Here’s something that can uplift your spirits, even just for a bit. A blooper reel from 1991 showcases the fun times Robin Williams had with the popular character Elmo. 

Before the comedian’s death in 2014, he appears frequently on Sesame Street, playing different roles in the show. His most notable moment in the show is when he interacts with Big Bird and Elmo. 

In one of the clips featured in the video, Williams can be seen trying his best to make Elmo’s puppeteer, Kevin Clash break character. The comedian cracks a few jokes in his style, and you can actually see Elmo trying his best (to not make a mistake). 

The clip was actually from the 1991 episode of the show called “Big Bird's Birthday or Let Me Eat Cake.” Thanks to Williams’ brilliance, he was able to get Elmo enthralled even if he accidentally lose composure, goofed a line, and then walked off camera. When the comedian came back to continue the scene, it was Elmo’s turn to make mistake as he gets Williams’ name wrong. 

Did your favorite cookie brand make it, we wonder? 

Cookies are one of the most common snacks that are loved by people of ages. The chocolate chip cookie variation is also a popular option for bakeries and manufacturers alike. Did you know that this flavor was invented in the late 1930s? 

Ruth Wakefield of the Toll House Restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts created the recipe and granted Nestle the use of her recipe in the succeeding years.  This small event has kick-started the rise of the multiple brands, flavors, and variations of the classic treat in supermarkets and stores. 

To determine what cookie is the best in the market right now, Tasting Table recruited three product testers to rank all the chocolate chip cookies in the market from worst to best. The results may shock you— they certainly surprised us! 

Before we give a short discussion on the results, we’d like to recommend you go here if you don’t want spoilers. If you’d rather read up on the top-ranking cookie brand, read more below! 

Interestingly enough, out of all the cookie brands you can find on grocery shelves, the Tasting Table ranks Trader Joe’s Crispy Crunchy Chocolate Chip Cookies as the best of the best. The testers found the ratio of chocolate chips per cookie good. Additionally, the cookie’s pleasing buttery flavor complements its crispy and crunchy texture. 

Image credit: Lisa Pawldak / Tasting Table 

The moon is receiving quite a lot of visitors recently. From debris to rocks to space junk, the celestial object has now got a mysterious object slamming into its surface. 

Initially reported as three tons of space junk back in March, NASA has determined that the junk that just hit the Moon is a rocket. Unfortunately, no one wants to claim ownership of the intriguing spacecraft that hit the Moon’s surface. 

Theories range from the rocket belonging to a SpaceX launch vehicle that was launched in 2015, to a Chinese rocket that launched in 2014. Both entities, however, denied ownership of the vehicle. 

According to China, the 2014 rocket was already burned during reentry. So until now, no one knows who owns it, much to the experts' and the Internet’s own dismay. 

The reason why this event has created more buzz for space enthusiasts and experts alike is that rockets create a lot of trash. They feature multiple stages and have multiple moving parts that can be dislodged during entry. With a lot of junk, it will be difficult to trace all of them and leaves the Moon with a lot of unwanted items on its surface. 

Image credit: Dom Le Roy/Pexels

Kreis Cup is a sustainable, durable, and reusable item perfect for coffee drinkers. Even though it is made from used coffee grounds and plant-based materials, the product is still heat resistant, so you’ll be able to drink your hot coffee with ease!

Speaking of hot coffee, what’s great about Kreis Cup is that it is also designed to keep your coffee’s temperature for longer periods of time. 

To create the right product for potential customers, the spent coffee grounds were dried, treated, and suspended in a natural polymer. The material holds the ingredients together as it is shaped into a cup. The resulting Kreis Cup doesn’t hold the full smell of coffee due to the manufacturing process, but it still has a faint whiff of coffee that is still a treat to the senses. 

Fully playing into its environment-friendly nature, the cup is biodegradable. When customers would like to dispose of theirs in the future, they can bury it in the soil. The product will safely biodegrade in the ground as a fertilizer for the soil.

For those interested, the Kreis Cup comes in a set of 3 different products: (a) 14oz (415ml) that comes with a detachable sipper lid, (b) 12oz (335 ml) cup, and (c) a complementary saucer. 

Image credit: Coffee Kreis  

A secret musician, caught in the act! 

In a video uploaded on YouTube, a dog can be seen hopping into a piano stool and starts… playing the piano. Well, of course, the pupper doesn’t just play, he also sings! 

He starts by warming up his skills by playing some small chords for a while. After that, he proceeds to howl along as he continues playing more notes on the instrument. We’ve noticed that this white pooch tends to offer an occasional howl that adds to the charisma of his performance. 

At the end of his wonderful performance, the pup seems to wait for the applause of the masses or a gesture of acknowledgment of his efforts. Unfortunately, there seems to be no one in the audience but the camera that was recording him. The pooch then decides to jump down the stool and go off his business. 

If you want to see the full video, we’ve embedded it below! 

Image credit: PawshPal 

People used to get rid of inconvenient family members quite easily by putting arsenic in food until a reliable chemical test for the poison was developed in 1836. Still, it took some time for word to get around, and by then Charles Lafarge was dead. His young wife, Marie Lefarge, was arrested on suspicion of murder. It was a sensational trial, with plenty of evidence.

1. People knew Marie was unhappy with her marriage, since she found out the groom was not as wealthy as he had told her.

2. Charles became sick on several occasions after eating Marie's cooking.

3. A nurse had seen her put a powder into Charles' eggnog. She even took samples, which were positive for arsenic.

4. The rat poison Marie left out for the rats proved to be inert flour and water.

5. Charles' exhumed body tested positive for arsenic, although that happened after several inconclusive teats.

Yet many people thought Marie was railroaded due to the new chemical tests that had yet to stand the test of time. Read what happened in the case of Marie Lafarge at Amusing Planet. 

The giant fiberglass statues of midcentury American advertising are becoming more and more rare, so it's a treat any time you see one these days. American Giants is a company that finds and restores these iconic statues, but it's not easy. Watch how they take an abandoned, weather-beaten Paul Bunyan statue in two pieces and do a complete refurbishment. They put him back together, patched up the cracks, and filled the holes. They gave him new feet, stronger bones, and a face that could light up a room! The result is stronger and shinier than the original statue, but still very much recognizable as an original Paul Bunyan. While the process is impressive, the before-and-after pictures at the end are amazing. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: nememess)

What is this jumble of letters trying to say? If your first impression was "fart water," you are not alone. That can't be it, but what are those letters at the top all about? Eventually, you figure out that if you start at the second tallest word and read down, it also says free water, which is an attempt at cleverness that ended up just kind of dumb. As signs go, there's a common problem with trying to write a message across divided panels that the eye normally reads within those panels, like the infamous "don't dead open inside" scene in The Walking Dead. Here it not only goes to extremes, but has one unfortunate individual unit that's just sad.

(Image via reddit)  

Some confusing signs offer a challenge to figure out where they went wrong. One sign was made over two panels meant to be read horizontally across both panels. Then a third was tacked on with a different sentence to be read on its own, which confuses the whole message. But then there's this, which is not only nonsense, but you can't even figure out how it went so wrong.  

(Image credit: FreeWillyPete)

Take a look through 50 such signs at Bored Panda and see if you can 1. decipher what they are saying, and 2. figure out how they got that way.

This award-winning animated short walks the line between adorable and terrifying. How do you do that? Simply make it about a cat. Black cats can be sweet as sugar, but they have the reputation of demons from the depths of hell. This is totally undeserved, as Lucy was just acting as cats do. Lucy is a cute black kitten that happens to resemble a void with gold eyes, but like anyone, she can only take so much. This film is from Kate Vaillant of the Ringling College of Art and Design Class of 2022.

This is a dangerous post! Not for any particular reason, but this post has claimed a lot of victims. A four-foot tall bollard in a Walmart parking lot in Auburn, Maine, attracts automobiles into its clutches far more often than probability would predict. They've tried painting it different colors, they've tried changing the traffic flow, but people keep ramming into the bollard. It's already a local legend; and it's beginning to have global notoriety like the infamous 11' 8" bridge in Durham, North Carolina

There's a slideshow at reddit showing 20 of the accidents involving this bollard and the great damage. Why does it keep happening? The Sun-Journal talked to driving instructor Andy Levesque, who said, “People make turns prematurely and cut corners.” That doesn't explain how cars manage to impale themselves on top of the bollard. Who drives fast enough to do that in a parking lot? -via Boing Boing

I recently watched The Grinch for the first time this holiday season and this caught my attention. As a student of history, it naturally piqued my interest. So I did some research and you won’t believe what I found out. /1 pic.twitter.com/xksowmJBa9

— Trevor Williams (@MeLlamoTrevor) November 22, 2022

This is going to blow your mind.

In a brief scene in the 2000 film How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch dresses Max the dog as a reindeer and explains to him his motivation as an actor. He does so while wearing a US Navy cap. This odd scene has long been described by fans as a reference to Rob Reiner's headgear in the documentary This Is Spinal Tap or to the mannerisms of Ron Howard, who directed the Grinch film--or both.

It's neither.

Trevor Williams researched the tragic life of the Grinch prior to his Christmas adventures. There's a huge clue in the scene: the name of the ship Whoville, which was a Gleaves-class destroyer that served in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

I had no idea that the Grinch was a very highly decorated war hero who decided, upon the end of his service, to move to the town for which his ship was named--a town that rejected him, despite his courage and sacrifice on their behalf.

You'll never look at the Grinch the same after reading this thread.

-via Debby Witt

The turducken, which is a chicken baked inside a duck, which is baked inside a turkey, is only one of many expressions of humanity’s desire to cook foods within other foods. The Inuit once prepared birds inside a walrus carcass. The Bedouin used to cook chickens and a sheep inside a roasted camel. The Americans, back in the before times, would cook five pies within one.

The need for foods within foods is transcultural. Jung might say that it is a call from our collective unconscious.

But that is not a scientific way to look at the phenomenon. Vi Hart, a mathematician, is a person of science and breaks down the possibilities of the turducken concept at great length. She prepares quail eggs inside hens inside ducks inside a turkey, but also considers the consequences of expanding the practice on a staggeringly complicated scale.

Content warning: math.

-via Nag on the Lake

VCHS TV reports that it all began in 1948 in the town of Dunbar, West Virginia. Two neighborhoods represented by two amateur football teams, the Riverside Rats and the Hillside Rams, wanted to prove which was the tougher of the two. On Thanksgiving Day, they squared off in a pads-free tackle game.

These days, the rivalry is more friendly and the event is far more than just a game. The Commode Bowl, as the game is called, is preceded by a parade with floats and vehicles decorated with toilets, toilet paper, and toilet plungers.

This year, the Rams prevailed and carried off the trophy after a final score of 28 to 6.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: WCHS

Warning: this video contains minor explosions, engineer talk, and a certain amount of pain. Maybe a little NSFW language, mostly covered by bleeps.  

Mehdi Sadaghdar of ElectroBOOM (previously at Neatorama) made an electrical device he calls the Photo-BOOM Electro-Pranker 3000. The purpose is to startle passers-by with sound, flashing lights, and explosions. He gets deep into the details of the electrical principles involved in this "ingenius" contraption. But that's not what we are here to see. If you've seen any previous ElectroBOOM videos, you can probably guess that he ends up pranking himself more than anyone else. The last minute of this video is an ad. -via reddit

A clay tablet from ancient Sumer tells quite a story. It is rare that records that old have any name attached to them, and when they do, it's usually royalty. Common people doing common work came and went, leaving no trace of who they were. But Kushim kept track of the barley trade in the city of Uruk, and he put his name on the receipts for shipments, signing them "administrator Kushim." That in itself makes the tablet, dated between 3,400 and 3,000 BC, an important artifact. But once translated, it shows that Kushim wasn't much of an accountant. The barley tallied on the front of the tablet should equal 3,910 bowls (a unit a bit bigger than a gallon). But the total Kushim etched on the back is 3,895 bowls.

Kushim was 15 bowls short. This could be a math error, indicating that he might have been in the wrong job. Or it could mean he was skimming some of the barley for himself. Either way, it's not the only math discrepancy in the ancient tablet, which you can read about at Historic Mysteries. One has to wonder if Kushim would have done anything different if he knew his work would be examined 5,000 years later. -via Strange Company