The folks at It's a Southern Thing have a video in which discount stores compete on a cooking show. That sounds pretty random, but putting a personality on inanimate objects based on their reputation can be funny. It turns out this is an experiment, called a sketch cobbler. Viewers sent in random elements, they pulled a few out of a hat, and made a comedy sketch out of it. Can they incorporate all the elements and still make it funny? Yes, but they could have left the smaller details out. All they really needed was "discount stores" and "cooking show." Anyone who has shopped all all these stores will understand. We all know who the winner is; since we have a discount grocery store against two discount stores who sell a few food items on the side. And now you know the reason I keep a stash of quarters in my car; it's not for emergency car washes.

My mother used to say that life is like a roll of toilet paper- it goes faster the closer we get to the end. Anyone who has achieved some age can understand. It took forever for me to grow up, but it took much less time for my children to grow up, and then grandchildren grow up in the blink of an eye. Young people can't wait for Christmas, while older people can't believe it's Christmas again already. Why do we experience the passing of time so differently at different ages?

I've read that it's because of percentages. A five-year-old has spent 20% of his life in the last year, while a 50-year-old has only spent 2% of their life in the last year. But that's not the whole story. Dr. Betsy Holmberg explains that the child and adolescent brain works differently from the more mature brain, so their experience of time passing is different. She not only explains how that works, but also gives us some tips to make our lives move a little slower at Psychology Today. -via Real Clear Science

2024: People wanting to be a #Brat during #BratSummer

1966: pic.twitter.com/ssYBWBR4tI

— LBJ Library (@LBJLibrary) August 23, 2024

The Johnson Presidential Library is hip, cool, and relevant, as demonstrated by this How Do You Do, Fellow Kids? post.

I affirm that we are having a brat summer here at the sprawling Neatorama corporate campus. But what does that mean? Urban Dictionary says that it's a season which celebrates a "hot yet trashy" feminine aesthetic inspired by the work of musician Charli xcx. I don't think that's what young Susan Gibson had in mind when she sent her brief appeal to the President in 1966.

-via Lyndon Baines Johnson (parody account)

You know how it is to eat Grape-Nuts for breakfast. The first few bites are like eating rocks, then the cereal softens up a little bit in milk, and by the time you get the bottom of the bowl, it's just mush. But when you eat Grape-Nuts cereal mixed into ice cream, it stays at the medium-chewy consistency. Yes, Grape-Nuts ice cream used to be a thing, and the recipe goes almost as far back as the development of Grape-Nuts itself in 1897. You might think it was a scheme to add some fiber to a decadent dessert, but it was actually a substitute for more expensive cookie crumbs in an ice cream flavor called bisque. We would call that cookies-and-cream flavor today.

But you won't find Grape-Nuts ice cream at your local grocery store anymore, at least not in the US. However, it is really common in Jamaica, where they consider Grape-Nuts to be an ice cream ingredient instead of a breakfast cereal. Read the odd history of Grape-Nuts ice cream at Atlas Obscura. There's a recipe, too.

(Image credit: Kristen Taylor)

Think of the Tour de Donut of Troy, Ohio as a race that combines competitive eating and bike racing. It's the chessboxing of the bicycle world.

Competitors race their bikes to a sequence of participating donut shops. Each donut eaten along the way, with a maximum of three donuts per stop, deducts five minutes of ride time. The person with the lowest time at the end wins. About half of participants forego eating any donuts at all.

The course lengths vary, ranging from 9.72 miles for casual competitors to 58.5 miles for ultimate athletes.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Miami County Vistors' & Convention Bureau

If you grew up in the 90s and 00s--before smartphones were invented or at least became ubiquitous and we weren't online all of the time--there was a different vibe to life. I was an 80s kid, so I didn't have most of the shared experiences in this film directly. But I was definitely aware of them going on.

Filmmaker Nate Milton's short film Viewfinder is "a kaleidoscope of memories to remind us that we’re all living different facets of the same experience." The directing is perfect, as is the accompanying music by Buck St. Thomas that adds to the sense of timelessness.

-via Laughing Squid

The Holy Grail is a term referring to the cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper before his arrest, trial, and execution. The term is more familiar to most people now as a metaphor for anything important yet unobtainable, that if it were ever found would change everything. That we even have a term for the cup is a testament to its value as a religious relic. But far from being unobtainable, there are Holy Grails in around 200 cathedrals in Europe alone, with more in the Middle East and elsewhere.

According to the canonical Bible, Jesus did not own the cup. The room for the Passover feast was donated or rented from a Jerusalem resident, and the dishes would have been reused and replaced as needed. A medieval story says Joseph of Arimathea retrieved the cup, but contemporary accounts only mention him as taking responsibility for interring Jesus' body. In any case, interest in the grail only arose hundreds of years later, as Christianity spread through Europe. Recovering the grail was a big part of the Crusades, and Middle Eastern entrepreneurs were happy to help fulfill their quests for a price. Read about the medieval obsession with the Holy Grail and the many relics that are still venerated today at CNN. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Johannes Adam Simon Oertel)

In the US, we have a presidential election every four years, plus elections for senators every six years and congressional elections every two years. The time between is spent campaigning, and there's nothing we can do about it. In the UK, they decide to have an election at random times for one reason or another, and a couple of weeks later, they vote. They don't even have political TV ads! And that's before even getting into the subject of campaign financing.

Laurence Brown grew up with the UK system, but has lived in the US for 16 years now. Having obtained his citizenship, this year will be his first vote in a presidential election. Therefore, without giving a hint as to his political leanings, he tries to explain the difference between the way elections work in the UK and in the US. The upshot is that US elections are exhausting, and UK elections are not. But you already knew that. There's a 90-second skippable ad at 1:55.

Star Trek, The Original Series had a memorable episode in 1967 titled "Space Seed" in which Ricardo Montalbán played Khan, a genetically-superior human from the 20th century. By the end of the episode, Khan, the villain, was exiled to planet Ceti Alpha V. The character was resurrected in the 1982 movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Khan proved so popular that he also was in Star Trek Into Darkness in 2013, although that was set in an alternate universe, with Khan re-cast since Ricardo Montalbán died in 2009.  

But Star Trek fans are still drawn to the character. What happened to Khan during those years as an exile on Ceti Alpha V? Nicholas Meyer, who directed The Wrath of Khan, sets out to answer that question in an upcoming podcast series titled Ceti Alpha V. The podcast series will explain how Khan went from an exile on a healthy planet to a desperate and cutthroat survivalist before returning to seek revenge on Captain Kirk. The story has been in the works for years, and now Meyer says it's in the casting stage. Read what we know about the podcast and the story at Inverse.

Back in 1974, the magazine Saturday Review brought together twenty of the era's experts to predict what the world would be like 50 years into the future. Now that 2024 is here, we can see how those predictions stand up. Several notable thinkers saw that the world would have interconnected computers, a system that would allow us to watch TV, read books, keep up with the news, shop, pay bills, work remotely, and even make video calls. One assumed that we would print out the news to read like we would a newspaper. None mentioned the astonishing miniaturization of computers. Still, pretty good predictions. Several also predicted the use of alternative energy sources, including an electric vehicle that would walk on legs so that roads would not be necessary.

Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon only five years earlier. He predicted extensive travel to the lunar surface, with people working in factories there. Wernher von Braun envisioned space flight with lavish first class airline service, which wildly missed the devolution of airline travel. One visionary thought a woman might be a US president by 2024, while another said maybe by 2074. Read up on how the best and brightest of 1974 saw the future and how right or wrong they were at The New Stack. -via Kottke

This is not such much of a war as it is a friendly competition- on the sports field, meaning that everyone takes it too seriously. People who try to explain history, culture, and economics like to compare people born in different eras as stereotypes, but it's really hard to pigeonhole millions at a time. In this game, or tournament, it's the Boomers vs. the Millennials vs. Gen Z. What about Generation X? As usual, no one is paying any attention to them. Foil Arms and Hog do the play-by-play with every stereotype possible making a play. The thing is, we are too busy trying to catch all the jokes to comprehend that we don't even know what sport this is. I assumed it was a ball game, with each side taking territory on the field, but the reference to "battle royale" at the beginning and "weapons" at some point implies that it's a down and out fight. A good time was had by all.

What was the original purpose of this recessed cabinet 5' up the wall in my dining room?
byu/Dry-Philosopher-8633 inOldhouses

Redditor Dry-Philosopher-8633 asked about this strange little home feature on the subreddit Old Houses. It's a recess in the wall with a door. They store things in it, but what was its original purpose? There were plenty of guesses, including the original fuse box, laundry chute, milk or ice door, phone nook, or a kitchen pass-through (the kitchen is on the other side). But it's five feet up from the floor! Well, maybe it was a safe, a liquor cabinet, or a gun cabinet, too high for children to reach. There were also some really imaginative joke guesses, like where the gnome lives, and where you leave your urine sample.

But when we learned that there is a chimney behind the recess, the original purpose became clear. This was where a stove pipe was attached to the chimney so it could vent to the outside. My house has a shelf where the water heater vents into a chimney, and the main chimney has two shelves that could have been original vents for something or other, but they are in the basement and don't need to be prettied up. So now we know. These days, it's just a perfect place to keep things away from the children.  

Scientists Uncovered a Blow From the Past: 17th Century Brains Contained Cocaine https://t.co/4JhdOiJEPz

— Popular Mechanics (@PopMech) August 22, 2024

There are around 200 species of Erythroxylum plants that produce cocaine, all native to South America. Chilean mummies that go back as far as 3,000 years have been found to contain traces of cocaine, but use of the drug elsewhere didn't become common until coca was synthesized into cocaine hydrochloride salts in the 19th century. Conquistadors brought coca to Europe, but its spread has not been well documented. A new report in the the Journal of Archaeological Science tells of a team that analyzed the preserved brains of cadavers interred in a crypt in Milan, Italy, and found cocaine. These people had been buried on the grounds of the Ospedale Maggiore, a 17th-century hospital.

The researchers had previously found evidence of opium in the same crypt, implying that the hospital had used both drugs, one from Asia and the other from South America. However, cocaine did not appear on the hospital's pharmacy list, which could mean that the cocaine was used recreationally. Read about this discovery at Popular Mechanics.  -via Damn Interesting

Henry Talmage Elrod had a troubled childhood, both of his own doing and through bad luck. He had to drop out of college when his father died, so he joined the Marine Corps in 1927. Elrod learned to fly, but had a problem with testing. He got so nervous under supervision that he flunked his pilot's test, so badly that he wasn't given another chance until a new commander was assigned. Even then he had to take the classes and training all over again. Elrod passed the test this time, just barely.

Without the pressure of testing, Elrod was a great pilot. He was promoted to Captain, and was transferred to Hawaii in 1940. He and his commander led a team of 10 other pilots flying Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat fighter planes to Wake Island, about halfway between Hawaii and Japan. That was on December 4, 1941. Four days later, Wake Island was attacked by Japan, just a day after the Pearl Harbor attack. The enemy destroyed eight of the 12 planes and killed most of the personnel. The Japanese returned on both December 10th and 11th, but this time Elrod gave them his all. Read about the early World War II battles that left Elrod with the permanent nickname "Hammerin' Hank" at Military History Now. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: US Navy)

Godzilla Minus One but it’s Cookie Monster. pic.twitter.com/K9Pur6kKZl

— Matthew Highton (@MattHighton) August 22, 2024

The historical drama Godzilla Minus One recounts the 1945-1947 struggle of postwar Japan against Godzilla. With very few military forces available let alone permitted, a handful of sailors gallantly stood between the monster, created as a result of US atomic testing, and the people of Japan.

The most famous scene in the film shows the climactic battle as Godzilla chases a decrepit minesweeper. This alternate version by filmmaker Matthew Highton replaces Godzilla with the more fearsome Cookie Monster.

You may recall previous work of Highton's that we have featured, such as his recreation of The Simpsons introduction and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer introduction with stock footage.

-via John A Konrad V