We've been graced with a few songs by The Kiffness where he turns cat noises into music here and at Supa Fluffy. We've also seen TikTok chains where people add onto existing videos until it's a full orchestra. In this video, TikTokers started with a Kiffness video in which an angry cat has already been autotuned, but changed the song to something you'll recognize. These TikTok chains can go in many directions, but this particular collaboration is an earworm. The third vocalist (second rapper) has some NSFW lyrics. -via Fark

👃 Just think of it as the opposite of wearing your mask as a chinstrap: Behold the Kosk, a nose-only mask from South Korea. The name is a portmanteau of 'Ko' (Korean for 'nose') and 'mask.'

🎵 This makes us happy: YouTuber played Toto's Africa using the musical instruments found in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask on the Nintendo 3DS.

📷 This pic is out of this world! Photographer Michael Shainblum managed to snap the "impossible" photo of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Milky Way in a single frame.

🐱 Cat + Marble Run = Not what you'd expect outta cats!

🏠 General contractor Peter Cohen "catified" his house into the House of Nekko, a paradise for 24 rescue cats. Now that's a cat lover's dream (though cleaning the litterboxes of a house with that many cats is probably a nightmare).

🧙‍♀️ For those who love Halloween 365 day a year: Cookies that look like a witch's severed fingers. It's like nom-nom with a side of eww, so in short: perfect.

🐶 Here's how dogs identify various wild animals, a field guide by Megan McKay. Let's hope my dog never chases a spicy squirrel in our backyard. Related: Street Cats by Hillary White.

⛳ Watch Bill Murray casually hit a no-look golf putt at the Pebble Beach Pro-Am. Legend!

More neat posts over at our new sites: Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista, Spooky Daily and Supa Fluffy.

Featured art: I'm Evil But I Have Feelings by indie artist Edu Ely.

Current special: Save up to 20% on all T-shirts in NeatoShop's limited-time sitewide sale - Hurry - this special ends soon!

Images: Kosk, House of Nekko

We can easily purchase a chess set for around $20 or less. However, did you know that a handcrafted wooden chess set that is certified for the World Chess Championship can cost you as much as $500? All certified chess sets need to have knights that look the same, and there are only ten people or fewer that are trained to carve knights for these special sets. Business Insider visits a factory in Omrisar, India, to learn about the process of making these chess sets to provide a context as to why they’re so expensive.

Yikes! Anna Leporskaya’s Three Figures, a valuable avant-garde painting, was vandalized by a ‘bored’ security guard when he drew on the faceless figures in the artwork. The artwork was painted between 1932 and 1934, and was insured for 75m roubles (~$1.3m). It was displayed in an exhibition at the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center in Ekaterinburg, where the guard was working on his first day. The guard was not identified but he was fired. “His motives are still unknown but the administration believes it was some kind of a lapse in sanity,” Anna Reshetkina, the exhibition’s curator said. Restoration work was estimated to cost around 250,000 roubles (~$4,600).

.Image credit: The Art Newspaper Russia/Newslfash/Australscope

It’s an actual snow sculpture. The T-Rex is in full color and looks like an inflatable standing in the snow, but Minnesota resident Paul Larcom poured his time and effort into creating the dinosaur artwork for three weeks. According to Larcom, he was inspired by a previous snow sculpture he did of a Tauntaun from Star Wars. “Everyone got real excited because they thought it was a dinosaur. I think they were a little disappointed when they saw it wasn't," he said.

His work was posted on Reddit, gaining the attention of the Internet, and landed the post on the front page of the website. Larcom was surprised to see his work on Reddit. "I didn't know it was going to take off like it did. I found out it made it to Reddit when my aunt and a friend of mine contacted me on Tuesday and told me about it," he shared.

Image credit: u/moist_ginger_toes1 via Digg

Cloisonnism is one of the significant styles that emerged during the Post-Impressionism period. Following the main themes in this art period, Cloisonnism is characterized by flat areas of color and dark linework. Created by Emile Bernard, Louis Anquetin, and Paul Gauguin, the art movement was inspired by Japanese woodblock prints and stained glass windows. Cloisonnism was coined by art critic Édouard Dujardin after the decorative technique cloisonné, which describes metalwork objects that contain colorful glass within wireframes. Learn more about this post-impressionism art movement here!

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

YouTuber Schmooey admitted his fraud in a lengthy apology stating that most of his videos were fabricated. The 20-year-old had a legendary reputation in the Guitar Hero community for mastering the most difficult songs in the game. However, his December 2021 upload made viewers notice something fishy. The recent upload was a "flawless" run of 9 Patterns of Eternal Pain, which was the first-ever perfect performance for the song. 

Expert players noticed an inconsistency with the player's fingers and the notes on the screen. The most suspicious part was the last few seconds of the video, where a Windows Media Player overlay can be seen. It turns out that Schmooey was playing Clone Hero, the PC port of Guitar Hero. He then used Cheat Engine to slow down the songs and play them at an easier difficulty. The YouTuber also admits that he edits the recorded video by speeding it up and splicing it together with his webcam footage.

Image credit: Karl Jobst on YouTube

The question from AskReddit was, "Teachers of Reddit, what was the worst thing you had to confiscate from a student?" The post got more than 10,000 comments. Some of the stories shared were pretty funny.

I had to confiscate a sea bass from a student who had brought it in to use in the playground at break time...he was walking around slapping people in the face with it and challenging them to a duel..

-FearlessPressure3

The bass in that story was dead, but live animals made the list several times: cats, dogs, fish, and this.

When I taught grade 2 a kid managed to bring a live wild badger in a box. It promply escaped and we had to evacuate while animal control was called. The kid's parents had no idea how he caught a badger, and he never told us where he got it.

-Leprechan_Sushi

Of course, there are stories of dangerous items like guns and ammo, a tattoo machine, and a 6-year-old with a broken bottle to be used as a weapon. One kid brought his baby sister to school without his parents noticing. You can read the best 30 stories in a ranked list at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: Flickr user John Campbell)

It's been more than five years since we introduced you to Tania Hennessy’s page called Doughnut Kitten. It's a cute and relaxing look at a kitten riding a frosted doughnut along a path of rainbows. You can't get any sweeter than that! It's good for meditation or for a smile anytime you need it. It's a project from Tania Hennessy, an artist and photographer in Vancouver who fosters kittens for VOKRA (the Vancouver Orphan Kitten Rescue Association). The kitten in the doughnut was one of her foster kittens. His name is Spaghetti.



Spaghetti was a member of the litter Hennessy called the pasta kittens. You won't be surprised to learn that the other kittens were named Orzo, Tortellini, Penne, and Macaroni. Spaghetti is the one on Hennessy's shoulder.


Hennessy tells us about the photoshoot that became Doughnut Kitten.

He’s sitting in a 3D printed doughnut prop which is attached to a set we built to lock it into exactly the right place. There was even a space under the prop that hid a little pillow for maximum kitten comfort.
During auditions, our adorable models would drift off to sleep in the prop, make playful silly faces, and photobomb each other as we attempted to get them to look at the camera with all kinds of toys, treats, and weird sounds.

That led to some wonderful outtakes!



The image that was chosen for Doughnut Kitten has Spaghetti looking directly at the camera, so his eyes follow you when you look at him. The result is "a pastel frosted confection" that we can turn to when we need a kitten, a doughnut, or a rainbow. -Thanks, Tania!

Israeli artist Vered Aharonovitch calls this disturbing masterpiece "The Cuckoo Clock". It's a complex, incredibly detailed automaton depicting a house of horrors filled with broken and insane people. Each member of the household has lost his grip in his own way. 

Although there is no clock face, when the hour strikes, several characters parade outside of the house--just like the wooden cuckoo in the traditional clock. The man in the exercise wheel, though, never leaves his place, nor stops moving in his Sisyphean labors. When the Herzliya Museum exhibited this piece two years ago, the curators explained that it is the story of the relationship between a father and his daughter who are depicted at different stages in their relationship throghout the sculpture.

-via Nag on the Lake

The hotel detective is a common figure in film noir and hard boiled detective stories from eighty years ago. Who are these people? What exactly does a hotel detective do? Professional travel writer Luke J. Spenser explores the history of this profession at Messy Nessy Chic.

Hotel detectives appeared in the United States by the 1870s. For Gilded Age America, travel opportunities proliferated and hotels boomed. Along with bellhops, cooks, maids, and clerks, hotel managers also hired security guards. These were commonly called "hotel detectives" or "house detectives."

Their primary role was to keep respectable hotels free from prostitutes and, worse, prostitutes who robbed their clients. In some cities, this was very much a full time job that required skills at blending in with the rest of the people at a hotel and spotting problematic characters early, then quietly removing such people from the hotel without causing disturbances. The good hotel detective was discreet in his work.

Other tasks included quieting down or removing drunkards. Solving murder mysteries was a far less common occurence, despite film noir stories. Read about their real adventures at Messy Nessy Chic.

Image: Heritage Auctions

CGP Grey is back after six months off to explain the interstate highway system to us. He lays out the plan of the grid as it was originally intended, which over time led to many oddities and exceptions. It makes sense in general, but the US is not completely sensical. The needs of urban areas clash with restrictions of land and geography -not to mention local politics- to give us some strange bits of roadway. Even if your city isn't mentioned, it's probably got something that doesn't quite adhere to the overall plan.

This information will definitely separate the generations. We got to five minutes in before I learned something I didn't already know, because I learned to drive while the interstate was still being constructed, and I drove all over the country using maps, landmarks, and dead reckoning. I have a daughter who is 40 years younger. She also drives all over the country, using nothing but GPS, and will never consult a map, much less learn how to orient herself by knowledge about highway systems. I hope she is never traveling when the electrical grid goes down. -via Digg

Last week's Sunday crossword puzzle in the New York Times was called Sci-Fi Showdown. It contained plenty of answers that were references to the worlds of Star Trek and Star Wars. The real kicker was the revealer clue, at 70-across. The puzzle isn't playing any favorites, as both Star Trek and Star Wars works! The beauty in the scheme is how the down clues work: they had to fit, use either franchise in the answer- meaning they had to be only one letter different, had to be correct with the same clue, and also work with the words going across them.

Trekkies, you’ll find TRAP, WRIST, PAYEES and LEAKED at 71-, 67-, 47- and 35-Down, making your crosses. Star Wars fans, you’ll get different entries that fit the same clues. “It’s a TRAP” can also be “it’s a WRAP”; a “body part that precedes ‘band’” can be a WRIST or a WAIST; “ones involved in a transaction” can be PAYEES or PAYERS; and “let out, in a way,” can be LEAKED or LEASED.

Whether you're a fan or Star Trek or Star Wars, or both, or neither, and even if you don't like crossword puzzles, this is pretty mind-blowing. Crossword constructor Stephen McCarthy gets the credit. If you aren't subscribed to the New York Times, you can find the entire puzzle revealed here. Note the 21-letter answers for 3 and 17 down.  -via Boing Boing

Robert and Samantha's 4-year-old daughter Aubrin Sage is an experienced snowboarder- she began when she was only 18 months old! She's also into dinosaurs. Her father rigged her up with a microphone for this video, so we get to hear her commentary as she shushes down the hill. It's adorable, and there are clues to her training, as this fearless child says "I won't fall, maybe I will, but that's okay, 'cause we all fall." And she ends the video with a great pun. Robert tells us how he taught Aubrin Sage to snowboard in this blog post. You can follow the tiniest snowboarder and her family at Instagram. -via Digg

We've posted a lot about the patent medicines of the 19th century, and now here's one that's different: not a scam, not addictive, and not poison -it's just odd. Atlas Obscura was looking for a Valentine subject, and found Valentine's Meat Juice.

In the fall of 1870, Mann S. Valentine II, who ran a dry goods store, saw his wife fall ill with digestive problems that doctors couldn't treat. So he spent weeks working on a tonic made of beef juice and egg whites. Mrs. Valentine couldn't eat solid food, so it provided her with the nutrients she needed, and she rallied. Valentine was so excited about his success that he made more, and started Valentine’s Meat Juice company. His tonic became quite popular, even without heroin or cocaine, or claims to be a cure-all. President James A. Garfield even used it after he was shot in 1881. In fact, the Valentine’s Meat Juice company stayed in business until 1986! Read the story of Valentine and his meat juice at Atlas Obscura.  

PS: Upon looking for the bottles for Sandyra, I also found this post with some interesting pictures of Valentine himself.