The traditional headstone is a bit less wide than the grave, inscribed with the deceased’s name and dates of birth and death. Sometimes there is a short phrase or a symbol carved into it. But some headstones are so different and distinctive that they dominate the entire cemetery, and maybe even draw tourists. A list at Atlas Obscura has gravestones that tell us a lot about the deceased, or very little. They are huge or tiny, expensive or use nothing but nearby material, or are just plain bizarre, like the statue gracing the grave of author Jules Verne.

It's fitting that Jules Verne, father of science fiction, would have a dark, otherworldly gravestone. Two years after his death a sculpture entitled “Vers l'Immortalité et l'Eternelle Jeunesse” (“Towards Immortality and Eternal Youth”) was erected atop his marker. Designed by sculptor Albert Roze, and using the actual death mask of the writer, the statue depicts the shrouded figure of Jules Verne breaking his own tombstone and emerging from the grave.

The effigy has become iconic enough that in first issue of seminal science fiction magazine Amazing Stories (first published in 1926) and for many years thereafter a drawing of his tombstone appeared as part of the masthead.  

The only thing the headstones in this list have in common is that they are there to mark the death and final resting place of someone, somewhere. And they all have a story to tell.

(Image credit: Atlas Obscura user rogerbcn)

Guy Williams tried to get some video of a raccoon he spotted on the campus of Bellarmine University in Kentucky. He had been feeding the raccoon acorns and even named him Stanley. Williams set his phone down while recording video in order to get a ground-level angle. Stanley took that as an offering and grabbed the phone with his teeth and absconded with it.

(YouTube link)

The phone continued to record as the raccoon ran off, with William’s yelling “Stanley!” Stanley dropped the phone, apparently convinced that it did not taste that good. -via Arbroath

When I ate in the school cafeteria in the 1960s, we ate beans and cornbread at least twice a week. Fish sticks on Fridays, and various mystery meats with mushy canned vegetables the rest of the time.  But my husband, who grew up in California, had tacos and pizza at the school cafeteria. School lunches varied widely by both place and era. Back in the beginning, the government had nothing to do with school lunches.

Volunteer organizations became the main source for low-cost and subsidized school lunches. By 1912, more than 40 cities across the U.S. offered programs through groups like the New York School Lunch Committee, which offered 3-cent meals. Kids didn’t get much for their money [PDF]: Pea soup, lentils, or rice and a piece of bread was a common offering. If students had an extra cent, they could spring for an additional side like stewed prunes, rice pudding, or a candied apple. In rural communities, parent-teacher committees pooled their resources. Pinellas County in Florida started a program that served meat-and-potato stew to schoolchildren using ingredients donated by parents. Even with these innovative efforts, there was still massive concern about hunger and malnutrition amongst America’s schoolchildren.

The U.S. school lunch program has changed a lot in the last 100 years, from its private-sector beginnings to the fast food/healthy eating hybrid it is today. Read the history of the American school lunch program, decade by decade, at mental_floss. 

The little stickers that say “I Voted” started showing up in the ‘80s, and hung around for years. But now, many voting boards have cut back on their use, citing expense. They should have asked the blood banks about those little rewards before they made that decision. Recent research show that it’s an expense well worth it.  

It’s a question that four researchers at Berkeley, Harvard, and the University of Chicago set out to study a few years ago. And their findings, published in a paper called Voting To Tell Others and featured this fall in The Review of Economic Studies and Berkeley News, reveal some startling truths about participating in democracy. While we might like to think of it as a noble pursuit, voting is deeply tied to more base human feelings and motivations, like social standing—basically, wanting to show off how good we are—along with dishonesty and shame.

It all boils down to this: Many of us vote so that we can tell everyone else we voted. And we don’t want to have to lie about it if we didn't.

What’s more, that little sticker lets us brag without having to say anything. The experiment they did didn’t involve the actual stickers, but the knowledge of the subjects’ voting behavior. Read about it at FastCo Design. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user brownpau)

A "Pensieve" is a magical object that only exists in the world of Harry Potter. It is a vessel used to view or relive stored memories. With a little work, it can be recreated in the world of Muggles, as Matt Bracone did. He made a Pensieve as a wedding gift for his Harry Potter fan bride Janine that packs a lot of love into the package, complete with bottled memories, a hand-made vessel, and a magic wand. See all the components and how he did it at Unreality.

Here we find out that a leaf blower is not just an autumn time-saving machine, but also a hi-tech dog toy. These canines want to catch the wind, or enjoy the rush of wind in their hair, or maybe attack that infernal contraption.

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Do NOT miss the dog that comes in at 1:25. The upshot is, if you have a leaf blower and a dog, you’re not going to get a lot of yard work done. -via Tastefully Offensive

This biker is ready for Halloween! Spotted in Mission Viejo, California, he’s got all the equipment he needs: ACME rockets, a butterfly net, and a “Yikes!” sign he can use when he drives off a cliff without realizing it. And all the time, that roadrunner will always be one step ahead of him. You can enlarge the picture at imgur and see the details better. -via reddit

The following article is from Uncle John’s Factastic Bathroom Reader.

As you may recall from your eighth-grade biology class, protozoa are single-celled creatures. Here’s something your teacher probably didn’t cover: There’s a protozoan that can alter what you think, feel, and do. It may sound like science fiction… but it’s not.

INVASION!

Imagine this plot for a movie: A trusted pet helps a race of microscopic invaders enter your body. Once inside, they affect your brain. You might start taking more risks and become more outgoing, or you might become paranoid. Strange smells, repugnant to most people, might suddenly give you great pleasure. And there’s a chance of blindness, insanity, and death.

Fairly ordinary science fiction, right? Nope. Because the invaders, protozoa known as Toxoplasma gondii, are real. What’s worse, they’ve already infected billions of people— maybe even some of your friends, neighbors, family members… and you.

HERE, KITTY KITTY

Ironically, all that T. gondii want is to find their way inside a susceptible cat so they can wake up from suspended animation, break out of their protective shells, and start to reproduce. They can only do this in the lining of a cat’s intestines, but when they do, they launch huge quantities of their spawn with each load of cat poop. And time is urgent, because they have only a few weeks before the cat’s immune system surrounds and neutralizes them.

Many credit, debit, and gift card systems are moving away from magnetic strips and into embedded chips. The transition isn’t going smoothly at all. Everyone I know who uses a chip card has encountered problems. Even one person who does not have a chip card ran into problems when every card reader in Europe required a chip. It’s like this:

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Have you changed to the chip-type cards yet? How’s that working out for you? -Thanks, Carl Baker!

The state of Oregon extended the right to vote to women in 1912, eight years before the 19th Amendment guaranteed that right to all American women. In 1920, the small city of Yoncalla, Oregon, elected a woman mayor and put women in all the city council slots. They were prominent citizens already; some were the spouses of the incumbents they replaced. The municipal election became a sensation in the national press.

The story of the women spread: They had held secret meetings, in which they voiced frustration with the current administration. Upset by broken sidewalk planks and misaligned outhouses, they had hatched a plan to run for office themselves. And, because they were elected just two months after women in the United States received the right to vote, their new administration made headlines all the way to the East Coast. Most publications treated it like a coup d’état: “Campaign secretly organized,” Morning Oregonian declared; “Sex uprising in Yoncalla,” asserted The New York Times.

The real story behind the election of five women is murkier. Local sources believe that the previous council just gave up their part-time unpaid jobs to let the women give it a try. The women, who were used to unpaid work, set out to fix the town’s problems. Read about the all-woman Yoncalla city council at the Atlantic. -via Digg

(Image credit: Douglas County Museum)

Luke Spencer went on a quest to trace the steps of Jonathan Harker, the protagonist of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Harker went from Munich to Transylvania to purchase land for a client. While this trip sounds like a fun time, it was also a research project. Bram Stoker never went to Transylvania himself, but he did plenty of research, so Spencer wanted to see how accurate his descriptions were. The first thing he found out was that places that existed (or not) in 1897 aren’t necessarily easy to find today. For one thing, Transylvania is no longer a country, but a region of Romania. And that wasn’t the only name that changed.   

My first stop on the vampire trail was meant to be the Hotel Royale, where Harker stayed the night in the old city of Klausenburg. But looking at an atlas today, there is no city by that name.

Located roughly halfway between Budapest, Hungary, and Bucharest, Romania, the city shed the name Stoker knew it by after World War I, when Transylvania became part of the Kingdom of Romania. Today it’s known as Cluj-Napoca, and it’s a bustling, bohemian university town.

The Hotel Royale doesn’t exist today, and maybe it never did. But nestled near the train station is an historic inn that claims to have been the inspiration for Bram Stoker. The Hotel Transilvania, located on Ferdinand Street, is one of the oldest in the city, and has been an inn since the Middles Ages.

When the Klausenburg railway station was built in 1870, the venerable old hotel went by another name, the Queen of England—perhaps a regal sounding inspiration for a Hotel Royale.

That was only the beginning. What he found was charming, and even spooky in parts. Read about the retracing of Dracula at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Luke Spencer)

2016 Literature Laureate Bob Dylan, age 75, born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, USA. #NobelPrize

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 13, 2016

The Swedish Academy has announced the winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016 is awarded to Bob Dylan

"for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".

It was certainly an untraditional choice, and the first Nobel in Literature won by an American since 1993. The oddsmakers had predicted a half-dozen other possible winners, so Dylan will be a surprise. The award comes with 8 million kroner, or about $900,000. -via Metafilter

Have you ever been to a wall that captures your shadow? I saw the one at the Exploratorium in San Francisco years ago. Never would I have imagined that you could recreate one in your own home! But that’s just the beginning of what Mark Rober (previously at Neatorama) is doing with this wall.

(YouTube link)

It glows. It captures shadows. You can draw on it. You can transfer existing images onto it. Combine all those, and get some really cool temporary artwork. The DIY part begins about 2:45 into the video. It’s just a matter of covering your wall with glow-in-the-dark paint or vinyl. Yeah, you can buy that stuff. You’ll also need the proper lights: flashing spotlight, UV flashlight, and laser pens. Most of the video is examples of the really neat things you can do with it. -via Viral Viral Videos

These adorable little mummy faces will be the hit of your Halloween party! And they are filled with yummy no-bake pumpkin cheesecake. The recipe is genius: crushed gingersnaps and graham crackers added to pumpkin and cream cheese, plus more spices. The decorating part requires a little dexterity, but the results are cute as can be. Get complete instructions at Creme de la Crumb. This was part of a list of Halloween party treats at Buzzfeed.

Have you ever heard of a tussie-mussie? Spellcheck certainly hasn’t. Before cities had adequate fresh water and sewers, when horses filled the roads, the air was full of the foul smells of body odor and worse. A tussie-mussie was a fancy container that 18th- and 19th-century ladies could carry sweet-smelling flowers in to fight the ambient stench. Collector Irene Deitsch, who wrote Tussie-Mussies: A Collector’s Guide to Victorian Posy Holders, tells us about them.     

In her book, Deitsch organizes her tussie-mussies by their materials—sterling silver, silverplate, gold, ivory, glass, porcelain, mother-of-pearl, straw—as well as their styles—handheld vs. lapel pin, bosom bottle vs. three-legged tripod. While some of these objects may be admired for their beautiful enameling or intricate etching, many are also windows into the courtship customs of privileged young ladies during the Victorian Era, particularly in England. “Some have flirting mirrors on them,” Deitsch says, “so a young women carrying a tussie-mussie could see who was behind her.” Others sport small flat surfaces holding thin sheets of ivory, upon which the names of gentlemen desiring a dance would be written.

Learn more about tussie-mussies and how they were used, and see a gallery of lovely examples, at Collectors Weekly.