Martin Stanton lives in Ireland, and his neighbors down the road have a donkey named Harriet. Harriet never learned how to heehaw like other donkeys, but she's got an operatic soprano voice with occasional vibrato. I am not making this up. -via Laughing Squid
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Malmo, Sweden, is welcoming a new museum opening at the end of this month. The Disgusting Food Museum will highlight recipes from around the world that make some folks salivate and others feel a bit queasy. Museum founder and organizational psychologist Dr. Samuel West is most known for opening the Museum of Failure last year.
There has been some criticism of the Disgusting Food Museum as an exercise in othering—deeming the food of some cultures to be normal and delicious, and the aromas, flavors, and ingredients of others to be weird and off-putting. Just as the Museum of Failure does more than just poke fun at the idea of Hot Road, the Harley Davidson perfume (the larger purpose is to explore the relationship between failure and innovation), the Disgusting Food Museum paints a more complicated picture of why we eat certain things and push others away in revulsion.
The items features on the museum’s website fall into roughly three, often overlapping categories: unfamiliar creatures (bats, dog, insects) or parts (penis, intestines, heads); very strong flavors, textures, and aromas (durian, natto, root beer); and items that violate certain religious or moral beliefs (pork, meat, jell-o salad).
Read more about the Disgusting Food Museum at Quartz. -via Nag on the Lake
On December 10, this year's Nobel Prize winners will gather with royalty and dignitaries at City Hall in Stockholm for the Nobel banquet. Some think the highlight of the evening is the awarding of the prizes, but those who know say it's really the dessert parade, a grand entrance featuring a light show of sparklers as an army of servers bring in the dessert.
Nobel banquets have been held since 1901, and each year, the menu is exquisite. That’s to be expected: Some of the world’s most lauded people, not to mention Swedish royalty and dignitaries, are in attendance. In the first few years, the food was mostly French-style, the cuisine of the elite. Only later in the century did Swedish dishes and ingredients take center stage, with filet of sole being replaced by filet of reindeer. But until recently, there was one constant: For dessert, dozens of waiters descended the grand staircase with trays of Nobel ice cream and sparklers, a fitting accompaniment to the Nobel Prize’s explosive origins.
Things change, and even the ice cream is optional these days. However the dessert parade will continue, upstaging the scientists and peacemakers once again. Read about the Nobel banquet and its ice cream parades at Atlas Obscura.
Ignoramusky is back, with a new compilation of the smartest, clumsiest, and funniest Russian cats around! Bonus: Many of the clips are enhanced with appropriate musical soundtracks.
Parents have a lot of things to teach children and relatively little time to do it. Most of us are just making it up as we go along, anyway. Everyone has a story about that one time that the kid outsmarted us, like the kid who kept his room clean by living in the hallway, or completely misunderstood the point, or even stories of totally unforeseen circumstances, like the father who auditioned for his daughter's high school play in order to demonstrate that failure is okay and then won a leading role. An askreddit thread has a treasure trove of those stories.
One of my 5 year old twins was still having occasional accidents because she would get so caught up in playing/doing something else that she just wouldn't go and would pee her pants. To combat this we would give her a special prize of some variety when she wouldn't have an accident. This, in turn, caused her twin sister to START having accidents so she could get prizes for not having accidents (even though she was fine on this front beforehand.) We had to rethink our methods. -KyleRichXV
Not a parent, but as a child I noticed my sister was writing her name on the walls when she was drawing on them with crayon. Taking on the role of Helpful Big Sister, I informed her if she was going to graffiti things she shouldn't write her name and give herself away.
A few weeks later, she was carving patterns into the wooden desk in the study and carved my name into it instead. -frozennie
Coworker of mine was trying to teach her kid the "don't talk with your mouth full" rule. Instead, the kid just spits out their food when they want to talk.
Children are the absolute masters of malicious compliance. -MisterCrispy
Read a book that suggested you ask your kid what an appropriate punishment for misbehaving would be and then carry it out. 6 yo son pinched his brother or something, so we asked what an appropriate punishment would be. He said “pluck out my eyeballs and throw me over a cliff?”. We didn't follow through. And stopped reading parenting books. -Mungobrick
Lifehacker has a roundup of the best stories, and you can read them all in the reddit thread. -via Metafilter
Oh yeah, there are more stories in the comments at Lifehacker and Metafilter. Feel free to add yours here.
When you grow up eating Mazola, you tend to think that margarine was always made of corn oil. That's far from the truth, as many different kinds of fats have been used to make the butter substitute. The only requirement was that it had to be cheaper than butter; otherwise people would just buy butter. That included whale oil, which was widely used for fuel before the rise of the American petroleum industry.
Margarine was invented in 1869, just as whale oil was on the verge of falling out of use as a fuel. To simulate butter, margarine must contain some kind of fat. That might come from a variety of vegetable oils—as in most margarines today—or beef fat. But in the first half of the 20th century, since whale oil was “no longer needed for illumination” and a “large amount became available,” as one researcher wrote in the 1960s, most of the world’s supply was being whipped into a spreadable butter substitute.
Read up on the history of whale oil margarine, which was so popular that it led to the formation of one of the world's largest corporations, at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: KingaNBM)
Genetic testing companies are doing great business- people are even paying to have genetic studies done on their dogs. This is a boon to researchers, as a new study used 6,000 such canine genetic profiles with permission of the dog owners. Adam Boyko and Aaron Sams of Embark Veterinary, Inc. were able to pinpoint the source of blue eyes in Siberian huskies.
The expansive analysis revealed that blue eyes in Siberian huskies appear to be associated with a duplication on what is known as canine chromosome 18, which is located near a gene called ALX4. This gene plays an important role in mammalian eye development, leading the researchers to suspect that the duplication “may alter expression of ALX4, which may lead to repression of genes involved in eye pigmentation,” Aaron Sams of Embark tells Inverse’s Sarah Sloat.
The genetic variation was also linked to blue eyes in non-merle Australian shepherds. Just one copy of the mutated sequence was enough to give dogs either two blue eyes, or one blue and one brown eye, a phenomenon known as “heterochromia.” It would seem, however, that duplication on chromosome 18 is not the only factor influencing blue eye color: Some dogs that had the mutation did not have blue eyes.
When a scientist asks why, the answer is a gene mutation that they can pinpoint. The rest of us want to know why that mutation became dominant for the breed as a whole. Maybe we'll find out eventually. Read more about the research at Smithsonian.
It's not unusual for food companies to bring out seasonal flavors for Christmas, but they are usually flavors of other foods associated with the holidays, like peppermint or egg nog or pumpkin spice. Iceland is offering a new flavor of crisps this holiday season- that of a Christmas tree. Okay, in case you're confused, Iceland refers not to the country, but to a British grocery store chain. Crisps are what we Americans know as potato chips. But the Christmas tree flavor is real. The chips are called “Luxury Christmas Tree Flavour Salted Hand-Cooked Crisps,” and the Christmas tree is a pine.
The crisps use the oil from real pine needles to help get that unique Christmas tree flavor. Some point out that pine nuts are a popular add to salads and soups and dishes like pesto—but how far does that piney love go? Enough to look at a Christmas tree and think, “delicious”? Maybe if these crisps had been released in November or something, but on October 8, they’re a little difficult to fathom.
Bon apetit!
Food can make a wonderful art medium. Making food "cute" is also a great way to get kids to enjoy their lunch, as we've seen in many artistic Bento boxes. But when does food cross the line from one to the other? Instagram user Peaceloving Pax is a doctor in Thailand who is also a food artist. You have to wonder whether his/her creations ever are actually eaten.
Peaceloving Pax recreates rice balls depicting kawaii characters from Pokémon, Studio Ghibli, and other anime and cartoon worlds. See more of these wonderful rice balls, as well as dumplings, sandwiches, baked goods, and other foods at Instagram.
-via Buzzfeed
Cole and Marmalade meet their new housemates, Zig Zag and Jugg, but only after a gradual program to get them used to each other first. Along the way, we can marvel at the cat paradise that Chris Poole and his family have made their home into.
If you dislike horror movies, you might want to shield your children from them, but sooner or later they're going to see something that might traumatize them while visiting friends. If you enjoy horror movies, you don't want to traumatize your child and turn them against the movies you love. There are films made for children that will introduce them to the thrill of being scared -but not too scared. Den of Geek has a list of movies that "offer children a safe, but interesting, introduction to the world of horror, with archetypal tropes, characters and even the odd jump scare." The trick here is to watch with your children, so you can pause, explain, and reassure when necessary.
When your child is older and has seen the movies made for kids, then what? Elementary students and tweens may get a thrill out of gore and jump scares, but to really appreciate the horror genre, they need to see well-made movies that engage the viewer. For that, you might consult the list of 81 Best Creepy Horror Movies, although you'll want to select movies you've already seen to ensure they are appropriate for your children. Older classics like Gaslight or The Uninvited will give them the creeps without the sex and violence of newer movies. Watching horror movies that are age-appropriate will help prepare your children for the time they are old enough to go to a theater without you.
A Pennsylvania dachshund named Patches developed a brain tumor the size of an orange. The cancer invaded her skull and pushed her head up in a large lump. Patches' family was referred to the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph, where veterinary surgical oncologist Michelle Oblak recommended surgery.
Normally in a case such as this, the tumor and a portion of the skull would be removed, and a titanium mesh fitted in place, Oblak told the Canadian Press. Instead, Oblak and her colleagues used a new procedure in which a 3D-printed skull cap is specially fitted for the canine patient, which the researchers claim is more precise and less costly than conventional methods. Incredibly, the titanium cap replaced 70 percent of Patches’ skull, which had to be removed during surgery. Oblak said researchers in the UK have done something similar, but on a “significantly” smaller scale.
Naturally, this kind of surgery raises questions about the expense, but the article does not address that. The surgery came through a teaching hospital that does research, which may contribute to the development of such techniques for humans eventually. Anyway, the surgery was successful, and you can see before and after pictures of Patches at Gizmodo. -Thanks, WTM!
(Image credit: Michelle Oblak)
Terry Laurmen of Green Bay, Wisconsin, is 75 years old. He volunteers at Safe Haven Pet Sanctuary, where he enjoys brushing the cats. They love it too! The shelter, which specializes in caring for disabled, ill, and elderly cats, is a comfy place, so Laurmen often falls asleep with the cats.
"They all know him, when he walks through the door they run over to him because they know he has the special brush and the special treats. They all pile on top of him and rub all over him and just love him," sanctuary owner Elizabeth told the BBC.
But grooming 20-30 cats can get exhausting, and the other volunteers began snapping shots of Terry taking his daily siestas with his furry friends.
The pictures, posted at Facebook, went viral. When the shelter attached a fundraising link, they raised more than $40,000 in donations! They also have more volunteers because of the publicity. So what's next?
"People have been requesting we make a calendar with Terry and the cats on it!" Elizabeth says.
"I asked him if he would be comfortable with something like that - and he said he'd do anything to raise money for them."
"I don't know what you're doing, Dad, but I wanna do it, too!"
Eli Clark was exercising by doing lunges across the living room, and his great Dane Luca did his best to join in. He didn't quite understand what moves were involved, but gosh darn it, he did his best! That's a good dog. Luca now has his own Instagram account. -via Tastefully Offensive
Blair Braverman came home to some "minor tornado damage," meaning there were tree branches all over the yard, so she put her puppies -and some grown dogs, too- to work. After all, dogs are great at fetching sticks!
I HALP pic.twitter.com/jiIBKOi8jP
— Blair Braverman (@BlairBraverman) July 6, 2018
The clean-up project was so adorable that the neighbors had to come by for a cuddle. But the best part of the day was the bedtime story that Braverman told the puppies about their grandfather (told to us complete with pictures). It's a tale you don't want to miss at Threadreader. -via Metafilter
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