Back in 2015, a video of a New York City rat carrying a slice of pizza back to his family became the biggest meme of the year. People in the flyover states were horrified, and New Yorkers were charmed to see two city icons come together (pizza and rats). But there may be a replacement hitting the internet.  

A couple of days ago, Carly Hittner posted a video of a rat finding a donut under the tracks of the New York City subway. That TikTok clip has gone viral, and may be the next big thing. Too bad it's a little late to be a Halloween costume this year -or is it? You could easily repurpose the Pizza Rat costume you bought a few years ago and carry around a donut instead of pizza. Better make it a dozen donuts, since people will expect you to share, just like the original rat. If you want to argue that this is not a donut but a bagel, go ahead and have fun with that. -via Boing Boing

Military specifications always make sense on paper, and there's a reason for every request. But even when you adhere to those specifications exactly, unexpected roadblocks or even human nature can throw a wrench into the works. In 1935, the US Army wanted a new kind of food for its soldiers that could be easily transported into battle and sustain them when nothing else was available. Captain Paul Logan worked with Hershey to create a chocolate bar that would be nutritious without taking up space. It had to withstand hot temperatures and last a long time. It couldn't taste all that good, either, so soldiers wouldn't eat them before they were needed.

What they came up with was called Ration D. It was so dense that it could break your teeth if you were to bite into it. It could be dissolved in hot water, or you could could hold it in your mouth for a long time as it dissolved. It was awful. The only fan Ration D had was a lieutenant whose plane crashed in the sea and he was adrift for 47 days. Not that he ever wanted more of it after he came home. Read the story behind Hershey's Ration D at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: U.S. Army Center Of Military History)

The Orlando Sentinel reports on the forthcoming inaugural Florida Man Games, named after the outrageous behavior of the male inhabitants of America's most insane state. Pete Melfi of Saint Augustine is organizing an open sporting event in which Florida men will be able to compete in original games inspired by the actual shenanigans of Floridians.

Pictured above is concept art of one of the games: the Evading Arrest Obstacle Course. The goal is to flee from actual police officers over fences and through backyards. Other games include grabbing cash while in a chamber with Category 5 hurricane winds, a motorcycle race with stolen catalytic converts strapped to the bikes, and "Florida Ma'am Pinup", a "beauty" contest for Florida women.

If you're a Neatorama reader from Florida, please consider entering and telling us about your experience. Don't worry about your fitness to complete. The rules say that "being athletic is not required at all."

-via Dave Barry | Image: Florida Man Games

In an attempt to teach you about peer pressure, your mother probably asked you, "If your friends all jumped of a cliff, would you do it, too?" Personally, no, but in this case, yes, they all did. Nick Coulter and company went to Vermont to a defunct granite quarry where the cliff sides are straight and tall and we hope the water is deep. I guess they knew, because this is not the first time they've been there. In such a sheltered area, the water is so still that they threw rocks before jumping to keep the landing from being painfully flat. While you and I would be most concerned about surviving or conversely getting up the nerve to actually do it, these cliff jumpers are going for style points! This video also features the longest selfie stick you've ever seen. A good time was had by all. -via Kottke

For many people, coffee is in their blood, quite literally. It's part of their daily routine. Every morning, they must have a sip of their cup of joe, and without it, they feel lethargic and sluggish throughout the day. Caffeine, at the right doses, keeps us awake and zaps our brains so that we can stay mentally alert throughout the day. It's a nice boost of energy that can help us be productive. However, studies have shown that higher doses of caffeine can cause nausea, anxiety, and overall shakiness. Not to mention, the occasional heart palpitations.

Noah Whiteman, author of the book Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature's Toxins - from Spices to Vices, shares the reason why he switched from using a French press to make his coffee to an automatic drip machine or by pour-over. Also, he has taken the habit of using mesh filters to make his coffee. He recounts a 2020 study involving more than half a million people in Norway which found that people who consume unfiltered coffee faced a significant risk of dying over 20 years than those who drank filtered coffee or didn't drink at all.

For those coffee addicts, who cannot function without caffeine in their system, you may want to read his article here on Science Friday.

(Image credit: Fahmi Fakhrudin/Unsplash)

Being able to stay longer in bed may be one of the upsides of daylight saving time, but it can also pose some health problems if we're unaware of how to manage the transition. One more hour of sleep may be very beneficial for us, however, once we shift back to our usual schedule, our circadian rhythms might have trouble adjusting, and you might begin to experience cluster headaches, which is a type of headache characterized by intense, sharp pain in or around one eye, or one side of your head.

Cluster headaches may jolt you from your sleep, and the period it lasts can range from a couple of weeks to even several months. The root cause for these cluster headaches can be found in our hypothalamus, which is also responsible for regulating our circadian rhythm, thus the connection to daylight saving time.

Dr. Rajkumar Dasgupta spoke with Madeline Holcombe to share what are the things to watch out for, how to prepare for the end of daylight saving time, and some possible ways to mitigate the effects of the change in our circadian rhythm. Check it out at KWWL.

(Image credit: Nik Shuliahin/Unsplash)

I didn't know this was a thing until I read this article on Bustle. Apparently, there is subgroup, if you can call it that, of men who, in dating, are called lowercase boys. As the name implies, they use exclusively lowercase letters when texting. Furthermore, there seems to be a perception of aggressive casualness that surrounds such people. They have built an image of nonthreatening flirtiness that, to some, gives off 'creepy' vibes but not so much as to offend or be offputting.

There was a time when I had used lowercase in communicating online, but that was all because I was too lazy to capitalize my sentences. Certainly I wouldn't do it in emails, but it also seemed like a fun and carefree way to text, so I had ventured into it, though I never once had an inkling that it was being used in this way to capture women's hearts. Of course, now that I'm using an iPhone, capitalization is a default means of texting for me.

Nowadays, in the new generation, I think emojis are the thing. Though I could be wrong. Still, to each their own, and at the end of the day, the way one texts won't fully capture how they are as a person. As long as they're honest and open, it shouldn't matter how they text.

(Image credit: Jonas Leupe/Unsplash)

This story takes us back to Stagg Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn back in 1925, and it involves the police, their mascot, and several stray cats apprehended by them. A fight broke out between the ruler of the territory at the time, a Tom cat named Spark Plug, and the perceived intruders of his domain. And as soon as the nasty scratching ensued, the police officers had to intervene, locking the strays into cells and bringing Spark Plug in the detective's room until the strays could be taken by the SPCA.

How did this whole fiasco begin with, you ask? It was all because of the empty lots on Scholes Street which had become a literal garbage dump, with people throwing old mattresses, food scraps, and all sorts of garbage, which attracted the rats scrounging for food, and thus attracting all the stray cats in Williamsburg. Despite actions from the local authorities, the rats and cats were not kept at bay, so when the people in the neighborhood had had enough, they asked the local police to step in. And so, for a time, the Stagg Street police officers became cat catchers.

Spark Plug, not being informed that such a thing was happening, was equally shocked and appalled by the presence of these uninvited guests into his domain. And that's how it all went down. For more on the history of Stagg Street Police Station and the Williamsburg Houses in 1937, visit Hatching Cat NYC.

(Image credit: Hatching Cat NYC)

Last time, we looked at a TikTok trend that had something to do with beauty standards and the canthal tilt. There's a new TikTok trend that's emerging at the moment, and it's called "skin streaming", wherein people reduce the number of steps in their skin care routine down to the bare essentials.

You may have heard of 7-step routines or even 10-step routines, but some dermatologists share some concerns about putting too many products on your face. There are cases when products will negate the effects of another, or worse, they might cause a severe allergic reaction when two ingredients mix. So, there may be some credit to streamlining one's skin care routine. But what are the most essential products in your skin care arsenal?

There are three basic skin care products according to dermatologists: a cleanser, a moisturizer, and sunscreen. The roles of each are straightforward. You have one to remove dirt, sebum, or any dead skin cells, another to restore your skin's moisture barrier and maintain its pH balance, and the last to protect your skin from the harsh UV rays when you go outside. All other products that you wish to add depends on what you want to target specifically.

For some suggestions on what products you can add, or if you want to simplify your routine even more, check out this article from Huffington Post.

(Image credit: Birgith Roosipuu/Unsplash)

In colonial America, those convicted of crimes were often hanged for offenses like theft or witchcraft. Jails held murderers and debtors together in common rooms. Sentences were often open-ended, and could drag on indefinitely. And incarcerated work crews could be seen in public, under guard and wearing prison stripes, making the law-abiding public nervous. Something had to change.

One of our Founding Fathers, Benjamin Rush, worked on a system to reform and standardize America's prison system, applying his Quaker principles to punishment for criminals. He advocated for specific sentences to give convicts hope. His idea of confining convicts away from the prying eyes of the public was meant to lower their shame. His idea of solitary confinement was to give a prisoner a quiet, contemplative period to calm his soul and ponder his deeds.   

Today, we know that solitary confinement can do horrible things to a person's psyche, and many consider it cruel and unusual punishment. Between the time that Rush proposed his ideas for effective rehabilitation for criminals and the opening of America's first penitentiary, Eastern State in Philadelphia, 50 years later, his ideals and the real world system diverged considerably. Read about Rush's original ideas for the justice system and incarceration in America at the Public Domain Review.  -via Damn Interesting

ba ba baaa ba da da bee be bop bop da doot doot doo pic.twitter.com/KWIdjLiIi5

— weird medieval guys (@WeirdMedieval) October 20, 2023

If you follow the Twitter feed Weird Medieval Guys, it might be because we profiled them last year. It has a delightful collection of odd and often nonsensical medieval art with added captions that make them even funnier. It's heavy on marginalia, the doodles made in manuscripts by bored monks, but is not limited to it. It turns out that the "guys" do not refer to the team behind the account. It's run by one woman, data scientist Olivia M. Swarthout, as a hobby. But it has become so popular that she's written a book, titled Weird Medieval Guys: How to Live, Laugh, Love (and Die) in Dark Times.

In discussing her book with The Guardian, Swarthout compares weird recurring motifs in medieval marginalia with internet memes.

“People ask about certain motifs in medieval art – for example, there are a lot of images of rabbits committing acts of violence. And you can really only explain the persistence of something like that by assuming that it was something that started off funny but was repeated so much that it became interesting. And that’s often the basis of a meme – it’s something that is stripped of its original context.”

Swarthout goes on to give her impression of five weird medieval artworks from the book, which will be released November 2. -via Digg

If you are young, you probably feel that the internet has always been with us. If you're not so young, you might be surprised at how long ago many of the milestones of the web have been around. The longest running webcam on the internet has been live for 29 years now. The first set of emojis was released in 1997. The first band to livestream a concert was all the way back in 1993!

I learned these things from Internet Artifacts, a sort of museum exhibit from Neal Agarwal (previously at Neatorama). It begins with a 1977 map of ARPANET that shows 111 computers connected to each other. We have more than that now. It has delicious tidbits like how the White House launched its website in 1994, but it was delayed because they needed more photographs of Socks the cat. The first person to purchase a book from Amazon was dismayed that he was charged money for it. And you might remember that Y2K was a big nothingburger, but that was only due to a lot of work by programmers to head off the disaster. The exhibit ends in 2007, when the iPhone was released and everything changed. -via Metafilter

Chinese YouTuber Aboringday builds new weird devices and adds weird modifications on common devices. In his most recent video, he made usually functional yo-yos from objects not commonly associated with the wood or plastic toys. These include fan blades, circular saw blades, ping pong paddles, and clocks.

Some yo-yo bases were easier to make or use than others. Dumbbell plates, for example, were easy to modify but also very heavy. But by far the most challenging project was making a yo-yo out of ice, which required multiple attempts at 3D design and printing before Aboringday got it right. In this process, Aboringday engages in amusing storytelling without ever saying a word.

-via The Awesomer

Around the turn of the 20th century, Halloween was steadily gaining popularity in the US. Picture postcards were at the height of their popularity, and Halloween gave people another excuse to send one. In the estimated 3,000 Halloween designs, we see familiar icons like witches, black cats, and pumpkins, but we also get a glimpse into some mostly bygone traditions, like petty vandalism, bobbing for apples, and trying to divine one's future spouse.

Despite its appearance, I don't think they meant to show a cat being strangled. He's just drawn that way. These vintage Halloween postcards depict children being frightened in a comical way, but the very weirdness of the images can make any modern person feel a bit ...uncomfortable. So many of them feature grim grinning pumpkinheads with uncanny and unnatural pupils that seem to be leering.

See a gallery of 60 Halloween postcards dated between 1900 and 1920 at The Public Domain Review. And since they are in the public domain, they can be shared with anyone. -via Metafilter

Gremlins were a type of fairy, or "little folk" in European legends. Although seldom seen, gremlins were known to be mischievous. If something in your home was broken or out of place with no explanation, the culprit was obviously a gremlin. This idea took on a whole new meaning when airplanes were developed, particularly in the military. When something went inexplicably haywire on a plane during World War I, the Royal Air Force blamed it on sabotage by gremlins. The idea spread to more countries by World War II, when planes were more numerous, more complicated, and under battle conditions were more likely to malfunction.

The civilian world took up the idea, too, and gremlins were used as shorthand for any kind of industrial accident or malfunction. It may have been used in early computer technology a bit, but those folks settled on blaming "bugs" instead. Gremlins went on to star in a book by Roald Dahl and a hit 1984 movie. Read about the rise of gremlins at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: National Archives)