Nell Cropsey and Jim Wilcox became sweethearts soon after they met in 1898, when her family moved to Elizabeth City, North Carolina. By 1901, they were not yet married and began to tire of each other. Nell began to flirt with other men, and Jim wanted to break off the relationship. He did so on the night of November 20, which was also the last time anyone saw Nell alive. Jim swore he didn't know what happened to her, as he left her at her home after the breakup. More than a month later, her body was found. The murder investigation turned up some weird anomalies, but Jim Wilcox was tried for murder.

While the jury deliberated, there were numerous reports that if Wilcox was found not guilty, he would be kidnapped from jail and lynched.  It was even suggested that the jurors themselves would be in grave danger if they did not return the approved verdict.  To no one’s real surprise, the jury voted for a conviction, and Wilcox was sentenced to death.  However, his lawyers, citing the extreme prejudice against their client in Elizabeth City, were able to win him a new trial in another county.  Wilcox was again found guilty, but this time merely for second-degree murder.  His life was spared, but he faced a long prison term.  As he was heading to the penitentiary, Wilcox told a policeman, “There is a little fire smoldering in Elizabeth City which might break out in three months, or it may be three years, but it will break out sooner or later, when the truth will be known which would then relieve me of the burden of somebody else’s sin.”

Jim Wilcox maintained his innocence for the rest of his life, and quite a few facts about the case raised questions about who really killed Nell Cropsey. Read about the case and the devastation it left behind at Strange Company.  

Eddie Van Halen did that guitar solo on the song "Beat It" from the album Thriller, but was not credited anywhere. Still, it was pretty easy to figure out who it was. Can you imagine if Pete Townshend had done it instead? Here's the story behind the song. -via Laughing Squid

Of the many types of games that are available for the Nintendo Switch, you wouldn’t expect that a simple kart-racing game would outsell them all. But, as they say, simplicity is beauty, and that’s what Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is. It’s simple, fun, and addictive, and that’s why it’s the top best-selling game in the game console, with 26.74 million sales. Nintendo, however, decided to take the fun to the next level: by taking the races, as well as the characters, to your own home in physical form, literally, through a new Mario Kart title, Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit.

The latest edition in the series isn’t just a video game. It’s an actual remote-control kart. Fit with a camera, you drive it around your house like a drone, turning your floor into a racecourse populated with virtual competitors and all the familiar Mario Kart tropes like heat-seeking turtle shells and Bowser’s pesky offspring.

Mark Wilson tested the game with his family over the past weekend. This is what he has to say:

Whereas most mixed-reality experiences feel like technical demos, Mario Kart Live is an incredibly entertaining mix of what’s happening on the screen and on the floor. But its real appeal is how it will make you appreciate the disorder of your own home.

[...]

After spending a weekend playing Mario Kart Live, I’ve decided it’s not really about the toy. It’s actually a machine that’s built to turn your whole home into a toy. And as many of us are hunkering down, prepping for a long winter, I couldn’t imagine a more apt gift than something that helps you celebrate the cramped chaos of home.

Check out Wilson’s story over at Fast Company.

(Image Credit: Nintendo/ Fast Company)

One of the methods that we use to examine whether a decision is moral or not is universalization. In this method, we ponder about what would happen if everyone made the same decision. For example, if all of us lied, then nobody would trust anyone. Through this reasoning, we are able to determine that an action is moral or not. The question is, do we practice it in our everyday lives? It seems that the answer is yes, but we don’t do it all the time.

In a study of several hundred people, MIT and Harvard University researchers have confirmed that people do use this strategy in particular situations called “threshold problems.” These are social dilemmas in which harm can occur if everyone, or a large number of people, performs a certain action. The authors devised a mathematical model that quantitatively predicts the judgments they are likely to make. They also showed, for the first time, that children as young as 4 years old can use this type of reasoning to judge right and wrong.

“This mechanism seems to be a way that we spontaneously can figure out what are the kinds of actions that I can do that are sustainable in my community,” says Sydney Levine, a postdoc at MIT and Harvard and the lead author of the study.

Learn more about the study over at MIT News.

Via Big Think

(Image Credit: Bessi/ Pixabay)

Self-driving car company Waymo has just announced that fully automated vehicles are now available in some parts of Phoenix, Arizona. This could soon revolutionize transportation, but it is up to us whether we will greet the new service with open arms.

The service is only available in a limited area for now, both because regulations in Arizona are relatively permissive and because the cars need a detailed three-dimensional map to tell them all about the road environment.

Waymo One currently requires a human driver to be present to supervise the self-driving care and override it when necessary, but the new announcement means fully autonomous, unsupervised vehicles. If successful, passengers will have entirely free time in the back seat.

More details about this over at The Conversation.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: John Krafcik/ Twitter)

HMS Parrsboro, a Bangor-class minesweeper from Woarld War II, plunges over the waves in this tempest in a teacup. This is one of many amazing ship miniatures made by Japanese Twitter user Black637.

The level of detail is truly extraordinary.

-via Super Punch

Full video of how I built it on YouTube! https://t.co/x0Rz5wop6V pic.twitter.com/YNUqUtfW7z

— Simone Giertz (@SimoneGiertz) October 15, 2020

The amazing inventor Simone Giertz has a brand new workshop in Los Angeles. One of her first projects in the new location was to build a dog selfie booth out of LEGO bricks. When her dog, Scraps, goes into the booth, she gets a treat for stomping on a pedal. The pedal activates a camera, taking a photo of Scraps.

-via Super Punch

Josh Carte, an artist in the Hocking Hills of southeastern Ohio, began with a chainsaw. After experimenting with chainsaw art, he decided to try designs that required tools more precise than chainsaws. For eight years, he's carved sculptures cut from the woods of his homeland. Sometimes they're scary and sometimes they're funny, but they're always beautiful.

That's what Messy Nessy Chic says, and I'm inclined to agree.

(Note that the Possum Lady isn't the Queen of the Internet as a whole. That title belongs to our own Miss Cellania.)

For a decade, Georgette Spelvin has enlightened and entertained people around the world through the magic of YouTube. With her psychic pet squirrel, Pearl, and Mabel the opossum, Ms. Spelvin speaks about the joys of Disney Princesses and demonstrates massage techniques. She's the hero we need right now.

Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, had two military camps training soldiers for World War I: one was for Canadian draftees, and the other, Camp Kościuszko, was made up of Polish refugees who wanted to fight to liberate their homeland. In 1917, the arrival of the Polish forces frightened townspeople, but the European soldiers soon made friends and were welcomed into the community. Then in September of 1918, the men began to fall ill.

Although some historians argue that Quebec beat Niagara to the unfortunate distinction by a couple of days, local experts are certain: Camp Kościuszko had become the site of Canada’s first Spanish Flu outbreak.

Merritt says the virus was likely imported along with trainees from the United States, where there were large outbreaks. Once inside the crowded camp, it spread quickly. Despite efforts to separate the sick from the healthy, men soon started to die. Over the course of two surges of infection — the second of which happened in January 1919 — 31 Polish trainees and two Canadian officers died.

“The real tragedy, of course, is that these men were all volunteers,” Merritt says. “They had all volunteered to fight for the repatriation of their homeland, Poland, which had been occupied by other countries for 125 years. These men were dying almost as martyrs.”

The women of Niagara-on-the-Lake sprang into action to tend to the sick soldiers, particularly Elizabeth Ascher, who they called their "Angel of Mercy." The Spanish Flu outbreak left a mark that is felt 102 years later in the town, and commemorations are still held to honor the Polish soldiers who died in service there. Read about the small town and the soldiers they still honor at TVO. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Justin Chandler)

Head lettuce, especially iceberg lettuce, gained popularity through the 20th century because it was easy to transport, had a longer shelf life than other greens, and stayed crunchy in a hamburger. However, compared top other greens, it's not all that nutritious or flavorful. Statistics show that head lettuce is losing ground quickly to other greens. What about those other greens?

About year ago, journalist Amanda Mull unleashed a brief but intense national debate with her assertion in The Atlantic magazine that, after having “entered into the cultural lexicon” in the early 2010s “as a status symbol for a generation of young adults drawn to conspicuous health-consciousness,” kale is on the way out because it doesn’t taste good.

Supermarket data do show sales stopped rising a couple of years ago. But as the above chart hints, oversupply may be part of the explanation too. The acres of kale harvested in this country jumped from 6,256 in 2012 — when food magazine Bon Appetit deemed the crispy kale salad at Brooklyn restaurant Battersby its “Dish of the Year” — to 15,235 in 2017.

It’s possible the nation’s farmers got a bit ahead of the market. And yes, it really is the nation’s farmers: California is responsible for about half the acreage, and South Carolina and New Jersey have a lot too, but kale is now planted in every state. In 2017, the most recent year for which data are available, there were even nine acres harvested in Alaska.

My own experience follows the trends in greens. I was willing to try kale, and even grew some, but it doesn't taste good. I never cared for spinach until I started using it fresh in salads. And while cole slaw and sauerkraut are okay, the best use of cabbage is in kimchi. Read about the rise and fall of all kinds of green leafy vegetables at Bloomberg.

Can you carve a pumpkin with a power washer? This guy is obviously more experienced with a power washer than he is with a pumpkin. He neglects to open and clean out the guts first, so he has so do it mid-project. But the video is short and the results are astonishingly adequate. Besides, you know it's gotta be super clean. -via Fark

Horror movies have go-to techniques that scare us silly, like the jump scare, the twist, the unknown lurking in the darkness, the expert who is no help, or the building sense of dread. You might not have noticed how many horror films have a sit-down dinner, which is used in a number of ways.   

Horror has understood how bizarrely masochistic our human ritual of eating together is, long before anyone was using their self-diagnosis of social anxiety to skip out on family get-togethers and Friendsgivings. Inescapable exercises in formal etiquette, the consumption of a meal someone else has prepared, the life-draining amount of small-talk necessary to survive – the dinner table truly is The Hunger Games of horror, a gladiator-esque arena where people live and die by how well they play the game.

What that game is depends mainly on who you’re dining with. Is it your significant other’s parents? Then the game is making a good first impression. Is it your extended family? Then the game is making it out without wading into a political debate with your insufferable uncle. There are all kinds of games we play at the dinner table, performances we put on so that we can fill a basic need without cutting to the meat of our psychological hang-ups. We all inherently understand how to behave during these social ceremonies, which is why watching them play out in horror movies is so damn unsettling.

Jessica Toomer looks at the ways different horror films harness the power of the dinner table, from benign foreshadowing to enlightening discussions to horrific reveals in movies such as Get Out, Hannibal, and Midsommar, among others at Uproxx. 

We've long known that the theme from Gilligan's Island, "Amazing Grace," and "House of the Rising Sun" can all be sung to each other's tunes. However, that only scratches the surface. From the YouTube page:

The Gilligan's Island theme song is what is called a "Ballad Metre" (or Meter). Each stanza of ballad metre has four iambic lines. Typically, only the second and fourth lines rhyme. Here are 31 short samples of the some of the songs whose lyrics can be sung to the Gilligan's Island Theme Song and Vice Versa (mostly, not every lyric fits perfectly).

Read more about ballad metre here. The YouTube page also has a list of the 31 songs with timestamps so you can skip ahead and hear the ones you want. Some are Gilligan's Island lyrics set to other tunes, and some are other lyrics set to the TV theme's music. You can switch them around in your head if you like. -via Metafilter 

DFW Wonder Woman, a cosplayer in Dallas, Texas, specializes in mashups of her favorite superhero. She produces each costume to a matchless level of quality, as you can see in this mermaid version of the Princess of Themyscira photographed by Ginger Arlene.