In the age of printers, e-books, the Amazon marketplace, and expiring copyrights, it's really easy to sell a book that one didn't write, and there is no shortage of people taking advantage of the opportunity. Anyone can release a new copy of a literary classic that's in the public domain with very little work. But these rapidly-produced books need a cover. The workshops that spew out all these novels don't want to take too much time designing a cover, so they do a Google search for art that will illustrate some word in the title, whether the title has anything to do with the story or not. The result is a glut of hilariously bad covers for books you know and love, or else were forced to read in high school.  

You can bet your bottom dollar that the people who put these covers together have never read the book. They aren't even looking for good art, either, just easy art, like stock images, Photoshopped copies of things they've used before, or even something cooked up on Microsoft Paint. You'll get a laugh out of a collection of the worst covers called Public Domain Atrocities. If you want more, there are lists of covers here and here as well. And then there's this.  -via Metafilter

We look back at fashions of the past and wonder what they were thinking. A little research and some common sense tell us that high heels were developed to hold one's feet in the stirrups while riding a horse, but became common for women because it signified someone who doesn't do hard labor and stayed for good because they make women flex their leg and butt muscles attractively. The codpiece started out for reasons of modesty, but became popular as a way of showing off. But what was up with the ruffled collars of the Elizabethan era? They only look natural on Bozo the Clown. They served no practical use, and they certainly weren't comfortable. Weird History goes over the real purpose of ruffs, plus how the fashion changed to become more elaborately ridiculous over time, spread across the world, and eventually died out -except for clowns. But hey, we may wonder about the strange fashions of the past, yet those folks would look at our modern clothing the same way. 

The Boy Scouts of America organization is changing its name to Scouting America, as an attempt at rebranding and because they have 176,000 girls in their ranks. They will still have merit badges for certain achievements, as do the Girl Scouts. But why should these badges be limited to young folks? We learn and change throughout our lives. And there are certain accomplishments that mark the achievement of middle age. The badge above is called the Ceramics Class at the Local Community College Badge. You receive that when you realize that you were too busy building a career and raising kids for the past twenty years and now you don't have any hobbies, and that has to be fixed quickly.

Another is particularly relevant due to a popular post we had not too long ago. The Boombox Badge is to mark your accomplishment of admitting that "you don’t care about new music and start listening only to music that was awesome when you were fifteen." Oh sure, you can argue about that all day, but then you won't get the badge. See nine of these badges for the achievements of middle age at McSweeney's Internet Tendency.  -via Nag on the Lake

(Images credit: Jane Demarest)

Does a person have the right to end their own life when it is full of pain and incurable suffering? How about someone else's life? Modern medical miracles sometimes come with a horrific cost. We may be able to save lives that were once doomed, but if it leaves the patient with severe brain damage, in a coma, or in a vegetative state, what have we gained? We've gained some deep ethical and philosophical questions, like what is the minimum standard of a life worth living? In the case of Terri Schiavo, which you may recall from the turn of the century, a 26-year-old woman was left severely brain-damaged and in a vegetative state after a heart attack. Years later, her husband proposed removing her feeding tube, the only artificial life support technology Schiavo required. Her parents objected on the grounds that you don't stop feeding someone because they are disabled. The case dragged on for years, and eventually led to reviews of the laws around life support and death with dignity.

The ethical questions remain, though. You may believe it is okay to refuse life support or life-saving interventions, but not active euthanasia. But what if the patient is unable to express their wishes? What if the patient with a terminal illness or profound disabilities or untreatable pain really wants to end their suffering but needs assistance to carry out that wish? As medical science continues to extend life beyond our ability to enjoy it, these questions will only get more difficult.

If you haven't been keeping up with the Disney theme parks, Disney–MGM Studios in Orlando is now Disney's Hollywood Studios. In 1994, they unveiled a terrifying roller-coaster with a drop shaft feature in a haunted house-type building called The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. They now have the same ride at Disney parks in Tokyo and Paris. The thrill ride features Rod Serling as host, both in archival footage and an actor doing an impression. But it didn't start out that way.

When Disney first opened the movie-themed park in 1989, they were still brainstorming ideas for rides that connected to Hollywood movies. The Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein was 15 years old, but was so memorable they were going to make a haunted house attraction based on it. The idea was presented as Mel Brooks’ Hollywood Horror Hotel, although staffers called it Hotel Mel. The premise was that Mel Brooks was in the process of directing a new movie there, and visitors would see classic monsters as animatronics in ridiculous scenes. What would that have been like, and why didn't it happen? Read the story of Mel Brooks' Disney attraction that never came to be at Cracked.

Once upon a time, we used cash, including paper money and coins. The most common coin was the quarter, and you may have come across a quarter that has been painted red, although that is pretty rare these day, too. Why would anyone paint a quarter red? These were "house coins," used in vending machines that provided a service. The company that owned the vending machines would collect the coins, and the red quarters would be separated out and given back to the business owner, who had used them in the machines. Harry of Harry's Coin Shop explain that they were used in juke boxes, but that's just one example. House coins were also used in laundromats, car washes, and arcades, but they didn't hold any weight for machines that dispensed products like snacks because the vending machine owner wasn't about to give those away. Business owners would use them to test their machines, make it up to someone who complained about losing their quarter in the machine, or to keep the grandkids busy. I used to get a handful of red quarters at an arcade in the early '80s because I was a "local celebrity" and they wanted me to hang out there. It was a very small town.

The army used to issue a red quarter to new recruits to keep for an emergency phone call, hoping the red would remind them not to spend it otherwise. Repairmen used them to test pay phones, too. But why red? Because they were painted with nail polish, which was predominately red in those days. -via Boing Boing

The term "wampus cat" can mean anything and everything, but the name was associated with real sightings, animal deaths, and hysteria in the early 20th century. In Quitman, Mississippi, a wampus cat was blamed for the deaths of 102 dogs, whose flesh was stripped from their skeletons. A wampus cat was captured in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, in 1914, and was described as having black fur with white spots, claws on its front feet and hooves in the back, and a nine-foot tail. It escaped after three days. A full-on war with a suspected wampus cat was declared in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1918 after the mysterious deaths of dogs, chickens, and a mule. The cat was seen, described as jumping 12 feet into the air, but was never caught.

These attacks may have come from cougars, which were already rare in the South by 1900. We don't believe it was a six-legged cat as shown in the photo above. But the fear was real during these episodes and left a legend behind. Read about the notorious wampus cat at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: U458625)

Thursday night was commencement for the Thomas Jefferson University School of Nursing in Philadelphia. As is custom, each student's name was announced as they received their diploma, and the on-screen captions soon followed. This quickly became a game for the viewers to try and guess what the name really was from the announcer's pronunciation. The carnage included a mangling of common names like Stephanie, Molly, and Elizabeth. The real kicker was the name Thomas, considering the name of the university.

The announcer was using cards with the phonetic spelling of the names, which should have included the normal spelling as well but apparently did not. After the first three rows of students, she apologized and her cards were replaced with a list of names, and the rest of the graduates had their names pronounced correctly. The university has issued an apology, but the viral moment will live on forever. -via reddit   

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is all about history. Many families take a trip there as their children begin to study the American Civil War, so they can experience the actual battlefield and visit the many museums dedicated to the Battle of Gettysburg and the larger history of the war. One that may be especially interesting for children is Civil War Tails at the Homestead Diorama Museum. This museum features expansive dioramas that illustrate the military engagements of the war, with a twist. All the tiny soldiers are cats! Look closely, and you'll see ears and tails on all the figures.

Civil War Tails is a project by twin sisters Rebecca and Ruth Brown who are fascinated with Civil War history and have been making clay cat soldiers to scale since they were children. Rebecca bought the Homestead Museum in 2013 as a place to display their battle cat dioramas. They are very serious about conveying the importance of the war, but think making the combatants into cats is a way to make the subject more engaging. Besides, making a cat is easier than crafting a human figure. They have recently unveiled their 10,000th cat figure! See more pictures of Civil War Tails at Facebook.  -Thanks, William!

(Image credit: Civil War Tails at the Homestead)

This is what can happen when you live on the internet. Not just that an internet outage will destroy your whole day, but how this guy got into the shape he's in. He's apparently been researching internet conspiracy theories, down the rabbit hole into a world of paranoia and altered perception. Okay, an internet outage requires a call to the service provider, miraculously resulting in a service call, which is suspicious enough in this day and age. But you get the feeling that this may be the first actual live person he's talked to in weeks. You can also believe that it's probably been that long since he took a shower or walked outside. This guy has his problems, and the further we go into the scene, the worse those problem prove to be. Don't let this happen to you!

Steakhouse, directed by Ft. Langley, is described as a "sci-fi comedy," although I would classify it as a short horror film. -via Nag on the Lake

The US Constitution is the framework for how the American government works. It's been that way for more than 200 years, so it's hard to imagine how the system could be any other way. But when that framework was hammered out at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, there was no blueprint for a nation to govern itself. A number of ideas were proposed by our Founding Fathers that didn't make it into the Constitution or any of its Amendments. Some representatives were wary of the idea of a president, because one man leading the country sounded too much like a king. Alternative ideas included having three presidents at once, or a council of 12 with equal powers. They also toyed with the idea of having no states at all, or else treating the states like lesser entities, for which the federal government would appoint governors. And the very first proposed Amendment would have set a constant number of constituents for each congressional representative. If it had been adopted, we would now have a House of Representatives with 6600 members! Read about the ideas that were floated for our Constitution that never made it into the final version at Mental Floss.  

(Image credit: Junius Brutus Stearns)

Randall Munroe of xkcd spends an awful lot of time and brain power answering theoretical questions in his What If? series (previously at Neatorama). For example, one question is "If every country's airspace extended up forever, which country would own the largest percentage of the galaxy at any given time?" The answer is Australia, not because it's the largest country (it is 6th), but because it's the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, which tends to point more to the center of the Milky Way.

Dumb questions can lead to a lot of learning. In the video above, the question is "If all the lightning strikes happening in the world on any given day all happened in the same place at once, what would happen to that place?" My first thought was that everyone would avoid that place, and that is certainly one of the consequences. But to understand the implications, we must first learn a few things about lightning, which is well worth the time it takes for Munroe to get to the actual question in this video. Spoiler alert: if it happened, it would look awesome. From a distance.

An extremely rare chunk of Tyrian purple dye has been found in England, in the archaeological dig on the grounds of the Carlisle Cricket Club. The dye was found in the drainage area of the remnants of a Roman bathhouse dating back to the third century CE, during the reign of Roman emperor Septimius Severus. It is a rare find because Tyrian purple, also called imperial purple, was such an expensive dye that it was restricted to royalty, and someone lost it in the bathhouse drain. You can imagine the uproar that must have caused. It is also rare to find Tyrian purple in a solid form, as it was used mostly for paint and for dying fabric. Also, the specimen is still quite colorful after 1800 years!  

Tyrian purple was so expensive in its day because it was made from the glands of murex snails, the most productive being the species Hexaplex trunculus. It took about a quarter million snails to produce one ounce of dye. These sea snails live in shallow water and die when exposed to air. Yet the dye gland can only be extracted from a living snail (which causes its death), or the dye will deteriorate immediately, so each snail must be kept alive until the glands can be harvested, one by one. The process for doing all this is explained in this post. The smell of the dye was remarkably bad, as you would imagine the smell of rotting sea creatures to be, and would not yield to washing the fabric. Emperors who wore Tyrian purple had to be heavily perfumed to disguise it.

The name Tyrian purple came from the Phoenician city of Tyre, which, along with the city of Sidon, was a center of the dying industry. In fact, the word Phoenicia came from the Greek word Phoinkes, which means "the purple people." Both cities were wealthy from Tyrian purple, and both cities were known to smell awful. There is no mention of whether the chunk recovered in England still smells. You'll find even more links about Tyrian purple at Metafilter.     

(Image credit: Wardell Armstrong)

Yesterday I drove through Atlanta as the construction season is starting to ramp up, so I am very impressed with this pavement replacement project in Switzerland. They simply erect a bridge over a section of the road so that cars can drive right across while work is going on underneath! The crew carves up the old pavement, repairs and prepares the sub-pavement, lays new asphalt, steamrolls it smooth, and cleans up the mess, before moving the bridge to a new repair section. Here's a machine translation of the YouTube description:

The mobile ASTRA Bridge construction site bridge has been in use again on the A1 in the direction of Zurich since the beginning of April 2024. The decking work under the ASTRA Bridge is progressing according to plan. While work is going on under the bridge, traffic above is moving in two lanes at 60 km/h.

You have to wonder how long it takes to move the bridge, because they probably do have to divert traffic for that part- or do they? Here's another video from the Swiss Federal Roads Office showing how the ASTRA Bridge is erected.



So yes, they close lanes to put the bridge up, but even so, it is a minimal closure compared to the weeks that lanes are closed in the US while miles of highway are repaved at a time.  -via Boing Boing

We tend to take it for granted that blue jeans were invented by Levi Strauss, who made work pants for the miners of the California Gold Rush. It's true that Strauss designed tough work pants with rivets, but the blue denim they were made of had already been worn by working class people in Italy for at least a couple of hundred years! We know this because of ten paintings by an unidentified Renaissance painter known only as the “Master of the Blue Jeans.” This painter depicted a family of working class people clad in denim, with a white weft and blue warp, the same as the jeans we wear today. The warp threads were dyed with indigo, which brought the price of blue fabric down considerably after it began to be imported from India.

The Master of the Blue Jeans is the subject of a new exhibition at Galerie Cenesso in Paris opening May 16. Read up on the history of blue denim and see two of the paintings from the mysterious Master of the Blue Jeans at Smithsonian.

(Image source: Galerie Canesso)