Somehow, I was under the impression that the entire city of Pompeii had been excavated from under the ash, rock, and lava of the 79 AD eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Not so. A new project to extend the excavation has uncovered its first victim of the volcano, and his fate appears to foreshadow that of a certain coyote in a Looney Tunes cartoon.           

Initial observations would appear to indicate that the individual survived the first eruptive phase of the volcano, and subsequently sought salvation along the alley now covered in a thick layer of lapilli. The body was found at the height of the first floor of the adjacent building, and thus above the lapilli layer. Here he was struck by the dense pyroclastic flow which threw him back.

A formidable stone block (perhaps a door jamb), violently thrown by the volcanic cloud, collided with his upper body, crushing the highest part of the thorax and yet-to-be-identified head, which lie at a lower height of the lower limbs, and probably under the stone block.

The skeleton is identified as that of a male, over 30 years of age, with a bone disease that would have impeded his escape. Read more about the discovery at Parco Arceologico Di Pompei.  -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Pompeii - Parco Archeologico)

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The annual Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling in Gloucestershire, England, was this past weekend. People who have lost their minds chase a rolling wheel of cheese down a hill. The hill is a lot steeper than you'd think from the camera angle, but when people start running, you'll get an idea. They really aren't so much running as falling, and there were quite a few injuries: cuts, bruises, and at least one dislocated shoulder. There's also a video featuring closeups of certain participants set to a musical soundtrack here. The competition is so dangerous that the event no longer has an official governing body or sponsors. -via Tastefully Offensive

Twitter has a link that you can use to go back and see what your feed would have looked like ten years ago if you followed all the same accounts you do now. Try it here. I thought it was a silly idea until I actually read through the resulting feed. Here's what I noticed.

1. There are no pictures.
2. There are no politics, except from the 2008 presidential candidates themselves, and those were just announcing their next campaign stops.   
3. There are no long nested threads. If someone had more to say, they linked to their website.
4. Sadly, many of those links went to blogs that I once read daily, but are no longer active.

And the subjects! People were lamenting how expensive a Wii is. Britney Spears was contemplating a comeback. Gas was $4 a gallon. The Phoenix Mars lander was about to touch down. Digg had a new comment system. Times have changed. Andy Baio has some tips on how to maximize the process and change the date, so you can relive those Twitter moments from anytime since you joined. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image source: reddit)

In most restaurants, you get a menu that tells you the name of the dishes or meals and how much each costs. If you're lucky, you get a description. But there are some places that get really creative to convey more information. The cocktail menu above is arranged like a scatterplot, so you can see how relatively strong and creative the drinks are. The menu below is a Venn diagram with all the possible breakfast sandwich combinations and prices.   

(Image source: reddit)

Other menus have ranked charts for the spiciness, or size, or temperature of the offerings. Some are weird, like the beer board with prices that change due to supply and demand, and others are just fun. See a roundup of creative restaurant menus at Buzzfeed.

Macaroni and cheese has been an American (and Canadian) staple since Thomas Jefferson regaled the recipe he encountered in France. It expanded to nearly all American tables because it was simple, delicious, and most of all, cheap. After all, cheese itself was invented as a survival food to make milk last longer when there was nothing else to eat.   

Although processed cheese was invented in Switzerland, big American cheese producers—as part of our factory-scale, get-big-or-get-out philosophy of food production—bought into processed cheese so heavily that the very definition of “American cheese” has come to be a processed product. Many Americans may never have had a macaroni and cheese made with real cheese, and many who grew up on mac and cheese may never have had a version that wasn’t made with a powdered mix. While the most popular brand of boxed mac only just recently quietly removed artificial colors and preservatives from their “cheese sauce,” it seems, from a traditional roux-making perspective, still far removed from the original recipe.

Macaroni and cheese has been served as long as there has been a United States of America, but in a 20th-century economy driven by convenience packaging and industrialization, it was elevated to an ideal American food: Pasta and processed cheese are very cheap to make and easy to ship and store, and they certainly fill up a belly. It’s no wonder a hot gooey Velveeta mac and cheese tastes like a winner to so many Americans, even those attending a fancy contest in San Francisco.

The contest the author refers to is one in which the popular vote went to a chef whose recipe for macaroni and cheese included Velveeta, causing a scandal among the gourmet judges. Read about how Americans fell in love with macaroni and cheese at Smithsonian.

Hacking into new technology for nefarious reasons isn't exactly new. Only the technology is new. People scheming to profit from someone else's system is as old as time. Such a scheme befell France's government communication system in 1834, which amounted to an old-fashioned game of telephone, but was a great innovation for the time -long before actual telephones.   

The world’s first national data network was constructed in France during the 1790s. It was a mechanical telegraph system, consisting of chains of towers, each of which had a system of movable wooden arms on top. Different configurations of these arms corresponded to letters, numbers and other characters. Operators in each tower would adjust the arms to match the configuration of an adjacent tower, observed through a telescope, causing sequences of characters to ripple along the line. Messages could now be sent much faster than letters, whizzing from one end of France to the other in minutes. The network was reserved for government use but in 1834 two bankers, François and Joseph Blanc, devised a way to subvert it to their own ends.

The plan was genius: they conspired to add in a code that they could intercept ahead of their competitors in order to manipulate the market. The Blancs were groundbreakers, in that communications security was a completely new concept and there was no law yet against what they did. Read how they did it at 1843 Magazine. -via Boing Boing

It started with a bit of a brag by Saguaro National Park in Arizona as they posted the picture above at Instagram with the caption "Ummm, what?! Did you know @saguaronationalpark has the best sunsets in the world?" It's certainly a lovely sunset, but in response, Joshua Tree National Park had to post their sunset.


And a battle was born. Other national parks got involved, and then visitors joined in to show off their best pictures of national park sunsets.





You can see the pictures, which are still coming in, with the hashtag #parksunsetwars. -via Nag on the Lake

Hero climbs up outside of Paris building to save child dangling from balcony. This guy Peter Parker as in Spiderman! Humanity still exists.

Mamoudou Gassama (22 years old from Mali) scaled 4 storeys in 30 seconds to save child dangling. Good job brother, wakanda forever! pic.twitter.com/jJavpXDAGu

— ᵈᵉʷᵃ ᵏˡᵃˢᶤᵏ ᵃˡᵉˣᵃᶰᵈᵉʳ (@Dewa_Klasik) May 28, 2018

On the fifth floor of an apartment building on the outskirts of Paris, a 4-year-old boy had fallen from the balcony railing, and was hanging on by his hands. People on the street heard him crying and 22-year-old Mamoudou Gassama instantly sprang into action. He didn't even pause to put his Spider-Man costume on, but climbed all four floors in 30 seconds to lift the child to safety.

"I just climbed up and thank God, God helped me. The more I climbed the more I had the courage to climb up higher, that's it," he added.

He said that the boy was crying when he hauled him to safety and had also suffered an injured foot.

Firefighters arrived to find the child had already been rescued.

"Luckily, there was someone who was physically fit and who had the courage to go and get the child," a spokesperson said.

French President Emmanuel Macron later met with Gassama, an undocumented immigrant from Mali, and said he would be made a naturalized French citizen. -via reddit

The 442nd Infantry Regiment was formed in 1943, and in a little more than two years became the most decorated unit in US history. During World War II, about 14,000 men served in the regiment and earned 9,486 Purple Hearts, 21 Medals of Honor, and numerous other medals and citations. Yet the 442nd was only formed after two years of struggle, because the US military didn't want soldiers of Japanese ancestry in their ranks.  

In the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast and Arizona were interned under Executive Order 9066; about two-thirds were U.S. citizens. Americans of Japanese ancestry were also reclassified as “enemy aliens” and were no longer allowed to join the military. Despite the fact that Japanese-Americans had served in the military for decades, many already-enlisted troops were discharged from service. The government even seized items like cameras or radios from Japanese-Americans, in case they might use them to spy.

The ousted troops and other young Nisei men wanted to help the war effort, and started from the bottom to work their way up into military service. Mental Floss has the story of how they did that, and the historic feats of bravery the 442nd performed in Europe once they were allowed to fight. 

The Women's Army Corps was founded in 1942 to fill non-combat positions in order to free up men to go to the front lines in World War II. It soon became clear that the brass preparing for women soldiers did not understand women. For example, they stockpiled smelling salts for those who fainted during vaccinations, which was unnecessary, but fed the new recruits a standard army ration of nearly 4,000 calories a day. That led to the peculiar condition of women gaining weight during basic training, and the harassment from male soldiers that followed. It took a while for real change, so the WACs took it upon themselves to correct the menu.  

The master menu had been written for men: Women found it heavy, fatty, and overly sweet. To counteract this, women mess officers bartered with the men’s barracks next door to swap out undesirables for things women wanted to eat. Pastry, lard, and syrup, for instance, might be swapped out for fresh fruit and vegetables. “For the first years of the war, adjustment was attempted on a local level,” writes Treadwell, “with the WAC mess sergeant ordinarily adept at swapping mayonnaise for salad oil, potatoes for lettuce, and large quantities of pork for small steaks.”

There were other hiccups, such as women wrestling with equipment designed for the average sized man and the unavailability of hair stylists to help women conform to uniform rules. Read about the rough beginning of the Women's Army Corps at Atlas Obscura.

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Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was founded as a secret nuclear research facility for the Manhattan Project. My mother's family lived in East Tennessee already, and my grandfather got a job as a day laborer in Oak Ridge. He didn't ask questions, because people who asked a lot of questions didn't last long there. -via Digg

If you're interested in the history of Oak Ridge, you might want to read the story of John Hendrix, a mystic from East Tennessee who died in 1915. The story is not quite as believable as the video above, but it is interesting.              

A young unknown writer named Joanne Rowling got a book deal in 1997 that started a phenomenon. When Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published, Rowling already had the entire universe set and a grand arc of plots for all the books ready. That meant serious documentation, albeit in cursive handwriting. Harry Potter fans will enjoy a look into the mind of JK Rowling as she was plotting out the adventures of the young wizard over twenty years ago. A collection at Flashbak includes her notes, charts, synopsis, and more from the days of constructing the stories which eventually spanned seven books and eight films. -Thanks WTM!  

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In one of the goofiest Simon's Cat videos yet, the cat encounters a crow. Crows are smart, and this one gets a real kick out of tormenting the cat for laughs. The cat isn't going to take that lying down. There's a bit of back and forth to determine who will have the last laugh. -via Tastefully Offensive

Several 19th century European monarchs married young women who were renowned for their beauty. As they took their place as wives of world leaders, they were all aware of the impression they made upon the public and worked hard to keep up appearances. Empress Eugénie, wife of Napolean III, wasn't at all vain, but was mindful that her choice of dress influenced an entire fashion industry. Empress Elisabeth, wife of Franz Josef, on the other hand, set aside an entire day to wash her hair, and spent three hours daily having it dressed. It wasn't wasted time, though, as she took lessons while her hair was tended to. Princess Alexandra of Denmark (pictured), who became the Queen consort of the United Kingdom as the wife of Edward VII, made the deepest impression of all on her subjects.

Princess Alexandra’s effect on fashion was so profound women even copied what some people might have considered to be a drawback. It was her limp. She acquired it in 1867 after suffering an illness that “threatened to contract her leg and make her a cripple.”[8] Thus, whenever she appeared in public she used a walking stick and exhibited a slight limp. Her infirmity was soon copied by “distinguished people, and the ‘Alexandra limp’ was adopted by various members of fashionable society!”[9]

Although fashion conscious women might have copied the Princess’s limp, perhaps, the most prized beauty secret of the Princess Alexandra was her goodness.     

Alexandra’s most lasting legacy was the choker necklace, which she used to cover a scar. A Google image search shows that she wore jewelry to cover her neck the rest of her life. Read about all three women and their beauty regimens at Geri Walton's blog. -via Strange Company

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The format of a nature documentary works pretty well with the wildest species in the world -the human. In a video from Viva Dirt League, the goal is made perfectly clear with narration by a David Attenborough soundalike. However, not all mating rituals are successful, especially when the participants are inexperienced and awkward. The survival of the species depends on whether they learn from their mistakes. -via Laughing Squid