Red velvet cake wasn't on the table for the first Juneteenth celebration in 1865, because it wasn't all that widespread, or all that red yet. But other red foods were there, like watermelon for dessert, and became symbolic of the holiday. So it's no mystery why red velvet cake is served at modern Juneteenth celebrations, and at Christmas, too. Besides, it's delicious!
The first velvet cake was a deluxe chocolate cake, and the faint red tinge was a byproduct of how the cocoa reacted with the leavening agents. The cake was a hit, and people liked the red tint as much as they liked the flavor. Yes, you had to use the right kind of cocoa to produce the red color, but if you wanted to make sure, you could add food coloring. A recipe for red velvet cake was even used to promote the sale of food coloring in the 1940s. The shockingly bright red color with the additive proved very popular, and now you don't even need chocolate to have a festive red cake. But don't forget the cream cheese frosting!
Read how red velvet cake came about, and try a recipe for the classic Velvet Cocoa Cake that produces the natural reddish brown color, posted at Atlas Obscura. I made a set of red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting Friday for an office gathering, and I will be eating my sole portion today in honor of Juneteenth.
(Image credit: I made this.)
Initially, the crime appeared to be straightforward. Police responded to a report of a robbery at a convenience store in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The clerk reported that a man had presented him with a written note that said "Give me all your money or I will shoot you." The clerk complied. Police tracked down the suspected robber and arrested him.
That's when the situation became complicated.
The suspect confessed to the crime, but said that a friend had set him up for the robbery. The police then talked to the friend, a young lady whom they arrested for an outstanding warrant. She said that one of her friends--the clerk at the convenience store--had asked her to rob the store because "he was tired and wanted to go home."* She provided texts to prove her claim.
All three criminal masterminds were arrested.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Pixabay
*We've all been there. Don't be jealous because someone else thought of this solution first and you didn't.
Luiz Pereira, a physicist at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and his colleagues recently published the results of their study of why peanuts move up and down inside beer.
Placing peanuts inside beer is apparently a custom in Argentina, so generations of drinkers have noticed that peanuts tend to move up and down repeatedly. Why? If I understand the article correctly, it is because during their descent into the beer, air bubbles within the liquid attach to the peanuts, causing them to become buoyant. When the peanuts arrive at the surface of the beer, the bubbles pop and the peanuts lose their buoyancy.
-via Dave Barry
Throwing a cable across a ravine is easier than building a bridge. Actually, throwing a cable across is the first step to building a bridge, but sometimes the project stops there, because people can cross with just a cable if they are brave enough. Slovenia has several manual cable cars strung across some of its more inaccessible ravines, but Tom Scott found only one that is regularly maintained. When you see it, you'll have your doubts. But Tom watched other people use it, and was game to demonstrate it for us. There's no way on earth you'd get me in that thing, even if I were being chased by some bad guys out of an Indiana Jones movie, and I grew up in the land of rickety swinging footbridges. Would you ride a rusty 70-year-old zipline? If heights make you queasy, be warned that they do show images of what Tom is crossing over.
From the early days of photography, here's a story of a torture that became a badge of honor. Born in 1799, Captain Jonathan W. Walker was an avid abolitionist. He worked with the Underground Railroad, and helped those who escaped slavery settle in Mexico. But in 1844, he was on a boat taking seven escapees to the West Indies when they got into trouble and were rescued by a ship with a pro-slavery crew. Walker was arrested, and a US Marshall branded his right hand with "SS," which stood for "slave stealer." He was jailed in Florida for eleven months.
The incident didn't slow Walker down at all, and he continued his abolitionist work lecturing and arranging for escapes after his bail was paid by an abolitionist group. Not long after, he commissioned a photograph to be made of his branded right hand. The image, however, is reversed and appears to be his left hand- notice that the Ss are backward. Read Walker's story that left us a lasting image of the fight over slavery at Vintage Everyday. -via Nag on the Lake
At its most basic level, cancer is when our own cells decide to grow out of control. Yes, it's much more malignant than that sounds. Your body will recognize and fight the danger, but if it gets bad enough, your immune system will need outside help.
In this video, Kurzgesagt describes the immune system's battle against cancer in an analogy of a city and its emergency systems going up against a chaotic gang of dangerous troublemakers, some of them with malevolent supernatural power. That makes it easier to understand, but I also see another analogy here in the story of drug-resistant bacteria. If you spread antibiotics out too widely, such as treating entire livestock herds before any infection is present, or using antimicrobial soaps, you risk allowing some surviving superbugs to evolve and flourish. So who wins the battle? It's hard to say, because this can all go on without us ever knowing it. But concerning the cancers that become bad enough for us to detect them, we are learning more and more about building more powerful weapons against these malignant cells all the time.
Before you get too excited, I must manage your expectations: the townsfolk do eventually pull the politician back out of the river. The immersion is a temporary affair.
The city of Trento in northern Italy holds an annual celebration called Feste Vigilane to celebrate the life of their patron saint, Vigilis, who was martyred after ordering Christians to throw an idol into the Adige River. My Modern Met explains that part of the festivities includes the Tonca, a ritualized and comedic dunking of a selected villain into the river.
A dramatic presentation of a Court of Penance determines who in the town is most worthy of being dunked. Politicians are a favorite choice. At the time of the Tonca, the convict is lowered into the river three times to the amusement of the population.
Photo: Feste Vigilane
Archaeologists studying an excavation in Nördlingen, Germany, have uncovered a sword in a grave that contained a man, a woman, and a young boy. It was among other weapons and artifacts included in the burial, which is considered around 3,000 years old. But the sword has been uniquely preserved, and looks only a few years old. The sword is bronze, made by the applied bronze casting method, which is labor intensive and requires quite a bit of skill. Scientists don't know where it was made. But you might wonder how it was preserved so long in such a pristine condition. It's all about the cuprous salts.
3/
— Bill Farley, Chafing Dish Enthusiast (@ArchaeologyGame) June 15, 2023
Copper-based artifacts create exceptional preservational circumstances because copper salts ward off microbes and copper doesn't corrode the same way that iron does. This can often lead to artifacts looking practically brand new, like this 400 year old chafing dish fragment. pic.twitter.com/BYTzX4yqrZ
You can read more about the chemistry involved in the Twitter thread. We don't know if the sword has been removed from the site yet, but there's a possibility that whoever lifted it from the rock after all this time is now the rightwise king born of somewhere. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Dr. Woidich)
The ESA spacecraft carrying the James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas morning 2021 from the Centre Spatial Guyanais in the city of Kourou in French Guiana. You may wonder what a European spaceport is doing in South America. The French space agency CNES was established in 1961 with a spaceport in Algeria, which was then part of the French empire. Algeria fought and won their independence in 1962, and the space agency had to start all over. They selected French Guiana because it was already a French territory and had good conditions for space launches. They built Kourou specifically for the space center, evicting around 600 villagers to do so.
But French Guiana, and particularly the Salvation Islands off its coast, has a sordid history. Until the mid-20th century, it was France's penal colony. After slavery was abolished in France, the country sent prisoners to South America to serve out their sentences- and to harvest crops and build infrastructure. Of the 80,000 or so prisoners sent to French Guiana, the majority never made it back to France even after their sentences were up. This was the setting of the book and movie Papillon. Read about the space centre built overtop a notorious penal colony at Supercluster. -via Smithsonian
(Image credit: Adèle Roncey)
I should clarify that Everard Digby's book De Arte Natandi was English in the sense that it was published in England. Digby, a theologian at Cambridge University, wrote The Art of Swimming in Latin. A few years later, Christopher Middleton translated it into English, which you can read online here.
The Public Domain Review describes De Arte Natandi within the context of European swimming practices of the time. The crawl was seen as an uncivilized stroke, but Digby does provide practical help for people who wish to swim through other means, such as the sidestroke:
This kinde of swimming, though it be more laborious, yet is it swifter then any of the rest, for that lying vpon one side, striking with your feete as when you swimme on your bellie, but that the pulling in and thrusting out of his hand, which then did onely keepe him vp, doe now helpe to put him forward: for onely the lower hand supporteth his bodie, and the vpper hand roweth like an Dare, as in this example.
De Arte Natandi came with at least thirty illustrations, all of which evidence that the swimsuit is a rather recent invention.
Fathers Day would not be complete without Darth Vader jokes. Star Wars fans of a certain age still haven't gotten over the twist in The Empire Strikes Back, the one that turned a single space adventure into an epic family saga. Too bad that was the peak of the series. (Dragging Leia into the family didn't happen until The Return of the Jedi, and never made much sense anyway. I think Lucas just did that solely so we wouldn't feel bad for the hero who didn't get the girl in the end. But I digress.) You'll have to recall what was said during that battle, because this video only has grunts, but I suspect you know what happened.
In this holiday vignette from LEGO, we finally see what caused Darth Vader to do a sudden turnaround and decide his loyalties were with his son instead of the Emperor. A simple gift causes Vader to think about all the things that might have been if he had spent his time as a dad instead of a Sith Lord. Send this post to your Dad to give him a smile for Fathers Day. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The 2009 Disney Princess movie The Princess and the Frog is loosely based on the Grimm's fairy tale The Frog Prince. But the character of Tiana, the "princess," was inspired by a real person. Disney wanted to place a fairy tale in the United States with a Black protagonist, and after a lot of changes to the project, focused on the real-life story of Leah Chase of New Orleans, “the Queen of Creole Cuisine.” The parts of the story that were not from The Frog Prince are Chase's.
According to Leah Chase's daughter Stella Chase, it was always her mother's dream to open a restaurant. She fell in love with a New Orleans musician whose parents owned a po-boy stand. They married, and Chase worked in the kitchen, honing the cooking skills she brought from her large family. When she and her husband Edgar inherited the restaurant, she expanded it and introduced an extensive menu of Creole cuisine. Now named Dooky Chase's Restaurant, the establishment became a meeting place and a refuge during the Civil Rights Movement. Read about Leah Chase and how her legacy figures into The Princess and the Frog at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Disney Parks/Sabina Graves/Gizmodo)
Pictured above is a pair of Great Tits.
Last year, researchers Els Atema, Arie van Noordwijk, and Simon Verhulst published the results of their study of Great Tits (Parus Major) in the journal Molecular Ecology. I bring it to your attention because I know that Neatorama readers take a great interest in this topic.
The scientists wanted to know if adding weight to a Great Tit, and thus increasing the physical workload it must endure while moving, would alter the telomere regions of its DNA sequence. They added a backpack weighing 0.9 grams to these birds and tracked their locomotion. At the end of their study, they found no significant changes to the attrition of the birds' telomeres. Perhaps the birds were physically stressed by the added weight, but they seemed to bounce back just fine.
Photo: Highway 45
As a father, I can see how this gets started. Rental bounce houses are popular at kids' birthday parties and other festive events. I've certainly thought about joining in on the fun. But is it okay to bounce along with the kids? Maybe not. It might look weird.
So, the Wall Street Journal (sorry, paywalled article) reports, companies that offer bounce house events are increasingly marketing their services to adult-oriented events, such as weddings, as well as offer bounce house events just for adults. Thus us grown ups can jump around without feeling socially awkward or worrying about accidentally falling on and injuring a child.
That said, we geezers aren't as flexible and nimble as we used to be. The Wall Street Journal reports that injuries occur, so it's necessary to know one's limits and get medical attention if you're a wuss you get hurt while bouncing around like the kid you are at heart.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Big Bounce America
The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft has been mapping Mars for twenty years now. In honor of the occasion, the space agency has released a global color mosaic of the red planet that's more than just red. The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) science team has stitched together 90 images taken from 4000 to 10,000 kilometers above the surface to show the features of Mars in the clearest detail yet.
Mars look pretty much all red in the images we've seen before, because the planet has so much iron oxide. That's what we call rust. But Mars also has more dense, dark bluish-gray sand made of volcanic basalt that formed enormous dunes across the center of the planet from this angle. It also has clay and sulphates that formed from the contact of water with volcanic materials that show up as lighter colors. Read more about the image and how it was made at the German Aerospace Center. -via Kottke
(Image credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Michael))
