Redditor CaptainWisconsin made this monstrous stuffed bell pepper. When other redditors confronted him/her with the lack of post-baking photos, the Captain responded that eating the delicious thing was a greater priority. That makes sense, especially if there was reason to believe the monster might wake up.

Bigfoot Sasquatch Sticky Notes

Leave messages for Sasquatch and your other bipedal friends with the Bigfoot Sasquatch Sticky Notes from the NeatoShop. This handy little booklet contains an assortment of sticky notes perfect for jotting down observations, clues, and muses about your day. They are specifically helpful for when you want to get some information to someone, but that someone never seems to be around. 

The holidays are coming. The Bigfoot Sasquatch Sticky Notes make a great stocking stuffer or gift for all your Cryptozoological loving friends. 

Be sure to stop by the store to check out more great Office & Desk Stuff. New items arriving all the time. 

Don't forget to stop by the NeatoShop to see our large selection of customizable apparel and bags. The store features the artwork of thousands of amazing artists. We specialize in printing curvy and Big and Tall sizes and offer custom printing for your business and personal needs. We carry baby 6 months to adult 10 XL shirts in house. We know that fun, fabulous, and Bigfoot seeking people come in every size. 

Above you see the first Western depiction of witches on broomsticks. It appeared in 1451 on the manuscript of the poem “Le Champion des Dames” by Martin Le Franc. At the time, the concept of witches was that of heresy and sin, women to be feared and even executed. And plenty of women were executed over the next couple of centuries. Medieval artists pictured witches as powerful and frightening. When they were attractive, it was in the context of tempting men to ruin. Then everything changed.

The biggest difference in representations of witches after 1750, according to Millar, is that people stopped believing in the magical creatures. Witch hunts had mostly stopped by the early 1700s. By 1750, all European countries besides Switzerland had decriminalized witchcraft. Depictions of witches from this era, said Millar, “don’t carry the same fear and repulsion as some of the much earlier images.”

That didn't mean the end of witch art. The depictions of witches just switched to fiction and fantasy, leaving the model of religious warnings against heresy behind, and opening up the subject to a wide variety of interpretations. Read about the history of the witch in art at Artsy. -via Everlasting Blort 

Jen Yates of Cake Wrecks fame and her husband John decided to go with a Ghostbusters theme for their Halloween decorations. It started out with a simple shopping trip, but then turned into a project, which led to another project, and  before you know it, there's ghosts and Ghostbusters all over. Just a mere Slimer decoration wouldn't do, so they  ended up with the proton stream above.  

The proton pack itself (not pictured off to the right) is attached to an adjustable stand, and the wand is held in place with a steel bar. So to take a picture you just have to stand with your back to the pack and act like you're holding the wand. In the low light it will look like you're actually wearing the pack!

 We're still working out some safety details (tripping hazards, etc), but I *think* this is going to work, and I am SO DARN EXCITED.

The real magic is that proton stream, which John made by wrapping a red plastic tablecloth around white LED rope lighting. Then he taped blue EL wire haphazardly down the whole length for the crackly lightning effect.

Check out the doghouse.

But neither of those are the main subject of the blog post. That's a life-sized Stay Puft Marshmallow Man head that they sewed together for the roof. See all their Halloween projects (so far) at Epbot.

In early October, a charter boat took a group of shark watchers offshore of Lincoln, South Australia. There, tourist Wendy Bower-Leech recorded a Great White Shark swimming on the surface on its back. Why? Global News explains:

Sharks do not typically swim upside down. However, they do flip over on rare occasions to assume a position known as tonic immobility, according to the Shark Trust, a U.K.-based non-profit dedicated to promoting shark conservation.

Tonic immobility puts the shark into a relaxed, trance-like state, according to the Shark Trust. Biologists often use this technique when handling much smaller sharks.

-via Ian Miles Cheong

The duties of a medieval court jester were to entertain the king, his court, and any visitors the king wanted to amuse. He (or she) was also used to cheer the monarch up when he was down, to act as a confidant, and sometimes as a messenger. The term "jester" wasn't coined until later, so medieval court entertainers were often called fools or buffoons. But the "fool" had to be clever enough to walk the fine line between eliciting laughs and offending those with power over him. That was a line that the famous French jester Triboulet crossed when he served King Louis XII and Francis I.

Legend has it, whether truth or not is impossible to tell, this led to an exchange between himself and King Francis in which he told the king one of the members of the court had threatened to kill him. The King purportedly replied to this, “If he does, I will hang him a quarter of an hour afterward.” To which Triboulet supposedly quipped, “Ah, Sire, couldn’t you contrive to hang him a quarter of an hour previously?”

In another famed instance, he angered the King via making fun of the queen, whereupon his execution was ordered. However, legend has it that given his years of good service, he was given leave to choose the manner of his death. After thinking it over, Triboulet purportedly told the king “Good sire, for Saint Nitouche’s and Saint Pansard’s sake, patrons of insanity, I choose to die from old age.” This so amused the king that he just had Triboulet banished instead of killing him.

Learn a lot more of the ins and outs of life as a medieval court jester at Today I Found Out.

I decided to help him out because I thought he was stuck, turns out he just likes to be upside down lmao pic.twitter.com/jJma03I9E5

— camila🐉 (@camilalissethh) October 25, 2019

Or at least I hope it just likes to play dead and not sick or anything.

Twitter user @camila tweeted a video clip of her baby turtle who apparently likes to lie upside down at the bottom of its tank.

Will trick-or-treaters be delighted or too terrified to walk into Cookie Monster's gaping maw to knock on Lisa Boll's front door?

She transformed the bushes in front of her home in York Township, Pennsylvania into the image of Cookie Monster eating a chocolate chip cookie. Spray painting her bushes gave them the color and texture of Cookie Monster's fur. She then made eyes and the cookie with styrofoam. ABC News reports:

Boll said drivers have pulled over with their kids to take pictures of her oversized open-mouthed character.

"It was surprising how many people get a big kick out of it," Boll told WHTM. "It's fun for Halloween and it's not a horror thing, so it appeals to kids under the age of 3. It’s not scary."

-via Geekologie

The ceramic animal figurines happily decorated homes for years before they were eventually discarded. One garage sale led to another and, finally, chipped and partially broken, to the thrift store.

That's where mad scientist/artist Debra Broz found them. She promised these discarded figures a home. But there was a price to pay for that new home. Oh, yes, a terrible, terrible price.

For Broz performed...experiments on them. She altered them.

In the 1990s, a unique and dying custom in the village of Grimentz, Switerland caught the attention of anthropologists. Villagers kept special wheels of cheese that would be eaten by friends and neighbors at their funerals. Atlas Obscura explains:

Devotion to dairy has taken different forms throughout the Alps’s secluded valleys. “A popular culture of the cow … traverses all moments, objects, and events of the mountain peasant,” wrote Preiswerk. In Grimentz, it manifested in elaborate funerals. After a death, the bells of the deceased’s cows were removed, so that the animals, too, could mourn. Families added a “picnic of the dead” to the casket, which included a bottle of wine, bread, and cheese (as well as sturdy boots, as ghosts were rumored to wander the glaciers after dark).

The same foods comprised the all-important burial meal, which symbolized the reconstitution of the community after its tragic rift. As one of Preiswerk’s interview subjects recounted, the funeral guests were told, “Come to the meal, because the dead man has left enough.”

In a historically poor area, “leaving enough” required advance planning. “There was the ‘cheese of the dead,’” explains Zufferey. “Everyone had a wheel of cheese so that they had something to serve at their funeral.” When the inevitable time came, the chiseled cheese was washed down with vin des glaciers, the local wine.

The practice has largely died out. But Jean-Jacques Zufferey, who is pictured above, has kept a local library of such death cheeses. The one that he is holding is 149 years old.

-via VA Viper | Photo: Molly McDonough

It's a clever idea that is gradually spreading this Halloween season. You're trapped inside your car while horrifying monsters lay just beyond the glass. They invite you to come out to play.

To make it only scarier, I'd suggest having the car wash "break down" in the middle, trapping the passengers inside. Then, in total darkness, the clowns try to open the car doors.

This particular haunted car wash is in Cleveland which, of course, makes it only scarier.

-via Super Punch

Because Neatorama is a serious, hard news endeavor that seeks to educate the public about scientific developments, let us pause from our usual levity to talk to you about your Uranus.

In 2017, researchers Carol Paty and Xin Cao published the results of their examination of Uranus. Because that planet rotates on an axial tilt that is, relative to us, on its side, the magnetic field interacts in an unusual way with the passing solar wind. New Scientist explains:

Uranus is not like most of the planets. It rotates on its side, tilted almost 98 degrees from the plane of its orbit around the sun. The axis of its magnetic field is tilted too, at a 59-degree angle from the rotational axis. The magnetic field is also off-centre, with the field lines emerging about a third of the way toward the south pole.

All of this makes Uranus’s magnetosphere a total mess. “As it is tumbling around, the magnetosphere’s orientation is changing in all sorts of directions,” says Carol Paty at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. [...]

The magnetosphere acts as a barrier to the solar wind: when the two are moving in the same direction, the solar wind slides off it like water off a duck’s back. But just as when water hits a duck’s feathers from the tail end, the duck gets wet, so when the solar wind blows toward Uranus at the right angle, the planet’s magnetic field lines up with the solar wind’s and lets some particles flow through.

This process, called magnetic reconnection, occurs occasionally near Earth’s poles, where the influx of particles from the solar wind can lead to intensified auroras. On Uranus, Paty and Cao found that it should happen every single day (roughly 17 Earth hours), switching the magnetosphere’s protection on and off. This could lead to an aurora there as well.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: NASA

Cinder-Block is an arthritic 22-pound cat who was relinquished to Northshore Veterinary Hospital. She was previously named Cinder for her color, but the hospital staff thought Cinder-Block was more descriptive. They have put her on a regimen of diet and exercise. Here's her first exercise session on the underwater treadmill.



She approaches exercise in a manner that many of us can relate to. Veterinarian Brita Kiffney explains more.

Kiffney acknowledged that in the viral video, the water is too low to really be supporting Cinder-block; the plan is to raise the water gradually so that she becomes used to it. The veterinarian also said that she’s ordered Cinder-block a special harness for the workouts that should be more comfortable and supportive than the one she’s wearing in the clip.

While it’s important for cats to be at a healthy weight, Kiffney noted that it’s equally important that cats lose weight gradually, since cutting a cat’s food too drastically can lead to fatty liver disease and liver failure. She recommends that anyone whose cat needs to lose weight work with a vet to create a health plan.

The treadmill is not Cinder-Block's only exercise. She likes to play, as long as she can do it lying down! You can follow the process of turning Cinder-Block into Cinder-Ella at Facebook. -via The Daily Dot

(Image credit: Northshore Veterinary Hospital)

A couple of years ago, the company that owns Chuck E. Cheese announced that the pizza parlor's famous animatronics would be phased out and replaced with human entertainers. That process has yet to be completed, but as the robotic characters wear out, out they go. People who grew up in the 1980s have vivid memories of birthday parties and family time spent at Chuck E. Cheese. According to those who were there at the beginning, the arcade games were the main point of the business- after all, founder Nolan Bushnell's other business was Atari. The pizza was added to make it kid-friendly, and the animatronics came later. When people get nostalgic about childhood Chuck E. Cheese visits, it's the alternately funny and terrifying animatronics that stand out.

Gene Landrum, Chuck E. Cheese co-founder: Bushnell gave me the money and he gets so much of the credit, but let me tell you how it happened. May 17th, 1977, I opened the first Chuck E. Cheese in San Jose, California and when I was putting it together, I went to Disneyland to do some research — I’m a bit of a research nut, see, so I went to Disney. They had hundreds of games and you could also go to the park and see all these animatronics, like the Country Bear Jamboree, and of course, they had Mickey Mouse! So I said to myself, “I got it! They have Mickey Mouse, I can do Chuck E. Cheese, it’s sounds the same, see? Mick-ey-Mouse, Chuck-E.-Cheese.” So that’s where I got it from. And Nolan had a rat costume in his office, so it worked out.

I wanted to create a place where a kid could be a kid. So often when you take a kid to a restaurant the parents say, “Sit there, be quiet,” and the kid knows that this isn’t a place for them. So with Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theatre, I wanted to create a place where a kid could be a kid, so that’s where that came from.

Strangely, there is no explanation for the rat costume in Bushnell's office. What we do have is the story of Chuck E. Cheese and that of their rival Showbiz Pizza and the creepy characters found at both at Mel magazine.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Sam Howzit)