The Iowa State Fair is taking place from August 13 to 23 in Des Moines. It is traditionally a venue for consuming deliciously unhealthy foods and engaging in unique contests.

Among the treats available will be butter-dipped soft serve ice cream. That is, as you might expect, soft serve ice cream that is briefly dipped in molten butter instead of chocolate. This is not a new invention (the above image is from last year), but the Iowa State Fair may be your first opportunity to enjoy it in addition to other exotic dishes.

The Des Moines Register has a list of 83 other foods that will be available, including Parmesan ice cream, banana cream fries, and peanut butter and jelly corn dogs.

Well, maybe not all of them are your favorite songs, but an awful lot of straightforward songs that profess love or tell stories have origins and inspirations that might surprise you. In an obvious reaction to the Doc Pomus story from a couple of weeks ago, we get a trivia list about where those song ideas came from. It may have been a simple cultural or language difference that gave the song an entirely different meaning, like "...Baby One More Time," the song that put Britney Spears on the map. Or it may have been inspired by a person, and good luck figuring out who. 

And there are some that were honestly pretty easy to figure out, llike "Sweet Caroline." But only if you were around at the time. Or if you were like me and made a living off of music trivia.

Read about 28 songs and where the ideas for them came from in a pictofacts list at Cracked. 

Chloë of Odd Socks Cosplay and Frank Cleary of Frankie Doodles made this cosplay imagining fairy tale versions of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy.

The Kermit is especially well-done, as his accessories include a lily pad shield and a blooming sword.

Photos: Event Horizon Cosplay

In the campy 1966-1968 Batman television series, the home of Bruce Wayne was referred to consistently as "Stately Wayne Manor." The exterior shots were of a mansion in Pasadena, California.

Deadline reports that this home is now for sale. Price at $32 million, it comes with 7 bedrooms, 3 full bathrools, 4 half-bathrooms, and 3 three-quarter bathroom.

What is a three-quarter bathroom? Apparently one with a toilet and a sink and either a shower or a bath, but not both.

The Zillow listing provide no photos of the Batcave, but that's probably because it's a secret. Lift up the head of the Shakespeare bust and push the button to access it.

-via Will Meugniot on Facebook

Every story is better when it's told with LEGO minifigs. Homemade movies have long used LEGO minifigs as characters, because they are attainable, first by stop-motion, then computer-generated. Eventually, we got official full-length LEGO movies, but like the homemade films, they are often parodies of popular live action movie franchises starring toys. Technically, Yellow is a parody of psychological horror films. It may remind you of the horror film Us at first, but the twist reveals that it makes plenty of sense within the world of LEGO minifigs, and mirrors what happened to the toys in the real world. 

Sure, this trailer gives away the twist (like so many real movie trailers do these days), but that's okay when you realize that there is no full-length movie. Yet. LEGO fans in the comments are clamoring for the full story of Yellow in an extended version, so creator George Coley is making plans to do just that. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

When the Founding Fathers designed the United States governmental structure, they took great care to make it look different from a monarchy. Therefore we have three equal branches, a house instead of a palace, and the custom of calling our leader "Mr. President." Occasionally, we have a president who wants to stray from those practices. 
  
The United States Secret Service Uniformed Division is a branch of the service that guards the White House and other locations. They are, and traditionally dress as, police officers. After visiting Europe soon after his first inauguration, Richard Nixon decided America needed more pomp and circumstance at the White House, and partnered with a Washington tailor to create fancy uniforms for the division to be worn for ceremonial occasions. The uniforms had double-breasted jackets festooned with gold braid and White House branding, and stiff caps trimmed in gold. They looked like marching band uniforms, and were ridiculed in the press. The uniforms were retired a few years later, and eventually went up for sale. What happened to the uniforms afterward is the more interesting story, which you can read at the Nixon Presidential Library. -via Fark  

Have you ever wondered how the International Space Station gets enough oxygen to keep its crews breathing? It's not shipped in, at least not often. The same goes for water, although humans use a lot of oxygen and water every day. The floating laboratory is equipped with hi-tech appliances for renewing its own supplies. Water is recycled into fresh water, and some of it is used to make new oxygen. Humans also expel a lot of carbon dioxide, which is not expelled from the station, but is converted into water and methane. New water is always welcome, but this video does not go into detail on what they do with the methane. One would like to think it's expelled, because a space station fart is amusing to think about. Maybe someday it will be used as fuel. 

These conversions require separating molecules into atoms, which is amazing enough, but they've also found a way to do it with no moving parts that could break down. I'm impressed.  

That leaning tower in Pisa, Italy, is not the only ancient structure that wouldn't pass inspection today. Poland has its own such tower, built of brick, in the town of Toruń, the birthplace of Copernicus. 

The tower dates back to the 13th century, when the Teutonic Order, a Catholic military/monastic order born of the Crusades, held the city of Toruń in the Baltic region. They built two towers as part of the city's fortifications against attack by the pagan Prussians and Lithuanians. The brick towers were quite heavy, and as soon as they were completed, they started leaning to one side as they settled into the soft ground underneath. At least, that's the practical explanation. An old legend says that one of the Teutonic Knights was commanded to build the towers to lean as punishment for falling in love with a local woman. 

Only one of the leaning towers is still standing, and it's been used as a prison, apartments, shops, and offices through the centuries. We can assume that the floors inside have been leveled, otherwise it wouldn't be useable. Read about the leaning tower of Toruń and the knights who built it at Kuriositas.  

(Image credit: Scotch Mist) 

Do you see this lake? It's Yathkyed Lake in northern Canada.

Otto the dachshund has a nice life for a pet, at least from our perspective. He has a nice house, plenty to eat, and a human who loves him. But the human has become more and more obsessed with Otto. Constant photographs. Videos. And the clothing- all so undignified! Otto feels more and more uneasy about all the attention. The human doesn't even go to work anymore, because he's too busy posting videos of Otto and his brother Kaspar, who doesn't seem to mind a bit. He's not too smart. Then one day, Otto spots an opportunity to make a break for freedom. The human has left the door open! Otto takes his chance to escape the prying eyes of the internet. 

Sparky Jones' short film Confessions of a Dachshund highlights Otto's constant concern and his talent for the side-eye. No doubt Otto will be a star, but will not appreciate the adulation. You can see more of Otto, Kaspar, and the human at Instagram. -via Nag on the Lake 

If you have trouble seeing distant things clearly, or if you have to hold something close to your eyes to see it, you have myopia, also called short-sightedness or nearsightedness. It's pretty common, and becoming more common as time goes by. Around the world, about a third of people are myopic now, and that rate is expected to rise to about 50% by 2050. It's caused by the eyeball growing too much, meaning growing too long from front to back, which causes the focal point of incoming signals to converge in front of the retina instead of on the retina. 

What's causing the rise in myopia? It's not the prevalence of computers, phones, and other screens, because the rates were rising before those became common, but they don't help, either. Studies point to two factors: children doing a lot of schoolwork and spending less time outdoors. But we still don't know what it is about those things that affect our sight. Myopia is not curable (yet), but there are ways to slow its progression, including spending more time outside, more exposure to intense light, hi-tech contact lenses, certain medicines, and red light therapy. Read about the epidemic of myopia at Science Focus. -via Real Clear Science 

(Image credit: Regina Chlumská) 

Germain Lussier of Gizmodo asks, "What would happen if the Mystery Machine was an actual Autobot?" Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We aren't yet sure that it's not a Decepticon.

Hasbro is offering a limited edition Transformer that is inspired by Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? The four teenagers without an obvious source of legal income travel around the country, coincidentally encountering criminals. That's a dangerous line of work, so it's a good idea to have a combat robot along.

The Mystery Machine toy comes with heads for the four main human characters and a box of Scooby snacks that transform into our favorite Great Dane.

We get rainbows when sunlight is refracted through water in the atmosphere. It's an optical phenomena, so it all depends on where you are standing. The rainbow moves when you do, and that's why you can never reach the end of it. What would be different on a planet that orbits a binary star system, like Tatooine? Well, first off, Tatooine is a desert planet, so we can imagine that rain and water droplets in the air would be quite rare. For another thing, Tatooine is fictional. But we can speculate, what is what they do in the What If? series by Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama).  

To answer the question, we first need to understand how rainbows work, and then how a binary star system works. Once we figure out what kind of stars Tatooine orbits, we find that their rainbows would be quite lovely. However, if rain and rainbows were common, then they wouldn't need moisture farms. A functional moisture farm would suck all the rainbow-making droplets from the air anyway, and ruin any possible rainbows.

Hasan Ceylan is a musician with the Ankara State Conservatory in Turkey. He plays Turkish instruments from the Ottoman era, often using them to offer fresh perspectives on modern pop music. He's especially fond of Radiohead. In this video, he's playing "Exit Music (For a Film)."

On his YouTube channel, you can also find his performances of "No Surprises" and "Street Spirit (Fade Out)", as well as selections from Metallica, Celine Dion, and the Intersellar theme.

-via The Awesomer

In 1958, Sean Connery was a rising star in the entertainment business, but he was not yet James Bond, and so was not quite a household name. He landed the lead role in the film Another Time, Another Place opposite Lana Turner. Turner herself lobbied for Connery to fill the role, which may have contributed to the trouble. 

Turner's boyfriend at the time was Johnny Stompanato, a mob enforcer for notorious gangster Mickey Cohen. Stompanato suspected something may have been going on between Connery and Turner. When Stompanato visited the British film set, there was already built-in tension between the two men. A few rude words were exchanged, and Connery ended up throwing hands. The fallout included Stompanato getting deported back to the US. The incident didn't force Connery out of the business, obviously, but Stompanato was killed not long afterward, and Connery decided to disappear for a while, in case Stompanato's associates came after him. That only lasted until he landed a role in Darby O'Gill And The Little People. Read about the time Sean Connery came a little too close to the mob at Vice.  -via Damn Interesting 

(Image source: Wikipedia)