The spine of the Andes running through the Cajamarca region allows a river to drop fifty meters down to the valley below. When viewed from the right angle, the water flows over the rocks to form the image of a woman in a long, flowing bridal gown, from her veiled face to her ankles.
Ring around the rosie, a pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down!
We all know the song, and probably played the game as preschoolers, in which children hold hands and march around in a circle until falling down together at the end, invariably in giggles. It was just nonsensical fun! But if you look at the lyrics closely, you might start to see how it might be talking about a virulent disease, the kind that gives you rosy red blotches and eventually kills. Even the pocket full of posies may refer to a nosegay to fight the stench of miasma, or a home remedy to ward off disease. What does the historical record say?
The history of the song proves that the theory is bunk. All one has to do is look at the lyrics of many earlier versions of the same children's chant, written down as far back as a hundred years before the lyrics we know today. Read about the evolution of "Ring Around the Rosie" and what it really means at Today I Found Out.
In the early 18th century, it was difficult to impress people into handing over money for entertainment. Still, there were people willing to risk life and limb in the name of show business. The "Flying Man" act became popular in England for a short period. A man would climb to the top of a building, tower, or church steeple, where a rope was secured to the ground somewhere. After warming up the crowd with acrobatics, he would climb onto the rope and "fly" down it. The man wore a breastplate with a groove that was supposed to keep him on the rope. As he flew down, he would continue to entertain, firing pistols, blowing a trumpet, or using some other device to draw attention. You can see how the Flying Man act fit into the range of aerialist skills like performing on a tightrope or the flying trapeze -for a while.
A 1733 newspaper account tells of one such act that included a donkey that went down a rope and killed a girl and injured other people! The Flying Man in this incident was not named, but a look at the lives of several who became famous doing it tells us why the stunt died out. It was because so many of the performers were killed trying it. Read about the Flying Men and their gruesome deaths at Singular Discoveries. -via Strange Company
We humans think we are so much smarter than cats. But cats have just managed to fool humans into thinking so. They trained us to feed them, shelter them, and clean up their mess for nothing in return but a little entertainment. And when we aren't looking, they do exactly as they please. Who am I kidding? They do exactly as they please even when we are looking!
Redditor foflexity was eating outside with his family, and the cat was annoying, so he put the cat in the shed. This tomcat has stolen food before. It didn't take long for the cat to escape. Putting the cat back into the shed was not working, so foflexity set up a camera to see how the cat was getting out.
See? cats don't need opposable thumbs to conquer the world. They just need to be smart enough to figure out how a mechanism works. It looks like foflexity's cat is that smart. -via Laughing Squid
Remember when Michael Jordan retired from basketball and decided to be a professional baseball player? That didn't work out so well. But there have been people who managed to conquer one sport and then pivot to another with surprising success. If you had to name a multi-sport athlete right now (besides Jordan), who would you think of? Probably Jim Thorpe. Thorpe won gold medals for the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics, which are multiple sports in each event already, but then was stripped of his medals when the Olympic Committee learned he played semi-pro baseball as well. In this age of the Olympics being dominated by professional athletes, that seems weird. Even at the time, it seemed unfair because he had to earn a living somehow. But you might be surprised to learn that Thorpe also played professional football later in his life! There are quite a few other pros who conquered more than one sport, and they deserve more recognition for it. Read about eleven of them in a list at Mental Floss.
Have you ever wondered what to do in a medical emergency if you're all alone? If you live alone, it might be time to look into one of those panic button devices. Those are pretty good if you've fallen and you can't get up, but what if you're choking? Well, let's take a lesson in just that. This is a bona fide public service announcement from Fire Department Chronicles, with information worth remembering. But it's also quite funny, if you don't happen to be dying as you watch. -via Digg
In 1978, Reno sculptor Dave Fambrough was inspired to use a Volkswagen Beetle in a metal rendering of a giant spider. He called it "The Volkswagen Beatle" for some reason. It stood 18 feet high and had legs made of irrigation pipes. Although he had planned to make a series of huge spider sculptures, Fambrough made only one other, and moved to Mexico in 2006, selling his "1928 Dodge Tarantula" on his way out. You can see pictures of a Fambrough's Volkswagen Beatle, now restored as a "black widow" spider, at its 2015 installation at Scudder's Performance in Sparks, Nevada. And it's still there! Now if we could just find out who bought the Dodge Tarantula and where it ended up, I'll be tickled. -via Nag on the Lake
DNA is strange. While gene sequencing can give us all kinds of information, constructing a family tree is still complicated. If the number of ancestors we have doubles every generation we go back, pretty soon your ancestors will outnumber the people that were alive at the time. It stands to reason that we are all kin if we go back far enough, so why do we find so many ancestors we aren't related to?
The Tech Interactive tackled a rather common question: "How is it that I know that my great grandmother was married to a Native American, but when I had my ancestry checked, I showed no Native American ancestors?" The simple answer from many internet forums would be that great-grandma fooled around on her husband. But there are other reasons for the disappearance of DNA. The chart above shows how a great-grandfather's DNA (green) might disappear from your profile. That's not likely for all 23 pairs of chromosomes, but it's possible to completely lose an ancestor's DNA as genes recombine over more generations. There are other reasons that have to do with history, and the history of DNA research, which you can read about at The Tech Interactive. -via Damn Interesting
British vlogger Half-Asleep Chris (previously at Neatorama) has two cats, Ralph and Bella. Ralph, like many cats, wants to eat very early in the morning, and wakes Chris up at 6AM to feed him. Chris does not like that, so he built a contraption that enables him to feed Ralph from his bed. Oh, no, nothing as simple as a container of cat food and a bowl to serve it in. Nor is it a computerized automatic feeder. This is a marble run, scaled up to accommodate kitty puzzle balls filled with kibble, and then scaled up again to ridiculous proportions with obstacles and decorations and long tubes that have the cats running all about the house to get their breakfast. He calls it the Meow Stopper, which is a totally tortured acronym he explains in the video.
Chris releases ten balls at once. Will they all make it through the miniature golf course, the Paddington Bear jungle, and the hamster cage? But even more important, will Ralph stop meowing and eat his breakfast? All questions will be answered in a video that's worth every minute. -via Laughing Squid
Sara and Jacob Witzling make beautiful and unusual cabins in a rainforest. On their YouTube channel, Cabinland, they demonstrate how they build their wilderness retreats.
Much wood must be cut not only for the lumber, but also for firewood. This means that Jacob swings axes a lot. To make it more efficient and/or absurd, he's welded custom axes. This Instagram video details 8 of them. The triple axe could actually be practical, but the flail axe blade strikes me (or hopefully doesn't) as dangerous to swing around.
Even if these axes aren't always useful for chopping wood, the Witzlings are, to say the least, amply prepared to survive a zombie apocalypse.
When you eat at McDonald's in America, the food is the same no matter what your location. The fries are made from potatoes grown in Idaho, and your burger is most likely made from Texas beef. But in historical terms, that's a fairly recent innovation. Before chains, restaurants mostly served what was locally available. This went double for seafood restaurants, where freshness makes a difference between success and failure. What was on the menu was what fishermen brought in, and many of the top seafood restaurants built their reputations on certain dishes they knew they'd be able to supply.
But that supply changed gradually over time. A genius study from the University of British Columbia had team members digging up historic menus from seafood restaurants in Vancouver, Anchorage, and Los Angeles. They managed to unearth archives of restaurant menus dating back to the 1880s, from hundreds of restaurants in Vancouver alone. Sorting them out by year and location, a picture began to emerge that was probably not at all apparent to the chefs who created those menus. They merely dropped a type of fish or seafood that became more difficult to get, and added another that became more plentiful. Over 130 years, the available catch changed considerably in each of the cities. Read what this data tells us at Hakai magazine. -via Atlas Obscura
It is true that no sandwich surpasses the Reuben, but there are other historic sandwiches worth considering and YouTuber Barry Enderwick is touring them in his kitchen. His channel, Sandwiches of History, shows him recreating sandwiches that appear in old recipe books.
Among them is the Eccles Sandwich, which appears in May E. Southworth's 1901 book One Hundred and One Sandwiches. The origin of the name is mysterious, but the recipe is not.
To make it, Enderwick needed fresh maraschino cherries. These are not what you can find in jars at grocery stores and served on ice cream sundaes. True maraschino cherries should be made from freshly picked cherries that soaked for two weeks in maraschino liqueur. Enderwich chopped these cherries and added them to bread, along with chopped almonds.
Enderwick licked the result, but added grated chocolate to the sandwich as an improvement. He suggests that a heavy, sweet cream would help the loose contents of this sandwich bind together.
In an interview with Atlas Obscura, Enderwick explains that he launched this project when a friend sent him a 1909 sandwich recipe book with some weird dishes. The first that he tried consisted of chopped, raw oysters with Worcestershire sauce, lettuce, and buttered bread. What was his judgment? Enderwick determined that "this was nasty" and moved on to a different sandwich.
The staff at Northwest Trek Wildlife Park in Eatonville, Washington, had a great idea for a fundraiser. They put art supplies in some of the bear enclosures. The idea was that the bears would walk through the globs of non-toxic paint on the floor and then leave paw prints in bright colors on the paper that covered the floor. The paw prints could be sold as artworks to patrons of the park. But one bear named Fern had a better idea. She shoved her face in the paint, several colors worth, and used her own snout to create a masterpiece! It's an example of abstract art, of course, but her keepers think it's priceless. This brings a whole new meaning to the term face painting.
But that makes us wonder who got the honor of cleaning Fern's face when the painting was completed. That's what interns are for, you know. -via Fark
Peter Gabriel left his band Genesis in 1975. Two years later, he released his first solo single, "Solsbury Hill." The song went to #13 in the UK, and #68 in the US. Gabriel went on to record several #1 songs, but "Solsbury Hill" had an afterlife of its own. Almost a quarter-century after its debut, it started showing up in movie trailers. And why not? It's a pleasant, bouncy tune that sounds familiar to the audience even if they don't recall the song. To those who know the song, it conveys the theme of a personal journey. "Solsbury Hill" has also appeared in countless advertisements on radio, TV, and the internet.
Gabriel doesn't regret licensing the song for commercial use, although he admits it might be overused. However, it started out as a very personal illustration of his journey from Genesis to retirement to a solo career. Read how the song came about and what it means, as well as its metamorphosis to an advertising staple, at Mental Floss.
Arthur Hardy publishes a New Orleans Mardi Gras guide. He had been searching for decades for a rumored film clip of the city's 1898 Mardi Gras parade, the first one ever filmed. The rumors were true, and he finally found it this past March in, of all places, Netherlands. The Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam had a clip, less than two minutes long, the Holy Grail of New Orleans history documentation.
Taken on February 22, 1898, the film depicts six floats from the parade. The theme that year was “Harvest Queens,” per the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate. People carried silver bell-shaped placards before each float to commemorate the Rex Organization’s 25th anniversary.
People sure did dress up to watch a parade back then! The found footage was debuted to the public last month, and will be a part of an exhibit on the Rex Organization's 150th anniversary. I read that and thought, "I bet that's on YouTube already." You can read the story behind the film and the search for it at Smithsonian.
