In the 19th century, before many urban areas lacked recreation areas, many people chose to have picnics, and other celebrations, in local cemeteries.
Unfortunately historians say one of the reason picnicking in cemeteries became so popular is because of epidemics like yellow fever racing across the country. Death was a constant to many families, and in cemeteries people could break bread, and "speak", with their family members.
Read more about this strange part of American History on Atlas Obscura.
Wars have been fought for a lot of dumb reasons, but when political, religious, or ethnic tensions are inflamed, it only takes a spark to light a conflagration. In medieval Italy, all those tensions were sprung into war by a bucket. To be honest, the two regions were already fighting, but the bucket incident blew everything up, drawing thousands of fighters to their deaths in the battle of Zappolino. It was called the War of the Bucket. Be aware that the last minute of this video is an ad, so it's not as long as it seems. -via Digg
Visually, the Surf Lakes concentric wave device is immediately striking ... Its rustic, creaking and noisy activations reminded this reporter of a wild theme park ride, complete with huffing, hissing and spluttering condensate explosions that served both to illustrate the immense pressures required to lift the 1400-ton “plunger” and the power and engineering feats that have occurred beyond the practical imagination of conceptualist and Surf Lakes Founder, Arron Trevis.
Redditor DraftDraw posted this picture, possibly taken during New York Comic Con, featuring two versions of the same comic book superhero. There's a lot going on here. First, there's the contrast between the Golden Age Aquaman from the comic books and the Jason Momoa movie version. Mera seems either shocked, intrigued, or attracted. Maybe it's the dolphins, or the sense of fun. The staging is obviously that of the Distracted Boyfriend meme, gender-swapped for your pleasure. That makes it resemble the You vs. The Guy She Told You Not to Worry About meme. A good time was had by all.
The Avoca Museum in Altavista, Virginia, sits on what was once the property of Colonel Charles Lynch. In 2005, a graveyard was discovered in the grounds. Now known as the Enslaved Persons Cemetery, it holds at least 32 graves, which were once marked by local stones without inscriptions. The stones were still there, but had been moved from the graves. Museum director Michael Hudson is committed to preserving and honoring the cemetery.
In order to find the exact location of the bodies beneath Avoca’s grounds, to illuminate the past for the broader Lynchburg community, a geolocation radar tool was used to detect the depth of compromised soil (unsurprisingly, usually six to seven feet under). This meant the graves didn’t have to be dug up, an option Hudson says was out of the question. Other general clues that it was a cemetery included the irregularly shaped rocks, a trend found in slave cemeteries across several states, which tended to be naturally occurring field stones like marble and granite found in the vicinity of the slave holder’s house.
At Avoca, Hudson says, “Some of them are in the shape of a human eye, kind of like an oval with points on the end.” According to local African-American families, growing up they were told that the purpose of this rock shape was to symbolize that the eyes of the dead watch over the living. The deliberate patterns in these rocks was a black mortuary tradition usually marking adult graves. Children’s graves were demarcated by a stone even more cherished; in some family circles, pink quartz indicated a child’s grave. At Avoca in particular, two quartz markers were uncovered, visibly unchanged from their natural state. “The graves we have that are covered with pink quartz, two of those graves are short. [They’re] tiny and little graves,” Hudson says.
The cemetery at Avoca is more or less like many other cemeteries of enslaved people that are still being discovered across the South. Read more about them at Atlas Obscura.
A cat strutted her stuff on the catwalk during a fashion show in Istanbul. Watch her graceful strides as she shows off a classic fur coat. Granted, she gets distracted by the models passing by, and has to stop for sudden grooming needs, but that's what you'd expect from a feline fashionista. -via Tastefully Offensive
Mad inventor Colin Furze doesn't let a little bit of chilly rain stop him. Instead, he invented a gas heated umbrella: a stainless steel canopy with built-in a patio heater.
Previously on Neatorama: More mad inventions of Colin Furze.
A post shared by Craig Alan Studio (@craigalanstudio) on Oct 3, 2018 at 12:37pm PDT
Painter Craig Alan creates amazing paintings of people, made from lots of tiny people. As you can see in this Joker painting, Alan puts in a LOT of detailed work.
Take a look at more of Alan's "Populus" series of artwork over at his Instagram.
This horse will have the best costume on Halloween for sure!
Michael Corrie of Mike's Tiny Shop created this amazing AT-AT Walker costume for a Clydesdale named Moana.
Corrie said that he was approached by Moana's owner, Brianna Dickmon-Fry, about the project:
"About eight months ago, she asked if I could make this costume, as I've been making prop replicas and costumes for about five years," Corrie says. He agreed, "not realizing what it took to costume a 2,000-pound Clydesdale.
He posted his work on Facebook. While many praised his effort, several wonder whether doing such a thing was animal cruelty.
"Best thing about draft horses," Mike writes, "They (do) not care. Her comfort and safety were paramount in all of this. Early on, when we tested the components ... if she had not liked them we would have abandoned the project."
Well, wonder no more: this short clip shows you how a clever contraption called a Gabion machine makes the hexagonal net. Watch closely as the wire-feeding cylinders split in half.
Why do we get a thrill out of horror films? And what's the deal with poisoned trick-or-treat candy? Those are a couple of the subjects in the Halloween edition of the Mental Floss show Scatterbrained. You'll also hear about a scientist who did research on trick-or-treaters, the inspirations for Stephen King novels, and a 1992 British TV hoax that terrified the audience.
A father who is totally embracing modern technology discovers that Google Home had saved a year's worth of data, including his 5-year-old son's questions. He is charmed by his son's curiosity about the world, and appreciates the funny parts.
Rowan's questions are adorable. On the other hand, it's a bit creepy to think that all these commands to an app are recorded for someone else to find, and for Google to analyze and market.
My children came to me with incessant questions about the world throughout their childhoods, which I tried my best to answer, even if I had to look it up. As a result, they thought I was the repository of all the world's wisdom. They know better now, but I wouldn't trade that experience for all the chocolate. -via Laughing Squid
Anyone growing up in the Pittsburgh area heard about the monster of Beaver County, Charlie No-Face, eventually.
Charlie was actually a man named Ray, who had been seriously injured by electricity as a child. And because of his serious injuries he developed a habit of walking along Route 351 in Pennsylvania at night, so that he could be outside in the world without being seen. But occasionally people did see him, and that’s how the legend was formed.
Kids at the time drove around hoping to see Charlie No-Face, and some did, including author Wil Fulton's father. He discovered that Ray was just a nice guy who enjoyed a good beer, and loved to smoke. The only thing Wils father could say, “is that he was sorry he was ever scared of the man in the first place.”
According to documentarian Tisha York he earned the “green man” moniker from something a bit more gruesome than working at a power plant, "His nose was basically an open wound his entire life," she said. "It would get infected quite often and that would make it turn green."
When you think of the phenomenal popularity of pets dressed in Halloween costumes, you can thank internet memes, iPhones, Instagram, Amazon, and Etsy. They make it easy to find the most clever costumes and share them with everyone. But the fun of seeing animals dressed in clothing goes much further back. We know that Harry Whittier Frees made a living dressing up cats 100 years ago, because his photographs are still around. The practice of dressing up pets is still much older.
During the excavation of the tomb of King Cuo of Zhongshan, who was king of China from 327 to 309 BC, archeologists found two large dogs buried in jeweled collars. The greyhound of Louis XI, king of France from 1423 to 1483, wore a red velvet collar with 20 pearls and 11 rubies, and Louis’s successor, Charles VIII, had robes made for his dog and marmot, according to Medieval Pets. Queen Victoria dressed her dog in a “scarlet jacket and blue trousers,” as she wrote in her diaries, right around the time that dog couture shops became a thing in Paris.
The normal life cycle of a salmon is to swim upriver and spawn right before they die. That leaves a lot of dead salmon in popular spawning areas. In the late 1980s, university students began studying the salmon population at Hansen Creek in Alaska. They counted and measured the dead salmon, and then by protocol, they flung the carcasses up onto the north-facing bank of the stream, in order to prevent the same fish from being counted again. The reason the protocol is to throw all the fish to one side of the stream and not the other was a long-term experiment in forest growth. Now the results are in.
Over the past 20 years, researchers across the Northwest have shown that salmon play an essential role in forests: Trees next to salmon-bearing streams appear to grow better than their salmon-deprived counterparts, and the nutrients salmon bring from the ocean make their way into the needles and wood of trees. But this experiment, described in a recently published paper, led by Tom Quinn, a professor in the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences at the University of Washington, proves a basic fact: More salmon means faster growing trees.
We learned in grade school that Native Americans taught the Pilgrims to plant corn with a dead fish for fertilizer. That method still works today, even better than fertilizers that contain the same plant nutrients.
Yes, dead fish or fish guts present a problem in shipping and storage for agriculture or gardening, but the research highlights the importance of maintaining a population of wild salmon as well as forest creatures, such as bears, who transport those fish inland. -via reddit
