Toilets are a part of life, but they couldn't be shown on TV, or even mentioned, until broadcasting had been around for several decades. Still, the toilet, with its flush action and relatively easy-to-clean surfaces, is a wonder of modern technology that makes life easier all around compared to what was common before its invention a couple hundred years ago. Yet the modern toilet was less "invented" than "developed," as the working components were added and improved one at a time. These developments make certain breakthrough toilets famous. But there are others that have a story behind them.

It might be pop culture’s most famous toilet: On August 16, 1977, Elvis Presley was found by girlfriend Ginger Alden on the floor of his second-floor bathroom in Graceland after falling off the seat. Presley reportedly died due to a heart condition preceded by excessive prescription drug use. Visitors to Graceland, however, aren’t able to peer at the toilet that hosted the King in his final movement: The bathroom and adjoining suite are off-limits.

Read about other toilets that made their mark on history at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Whoisjohngalt)

(Image credit: Another Believer)

Rasmus Petersen was a teenager when his family immigrated from Denmark and settled near Bend, Oregon. As an adult, Petersen began to collect rocks from the countryside and built miniature buildings on his property, for almost 20 years until his death in 1952. By then he had constructed a miniature Danish village, bridges, roads, water features, and sculptures including an American Flag and the Statue of Liberty with local stones. The four-acre Petersen Rock Garden became a popular roadside attraction, drawing 150,000 visitor a year at its peak. The garden has since been designated on the National Register of Historic Places.    

(Image credit: Another Believer)

The garden is still in the hands of Peterson's family, but not for long. It has been listed for sale. The property consists of more than 12 acres, four of them covered with Petersen's artworks. There is also a house, several outbuildings, and a gift shop included in the deal, for a mere $825,000. Oh yeah, the peacocks that stroll the grounds are included, too. -via Fark

DoodleChaos (previously at Neatorama) brings us a video in which eight Line Riders compete in a race set to the tune of Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries." It's survival of the fittest in a steeplechase, as they crash into each other, fall, lose their sleds, and sometimes regain them. A free fall doesn't always mean elimination. But only one rider can win at the end. You might get caught up in the drama of the riders and their, uh, "luck" in the race, but if you do, you'll need to go back and focus on the tracks and how well they synch with the music. These lines were all hand-drawn, and took several months to create. Then again, if you focused on the music the first time around, you'll want to watch again to focus on the riders. These are tough little cartoon figures! -via reddit

Magic: The Gathering is an enormously popular fantasy-based collectible card game that launched that gaming genre. Since 1993, the corporate owner, Wizards of the Coast, has produced billions of Magic cards.

When you're looking at billions of pieces of paper with variable values, you need an economist to understand how they behave. That's why Wizards of the Coast is hiring a Senior Design Economist to study how the game is played and help the company make prudent design decisions about it.

The job posting is here. You'll need a graduate degree in economics or some other data science field and a familiarity with an analytical programming language.

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Robert

The algorithm knows all. No matter what your mouth says, there are statistics that know you're lying. You might even explicitly request fewer sexy dancing ladies on TikTok, but your behavior when they are around is recorded and quantified. It's the price we pay for using the internet for distraction and entertainment. This video from Viva La Dirt League illustrates how it works in human terms. Now, I surf the internet for a living, trying to sort out the interesting/funny/enjoyable stuff from the mountains of trash every day, so just try to imagine the things I get served up by the algorithms of various internet services. It's the price I pay for being a super-surfer with no consistent preferences. Your mileage may vary. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The White House was first built just prior to 1800, but then it was burned down during the War of 1812, rebuilt, and maintained rather haphazardly for the next century, with little attention being paid to the structure during the Great Depression and World War II. By the time Harry Truman moved in after the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, it was literally falling apart. The Truman family heard weird creaking, the floors bounced, and chandeliers would swing for no reason.

Official White House photographer Abbie Rowe (who also captured the reconstruction) even recalled that the president said he heard ghosts in the Second Floor residence. Truman also imagined a not so humorous scenario in which his bathtub fell through the floor during a Daughters of the American Revolution tea, with the American president “wearing nothing more than his reading glasses.”

Finally, Margaret Truman’s piano leg pierced through the floor into the room below due to the rotting floors. Truman knew the White House needed extensive repair, but didn't want to do it during his re-election year, so the renovation project didn't begin until 1949. Even then, appearances needed to be kept up, so all the work was done from the interior, while the exterior facade appeared almost unscathed. The Trumans lived in the rotting building for four years, then moved to the Blair House during the renovation project, and only moved into the new and improved White House in March of 1952 and stayed for less than a year. Even then, President Truman lamented the $5.4 million cost of the upgrade. See pictures of the White House completely gutted during its renovation at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: National Park Service)

Have you ever dreamed of sporting perfectly-manicured nails that appear to be dripping with cheese sauce? Nails.INC of London is offering a cheesy deal on nail polish in their Pinkies Out line that mimics the look of melty-good Velveeta cheese sauce! It even has the scent of cheese, once it's dried. The polish is available in a two-pack for $15, one bottle that's Velveeta yellow, the other in red because that's the color of the font on the box, I guess. The first run of this limited-edition polish sold out in nine days, but they've restocked now. If the sales continue that quickly, the limited edition may become as regular product. Now, why anyone would want their nails to look like they're a messy eater is anyone's guess, but apparently some do. -via Everlasting Blort

Uh oh, we've got some bad news if you love sriracha: a hot chili sauce shortage is looming.

Huy Fong Foods Inc, the maker of the beloved hot sauce, has suspended production of the Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce, Chili Garlic and Sambal Oelek because they ran out of chili (they use about 50,000 tons of chili every year).

"Several spiraling events, including unexpected crop failure from the spring chili harvest," said the company as reported by San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

A recent letter sent by the company to its vendors advised them "not promise any products to your customers unless you have the product in stock."

BRB! Going to the supermarket to hoard me some Sriracha (doesn't this seem just like the good ol' days of the pandemic?)

Image: Chris Liverani/Unsplash

The miniseries Becoming Elizabeth will premiere on Starz this Sunday. It's about the teenage years of Queen Elizabeth I, and will consist of eight episodes. You might wonder what could be so exciting about a 16th-century teenager who wasn't expected to become queen. You'll be quite surprised. Sure, we know she was embroiled in a political free-for-all after her father, Henry VIII, died, which resulted in all three of his surviving children eventually reigning as the British monarch. But Elizabeth, the "virgin queen," was a teenager with her own needs and desires, and was sought for marriage by many men, one of whom was her stepfather.

Considering how convoluted the royal family relationships were, you might want a primer before watching the show. Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII and his second wife Anne Boleyn, whom Henry had beheaded. When Henry died in 1547, his sixth wife, Catherine Parr, was named as 15-year-old Elizabeth's guardian. Elizabeth had already been approached for marriage by Thomas Seymour, brother of Henry's third wife Jane Seymour. Elizabeth, then thirteen, had previously decided to never marry. Instead, Thomas Seymour married Catherine, Henry's widow, very soon after the king died (they had been romantically connected before her marriage to the king). Thomas, however, didn't stop pursuing Elizabeth, as the teenager lived with him and his new bride. Elizabeth, as teenagers do, was both intrigued and repelled by Thomas' attentions, until Catherine sent her away. After Catherine's death, he continued to push himself on Elizabeth. The history is much more salacious than this synopsis, and you can read it at Smithsonian. 

We all know that Steven Spielberg is a treasure among filmmakers. His films include blockbusters like Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and Jurassic Park. He is also behind important historical projects like Saving Private Ryan, Lincoln, and Schindler's List. He also had some flops. You can see the complete Spielberg filmography here. That's a lot of material for unearthing easter eggs, like the painstaking process he and John Williams went through to come up with the perfect five-note melody used in Close Encounters. Or how Spielberg figured in the TV series The Incredible Hulk.

Now that's impressive, and ballsy, too. You'll certainly learn some new things about your favorite Spielberg movies in a Pictofact list at Cracked.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by DaveMakesStuff (@davemakesstuffbc)

Eating, though it is great fun, is also a lot of work. Futurists promised us flying cars, but we don't actually need flying cars. We need automatic forks in order to ingest more food while using as little effort as possible.

Dave of DaveMakesStuff makes the best possible future a reality. He likes to say that "I don't usually know what I'm making until it's too late." This invention was supposed to be a 7-pronged screwdriver, but an eating utensil makes more sense. It's driven by eight beveled gears nested in a sphere. Dave kindly offers his STL files if you'd like to 3D print your own.

-via Ugly Design

The Laundry Jet is the first vacuum powered laundry chute that transports laundry from any room with ports installed, to the laundry room [read more: https://t.co/ad50LRzmkn] pic.twitter.com/vuPaVi8j40

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 9, 2022

Is it really necessary? No. Would it be useful? Yes. Would I use it for purposes other than laundry processing if there was one in my home? You'd better believe it!

Laundry Jet has up to four ports that open either with a manual slide or motion sensors. Vacuum force sucks the clothes down to a central repository in the laundry room. It works the other way, too. You can get an optional return system installed that sucks the clean laundry up to a designated location in the house.

Although Laundry Jet is best installed during the home construction, it's also possible to retrofit the system into a preexisting home by routing the 6-inch wide pipes through an attic. Those pipes are wide enough for most laundry items or carefully wrapped sandwiches.

-via Born in Space

YouTuber North of the Border gives us a rather idiosyncratic project. He built a LEGO minifig out of clay. Except he made it much bigger. All in all, that's pretty normal, but then he had some modifications in mind. He decided to make it more "realistic" while keeping the basic idea of a minifig. That meant decisions had to be made, and that's when this project went completely off the rails. His intention was to kept the thicked-legged, cylindrical-headed minifig shape, or otherwise it wouldn't be recognizable as a LEGO minifig. But he added wrinkles to the skin and clothing. He also gave them human fingernails and toenails, in numbers that matched the plastic minifig shape. And those eyes! At normal scale, a minifig's eyes are dots, but this? Yeah, the result is quite unnerving, but you'll enjoy the process anyway. Now you know why North of the Border titled this video "I made a Realistic Lego Man and I'm Sorry." Is he really sorry or just Canadian? -via Metafilter

Ask anyone about their earliest memory, and they'll probably tell you something from when they were about three years old. Memories from much earlier than that are probably fake, derived from photographs or family stories. But why can't we remember our infancy? Some research suggests that we have trouble storing long-term memories of events that occurred before we have the language to encode them. Newer research suggests that infants have to learn and develop the process of long-term memory storage.

We know that babies form memories. Their entire job is learning, after all. Newborns quickly learn to recognize their mother's face. They learn how to elicit a response from their parents. And as they age, their ability to learn gets better with exercise. In an experiment, when six-month-old babies were trained for one minute to activate a toy with their legs, they would remember it for a day. Older infants would remember the task for much longer. But if you spent more time training, the memories would last longer even for younger infants. Newborns see their mother's face every day, often many times a day, so they don't have to store that memory for a long time. As we age, we learn to remember. Maybe it takes until the age of three to learn to store permanent memories. Read more about this research at The Conversation. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Carin Araujo)

We've seen some "modern trailers" made where the editor is making fun of the formulaic sameness of today's movie trailers. This isn't that at all.

The original trailer for the 1986 movie Aliens, the action-movie sequel to the horror classic Alien, has no narration and very little dialogue. It was all action scenes that gave away almost no plot. Michael Edwards made a new one 36 years later with a modern aesthetic. Well, digital editing is going to give us a much better-looking trailer, but the difference here is that his trailer explains the main premise of the movie. There's still no narration, but bits of dialogue are artfully strung together to tell just enough of the story to make us want to see the rest. Oh, there's some action, but also suspense and exposition, carefully balanced in a well-edited barrage of clips, with just a touch of the xenomorph. And unlike real trailers of the 21st century, this doesn't give away everything in the movie. Contains NSFW language.

For contrast, here's the 1986 trailer, which you should probably watch first.



See what I mean? -via Laughing Squid