Nature has given us a wide variety of substances that can act as a medicine, a recreational drug, or a murder weapon, depending on the dosage. There are also a lot of substances that will just plain kill. And since we all eat and drink, poisoning has a long history of the being the easiest way to murder someone. Arsenic was once the easiest way to get rid of a husband, just by serving him dinner. In the Old West, whiskey was sometimes served with a dash of strychnine. During Prohibition, industrial alcohol was imbued with poisonous methanol, to deter -or kill- those who wanted to drink it. Nazi war criminals used cyanide for both killing concentration camp inmates and for suicide.
Read about these poisonings and more, and also the most fashionable way to store your poisons, at Messy Nessy Chic. And when someone pours you a drink, watch how they hold their hand over the glass.
Back in 2010, Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate introduced the world to an adorable seashell named Marcel, or more specifically, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. You can see the original trilogy of shorts here. Over the past five years, the creators have been working on a full-length film in secret, so they could maintain creative control without having to deal with deadlines, a budget, or outside interference. The finished product was unveiled at the Telluride Film Festival last fall, and was picked up for distribution by A24. The movie is a "documentary" that follows Marcel as he searches for his family. The movie stars Fleischer-Camp and Slate, plus Isabella Rossellini, Rosa Salazar, Thomas Mann, and Lesley Stahl. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On will be in theaters on June 24. -via Metafilter
Last fall, we learned about Dylan, who ate all his meals at Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park with a $150 annual Dining Pass. Over seven years, he saved enough money to pay off his students loans and buy a house. Dylan's story went viral, and he was interviewed on some major TV shows. At the time, he was still eating a meal every day at Six Flags, but that will soon come to an end when his current pass expires. Six Flags is doing away with the $150 all-you-can-eat plan. The park's new pricing structure doesn't have any plan offering unlimited meals. In fact, the most expensive plan will now only come with ten meals for the year.
Did Dylan's viral story have anything to do with the annual pass plans changing? You might guess that the park probably sold a lot of dining passes right afterward. A representative from Six Flags denies that Dylan's story had anything to do with it, stating only that the pandemic caused the pricing restructure. Read about what Dylan's life was like after going viral and how it may have contributed to the scheme's downfall at Mel magazine.
(Image credit: Jeremy Thompson)
There're two types of cats.🐈🦐😅 pic.twitter.com/W9NQWsr5fv
— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) March 28, 2022
Make sure the sound is on for this one. The common perception of cats is that they all like seafood. Cat food producers will tell you that the fishier the smell, the more that cats like it. They have to draw a fine line between appealing to a cat and making the human who serves that cat food sick from the smell. But common perception doesn't tell you that all cats are different, just like humans. I have a white cat like the first one in this video. She is deaf, and I enjoy waking her up with something she thinks smells good. But as you can see here, cats preferences can vary greatly. -via Fark
Governments used to build underground bunkers to protect people from aerial bombardment in wartime, but after World War II, they backed off because the danger is just too widespread, unpredictable, and devastating to even think they could protect everyone who might someday might need it. The private sector stepped in, because there was money to be made.
Ever since the dawn of nuclear weapons, there have been companies that specialize in building underground bunkers in which one could survive a nuclear war. They thrived during the Cold War era, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, turned to doomsday preppers for business. But in the five weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, business has been booming. You can get a concrete bunker built underground for around $45,000 and up (way up). You can purchase a space in a converted missile silo so you can hunker down with others. But if you are just starting to think about it, you may have to wait in line. Read about the booming business of bunkers at CBC. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: A. Latina Brown)
✈️ Need a place for your upcoming event? Don't rent a boring dance hall for your party or wedding - rent Mexico's presidential jet instead! After more than 3 years failing to sell the airplane (it's too expensive to reconfigure into a typical passenger jet), current Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has decided to rent it out for special events.
🍭 Check out this massive 4-story building shaped like a pink lollipop that houses a kindergarten.
🙀 Cat vs treadmill: who wins?
Image: Marco Ugarte/AP
🦏 There are only 80 Sumatran rhino left in the world. Well, make that 81 as a new baby was just born - check out the super cute pics of the baby Sumatran rhino!
🍺 We all want to get away from our family sometimes, but this Chinese man has been living in the Beijing Airport for 14 years to get away from his family. He said that he had a falling out with his family, who wanted him to quite smoking and drinking but he'd rather live in an airport than do either.
Image: Biro Humas KLHK
🎧 Dyson's new air-purifier and noise-cancelling headphones combo named Dyson Zone looks like it came straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel. The company made the product launch announcement dangerously close to April 1 and had to confirm that it's actually not an April's Fool joke.
✋ If you're sick and tired of "The Slap" stories, skip this. For the rest of you, check out the infamous Will Smith Slap in Tattoo and cake forms. Also: Will Smith Slap Meme: The Ultimate Collection | SNL Skit: Oscar Seat Fillers Meet Will Smith
For more neat-o posts, please visit our new sites: Laughosaurus, Pop Culturista, Pictojam, Homes & Hues, Supa Fluffy, Spooky Daily and Infinite 1UP.
Featured art: Cat-Man by indie artist Chet Minton | More New T-Shirts
The internet is a wonderful place, full of documentation on things you never knew existed. You've probably never considered the testing procedures for manhole covers, grates, and other objects made to be embedded in roads. After all, they have to be tough, or anyone driving over them could meet disaster. The testing process is largely automated and is conducted by a robot that drives over them. This industrial video from the company PAM has no narration and French text, but what information they give is pretty easy to decipher even if you don't read French. The robot drives over the test object ten times a minute, at 50 kilometers per hour, for a total of 5,000 passes, to ensure the manhole covers will last 20 years. At least that's what I think it says. -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
Inspired by the Lego Star Wars trench run diorama, which won't even be available until later this month, Evie Rees made a birthday cake. It's quite elaborate, to say the least! The entire artwork is edible, with the exception of the spaceships and their stands. Using real LEGO bricks as molds, she made the LEGOS out of fondant. The blue pieces were picked out of assorted candy sprinkles. It took two days to get it all done- the fondant decorations came first, and the cake was baked on the second day. One side of the trench is Victoria sponge cake, and the other side is carrot cake. Rees could have made it chocolate and vanilla to represent the light side and the dark side, but bowed to what her family prefers to eat. Yes, they ate it. But the photographs are forever. You can see a gallery of ten larger images of the cake in this reddit post.
When you think about a cat in ancient Egypt, you probably think of the god called Bast. A god pictured as a cat must mean that cats were worshiped, right? That's the popular notion, but it's a lot more complicated than that. Yes, we've found millions of cat mummies, but my first thought on learning that was that they used cats as practice for mummification. However, that's not part of the story, either. SideQuest gives us the longer, more involved story of how cats were regarded in ancient Egypt. Now, just imagine when archaeologists a few thousand years from now dig up and decipher our internet archives of lolcats and catios and crazy cat lady stories and, quite understandably, assume that we worshiped cats. No, we just treat them like they are our masters and we are their servants. And when they eventually discover toxoplasmosis and its effects, they'll understand why. -via Digg
Letters of Note is a blog that features historically significant, unusual, or sometimes amusing letters exchanged between people. A few days ago, it shared the funny correspondence between Justin Lee of Auckland, New Zealand and the national police force.
Lee received a ticket for speeding. When was he driving 100 KPH on a public road? On June 23, 1974. That was also, coincidentally, the date of his birth.
Lee wrote a letter protesting this ticket. He does not remember the date of his birth, so he asked his mother if she remembered him driving too quickly, or even driving, on that date:
[…] I rang Mum to see if she remembered what I was doing that day. She said that – coincidentally – I was born that day!!
Mum mentioned that I was born at around five o’clock in the evening on that day in Porirua, which is not far from Wellington […]
For me to have traveled from Porirua to the foot of the Bombay Hills just out of Auckland by six thirty, I would had to have crawled into the first car in the hospital parking lot and headed for Auckland at around 1,000 km/h. For this reason, it is entirely possible that the constable who clocked me back in 1974 was holding his laser equipment upside down and instead of doing 116 km/h as per the infringement notice, it is more likely that I was doing 911 km/h.
Lee adds that his Nissan Bluebird, a robust and reliable car, was not, unlike Doc Brown's Delorean in Back to the Future, equipped with time travel accessories, making it even more unlikely that it was indeed his car that was recorded by police radar equipment.
You can read all of Lee's letter and the police response at Letters of Note.
-via Nag on the Lake
Ukraine is so proud of their wheat fields that they designed their national flag around them. You may have recently read that Ukraine is the world's breadbasket, which might come as a shock to Americans. Yes, America produces a huge amount of the world's wheat grain, too, but Ukraine is the reason we grow that productive wheat to make bread. Before 1880, most American bread was made with rye, corn, or low-gluten soft wheat varieties. The vagaries of history and waves of immigration brought the staple known as Turkey wheat to the Great Plains of the US.
This variety of wheat has roots in Crimea, a peninsula that is recognized as part of Ukraine, which was once under Turkish control—hence the grain’s name. It earned German Mennonite stewards in 1770, after Catherine the Great promoted settlement, promising the group they could keep their pacifist values and language. When regime change and conscription came knocking again, these people needed to find a new home.
Of course, wheat continued to be produced in Ukraine long after it spread to America. Read the history of how Ukrainian wheat came to the US at Modern Farmer.
(Image credit: Сергей Марцынюк)
Real actors doing The Simpsons' opening? And it's good? This was created by British Sky Broadcasting as a promotion for the series, which went viral and then was used for the opening of The Simpsons season 17 episode 15 entitled "Homer Simpson, This Is Your Wife," co-written by Ricky Gervais, who also guest-starred. You might be surprised at Bart and Lisa portrayed as redheads, and Marge's hair is not quite so outrageous, but you can't argue that those involved didn't do an excellent job of channeling the animated yelllow-skinned family. -via reddit
Patricia Brennan, a biologist, specializes in animal genitalia, especially female genitalia. She began her exploration of this specialty when she observed the corkscrew-shaped penis of the great tinamou, a bird native to the Costa Rican rainforest. About 3% of bird species have penises, most often shaped like corkscrews. What was less well known prior to Brennan's work was what the receiving female genitals of various animals are shaped like and why.
Her work is the subject of a new article in Scientific American. It includes a lengthy exploration of duck vaginas, which are the most diverse vaginas among birds. The typical duck vagina is a "penis rejection machine" that requires the corkscrew penis to navigate complexly spiralled folds with inner pockets to trap unwanted sperm before it reaches the interior. Mating is enormously difficult and requires the cooperation of the female duck to achieve full penetration.
Brennan looked at mammals as well as birds. She learned that a dolphin clitoris is larger than a tennis ball. Why? It's because dolphins engage in sexual behaviors for pleasure as well as reproduction. It's possible that female dolphins may choose mates based on their ability to stimulate their clitorises effectively.
Why are you just learning these facts now? The author of the article, Rachel E. Gross, explains that biology, a male-dominated field, tends to be overly focused on penises and other aspects of the male, giving less attention to females. This bias can be traced back to Charles Darwin himself, whose Victorian moral sentiments avoided discussions of female sexuality and sex for purposes other than reporduction. Leave Darwin aside when you explore the wild world of animal genitalia.
-via Dave Barry | Photo of a great tinamou by Katja Schulz
Science demonstrates once again what we suspected all along. People who had a rural upbringing have better navigation skills than their counterparts raised in cities. This is most likely due to the lack of standardization of rural roads as they are routed around mountains, rivers, and much older roads -and because country folk often have to travel further for a variety of reasons. Rural travelers exercise their sense of direction out of necessity, while those who live on logically-designed city grids can find their way around much more easily.
To check out this hypothesis, a team of scientists used the video game Sea Hero Quest, which was developed in 2016 specifically to study the effects of Alzheimer's disease. In the game, participants have to navigate around the ocean, and remember where they've been. The results showed not only that people who grow up in the countryside had better navigation skills, but those raised in older, more complex cities like Paris and Prague showed a better sense of direction than those who grew up in cities with a planned grid, such as Chicago. Still, you have to wonder whether it's the grid itself, or the ability to rely on mass transit that makes navigation easier for city dwellers. Read more about this research at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: Jonathan Billinger/Walking up Coppet Hill/
Would you like to have your own Higgins boat? Very few of the 23,398 LCVPs built by the Allies during World War II survive to this day, but you can own a very similar and, in fact, improved landing craft. Hard Drive Marine, a boat builder in Bellingham, Washington, manufactures practical, civilian-use landing craft for people who need to land in places without docking facilities.
Among the company's innovations is the Maxgate, which is an articulated landing gate that drives spikes into the beach, then pulls the entire boat forward. After disembarking people and equipment, just reverse the system to push the beached craft back into the water.
-via Born in Space
