🍕 Roses have always been expensive on Valentine's Day, even before we lived in the Age of Inflation. But thankfully, there are some creative alternatives to giving your lovey a bouquet of flowers. So, forget roses! Here are 9 unusual Valentine's Day Bouquets (which include the pizza bouquet shown above)

❤️ Pro-tip: tees last much longer than roses, so here are 7 Funny Valentine's Day Tees and Big & Tall T-Shirts that'll make your crush LOL (remember, a maid that laughs is half taken).

🎥 Movie theater attendance has been declining for a while. A lot of people point to Netflix and other streaming services as the reason there aren't more butts on movie theater seats, but I have an another explanation: we just can't understand what's being said on the big screen without captioning.

Image: @VillaItalianKitchen/Facebook

🕯️ Here's the unusual story of the 40 Year Candle: one night forty years ago, Tiktoker Taylor Underhill's grandma lit a candle on top of a beer can. Then, after the candle melted, she lit another one on top of it, then another one, then another one night after night for forty years! (Image above: @taylorunderhill)

🐻 Love bears? Ursine luck! NASA just released this image of a bear on Mars. Naturally, it's a self pawtrait.

🦒 Nature is so unfair. Here I am, a grown man, standing shorter than a baby Masai giraffe who's just been born (baby giraffes are about six feet tall at birth!).

💩 Oh bother! Now you've really stepped in it.

Want more neat stories? Check out our sister sites: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista, Supa Fluffy, Infinite 1UP and The Shirt Stack.

👕 Don't miss: Anime T-Shirt and Video Game Tee sale (save up to 20%) over at the NeatoShop.

An island named T-3, informally called called Fletcher's Ice Island, is an anomaly because it was never an island at all. It was an iceberg that had calved off an Arctic glacier in the 1950s. Since it was so big -11 kilometers long and five kilometers wide- the US Air Force put an airstrip and a research station on it. The station was manned by mostly civilian contractors, who lived in trailers and huts and whiled away the long Arctic winters by drinking and fighting. It was in this strange environment that Mario Escamilla shot station director Bennie Lightsy under stressful circumstances in 1970. Was it murder or manslaughter or an accident? Before that could be determined, the question of jurisdiction had to be settled.

The research station on T-3 was run by the Air Force, but the men involved were civilians. The place where it happened wasn't claimed by any nation, because it wasn't land. The Arctic Ocean isn't the property of any country. Canada didn't want the case. Escamilla was seized by going through the US airbase at Thule, in Greenland, which is owned by Denmark, who didn't want the case either. Would maritime laws apply? T-3 wasn't an island, but it wasn't a ship, either. Read about the many problems of jurisdiction for this case, and how it was eventually resolved, at Today I Found Out.

This is a photograph of a rock formation in the Hingol National Park in Pakistan. What does it look like to you? Take a minute and decide. Now, when you learn that this is sometimes called the Balochistan Sphinx, you will see its resemblance to the Great Sphinx of Giza. It has the face of a man, the body of lion with paws and everything, and a Nemes headdress worn by Egyptian pharaohs. This rock stands atop another formation that appears to have the columns of a Hindu temple. Who carved this?

Mother Nature carved it. There have been some articles and videos proposing a theory about an ancient civilization that for some reason carved a giant Egyptian sculpture and a Hindu temple in Pakistan so very long ago that it has been worn down by erosion. But that theory doesn't stand up at all, especially when you see the formation from different angles. This is an example of pareidolia, the tendency to see familiar shapes, particularly faces, in random objects. Read about the Balochistan Sphinx at Historic Mysteries.  -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Bilal Mirza)

British folks have blood pudding or black pudding, and they also have Christmas pudding, which are nothing like each other, and nothing like what Americans put into a chocolate pie. So why are they all called pudding?

Adam Ragusea explains the different kinds of puddings. Beware, the European pudding began as a sausage, and that is explained in a way that... well, let's refer to the saying "If you love sausage and you love the law, you don't want to see either being made." Then eventually pudding became more than just sausage, and the word was highjacked to mean a sweet soft dessert with all manner of things in it. Ragusea even makes one from a 17th century recipe. But the evolution continued in a different way in the United States, where our pudding eventually became more liquid with fewer things in it.

The video has a skippable ad from 3:00 to 4:20. -via Digg

THE GRAY MAN: LA

Pre-drinks, anyone? 🍃🫖

📸 @Mr_Dadams00 pic.twitter.com/upQUXABhjY

— Regé-Jean Page (@regejean) July 14, 2022

Bridgerton is a British television series set in the Regency Era. Regé-Jean Page was one of the stars of that show and, apparently, the most handsome man in the world.

The New York Post reports that this is the finding of a British plastic surgeon named Dr. Julian De Silva. He calculated the handsomeness of famous men using the Golden Ratio, which establishes a proportion of facial features of 1 to 1.618. Page is within 93.65% of compliance with that standard.

Following him were actors Chris Hemsworth, who scored as 93.53%, and Michael B. Jordan with 93.46%. According to Dr. De Silvia, it was Page's perfect lips which secured him the #1 position.

-via Instapundit

The AP Stylebook's Twitter account, in addition to creating writing standards often used in journalism, spends its time telling people what they should and should not think and say. In a recent now-deleted tweet, it urged people to avoid a particular type of phrasing that it regards as dehumanizing--describing people with a label preceded by the definite article.

Do not, it emphasizes derisively describe any person as belonging to some unfortunate class of people, such as "the poor, the mentally, ill, the French...."

The Embassy of the...uh, I mean, the Embassy of France to the United States is taking it fairly well:

-via David Burge

Josh Jacobs, also known as Slinky Josh, is the world's premiere expert in slinky manipulation, or slinking, as he calls it. He came by the art honestly, by seeing someone on the internet do it. He was so impressed that he got a slinky and started practicing. The slinkys that Jacobs uses are a far cry from the original metal slinkys, which got bent before you could ever do fancy tricks with them. He uses tough, colorful slinkys that he sells along with slinky manipulation lessons. In this video, Jacobs shows us a couple of the basic moves that anyone can do, but you can only get really good at it with practice. -via Digg

It's been 30 years now since the last Sears catalog was printed. By then, the company had spent more than 100 years as the king of mail order. Does anyone else remember when you could order a gun through the Sears catalog? Sears would mail some items that would be unthinkable today, like heroin, back when it was offered as a non-addicting alternative to morphine. Sears offered a whole line of drugs, many that would be categorized as "snake oil" today.

You could order an entire house delivered from Sears, although it would come in many separate packages that you put together yourself. Plans were included that gave you step-by-step directions for buildings your own house from a kit. For an additional charge, you could even get one designed to include a bathroom.

Smithsonian gives us the origin story of the company founded by 22-year-old Richard W. Sears in 1886, including the short appearance of Alvah C. Roebuck. And we get a taste of some of the weirder things that were once sold by mail order through the Sears catalog.

(Image credit: Mike Mozart)

Core 77 shares with us a fascinating development by NVIDIA, a graphics and artificial intelligence company.

Let's say that you're in a long virtual meeting with someone and would like to pretend to be paying attention to that person. Just occasionally nodding saying "uh huh" every 30 seconds isn't enough. People expect that you will maintain eye contact through the webcam in order to convincingly feign interest.

INVIDIA has developed an AI-based filter that will automatically present the eyes on display as directed at the camera. In addition to creating the appearance of attentiveness, it's useful when people are reading off of a script, such as a teleprompter, but wish to look their audiences directly in the eye.

Image: INVIDIA

Take a good look at the musical notation before you play the video. In ten measures scored for ten instruments, you see a cat curled up in a ball. How does it sound? Surprisingly good! How does that happen?Noam Oxman wrote this music as a memorial tribute for his beloved Chubby Cat, who he describes as "a sprinkle of playful piccolo, a touch of warm strings, and a sweet harmony progression." He is describing both the cat and the music. We can be impressed with the skill that went into this, although it's not Oxman's first such musical illustration. His YouTube channel of "Sympawnies" has a lot more, and some of them are for sale as art prints as well. Proceeds are used to feed and give medical treatment to stray cats.

When you've got the talent to do something as odd as this, you have to share it with the world. -via Fark

🐈 The last exercise I had that involved a cat comprised of running away from its murderous claws, but apparently, you can exercise with a feline strength training equipment. Behold, catflexing.

🍳 Long before the open concept kitchen and the farmhouse kitchen trend, there were avocado green appliances and other bygone kitchen fads. Take a stroll down memory lane or gawk at your parents' bizarre dream kitchens of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s.

☎️ Got an insufferable coworker who kept on droning about his mechanical keyboard? Tell him that he's behind the curve: the hot new, er ... make that old thing is the rotary phone keyboard.

🕹️ These movie adaptation of video games are so bad that they'd best be forgotten ... but who am I kidding. This is the Internet, so such things are celebrated.

👶 Move over, Perry Mason! Here comes Toddler Lawyer. LOL! If you like that, there's plenty more laughs over at Laughosaurus.

👻 It's 279 days till Halloween, but you don't have to wait that long to get your fix of horror and other witchy delights. Spooky Daily, where very day is Halloween, has got you covered with Halloween in January.

Image: Catflexing: The Catlover's Guide to Weight Training, Aerobics, and Stretching by Stephanie Jackson

☕ Tee of the day: Better Latte Than Never by indie artist zawitees

👻 9 Ghostbusters Tees and Big & Tall T-Shirts that are Out of This World

🔥 Don't miss: Save up to 20% on all Cartoon T-Shirts, Movie Tees, and TV Show Shirts over at the NeatoShop.

Who was the real life Carmen Sandiego? History has so many male thieves, con artists, and scammers that the women who pulled these capers often fly under the radar. But they are there, making themselves wealthy by convincing people they are someone besides who they really are. Con women may present themselves as someone worthy of expensive gifts, or talk their way into money that is never seen again, or marry into wealth by false pretenses, or engage in plain old thievery. Some are better at it than others.

The picture above is of May Dugas, an educated prostitute from Michigan who blackmailed her wealthy clients. When her scams were uncovered, she took her show on the road, to Shanghai, Tokyo, London, the Netherlands, and back to the US, where she returned to her hometown as a fabulously wealthy woman. But Dugas continued her crimes even then. Other con women from history include a jewel thief, a royal fraud, and one woman who faked her own death. Read about five of them at Messy Nessy Chic.

It's so cool when people who have access to hi-tech equipment share the stuff they see with the rest of us. Photographer Jens Braun dissolved some vitamin C and then let it recrystallize under a microscope fitted with a camera, using polarized light and everything. We get to see the action in various speeds and colors. Even if you don't understand what's going on (and few truly do), the process is beautiful. It's the conjunction of art and science. Or you might say that the natural world is a work of art, but we aren't able to see all of it without the help of an artist.  -via Digg

If a conjoined twin were to commit a crime, what would be the legal implications? The state could certainly put the perpetrator on trial, but could they be punished with a prison sentence? One twin could not be incarcerated without the other, and that would mean jailing an innocent person. You might think, how could one be guilty without the other also being guilty? There are plenty of crimes that happen in the blink of an eye, like shoplifting or simple assault, that the second twin might have no knowledge of before the moment it happens. That brings up the question of how responsible one twin would be for preventing their sibling's crime, or failing to report, or even fleeing. While one twin might be the guilty party, the other might be an accessory to a crime. That brings up the question of free will, the exact nature of the twins' physical bond, and how competent each twin is.

This is a common thought experiment in law school, but believe it or not there have been a couple of real world cases, including one in the US. There was also a fictional case in the TV series American Horror Story. Read about those cases and the legal questions surrounding conjoined twins and the law.  -Thanks, Jill!

(Image source: Wellcome Images)

In Iceland, people are beginning to celebrate Sólardagur by enjoying sólarkaffi. That takes a bit of explanation. Iceland is below the Arctic Circle, but it is close and quite mountainous. In some valley communities, the sun does not shine for a month or so on either side of the winter solstice. Sólardagur translates to Sun Day, the day when the light comes back, even for just a few minutes. That calls for a celebration which involves sólarpönnukökur (sun pancakes) and sólarkaffi (sun coffee). Some villages, schools, and and workplaces have community breakfasts to celebrate, and children sing songs welcoming the sun.

In those villages affected by midwinter darkness, the coffee and pancake tradition goes way back. But due to people moving into the city, meaning Reykjavík, they spread the traditions of Sólardagur to all of Iceland. Read about the return of the sun to Iceland and the celebrations that accompany it at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Greg Neate)