Genesis tour manager Regis Boff recalls a stage stunt from the mid-70s that will remind you of something out of Spinal Tap. It no doubt contributed to the inspiration behind the film. Here's what was supposed to happen:

A standard early-to-mid-70s Genesis show finished with Peter Gabriel dressed in his “Magog” outfit: a long velvet black cape and a giant triangular headpiece. Towards the climax of the show, Peter would throw off his hat and cape to reveal himself in a silver jumpsuit. We made him momentarily invisible by detonating controlled explosions that came from metal pods at the front of the stage. The audience was blinded and dazed so it made for an excellent finish. We filled these canisters with a martini of flash and gunpowder that would be criminally outlawed today, whereas back then it was quietly banned. We never told anyone we were going to do it. One of our roadies filled them a couple of hours before the show and set them off just at the right moment.

Someone had the inspiration to “fly” Peter into the air while the audience was blinded (it was most likely Peter himself). He’d be hoisted fifteen feet into the air by nearly invisible thin metal wires and finish the song floating in a silver jumpsuit, as the curtain closed. End of show. Nice. He’d also be concealed by the smoke machines and the intense fog that bubbled up from stage hands dumping huge blocks of dry ice into buckets of water. If the prevailing winds permitted, this vapor would fill the entire stage.

What could possibly go wrong? Oh, so many things, most of them unforeseen. The story of how it all went horribly wrong one night "either in Cleveland or Berlin" is a comedy of errors that will paint an unforgettable picture in your mind. -via Nag on the Lake
 
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One thing we all know about dogs is that they're all good dogs. This episode of Scatterbrained from Mental Floss has a lot of neat stuff about dogs, starting with trivia. Then learn how bloodhounds work, how a breed gets into the American Kennel Club, the origins of the Puppy Bowl, and research on dogs' ability to smell human emotions. No, it's not everything there is to know about dogs, but the entire show is about dogs, so it's all about dogs. 

You know when you get a press release to cover a Guinness world record attempt for tallest stack of waffles & expect it to be some big commercial thing & then it's just a guy's house? This is SO MUCH BETTER. Follow along, #Denver! Things might get weird! pic.twitter.com/xcxqZCMJZM

— Elizabeth Hernandez (@ehernandez) May 26, 2018

Today was a momentous day in Denver. Spencer McCullough and Cory Trimm invited all their friends and a few professionals to attempt the Guinness World Record for waffle stacking. Elizabeth Hernandez of the Denver Post was dispatched to cover the event. She is preparing a proper article for the Post, but first posted a Twitter thread as the event unfolded.

Land surveyor Dustin Hoaglin laughed when he heard about his services requested for a waffle record stack measurement but then he figured he had a bunch of fam in town for his son's graduation & decided it sounded GREAT to do this

— Elizabeth Hernandez (@ehernandez) May 26, 2018

The previous record was 51 centimeters. Guinness sent a 40-page document with their rules for waffle-stacking, including a long and precise definition of "waffle." Friends flew in from out of town, and total strangers joined the fun. Hernandez' enthusiasm grew as time went along, and you have to wonder how grim her other assignments are.

THE RECORD IS BROKEN THE RECORD IS BROKEN I REPEAT HISTORY HAS BEEN MADE, THIS IS THE TALLEST STACK OF WAFFLES EVER RECORDED *IN THE WORLD* (without official confirmation from Guinness but with official confirmation from a, uh, measuring tape)

— Elizabeth Hernandez (@ehernandez) May 26, 2018

 
The stack was 67 centimeters! You can witness the drama unfold in her Twitter thread.  

-via Metafilter

Update: Here's a threadreader version if you prefer that to Twitter, and the Denver Post story has been published.

The expected dress of a proper women in antebellum America was hot, uncomfortable, and impractical. The preferred silhouette required a cinched waist, multiple petticoats, and a floor-length skirt. All that fabric was dangerous for a working woman, and even upper-class housewives had trouble maneuvering. Imagine climbing stairs with a lamp in one hand, a baby in the other arm, and trying not to trip over your skirt. That's where bloomers came in. But they were not invented for Amelia Bloomer -they were just named for her.  

An editor of the Seneca County Courier had one idea: maybe women could avoid the discomfort and dangers of their attire by switching to “Turkish pantaloons and a skirt reaching a little below the knee.”

The editorial, written in February 1851 by a man who had previously opposed the women’s suffrage movement and the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, drew the attention of one feminist. Amelia Bloomer was herself an editor of the first women’s newspaper, The Lily. She used her paper to gently upbraid the Seneca County Courier writer for supporting dress reform, but not women’s rights.

At almost exactly the same time, Bloomer’s neighbor, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, received a visit from her cousin, Elizabeth Smith Miller—who was wearing the very outfit Bloomer had just been discussing in the press. Alternately called “Turkish trousers” or “pantaloons,” the outfit combined knee-length skirts with loose pants. Stanton exclaimed over the style and made herself up in the same way. Bloomer wasn’t far behind, feeling that it was her duty to do so, as she’d engaged in the question of women’s dress in the media, and announced her decision to her readers in the April 1851 edition of The Lily.

The practical bloomer outfit became a sensation, but didn't last long. Amelia Bloomer's suspicion that they were a distraction from more important battles was precient. Read about the rise and fall of bloomers at Smithsonian. -via Strange Company

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KLAS-TV in Las Vegas was doing a live report from Lake Las Vegas. Photojournalist Chris Benka was walking along the dock, following the reporter's boat, and wasn't watching his feet. Luckily, the water wasn't all that deep. The camera is okay! Oh, yeah, he's okay, too. In fact, he kept on rolling that live footage. -via Digg

As coffee made its way out of Ethiopia to the rest of the world, it was an insanely controversial drink. The fact that people loved and enjoyed it was enough to brand it as sinful. Ottoman Sultan Murad IV took note of the coffee's popularity and set out to destroy the coffeehouses of Istanbul in 1633. Being caught drinking coffee in public would get you beaten on the first offense, a second offensive meant death.

Odd though it may sound, Murad IV was neither the first nor last person to crack down on coffee drinking; he was just arguably the most brutal and successful in his efforts. Between the early 16th and late 18th centuries, a host of religious influencers and secular leaders, many but hardly all in the Ottoman Empire, took a crack at suppressing the black brew.

Few of them did so because they thought coffee’s mild mind-altering effects meant it was an objectionable narcotic (a common assumption). Instead most, including Murad IV, seemed to believe that coffee shops could erode social norms, encourage dangerous thoughts or speech, and even directly foment seditious plots. In the modern world, where Starbucks is ubiquitous and innocuous, this sounds absurd. But Murad IV did have reason to fear coffee culture.

The fear had to do with the nature of the coffeehouse. Patrons had to wait for the coffee to brew, and then sip slowly because it was hot and bitter. And since it was fairly inexpensive, both wealthy and poor citizens gathered to drink it, and discussed the news of the day while they waited. Those discussions might lead to plots against Murad IV, as he was a particularly brutal ruler. Yet Murad himself enjoyed an occasional cup. Read about the despotic ruler and the political dangers of coffee at Atlas Obscura.   

Brianna Doyle and Casey Walko were planning to get married before their baby came, and already had a license, but then Doyle went into labor early. At New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, the couple desperately searched for someone to solemnize their vows before the baby was born. Sushma Dwivedi volunteered that she was ordained in the Universal Life Church, and although she had never performed a marriage ceremony, she was willing to do it. But Dwivedi was a patient in the maternity ward -she was in labor herself!   

There was just one problem. Dwivedi had just gotten an epidural and couldn't move at all from the waist down.

"My legs were jelly by this point," she said.

"It was a little bit of a Jabba the Hut moment where they took the automatic bed ... and sort of propped that up so that I could sit and officiate, and they came to me in my room."

With the officiant in bed, Doyle and Walko were married. The nurses had put together a bouquet and fixed Doyle's hair. Both women gave birth to healthy babies within a few hours. The ceremony is on video at CBC Radio. -via Metafilter 

(Image courtesy of Sushma Dwivedi Jindal)

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Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, Delhi's biggest Sikh temple, welcomes everyone, no matter their station or religion, for a meal. The kitchen is open 24 hours a day, and is supplied and staffed by volunteers. Chapatis, dal soup, potatoes, and more, all for around 10,000 people every day. Anyone who visits can volunteer for simple jobs to help out with the production if they want to. Besides a temple and kitchen, the complex also houses a school, hospital, hotel, and a library. -via reddit

Joonas Suotamo is a former basketball player from Finland. He took over the role of Chewbacca in the Star Wars movies from Peter Mayhew, who made the Wookiee what he is. Suotamo is very cognizant of Mayhew's creation, and takes pains to continue his legacy seamlessly, knowing that Mayhew has his eye on him.   

But with time and creativity, Suotamo has mastered the character’s every move, adding layers to an already beloved and familiar face, particularly in The Last Jedi and Solo. It’s almost jarring to watch one film after the other, taking in the heartbreak in Chewbacca’s eyes when Luke Skywalker asks, “Where’s Han?” and then rewinding to the very day that the iconic duo first met.

For Suotamo, who has played the character opposite the original Han Solo, Harrison Ford, and newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, following that narrative has been an interesting experience. “In this movie, Chewbacca doesn’t really know Han; he’s just getting to know him,” said Suotamo. “So it was interesting to play him in a way that sort of places Chewbacca in this space where he has to decide what he’s going to do with his life...whether this reckless scoundrel is the partner for him.”

Suotamo talks about that temporal shift, plus what it's really like to wear the big hairy suit, the cool special effects in Solo, and the thrill of piloting the Millennium Falcon in an interview at Den of Geek.  

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I watched this video and thought about the people who say they've been abducted by aliens. You know these sheep are going to tell tales like that the rest of their lives, and none of the other sheep will believe them. This relocation project helped to bring the population of North American bighorn sheep from 100 to 600 in recent years. It's one of 5 Heartwarming Stories That Are Also Totally Hilarious at Cracked. In fact, the bighorn sheep were just a small part of the story about how helicopters are the funniest way to transport animals.

An Amazon Alexa home assistant recorded a conversation taking place in the room and then sent it to a third party. There were no orders for it to do so. Danielle, in Portland, says she received a call from one of her husband's employees in Seattle, who told her that their Alexa device had been hacked.

"We unplugged all of them and he proceeded to tell us that he had received audio files of recordings from inside our house," she said. "At first, my husband was, like, 'no you didn't!' And the (recipient of the message) said 'You sat there talking about hardwood floors.' And we said, 'oh gosh, you really did hear us.'"

Danielle listened to the conversation when it was sent back to her, and she couldn't believe someone 176 miles away heard it too.

"I felt invaded," she said. "A total privacy invasion. Immediately I said, 'I'm never plugging that device in again, because I can't trust it.'"

An Amazon technician confirmed that Alexa had done exactly what they suspected, but it hadn't been hacked. The company later responded with an explanation.

In a statement Thursday, Amazon confirmed the woman’s private conversation had been inadvertently recorded and sent. The company said the device interpreted a word in the background conversation as “Alexa” — a command that makes it wake up — and then it interpreted the conversation as a “send message” request.

“At which point, Alexa said out loud ‘To whom?’” the statement said. “At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customers contact list.

Amazon called it an “unlikely” string of events, but if a device can activate by and interpret (or misinterpret) background conversation as commands, the sky is the limit as to what it may do. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Flickr user methodshop .com)

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Can you stack boxes too high for Maru to climb into? Maybe the real question is, how can you get that many boxes all the same size? Well, I can imagine if you're mugumogu, people just give you boxes all the time. Maru eventually meets his match, and we get to hear him meow more than we've ever heard before. -via Everlasting Blort

In October of 1886, slaughterhouse workers near Hamilton, New Zealand arrived at work to find that one of the sheep carcasses had been eaten. To be precise, something had climbed up and removed the sheep from its hook and left nothing but bones ...and footprints. The witnesses has never seen footprints like that before.

These, New Zealand’s Daily Telegraph reported, were the “undoubted traces of a saurian monster.” The word “saurian” means lizard-like—other papers concluded that this monster must be an alligator or crocodile, despite New Zealand’s smattering of living reptiles being, without exception, only a few inches long.

For two months, throughout October and November, the people of the Waikato region kept up a near-constant watch for their worrying new neighbor. Farmboys reported seeing it in the river, with its head poking up from the creek; indigenous Maori told settlers that they had known of it for some time and called it a taniwha. “Stories are extant among them of a very large animal, like an eel, which has come out of the water at times and chased them, even seizing their legs in its teeth,” reported the New Zealand Herald. A year earlier, a Maori girl had allegedly been found dead in the same river, with the flesh stripped from her arm.

Talk of the monster grew so that no one knew which stories were real and which were exaggerations or pure hogwash. But they eventually found the monster. Read that story at Atlas Obscura.

Oh yeah, the animals pictured were already quite extinct.  

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When you live in the desert, you evolve to eat what's there. Watch this hardcore dromedary munch down on a prickly pear cactus with 6-inch spines! And you thought Captain Crunch made your mouth sore. Apparently, camels have protrusions inside their mouths containing keratin that are tough and flexible like plastic that enables them to deal with just about any food source they come across. They are also ruminants, so everything gets chewed up more than once. -via Boing Boing

On May 30, 1943, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League debuted to fill a shortage of baseball players due to World War II. Like the women who filled factory jobs during the war, they stepped up to the plate and proved that women can do what was normally seen as men's work at the time. Betsy Jochum (pictured) was the star batter for the South Bend Blue Sox. Her uniform is now enshrined in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, but Jochum, now 97, says no one today would know about the league at all if it weren't for the movie A League of Their Own.    

The ballplayers were for the most part factory-town women happy to have the paycheck until the men got home, observes Kelly Candaele, a filmmaker whose PBS documentary about his ball-playing mother was the inspiration for Marshall’s film. “Most of them didn’t approach this thing academically, like, oh, they were pioneers and proto-feminists,” he says. It was decades before they grasped how much they meant to the workplace, how much credibility they conferred on their gender with sheer physical competency, similar to the more than 475,000 Rosie the Riveters who worked in the U.S. munitions industry. If Jochum’s uniform is emblematic of what a little opportunity can do, it’s also threaded with stigma and represents the halting one-step-forward, two-steps-back progress that women faced. When Jochum asked for a raise, her disapproving club owner traded her to Peoria. “If you didn’t do what they told you, you know how that goes,” she says. Instead of accepting the trade she retired in 1948, got her college degree at Illinois State and became a middle school physical education teacher in the South Bend schools.

Read about Jochum and the short-lived All-American Girls Professional Baseball League at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: The History Museum)