The Rocky Horror Picture Show was released on August 14, 1975 in the UK and on September 25, 1975, in the US. The movie is a science fiction horror comedy musical with a ton of sexual innuendo (but no nudity) starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, and Meat Loaf. I didn't see it until early 1977, when it was established as a midnight movie in college towns. The Rocky Horror Picture Show seemed shocking and downright deviant to mainstream audiences, but it was a lot of fun and had plenty of catchy songs. It also had quite a few awkward pauses in the dialogue, which led to the custom of audience responses. Over time, going to the movie became an full-on participation event, with thrown props, cosplay, and even shadow casting, in which costumed characters perform the parts along with the movie. It's no wonder it became the biggest cult movie of all time. It never left theaters, even during the pandemic.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its audience traditions spurred the formation of fan clubs and communities of people who appreciated the film's subversiveness and sense of fun. Those who felt excluded from the wider culture found kindred spirits among Rocky Horror fans -and that's been going on for 50 years now. Read more about the legacy of the longest-running theatrical film ever at Ars Technica.
The Canary Islands are a Spanish archipelago off the coast of western Africa. Before tourism transformed the islands into a sunny destination, the economy was dominated by shepherding. Long centuries of this profession led to the development of Salto del Pastor--the shepherd's leap.
To navigate through the rocky hills of the islands, shepherds used a long staff with a metal tip to hurl themselves over obstacles and down the mountains. Today, it is a sport that requires great strength and dexterity.
I can see how the technique is useful. Salto de Pastor is a kind of practical parkour, but for rural rather than urban environments.
-via Massimo
When I finally achieved getting a yoyo to return to my hand consistently, I was rather proud of myself. If I had attempted anything like this, I would have hit myself in the face a couple of times and ended up with a ball of permanently tangled string binding my fingers, all in less than 30 seconds. This is Hajime Miura (previously at Neatorama) performing in the 3A event at the World YoYo Contest held in Prague, Czech Republic, last week. If you have a hard time following his moves, you can listen to the crowd full of yoyo fans to tell which moves are most impressive.
Yeah, he won. It's not the first time, either. Miura has now won his eighth world championship- and he's only 22 years old! This year's performance is kind of a comeback for Miura, who placed fourth in the category last year. He won both the 3A and 4A championship in 2018. Yoyo enthusiasts have been following Miura since he started winning competitions as a child, back in 2012. -via Memo of the Air
Phineas Gage was 25 years old and had a job working on a railroad in 1848. As he was tamping down explosives, they went off and sent the iron tamping rod through his head, from the jaw through the top of his skull. Gage lost vision in one eye, but surprisingly recovered and survived for another 13 years. Scientists who studied Gage's case learned enough to begin removing brain tumors and performing lobotomies. But Gage had trouble holding a job because of changes in his personality. He would drink, fight, gamble, and consort with prostitutes. Scientists called this "disinhibition," and attributed it to his brain injury. It became a theory that his damaged frontal lobe was the center of inhibition that kept most people from doing things they shouldn't. Gage became patient zero for the science of personality by brain mapping.
Another case of a personality change after a brain injury involves Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge became both eccentric and creatively productive after a brain injury, but he also shot and killed a guy. Was this frontal lobe disinhibition? The case of Muybridge is not so clear-cut, because it was much better documented. That brings up the question of whether Gage's personality really did change. The actual evidence is scant, and what is there could be explained by the life-changing trauma of his accident. And Gage's and Muybridge's behaviors were ultimately judged by different scales. Read about science's new look at the case of Phineas Gage at Aeon, or here if you're out of free articles. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Originally from the collection of Jack and Beverly Wilgus, and now in the Warren Anatomical Museum, Harvard Medical School)
As you might guess, the portmanteau "scamageddon" refers to the end of the world brought about by folks who con you out of your money. It seems like this is happening now, but to truly be world-ending, it would come from extraterrestrials.In this scenario, Steve Buscemi plays the supreme leader of an invading force using scams against Earthlings, with all the pomp and circumstance that a sci-fi movie would require. But in their plans of domination, they didn't count on a security network that blocks their efforts. Yeah, it's a dumb idea, because what would aliens do with our money, after all? This story would require a suspension of disbelief if it weren't a total comedy. Forget plausibility, because this alien is a ridiculous stereotype, and so are the weird minions (Zelunians?) who worship him, and his incompetent henchmen. -via The Awesomer
If you didn't learn to cook before you left your parents' home, you may have had to consult a video to learn the proper way to dice an onion. While methods vary, it's usually a straightforward operation. However, if you are a math nerd, you might worry about the uniformity of the onion pieces you are left with. Since an onion consists of round layers, and chefs cut them straight down from top to bottom to maximize both speed and safety, the pieces from the side of the onion tend to be slightly larger than the rest.
To make the most uniformly diced onion pieces, you need to reduce the standard deviation in the size of the pieces. Radial cuts makes sense for this, but it does nothing for the safety of the knife wielder. And using math, we find that it actually increases the standard deviation in size because of the smaller pieces in the middle. There is another cutting technique that will reduce that standard deviation, and you can learn all about it at The Pudding. Personally, I find no correlation between the consistency of onion pieces and the enjoyment of the finished dish, but your mileage may vary. -via kottke, who mainly admired the onion font in the article.
Sorry I can't!
— ฿₳₮₮ⱠɆ ฿ɎⱤĐ (@BattleByrd) August 15, 2025
I'm locked in to the German Shopping Cart Return Championships... pic.twitter.com/cwa44vNsAK
Shopping Cart Theory is the belief that returning the shopping cart after exiting the store is the best test of a person's moral capacity for self-governance. Or, to put it in Starship Troopers terms, the difference between a citizen and a civilian.
Returning the shopping cart is only the beginning of the journey into civilization. To people on this German game show, it is necessary to return the shopping cart with precision and elegance. Watch the contestants attempt to propel their carts into the corral perfectly.
Watching classic Star Trek is...soothing. That's what I'll call it. Pop in the DVD and watch an episode of The Next Generation that you've already seen half a dozen times in the past thirty years. It's like an old friend. So this is a fitting mashup with Gary Portnoy's song "Where Everybody Knows Your Name," which served as the opening theme to Cheers.
Commenters on YouTube remind us of a connection between Star Trek and Cheers: the Deep Space Nine barfly character Morn was inspired by the Cheers character Norm. Norm, though, was less annoying because unlike his Star Trek counterpart, he wouldn't talk all of the time.
-via Kurositas
When I was a kid, my grandmother wore her hair in tight curls with bluing, cat-eye glasses, and stockings rolled to her knees. And dentures. I thought she was ancient, but she was younger then than I am now. It's not your imagination- people did indeed look older in those days. The easiest way to see the effect is in TV shows. You can watch an old episode of All in the Family and assume that Archie Bunker was in his 60s, but actor Carroll O'Conner was in his 40s when portraying him. In the 1984 movie Cocoon, Wilford Brimley played a character in a retirement home, but he was only 49. YouTuber TV Guess-O-Matic goes over some of the main reasons people used to look older. The comparison of Lucille Ball and Jennifer Anniston seems a bit of a stretch, because if you swap the hairstyles, the difference in appearance just disappears. It's the same with The Golden Girls, because their hairstyles made them look much older than they were (and Estelle Getty required plenty of makeup to look old). -via Laughing Squid
Roger Williams was a very accomplished man. He was a Puritan clergyman who emigrated from England in 1631 to what is now Massachusetts. But his strange ideas about religious freedom and the separation of church and state, not to mention his belief in the humanity of Native Americans, got him kicked out, so he founded both Rhode Island and the First Baptist Church.
Williams died in 1683 and was buried on his own property in Providence, next to his wife, who had died a few years before. In 1860 when the graves of Roger Williams and his wife were dug up in preparation for a monument to be erected, a very peculiar situation was found. There were no remains of the couple found except for a braid of Mrs. Williams' hair (and a few teeth, according to Wikipedia). What was found was an apple tree root. The tree had been planted many years after Williams' death, and the root had grown through the grave. The root was found to have taken a shape as if it had grown around a human skeleton, even though there were no bones. That root was preserved, and can still be seen today. Read about the tree that ate Williams at American Strangeness. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Rhododendrites)
Alone, these items are ordinary purchases. But when they are selected on a single trip to the store, it's reasonable if not also advisable to be suspicious.
Honestly, I don't know why it's even legal to own or pruchase a copy of Garfield 2: A Tale of Two Kitties. There's a reason why it polls so badly on Rotten Tomatoes. It's just too dangerous to have around, especially where kids can get at it.
Redditor /u/eugendied crafts mostly quilts and other creative fabric arts, but what drew my attention from her body of work was this strikingly realistic and beautiful bench that looks just like a stick of butter. As one commenter says, "I can't believe it's not butter!"
The form is actually a precisely cut and shaped wooden box. /u/eugenedied then used Canva and Photoshop to create the lettering design, which she then cut out of vinyl with a Cricut.
This table was a fitting gift for a friend who is a food scientist at Land O'Lakes.
I've read that cat food manufacturers struggle with having to walk a fine line between making cat food smelly enough to attract our feline pets, but not smelly enough to make their owners sick when opening the can. Cats love smelly foods, and what's stinkier than surströmming, the Swedish fermented fish famous for its strong smell? Viral internet videos make it clear that just opening the can can make humans lose their lunch. Etiquette requires you open a can of surströmming outside.
This guy asked his cat Pusic (previously at Neatorama), who we have called Russia's most pampered cat, and his year-old sister Mila if they would like some surströmming. The two cats are curious, bordering on excited, but will they eat it? The average house cat naturally loves fish, but fermented fish in a can is something outside their wheelhouse. Too bad we don't get to see the human's reaction.
What do you know about Vincent van Gogh? Most people would say he painted The Starry Night and cut off his own ear. The artist was a complicated man who suffered from mental illness and died at age 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1890. Ever since then, people have been trying to untangle what was wrong with Van Gogh.
In addition to a very unhealthy lifestyle, Van Gogh had pica, an unnatural compulsion to consume things that are not food. He ate paint, particularly the yellow paint he used so much, plus the paint thinner turpentine. These dangerous substances can cause brain damage, but no one knows for sure whether the cravings were his primary problem, or just another in a pantheon of mental illnesses. Van Gogh himself didn't know why he ate paint. One theory is that he had a biochemical craving for terpenes, the chemicals that give plants their distinctive aromas. Read about pica, terpenes, and Van Gogh's obsession that may have led to his death at Big Think. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Vincent van Gogh/GoldenArtists)
We recently showed you a robot soccer game in which small humanoid robots competed (poorly) using artificial intelligence. In this robot kickboxing tournament held in China, the action is much more exciting. These are Unitree G1 EDU model robots, which can be operated by a remote control, by voice commands, or by motion sensing. In these fights, they are using remote controls. The robots are quicker and better balanced than the AI robots playing soccer- and a little taller, although not yet human sized. Most impressively, they also have the ability to get back up when they are knocked down (cue "Tubthumping"). They even show a little personality in their fighting style, which might be hard to replicate in AI. In this video, their main vulnerability seems to be a tendency to get lost when they aren't facing the right direction. Read more about robot kickboxing at Cnet. -via Geeks Are Sexy
