Have you ever played Monopoly and had to deal with someone who wanted to cheat their way to a win? Have you ever done that? Hasbro conducted a study that found about half of players will attempt to cheat at Monopoly. So they bowed to the trend and designed a Monopoly edition that encourages cheating. It comes with a stack of 15 extra cards that direct you in an attempt to cheat your way around the board and collect more money.

Some of the cheats include:

• Stealing money from the bank
• Placing a hotel on one of your pieces of property
• Removing a hotel from someone else's property
• Taking an extra $100 in Monopoly money from the bank when you pass go.
• Moving another player's token instead of your own on your turn.
• Giving someone less money than you owe them.
• Collecting rent for someone else's property

If a player succeeds at any given task, they get rewarded. On the flip side, if they get caught, there are consequences. The back of the cheat cards list specific rewards and punishments for each cheat. 

There are other differences in the cheater's edition that you can read about at Business Insider. The game will be available in stores this fall.  -via Uproxx

You've seen that bird that constantly drinks, maybe only at Grandma's house, or at a local restaurant. It's pitched as a perpetual motion machine, but you know there's no such thing. How does it work? Bill Hammack, the Engineer Guy (previously at Neatorama) explains that toy that fascinated you as a kid.

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The secret is in how the bird is built. The liquid inside it is not water, and the air inside it is not air at all -it's a vacuum! The mechanism of its movement is quite interesting. And there's an explanation of why the bird drinks whiskey faster than it drinks water, which has nothing to do with getting drunk. -via Boing Boing

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

In the early 1970s, the Zucker brothers, David and Jerry, and their creative partner Jim Abrahams, were performing in a comedy and improv theater group called Kentucky Fried Theater. During nights while the three slept, they had a habit of taping the television shows that ran into the early hours of the morning. They used this procedure to try and find TV commercials which they could satirize in their comedy routines. One night, completely by accident, they happened to record an obscure 1957 movie called Zero Hour!

Zero Hour! was an oh-so-serious drama starring Dana Andrews, Linda Darnell and Sterling Hayden. The plot of Zero Hour! involved a commercial plane flight, during which the pilots and some of the passengers get food poisoning, which causes one of the passengers, an ex-World War II fighter pilot, to try and land the airplane in a heavy fog. The Zuckers and Abrahams watched the film and found its extreme seriousness highly amusing. It contained lines like: "We have to find someone who can not only fly the plane, but who didn't have fish for dinner."

The trio of young writers eagerly wrote a satirical script, mainly using things from Zero Hour! and adding several satirical commercials. They called this original script The Late Show. This script was later changed and the idea of the satirical commercials was eventually dropped from it. The basic premise of satirizing Zero Hour! remained, but instead of the commercial satirization, the boys threw in scores of crazy puns, bizarre sight gags, wild slapstick and hilarious dialogue.

You'll want to set your alarm clock pretty early on Wednesday, or stay up really late on the West Coast, because January 31st will give us a super blue blood moon. No, it's not "blueblood," a term meaning royalty, but a lunar trifecta. A "supermoon" is one that's closer to the earth than usual, meaning it will look a little bit larger. A "blue moon," like the song, is the second full moon of the month (this one barely squeezes in for January), and a "blood moon" means an eclipse, which is the really neat part. The total eclipse can be seen from Asia and Australia, and the US will see a partial eclipse. That will make the moon appear red, so that's why it's called a blood moon.

Here’s the deal: On the West Coast, the eclipse will start at 3:48am and the totality of the eclipse will wrap up around 6am. Yes, friends, this is an AM viewing opportunity — set your alarms. In Mountain Time, it’ll start at 4:48, but Central and Eastern it’s a little trickier. You’ll need to be somewhere fairly high up at 5:48 or 6:48 respectively to see the whole thing unfold, and you’ll need to move quickly, as the moon sets around 6am and 7am, respectively.

See more tips on viewing and photographing the super blue blood moon at Uproxx. For more about the science of the super blue blood moon, we turn to Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer. 

What's funny also is that February has 28 days this year, so it won't have a full Moon in it at all! We have a full Moon the day before February 1, and the next one on March 1, the day after February 28. The nickname for this event is black Moon (though the term has other meanings as well). This happens roughly every 20 years or so.

He's got a lot more to tell us about the lunar trifecta at SyFy Wire's Bad Astronomy.

(Image credit: NASA)

You'd think that a skull-and-crossbones symbol would strike fear into people no matter where they are, making it a good warning symbol for danger in all languages. But over time, the Jolly Roger came to be associated with pirates and treasure maps, so not only is the fear muted, the symbol became attractive. Hey, there may be treasure buried here! What seemed to be common sense became useless to warn people away from dangerous places, like, say, a nuclear waste disposal site. So how do we label such dangers in a way that people who don't read, or don't know the language, will know what they mean thousands of years in the future?

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Designing a warning sign is much more complicated than you'd think. In addition to this video from Vox, you can read the accompanying article at 99% Invisible.

See also: How the Government Plans to Protect Our Nuclear Waste.

Blue lights flashing in your rearview mirror will always make you nervous, even if you've done nothing wrong. This young lady had to roll her eyes, because it's probably happened to her before. Will she get a ticket this time?  

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There are some things about living in a small town that you just can't get away from, until you get away completely. -via reddit

There are those who throw footballs, and there are those who throw pottery. Which one is more useful in the grand scheme of things? A double pun from Raynato Castro and Alex Culang at Buttersafe reminds us that the Super Bowl is this weekend. I'm sure you don't need an explanation of the jokes, but they included one in the commentary below the comic at Buttersafe, just in case.  

One of the perks of living in a Florida retirement community is the "early bird special," where restaurants offer discounted meals at off-peak hours. It arose to spread out business through the day, and elderly people on a fixed income thrived on it. At least they did until recently. As Baby Boomers retire to Florida, either richer or poorer than the generation before, they've killed the early bird special. Fewer eateries are offering it, and those that do don't even want to use the term, because Boomers do not want to be reminded that they are old.

Rosie Ross, a snowbird — though she prefers the term “sunbird” — who spends summers in upstate New York and winters in South Florida with her husband Bernard, told me that “the notion of early bird specials is something we attribute to older seniors, the same ones who sneak leftover rolls and sugar packets in their purses.” Though Bernard’s mother lives in North Miami, the Rosses didn’t want to live like she does. “We settled on a very cool active-adult community in the very cool city of Delray Beach,” Rosie said. The Rosses dine out multiple times a week, eat everything from Japanese to vegan, prefer to eat around 7 p.m., and “do not eat out based on early bird specials at all.” I could feel the pride emanating from her email.

When the new generation of retires does pinch pennies, they’re finding new ways of doing it. In 2014, Americans 65 and older ate out an average of 193 times a year, and 63 percent of those meals were at fast-food restaurants, where a cheap meal can be had no matter the time of day. “A lot of people will drive to the Wendy’s, the burger place, for hamburgers,” Isabel Lubchansky told me. A $7 cheeseburger combo beats a $12 diner platter any day, and it’s the same price no matter when you pick it up. Captain’s Catch Seafood Restaurant was the only place I found a line out the door for the early bird special, and the only people below the age of 75 appeared to be accompanying nurses or family. Their early bird dinner starts at $10.95, which is around $4 more than a Wendy’s burger combo. And while some reviewers have raved about the early bird, one also notes, “This is an older restaurant.”

The demise of the early bird special in Florida tells us a lot about the changing demographics of American retirees. Read about those changes at Eater. -via Digg

Artist PJ McQuade makes new geeky greeting cards for every occasion, every year, and his 2018 Valentines are now available at his Etsy store CastleMcQuade. They feature your favorite pop culture icons, many of whom would be completely unexpected in a romantic Valentine, but they work. Even evil villains have one great romantic line, or one that can be altered for the occasion. For example, Gollum's Valentine says, "You're Precious To Me." FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (from Twin Peaks) says, "You're a Damn Fine Cup of Coffee!" (That one is new for this year, along with Kylo Ren) You could probably guess the quote from Ian Malcolm on the Jurassic Park Valentine, which comes with a illustration of two dinosaurs falling in love inside, too. If you can't decide which one is best, you can get a collection of 17 different Valentines, and he'll even customize the selection!  -via Geeks Are Sexy

If we were to tell you cats were playing Monopoly or Scrabble, you wouldn't believe it was real. But the game Hungry Hungry Hippos has just the thing to enthrall the whole clowder: marbles!

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Watch a group of rescue cats in Sao Paulo, Brazil, play the children's board game. Or, to be more exact, one is playing while the others watch, fascinated. It's going to take a while before he finishes his turn and lets the next cat play. -via Tastefully Offensive 

Yakutsk, Siberia, has a population of 280,000 people, even though the temperature hovers around 40 below zero for several months of each year. The reason a city of such size even exists that close to the Arctic Circle is because of the minerals beneath it: a fifth of the world's diamonds come from mines near Yakutsk, and the area is rich in natural gas, oil, gold, and silver, too. Photographer Steeve Iuncker visited Yakutsk and witnessed the challenges that come with living in serious cold.

Case in point: Iuncker noticed that locals tended to visit one another a lot, but for only a few minutes: “They would come in, take off their first layer, drink hot tea, and have a toast with jam before bundling up again and stepping outside. It was as if their neighbors’ abodes served as relay points along their journey.” Like them, Iuncker had to adapt his working habits to the elements. His camera, a twin-lens Rolleiflex, afforded him only 15-minute shooting periods. After that the winding mechanism would freeze, and the film risked cracking. Which was just as well; by then his fingers were numb.  

Read about Yakutsk and see two galleries of images at National Geographic. -via Mental Floss

(Image credit: Flickr user Maarten Takens)

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Improbable theories, experiments, and conclusions
compiled by Dirk Manley, Improbable Research staff

Slingshot-delivered, Microchip-laden Hot Dogs to Gulls
“High Predation on Small Populations: Avian Predation on Imperiled Salmonids,” Ann-Marie K. Osterback, Danielle M. Frechette, Andrew O. Shelton, Sean A. Hayes, Morgan H. Bond, Scott A. Shaffer, and Jonathan W. Moore, Ecosphere, vol. 4, no. 9, 2013, article 116. The authors, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and San Jose State University, report:

PIT [passive integrated transponder] tags were inserted into miniature hotdogs (Hillshire Farm Beef Lit’l Smokies) and tossed out with a folding slingshot to maximize the number of different individual gulls that ingested tags.

Detail from the study “High Predation on Small Populations: Avian Predation on Imperiled Salmonids.”

Increased Gravitational Acceleration in Potato Deep-Fat Frying

He's a 44-year-old man from Austin, Texas. His wife and his friends made fun of him, and that led to a bet. He bet that he could put out a legit hip-hop song and make at least ten dollars from it. He took the name Spinach Dippa. Here he is, rapping' about eating at Applebee's, his German mechanic, and running up his credit cards.

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You can buy the song (for 99 cents) through his website, and half the proceeds will go to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The other half will go toward fulfilling his bet. -via Tastefully Offensive 

Artist George Catlin traveled to the American West and painted Native Americans in their homelands, before the land was carved up into towns, farms, and ranches. He envisioned land set aside to stay in the condition in which he found it, complete with the settlements of the tribes who lived there. His idea of allowing outsiders to come in and see the Native Americans was exploitive at best, although what ended up happening was hardly better. They were almost completely displaced.  

Today, the foundational myth of America’s National Parks revolves around the heroic preservation of “pristine wilderness,” places supposedly devoid of human inhabitants that were saved in an unaltered state for future generations. This is obviously a falsehood: Places like Yosemite were already home to thriving communities that had long cherished—and changed—the environment around them. Catlin’s paintings are vivid reminders that the vast expanses of our western frontier were not empty, but rather brimming with human cultures.

Though the National Park Service prevented wholesale industrialization, they still packaged the wilderness for consumption, creating a scenic, pre-historical fantasy surrounded by roads and tourist accommodations, all designed to mask the violence inherent to these parks’ creation. More than a century later, the United States has done little to acknowledge the government-led genocide of native populations, as well as the continued hardships they face because of the many bad-faith treaties enacted by the U.S. government. This story is an elemental part of our National Park system, the great outdoor museum of the American landscape, but the myth continues to outweigh the truth. How did the National Park Service evict Yosemite’s indigenous communities and erase their history, and can it come to terms with this troubling legacy today?

While the latter is a theoretical question, the story of how the National Park system grew while completely discounting those who lived there is told at Collectors Weekly.

There is nothing more heartbreaking than losing a child. Robin Birdsong founded Enchanted Farm Sanctuary after she lost her baby son. Ronnie the donkey came into her care after he underwent the trauma of losing a child, too. It took lots of time and love for the depressed donkey to start living again. Five years later, he is the king of the sanctuary, and helping Ronnie helped Robin to heal, too.

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You'll want to have a hankie ready for this video. -via Metafilter