The little triangle you see above is the result of the collision of New York City's street grid with New York City's attitude. And it happened over a hundred years ago. But the story begins a lot earlier, when Manhattan Island was a new and popular place to settle, long before city planners tried to make sense of the city.   

While most of New York City’s streets are laid out in a neatly ordered grid, Lower Manhattan—the oldest part of the city—is, cartographically speaking, kind of a mess. That’s because the city didn’t implement an official master plan for the layout of new streets until 1811, more than a century after the Dutch established a settlement at the southern tip of the island. The earliest-built parts of the city still maintain some of the quirks of a pre-plan settlement where property owners built their own streets with nearly no official oversight, resulting in a haphazard array of oddly shaped, variably sized blocks and narrow, crooked streets.

The bit of property now known as Hess’s triangle is located in this latter part of Manhattan, where the street grid is still a little wonky. It was even more so in the 1910s, when the city decided it needed to extend Seventh Avenue, a wide thoroughfare that was first built as part of that landmark 1811 master plan. In order to make room for traffic and for the construction of a new subway line, the city condemned an 11-block stretch of the West Village, demolishing hundreds of buildings starting in 1913. The extension was finished in 1916.

David Hess owned one of those buildings that was condemned, and he didn't like the idea one bit. Read the story of the Hess Triangle at Mental Floss, and see an explanation of the maps that led to it in this Twitter thread.

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Yeah, America is big, so we developed four lane roads to get us from town to town faster. Then four-lane roads were extended into town to alleviate traffic. But do we really need four-lane roads in a city? City streets are safer with traffic going slower. To achieve that, some cities are putting their streets on a diet, making them smaller and slower. So far, that's making street use easier for pedestrians and cyclists, while still not causing worse traffic for drivers -in most places. Your mileage may vary, no pun intended. -via Laughing Squid

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The annual St. Teresa's Charity Pantomime Horse Race pits teams of humans dressed as four-legged beasts against each other in a mercifully short race.

The St. Teresa’s Charity Pantomime Horse Race at the UK’s Catterick Racecourse raises funds for St. Teresa’s Hospice in Darlington. In its third annual running, the race welcomed four entrants: Heavy Brigade in the cow suit, racing for the Royal Dragoon Guards; Unicorn on the Cob in the unicorn suit, racing for marketing agency Purple Creative; #Professionals in the horse suit, a last-minute entry from Racing UK; and Wonky Donkey, racing for Lookers Volkswagen.

Spectators will be forgiven for thinking that alcohol may have been involved. -via Metafilter

Everyone has weird workplace stories, or at least everyone who is old enough to have held a job or two. I once had a summer position where the job description involved an activity that was technically illegal -I stapled posters on telephone poles. What was the weirdest thing your boss ever asked you to do?

Yeah, that's weird. I have a degree in psychology, and I know interpreting dreams is a fool's errand. The upside is that these people have some good stories to tell years later.

You can see 27 pictofacts about weird orders from bosses that you are glad aren't your boss at Cracked.

Got bit + dragged by a 10 ft (3 m) croc and all I got were these scars. Today all wounds have healed (finally!), bruising gone, + can walk w/o (much) pain. || Me mordió y arrastró un cocodrilo y esto es como se ve mi pierna! Gracias que estoy bien y puedo caminar! #SharkWeek pic.twitter.com/Rdp0R6IrO1

— Melissa Cristina Márquez (@mcmsharksxx) July 24, 2018

Australian marine biologist Melissa Cristina Márquez was looking for a hammerhead shark south of Cuba while filming a documentary for Shark Week. Her mind was on sharks when she felt pressure on her leg. She thought it might be her flipper caught on something, but it was a crocodile... which began pulling her away by her leg! Luckily, while Márquez had never before encountered a crocodile up close, she knew something about alligators, and was calm enough to realize she must not move her leg even the slightest.      

I was in its mouth, which is highly receptive to texture, to taste. I hoped that it wasn’t not biting me too hard. It didn’t feel like it. I didn’t feel pain. I felt really, really hard pressure, but no actual pain. So I was hoping, “Alright, hopefully, because I have the scuba suit on, no blood is coming out, so it doesn’t taste that. It doesn’t feel the meat, essentially, of my leg. It just tastes the neoprene, and it’s gonna let me go.”

I was like, “Don’t struggle,” because two things can happen. Crocodiles will either bite down harder, and then I would start feeling pain, and then: There goes all my rational thinking, really. If it bit down harder, not only would it possibly be painful, but it also could have taken out a chunk of my leg. Or, the worst scenario is that it rolled. That’s how a lot of them incapacitate their prey.

Márquez suffered numerous bite marks, from which the biggest danger was infection, but is on the mend. Her new wetsuit, however, was completely destroyed. Márquez told the complete story of being dragged by a crocodile to Jezebel, with a unique science perspective, and it's a compelling story.  

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Seth Meyers tells the tale of DeDe Phillips, who was attacked by a rabid bobcat. As he proved when his second son was born, Meyers really knows how to tell a story. Since the June 7 attack, Phillips has undergone rabies vaccination, and is okay. Well, she's not only okay, she's a badass.   

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We saw an impressive teaser a couple of months ago, and now here's the first full trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody, the story of Queen. The film, starring Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury, focuses on the band's music more than anything else.

The film traces the meteoric rise of the band through their iconic songs and revolutionary sound, their near-implosion as Mercury’s lifestyle spirals out of control, and their triumphant reunion on the eve of Live Aid, where Mercury, facing a life-threatening illness, leads the band in one of the greatest performances in the history of rock music.

Bohemian Rhapsody will open nationwide November 2.  

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You're flying home, and you need a ride from the airport. Your family assures you they will be there to pick you up. But you don't know what they're going to do to stand out in a crowd so you will see them.

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I have two daughters coming in from different countries in the next couple of weeks. I may have to arrange something really embarrassing for the pickups.

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These are a few from a mega-list at Bored Panda that go beyond greetings and encompass more than 100  weird things photographed at airports.

Kate Wagner at McMansion Hell is doing a series called 50 States of McMansion Hell, where she looks at terrible architecture of the various states of the union. In Texas, she had way too many to select from (2000, she said), and so is giving the state a two part roundup, with eight homes in the first post. That will be followed by another eight and a tournament bracket for readers to vote for the "Most Terrible in Texas." Check back next week for part two, or you can look for a post on your state by using this tag http://mcmansionhell.com/tagged/texas and changing the last word to your state.  -via Boing Boing

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Former NASA engineer Mark Rober (previously at Neatorama) was asked to charge a very powerful battery for an electric Volkswagen. He decided to make lemonade- a really serious lemon-powered battery, using 1232 lemons. After having as much fun with that many lemons as they could think of, he and William Osman got down to business. Lemons were not the only creative idea he had for charging the huge car battery. The Volkswagen supercar ended up winning the Pike's Peak Challenge, and set a world record, too! -via The Kid Should See This

Vacationing in the Poconos Mountains goes way back into the early part of the 20th century. But in 1945, as soldiers returned from the war and got married, Farm on the Hill became the first "honeymoon resort" in the Poconos, and others soon followed. There were plenty of honeymoon accommodations to select from, like the "honeymoon mansionette" pictured above, complete with fireplace, plastic flowers, sky-blue decor, and a TV with a matching blue screen of death. There were plenty of recreational opportunities, like archery, swimming, golf, canoeing, and table tennis, as well as lounges and restaurants.

Some hotels went all in on the honeymoon idea as the 1960s progressed, with heart-shaped bathtubs during the era of "affluent vulgarity," which extended the potential clientele to unmarried couples ready to pay for a getaway. See a roundup of postcards from the Poconos during its honeymoon heyday at Flashbak. -via Everlasting Blort

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Devin Supertramp and his band of stuntmen recreate a chase scene from the Jurassic Park movie series. Since CGI is expensive, they used parkour athletes in T-rex costumes for the dinosaurs. That makes this video no less exciting for all the action, but does make it funnier than it should be. There's a behind the scenes video, too. -via Geeks Are Sexy

During World War II, a shocking number of army recruits were rejected due to malnutrition. Children of the Baby Boom were fed daily vitamin tablets to grow up big and strong. But the world is different now, yet we still buy multivitamin and trendy supplements by the ton. Do we really need to take vitamins?

We all need vitamins, but that doesn’t mean you need to take a vitamin. This week, science gave us another brick for the giant “vitamin pills are useless for most of us” sign that’s been under construction for a while. (It’s a metaphor, but I imagine it as something like the Hollywood sign, except nobody looks at it because they’re all busy shopping for vitamins in the valley below.)

Vitamin pills may be necessary if you have certain health conditions. For example, if you’re pregnant, it’s a good idea to take a prenatal vitamin that includes folic acid. If you’ve been eating nothing but ramen all semester, you might want to stock up on Emergen-C. But if you just have a vague sense that you’d like to be healthier, vitamins aren’t likely to help you, and they might hurt.

Lifehacker has a quick course on vitamins and who might need to take supplements. Do you need to take a supplement? If you have symptoms that make you suspect a vitamin deficiency, you should ask a doctor, because it might be something else that needs to be identified.  

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The annual Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling in Gloucestershire, England, was this past weekend. People who have lost their minds chase a rolling wheel of cheese down a hill. The hill is a lot steeper than you'd think from the camera angle, but when people start running, you'll get an idea. They really aren't so much running as falling, and there were quite a few injuries: cuts, bruises, and at least one dislocated shoulder. There's also a video featuring closeups of certain participants set to a musical soundtrack here. The competition is so dangerous that the event no longer has an official governing body or sponsors. -via Tastefully Offensive

Hacking into new technology for nefarious reasons isn't exactly new. Only the technology is new. People scheming to profit from someone else's system is as old as time. Such a scheme befell France's government communication system in 1834, which amounted to an old-fashioned game of telephone, but was a great innovation for the time -long before actual telephones.   

The world’s first national data network was constructed in France during the 1790s. It was a mechanical telegraph system, consisting of chains of towers, each of which had a system of movable wooden arms on top. Different configurations of these arms corresponded to letters, numbers and other characters. Operators in each tower would adjust the arms to match the configuration of an adjacent tower, observed through a telescope, causing sequences of characters to ripple along the line. Messages could now be sent much faster than letters, whizzing from one end of France to the other in minutes. The network was reserved for government use but in 1834 two bankers, François and Joseph Blanc, devised a way to subvert it to their own ends.

The plan was genius: they conspired to add in a code that they could intercept ahead of their competitors in order to manipulate the market. The Blancs were groundbreakers, in that communications security was a completely new concept and there was no law yet against what they did. Read how they did it at 1843 Magazine. -via Boing Boing