The lifestyles of the rich and famous sometimes include the ability to find and keep a dangerous wild animal as a pet. Sometimes these animals were more of a private zoo resident than a house pet, like the lions and elephants traded among royal families as gifts and tributes. But there have been plenty of folks who like to flaunt that they can afford to hire a handler and buy tons of raw meat for a creature that the rest of us can't even get near.

The animals include bears, venomous snakes, moose, and big cats of all kinds. Some of the celebrities in a pictofacts list of the 15 most extreme celebrity pets at Cracked are still around. We don't know whether their pets are.

A supernova is when a star explodes. If our sun were to go supernova, we wouldn't know what hit us. That's not going to happen in your lifetime. But what about a star outside our solar system? That's been happening since the early days of the universe. Supernova explosions are usually too far away to affect earth much, although they can leave evidence we find millions of years later. Kurzgesagt gives us various scenarios for stars at difference distances from Earth, and what would happen if they exploded into a supernova. As the theorectical distances get closer, the process of a star dying is pretty complicated for relatively nearby planets. There is a distance that's a "sweet spot" that will rain destruction on Earth over the course of centuries, leading to a future dystopia. Closer than that, well, that's it. The last two minutes of this video is an ad.

So you majored in physics and then got a graduate degree in fluid dynamics. What good does that do for the world? The next time someone asks, you can point them to the research that is leading us to a splashless urinal. Mechanical engineer Zhao Pan and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Canada (how appropriate) have designed a urinal that employs the same geometry as a nautilus shell, with a round inner surface that ensures a shallow angle to minimize splashing. The tall fixture also accommodates people of various heights. It is the urinal second from the right in the above image.

The team presented their urinal to attendees of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting in Indianapolis today. If the meeting wraps up with a party featuring liberal libations, they may get a real-world beta test. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: M. Shi and Z. Pan/University of Waterloo)

(Image credit: cervenit)

Longtime Neatorama readers know that you can trap a cat just by drawing a circle or a box on the floor. Bit if you want to know where your cat is, any number of traps can work. A cardboard box is extremely reliable for this, but other object will work, too, like a paper towel on the floor, or a sink, or a massive LEGO construction. You'll find an endless supply of cat trap images at the subreddit TheCatTrapIsWorking. As you might guess, the images are all of cats that have already been trapped, proving the utility of the materials used. Below, you'll see a child's first cat trap. She caught two cats in her first attempt!

(Image credit: Special-Ferret)

Yes, the possibilities are limitless, but nothing seems to work as often as the standard cardboard box. See 50 cat traps and the cats they caught in a roundup at Bored Panda.

Daniel Craig doesn't think much of turkey stuffing, but most of us love it. You don't have to stuff it into a turkey; in fact it's easier (and safer) to call it dressing and eat it as a side dish. But whether you call it stuffing or dressing, it is required for an American Thanksgiving feast. Food writer Erik Kim tells us about the astonishing ways that Americans have taken stuffing and made it every which way they can, incorporating their favorite flavors into Thanksgiving. He says you can call it stuffing because it has stuff in it. He grew up with boxed stuffing, but gradually tried out different ingredients to make a side dish to go with the turkey every year.

Kim did his research of recipes from all over the US, and came up with the "perfect" recipe of his own for the New York Times (non-paywalled link) that is very close to the dressing I make every year for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. (I skip the milk.)

Read how stuffing came about in the first place, and how it's different everywhere you go at Atlas Obscura. The article contains links to many different stuffing recipes.

Why would anyone need a diving board that is twice as tall as an Olympic diving platform? The Montreal Olympic Sports Centre has a 20-meter diving platform, to go along with their many other specialized swimming and diving facilities. It was cliff diver Lysanne Richard who talked them into adding the super-high platform. After all, they had room for it, and it's indoors where she can practice out of the cold. Tom Scott (who we know is afraid of heights) climbs up to the platform, but it's Richard who takes the plunge -after she sends her shoes down by zipline.

The closest business to my house is a pizza place, and there's another pizza outlet next door to it. It's hard to believe there was ever a time when pizza wasn't ubiquitous in America, but when I was a child, the only pizza available was in a kit from Chef Boy-Ar-Dee. In the 1950s, Americans outside of major cities were mostly unfamiliar with pizza. Travelers wrote about it, and it was gradually introduced to the more rural parts of the country. However, to eat one back then, you has to make it yourself. That could go wildly off the rails in some cases. See more newspaper clippings and some advice for making this strange new food called pizza at Boing Boing.

If you watched the series finale of The Walking Dead last night, you might have noticed that there were plenty of ads that had zombies in them. While that seems appropriate, there was more to it. Look closer, and you'll see that those zombies were characters that had died along the way in the series.

First, there was Rodney, who was decapitated in season nine and his head left on a pike. Then there was Milton, the Governor's right hand man. And who could forget Gareth, the leader of the Terminus cannibals? Finally, there are two ads starring Andrea, one of the main characters in the first three seasons. All of these zombies were played by the original actors.

It was Ryan Reynolds who put this idea into motion through his Maximum Effort production company. Who knows how effective the ads were, but seeing them was a welcome and lighthearted break during an intense show. Sure, the project was a lot of work for a bunch of ads that would only be broadcast one night, but 1. Reynolds can afford the risk, and 2. they are sure to go viral today.

Update: YouTube has placed the video under an age restriction, although it is advertising from TV. You can watch it here.

We posted a video of the joy displayed by scientists when they saw video recordings of a bird that they thought might have gone extinct. The black-naped pheasant-pigeon is far from the only species that goes decades without a sighting. There are quite a few identified species in the world that are so rare and elusive that we don't know if they have gone extinct or not. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, so scientists hold out hope that there are still some Fagilde’s trapdoor spiders in the wild, even though they haven't been seen since 1931. Or a fat catfish, last seen in 1957. Until they know for sure, they will stay on the critically endangered list.  

Re:wild has posted a list of 25 such species. Most of them are animals, including one coral, but there is also one plant and one fungus on the list. Once these species are gone, they are gone forever, so you may as well get to know their stories. Each entry is accompanied by a lovely watercolor impression. -via Fark 

(Images credit: Alexis Rockman) 

Jeffery Chong's grandparents lived in a Vancouver bungalow since it was built in 1959. He never knew his grandfather, but his grandmother recently passed away, and the house is for sale. Chong memorialized the home in a photograph titled Home Edition in which he recreated the exact mid-century living room he recalls from his childhood. The photo above was enlarged and installed on the side of the CBC building in Vancouver. It is familiar to many Vancouver residents who lived in the same style of house with the same furnishings in the past.

But look closely at the television. It contains an image of the time Chong's grandfather appeared on TV in 1966. Chong's relatives didn't even know about the footage, but the event that led to it has been retold in their family history many times. The story of that day, the discovery of the image, and the memories that led to the art project are a story well worth a read at The Tyee. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Jeffery Chong)

If you attended elementary school in Scotland during the past ten years, you almost surely learned that the bread toaster was invented by the brilliant Scotsman Alan MacMasters in the late 1800s. Wikipedia said so, and the article had plenty of citations. MacMasters was lauded by the government of Scotland, and his invention was credited in quite a few printed books. That was the state of that, until this past summer when a teenager raised the question of the authenticity of MacMasters' photograph that accompanied the Wikipedia article.

That when the dominos started to fall. The entire thing was a hoax launched in 2012. There really is an Alan MacMasters, and that picture of him is real, but he is a 30-year-old aerospace engineer in London. The citations in the Wikipedia entry are an example of circular citing, or citogenesis, as Randall Munroe called it. Read how the story of the invention of the electric toaster got out of control at BBC. -via Metafilter

As an aside, the only time we've covered the invention of the toaster at Neatorama was in 2010, and that was the pop-up version.  

The town of Chickasha, Oklahoma, has a new monument and tourist draw. It's a giant fiberglass version of the leg lamp featured in the 1983 movie A Christmas Story. The lamp is either 40 or 50 feet tall (sources vary). The leg lamp was first erected as an inflatable in November of 2020, but had so many wind related disasters that it was eventually retired, and was replaced by a permanent fiberglass sculpture earlier this month.

The leg lamp was a dream of Chickasha resident Tim Elliot, who wanted a unique symbol to draw tourists to his hometown. No one else was interested, though, until they learned about the lamp in the office of visual arts professor Noland James. James died in 2020, and his obituary revealed that he was convinced that his homemade lamp inspired the one in the movie. You can see James' lamp in this article. While those involved with A Christmas Story deny any connection with James, the legend was enough to galvanize the town into making the giant leg lamp happen. The Chickasha Leg Lamp has its own Facebook page. -via reddit

(Image credit: stoneytopaz)

Out of sight, out of mind. A man with a metal detector found an interesting old ring buried in Knaresborough, UK, in the 1990s and sold it to an antique collector for a few hundred pounds. The collector thought it might have been from the period in which the Romans ruled Britain, or possibly the later Anglo-Saxons. He was going to get it appraised. He put off the appraisal, the ring in a cupboard, and finally got it checked out 28 years later.

Experts at the British Museum determined that the ring is older than previously thought. It dates to 100 BC, before the Romans entered Britain. It is now believed to be the ring of a Celtic chieftain of the Corieltauvi tribe or the Iceni tribe. This makes it a unique and valuable piece of British history. The ring is up for auction, and is expected to draw up to £30,000.

Contrast this to American artifacts. If someone found a ring that was 500 years old, they would consider it an important treasure. In Britain, a ring thought to be a mere 1000-2000 years old wasn't worth booking an appointment for an appraisal.  -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Noonans)   

The black-naped pheasant-pigeon is a rarely seen bird. Scientists documented a sighting in 1882, but since then, only locals on Fergusson Island in Papua New Guinea have seen the bird they call "auwo," and those sightings were decades ago. The pheasant-pigeon was thought to be extinct. But a team of scientists from the Papua New Guinea National Museum, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the American Bird Conservancy spent a month setting up camera traps in the mountains of Fergusson. It was two days before their scheduled exit when the bird was discovered to have been recorded on a camera trap, 3200 feet up a ridge. Jordan Boersma recorded the moment he recognized the bird in the camera trap's footage and showed it to his colleague Doka Nason. This is the moment that ornithologists (and all wildlife biologists) live for. The black-naped pheasant-pigeon is now listed as critically endangered. This video contains NSFW language.  

For those who want to see the bird, here's the video.

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the communist regime of North Vietnam was reunited with millions of South Vietnamese they didn't trust and who vastly outnumbered them. Two of them were Dzung Nguyen and his father, who were sent off to re-education camps. That left Dzung's much younger brother Thomas, a high school student, as the head of the family. The brothers, both the incarcerated Dzung and the relatively "free" Thomas, resisted their new overlords as much as they could without drawing too much attention to themselves. After Dzung was released five and half years later, he and Thomas arranged to escape Vietnam on a fishing boat, along with 24 other people. Dzung was to be the navigator and Thomas the mechanic. The responsibility of the journey weighed heavily on the brothers' minds.

They aimed toward Natuna, an Indonesian island that promised refuge for fleeing Vietnamese. But their rusty water tank developed a leak and all the fresh water was gone before they found out. The boat was still four days away from Natuna. Would they all be able to survive that long? There were a few children aboard. Could they even find the island? Read their story, or listen to the audio version, at Truly Adventurous.