A sufganiyah is a traditional Jewish pastry of North African origin eaten at Hanukkah. It’s similar to a stuffed donut.

This year, American Thanksgiving and Hanukkah overlap on November 28. It’s a rare event that hasn’t happened since 1888. So some Americans are celebrating “Thanksgivukkah”—a blending of the two holidays.

To mark the occasion, the Zucker Bakery in New York City is selling sufganiyot that are stuffed with Thanksgiving foods, such as turkey gravy and cranberry sauce.

-via That’s Nerdalicious!

(Photo: Opal Auctions)

This beautiful fossil is a pine cone infused with opal. It was found in the Ken's Retreat opal mining area of Finch County, New South Wales, Australia. Many plant and animal fossils can be found here including--on rare occasions--opalized pineapples.

-via TYWKIWDBI

Last Saturday, I posted about Allison Schrager's proposal to reduce the 48 contiguous states of US from 4 time zones to 2. In a poll, Neatorama readers agreed that this was a dandy idea.

Kevin Depew of The Awl, however, wants us to go in the opposite direction: expand the 4 time zones into 19, each of which are 9 minutes apart:

Before you immediately agree to this obvious plan and begin changing your clocks, let me explain how it would work. Our map illustrates the new nineteen U.S. time zones. They are separated by nine minutes each, more or less. Under my plan, after you get past Chicago (Angry Time), the time zones start to become more intuitive because they subdivide horizontally rather than vertically. Driving from Montana to Arizona is like metaphorically going back in time, only literally. Because you will actually be going back in time. By nine minutes for every time zone. Also, as you can see, the new time zones will have really cool names.

Do you live in the New York City megapolis? You're still in just one time zone. But you're also separated from the hillbillies in Philadelphia and New Haven:

The New York City tri-state area pretty much has its own time zone because the people there are very, very selfish. City Time will lose a minute every day because the pace is just… whatever. People hurry around all the time, push each other to get on the subway and yell stuff at each other and there is another train right behind this one. One minute away. Look, you can actually see it! The next train is right there. It’s right there! And it’s not even crowded. Why do you have to push yourself onto this one? Wait one minute.

Do you live in Indiana? Bad news: you don't get a time zone. At all.

The zones seem kind of irregularly drawn. But there's a good reason why:

Some might point out: I'm confused. This map seems completely random, almost as if the time zones were drawn by a five year old. This confusion is understandable because the time zones were, in fact, drawn by my five-year-old daughter, so I think we can all agree that these are actually pretty good time zones for someone who is five and that the Twilight Sparkle time zone (Louisiana, of course!) is the prettiest.

I'm not complaining. In fact, now I want to move to Louisiana--at least until my native Texas adopts Fluttershy Time.

How did your area earn its time zone name? Read Mr. Depew's post to find out. It's hilarious.

Note: We're happy to introduce a new experimental feature on Neatorama! Our NeatoFacto blog features self-contained "neat fact" graphics that's easily shareable on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

We hope you like it! And remember, please share it along!

It took twenty years for Walt Disney to create the Haunted Mansion. The whole thing actually began well before Disneyland came into being. Disney had always wanted a spooky haunted house attraction for the theme park (he even commissioned Disney Legend Harper Goff to draw some sketches), but Disneyland opened in 1955 without it.

Three years later, Disney decided to expand Disneyland and the effort to create the Haunted Mansion began in earnest. The first plan for the mansion called for an old New Orleans-style antebellum manor with boarded doors and windows and overgrown with weeds and dead trees. Disney, however, didn't like the idea of a run-down building in his park and said, "We'll take care of the outside and let the ghosts take care of the inside."

Neatorama Facts: Haunted Mansion

Disney put Imagineers Rolly Crump and Yale Gracey in charge of building the Haunted Mansion special effects. The two had plenty of ideas and apparently often left the special effects running all night long. The night cleaning crew were spooked and complained to the management, who in turn, asked Crump and Gracey not to scare them off.

But instead of leaving the lights on and the special effects off, Crump and Gracey decided to connect their "spectral effects" to a motion-detector switch. When the duo came in the morning, they found a broom hastily left in the middle of their studios. The Imagineers had to clean their studios by themselves from that point on, as management told them that the night cleaning crew were never coming back.

Bonus Fact: The Real Ghost that Visited Haunted Mansion Creator Yale Gracey

When they were working on the Haunted Mansion special effects, Crump asked Gracey whether he had any experience with the supernatural. "Oh yeah, I had a ghost read to me when I was 10 years old," Yale replied without hesitation, as reported by Disney History Institute.

Crump told the story, which went like this: When Gracey was a child, he and his mother went to visit relatives on the East Coast for the summer. They lived in a big old house, and Gracey and his cousins would sleep together in a large bedroom, with an old lady who lived in the closet. The lady would come out and read stories to the kids, under the condition that the children do not talk about the lady to the grownups or she'd disappear forever.

At the end of the summer, Gracey's mother asked him what he liked best about the vacation and the small boy replied, "The little lady that lives in the closet that reads to us every night." Gracey's mom was surprised and the children were mad at him, saying "No, no, Yale, she'll never come back."

Crump said that Gracey's mother was so concerned that she went to the local history society and found a photo of the woman who lived there. When she showed it to the kids, they said that she was the lady that lived in the closet.

Did Gracey make the whole thing up? Disney History Institute reported that Crump swore that this was exactly as Gracey had told him. "Yale would never make anything up. He was about as straight as they come," Crump added, "As far as I'm concerned it's true. It can't be any truer than that."

The Scientific Mole T-Shirt by Nathan Mazur from the NeatoShop

Today, October 23 (or 10/23, as it's written the American way), from 6:02 am to 6:02 pm, is Mole Day. No, it's not a day for freckles, spies, Mexican sauce, or cute little burrowing mammals. Rather it's the day to celebrate the chemical unit the "mole."

What is a mole, you ask, having forgotten high school chemistry. A mole of something is 6.02 x 10^23 of it (kind of like a dozen of eggs is 12 eggs, a mole of eggs is 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 eggs*.)

*okay, technically, it's 602,214,129,270,000,000,000,000 eggs (give or take a few quintillion - scientists can't agree on the exact number).

So, with that out of the way, here are 5 fun facts about the mole and Mole Day:

1. The mole is attributed to 18th century Italian scientist Amedeo Avogadro, whose full name is Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro di Queregna e di Cerreto.

Man, that's a long name, but it somehow fits the long number that now bears his name (6.02 x 10^23 is called Avogadro's Constant). His parents called him Amedeo Carlo Avogadro.

We won't get into the technical aspects, but in 1811 Avogadro proposed a law (now known as Avogadro's Law) stating that equal volume of all gasses, at the same temperature and presssure, have the same number of molecules.

As with many scientific accomplishments of that age, Avogadro's findings were promptly ignored. It took about a hundred years for the scientific community to get around to appreciating what he's done. In 1909, French chemist and Nobel laureate Jean Baptiste Perrin proposed that quantity of molecules be called "Avogadro's Constant."

2. Mole Day was proposed in an article in The Science Teacher in early 1980s. Inspired by the article, Maurice Oehler, a chemistry teacher (now retired) in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, created the National Mole Day Foundation in 1991.

3. Did you know that the Mole Day has annual themes? Here they are:

4. To help you celebrate, here's the Molemorial Day song by Michael Offutt (that's the theme of the Mole Day in 1996, when Offutt recorded the song). Actually Offutt created a whole album, titled "Molennium," filled with songs about the mole.

(YouTube clip - via Metafilter)

5. As you can probably guess, a mole (6.02 x 10^23) is a VERY large number. But, what does a mole of moles look like? What if we release a mole of moles onto our planet? xkcd explains:

An eastern mole (Scalopus aquaticus) weighs about 75 grams, which means a mole of moles weighs (6.022×10^23)×75g≈4.52×10^22kg.

That’s a little over half the mass of our moon.

Mammals are largely water. A kilogram of water takes up a liter of volume, so if the moles weigh 4.52×10^22 kilograms, they take up about 4.52×10^22 liters of volume. You might notice that we’re ignoring the pockets of space between the moles. In a moment, you’ll see why.

The cube root of 4.52×10^22 liters is 3,562 kilometers, which means we’re talking about a sphere with a radius of 2,210 kilometers, or a cube 2,213 miles on each edge. (That’s a neat coincidence I’ve never noticed before—a cubic mile happens to be almost exactly 4/3pi cubic kilometers, so a sphere with a radius of X kilometers has the same volume as a cube that’s X miles on each side.)

If these moles were released onto the Earth’s surface, they’d fill it up to 80 kilometers deep—just about to the (former) edge of space:

After last week's stealth Banksy art sale in New York City, you knew this would happen. In fact, I figured entrepreneurs selling fake Banksy prints would be popping up all over the city. But this experimental prank didn't even try to cover the fact that the artworks were fake! Dave Cicirelli, Lance Pilgrim, and George Gross set up a kiosk on the street to sell Banksy art.

Same price. Same images. Same location. Everything was the same--we even got Lance's father Michael to be the salesman. Everything was identical...except for two things:

    The public consciousness had changed.
    Our work was completely worthless.

We were open about this. Our sign said "Fake Banksy." Mike assured every customer that it was fake. Each canvas even came with a legally notarized "Certificate of Inauthenticity," claiming that what they bought was not an original Banksy.

So, how did they do? They sold out. Yeah, people bought every artwork they had, and someone even bought the price sign. It took less than an hour… which just goes to show that savvy New Yorkers have a sense of humor and love to be part of a meme. See a set of pictures from the stunt at Fakebook. You have to wonder how many vendors were trying the same thing without labeling their wares as fake. -via Digg

The Kannesteinen Rock is an unusual rock formation on the Norwegian island of Vågsøy. The slab of eclogite has been weathered by the waves for thousands of years. From the sea side, it’s about 3 meters tall. At its widest, it’s about 10.4 meters in circumference.

Some people say that it looks like a goblet, but local people refer to it as a chair. Perhaps that’s why tourists often climb on top and sit on it. It’s a hard climb, but so some even more daring people prefer to jump to the summit from an adjoining rock.

(Video Link)

-via Yababoon

When I saw the original headline late last night, I predicted waking up to an internet storm this morning.

Slate published an article by Emily Yoffe entitled College Women: Stop Getting Drunk. It references several studies that link sexual assault on college campuses with alcohol consumption. Well, duh. While it's good to have such studies with hard numbers, the real problem is what to do about it. College students are, by and large, adults who are on their own for the first time. And some are more naive than others. An excerpt:

And who is it purveying alcohol? In some cases it’s a type of serial predator who encourages his victim to keep pouring the means of her incapacitation down her own throat. Researchers such as Abbey and David Lisak have explored how these men use alcohol, instead of violence, to commit their crimes. Lake observes that these offenders can be campus leaders, charming and well liked—something that comes in handy if they are accused of anything. “They work our mythology against us,” says Lake. “We would like to see our daughters hang out with nice boys in navy blue blazers.”

The three young women I spoke to who were victims of such men attended different colleges, but their stories are so distressingly similar that it sounds as if they were attacked by the same young man. In each case the woman lost track of how much she’d had to drink. Then a male classmate she knew took her by the hand and offered her an escort. Then she was raped by this “friend.” Only one, Laura Dunn, reported to authorities what happened, more than a year after the fact. In her case she was set upon by two classmates, and the university declined to take action against either one.

Although the facts are not in dispute, the tone of the article verges on blaming the victim. If the fastest way to stop campus rape is for women to stop drinking, then doesn't that put the responsibility for crime prevention solely on women's shoulders? So a young woman has one too many and wakes up to realize she's been sexually assaulted. Is it all her fault? That's not the message we want to send to young people.

Slate also posted a response from Amanda Hess, To Prevent Rape on College Campuses, Focus on the Rapists, Not the Victims, which articulated what many of the 3,000+ Slate commenters said.

Rape is a societal problem, not a self-help issue. Parents can tell their own daughters not to get drunk, but even if those women follow instructions, it won’t keep other people’s daughters safe. It will just force campus rapists who rely on alcohol to execute their crimes to find other targets. As Yoffe notes, the research of David Lisak suggests that most rapes are committed by a small group of predators who claim a large number of victims. We can prevent the most rapes on campus by putting our efforts toward finding and punishing those perpetrators, not by warning their huge number of potential victims to skip out on parties.

Similar responses came from HuffPo, The Atlantic, The Frisky, Jezebel, and other sites.

The controversy pits what is best for one person against what is best for society as a whole. Our culture would be better off placing the blame squarely on those who commit rape, but we have little control over other people before they act. Until men are specifically trained in how to properly seek consensual sex, starting at a fairly young age, we will have to deal with the "misunderstandings" and peer pressure that lead to rape, in addition to serial predators. Of course, we warn our daughters against putting themselves in situations where they may be raped. But if and when they do, they often feel responsible and might never seek justice. After all, they know they will be blamed for putting themselves in that situation, meaning they failed to protect themselves the way we told them to. Young men internalize this idea, too.

Treating our daughters as potential victims is only a short-term solution. Making nonconsensual sex as recognizable and shameful as say, burglary, and raising our sons as if they are going to date our daughters is the longterm solution. So I will continue to shares stories of cases like those in Steubenville, Ohio, and Maryville, Kansas, with my teenage daughters both as a warning and as a talking point about my anxieties regarding the difference between the way things are and the way they should be.   

(Photo: Savannah)

Wonder Woman is now ready to save the entire galaxy in this cosplay display by Hakuchan that mixes the DC character with Leia in her iconic slave costume. Leia strangled Jabba the Hutt with a chain in Return of the Jedi, but this time she'll use the Lasso of Truth to interrogate him, then kill him.

-via Fashionably Geek

(Photos: hahahatutu, Girls' Channel)

Are you still pursing your lips together like a duck when taking selfies and uploading them to Facebook? Well, stop! Duck face is old and out of style. The newest trend in selfie photo facial scrambling is called “chirp face.”

It’s a trend emerging from Japan. Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft, who speaks Japanese, thinks that a better translation would be “sparrow face,” because that’s the animal it imitates.

To do it, open your eyes wide and your lips slightly, like you’re about to chirp with appreciation at a fresh worm spotted on the ground. Take a picture and upload it into the comments of this post. Be sure to include your real name so that the photo can be forever tied to you.

(Photo of a different bear by Marie Hale)

“It’s like…an extreme sport.” That’s how Gilles Cyr of Grand Falls, New Brunswick, Canada describes his fight against a wild brown bear.

Mr. Cyr had no warning. Suddenly, while tending to his woodlot, a bear attacked him from behind. The bear struck at him with his claws. Mr. Cyr saw the bear’s tongue lolling out of his mouth. He grabbed it and wouldn’t let go. He says that his reasoning was, “If you hurt me, I’m going to hurt you, too.”

Mr. Cyr fled behind a tree. The bear struck at him again, then lost interest the fight and left. Mr. Cyr was treated for minor injuries.

-via Dave Barry

You don't have to be a stoner to appreciate these dishes. What these recipes are is ultimate junk food, even when they are homemade. They are calorie-laden mashups with no respect for appearance or nutrition. They exist merely for hedonistic pleasure. May I present Deep Fried Deviled Eggs.

Deviled eggs are delicious, but they aren't nearly fatty enough for some people. That's why stoners should try deep frying the boiled egg whites in a light batter before adding the filling (seriously, do this before you get wasted people). Bam! Hot, crispy, sweet, egg-y goodness.

And you can add sausage and bread crumbs a la Scotch eggs -or even bacon. The quote does bring up a serious issue with calling these "stoner foods." Some items in this list can be bought ready-made, and some are simple to prepare, but a few of them should only be cooked while all your wits are about you, otherwise you risk both injury and a ruined snack. Then again, if you can get past the weirdness, you can enjoy them whatever state you are in. See all ten snack items at Oddee.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), a Norwegian Expressionist painter, is perhaps most widely known for his 1893 painting “The Scream.” This painting sold last year for a record $120 million.

SugarWinzy’s scream cheese version is filled with chocolatey horror. First, she poured the brownie batter into her baking pan.  She placed cream cheese into a squeeze bottle, then squirted small amounts on the surface of the brownie batter. Then she used a toothpick to paint the surface with the cream cheese. The image remained impressively consistent after baking.

-via Tasteologie

Photo: superbonnie/imgur

"The Zoo is temporarily closed," said the sign.

Redditor superbonnie shared this photo of a young child all wearing a bear costume looking longingly at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C., which was temporarily closed because of the US government shutdown. The gates to the zoo were locked and the kid was left outside looking in.

Since it was posted a day ago, the image has gone viral and has become the unofficial mascot of the frustration over the government shutdown. Some people were suggesting that the photo was staged (there was no background story attached to the photo, and media's requests to the Redditor who posted the photo haven't yielded any additional clues), but the sentiment that the image provided seems to have struck a nerve amongst many.

The National Zoo wrote on their website:

Due to the federal government shutdown, the Smithsonian's National Zoo is closed to the public. All programming and events are canceled. All vehicle, pedestrian, and bicycle paths into the Zoo are closed. None of our live animal cams are being broadcast.

All the animals will continue to be fed and cared for. A shutdown does not affect our commitment to the safety of our staff and standard of excellence in animal care.

Meanwhile, the circus that is the US Government shutdown continues and the Shutdown photo meme has started.

Photo via @Daily Caller

I found this picture in an image collection at The Chive called It’s nearly impossible to argue with kid logic. I believe 7-year-old Elijah had a perfectly good answer on number ten, yet the teacher marked it wrong. Isn't a fart a gas? Yet, it is. According to Wikipedia, farts are composed mostly of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and methane.

It's possible that the test required answers that were part of class discussion, but one gets the feeling that the teacher objected to the vulgarity of the term fart. If that was the case, she could have suggested the terms "flatulence" or "methane" as a substitute. Telling a child that a word is inappropriate is very different from telling a kid that he's wrong on a science test. After all, families who don't use the term "fart" are very likely to say "gas." Any 7-year-old knows they mean the same thing. What do you think?   

(Image credit: Christine Lee)