What could be more heartbreaking than a cat left alone while his human is at work? An obviously lonely and talented cat named George Rufus sang a deep and profound song about his misery, and touched the heart of South African musician David Scott, known as The Kiffness (previously at Neatorama). Or at least it's deep and profound for a cat. Never mind that we should be alarmed at a cat singing in English. It's an audio form of pareidolia, and we cat owners hear it all the time.

Consumed with empathy over the cat's predicament and moved by his performance, The Kiffness added a musical accompaniment and a few more lyrics to bring George's plaintive blues to life. By the time this song is over, you'll be shedding a tear for a poor lonely cat. Go give your kitty a hug and maybe you'll feel better. -via Nag on the Lake

The Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989 and spilled ten million gallons of oil on the shore. How do you clean up that much oil from the seashore? At first, it was power washing, pushing the oil from the shoreline into the water so it could be scooped up easier. But the power washing itself was damaging the ecosystem, so the cleanup crews limited that procedure to some places, while leaving others alone. A car-sized boulder called Mearns Rock was left with oil on it. The rock was named after Alan Mearns of NOAA's hazmat team.

In the 33 years since the cleanup, Mearns Rock has been photographed every year, first by NOAA, and afterward by volunteers. The rock, exposed to oil, sun, rain, ocean water, and air, stands firmly in the same spot but plays host to different life forms year by year. Scientists and conservationists get an idea of which plants and animals recovered from the spill and how long they took to do it, and which species never returned. Read about the recovery from the Exxon Valdez spill and how Mearns Rock plays it part at Hakai magazine. -via Atlas Obscura

(Image credit: Alan Mearns/NOAA)

Port Revel is an artificial 13-acre lake in southeastern France that is the center of a ship handling school. The owners have designed this lake to simulate a variety of common ship handling challenges. Since 1966, the Port Revel Shiphandling Training Centre has offered courses to mariners who pilot 1/25 scale versions of cruise ships, containers ships, and supertankers.

U.S. States Ranked By How Easy They Are To Form By Nibbling A Graham

1. Wyoming
2. Colorado
3. Ohio
4. Idaho
…
…
49. Maryland
50. Alaska pic.twitter.com/AlYmE5kwMK

— Nathan W. Pyle (@nathanwpyle) June 11, 2023

When I was growing up in Alabama, we used to commonly say, "Thank God for Mississippi." This was usually preceded by the statement, "Our state ranks 49th in X." X represented a variety of socioeconomic indicators.

Nathan W. Pyle has yet to get around to either Mississippi or Alabama, but I'll bet the the curve of the Mississippi River will bring Alabama on top. It would be hard to shape with just human teeth into the crunchy and fragile form of a graham cracker.

Whilst taking care of an infant, Pyle, who is famous for his cartoon Strange Planet, has been chewing over which state outlines are the hardest to bite into graham crackers. You can view his ongoing work on Twitter.

Love Hultén, an artist in Gothenburg, Sweden made this goovy audio and visual experience that combines retro styling with new technologies. It’s a Delton8 drum and sampler synthesizer in a case fit for the 70s and combined with ferrofluid display. A ferrofluid that is attracted to magnetic pull. This combination uses either BurnSlap FAV ferrofluid sound-reactive system or something very similar. Either way, the ferrofluid acts like a living lava lamp that dances to the controls on the synthesizer panel.

This seems like a project that could be scaled up far beyond this portable unit to a grand audio and visual symphonic ecstasy.

-via David Thompson

It never occurred to me how much the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard was like Star Wars. Really, why would anyone think about that? Nebulous Bee thought about it, 40 years later, and laid the theme song from Dukes over footage from the first Star Wars trilogy. The Dukes of Hazzard was a comedy, while Star Wars was a space adventure, but they mesh well, from a certain point of view. But the real genius in this is the casting. Sure, we can see Han Solo and Chewbacca as the Duke boys, and Leia Organa taking the part of their cousin Daisy Duke, but everyone else gets a role, too.

If you liked that, you might want to check out what Nebulous Bee did to the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series (twice) and The Mandalorian. Yeah, the humor in some of these mashups will depend on your age and how well you recognize what these Star Wars properties are mixed with, but I think you will get a kick out of them.

There's nothing odd about a lot of graves near a church, but one church in the village of Luzino, in the Kashubia area of Poland, apparently didn't thoroughly map where their parishioners were buried. The church followed the European practice of occasionally digging up graves and storing bones in an ossuary to free up room for more graves. But during recent road work, excavators found skeletons that had been missed or forgotten- 450 of them!

The skeletons are believed to be from the 19th century, when people were afraid that the dead would rise again to cause havoc among the living. In other words, vampires. Researchers are studying the remains, and report that about 30% of the skeletons show evidence that measures had been taken to keep them underground. Many skeletons had been disinterred, their heads cut off, and their skulls placed down by the legs before re-burial. Some had rocks placed between their jaws to the same end.

Archaeologists also found three forgotten underground ossuaries containing piles of disarticulated bones from earlier disinterments. Read the full account of the grim discovery at The First News.

-via reddit

(Image credit: UG Luzino)

In any governing body, you run into a problem with any one person having ultimate authority. What do you do with an evil, incompetent, or otherwise disliked ruler? With monarchies, there's nothing to be done outside of all-out war. In modern governments, there are built-in systems to remove elected officials. But in the Catholic Church, you have the pope and his ultimate authority, but it's an elected position, and the cardinals have some say about who is qualified. These two ideas butted up against each other in the 14th century. The cardinals could elect a pope, but whether they can remove one against his will was another question. So the church ended up with three different popes! There was Urban VI in Rome, Clement VII in Avignon, and John XXII in Pisa. By the time John was named Pope, the title in Rome and Avignon had been passed to others, making the succession even more confusing. The story is simplified for modern audiences in this TED-Ed lesson from Joëlle Rollo-Koster. -via Nag on the Lake

An unnamed blogger is sharing his account of living in Antactica at the site named brr. He's an IT worker who spent a year at McMurdo Station, then moved to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. He is part of the small crew overwintering at the South Pole, where they are almost to midwinter. The latest post explains how food works in Antarctica. When supply flights stop in autumn, they are on their own until November. They have plenty of frozen food, plenty of dried food, but fresh food will be a dream for another five months.

He even took a picture of the very last "fresh" egg at the station, as it was ceremoniously fried. The food they will eat between now and spring is almost all frozen, sometimes for years. The cold storage is natural, but extreme. A bucket of ice cream stored at -70°F has to be brought inside for days before it is an edible temperature of 0°F. The station does have a greenhouse, but it's small and any salads have to be carefully rationed. Yeah, there's plenty of food, but milk and eggs will be the powdered kind until spring arrives. Nobody said overwintering at the South Pole would be easy. -via Damn Interesting

Spokesman Roger Horton is back with an ad for a bar. This is not about the dive down the street where you drop by and know every customer already, because you saw the same people there yesterday. No, this is a newer place, with pretentious menu items to match the pretentious drink prices. This one has taken an Irish theme, without much real connection to Ireland. An authentic Dublin-style Hawaiian pizza? Is that some kind of a joke? Yes, it is, but it's not all that far off from the fake ambience this bar is trying its best to exude. The only thing cringier is seeing Roger in a dress, as he plays the waitress as well as the bartender. Well, the experience won't be so bad if you drink enough. You'll just have to suffer a hangover and an empty wallet.

You've heard about Atlantis and El Dorado, legendary cities that disappeared and may have never existed at all. This year, we also learned about Dunwich and Heracleion that really did disappear into the ocean. Germany has its own lost city, named Rungholt. Except it was in Denmark when it disappeared.

Rungholt was once thought to be a legend, and it had its own legendary story. The city was a den of iniquity, having grown prideful and complacent due to its wealth. One night, some drunken young men harassed a priest to give last rites to a pig. The priest asked God to send a punishment to the young men, and when the priest left town, a huge storm wiped out the entire city, and it was never seen again. But the legend says that afterward you could hear the sound of the church's bell ring from the North Sea.

That storm was the Grote Mandrenke, or Saint Marcellus's flood, of January 1362. It raged across several countries and killed around 30,000 people. It also changed the coastline of Denmark. Rungholt, a port city of around 3,000 people, was wiped out and left underwater.

The first signs of what might be Rungholt were found in 1921 near the islands created by the storm. Archaeologists have been studying relics in the mudflats of the UNESCO Wadden Sea World Heritage Site. Last month, they found the remains of a large church near the island of Südfall. They had already found a large drainage system, dykes, and two smaller churches. This discovery may confirm that the excavation area is indeed, the lost city of Rungholt. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Ralf Roletschek)

Microsoft Office 97 came with a virtual assistant named Clippy, an animated paper clip. He could be helpful if you had no idea what you were doing, but as you mastered the program, Clippy became more annoying by the day. He was cute, but could be snarky at times, and always managed to treat you like an idiot. But Clippy managed to escape his original job and became a meme, so now he is less an annoyance and more of nostalgic reminder of 1990s computer culture. You know, if it weren't for Clippy, we might not have Siri or Alexa now. Or we might have a really annoying Siri or Alexa now.     

You wouldn't be at all surprised that the guy who created Clippy was a children's book illustrator. Or at least he is now. Kevan J. Atteberry tells the story of how Clippy came about. -via Nag on the Lake

A big portion of the Netherlands is below sea level, and the Dutch are masters at controlling water levels to maintain that land. The city of Utrecht is shot through with dams, canals, and locks as part of that water control system. That caused a problem for migrating fish. Many species travel from the Vecht river to the shallower water of the Kromme river in order to spawn. But getting through Utrecht was an obstacle course, until ecologist Mark van Heukelum came up with the Fish Doorbell, or Visdeurbel.

The Fish Doorbell starts with an underground camera that anyone can access online. When fish gather near a lock, a user can activate the doorbell, and an operator will open the lock for the fish to pass through. The system has been online three springs now, and has gathered a community of "fisherman" around the world who monitor the canals of Utrecht to aid the fish. They are like birdwatchers, trading sightings of different species of fish with each other. Read about this awesome project at Atlas Obscura, and you might just find yourself with a new hobby. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Хомелка) 

Modern medicine has made things so much easier for us, with vaccines, antibiotics, chemotherapy, and anesthesia, among other modern miracles. But surgery itself is pretty old. What was that like before we had knockout drugs? Do you really want to know? Back then you didn't want surgery ever, unless it was a life-or-death situation. Yeah, you could drink alcohol, but that came with its own problems, like making uncontrollable bleeding more likely. Harder drugs were tried, but they might just kill you. However, this TED-Ed video is not misery porn about the agony of surgery while awake; there's just a small bit about that before they go through the history of how relatively safe and effective modern anesthetics were developed. It was a bumpy ride from there to where we are now.

The comments at YouTube have hundreds of anesthesia stories, almost all of which are positive, even from people who were terrified of surgery. -via Digg

We've posted quite a few times about the bizarre molded Jell-O dishes of the early-to-mid-20th century, but this collection takes the cake, so to speak. There are plenty of gelatin abominations, like the Ham Buffet Mold shown above. The recipe calls for pureeing the ham and setting it in a mold of orange Jello-O, according to a commenter. I couldn't find the recipe by search, as "Ham Buffet Mold" only brought up people asking if it's okay to eat ham with mold on it. There are two recipes in which you are to set pasta in a ring mold, one with gelatin. A couple more with a whole fish set in gelatin, and way too many of shrimp swimming in gelatin.

Fruit Salad Linguini, anyone? No, thank you. But there are also cakes. Cake decorating books at the time appear to be obsessed with clowns, and no matter how well they were recreated, they were still creepy. The dishes taken from the Instagram account Weird Old Food just get weirder the more you look. See a ranked list of 30 of the weirdest at Bored Panda.

Update: Andrew Dalke found the recipe for Ham Mold! You'll be delighted to see it calls for unflavored gelatin instead of orange. The color is from tomato soup. Not that those facts make it any more appetizing...