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

Dante Boccuzzi is among the most accomplished and sought-after chefs in the world. The Takeout reports that his restaurant in his native city of Cleveland occupies a building erected in 1924 as the Lincoln Heights Savings and Loan. Since it was built as a bank, its architecture includes the features that you would expect of one, including a vault.

If you're able to get a reservation for it, you and three other people can dine at the vault table. It was created at great trouble, as installing ventilation required jackhammering through a foot and a half of concrete. But don't shut the door anyway.

Photo: Dante Dining Group

The South China Morning Post reports an elite restaurant in Shanghai is offering a 15-course meal inspired by the rainforests of the Yunnan province. It culminates in a dessert which consists of flowers resting on a bed of elephant poop.

The poop has been sanitized and thus passes national food safety standards. The entire meal is popular and is drawing many people who are willing to fork over the equivalent of $550 USD for the feast. Some online commentators are skeptical, though, including one who said that "This feels like a grand-scale humiliation and an obedience test for the wealthy."

-via Dave Barry | Photo: 163.com

Malaysian-Chinese residential tower superstition. All floors with a 4 in it are the lower floor plus an A (Eg floor 4 is 3A, 14 is 13A, 24 is 23A, 34 is 33A) pic.twitter.com/uuWO6dZXse

— JR Urbane Network (@JRUrbaneNetwork) March 14, 2025

In the book Malaysia by Heidi Munan, Yuk Yee Foo, and Jo-Ann Spilling, the authors explain that the word "four" sounds like the Chinese word si, which means "death." It is therefore unlucky and people avoid it. License plates that end with the numeral 4 are undesirable. In contrast, "eight" sounds like the word for "prosperity" and is thus considered auspicious.

-via Super Punch

Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce represented her homeland of Jamaica in the 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 Olympic Games, winning three gold medals, four silver, and one bronze. Her specialty is the 100 meter dash and her personal record for that distance is 10.60 seconds. She holds the Guinness World Record for the most number of Olympic medals in the 100 meter race for a woman.

She's also a mom, having given birth her son, Zyon, in 2017. When Zyon's school held a race for parents--specifically, 100 meters--she joined in. Sports Illustrated reports that she won handily this time, as she did during a similar race in 2023.

There's no mention of who took the silver medal in this particular race.

-via Kottke

About a fortnight ago, we showed readers the innovative dishwasher developed by the STS 3D robotics firm and YouTuber Plumber John. That dishwasher cleaned dishes more brutally and effectively than any other dishwasher on Earth. It agitated the dishes with such intensity that only a few seconds is necessary to completely transform your dishes into a nearly unimaginable state.

Now the inventors are back with an improved design focused on the professional food service industry. Restaurants need to process dishes very quickly, so this dishwasher has a flame-powered dryer function, an auto-eject function capable of moving dishes out of the unit at high velocity, and heat-powered sanitation process.

My suggestion for the next step: the addition of a W54 warhead to ensure that no bacteria remain.

-via David Thompson