Halloween was cancelled in 1918 because of a flu pandemic that killed fifty to one hundred million people. With the current pandemic, the holiday may be cancelled this year. Los Angeles County has issued a formal guidance that recommends against trick-or-treating and bans outright haunted houses, festivals and other traditional festivities that would fall under current Covid-19 health guidelines. Safety first, everybody! There’s always the next year to come for celebrations!

Image via CNN

Fredrick Joseph, a former national surrogate for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, accused the owner of an Airbnb of having satanic objects. The marketing CEO released a long Twitter thread where he claimed that the Airbnb he stayed in was full of “seemingly satanic items and stuff for witchcraft rituals.” Vice reached out to the host of the Airbnb and the Church of Satan for their thoughts on the matter: 

the host was able to take us on a walkthrough of the house and show convincingly that many of the alleged markers of “Satanic” activity are art books and kitschy objects. Joseph also claimed the house’s basement had “ritualistic markings” on the floor, which, from our viewing, is flatly untrue. They looked like paint smudges.

“They [the items] are not Satanic,” the host, whose name is Alex, told Motherboard on a video call from the house. “They’re kitsch. None of it is occult. You can get this stuff at a bodega.”

The Church of Satan, one of two prominent global Satanic organizations based in the United States, responded to Joseph on Twitter, writing, “The photos in this thread depict thrift store curiosities & hot topic kitsch, not evidence of satanic rituals. Sounds like you have an over active imagination and can’t tell the difference between supernatural horror movies and reality.” (Joseph did not respond.) The Satanic Temple—a group distinct from, and which has long feuded with, the Church of Satan—has a Baphomet statue at its headquarters, and garnered a great deal of news coverage for trying to place Baphomet statutes alongside Christian monuments at state capitol buildings across the country, to make a point about religious plurality in America.

image via Vice 

Watching YouTuber GeorgeNotFound see color for the first time makes me feel privileged and blessed to be able to see my surroundings normally. Feeling his excitement as he explores the world of Minecraft with the help of his new glasses is both touching and inspiring. In addition, it’s always fun to watch players replay a game as if they're playing the game for the first time.

Nicky Quamina Woo’s photograph of a boy playing on a retaining wall near the sea may be one of the best examples of how climate change has affected our society. In an interview with the Guardian, the photographer shared that people in Senegal, where the photo was taken, were moving to other areas because of the rising water. She was awestruck when she saw a boy playing on the structure that was built to defend homes from the sea, as the Guardian details: 

his imagination turned this structure defending his home into a playground. He’s striding above it like a king with his little stick. It captured, for me, the incredible resilience of children and the imagination of childhood. It’s an image of strength.

But it’s also tragic. In a few years, he will be forced to understand the role of that retaining wall, and he will likely have to join the thousands forced to live in makeshift homes. The ocean sustains the fishing communities, and offers a space for its children to play, but it’s now threatening to engulf the city.

Obviously this isn’t Senegal’s problem alone. I have a place in New York City and a few years ago the neighbourhood was ruined by flooding. Today, I live in Jakarta. The whole city is quite literally sinking.

Image via The Guardian 

It seems that the Notre-Dame Cathedral is slowly opening up to people after the fire that devoured the cathedral’s roof. Masses of toxic lead dust from the fire were removed, ancient stones cleaned, ventilation systems vacuumed, lighting and interactive programs reorganized, molds eliminated and anti-Covid measures imposed before the portion of the crypt was opened for public viewing, as the Smithsonian detailed:

The crypt celebrated the opening with an exhibition on the two 19th-century men who helped restore the 850-year-old medieval monument to greatness: the novelist Victor Hugo and the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.

“We are paying homage to the cathedral after all that has confronted Paris, from the tragedy of the fire to the crisis of the pandemic,” said Sylvie Robin, chief curator of the crypt, who helped organize the exhibit.

The crypt has been one of Paris’s hidden jewels ever since it opened to the public in 1980. At more than 19,000 square feet, it is the largest crypt in Europe and includes archaeological discoveries made during excavations between 1965 and 1970 to prepare for the construction of a parking lot on the open plaza in front of the cathedral’s main entrance. (The plaza, which has been car-free for some time, reopened to the public at the end of May.)

Image via the Smithsonian 

If you want a taste of foods you actually eat at annual state fairs, you can push a stick into any random food item around the house, dunk it in pancake batter, then into a pot of hot oil. This is better. Since 2009, the Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance has held the Heirloom Recipe Competition at various state fairs, highlighting family recipes that have been handed down for generations. Each entry comes with a story, like that of Amy Wertheim's peanut brittle, which won second prize at the 2011 Illinois state fair.  

In 2004, Amy Wertheim saw her family’s candy store burn to the ground. Along with equipment and more than 500 pounds of treats, she lost something far more precious: her grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ handwritten recipes. “Of everything we lost, that was the most devastating,” she writes.

One way Wertheim filled the void was by collecting cookbooks. At an auction in 2010, she picked up a weathered collection of personal recipes written down for a new bride. “As I turned the pages, I started seeing names I recognized … and then I saw the name, Mother Hoblit.” It was her great-grandmother’s family nickname. She also noticed something stuck in the book’s folds. “My hands were shaking as I unfolded the crackling paper … there, in my Great-Grandmother’s handwriting, was our lost peanut brittle recipe.”

Since state fairs and their competitions have been canceled this year, you may want to try some of these award-winning recipes at home. Gastro Obscura shares the recipes for blue ribbon pies, cakes, candy, biscuits, and moreover, the stories behind them.

(Image credit: Sam O'Brien for Gastro Obscura)

Here's a tale of small town government corruption that makes Walking Tall look like a Disney movie. During the 1930s and '40s, McMinn County, Tennessee, was the personal fiefdom of Paul Cantrell, who was the county sheriff, then Chairman of the County Court, and then a state senator -along with some other positions he was paid for simultaneously. Cantrell installed his cronies in other offices, and ran the county with an iron hand. Elections were rigged, everyday citizens were shaken down for money, and bootlegging, gambling, and prostitution flourished as long as it was profitable for the political machine. When World War II ended, hundreds of young local men who had been gone for years fighting fascism came home and did not like what they saw. After getting a taste of the local machine's power when Navy Seabee Earl Ford was murdered, the veterans organized and launched a slate of candidates for the county election of 1946 under the non-partisan “Ex-Serviceman’s Cleanup Ticket for McMinn County.” Their path would not be easy. Paul Cantrell himself was running for sheriff again, and his successor Sheriff Pat Mansfield ran for state senator.

Election Day had finally arrived. A local minister exhorted his congregation thus: “If you do not vote as your conscience dictates, then you have sold your citizenship and do not deserve to be citizens. It is the responsibility of each and every person to preserve our most cherished possession, liberty, or forever lose it.” Armed deputies “guarded” each polling place, and reports of election fraud poured in to GI headquarters almost immediately. One veteran lamented, “They already started knocking our boys in the head and putting them in jail. They’re taking this thing…This thing’ lost.” Bill White would have none of that, replying, “Now…this thing’s just getting started.” White was right; indeed, it would not be long before the machine drew first blood.

At one polling place, a deputy beat and shot a sixty-year-old whose only crime had been his surplus of gumption in exercising his right to vote. Meanwhile, another deputy delivered a brutal beating to a GI election judge after he protested the brazen voter fraud happening before his eyes; the deputy tried to draw his gun, and likely would have killed the veteran, but it snagged in his holster. When he had exhausted himself, he had the man dragged to the jail bloody and insensate. By this time, DeRose notes, “there were twelve ballot boxes: one in the jail, another inside a heavily defended courthouse, a third barricaded in the Dixie Café, a fourth in the vault in the Cantrell Bank Building, and poll watchers had been ejected at two other locations.” Inside the courthouse, deputies held a handful of GI poll watchers hostage, two of them wounded.

However, those hostage GIs were tougher than they were before they went off to war. And the rest of the veterans had developed skills with guns, explosives, and even airplanes. Read about the Battle of Athens in a gripping account at The Abbeville Blog. Oh yeah, and when the smoke cleared, there were election results. -Thanks WTM!

Suttie Economy is 94 years old and still alive, now recovering from heart problems at a veteran's clinic. He had told his longtime friend Sammy Oakey of Oakey's Funeral Service that when his time came, he wanted to be buried in a casket painted to resemble a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. Since then, Oakey has been working to get permission from the Mars Wrigley company to use their gum logo.

"Suttie would come in here for visitation or just come in to visit and he would always bring a bunch of packs of Juicy Fruit chewing gum and put it out for the employees to enjoy," said Oakey.

"He didn't just do that here. He did it at restaurant and doctor's offices wherever he went."

During World War II, Wrigley supported US troops by taking Wrigley's Spearmint, Doublemint and Juicy Fruit off the civilian market and dedicating the entire output of these brands to the US Armed Forces, according to Mars.

Economy became fond of Juicy Fruit during the war and had been giving it away to his community ever since he came home, according to his brother, John Economy.

"It served as a symbol for his mission to talk to people about the World War II memorial and to honor the deceased veterans that died for our freedom," his brother said.

While the request was initially denied, a social media effort convinced Mars Wrigley to grant permission for Economy to have the casket he wants. Read more of the story at CNN. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Flickr user Thomas Hawk)

Imgur user angiexpangie found an opportunity to draw the attention of distance-learning students that aren't even her students! She explains,

My boyfriend is a High School math teacher and his school started distance learning recently.  His webcam faces my white board so I decided to start leaving his students messages. Here are some of my favorites...

Every day she surprises viewers with a new cartoon featuring a pun, dad joke, or meme. Check out a gallery of the best ones so far here. -via reddit

Taking a glimpse into the vastness of the universe might make you feel small, but it will also make you feel part of something beautiful. We are thankful for the photographers who bring those distant places down to earth for us. The Insight Investment Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition has selected winners for their 2020 competition.

This is the 12th running of the photo contest, which is managed by Royal Observatory Greenwich in association with BBC Sky at Night Magazine and Insight Investment. For this year’s contest, judges had to pore over and shortlist 5,000 entries gathered from six continents.

French photographer Nicolas Lefaudeux’s stunning picture of the Andromeda galaxy (pictured up top) earned him the overall top prize of £10,000 ($12,860). Lefaudeux’s composition makes it appear as if the Andromeda galaxy—the closest galaxy to our own—is at arm’s length, even though it’s 2 million light-years away. The photographer created this tilt-shift effect by 3D-printing a part that held the camera at a key angle, while the blurring effect was created by a defocusing the outer edges of the photo.

There were also winners selected in various categories, such as Our Sun, Our Moon, Aurorae, People and Space, Skyscapes, and Planets, Comets, and Asteroids. See those winning images at Gizmodo.

Physics professor Vitaly Vanchurin attempted to change our perspective about the reality we’re living in. In a study uploaded to arXiv this summer, Vanchurin suggested that we’re living inside a neural network that governs everything around us. According to the professor, artificial neural networks can “exhibit approximate behaviors” of quantum mechanics and general relativity, a feat that physicists that have been trying to  reconcile for years, as Futurism details: 

Since quantum mechanics “is a remarkably successful paradigm for modeling physical phenomena on a wide range of scales,” he writes, “it is widely believed that  on the most fundamental level the entire universe is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics and even gravity should somehow emerge from it.”

“We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works,” reads the paper’s discussion. “With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong.”

Image via Futurism 

This rehabilitation center in Switzerland caters to royalty, politicians, oligarchs, business tycoons, and A-list celebrities. It isn’t a surprise that the Paracelsus is labeled as the most expensive in the world. A five-week residential rehab in the Paracelsus costs £315,000 (around $400,000)! The rehabilitation center provides a 24/7 limousine transportation, a personal chef, butler, and concierge. It feels like their clients are staying for vacation and less for rehabilitation. Well, they did pay a huge amount of money for it! 

Learning how to fish is perhaps the most valuable skill that we can learn in this lifetime. As the old proverb goes, “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day,” but “teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” But of course, learning something new takes time, and fishing is no exception.

It’s already been half an hour since this kid started fishing, and it seems that she hasn’t caught anything yet. According to her mother Marsha who took this photo…

“Time after time she would throw her line out and then…. much to her surprise she caught herself!”

She might have been frustrated because she did not catch any fish, but hey, her catch is much more valuable than all of the fish she could have caught at that time.

What do you think?

Image via Awkward Family Photos

The ability to concentrate and react quickly to the things in the game is what makes a gamer competitive. That’s why Razer designed a drink last year that will keep a gamer’s focus sharp for hours. This year, the company released yet another product for gamers: a fortified gum called Respawn By 5.

Razer has partnered with Wrigley’s 5 gum… to make a gum specifically for gamers. The product is infused with B vitamins and green tea extract to help improve your focus and reaction time, according to a statement from Razer. Choose from a classic cool mint flavor, or two flavors already time-tested in the Respawn drink: pomegranate watermelon and tropical punch.

If the Respawn drink seemed a little out of left field, this gum is a bit of a surprise as well. However, Respawn By 5 could be an alternative for those who don’t want the caffeine in the Respawn drink but still want a “mental performance supplement.” If you think a stick of gum could be the difference between beating the next boss in your video game or becoming an esports master, you can snag 10 packs for $27.99 at the Razer website.

While this gum is intended for gamers, it could be used by other people as well, like those who work in the office.

Well, what do you think?

(Image Credit: Razer/ Engadget)

In a surprising turn of events, Microsoft finally announced the price of the Xbox Series S. The next-gen Xbox will cost $299 in the US, housed in the smallest console ever. Microsoft released details on the budget-friendly console in reaction to leaks that surfaced all over the Internet, as Gamespot detailed: 

In terms of design, Series S looks exactly like the leaked image that surfaced on September 7--it's a small, white rectangle with a minimalist design and no disc drive. The front features nothing more than a power button, USB port, and a sync button for the controller.

According to a report from Windows Central, the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X will both release on November 10, with the Series X selling for $499. The Series X price and release date both remain unconfirmed, but given that the Series S information was correct, it seems like a safe bet.

However, a leaked Xbox Series S trailer also made its way online, revealing some of the key details about the system. That trailer has now been released officially, and you can watch it above. It states that Series S comes with a custom 512 GB SSD to allow for fast load times and instant game switching and support for 1440p gaming at 120 FPS. In other words, it appears to largely be what the rumors suggested: a box that's every bit as capable as the Series X, but one that isn't intended for native 4K gaming.

Image via Gamespot