We see audacious prison escapes in movies and think, that can't happen in real life. Strangely, it happens, and sometimes in ways too unbelievable for the movies. Successful prison breaks often require collaboration with outside accomplices. Or with those who are supposed to keep you inside, or at least their carelessness or incompetence. It can also require long term planning, patience, and luck.

However, breaking out of prison doesn't mean you are exactly free. Most prison escapees are apprehended sooner or later while on the run, which leads to the subgroup of prisoners who managed to escape over and over. You have to wonder how someone with an escape on their record isn't under better security, but the most talented escapees have several in their history. Honest Jack Sheppard (illustrated above) flew the coop four times! John Dillinger managed multiple prison breaks because he had a network of people willing to help him. And even Ted Bundy pulled off two of them. Read about eight of the most spectacular prison breaks at Mental Floss. 

(Image credit: J. Sketch) 

Try as you might, it would be extremely difficult to find more disparate music genres than Snoop Dogg's West Coast rap style and a classic Russian ballet. But in the hands of Dustin Ballard, also known as There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama), the two have finally come together. And we only post those songs that aren't ruined, but are instead actually improved. 

You didn't know this tune had lyrics, did you? Snoop Dogg is all about lyrics, and these are definitely NSFW. Snoop not only sings along with Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Cygnets" from the ballet Swan Lake, he also dances as the prima ballerina. That requires a lot of athletic ability for a 53-year-old. But Snoop has surprised us before. So has Ballard. The comments are all wondering when we are going to see a reaction video from Dogg himself, possibly racking his brain trying to remember when he danced the ballet. 

Chris-Rachael Oseland is a professional chef in Columbus, Ohio. She has a long-established track record as a geek who prepares artistically perfect foods inspired by her pop culture interests, leading to the publication of several cookbooks with dishes inspired by True Blood, Doctor Who, and The Settlers of Catan.

When the first Deadpool film came out, she made these startling brownies that look like Wade Wilson's mask. The recipe is detailed, measured, precise, and orderly--quite unlike the antihero that inspires them. Oseland made the eyes from Oreo cookies and then sliced them midway to produce the sharp impact of Deadpool's vision.

Ian Falconer published the first of the Olivia picture books in 2000, which secured a Caldecott Honor the next year and launched a popular media franchise that included a 40-episode cartoon. Falconer passed away in 2023.

Falconer named the piglet character after his niece, Olivia Falconer Crane. Dan Kois recently interviewed her for Slate.

Crane tells Kois that she was five years old when the first Olivia book came out. She had a close relationship with her uncle, who gave her many gifts, including illustrations of her as a piglet. The characters in the books, including the pets, were all real people and animals that Olivia grew up with.

Despite her fictional appearances in the books, Crane's mother made a point of telling the young Olivia that she was not the character and vice versa. Crane grew up with a healthy separation from Olivia the piglet.

Image: Amazon

The Columbo story aired from 1971 to 2003 with a total of 69 episodes. It was tremendously popular, especially during the 1970s, leading to merchandising efforts. Those projects included this board game published in 1973.

Board Game Geek says that it is structured identically to a 1958 game inspired by the works of Alfred Hitchcock. It has cards for weapons, suspects, and clues, but, sadly, no "Just one more thing" cards. Copies are available for sale on eBay, although they are pricey.

Notice that Columbo is facing away from the players. Internet rumor holds that choice is because the designers did not have permission to use Peter Falk's likeness.

-via Super Punch

Mountains are usually measured by their height, but should height be measured from the center of the earth, from sea level (not possible on Mars), or from the surrounding terrain? Besides, a mountain's height is not its only quality. As a Yale mathematics and computer science student, Kai Xu wanted to measure the impressiveness of mountains, or their magnificence to the person looking at them. He came up with a metric that measures a quality he calls a mountain's "jut." It takes into account how steeply a mountain rises from the surrounding terrain, and other factors. 

The measure of jut has been gaining respect over the past few years. People are planning trips around a mountain's jut. You can see rankings of jut in this database. Strangely, Mount Everest doesn't rank high at all, although many of the highest rankings can be found in Nepal. You can explore the jut of mountains near you with this interactive map. 

Still, "magnificence" is in the eye of the beholder. A visitor's experience can be affected by many things, like the psychological experience of high altitude when viewing Everest. Mount Fuji is familiar, iconic, and beautiful, but it doesn't rank high in jut. Yet sightseers can find wonderful new places to visit by seeking out mountains with high jut rankings. -via Metafilter   

(Image credit: Drouyn Cambridge) 

Cats might not understand death the way humans do, but they sure understand when someone they love is not where they should be.

Maru graced us with his presence for 18 years, and then left us on September 6. When we announced his passing, Mary Ann 02 asked about his little sister Hana. Hana had lived with Maru for all of her 12 years, and felt his absence deeply. She and the youngest cat Miri are clinging to Maru's favorite objects and inhabiting the beds where he napped. So many people inquired about the younger cats that mugumogu posted this video update, with the story told in captions. 

A week after Maru died, mugumogu posted about Miri's 5th birthday party (in which a plate was prepared for Maru) and hinted that Miri may have seen a vision of Maru in attendance. A further update tells us that Hana is still looking for him. 

The Nazis who ran the Auschwitz concentration camp assembled a band from musically trained inmates to play lively marches every morning as they hurried other inmates off to work assignments. The 40 or so women, mostly teenagers, were also required to play concerts for the officers and guards and visiting dignitaries. Later on, they greeted incoming trains of prisoners with music to lull them into thinking this place might be so bad after all. But music by Jewish composers was forbidden, so they had to hide in their barracks to play Beethoven for their own enjoyment. 

Survivors of the camp had mixed feelings about the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz. They were resented by the men's orchestras because they had to perform physical labor in addition to playing music. Some prisoners enjoyed the music as a respite from everything else around them. Some have traumatic responses to music because it was connected to the worst parts of their confinement. Surviving orchestra members also recall those days with mixed feelings, aware of their privilege and racked by survivor's guilt, while also acknowledging they had no choice in the matter. Read about the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz in a book excerpt at LitHub. -via Nag on the Lake 

Canonically, the Riker Maneuver is a tactical maneuver completed in the movie Star Trek: Insurrection, which is the last of the Next Generation films. But in trekkie parlance, the Riker Maneuver refers to the way that Jonathan Frakes would swing his leg over a chair to sit down--a practice that the actor didn't know was notable until years after the end of the series.

In this AI-generated video by NetDystopiaMusic, Captain Picard summons Commander Riker to a private meeting in the captain's ready room to address complains about how members of the crew are experiencing these close encounters with Riker's masculinity.

-via Holodeck Four

West of Bakersfield is the town of Taft. It has a population of 8,546 people. It developed in the late 1800s and was known as Moron.

Stories vary as to how it got its name. Either the residents chose it on their own or the Southern Pacific Railroad decided to change its name from Moro to Moron so as to distinguish it from the town of Morro Bay.

Either way, Moron was at the center of the 1909 California oil boom. The next year, residents decided to change the name of the town to Taft in honor of then-President William Howard Taft.

-via Super Punch | Photo: LA Dork

If you watch the video before reading this description, it will be a lot more terrifying. Ulvi Ercan was paragliding at an altitude of 1100 meters (3600 feet) when he experienced a "60 percent asymmetrical collapse" which is terrifying, but he managed to recover. The point of view in the video is the camera he dropped. It spins and recovers over and over, but keeps filming the ground rushing up. Is this because the lens is the heaviest part of the camera? You can almost hear the camera go "Wheee!" when it's spinning and "Aaaah!" when its not. 

Luckily, the camera lands not on someone's head or on a boulder, but in a grassy area where an ant is somewhat surprised. Ercan checked his flight log to figure out the approximate location of the camera, then wandered around turning an app on and off to hear a beep and to find his GoPro. We assume the spunky little camera just kept recording until it was found. -via Born in Space 

Panic over consumer products that have been tampered with happens every once in a while. Every year, folks get concerned over Halloween candy, although the original panic was sparked by one incident of a father who attempted to kill his own kids (one died) in 1974. Then there were the Tylenol murders, a very real tampering case in 1982. So when a report of a couple who found a hypodermic needle inside a Pepsi can surfaced in 1993, it sparked a nationwide panic. 

After the case of the found needle made national headlines, around 300 other reports came in of needles or other foreign objects in Pepsi cans -and a few found in Coke cans, too. Over the course of the panic, Pepsi lost more than $50 million. The reports were thoroughly investigated by the FDA's Office of Criminal Investigations. In the end, the panic faded as fast as it arose. Read how that all played out at Mental Floss.  -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Qirille) 

The 1997 monster movie Anaconda was about a documentary film crew in the Amazon looking for a legendary giant snake, which finds them instead. It was critically panned, but financially successful and spawned five sequels. The sixth movie in the series is somewhat of a remake, a comedy starring Paul Rudd and Jack Black. Also called Anaconda, the new movie sees Rudd and Black on a quest to remake the 1997 film, which was their childhood favorite, on location. They just can't see how history tends to repeat itself. 

I had no idea there were so many movies in the series already, but it's a bit of genius to keep the implausible monster while highlighting the cheesy plot points by making them into intentional comedy. The judicious use of "Baby Got Back" as a threatening background motif in the trailer is too clever by half. Anaconda opens nationwide on Christmas Day. -via Laughing Squid 

What is supposed to be a list of "12 Unforced Errors," is actually way more, since each item may contain a multitude of bad decisions. Each of them probably had their reasons at the time, but were profoundly regretted by someone after the fact. Burt Reynolds was an engaging comedic actor in the 1970s and '80s, with a lot of hit movies, but he could have been so much more. After his breakthrough role in Deliverance, he was offered the biggest roles in Hollywood. These included James Bond, R.P. in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Michael Corleone in The Godfather, and Han Solo in Star Wars. But he turned all those down. Bad decisions also involved studios that turned down movie projects that became classics for the thinnest of reasons, or no reason at all. Imagine greenlighting Howard the Duck after you passed on E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. Too much punctuation in the title? Read about these and plenty of other regrettable choices from Hollywood at Cracked. 

Open Reel Ensemble comically refers to their apparati as "traditional folk instruments." These are electronic instruments that involve pulling and releasing magnetic tape with bamboo rods. When accompanied by keyboards, the resulting techno music is mesmerizing and, I find, reminiscent of 70s-era science fiction. 

The band members do not restrict themselves to these bowed instruments. They also sing in front of live audiences. I don't know what this song is about, but I heard the words "America" and "San Francisco." This electronic piece has no vocals, but it does use the magnetic reels as turntables and percussion instruments. It's impressive how Open Reel Ensemble can find so many uses for these antiques.

-via David Thompson