Sweets for the sweet! That makes so much sense that it's hard to imagine a Valentines Day without candy, whether it's fancy chocolates in a heart-shaped box from your sweetheart or a desk full of handy conversation hearts you picked up at the checkout counter. But it was not always so.

The holiday started out as the feast day of St. Valentine, first observed in 496 AD. It wasn't associated with romance until centuries later, possibly when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a poem in the 1300s mentioning St. Valentines Day as the day birds chose their mates. If that's the case, the holiday as we know it today came about simply because it's mating season.

Candy is a nice gift to show romantic feelings, along with flowers and jewelry, and certainly more affordable. Candy as a Valentines Day gift got off the ground during Queen Victoria's reign. Victoria was a hopeless romantic, had a sweet tooth, and was the world's biggest influencer in her time. That was also when a man named Cadbury invented the heart-shaped candy box. Then came Hershey's Kisses, Russell Stover assortments, and conversation hearts. Read the history of Valentines Day candy at Cracked.

(Image credit: Parnote)

1955 Disneyland Casa de Fritos Matchbook https://t.co/qfLqdDgDkL pic.twitter.com/AkwhcbABs9

— Cory Doctorow RIGHT-CLICKING WORDCEL MENTALITY (@doctorow) November 12, 2018

Does anyone remember the restaurant Casa de Fritos at Disneyland? It was sponsored by Fritos (later Frito-Lay) and served Mexican food at the park -dishes heavily dependent on Fritos- from shortly after the park opened until the name was changed in 1982. You could get a full combination plate there for a dollar, and then purchase a small bag of Fritos from an elaborate vending device featuring a statue of the Frito Kid. Casa de Fritos got their tortillas delivered from a manufacturer called Alex Foods.

“One day, a salesman from Alex Foods noticed that Casa de Fritos was dumping stale tortillas in the trash,” Bob Sorokanich wrote for Gizmodo. “He gave the kitchen a tip: instead of trashing the stale tortillas, cut them up and fry them.”

Now, mind you, this wasn't an original idea from the tortilla salesman. He was passing along a trick that came from tortilla manufacturer Rebecca Webb Carranza that had been in use since the 1940s to produce tortilla chips. But the resulting chips became very popular at Casa de Fritos, and Fritos partnered with Alex Foods to market them nationally in 1966. Read the story of how Doritos came about and took the country by storm at SFGate. -via Digg

Redditor Ravi emphasizes that he is not from Australia. He's from Texas. But Australia is basically British Texas, so that's close enough.

Anyway, as an honorary Australian, he makes boomerangs, including an axe-shaped boomerang, a Batarang (Batman's throwing weapon), and a whistling boomerang. Perusing his Reddit profile is very educational. I learned that there are left and right-handed boomerangs.

Javi's most recent creation is this one shaped like a kangaroo. So it's a kangarang or a kangarooarang. I suppose that it could be used to hunt kangaroos in Australia, which would be appropriate, as that was one of the original purposes of the boomerang.

National borders are artificial constructs that you can't see from above. However, they are important to people who live in those countries, and are carefully surveyed by cartographers. They are marked with signs, survey markers, and sometimes fences. Many are also supervised by border guards and immigration officials. But when national borders are also natural features of the earth, like rivers, oceans, or mountain ridges, they can sometimes move. This brings us to the glacier that covers the peaks of the Alps. The border between Switzerland and Italy runs over the highest ridge of the Alps, and the glacier underneath is moving. This is cause for concern, as you can imagine. It's a special concern for businesses, such as ski resorts, that can change nationality without moving at all. Vox tells us the history of the Swiss-Italian glacial border and what's to become of it as climate change melts the glacier.

One part of figure skating that you don't see that much of on TV is the part where a skater's fans will throw things onto the ice after a performance. At one time, it was customary to throw flowers on the ice, but that left a lot of debris that had to be cleaned up, and in 2001 the US banned flowers from rinks because of security concerns after 9/11. But fans found another way to show their adoration- by throwing stuffed animal toys on the ice. Skaters talked to NBC Sports about the gifts they've had thrown at them, which sometimes require an army of sweepers to collect. Michelle Kwan had a full skating outfit thrown once -and it fit her! Elvis Stojko and Patrick Chan have seen lingerie thrown on the ice. Stojko got a bra once with a name and phone number attached. Debi Thomas once got a Domino's pizza. And of course, there are the stuffed animals.

What happens to all those toys? For international competitions, shipping them all home is out of the question, so skaters pick and choose what to keep, while the rest are given away. Michelle Kwan once threw a stuffed animal on the rink for a skater she admired before she became famous. Now she still has a great number of stuffed toys still stored at her parents' home, but believes they may be too old to give away. Read about the toys and the stranger items thrown at figure skaters at NBC.  -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Luu)

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