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Gertrud Gunther was born into a normal Prussian middle class family in 1881, but she made good when she married Baron Heinrich von Puttkamer and ascended to a life of high society and wealth. She took to it well, from entertaining royalty to doting on her much older husband. But she had a secret identity. The baroness wrote lesbian-themed poetry and novels, which she published under the name Marie-Madeleine. It is possible that the baron never knew about her writings in all the years they were married before he died in 1914.  

In the following 14 years, the baroness published another 28 books, including novels. Just as lesbian love dominated her works at first, morphine started appearing in her writing beginning in 1910. It became the dominant theme after the baron’s death and for the rest of her literary career. “Her work was particularly appreciated during the decadent, dissolute years of the Weimar Republic when alternative sexual behavior and drug use were tolerated — and often celebrated,” says Gertz.

If anything, her writing became even more ecstatic and rapturous after her husband’s death. “She traveled around Europe with a male companion and fellow morphine enthusiast, living in villas in Germany and France,” says Gertz, “completely unknown as the notorious Marie-Madeleine.”

The baroness had maintained her secret identity for more than three decades, but Hitler’s Nazis eventually ferreted her out. The Third Reich wasn’t too keen on Jewish lesbian poets addicted to morphine, and despite her nobility, they wanted to erase her from history. When the Nazis starting burning books, Marie-Madeleine’s were among the first to go into the flames. Her books sold more than 1 million copies during her career, but it’s extremely hard to come by a copy of one today.

Read about the life and legacy of Baroness Gertrud von Puttkamer at Ozy.

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If you've seen your cat give you "that face," you probably felt bad about it, because the same sneering expression on a human indicates disgust, horror, or at least a hateful thought of some kind. But that's not what's happening from the cat's point of view. Hank Green of SciShow is here to explain. -via Geeks Are Sexy

You know them, but how weird is it to see brand logos out of context? The digital agency Hello Velocity made a new font, Brand New Roman, using 76 different corporate logos to spoof late-stage capitalism. Lukas Bentel explains the effect of the font.

"At this point, brands are inescapably ubiquitous and attention-hungry," says Bentel. "What's interesting about Brand New Roman is that when you smash so many of these brands together, they start to lose their powerful brand connotations in interesting ways. The sheer density overrides all the extra brand identity connotations each symbol usually carries."

The font becomes more readable when rendered in a single color, but the brand identity of the individual letters starts to get a little fuzzy and harder to identify. So which is more important to your finished product, the brands represented, or what you are saying in your text? Try Brand New Roman yourself- you can type anything into this generator to see what it looks like. The applications are endless, and can be quite funny. Check out some examples at Muse.

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Animator Joshua Slice is also a musician. That means Lucas the Spider can play tiny little musical instruments -five of them! And he does it cutely, as always. -via Geeks Are Sexy

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John Krasinski is best known for playing Jim Halpert in the TV series The Office. Now he's playing the title character in Amazon's new series Jack Ryan (available as of today), based on the Tom Clancy character. It only makes sense that the CIA operative would be instantly mashed up with The Office. Funny or Die jumped on that idea. -via Metafilter

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In case you've ever wondered why the comic strip Garfield isn't funny, comic artist Jim Davis will readily admit to the fact that it wasn't even designed to be funny. The cartoon cat is wildly popular in spite of this ...or specifically because of this. Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out explains the thinking behind Garfield. Despite the apparent length, the story is less then 12 minutes.

The roots of the words we use for numbers vary around the world, but they often originated in terms that correspond to our body parts. That shouldn't be surprising, since our base ten (decimal) counting system stems from the fact that we have ten fingers. But there are other number systems that arose naturally, that also relate to parts of our bodies.

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Linguist Arika Okrent and illustrator Sean O’Neill tell us about the anatomical origins of number language. -via Laughing Squid