And now for today's cautionary tale. (Miami Herald 1916, via @_newspapers) pic.twitter.com/ewlP33X3PG

— Undine (@HorribleSanity) May 30, 2023

The headline doesn't seem to make a bit of sense, but it's real. The syndicated story survives in more detail in the December 16. 1916 issue of the Nevada newspaper Elko Independent. A British man named Wilberforce Wiggins explained why he was in New York.

As the story goes, Wiggins was late for a lunch meeting with friends. To explain his tardiness, he spun a tale out of whole cloth. He said he was busy fulfilling an order from officials in India who were looking for 2,000 Manx cats to import in order to control snakes, and that they were paying $25 each for the cats.

Wiggins thought it was a hilarious tale, but the men he was dining with took it seriously, and each snuck off to make phone calls to connections on the Isle of Man (where Manx cats come from) to arrange fulfillment of Wiggins' mission. After all, $25 a cat was a lot of money in 1916.

Afterward, Wiggins was inundated by shipments of cats from the Isle of Man -and elsewhere, as the story got around quickly. There were also children carrying cats to his house, demanding their $25. His aunt even lost her beloved Angora cat when she walked away with one of the cats who escaped a cage at the dock. So Wiggins did the only thing he could do to escape the mess he caused, and fled to the United States to hide until the excitement died down.

Is there any truth to the story? Wilberforce Wiggins already proved himself to be a teller of tale tales with his luncheon story, so that's quite doubtful. But it's plausible that he actually said all this to a newspaper reporter in New York. -via Undine 

Atlas Obscura introduces us to a unique drive-through restaurant in the Netherlands. It began when Jan and Birgitte van den Elzen built up a successful strawberry greenhouse facility in the town of Uden. They looked for innovative ways to sell their fruit, including vending machines. Those vending machines are still present, but during peak strawberry season, which is from March to September, visitors to the Aardeien Drive-In can also purchase strawberry foods at the drive-through window.

These dishes include strawberry waffles, chocolate-dipped strawberries, strawberry shakes, strawberry smoothies, strawberry jam, and strawberries with whipped cream. Who's up for a yummy roadtrip to the Netherlands?

Photo: Aardeien Drive-In

The live-action film Barbie opens on July 21. It promises to be a true reflection of the doll's life and culture, and that includes a dazzling pink set full of Barbie Dreamhouses. While the Barbie Dreamhouse has been produced in many different versions, they all evoke a midcentury modern design rendered in bright colors, mostly Barbie pink. And so the movie set had to reflect that.

Production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer talk about how they translated the Dreamhouse aesthetic into the real world in order to put real actors into the Barbie world. The set size is not exactly human scale, but close enough to use. There are few exterior walls, because there is no privacy in Barbie world, just as there is no place in the Barbie Dreamhouse you can't see -and the weather is always perfect. The San Jacinto Mountains in the background is not a CGI landscape, but rather a painted backdrop. Constructing the set meant causing a global but temporary shortage of pink paint.

Read about the Barbie set and the care that went into evoking the unique doll's world at Architectural Digest. The article has plenty of pink pictures. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jaap Buitendijk/Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

Redditor Mare Astra found this in her mother-in-law's basement. Take a closer look at the fine print. If you are not familiar with this gadget, it may be alarming.

In case you are wondering, the polonium in the product is polonium-210, which has a half-life of 138 days. It is considered harmful to humans only if it is ingested, like if it got into a skin wound or was drunk in the form of Russian tea from a political enemy.

The Staticmaster 500 is one of a line of products from the Nuclear Products Company introduced in 1950. It was intended for use in cleaning vinyl records or photographic film by ionizing the air around the object, therefore eliminating static electricity and making dusting easier. If you already had one of these around the house, you might use it to keep your clothes from clinging or get your hair to stay in place. Since polonium-210 has such a short half life, these products were only guaranteed for a year. If you find one of these gadgets, it's safe to be around by now. But if you really want to have some polonium-210 around the house, you can still buy new static eliminators that use it.

Sometimes earth-shattering events go on right under our noses, and we pay no attention to them because we are human. We most likely would have no knowledge at all of a war going on for years in Nigeria if Jane Goodall hadn't been there to document the Gombe Chimpanzee War. She was there at the Gombe Stream National Park in 1974 when a war broke out between communities of chimpanzees. One population started to infringe on the territory of another, and they fought over it until 1978.

During the war, male chimps were observed forming alliances, sharing patrol duties, and carrying out raids and attacks that indicated strategic planning. Read about the human-like war and the implications of such behavior among chimpanzees at History of Yesterday. 

But that article didn't tell us how the war ended, or who won. Wikipedia has a longer and more detailed account of the war, and Goodall's reaction to it. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Syaibatul Hamdi from Pixabay)

Gavin Free and Dan Gruchy, the Slow Mo Guys, know how to have some summer fun. They've played with water balloons before, but this year they're going all out, with a 6-foot balloon, rigged up with a high-speed camera and lights inside! The idea was that Dan (it's always Dan) would slide across a wet tarp head first right into it, bursting the balloon, and they would have some cool slow motion footage. Dan even rigged up a device to make sure the balloon actually burst instead of just acting like a brick wall he was slamming his head into. If you just want to see the ultimate balloon burst, skip ahead to the nine-minute mark, but the rest of it is pretty amusing, too. They titled the video "Giant Balloon June," which hints that they have more of these balloons, and have plans to use them in later videos this month. -via Digg

There is a problem when people try to retrieve the huge deposits of natural resources underneath the earth's crust. The most valuable of these resources is fuel, and to get to them, we must expose them to air. One stray spark can cause that fuel to catch fire, and you've learned your lesson. But by then it may be too late, since there's a lot of fuel under there, and mines and wells continue to feed the flames while making it impossible to fight the fire. You know about Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a coal seam has been burning since 1962. But that's just one fire that's been burning an awful long time. The world is full of them.

The Jharia area of Dhanbad, India, was once a treasure of mining, as billions of dollars in prime coke coal lie underneath the ground. But it's turned into a nightmare, since that coal seam has been on fire since 1916! Over 40 million tons of coal has burned in that time, and in addition, no new mines can be opened to collect the unaffected coal, since the burning seam goes in all directions. The fire is making a growing area on top uninhabitable. That's just one of five places where the earth has been on fire for ages and probably will remain on fire for years or even centuries to come, that you can read about at Cracked.

(Image credit: miketnorton)

What we have here is someone driving into a huge morningstar, a medieval weapon that resembles a wrecking ball with spikes. You have to wonder why. The van seems pretty tough against it at seven miles per hour, but then they try again at higher speeds.

Trust me - The most entertaining video you will watch on Twitter today. 💥🚐 pic.twitter.com/WwcM66zXwo

— TG ☕️ (@TG22110) May 29, 2023

I'm sure there were many thoughts going through your head while you watched it.

1. Why are they doing this?
2. That van seems to be pretty tough.
3. Hey, what's that ball hanging from?
4. Wait, are they using more than one van?
5. No Ford van, especially one that old, can go 75 mph.
6. Where did they get all these vans?
7. Oh, I get it.
8. Airborn!
9. Yeah, this is the most entertaining video I've seen today.

-via Everlasting Blort

Dr. Sander Markx was astonished to learn that a catatonic psychiatric patient he'd met as a medical student was still in the same hospital in the same unresponsive state 20 years later. April Burrell had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and could not communicate, care for herself, or follow orders. Markx ordered a full workup on April, and test results showed she also had lupus, an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks various body organs. Could it have attacked April's brain? April underwent a serious regimen of chemotherapy designed to treat lupus, in which she was bombarded with medications once a month for six months. By the time her treatment was completed, she had returned to reality, reconnected with her family, and was discharged from the psychiatric hospital to a rehabilitation center.

So did the lupus cause April's psychiatric symptoms? A second patient was found to have both schizophrenia and lupus, and showed an even better recovery after treatment. This opens up a whole new world in possible treatments for autoimmune diseases that may have caused psychiatric illness in people who are currently consigned to lifetime care. That may be just a small fraction of schizophrenic patients, but it is a possibility well worth testing for. Read about April, the second patient Devine, and Dr. Markx's quest to help them. -via Digg

(Image credit: NIMH)

The coastal region of Sweden known as Bohuslän is known for its ancient petroglyphs. In early May, a series of 40 petroglyphs that hadn't been seen in hundreds of years was discovered on a rock face in Bohuslän. A team of archaeologists had to stand on a platform to remove moss and reveal them. The carvings are estimated to be around 2,700 years old.

What's remarkable about these petroglyphs is their location. This particular sheer face was on an island 2,700 years ago, and there are no footholds in the rock, which means that whoever made them either had to do it from a boat, or stand on a platform built on the winter ice. The biggest petroglyph depicts a ship 13 feet long, while many are only 12 to 16 inches wide. Scientists say they were made by banging rocks on the cliff face, which chipped away the dark outer layer and revealed a lighter material just below the surface.

No one knows the meaning of the images, although they might tell a story, or mark territory. The big question is what made them so important that people went through such trouble to place them where they are. Read more about the new discovery at LiveScience.

(Image credit: Foundation for Documentation of Bohuslän’s Rock Carvings)

You've seen this stunt performed in movies before, and probably on The Dukes of Hazzard several times. When it happens in real life, the outcome can be much worse. The above is police bodycam footage from an incident near Valdosta, Georgia. Lowndes County sheriff's deputies were making an arrest on the side of a highway on May 24, and had a tow truck ready to impound a car. But a driver didn't see the activity going on and drove up the tow truck ramp at a high speed. The car launched into the air off the front of the truck, flew about 120 feet, and crashed into another car. The driver was taken to the hospital with serious injuries. The only other injury was to a police officer hit by flying debris.

WSB has more on the incident. 

Update: I found a better quality video.

Louisiana Representative Robert F. Broussard introduced a bill to the US House of Representative in 1910 that would promote the importation and domestication of hippopotamuses for commercial purposes. Broussard thought he had a great idea for killing two birds with one stone. Hippo meat would help ease the meat shortage the country was experiencing at the time, and hippos could also eat the invasive water hyacinths that had spread across Louisiana's wetlands since it was introduced in 1884.

The idea had some support. Teddy Roosevelt, the big game hunter, was all for it. Broussard also brought in experts to tell how nutritious hippopotamus meat is, how it tasted like a “combination of pork and beef,” and how hippo ranches could be set up on federal land to get the concept started.

Broussard had ideas for importing all kinds of African wildlife to the US, but hippos offered the most bang for the buck. He was mistaken in thinking that it would be easy, though. Hippos are dangerous, and there is no evidence they can ever be domesticated. Also, they wouldn't be able to survive on a diet of water hyacinths. There are many reasons the idea was bad, but Congress didn't know about them at the time. While Broussard's idea for hippo ranching never got out of the starting gate, his campaign for the US to eat hippos is an amusing story you can read at Smithsonian.

(Illustration credit: Meilan Solly)

pic.twitter.com/md9trSGpLe

— summer 🖕 (@salesforcechild) May 29, 2023

Summer Emerald, who goes by the online pseudonym of salesforcechild, is preparing to be a mother to children who are mentally and emotionally healthy and prepared for the challenges of the future. This means looking back to before our children were distracted by non-stop screentime and processed artificial foods. In this video, with the help of AI-generated art, Emerald describes how she will cultivate her children into confident adults.

Emerald is an artist with a surreal and symbolist bent, as you can see from her paintings and videos, which include depictions of various parasites that she has successfully expelled from her body. This is what happens when the human psyche is ready for the next stage of evolutionary development.

-via David Burge

Well, we have to admire his dedication to looking for his phone. Rajesh Vishwas, a food inspector with the Chhattisgarh state government in India, was taking a selfie when he dropped his phone. 

The government official was in the Parallkot reservoir, a scenic spot in central India. So it’s no surprise that he took the chance to take photos. However, he was not able to secure his $1,200 Samsung phone, and it dropped below the reservoir. He did try to take it back using different attempts. His first try was sending divers into the reservoir, but they failed to bring his precious gadget.

He then decided to have the entire reservoir drained. It took three days to drain around 530,000 gallons of water from the reservoir, but after all that effort Vishwas was able to get his phone back. But alas, it stopped working. 

According to reports, the reason why he took such efforts to get it back was because his phone contained sensitive government information and he had permission to drain the reservoir. The state, however, denied that he had no such permission. He is now suspended as a full investigation will be taking place.

Image screenshot via CBS News

Sign me up. Embrace the stress and hardships brought on by finals week in school with themed makeup. Even if you’re too tired to do other fun things except just eat, bathe, and study (also take tests in between), there’s no harm in making sure you look amazing. Even if you fail (we hope you don’t). 

Well, if ever you feel like you need to look more awake than ever, maybe makeup can give you some assistance. Personally, we just like this one because of the sheer hilarity of the concept behind it. Introducing, Sephora and Stabilo's (yes, the brand that produces a lot of highlighters) collaboration: a felt eyeliner collection that is shaped like a highlighter. It’s like a weird brainchild from a fever dream you had while studying for hours. 

The eyeliner comes in a container that is shaped like a small Stabilo highlighter and comes in different shades. These are Ink Splash (black), Back to School (gray), Summer Holiday (blue), and Chocolate Break (yes, that’s brown). While it is currently listed on Sephora Singapore’s website, we’re having our fingers crossed to have this collection reach other areas (such as ours) as well. 

Image credit: thebrunettemix