Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.

(Image credit: Taz)

The tale of the McBarge, the former McDonald’s location created for Expo ’86 in Vancouver. Shockingly, it wasn’t the only fast food joint designed to float.

That’s because I’m about to bring up a bad memory for the fast-food giant.

In the late ’80s, the World’s Fair was still a fairly Big Deal in North America, and Vancouver played host to one of the most notable World Expo galas, Expo ’86. (If you’re a millennial and don’t remember this, I’ll point out that Death Cab for Cutie wrote a song about it. I hope you’re not too young to remember who they are.)

Like the Olympics, World’s Fairs have a tendency to roll over a city and change its character for a short period of time, but eventually leave lingering signs of decay after the fact.

Occasionally, such large-scale events might force slow, grudging change to an urban area. But that’s not what happened in the case of the Friendship 500, a floating McDonald’s location better known as the McBarge.

Screen Junkies is doing it again, with a movie that did it again. Alien: Covenant came out this past May and was pretty much immediately forgotten. It did extend the Alien franchise to five movies over almost forty years.

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The first movie was a horror film. The second was an action movie. Then there were three more that rehashed all that without coming up with anything new or interesting. It's enough to make you feel sorry for the xenomorph. -Thanks, Lacey!

Some would argue that humans' ability to make and harness fire is what sets us apart from animals. Others would say that's just one of many things in our history that led to what humans are now. In any case, the way we learned to control fire has come a long way. We once kept fires going round-the-clock because it was so much easier than starting a new one. But we learned, and the history of personal fire leaves us with collectible objects, documented in Ian Spellerberg’s book Match Holders: First-hand Accounts of Tinderboxes, Matches, Spills, Vesta Cases, Match Strikers, and Permanent Matches.

Match Holders begins with a chapter on tinderboxes, which were a popular form of portable fire-making prior to the invention of the friction match by an English pharmacist named John Walker. Tinderboxes consisted of three basic ingredients—a piece of steel, often called “fire steel”; a stone flint; and tinder, usually some dried fungi or charred linen. “With practice and patience,” McLean writes, “sparks could indeed be produced by striking the steel against the stone flint. If a spark landed in the dry tinder, care was needed to coax the spark into a smouldering piece of tinder then a flame.” As McLean recounts, the clink, clink, clink of steel coming in contact with stone was once a common early morning sound, as must also have been the curses that bounced off the rafters when cold, numb hands caused a hard chunk of steel to miss its mark. Little wonder, McLean writes, “that some domestic fires were kept permanently alight.”

Things got much easier when matches were invented, but matches were dangerous and hard to keep dry. That's when we developed the match holders, or vesta cases. Read about these bygone trinkets at Collectors Weekly.

In 1954, Toho Studios turned Haruo Nakajima into a monster. Nakajima was the first actor to portray Gojira, or Godzilla, in a movie. He made the role his own, appearing as the giant reptile in 12 films. That wasn't his only role in monster movies.

In addition to Godzilla, Nakajima also portrayed monsters in Rodan, Mothra, The H-Man, and Frankenstein Conquers the World, and The War of the Gargantuas, as well as the Tsuburaya-produced series Ultraman: A Special Effects Fantasy Series. Simply, if you’ve seen a kaiju movie made before 1973, you’ve seen phenomenal and iconic work of Haruo Nakajima. He’s a legend.  

As an actor and stuntman, Nakajima was also seen in movies such as Seven Samurai, Eagle of the Pacific, and Sword for Hire. We posted an interview with Nakajima just a few months ago. Toho studios announced that Nakajima died on Monday. He was 88.

The African Grove Theater was an attempt to bring culture and entertainment to black audiences in Manhattan. It flourished for only a few years beginning in 1821, while slavery was still being phased out in New York state. But during those few years, a teenager named Ira Eldridge caught the acting bug. He learned the basics of his craft at the African Grove, and when it folded, he saw there was no other outlet for his passion in the United States. So he boarded a boat for Europe at the age of 17, and never looked back.    

Aldridge’s career as an actor was exceptional, and not just for a black actor at that time. He traveled farther, was seen by audiences in more countries, and won more medals, decorations, and awards than any other actor of his century. But, somehow, this 19th-century great slips under the radar. He seems to be too American to make it into British or European theatrical histories, and, because he performed almost exclusively in Europe, tends not to appear in American ones. For most of his career, Aldridge traveled from place to place, on short-term engagements that made it hard for him to build a reputation in any one spot. “As a luminary,” writes scholar Bernth Lindfors in the introduction to Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius, “he was more a comet than a fixed star—here today, gone tomorrow—and as a consequence, he shines less brightly now.”

Aldridge’s story is well worth knowing. Read about him at Atlas Obscura.

Berkeley Breathed's revival of his Bloom County comic strip is on Facebook. A recent story contains a couple of beautiful paintings like the one above. The story pertains to a young child who is in the hospital for cancer treatment. A big storm comes up, scaring the little boy so much he is unable to sleep. But Frank the hospital custodian is there (click it, you need to see the large version). You can read the story at Facebook, although it's in reverse order. To read them in order, you can follow the links at Metafilter.

Lisette Pylant was set up on a date with a guy she'd never met. They met at a bar in Washington, DC, to get to know each other. Luckily, Pylant has a lot of friends, and even knew some people who work at the bar. When she and her date decided their relationship wasn't in the cards, she surreptitiously stayed at the bar and observed him meeting five other women, one after another, on that same night!

JK ITS NOT OVER! The bartender just texted us to tell us homeboy is on another date so I sent my friend over to retrieve his 8pm date

— Lisette Pylant (@LisettePylant) August 8, 2017

He had apparently arranged a speed-dating session, unbeknownst to the women who met him there. Pylant found a way to speak to each of the subsequent dates, and the women ended up bonding as friends. And she live-Tweeted the experience! Read the whole story in Tweets at Mashable.

(Image credit: Lisette Pylant)

NBC 4's news crew in Washington, DC, saw a driverless van on the streets. But it wasn't your everyday driverless vehicle. The van was being driven by a guy dressed as a car seat! We've seen this at Halloween, but this driver honestly did not want publicity. Reporter Adam Tuss approached the vehicle to interview the disguised driver. He got no cooperation.

Here's me trying to talk to a man in a car seat costume @nbcwashington pic.twitter.com/e5humOM7uS

— Adam Tuss (@AdamTuss) August 7, 2017

But the mystery was eventually solved.

After multiple inquiries by News4, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute said Monday afternoon that the van and van driver are part of a study they are conducting on driverless cars. The worker was wearing the uniform he was supposed to wear.

"The driver's seating area is configured to make the driver less visible within the vehicle, while still allowing him or her the ability to safely monitor and respond to surroundings," a statement from the institute says.

So what are they studying? The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute has some information on the experiment, and deep down in the bullet points, we think they may be studying the reactions of people to seeing a driverless vehicle. I wonder if the "reaction" of requesting an interview will be included in their data. -via Ars Technica

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!

(Image credit: Bertrand Devouard and Florence Devouard)

compiled by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

People who watch the faces of other people eating, or who watch those other people while those other people are not putting food in their faces, may sometimes react to what they see. Here are some attempts to probe some questions that some people wondered about, about that.

Conscious Effect of Faces on Other Faces (1995)
“Facial Expressions Are Contagious,” Lars-Olov Lundqvist and Ulf Dimberg, Journal of Psychophysiology, vol 9, no. 3, 1995, pp. 203-211. The authors, at Örebro University and Uppsala University, Sweden, explain:

[We] explored the facial muscle responses to exposure to stimuli of facial expressions (FEs) that correspond to specific emotional experiences; and whether FEs are contagious. 56 subjects were exposed individually to slides of males and females...

Sad faces evoked significantly larger reactions from the M. corrugator supercili muscle region. Faces expressing surprise evoked significantly larger reactions from frontal M. lateralis region. Angry faces evoked an increased experience of fear and disgust.

Unconscious Effect of Faces on Other Faces (2000)
“Unconscious Facial Reactions to Emotional Facial Expressions,” Ulf Dimberg, Monika Thunberg, and Kurt Elmehed, Psychological Science, vol. 11 no. 1, January 2000, pp. 86-89. The authors, at Uppsala University, Sweden, explain:

We investigated whether corresponding facial reactions can be elicited when people are unconsciously exposed to happy and angry facial expressions.... Despite the fact that exposure to happy and angry faces was unconscious, the subjects reacted with distinct facial muscle reactions that corresponded to the happy and angry stimulus faces....

Sunday morning I found ten zucchinis on the railing of my back deck. It had to be one of my two next-door neighbors, because anyone else would have left them on the front porch. I went to Google and found out they were two days early. Trying to get a jump on the rest of the neighborhood.   

Every year, millions of backyard gardeners decide to grow a variety of vegetables, including zucchini. Yeah, they'd like a loaf of zucchini bread (they think). But there are many seeds in an envelope, and even if they buy plants, they usually come in at least a four-pack. But even when they only have one surviving vine, zucchini produces way more than you need. What to do with all these vegetables? Give it to your neighbors, even if they don't want it! 

"Everyone who has grown zucchini knows that it can be difficult to keep up with the yield. The gourds grow quickly if not picked, and do not freeze or can well," said Dr. Pam Duitsman, nutrition and health education specialist with University of Missouri Extension. "Since you can only bake so many loaves of zucchini bread, many folks find giving their zucchini to neighbors is a great solution. To celebrate the holiday, you are to quietly sneak up to your neighbors' porch, and leave them a pile of homegrown zucchini."  

August 8 is National Sneak Some Zucchini Onto Your Neighbor’s Porch Day. The holiday was launched by Tom Roy at Wellcat Holidays & Herbs in Pennsylvania. They have some zucchini jokes and recipes that will help you deal with what you may find on your porch today. Otherwise, you might take some to your local food pantry.  

When the apocalypse comes, it's not going to be the way it's scripted out for you in Fallout 4 or Mad Max or The Walking Dead. And even if it were, there will be a lot more red shirts than cult leaders. Think for a moment: how many ways could the apocalypse happen? Can you possibly be prepared for all of them? If you think you can, you are probably not living much of a life in the here and now. This is the latest comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. The story is by Zach Weinersmith, with guest illustration by Abby Howard. Like any of the comics, it can be purchased as an art print, which would be the perfect gift for your favorite prepper.

Tom Otto and Shaun Sears are professional arborists (tree guys) and cat lovers. The brothers-in-law volunteer to rescue cats that are stuck in trees. See, in Washington state, the trees can be very tall, and cats can be very scared once they get too high. Firefighters aren't equipped for that kind of height, even if they had the time to rescue cats.   

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Their project is called Canopy Cat Rescue. Since they don't charge owners for rescuing their cats, the organization relies on donors. -via Tastefully Offensive

The Andy Samberg movie Hot Rod was released ten years ago this week. That seems like just yesterday, but the guys from The Lonely Island made their first feature film in 2007. Let's learn some trivia about the movie.

10. The stuntman trying to jump over the bus actually broke his leg.

Gotta give it to stuntmen and women, they take a horrendous beating sometimes for their job. The kind of things they go through on a regular basis can risk life and limb for just a brief moment on camera that a lot of times they won’t ever be known for.

9. The band called “Gown” is actually Queens of the Stone Age.

It’s kind of interesting why they wouldn’t use their real name, but in a film I suppose it doesn’t matter. They were awesome as always. Sometimes the director just wants to keep the fantasy without bringing too much of the real world into the picture.

Read the rest of the movie trivia list about Hot Rod at TVOM.

The kids are asleep! That means it's time to do that thing. Meaning, all those things you can't get done when the kids are sucking up all your time and attention. How you prioritize that long list of things is up to you. In this case, the reward is a cleaner home, although tomorrow it will go back to chaos. It's one step forward and two steps back, but it's better than no steps forward at all. This is the latest from Lunarbaboon.

Trader Joe's is a grocery store chain with 450 locations in the United States. The chain has thrived by offering a wider variety of food than their competitors at reasonable prices. But there are lots of procedure that go on behind-the-scenes that make the store what it is. That includes  the benefits that go to employees, several of which involve food.

10. THE BREAK ROOM KEEPS THEM WELL-FED.

Trader Joe’s customers enjoy visiting the store’s sample station for food and coffee, and employees enjoy their own grub in the break room. “We are always cooking things up,” a Trader Joe’s employee tells Forbes. “When we get new foods in, we try them out. We eat and drink throughout the day here.” Because employees are constantly tasting new products and familiarizing themselves with older ones, they can recommend certain products to customers and speak genuinely about the flavors, textures, and overall tastiness of the food. And just like customers, Crew Members also definitely hit up the sample station. “I can’t even begin to tell you how many teeny tiny cups of coffee I chugged or samples I inhaled in a given shift,” Royal says.

Learn more of the secrets behind Trader Joe's at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Anthony92931)