The battleship USS Missouri, commissioned in 1944, is famous as the site of the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender that ended World War II. Earlier, under the command of Captain William M. Callaghan, the ship had been attacked by a Japanese Zero piloted by a kamikaze attacker. On April 11, 1945, the fighter plane came in at a low angle, as you can see in the image above, and crashed across the deck.

Even as antiaircraft fire hit the plane, the plane hit the ship. The ship’s baker, Len Schmidt, captured the terrifying millisecond right before impact on camera. An explosion could have killed hundreds. Instead, what foxhole converts call a miracle – historians call it wartime’s dumb luck – intervened: the bomb fell off the plane before impact. The hit barely made a dent, although it did start a gasoline fire. The Japanese pilot was the only casualty. Half his body fragmented, scattering on deck; the other half sank into the sea with his plane.

With the special fury sitting-duck sailors expressed for these flying suicide bombers, crew members prepared to wash their enemy’s body into the sea. Then in a decisive, life-defining, incredibly decent move, Captain Callaghan said “No.” He decided to see past the fearsome façade, and honor the fearlessness—and fealty—this boy demonstrated.  Callaghan ordered that the body be brought to sick bay “and we'll have a burial for him tomorrow.”

Callaghan explained to his crew that they were not honoring the enemy, but instead a fellow warrior who had done his duty and given his life for his country. Read about the incident and the funeral at sea at The Daily Beast. -via Metafilter

Haines, Alaska, has a population of 2,508 people, but the town boasts five museums. One of them is the Hammer Museum. It's a museum dedicated to hammers. There are more than 2,000 hammers on display, for every use you can imagine, including historical hammers and the 20-foot-tall hammer that stands outside.

The museum also holds special events like the Art & Hammer series and the annual Blacksmithing Workshop. The Hammer Museum is open from May through September, so make your summer road trips plans accordingly. Meanwhile, you can explore the museum through Facebook and Instagram. -Thanks, John Farrier!

Artist PJ McQuade (previously at Neatorama) has unveiled his new pop culture Christmas cards! From Die Hard to Lord of the Rings, there's at least one that will tickle your fancy. More likely, you'll have trouble selecting among them.

These original artworks feature your favorite movie and TV characters in quirky holiday scenes. They are sure to stand out among all those generic cards displayed on the mantle. Continue reading to see more of them.

Get your hankies out, this is a sweet story about a Polish man learning to speak English. It's two steps forward and one step back, which gives us some funny moments, but he is determined to communicate in English. Contains a very little NSFW language.

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This is an ad for Allegro. It took some digging to find out what they sell. It's a buying site, sort of a Polish eBay. -via reddit

The Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London made Big Ben, the Liberty Bell, and the Bells of St. Mary's. It has sent bells all over the world since the business opened in 1570. The foundry has been at the same Whitechapel location since 1783. But now owners Alan and Kathryn Hughes have announced that they will no longer take new orders, and the firm will close down next May.

It has been several centuries since the boom years of bell making, yet the foundry has found ways of adapting to modern times by making traditional doorbells, popular among people restoring Victorian properties.

The Downton effect has seen a third of its business exported overseas.

However, quality craftsmanship takes time. The average time from enquiry to order is 11 years, and the longest commission in the foundry’s history took 100 years to produce.

Order to installation takes another year, and a major project could cost as much as £250,000 to produce.

It's still possible that someone else will purchase the equipment and keep producing bells at another location. Read more about the oldest bell foundry in the world at the Telegraph. -Thanks, John Farrier!

(Image credit: ceridwen)

Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Andrew Egan, writing for Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

(Image credit: Adam Jones)

Historic sites are often huge draws for tourists, even when the history is tough to discuss. Just don’t expect to find the darkest topics in a travel guide.

Governments, or more specifically, their tourism boards are usually enthusiastic to promote any noteworthy site or event possible. This has lead to more than a few missteps, of course. Like the recent ”Syria: Always Beautiful" campaign touting the country’s beaches. Come for the Mediterranean scenery, please ignore the raging civil war. This eagerness to encourage tourism makes certain decisions particularly interesting. Denying or restricting access, or even failing to promote something significant, is lost revenue. In some instances, the reasons for doing so are practical, as with Chernobyl or any number of active government buildings. With others, it’s a matter of taste and dignity. I doubt the German Tourism Board will launch a million-euro campaign touting tours of the country’s concentration camps. Today we head to Germany to look at why we get to see some things, but not others.

A million and a half people visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in 2014. After some research (along with a fair amount of estimation) and back-of-the-envelope math, concentration camps add some $100 million annually to the economies of Germany and Poland.

Me standing at the entrance of Slaughterhouse-Five. I never know what to do with my hands in pictures. (Image credit: Danilo Hommel)

How is access to historically significant sites determined?

World War II tourism is a big money-maker. While admission to Auschwitz is free, guided tours begin at 25 euros per person. Keeping in mind other notable sites, such as the Normandy beaches, Buchenwald, or Dunkirk, and the money flowing from tourists is substantial.

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: Drew Fairweather at Toothpaste for Dinner)

Research about business and business-like odors
compiled by Grover Dunn, Improbable Research staff

Corporeal Porosity in Office Work
“Smell Organization: Bodies and Corporeal Porosity in Office Work,” Kathleen Riach and Samantha Warren, Human Relations, epub October 9, 2014. The authors, at Monash University, Australia, and the University of Essex, UK, explain:

Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" has been turned into a hardboiled crime noir film. You already know the plot. You probably already know the entire script. But you'll want to watch anyway.  

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This movie has no soundtrack because there's one playing in your head already. It ends before the songs does, but few viewers seem to have realized that so far.  -via Digg

The First Amendment to the Constitution begins: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…" and goes on about freedom of speech, the press, and assembly. How does that translate to state and smaller governments? The Kenai Peninsula Borough is an area, like a county, south of Anchorage, Alaska. the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly is its governing body. In June, one member of the Assembly proposed a new rule that would do away with a prayer before opening Assembly meetings, but it wasn't passed due to lack of interest. So they opened up the invocation to anyone who wanted to give it on a first-come, first-served basis. In August, Satanic Temple member Iris Fontana opened the meeting with a prayer that invoked Satan. At another meeting, an atheist spoke for the invocation. 

In October, the Assembly changed the process of selecting who gives the invocation.

As the new resolution spells out, those eligible to recite an invocation include religious associations "with an established presence in the Kenai Peninsula Borough that regularly meet for the primary purpose of sharing a religious perspective, or chaplains who may serve one or more of the fire departments, law enforcement agencies, hospitals, or other similar organizations in the borough."

In November, the rules were changed again to re-open the invocation to anyone who wanted to give it. That happened after they started thinking about possible lawsuits.

An ordinance that would have appropriated $75,000 in borough money to fight future court battles over the religious rule was withdrawn as a result of the Assembly approving the amendment. Decker said in the past that while the ACLU hopes not to sue, it wouldn't rule it out, "if that's what upholding the Constitution takes."

However, the reversion to the open rules has not yet taken effect, so the story is not over. The simplest thing would be to do away completely with an invocation before Assembly meetings. There's nothing wrong with a good "I call this meeting to order." -via a comment at Metafilter

Bear with me here. I saw the new video at the Presurfer, and thought it was neat. But the next video that YouTube loaded for me was from 2014, and I realized that the new video is a sequel to this one, so watch the first video first.

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Two years later, we get an update to the story, this time in animation.

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Three Ireland commissioned both videos, and there's a children's book that tells the same story. Proceeds from the sale of the book go to Barnardos, a children's charity in Ireland. I don't see a way to order it online, however. -via the Presurfer

Ocean's 11 was a 1960 Rat Pack film that was popular, but not as big as the 2001 remake, which spawned two sequels with another related movie now in development. Whether you're already a fan or plan to watch them all someday, you'll want to check out some trivia about those three films.    

The cast had to accept a lower salary for the first movie in 2001.

As there were so many A-list stars featured in the first film, they all had to accept a lower pay check if they wanted to be involved. They all agreed eventually as they all wanted to be on the film together.

Brad Pitt ate 40 shrimp while filming for the scene where Rusty eats a shrimp cocktail.

It was actually Brad Pitt’s idea that his character should be eating all the time to show that the Ocean squad were pushed for time, meaning they had to grab food whenever they could.

Read the rest of the trivia list about Ocean's 11 and its sequels at Unreality.

I gave one of my daughters her first taste of eggnog (store-bought) when she was maybe seven years old. She sipped it and said, "Oh Mom, that's disgusting. Why did you give me that?" I thought, "sez the kid who eats sardines in mustard sauce." That's eggnog for you; people either love it or hate it. Eggnog is a real American drink, from our colonial history when milk, eggs, and rum were  plentiful here compared to Europe. The real pull was that the original drink had more alcohol than milk or cream, which conveniently preserved the milk and eggs. We've refined our recipes considerably since then, and egg nog connoisseurs agree that homemade is better than store-bought. Uproxx has three different recipes for your holiday eggnog, including George Washington's popular recipe that produced the drink by the gallon.

Professor Fukanō is going to circumnavigate the globe in his airplane, but his tank doesn't hold enough fuel for the entire trip. He has support planes of the exact same model which can refuel him in the air, but none of the planes can land anywhere except the starting point airport. How can he get around the world without crashing from lack of fuel? There's some math involved. If you want to try this on your own, keep in mind that only Professor Fukanō's plane needs to go all the way around. Good luck.

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I didn't even attempt to figure this out on my own, but the answer is rather simple when you start thinking in the right direction. It's that initial thinking in the right direction that's so daunting. Students of British military history have an edge, in that this kind of thing has been done before. Operation Black Buck during the 1982 Falklands War saw RAF bombers fly 12,600 kilometers, and had to refuel from support vehicles. The refueling scheme had to be explained in a diagram.  -via Viral Viral Videos

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This is Clyde, a fluffy blue point Himalayan cat. He's super friendly and super cuddly, as he canoodles with his boy. See more of Clyde at Instagram.  -via Tastefully Offensive

Do you know anyone who's really into beer? I mean, not just to drink it, but into the craft beer thing, critiquing and comparing, and telling everyone around about it? A beer snob, if you will.

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Yeah, that can be pretty darn annoying. Even stranger is that this video by Third Leg Studios is an ad targeted to exactly those people. That thing he used is for sale.  -via reddit