets. There are aerial shots, looming architecture, and landscape vistas, but most of what you see is from ground level as if you are actually there. Even the rain cannot dampen the mood. The Shape of Paris not only appeals to skateboarding enthusiasts, but anyone who wants a beautiful and soothing look at Paris. -via Nag on the Lake 

In the Color Memory Game posted last month, you were challenged to recall a color you saw a few seconds ago. Another game takes the memory variable out of it, but it's still a challenge. 

In the game What's My ΔE(OK) JND? you are given two colors at a time, and your job is to find the line between them. JND stands for Just Noticeable Difference, and you'll find a rather dense explanation of it here. That doesn't make the game any less fun. 

You'll be given 40 pairs of colors. The first ten are very easy, but the rounds get harder after that as the color pairs become more similar. You will most likely notice that your screen needs to be cleaned. Or your glasses. Like the earlier game, you'll get some snarky comments along the way. Your score at the end may be confusing, but it appears that the lower the number, the better you did. My score was .0054, but you can beat that easily, since I have cataracts. -via Metafilter

How much do you know about the skeleton inside of you? We know bones are hard, but they take a lot of punishment, too, so about half of us break a bone at some time in our lives. But they can heal, and how they do it is much more complicated than just getting a cast and not putting weight on it for however long the doctor tells you (I've never broken a bone). There's a lot going on inside that we can't see. When you break a bone, you're also breaking blood vessels and nerves, and the damage control system goes to work. 

I have a friend currently recovering from a knee replacement, and this video helped me understand why she has so much inflammation and yet no infection. It's part of the healing process. I've also seen what a crushed hip can do to an older person, and that's why I take my calcium supplements and walk around the neighborhood every day. Take it from Dr. Skeleton. 

An essential part of the process of turning cream into butter is continous, vigorous motion. That's similar to the up and down motion of long distance running. Runner's World reports that some runners are multitasking effectively by strapping on packs of milk.

In a demonstration video, runner Libby Cope and her boyfriend ran five and a half miles with a mixture of cream and sea salt. After removing the excess water at the end, she had usable and tasty butter.

Berne, the capital city of Switzerland, has an eye-catching coat of arms. According to the legend, the duke who founded the city in the Thirteenth Century caught a bear while the land was being cleared. This bear became the symbol of the city.

The heraldic bear is black with red claws, tongue, and penis. It is this last detail that recently attracted scrutiny.

According to Swiss Info, local politician Thomas Brönnimann proposed that the cantonal government remove the penis from the coat of arms in order to better represent the local population. The government, citing that the penis has been visible for at least 600 years, rejected this proposal.

-via TYWKIWDBI

British builder Tommy Lynch woke up one morning after sleeping for 14 hours straight. A friend woke him up after being concerned that Lynch had slept so long, and found that Lynch was blue. That wasn't anything to do with his mood, but because his skin had turned an alarming shade of blue! They went directly to a hospital, where Lynch was given oxygen while being examined. 

The first thing you think of when someone turns blue is a lack of oxygen. But Lynch didn't seem to have trouble breathing, despite his anxiety over his blue skin. You might assume it was due to colloidal silver, which was touted as a cure-all a few years ago, and turned some people's skin blue. Lynch had not been using colloidal silver. The cause of his malady was discovered in the emergency department, quite by accident. Read his story at People magazine.  -via Fark 

https://t.co/lpMXnhXomb pic.twitter.com/57hS3Svlr8

— Columbus Library (@columbuslibrary) March 9, 2026

Chris Kempczinski, the CEO of McDonald's, produced a viral video when he taste-tested a "product" (his term) on camera while apparently trying to ingest as little of it as possible. That video sparked a trend of other fast food CEOs eating their burgers on camera. It's become a media trend.

The public library system of Columbus, Ohio got into the game when its social media manager said that their CEO would eat a hardcover book if the tweet got at least 10,000 likes. Lauren Hagen, the CEO of the Columbus Metropolitan Library, was a good sport about it.

This story takes a bit of explaining.

Wintzell's Oyster House in downtown Mobile, Alabama is a local icon of fine Gulf coast cuisine. It has long had a sign offering free oysters to any man who is 80 years old if that man is accompanied by his father.

Fox 10 News reports that Jimmy Rush, 80, became the first person to secure this prized dinner when he walked into the restaurant with his father, Jim Rush, who is 99 years old.

Father and son began eating at this restaurant in 1972. They decided that, one day, they would dine for free when the son was old enough.

In the event that you haven't seen any of the nominees for Best Picture at the 2026 Academy Awards, you might learn enough about them from the annual Honest Trailer to form some kind of opinion on who should win. Don't laugh, I have seen exactly none of them, but I probably will catch a few in the next couple of years on TV. Whether I will make that effort at all depends on who wins and what Screen Junkies can tell us about them. The only one that has been recommended to me is Sinners, but they are all rated pretty highly. 

There's plenty of fun in the Honest Trailer. I'm going to put "Thousand Island stare" in my backpack to pull out at the proper time. That's golden. The best part is at the end, where they make a supercut showing how all these movies are the same, or at least incorporate all the same elements. The 98th Academy Awards will be bestowed this Sunday night. 

We have long been fascinated with falling cats and their ability to land on their feet. So much so that we've dropped an astonishing number of cats in the name of science over the centuries. Even after the development of high-speed photography, experts disagree on how they do it, but there are several theories, including the “tuck and turn” model, the “falling figure skater” explanation, and the “bend and twist” method. My favorite is the "propeller tail" concept.

Recent research gives credence to the tuck and turn theory. The study began with a truly terrifying phrase in which each word is worse then the one before, until you get to the end: "A team of Japanese scientists removed the spines from five donated cat cadavers," and placed them in a twisting device. The researchers then moved on to live cats, but they neither had their spines removed nor were they put into a twisting device- they were just dropped, which is bad enough. The cats landed on their feet, and showed a marked preference in turning to their right. Learn more about this important research at Ars Technica. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Yasuo Higurashi et al., 2026) 

The 1927 German silent movie Metropolis gave audiences of a hundred years ago a fantasy glimpse a hundred years into the future. So what does Fritz Lang's vision mean in the world of 2026? The movie was groundbreaking in its special effects, and influenced all science fiction films that came afterward, and indeed filmmaking itself. The plot was more political, and wasn't all that impressive to viewers of the time. Reviews were mixed, and H.G. Wells called it "silly." Yet modern audiences recognize historical events that came afterward in the movie's elements. 

The influence of Metropolis on later science fiction films is undeniable. It gave us the classic humanoid robot, cities with flying vehicles, and the mad scientist, not to mention innovative filmmaking techniques still used today. We'd all know that already, if we were inclined to sit through several hours of a black and white movie with no voices. DW History and Culture takes us through the history of Metropolis and why it still relevant today. -via Laughing Squid 

Two million years ago, the area of France that became Le Puy-en-Velay was a huge lake with a volcano. As molten rock rose through the volcano, it cooled, shattered, collapsed, fused, grew, and became a volcanic plug. Over time, the volcano eroded away and the lake dried, leaving the volcanic plug looming above the town of Le Puy. 

In 951 AD, Bishop Godescalc wanted to celebrate his return from a pilgrimage by building a shrine atop the plug. At the same time, Local cathedral dean Truannas also wanted a chapel up there, in gratitude that the village survived a plague. Together, they oversaw the beginnings of Saint Michel d'Aiguilhe, or St. Michael of the Needle. The only way to get to the chapel is by climbing 268 stairs, yet plenty of people do it. It's no wonder they added living quarters for the serving priest. Read about Saint Michel d'Aiguilhe and see plenty of pictures at Kuriositas. 

(Image credit: PMRMaeyaert)