🍸 In 1955, Campbell Soup had an idea of how to sell more of their canned beef bouillon: make them into nonalcoholic cocktails! Thus Soup on the Rocks was born. Later, they also came up with Frisky Sour (Campbell's beef broth mixed with ice and lemon juice) and chicken soup martini. You can guess what that one contained.

🏰 Psst! Got £500,000? Go and buy an actual fort in Wales. That turns "man's house is his castle" into something quite literal.

🦔 That baby porcupine sure looked delicious to a leopard, but thankfully momma and poppa porcupines were there to, uh, poke a hole in the big cat's dinner plan.

🤣 Here's something to make you LOL: 7 Funny Tees and Big & Tall T-Shirts. This one above is "I Live in a Van Gogh" by indie artist kg07. Who remembers that skit?

🥔 Star Trek: Voyager characters drawn as potatoes. Tuvok is spot on.

🚽 Did the Chinese invent flush toilets too? (Sorry Thomas Crapper!)

Experience: I gave birth to the world’s ‘8 billionth baby’ https://t.co/conNZAQsDq

— The Guardian (@guardian) February 24, 2023

On November 15th last year, the world population crossed to over eight billion people. Most people who read about it wondered in the back of their minds just who that eight billionth person would be. Now we know. Her name is Vinice, and she lives in the Philippines.

Several new babies in different parts of the world were designated to be the symbolic eight billionth person, but Vinice has become the best known. Her mother, Maria Margarette Villorente, was in labor and on the way to the hospital in Manila as midnight approached on November 14th. The hospital staff turned them away, because the facility was already full! So Maria and Vincent went to another hospital in the San Andres area of the city. Representatives of the Philippines Commission on Population and Development (Popcom) were already at that hospital to welcome the birth of the eight billionth person. Vinice was born shortly after midnight on the 15th, and was immediately lavished with a huge cake, baby supplies, and toys. Maria was obliged to give an immediate interview. It was a total surprise for the couple. Read the story of how Vinice came into the world of eight billion people with much fanfare at the Guardian.  -via Damn Interesting    

LEGO makes a very special kind of brick that can shoot objects out forcefully. These spring-loaded shooters work on the same simple principle as a ballpoint pen that clicks open and shut. Simple, but still fun. And like any cool toy, someone will go way overboard with them for our entertainment. Brickstory Builds collected 400 of these shooter bricks, and just as many projectiles to shoot out of them. How many different ways can he fire them en masse? Who is he going to shoot them at? Anyone who has 400 shooters will have plenty of LEGO figures to select from. He starts with a tower, then a train attacking Star Wars droids, and moves to ever more elaborate artillery constructions until he goes up against a truly menacing monster.

I used to lament how LEGO went from basic brick sets that required imagination to make anything to complex sets that make one thing and you have to follow pages of instructions. But there will always be people who think outside the box, literally, to brings us nonsense like this.  -via Born in Space

The "w" in the English language is an outlier. It is the only letter with a name that's more than a syllable long (it has three), and the only one in which the name is a visual description instead of its sound. Yeah, it would make sense to call it wuh, but it's a bit too late for that. Furthermore, its description doesn't make sense in type. It looks like a double "v." The conundrum is the basis for a children's poem from 1885.

    “Excuse me if I trouble you,”
    Said V to jolly W,
    “But will you have the kindness to explain one thing to me?
    Why, looking as you do,
    Folks should call you double U,
    When they really ought to call you double V?”

    Said W to curious V:
    “The reason’s plain as plain can be
    (Although I must admit it’s understood by very few);
    As you say I’m double V;
    And therefore, don’t you see,
    The people say that I am double you.”

But if you want the real answer, you have to go back to the time when the Latin alphabet collided with the English language in the 7th century, and had to make accommodations for sounds that did not occur in Latin. For the "w" sound in Old English, they used two letters. And those were "u"s. For example, the word "wonder" was spelled "uundra" in Old English. The process of this sound becoming a "w" in English is a bit more complicated. For instance, there was another letter, "ƿ" (or wynn) that tried to take its place, but was ultimately discarded. You can read up on the evolution of the letter "w" at Grammarphobia. -via Strange Company 

Madeleine McCann was a 3-year-old girl who disappeared from her bed in an apartment in Praia de Luz, Portugal, on May 3, 2007. People have been doing search operations for years but nobody was able to find her. Her case is one of the most heavily reported missing person cases in history. 

More than a decade after her disappearance, a woman on social media is now claiming that she is that missing person. A woman with the Instagram name “I am Madeleine McCann” appeared last February 14 and rekindled people’s attention to McCann’s case. The Instagram user does not call herself as Madeleine, though– she introduces herself as Julia. 

What’s interesting is that this lady actually states her goal: to have her story heard, and be given a DNA test to prove her identity. "Police investigators from UK and Poland try to ignore me. I will tell my story in posts here,” her bio read. “Help me, I need to talk with Kate and Gerry McCann.”

Julia uploaded posts where she explains multiple reasons why she’s the missing girl. From sharing her earliest memory being a holiday in a hot country with white apartments to having the same hazel mark in her eye that Madeleine has. “I want to prove that I’m real and honest and I really think that I could be Madeleine,” she said. She insists on taking a DNA test so she can also be 100% sure. 

As of the moment, she has managed to speak with the McCanns and will be getting a DNA test to prove her identity. 

Image screenshot via iammadelinemacann/Instagram

The USS Albacore was a submarine from World War II that was used by the United States. Unfortunately, the sea craft disappeared almost 80 years ago after managing to sink ten enemy vessels during the war. 

The submarine– the wreckage of it, at least, was found by the University of Tokyo's Tamaki Ura off the shore in Japan. According to the country’s records, it likely struck a mine off the shore in 1944. 

The wreckage of a U.S. submarine from World War II was found off the coast of Hokkaido in northern Japan — after disappearing almost 80 years ago. The USS Albacore was positively identified by the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) after its initial discovery. 

Archaeologists employed by the NHHC utilized the underwater imagery provided by Ura’s team to confirm the remains of the submarine. 

Image credit: Naval History and Heritage Command

Foreigners and residents in Portugal are no longer allowed to purchase homes and use them as Airbnbs in the country. In a series of laws passed, the government has limited the number of these hotel-like places in their country. 

This decision came after an influx of foreigners decided to purchase expensive homes and turned them into these kinds of establishments, which lead to the country’s housing market rising up and managing to drive away the local population. “The great appeal of our cities is not to turn [us] into some sort of Disneyland,” Prime Minister Antonio Costa, said at a press conference. “There is no city that can remain authentic if it isn’t able to maintain its residents.”

Aside from limiting the Airbnbs in Portugal, the country will also no longer hand out “Golden Visas,” which are passes that allow people to have an easier and streamlined process to become residents of Portugal as long as they promise to invest in the country. 

Image credit: Carlos Machado

The annual Mister Global beauty pageant for men was held a couple of weeks ago in Chaing Mai, Thailand. The winner for 2023 is Juan Carlos Ariosa, from Cuba (shown above). Contestants from 39 countries competed in tuxedos, national costumes, and itty-bitty swimsuits. The most interesting part of the pageant is the national costume competition, because let's face it, all these guys are hot and it would be difficult to judge their looks against each other. Below is the representative from Haiti.



However, the costumes ranged from sublime to baffling. The readers at Bored Panda have judged and ranked all 39 contestants in their costumes, which you can see here. The contestant from the Philippines drove his costume in. 

If you want to see the entire pageant, it's up at YouTube, or you can see just the costume parade, or the swimsuit competition if you prefer. We won't judge you.

(Images from Mister Global at Instagram)

In 1937, February 20 to be exact, composer and bandleader Raymond Scott recorded a jazzy tune called "Powerhouse." You might not recognize the name, but you know the song. Raymond Scott never wrote music for cartoons, and never even watched them, but he sold the publishing rights to his catalog to Warner Bros. Music in 1943. Carl Stalling used "Powerhouse" in 40 classic Warner Bros. cartoons. The first part of the song lent itself to frantic chase scenes, and the second half became known as "assembly line" music due to its industrial, rhythmic beat. Stalling used it any time a factory assembly line was part of a cartoon.

pic.twitter.com/YCvWCV9V2N

— Cartoon Study (@CartoonStudy) February 20, 2023

Even after Stalling, the tune that had become so familiar has been used in cartoons over and over, in The Ren & Stimpy Show, Animaniacs, The Simpsons, and even in the Cartoon Network's promotional bumpers. For the song's 86th birthday, Cartoon Brew has assembled a collection of cartoons that use "Powerhouse," plus the story of the song, and even a video of the Raymond Scott Quintet performing it in 1955. -via Kottke

Experts tell us to use up your spices within a year or so because they lose their flavor over time. Then we get this story in which saffron still smells like saffron after being underwater for 527 years!

The remains of a burned and partially buried shipwreck were first discovered in the 1960s off the coast of Sweden. In the 2000s, experts suspected it might be medieval. An archaeological survey began only in 2019, when the ship was determined to be the Gribshunden, a ship belonging to King Hans of Denmark and Norway. The ship caught fire in 1495 as it was moored off of southern Sweden, and there it has been ever since.

One of the remarkable finds inside the Gribshunden is the remains of 40 kinds of foods and particularly spices that are still recognizable after all this time. They came from near and far and were the expensive kinds of spices a king would own. Experts believe they were carried on the ship to impress Swedish authorities as Hans was on a mission to unite Sweden with Denmark and Norway under his rule. In that, he was successful, even without his flagship, although he used strong arm tactics rather than consent.   

The spices found include ginger, clove, peppercorns, dill, mustard, and caraway. The saffron mentioned above comprised 13 ounces of the spice, which costs around $50 per ounce even today, and was more expensive in medieval times. Read about the 500-year-old spice rack found aboard the Gribshunden at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Mikael Larsson and Brendan Foley/PLOS One)

Phil Vance says that he is "an artist obsessed with process, pattern and rhythm." In his works, we read the rhythm of words, including those that are spoken, sung, and written. 

Here is Winston Churchill, a statesman, soldier, and writer. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 thanks to his vast corpus of written works. By changing the colors of Churchill's words, Vance creates a vibrant portrait of this giant of the Twentieth Century.

This wonderfully weird video is circulating the internet. It's been attributed to the Soviet Union and it definitely has a late Soviet vibe to it. YouTuber Doktor Uzo dates it so the 1990s and, since the USSR lasted until 1991, I suppose that it's possible. But the electronic music emits an 80s feel.

Office ladies in professional clothing and heels pump up the volume and the energy with a light aerobic workout. They smile with delight at the prospect of increased rations if they keep the charade going well enough for it to become someone else's problem. Keep dancing!

-via Rebecca Baumann

🍳 Singapore Airlines spends $500 million a year to cook 50,000 in-flight meals a day, including up to 7,000 omelet dishes served in flights departing from 77 different cities around the world. How do they do it? Here's how. It's simply amazing.

🎨 The Internet saves an amazing hand-painted mural inside this home from being painted over. Go us!

🕹️ Oh, how I want to go back in time, so I can see Nintendo's SlamFest of 1999 with my own eyes.

🤣 This professor waited and waited for 40 of his students to show up to class. But they never did ... and the reason will have you laughing out loud.

This fat cat is a top-rated tourist attraction in the Polish city of Szczecin. He's rated ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐!

🔫 Watch a bullet bounce off water in ultra slow motion.

🕸️ 8 Wednesday Fan Art Tees and Big & Tall T-shirts

👕 Don't miss: Funny T-Shirt sale over at the NeatoShop. Save up to 20% on all Funny tees!

The Pope's Exorcist is a horror film based on the career of Father Gabriele Amorth, the official exorcist at the Vatican from 1986 until his death in 2016. Amorth claimed to have performed more than 50,000 exorcisms, even after rejecting 98% of the cases referred to him. The movie was adapted from Amorth's two memoirs, An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories. It stars Russell Crowe as Amorth and Franco Nero as the pope, presumably Pope John Paul II, although he wears a beard in the movie. While it is unclear how closely the supernatural horror film follows the books, we can guess that a lot of mustard was thrown on the visuals and action scenes.  -via Digg

Marketing departments love to use the power of the internet to crowdsource decisions, but they tend to not learn from history. Or even research the history of such polls. The classic example is when a British research ship was to be named by online poll. The overwhelming favorite name was Boaty McBoatface, but they didn't give that name to the ship. However, Boaty McBoatface became an enduring meme and a metaphor for internet polls that weren't thought all the way through. Boaty McBoatface is a great name, after all. Other naming polls and crowdsourcing projects have been worse.

But every once in a while, even a joke result works out just fine.

Read 12 other instances of internet polls gone wrong in a pictofacts list at Cracked.