Aww! Six-year-old football fan Joe sent a heartfelt letter to one of Swindon Town’s top players. "Mummy doesn't have any money to come to Swindon games because she has no money for food and has to pay for my dinner at school. I like Swindon Town Harry McKirdy. I will come one day. Joe aged 6 ½,"  the letter read. Attached to the note was 26 pence as well! 

The team reached out on social media in the hopes of finding Joe. According to Forest Green Rovers chairman, Dale Vince, they are willing to pay the child to be a mascot for Swindon if he can be found. I hope the kid gets to watch the games to cheer for his favorite team! 

Image credit: Swindon Town FC

When Julius Caesar was 26 years old, he was a long way from commanding the Roman Empire, yet he was an impressive man. He was a Roman prosecutor, known for his way with words, educated and ambitious. Caesar wasn't all that wealthy, but he had plenty of family and political connections. As he was traveling the Mediterranean to further his education, the ship was boarded by Cicilian pirates. Most of the passengers and crew were sent off to be sold in slave markets, but the pirates could tell from his appearance and his demeanor that Caesar would bring more profit by holding out for a ransom. They suggested 20 talents. Caesar was insulted, and insisted that they demand 50 talents. The pirates took him to the island of Pharmacusa, where he lived with the pirates for 38 days while his allies arranged to pay the 50 talents. The pirates thought Caesar was funny, first because of his arrogance in demanding a higher ransom, and then by his bad poetry. But they admired his continual air of authority while in captivity. The ransom finally arrived.

As he prepared to board the ship back to Miletus, Caesar paused to address the pirates. He had no choice, he said, but to bring them to justice. Although they had failed to appreciate his poetry, they had in general treated him well, and individually he bore them no ill will. But they were, after all, pirates. And pirates must be hunted down and executed.

The pirates laughed. They whistled and cheered. He really was a fine speaker.   

Caesar was deadly serious. Seeking the pirates turned him from a lawyer into a warrior, and he hunted them down and captured them. Then he had to do it all over again, as the authorities he gave them to would rather sell them into slavery than crucify them. Read what Caesar did to the pirates at Truly Adventurous.

Ellis Brooks tells us about an accidental experiment with "dystopian food units." What he means is food that comes in shapes, colors, and/or textures that we aren't used to. A buddy gave him some ready-made meals from a delivery service that turned out to resemble astronaut food. A meal of salmon, sweet potato, and asparagus came in six squares in shrink-wrapped plastic. They are packaged that way for portability and ease of cooking, but also to control portions and ingredients. Brooks did not enjoy them.

It was like eating a sad, square-shaped memory of what food once was.

This might remind you of a certain dystopian movie that imagined what eating would be like in the year 2022. Brooks stayed with the packaged food for 24 hours to give it a chance, but ended up eating salad and licking maple syrup off a plate. Read his adventures with real but super-processed square food at OneZero. -via Kottke

(Image: Ellis Brooks)

Giuseppe Marco Fieschi built this gun to be dangerous. A former soldier and lifelong criminal, Fieschi hatched a plan to assassinate King Louis-Philippe of France in 1835. He pondered that old saying, "You come at the king, you best not miss." Not having that much confidence in his aim, Fieschi built a gun with 25 barrels to spray destruction on the monarch. The gun, later named the Infernal Machine, was designed to fire all 25 barrels at once. Fieschi positioned himself, along with the gun, on the third floor of a Paris building while the king performed his annual review of the Paris National Guard. What could possibly go wrong?

Regarding Fieschi's plan, everything went wrong. The Infernal Machine was dangerous to everyone in the Paris street and to Fieschi himself. The scene that day, as described by Amusing Planet, could have been a comedy if it weren't for so many people being killed. That eventually included Fieschi himself, who was executed for his crimes, along with two accomplices. The destruction was so profound that it's a wonder they were able to reconstruct the Infernal Machine well enough to display it in a museum.    

(Image credit: Parisette)

😊 When Jared Walls found out that one of his students was bullied for wearing Spongebob Squarepants shoes, he decided to buy himself matching shirts and shoes so he could "twin" and support the boy. 'Tis a gesture that'll melt even Mr. Krab's stone cold heart.

🐻 "Hank the Tank" is a chonky 500-lb bear that keeps on breaking into people's houses in search of pizza. So far, he's broken into 28 homes in South Lake Tahoe.

🐦 Who knew that this "Ghost of the Forest" bird could be so cute? And such attitude, oh my!

🎬 The Spider-Man meme has finally been recreated by actual Spider-Men: Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and Tobey Maguire.

Image: Darla Mullins

💪 Move over, T-rex! Paleontologists have discovered a new dinosaur with even tinier arms.

🎵 The ultimate air guitar: Japanese musician Ei Wada plays the electric fan. Yes, he turned an electric oscillating fan with a stand into a musical instrument. The tune's pretty catchy, too!

🚁 Get in da choppa and ... relax inside, because this helicopter is actually a romantic rental cabin.

Image Credit: Fred Wierum/ Wikimedia Commons

Tons more neat stuff over at our new sites: Pop Culturista, Laughosaurus, Pictojam, Supa Fluffy and Homes & Hues.

Tigers are revered in Bhutan, but they still try to stay away from humans whenever possible. In 2018, a large male tiger was observed hanging around the outskirts of the nation's capital, Thimphu. The tiger appeared listless and unafraid of humans. Tigers are nocturnal, but here it was in daylight, so something was definitely wrong with this tiger. Officials from Bhutan's Nature Conservation Division sent a unit out to find the tiger. A wildlife veterinarian flew in from Cornell University, concerned that the tiger might be suffering from canine distemper, which could spread to other tigers in the dwindling population of Bhutan. A local veterinarian thought the tiger might be suffering from a tapeworm that had been observed in local yaks.

It didn't take all that long to locate and capture the tiger, but figuring out what was wrong with it was another story. Read about the sick tiger and the conservationists who worked to solve the mystery at Atlas Obscura.

The History Channel series Vikings ran for six seasons and proved to be quite popular. Now Netflix is launching a sequel series called Vikings: Valhalla, to premiere Friday. The new series is set a hundred years after Vikings ended, and centers around Leif Ericsson, his sister Freydís Eiríksdóttir, and Harald Hardrada, who is Freydis' lover and Leif's close friend. All are historical characters, but Vikings: Valhalla is heavily fictionalized. You know Leif Ericsson, but who was Harald Hardrada? He was the king of Norway, a world traveler, and died while trying to invade England. Smithsonian calls him "perhaps the most interesting Viking in history."

Before you watch Vikings: Valhalla, you might want to learn what is historical about the series. For one thing, Ericsson and Hadrada were not quite contemporaries, so their relationship is just for the show. Ericsson was more of an explorer than a warrior, but he does give us a familiar name to orient us for the series. The battles depicted in the show are mostly historical, but somewhat out of order and fought by different people. You may be surprised at the appearance of a Black character among the Vikings, but Viking settlements were more multicultural than you may have realized, although not at all egalitarian. Read an overview of the action in Vikings: Valhalla and how it measures up with the historical timeline at Smithsonian.

Conan O'Brien's talk show on TBS was simply called Conan. It ran from 2010 to 2021. Jack Black was a frequent guest, and in this video explains that his first talk show appearance was on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. So O'Brien asked that Black be his final guest on the final episode of Conan, to air on June 24, 2021. Black wanted to go out with a bang, and came up with a great idea for a pre-taped skit in which he would be injured. It was all planned, except for the very real injury. That's why Black hobbled onto the stage for the final Conan segment wearing a medical boot. The plans went out the window, and O'Brien and Black winged it through the show.

Yesterday, after months of sitting at home, Black posted a video to explain the entire story behind his Conan experience. And since the bit was being taped, there's plenty of video evidence. There are plenty of funny lines, but you'll really get a kick out of the ambulance driver. We are glad to see that Black has recovered, and has grown a beard fit for a wild man. -via reddit

The question at AskReddit was for teachers: "What was the best excuse for being late that turned out to be true?" Oh, there are some great answers. The chickens were blocking the road. The bus blew up. My goat followed me and I had to take her back home. But the most highly-rated answer was pretty involved. It wasn't the student who was late, but an assignment.

I'm an English professor, and one year a pretty good student showed up without one of his 2 major term papers. He explained that his safe had been stolen by a contractor who was working on their house. His laptop was in the safe, and that's where his paper was. I genuinely believe him because he been a really good student.

But that's just the beginning of the story. The student investigated the theft himself, and ended up in a crack house bribing prostitutes. Then the Secret Service got involved because of counterfeiting. But the most important contents of the safe were recovered. It's a story you just have to read. And then the list gets into the funnier side.

"Sorry Bohemian Rhapsody came on just as I parked." - My art teacher when he was about 5:55 minutes late.

Read 40 of those stories in a ranked list at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: Flickr user William Murphy)

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the most destructive flood in US history, affecting 630,000 people and leading to structural changes in the engineering of the Mississippi River. Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie wrote a little song about it in 1929. You are probably more familiar with the 1971 version of the song by Led Zeppelin. That's the version covered by a couple of dozen musicians from all over the world, including Stephen Perkins of Jane's Addiction, Susan Tedeschi, Derek Trucks, and Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones.

"When the Levee Breaks" is about a terrifying natural disaster, and evokes our concern about unusual weather patterns, accelerating disasters, and environmental degradation brought on by climate change. This is the latest project from Playing for Change (previously at Neatorama), an organization that aims to connect the world through music. Read more about this video at their website. -via Digg

🤣 YouTuber Jean-Paul (PaperPaul) has turned famous Internet memes into pop-up cards, and we're mad that we didn't think of this first! Genius!

🧠 Researchers were monitoring the brain activity of an 87-year-old man when he suddenly suffered a cardiac arrest and died. The unexpected death of the patient yielded a surprising scientific data: for the first time ever, researchers were able to record brain activity during death and revealed what the dying person may be experiencing during the final moments.

🚪 Why are these mother-in-law doors of Newfoundland so high up from the ground? Is it because they are witches and can float?

Image: @paperpaul01/IG

🤔 This guy is not Tom Cruise, but it's nearly impossible to convince your eyes that you're not actually looking at Tom Cruise. The age of deepfakes is here and you can't believe what you're seeing anymore.

🦈 Meet baby ghost shark, who is both terrifying and kind of cute at the same time.

🛹 Urban Isolation is a neat video of a skateboarder on the empty streets and highways of Los Angeles. Empty streets? Impossible, you say, but the filmmakers managed to do it by editing out all the vehicles.

I🖤U: Late grandmother sent family a message of love from the afterlife.

🏀 Boomshakalaka! Arcade 1Up has finally made a Shaq-sized NBA JAM arcade cabinet.

🎃 For those of you who love Halloween 365 day a year: Hilarious DIY Halloween costume ideas from 1986.

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

Featured art: The Adventure Never Ends Just Start Another Book by Tobe Fonseca

Current Special: Save up to 20% on all T-shirts in NeatoShop's sitewide special!

In the spring of 1918, families in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg, Russia) were suffering from a lack of food due to transportation challenges in the wake of World War I and the October Revolution. So they sent 782 of the city's children to the Ural Mountains in the south, to a summer camp run by a charity called the Union of Cities. There they were caught between Russian and Czech fighters and could not leave- they spent the winter at camp. Aid workers from the Young Men's Christian Association (yes, the YMCA) found the children and helped them evacuate further east, to Siberia. There, the children fell into the care of the American Red Cross at Vladivostok. Then the Japanese invaded Vladivostok, and took the children to sea. For reasons that aren't all that clear, they didn't go west through the Indian Ocean, but sailed east to the US, around through the Panama Canal, and then the children spent some time in New York City. They didn't return to their parents in Petrograd until January of 1921! What they thought would be a summer in the mountains turned into a trip around the world, which you can read about at Messy Nessy Chic.    

(Image source: Library of Congress)

Six-language coverage from #Kyiv with @AP_GMS. In this order: English, Luxembourgish, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German. pic.twitter.com/kyEg0aCCoT

— Philip Crowther (@PhilipinDC) February 21, 2022

How many languages can Philip Crowther of the Associated Press speak? At least six. We know this because he's recently reported on the war in Ukraine in English, Portuguese, French, German, Spanish, and Luxembourgish.

The last of these is not surprising once one learns that Crowther was born in Luxembourg to a German mother and a British father. He was raised and educated in Luxembourg, as well as the UK. His travels have taken him around the world, where he rounded out his linguistic versatility.

So as this compilation of his recent reporting shows, Crowther is a very useful person to have when a news organization needs to understand and deliver information about rapidly changing current events.

-via Althouse

Alfred Hitchcock seemed to have had an obsession with stairs. Staircases are featured prominently in many of his films, which stands out because a person going upstairs or downstairs, or just generally moving from one place to another, is the kind of thing that most filmmakers would skip to save time. For Hitchcock, it may have been an excuse to film actors from strange angles. Or maybe it represents the character's journey. Or maybe it was a way to build tension. When asked about those scenes, Hitch said, "Stairs are very photogenic."

Max Tohline compiled 39 staircase sequences from 39 Hitchcock films and named it Alfred Hitchcock’s 39 Stairs. Yes, the movie The 39 Steps is in there. The films used in this supercut are listed at the vimeo page. This video is less than three minutes long, because the compilation is shown twice.

Tohline points out that Hitchcock's very first film, The Pleasure Garden from 1925, opened with a staircase scene, and his final film, Family Plot from 1976, ends with a shot of a staircase.  -via Kottke

Before the 20th century, some scientists thought that humans arrived in the New World around 1000 BCE or so. It was only when the Folsom Site near Folsom, New Mexico, was excavated that evidence of Native Americans were found that confirmed they were here during the last Ice Age. That might never have happened without George McJunkin.  

George McJunkin was born enslaved in Texas and became a cowboy after the Civil War. He was also a self-taught archaeologist and naturalist who was always on the lookout for bones and artifacts in the scrublands of New Mexico, where he managed a ranch. In 1908, a heavy rain flooded the arroyos. Surveying the damage, McJunkin noticed bones that had been unearthed by floodwaters washing away the soil. They were bison bones, much larger than any existing bison. He took some samples of what turned out to be an extinct species that died out at the end of the last Ice Age. McJunkin died in January 1922. He didn't live to see the Folsom site excavated and studied, but he spent the last 14 years of his life trying to convince others of its importance. There is some question about exactly who found the arrowhead embedded in the bison bones of the extinct species, but that discovery reset the narrative over the historical timeline, showing that humans were in New Mexico at least 11,000 years ago.

Read about the life and discoveries of George McJunkin at Sapiens. -via Atlas Obscura