Books for Cooks is a unique bookstore in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London. The two walls are lined with shelves of cookbooks--one half by subject and the other by country. In the back is a small kitchen. Since its founding in 1983, the store has offered professional and amateur chefs the ultimate reference library for recipes, many of which it prepares in the kitchen and serves four days a week to up to forty customers. Each meal costs a mere £7 ($8.84 USD).

The lunch program is a great draw for customers to the shop. It's a way to bring people together over a shared love for food. You might as well join the other customers for lunch because you can't shop online at Books for Cooks; you have to go in-person and smell the kitchen in person.

-via Messy Nessy Chic

Atlas Obscura explains that in Ming and Qing Dynasty China (1368-1911), physicians could not directly examine the bodies of upper class women. Even directly speaking about the bodily conditions was unacceptable, so the women would point to relevant areas on medical dolls, such as the one pictured above. The doctors would diagnose maladies and provide treatments based on this indirectly communicated information.

The author's source is a scholarly journal article published in 1952. I found this sourcing insufficient, so I searched for other, more recently and clearly referenced sources and came across this webpage by Yuewei Yang, a student at the Royal College of Physicians in London.

Yang is deeply skeptical of the historical claim and concludes that these dolls were probably for sale to gullible Westerners who had exotic (and erotic) views of Chinese culture. For one thing, most of the dolls are posed in rather . . . sensual ways. The one pictured above isn't even the most suggestive example that I've seen. Yang also points out that most of the surviving dolls are found in the West (the one above is in Kansas), not in China.

Finally, during the Ming Dynasty, elite ladies and physicians weren't allowed to communicate in any form at all. Rather, male relatives would ferry messages back and forth between female patients. Thus a medical doll would be unnecessary.

It's clear that more (hopefully grant-funded) research is necessary in this field.

-via Messy Nessy Chic | Photo: Clendening History of Medicine Library and Museum

The saga of Tami Manis of Knoxville, Tennessee and her glorious mullet began in the 1980s, when she encountered the work of the be-mulleted Aimee Mann of the band 'Til Tuesday. The video for "Voices Carry" inspired Manis to cultivate her own mullet. She grew her mullet gradually. Then, on February 9, 1990, stopped cutting it altogether.

Guinness World Records announced that Tami Manis has the "longest competitive mullet (female)" in the entire world.

(I'll assume that the gender designation refers to Manis, not her mullet.)

Her mullet stretches 5 feet and 8 inches long. This exceeds her own height, so Manis often keeps the mullet braided. Maintenance takes a lot of work, but with great mullet comes great responsibility.

-via Dave Barry

When Nature's fury arrives in its swirling, wet majesty, it is our hero, Florida Man, who rises to the occasion. In this instance, though, there were no fewer than two Florida Men who braved the ravages of Hurricane Idalia.

NBC 9 News in Tampa recorded this footage of two sailors who plowed through the torrential seas of Bay Shore Boulevard. Their ship was an inflatable duck wearing camouflage gear. Like wood, bread, apples, cider, lead, and very small rocks, ducks float, thus providing a suitable basis for shipbuilding.

-via Dave Barry

The origins of historic bog snorkeling are shrouded (or muddily immersed) in mystery. Perhaps it was a survival technique necessary in the wild days of early Wales. But the modern sport is more concretely known. The Associated Press reports that, for 35 years, Welshmen have conducted this aquatic sport near the village of Llanwrtyd Wells.

A 60-yard trench is cut into the ground of a peat bog. It soon fills with water, which the competitors must traverse as quickly as possible while remaining submerged. They may use foot flippers, but they may not use swimming strokes. The current record for the journey is 1 minute and 18 seconds.

The competitors have a lot of fun in the process. In recent years, it has become common for the athletes to wear eccentric costumes. You can see a slideshow of these costumes at the AP.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Ethreon

The language is very different from Queen's English, but the tune is instantly recognizable. Hātea Kapa Haka, a Māori cultural organization and performance group, delivers a rousing performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen. It's one of many syntheses of the traditional and the modern that Hātea Kapa Haka has composed.

Bob Barker, the famous host of the game show The Price is Right, has departed from us for the great showcase in the sky. He was 99 years old. As the joke circulating the internet goes, he managed to get as close as possible to 100 without going over.

He leaves behind a legacy of thousands of episodes aired over 35 years. Some of those episodes were quite creative. Here's a 1978 scene that is an extended and detailed parody of the first Star Wars film. Announcer Johnny Olson explains that they had a limited production budget, but the set designers, costumers, and actors nonetheless did a fine adaptation of the science fiction classic.

-via Super Punch

Curated an art show and concert in a laundromat yesterday 🫧🧼

6 artists featured works on the walls alongside guitar & marimba. People did laundry too

Here’s an amazing set by Fool_0f_Ideas (Jesse Garcia), the artist emi.mbg hanging work (photo by Jorge), and guests mingling pic.twitter.com/BhzDK6YkJ0

— Danielle Baskin (@djbaskin) August 25, 2023

Entrepreneur and visionary Danielle Baskin is very much worth a follow on Twitter. She's consistently innovative in business and the arts as she brings delightful weirdness to her beloved San Francisco.

In the past, we've seen her watermark her own face to protect herself from undesired photos, create a dating app for sailors trapped inside the Suez Canal, invent a completely offline Zoom meeting experience, and host an art show on her city's public trains.

Baskin's most recent project flows from that final vein. She staged an offbeat art show and concert inside a functional laundromat while that business was in full operation.

Incredible performance by this gentleman
by u/notajock in toptalent

This unknown man hasn't reached the superstardom that he deserves, but the people of the internet can make that happen! Watch him shuffle-dance with a precise rhythm while playing his guitar at the same time and never missing a note.

Various redditors are noticing that the gentleman has an unique physical advantage: unusually long fingers. Perhaps this helps him keep his grip on the neck of the guitar while maintaining precise control over the fretboard.

-via Born in Space

The Pudding is a unique website that you should regularly visit (after your hourly check-ins at Neatorama, of course). There's fresh and novel content that informs and entertains readers in clever ways.

This clock, for example, plays music that varies with the time. At 9:13 in the morning, it plays 9:13, a song by the metal band No Murder No Moustache. The song refers to the 1966 Aberfan mining disaster that killed 144 people, most of them children.

It is a work in progress. Some times, such as 9:26, appear and no song titles. Perhaps some enterprising musicians might fill these gaps.

-via Kottke

The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks is a legendary (and historically fictitious) exchange of letters between Ottoman Sultan Mehmet IV and warlord Ivan Sirko, the leader of a band of Cossack peoples who lived in what is now Ukraine.

The story goes that in 1672, the Sultan demanded the submission of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to his rule. The grandeur of the Sultan contrasts sharply with crudeness of Sirko's reply. It makes for good reading, especially out loud.

Letters Live is an ongoing theater program which has famous actors reading famous letters. On this particular evening, Peter Capaldi, who is noted for his work on Doctor Who, and Matt Berry, who starred on The IT Crowd, offer a lively performance of the letters.

Content warning: foul language.

-via Laughing Squid

The great Paul Di Filippo of Weird Universe mines the digital bowels of the US Patent Office for bizarre, wonderful, and wonderfully bizarre inventions that never quite made it to mass production. Today, he shares with us this unusual device granted a patent in 1942.

Inventor Benjamin L. Dorsey calls his device the "antiholdup cashier's cage." It appears to be a sealed chamber accessible through a locking revolving door. The cashier controls entry and exit. If a bank robber is able to persuade the cashier to part with money, s/he may not escape with it until the cashier unlocks the chamber.

What are the possible drawbacks? Well, a trapped robber might go all Rorschach on the cashier (NSFW).

Tシャツをパタパタする装置を作りました。 pic.twitter.com/Jq1Rpr0T9T

— カズヤシバタ(KAZUYA SHIBATA) (@seevua) August 14, 2023

It's been a few months since I've seen a daily high temperature under 100°F. I need to cool down and Kazuya Shibata has a solution to my problem. Well, one of them.

You can flap your shirt with your hand, but this exercise itself gets tiring and no one should exercise in this heat. So Shibata made this Arduino-controlled device that hooks onto the front of his pants. A magnet holds the shirt front in place and lever arms push the shirt back and forth. This is the sort of forward-thinking leadership that we need in technology today.

-via Massimo

If your baby cries near you, do you instantly recognize the sound and respond? Even if you do, there's a chance that a crocodile will reach your baby before you do.

Science reports the results of a recent study conducted at a zoo in Morocco that houses over 300 Nile crocodiles. The scientists set up speakers around the enclosure and played sounds that baby primates, including human babies, make. Many crocodiles responded to the sounds by homing in on their sources. They were especially inclined to engage in urgent hunting if they heard human babies crying. Some crocodiles even bit the speakers in their feeding frenzy.

Why? The researchers speculate that human babies are likely to begin crying if dropped in the water and thus signal to crocodiles that easy prey has appeared.

The scientists also asked humans around the enclosure to evaluate whether the sounds represented crying babies. The crocodiles were generally better able to detect babies in distress than the humans.

But the humans, to their credit, did not respond to the sounds of crying babies with hunting and feeding behaviors. That's probably a good thing.

-via Bowser | Photo: Daryl Mitchell

What's it like to get a doctoral degree? Or, to be more precise, what's it like to try to get a doctoral degree? Mianzhi Wang, a graduate of a doctoral program in electrical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, created a text-base simulation game that shows you. Make good choices, but be aware that your time and money are finite resources that must be used prudently.

It is not a Kobayashi Maru game, which was my expectation. You can definitely win and I did so on my first try.

The game is designed to reflect the norms of STEM fields. It would be interesting to try a similar game for the humanities, which would, of course, end in poverty even if successful.

-via Book of Joe