When Kristine met this fat cat, he was so big that he was named Biggie. Biggie weighed 43 pounds! For reference, the last time I took a cat to the vet, he weighed eight pounds, and I thought he was overweight. Biggie is a heckin' chonker, as they say. Kristine took him in and put him on a diet. Big orange cats are known to be very food-motivated, so Biggie was not happy with the amount of food. But he lost weight over time, and went from barely being able to move to playing with toys and walking all over the house. There was a period when he could walk downstairs, but not upstairs, which meant Kristine had to haul his behemoth butt back up. The family's success with Biggie led them to found The Big House Sanctuary and Rehab to help overweight cats get healthy. They've published an online guide called A Quick Guide to Dechonking. This video has a 30-second sponsor message at :30.

Advertisers in the 20th century brought our attention to shameful and scary conditions that sold a lot of products, like ring around the collar, dishpan hands, and halitosis. Dishpan hands was a real thing, a case of eczema caused by lengthy exposure to hot water and detergent, which you don't hear about anymore because we have smaller families and dishwashers. But in the 1930s and '40s, Lux dishwashing detergent had a campaign that shamed women for dishpan hands that embarrassed their husbands. The advertising reached further than Lux ever imagined.

In 1948, a Soviet delegate to the UN explained that the reason Soviet women were not allowed to leave the country with foreign husbands was because that in the West wives became kitchen slaves and developed dishpan hands.

Now, we shouldn't take anything a Soviet diplomat said at face value, but you have to wonder if this was claim to give credence to a harsh policy while dissing the US, or whether the Soviets were just strangely influenced by American advertising. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: ladies Home Journal, 1945)

Australian twins Bridgette and Paula Powers spoke to a TV journalist after witnessing a carjacking incident in which their mother tried to help after the car crashed. But you probably don't need to catch every detail of the crime, because that's overshadowed by how they told the story. The sisters are so in tune with each other that whatever one says, the other is already saying!

This interview is not the first time that Bridgette and Paula have gone viral. They've been called "the world's most identical twins" since they were quite young. Yes, they always dress alike, and they do everything together. The Powers sisters say they have tried in the past to speak on their own and to wear different clothing because people thought they were weird, but it never felt right to them. The way they speak in unison makes us wonder whether they have some kind of telepathy, or if they long ago got into the habit of predicting the next word our of their sister's mouth. -Thanks, Brother Bill!

Movie mistakes happen all the time. The process of creating a feature film involves so many details that it's inevitable that something wrong will make it to the final print. Usually these mistakes are so small and flash by so fast that the vast majority of viewers will never notice. But in the age of home video with pause and rewind capabilities, movie buffs will find them. Filmmaker Todd Vaziri shows us a few of those details from movies like Aliens, Glory, and Goodfellas, but the one he investigated himself is the real story here.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith came out in 2005. It was ten years later that fans began discussing a strange artifact during the final battle on Mustafar between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker in which a human figure, which came to be called a force ghost, appeared. It was a complicated scene, and no one at Lucasfilm was able to explain it. But in 2024, Vaziri, who works at Industrial Light & Magic, decided to put in whatever time it took to investigate the glitch. He unearthed the raw footage from the scene before it was composited and discovered who that mysterious figure was and how he got into the movie. You can read that story at FXRant.  -via kottke

Visitors to Disneyland are often charmed by spotting cats in the park. They aren't trespassing; these cats live there. They serve an important role in rodent control, which is quite necessary when you consider the amount of food purchased (and dropped) and the amount of garbage Disneyland has to deal with every day. But they weren't brought in as pest control experts. When Disneyland was preparing to open to the public, the staff found that a colony of feral cats had set up housekeeping in Sleeping Beauty's castle. Getting rid of the cats would be difficult, so Disney decided to let them stay, and even made them official cast members. Their talents in rodent control was a bonus. The park has an estimated 200 or so cats who mostly stay in areas away from people when the park is open. They are fed and fixed, but are still feral. And in case you are wondering, Walt Disney World in Florida does not have an official feral cat program like Disneyland, but you may well spot cats in the park because Florida just has a lot of feral cats. -Thanks, WTM!

In 1911, Wyoming State Penitentiary got quite a bit of notice, not for scandal or abuse, but for its baseball team. New warden Felix Alston took note of a number of talented baseball players among the inmates and decided to form a team to boost morale. The Wyoming State Penitentiary All Stars were a dozen players who were serving time, and at least two were slated for execution. Convicted murderer George Saban was selected as coach, but did not play because of prior finger amputations. Another convicted murderer, George Seng, was the star player.

While no deals with the players were recorded, Saban encouraged the team by telling them their performances would affect their sentences, which meant a stay of execution for Seng. The All Stars didn't last long, due to public outcry when the team made the papers, but they won every game they played. Read the story of the prison team with a perfect record at Cracked.

You might also be interested in Saban's crime and what happened to him after his stint as coach.

Young people in 2025 know that when someone "has drunk the Kool-Aid," it means they have bought into someone else's worldview, no matter how bizarre. But they might not know where the saying came from. The phrase originated after the 1978 Jonestown Massacre, when 900 followers of paranoid cult leader Jim Jones drank poison and died in the jungles of Guyana. And it wasn't even in Kool-Aid, but a generic knockoff drink.

The horrifying mass suicide came about after Congressman Leo Ryan went to Guyana to investigate the People's Temple. Ryan and four others were shot and killed trying to leave the cult compound, and Jones knew that the murders meant the end of the People's Temple. He had been preparing for such an event for years. Read about Jim Jones, how his cult began, and how more than a thousand followers ended up in Guyana, most of them for the rest of their lives, at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Federal Bureau of Investigation)

Art Weston and Kirk Kirkland set out on Lake Livingston near Houston on April 8 with the specific aim of catching a world-record fish. Weston was fishing with a two-pound test line, which means that a force of more than two pounds could snap the line. However, a swimming fish usually doesn't apply as much force as lifting a dead weight. Still, it takes finesse to bring in a fish that greatly outweighs the strength of the fishing line. Weston, a champion fisherman, was up to the challenge.

They caught an alligator gar that was seven feet, three inches long and weighed 153 pounds! That was after chasing the fish for four hours, twice as long as Weston had predicted. This catch could very well be a world record for a two-pound test line. That decision will rely on the photographs and measurements that Weston and Kirkland took, since they then released the alligator gar back into the water. Weston is an avid fisherman, but he's also a conservationist. Alligator gar can live for decades and grow to several hundred pounds, and you can't replace a fish like that. Read about the catch and see plenty of pictures at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Art Weston via Facebook)

Pac-Man has been running away from or killing the same ghosts for 45 years now (as if you can really kill a ghost). He's gotten to known them all and their individual quirks pretty well, and it works for him. But this day is different, and suddenly now he runs into a ghost he's never met before. A stranger in the Pac-Man grid? Say it ain't so! It turns out that one of the regular ghosts couldn't get out of jury duty and they had to call in a replacement. The problem is that the temp agency sends them ghosts who can't get a steady job for one reason or another. How bad do you have to be to be bad among ghost? We are about to find out, courtesy of Dorkly. The video is only 2:15; the rest is promotional. Contains some mild NSFW language. -via Geeks Are Sexy

People are squishy, which is why cars come equipped with airbags. But these airbags are usually inside the cars and designed to protect the driver and passengers.

Carscoops reports that Subaru is now providing additional airbag protection. The Forester model offered in Japan can be purchased with an airbag designed specifically to protect cyclists from crashing through the windshield during a collision. Although other Japanese cars have airbags that cushion pedestrians, this Subaru design takes into account that cyclists are higher up off the ground than pedestrians.

This video with extremely an annoying audio track demonstrates the instantaneous deployment of the airbag.

-via Jalopnik

Philippe Chrétien, a computer programmer and engineer, built this clock described on Instructables. The screen consists of five squares proportionate to the first five numbers in the Fibonnaci sequence. The hour is marked by the red square and the minutes with the green square. If the square is blue, that square illustrates both the hour and minute.

How do you tell the time? Chrétien explains the math:

To read the hour, simply add up the corresponding values of the red and blue squares. To read the minutes, do the same with the green and blue squares. The minutes are displayed in 5 minute increments (0 to 12) so you have to multiply your result by 5 to get the actual number.

-via Book of Joe

Elias Herrera has cattle. This is not too uncommon in the United States. But Herrera lives with his as pets. Buttons the cow and Bruce the bull (steer?) live in the house or at least visit it frequently. They certainly act like it's their home.

The cow and bull pull their weight. They help Herrera with his household projects, especially cooking. In this video, Bruce helps his human prepare cupcakes. Despite the mess that they make together, the end result is quite presentable.

Both cattle help with the consumption. Not so much the cleanup, though. Herrera should probably get another cow for that purpose.

-via Massimo

After Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Disney and Lucasfilm swung heavily toward television series for the Star Wars universe. There has been talk about a new film starring Daisy Ridley as Rey Skywalker trying to resurrect the Jedi order, but nothing concrete is in the works yet. But that doesn't mean the end of Star Wars feature films.

Star Wars: Starfighter is a video game that was released in 2001. But it's also the next Star Wars movie from Lucasfilm. The official announcement was made yesterday during a Star Wars Celebration event in Tokyo. There's even a short teaser, although with little information.

The movie will be directed by Shawn Levy and will star Ryan Gosling. It will be set a few years after the events of The Rise of Skywalker, but Star Wars: Starfighter will be a standalone feature with all new characters. Filming is scheduled to begin this fall, and the projected released date will be May 28, 2027. Read what we know about Star Wars: Starfighter so far at People.

When French metal band Eons of Decay needed a video for their song "The Perfect Storm," they enlisted the talents of Fabrice Mathieu, who has delighted us with his film mashups for years. Mathieu turned to popular science fiction, dystopian, and disaster movies and used clips from more than 50 of them to illustrate how awful a perfect storm could be. Things go from bad to worse as we see war, wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, urban overcrowding, sandstorms, economic collapse, floods, asteroids, and the general mayhem that you would expect from armageddon. If you enjoy such mashups but you don't care for heavy metal, you should watch with the sound off to wallow in the utter destruction that Hollywood offers us, and tell yourself "It's just a movie..." In case you you don't recognize the clips, there's a list of the movies used at the YouTube page, under "more."  -Thanks Fabrice!

Only in Florida 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/H6QTc8kMru

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) April 18, 2025

I used to live in Florida. I like to hike, but avoided doing so in Florida. It's just too dangerous because of the wildlife. Even the delights of tubing down the Ichetuknee River are hard to enjoy when one is constantly watching for water moccasins.

Florida Man is the apex predator in Florida, but alligators routinely challenge him for that title. Here are two in the town of Ave Maria, a Catholic community in the southern part of the state. I doubt that they rang the doorbell because they have cookies to sell.

-via Jonah Goldberg