When Ruth Mae Urdanivia married Jose Urdanivia, a Peruvian diplomat, he life turned into a whirlwind of gentility, world travel, and state occasions. The couple had five children and seemed very happy. Then in 1957, Jose died of heart attack at age 42, and Ruth moved back to her hometown of Allentown, Pennsylvania. She had trouble adjusting to life as a single working mother. 

Urdanivia spent two years hoarding a prescribed barbiturate, and in October of 1959, gave it to her five children, aged four through twelve, crushed into drinks, and took a massive amount herself. She woke up three days later, tried to slash her wrists, and then turned on the gas oven. Her landlord found her and the five dead children. Urdanivia was hospitalized and charged with five counts of murder.

What drove Urdanivia to kill her children? She complained about money, the limited lifestyle she had as a widow, and the lack of help from others. Yet she had a pension from the Peruvian government she never bothered to accept, and her brother was caring for two of the children. And her story indicated she began hoarding drugs soon after her husband died. Read about Ruth Mae Urdanivia and what happened to her after the murders at Pennsylvania Oddities. -via Strange Company 

You know how people used to say never touch a baby bird that fell out of its nest? That's been debunked, and now we are encouraged to return it to the nest for the mother to find. The same principle held when park rangers in South Africa found a newborn zebra that was in the water behind a concrete dam, with no mother around. They rushed the foal to Care for Wild Rhino Sanctuary because there wasn't a zebra sanctuary nearby, and you can't really get picky about the species you care for when a baby is in danger. 

However, they didn't find a dead zebra mother, so why was the foal left behind? If the newborn was unresponsive at first, she may have thought it was dead. Or she may have given up after not being able to get the foal out of the water. In either case, this story from the Dodo has a happy ending.

Your 2026 Solon Beef Days Hay Bale Toss Champion ➡️ @CaelWinter pic.twitter.com/REoo1lHif5

— Hawkeye Football (@HawkeyeFootball) July 18, 2026

Solon, Iowa is the home of Beef Days, an annual festival of food, music, and sports. One of its feats of strength competitions is the hay bale toss. The goal is to toss a hay bale over a bar set high

The winner this year was Cael Winter, a football player with the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, having thrown the bale thirteen feet and six inches. You can see his winning toss above or watch the entire 2 hour and 27 minute contest here.

-via David Burge

Check out this image from a Zillow listing. When you have a huge golden dome on your house, it may be a little difficult to decide what to do with the interior. This looks weird overall, but I focused on the shiny wooden surface. At first I thought it was a table, but the way it aligns with the carpet leads me to think it's just a shiny part of the floor. Now, how fun would it be to remove the stair railing and make a game out of it? It would be like curling- just slide your little brother across that wood and see if you can chuck him down the stairs. Goal! 

This is just one of a collection of strange images from Zillow listings that Rebecca Makkai has collected over the past year or so. Most are like puzzles in that the more you look, the more details you find that make no sense. It's no wonder people wanted to sell these places. See 21 of these over-the-top rooms in the post, with a button at the bottom that implies you can see more if you sign up for notifications. -via Nag on the Lake 

Andy Beth Miller of The Takeout undertook the laborious task of evaluating the many beef sandwiches available across the United States and selecting the best from each state. Seriously, there's a methodology section at the end because this is science.

Part of good scientific research is replication of experiments, for which I volunteer.

Seven of the sandwiches are reubens, of course. But this one pictured above also has my attention: the three-way roast beef from The Modern Butcher in Danvers, Massachusetts. It's a delicacy available only one day a week because preparation includes a 16-hour sous vide. It has garlic, mayonnaise, and very rare roast beef.

Photo:The Modern Butcher

Flightradar24 is an internet service that tracks aircraft flights all over the world. If a plane flies overhead, you can point your phone to it and pull up the aircraft type, the flight number, its origin and destination, and even its altitude and speed. You can also look up historical tracking information. Aviation enthusiasts rely on Flightradar24.  

Flightradar24 also has a blog, where they post aviation news, airport incidents, crashes and near misses, and general information. A recent post is titled Investigators release preliminary report on LEGO 747 and Space Shuttle crash. The LEGO Space Shuttle was being transported by the 747 when the accident occurred, which is described as "a kinetic encounter with a Felis catus." Accompanying photos show the crash site and debris field, as well as the alleged perpetrator. There is also a chart detailing the Owner/Operator Information, just as it would for any other crash. And 129 comments from aviation enthusiasts, including one urging an investigation by the FAA (Feline Accident Avoidance) and the NTSB (Never Trust Silly BlackCats). -via Metafilter 

Have you noticed that people who never talk about or even think about soccer (also known as football) are suddenly fans, or maybe even experts? This is particularly true of Americans, because North America is hosting the World Cup. There are also those who are soccer fans once every four years, when the World Cup happens elsewhere. Or the Olympics, when you find yourself wrapped up in women's gymnastics for a short time, but then switch to speed skating two years later. Meanwhile, you haven't paid attention to anything outside of baseball. Or maybe not even that. So many people only care about American football for one weekend in February, or horse racing on the first Sunday in May. If you don't keep up the rest of the time, it might be difficult to bluff your way through, as Ryan George demonstrates here. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

In case you aren't even trying, the 2026 World Cup comes to an end tomorrow when Spain and Argentina play at 3 Eastern Time.     

Like actor Ed O'Neill, I'm only vaguely aware of Taylor Swift. I know that Batboy was caught flipping a grunt, but that's about the extent of my cognizance of pop culture.

Fortunately, I have teenage daughters who tell me that there are numerous references in this video to Taylor Swift songs including "Getaway Car" and "Cruel Summer" in just the first 20 seconds of this video (they declined to watch any more of it) by Dustin Ballard's There I Ruined It.

Other Ballard videos in this theme include music by AC/DC, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pearl Jam, and the bro country genre of music.

The last royal family of Russia were the Romanovs, headed by Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra, a German princess and granddaughter of Queen Victoria. They produced four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia, and then finally a male heir, Alexei. But Alexei was hemophiliac, and it seemed like the Romanov dynasty was doomed. That was true, but it wasn't due to the lack of a healthy male heir. 

The Romanovs were great proponents of photography, and documented much of their family life in pictures. Official photographs were numerous, and stood in place of an accessible monarch. But they also took lots of private photos, which they guarded as fiercely as they did their private family life. Under pressure from revolutionaries, Nicholas abdicated the throne in 1917, and the entire family was killed in a sudden and particularly gory execution in July of 1918. The new Soviet government tried to find and destroy all images of the royal family that they could, but official photos were already available internationally, and six private photo albums were smuggled out of Russia soon after the executions. It was the last thing the family would have wanted, but those private photos are now public domain. See a selection of images from the private life of the Romanov family, along with their story, at Smithsonian.  -via Strange Company 

A group of first class domino experts got together to break a Guinness World Record. And they did, on June 20th, when they toppled a 3D pyramid containing 29,193 dominos. But would you believe that is about the least interesting part of this sequence? This 123,456-piece domino fall takes up a whole gym, and it's quite entertaining. 

There are lots of mind bending side quests, while the main line continues in a back-and-forth manner intended to give you enough time to enjoy the side quest without losing the point of progress. I had to go back and watch the pair of gummy bears again to figure out how they made them fall twice. There are a couple of places where an art piece did not entirely fall. That seems a shame, but maybe they were just setting the viewer up for the surprise duck. In between sequences, there are non-domino transitions that make this a truly Rube Goldberg contraption, and they often don't work the way you expect them to. After all that, the record-breaking pyramid didn't seem all that important, but overall, it's quite a ride. -via Born in Space 

It is hot outside. Like, really hot. Dangerously hot if you stay out too long.

Sora News 24 brings us a solution from Japan. The company SRDS manufactures refrigerators and vending machines. It has re-purposed some of its designs to create boxes where people can seek temporary relief from the heat a 59ºF environment.

The Do Hiemon Box provides a seat and blows cold air on the head, neck, shoulders, and back to prevent and counteract heat exhaustion.

The machine has three airflow settings and automatically shuts off after 20 minutes of use. One is already in public use at the city hall of Maebashi in central Honshu.

In the 1980s, before everyone was on the internet, Japanese photographer Satoru Tsuda created a sensation with Namennayo cats (sometimes also called Nameneko). These cats dressed like high school gangsters and juvenile delinquents, among other characters, and posed rebelliously in elaborate miniature settings. They could be seen smoking in the boy's room, sneaking kisses, peeping into the girl's bathroom, showing off their motorcycles, and intimidating normal adults. Since they couldn't be passed around on the internet, these cat photos were purchased, and each sold in the millions. While that's about as viral as you could get in those days, Namennayo were little known outside of Japan.



Like Harry Whittier Frees almost a century earlier, Tsuda trained kittens from an early age to wear clothing specially designed for them, and posed them gently and patiently for short periods of time. Read about how Tsuda came to develop Namennayo and see more of these cats at Flashbak.  -Thanks, WTM!  

Little Horrors Glassworks in Atlanta produces works of stained glass that are terrifying and amusing if you have a sick sense of humor like I do. Her corpus includes many facehuggers from the Alien franchise because you always need more facehuggers in your life.

Yokai are a Japanese pantheom of supernatural folklore spirits that range from demonic to the beneficial. They include monsters, ghosts, and demons, which aren't always separate categories as they are in the West. Kitsune is the one you are most likely to run into today. 

Foxes are known for being cute and intelligent, so clever that it was easy to ascribe superpowers to them, which is exactly what happened in ancient Japan. The supernatural fox called Kitsune could be a mischievous prankster, a shapeshifter, a protector, a blessing, or a spirit that possessed humans, depending on the time and place. They are rarely 100% malevolent, but they can ruin your life in order to teach you a lesson. Kitsune can take a form of a beautiful woman, and in some cases even reproduce with humans to provide hybrid offspring or some form of Kitsune ancestry. 

Dr. Emily Zarka explain Kitsune, from ancient tales (with many tails) to modern depictions in pop culture, including a bizarre (and clueless) American plan for weaponing Kitsune against the Japanese during World War II. 

African penguins are a critically-endangered species, but the New England Aquarium in Boston has a thriving colony. These penguins usually live 10-15 years in the wild, but in the aquarium's protective environment, they can live to more than twice that age. Earlier this year, the aquarium designed a separate island as a geriatric ward, sort of a retirement home, for six penguins. Four of them are in their 30s, and two others, aged 29 and 14, were included because they are mates of the older penguins. The penguins are dealing with maladies like arthritis or cataracts that penguins in the wild rarely survive long enough to suffer. 

The new island separates the "retired" penguins from the more rambunctious younger birds, although they are still in sight. It is equipped with level mats that make it easier for older penguins to get around and to find their way despite poor eyesight. They also get world class medical treatment and nutritional supplements for their aches and pains. Read about each individual retired penguin and their new home in a press release. You can read more about meeting the penguins' medical needs at National Geographic, although you'll have to sign up for notifications to read it. -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Vanessa Khan/New England Aquarium)