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.

In 1893, James MacMurray gave up his job of tending sheep to become a New York City firefighter. He brought along his trusty collie, Robert Bruce. The dog was a trained and capable sheep dog, now expected to become a big city fire station mascot. They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but Robert Bruce was only two years old, and quickly came to understand his new responsibilities. In fact, he soon became a hero. In October of that year, the Nevius & Haviland wallpaper factory caught fire, which spread to the William Campbell paper factory.   

Flames were bursting from the windows of both factories by the time the first of many fire companies arrived. In their rush and excitement, the firemen of Robert Bruce’s company forgot about the horses. Even fireman Pete Tinkum, who drove the engine that night, did not notice that the fire was beginning to spread at the corner of the block where his horses stood.

Since it was the dog’s job to stay with the engines during the fires, Robert Bruce was the first to notice the horse nearest the flames succumb to the heat and collapsed.  He jumped from firemen to fireman to get their attention, but they were too occupied to pay the dog any mind. Finally, he jumped on Pete, who followed the frantic dog to the engine and saved the other horses just in time before they also suffocated.

That's a good dog. It was not the last time Robert Bruce saved lives during fires. Read about two other occasions in which the fire dog distinguished himself, including once where his sheep herding skills were crucial, at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

Nikon has announced the winners of their annual Small World Microphotgraphy competition. The top winner this year is Daniel Castranova, along with Dr. Brant M. Weinstein and Bakary Samasa of the National Institutes of Health for this image of a juvenile zebrafish with its organs highlighted with fluorescent tags. The lymphatic system is orange and the scales are blue.

This image is particularly significant because it was taken as part of an imaging effort that helped Castranova’s team make a groundbreaking discovery - zebrafish have lymphatic vessels inside their skull that were previously thought to occur only in mammals. Their occurrence in fish, a much easier subject to raise, experiment with, and photograph, could expedite and revolutionize research related to treatments for diseases that occur in the human brain, including cancer and Alzheimer’s.

Castranova stitched together more than 350 individual images to create this single stunning visual. The image was acquired using a spinning disk confocal, merging together maximum intensity projections of three separate image Z stacks to generate the final reconstructed image.

See, and read about, the top twenty ranked images from this year's competition at the winners gallery. The honorable mentions are worth a look, too. -via Kottke

The Miss Mexico pageant competition is underway, and all 32 contestants are required to model a costume that reflects the national character. While some have the Vegas showgirl vibe we are used to from the Miss Universe pageant, many are stunning in other ways.

See all 32 contestants in their costumes in a ranked list at Bored Panda. The pageant finale will take place on October 31st.  

(Images from the Miss Mexico Organization at Facebook)

Scientists pretty much agree that the 50-foot shark Otodus megalodon has been extinct for millions of years, yet the monster shark is very much on the public's radar, thanks to monster movies and Shark Week -and even before that, anyone who's ever stood inside a fossil megalodon jaw had to be very impressed.    

Fossil shark teeth got people hooked on the Meg long before paleontology took off in the early 19th century, when scientists started cataloging fossils with gusto. In 1835, Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz described triangular, finely serrated teeth, which had been found worldwide since antiquity, as belonging to a “megatooth” relative of the great white.

Discoveries around the world—in locations as diverse as Panama, Japan, Australia, and the southeastern United States—piled up over time, but one particular find raised the specter of a Meg still swimming in the deep. In 1875, during an expedition for the Royal Society of London, the HMS Challenger dredged up 4-inch-long teeth from a depth of 14,000 feet near Tahiti. In 1959, zoologist Wladimir Tschernezky, who made a hobby of researching “hidden animals” like Bigfoot, estimated the specimens were just 11,300 years old. Other scientists have since dismissed this dating, but unscrupulous documentarians and curious amateurs still highlight the research as a hint that Meg might persist.

Even if the date is wrong, it's intriguing to think that megalodon may be hiding out in the deeper parts of the ocean, where humans find conditions difficult for study and there's plenty of room for creatures we've never seen before. However, there are scientific reasons to think that even if the giant shark managed to make a home there, it would have had to change into something very different to survive. Read those reasons at Popular Science. -via Digg

Food has to have at least 2 qualities. One, it has to be edible. Two, it has to look good (if not, then at least it should look decent). And then, there are those people who take away even these basic qualities from food, and the result is stomach-churning “food.”

Instagram account @TotallyGourmet has taken upon itself to show the world terrible food pictures that will make you feel deeply uncomfortable just by looking at them.

For your safety, I will only share here the picture that gives the least discomfort. But if you’re brave enough, then go ahead and visit Sad and Useless for more photos.

(Image Credit: Totally Gourmet/ Sad and Useless)