Concordia Station is a French-Italian research facility in Antarctica. It is roughly halfway between the Antarctic coast and the South Pole, which makes it pretty isolated from anything. However, the French and Italians care greatly about the food served to the station's crew. Luca Ficara spent a year as the station's chef.  

Each year, the Italian National Program for Antarctic Research (which maintains the base along with the French Polar Institute Paul Emile Victor) holds a lottery to determine who will be spending the next year as the resident chef at Concordia. This lottery system has won the station something of a reputation for its food, which received a nod in the Lonely Planet as a place "considered by many to enjoy Antarctica's best cuisine, with fine wines and seven-course lunches on Sundays."

While Ficara didn't really expect to end up in the Concordia Kitchen, he turned out to be the perfect fit for the job given his diverse culinary repertoire. The chefs chosen by the PNRA must demonstrate not only proficiency as cooks, but also a robust knowledge of international culinary practices so that they can cater to the tastes of the 13-person Concordia winter crew, who hail from England, Switzerland, France, and Italy.

Ficara was challenged with feeding 75 people during the summer (November to February) and then providing interesting meals for 13 during the long dark winter, using an inventory of supplies that must last eight months, with no assistants. And for the Sicilian Ficara, another challenge was that the wine is all French. Read about how he worked with what he had to create amazing meals at the bottom of the world. -via Digg

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

The genesis of King Kong was director Merian C. Cooper's fascination with gorillas when he was very young. As a boy, he had read Paul du Chaillu's 1861 book Explorations and Adventures of Equatorial Africa. His fascination increased when he studied a tribe of baboons in Africa while filming The Four Feathers in 1929. Cooper later claimed the his "original vision" was of a giant ape on top of the world's tallest building, fighting off airplanes.

In 1931, Cooper brought the original idea for King Kong to Paramount studios. Paramount turned the script down, mainly because it was during the Great Depression and the costs of sending a film cast and crew to Africa and Komodo would be too much. Later that year, producer David O. Selznick brought Cooper to RKO studios as his executive assistant, with the promise that Cooper could produce his own films there.

Cooper proceeded to produce The Most Dangerous Game, a 1932 jungle adventure, at RKO- the film starred Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong. Cooper was to produce a handful of films after this, but the "ape film" idea stuck in the back of Cooper's mind. After a personal presentation of his idea for the film to executives, he finally convinced RKO to take a chance and produce it.

Not that I ever really thought about it, but you might think that a working actor who needed a temporary color change might use something temporary, like Manic Panic, to make their hair purple. But Mark Hamill went the extra mile, and then went the extra mile three times to get his hair back to normal. And he isn't too self-conscious to share it with us.

Road to Recovery From the Perils of Purple Hair-Took me 3 dye jobs to get back to normal. #ACautionaryTale #HairDont #DudeWheresYourDignity? pic.twitter.com/k0SiPp5yvs

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) March 7, 2017

The purple hair was for his portrayal of the Trickster in a December episode of the TV series The Flash. You see that some time had passed since his Trickster role when this photograph was taken, because he's busy growing out his Luke Skywalker beard. Maybe there was some Star Wars stuff he had to get ready for quickly.

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Ig Nobel achievements distilled into limerick form
by Martin Eiger, Improbable Research Limerick Laureate

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK. For details of all the Ig Nobel Prize-winning achievements, see each year’s special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine, and also see the winner's page.

2015 Ig Nobel Physiology and Entomology Prize
Awarded jointly to two individuals: Justin Schmidt, for painstakingly creating the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, which rates the relative pain people feel when stung by various insects; and to Michael L. Smith, for carefully arranging for honey bees to sting him repeatedly on 25 different locations on his body, to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm) and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft). [Schmidt’s research is documented in the study “Hemolytic Activities of Stinging Insect Venoms,” Justin O. Schmidt, Murray S. Blum, and William L. Overal, Archives of Insect Biochemistry and Physiology, vol. 1, no. 2, 1983, pp. 155-160. Smith’s research is documented in the study “Honey Bee Sting Pain Index by Body Location,” Michael L. Smith, PeerJ, 2014, 2:e338.]

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

By Catherine Caldwell-Harris
Department of Psychology
Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts

[Editor’s note: This is a case study inspired by the report “Where The,” that appeared in July/August 2006 issue (vol. 12, no. 4) of AIR. That article profiled the study “The Definite  Article: Acknowledging ‘The’ in Index Entries,” Glenda Browne, The Indexer, vol. 22, no. 3, April 2001, pp. 119–22.]

Three long shelves span the wall of my office. Over a period of years I neglected to shelve books and they piled up in odd stacks. So many students responded to my announcement seeking a research assistant for $10 an hour that I felt compelled to pick a student almost at random. I chose a student from China, enrolled in law school, because I thought I might learn something about Chinese students, as I had recently been assigned to be the doctoral supervisor of a student from Taiwan, Hui-Wen. I asked my new assistant, Yi-Chuan, to alphabetize the shelves, and indicated where there were clumps of books that needed to be alphabetized in with the others.

Alphabetizing took Yi-Chuan a long time.

Piñatas can come in any form, I guess, so it shouldn't be too much of a stretch to have horror movie characters made up to be beaten to shreds. Still, I don't see the piñatas by Etsy seller  at Sam Kaleal at Hang Me Official being used at children's parties. For one thing, they are too creepy for little kids, and for another thing, they are pretty near works of art that you wouldn't want destroyed. But you might want to have one for your own reasons.  

See eleven different movie characters in piñata form at TVOM.

Yes, of course, "best" is always a subjective word, and a list of the best of anything is going to cause a little controversy. However, you cannot argue that these breakfast diners aren't good. Too bad the Kentucky pick is in Paducah, all the way across the state from my town.

If you like meat with your breakfast, Gold Rush Cafe is the place to go. Their bacon cheeseburger skillet omelet and breakfast burger melts are rich and decadent, but the meatloaf omelet is truly an original. It comes with meatloaf bits, veggies, cheese, and barbecue sauce. If the thought of that much breakfast meat is giving you the sweats, try the bread pudding waffles with baked cinnamon apples on the side.

Check out the list of the best breakfast restaurants in each state at mental_floss, let us know how well they picked the best from your state, and if you've got a road trip planned, you might want to make notes on breakfast for your traveling days ahead.

(Image credit: Gold Rush Cafe via Facebook)

Any time you are playing a round of golf and see an alligator is an opportunity for a video -if you aren't too terrified. In Florida, you have to be ready for such encounters. But this gator was just minding his own business, taking home the bacon, er, fish to the family, as he strolled across the fairway with his catch.

(YouTube link)

Or was he showing off? It's a pretty big fish! -via Viral Viral Videos

Electric cars are eerily silent. Hybrid cars will give you a start when they go from gas to electric or vice-versa, because we are used to the sounds go a gas engine. We've read about how car manufacturers are adding artificial sound to make electric cars sound real, but that will become even more important in the future when there are self-driving cars on the streets.  

As a pedestrian, it’s been pretty great being able to hear if a car’s coming. But with the rise of electric vehicles, pedestrian accidents have increased. These problems will only get exacerbated once self-driving cars go mainstream. The computers behind the wheel will need a way of alerting others to their surroundings — Google’s autonomous car team has already said their cars will “honk patiently,” but there’s no denying the fact that computers will have to make up for even more of the noises missing from traditional cars.

With a series of regulations set to come into force, car manufacturers are getting ready: the next generation of cars are going to need to make noise, and somebody has to come up with them.

Read about the need for those regulations and the technology that is being developed for car sounds in the age of self-driving vehicles at Inverse. -via Digg

(Image credit: Thomas Wolf)

Key West, Florida, has long been the home of quirky folks with a sense of humor. That humor is reflected even in gravestones. The Key West Cemetery is famous for its many one-liners, some with backstories that are still available, others for which one must use one's imagination. The gravestone shown here is for Thomas Romer, 1783-1891. The epitaph says he was a good citizen for 65 years. That's nice, but he died at age 108. That's just one of many witty one-liners found at the cemetery, some with pictures, that you'll find at Amusing Planet.  -Thanks, hearsetrax!

(Image credit: Flickr user Stephen Weppler)

Here's a timeline app at the Atlantic that pulls up facts and trivia based on your age. It could make you feel old, but should make you feel nostalgic. Or, if you're young, it could just be boring. Enter your birth date to get started. Here's part of what came up for me.

At 10 years old, you were alive to behold people walking on the moon.

You're one of the first people who's never lived in a world without The Cat in the Hat.

Around the time you were born, Jack Kilby demonstrated the use of his invention, the first working integrated circuit.

Each fact also has links to Atlantic articles about the same subject. You can add or subtract a few months to get different facts, or enter a random date to see how different it is for people of different ages. -via Nag on the Lake

Talking to a couple of people at a time is easy, but the prospect of addressing critical number of people at once can make you become paralyzed with fear. I was terrified of public speaking when I was young, but over time, I realized that people in the audience look at you as an admirably brave person for even attempting it. In some cases, that's more important than your overall performance. But getting there is terrifying. This is the latest from Sarah Andersen at Sarah's Scribbles.

Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.

Why rich people really love to pretend to be poor every once in a while, just like in Pulp’s “Common People.”

The greatest six minutes that the British band Pulp ever put to wax pulled off a lot of small victories as it leaped into a larger one. “Common People” highlighted the lingering definitions of class that the U.K. still hasn’t managed to shake; it drew a vibrant character sketch that few songwriters can put together in a single album, let alone a pop song; and it broke through to the mainstream at a time when most British music buyers were focused mostly on Blur and Oasis. It’s still highly regarded, and Jarvis Cocker’s masterwork still generates cultural discussion. But more than two decades after the song reached its peak on the U.K.’s Official Singles Chart, I have to admit to being curious—are there people like the Greek college student who likes slumming at grocery stores and swilling working-class pubs? Are there people who pretend to be lower-class just because they dig being poor? We have to start it somewhere, so we’ll start it there.

Who's Rich?

It's been estimated that 40% of respondents with more than $5 million in assets do not consider themselves rich, according to a 2013 UBS study. The study, which emphasized that lacking stability was the key cause of this opinion, also found that 50 percent of respondents considered a lack of financial constraints as the key signifier of wealth.

Russia’s richest man likes hanging out with the regular folk

The following article is from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into California.

Kelso Dunes (Image credit: Binksternet)

If we told you that there are sand dunes in California that can actually play music all by themselves, would you believe us?

WHEN IN DOUBT, BLAME EVIL SPIRITS

In the 13th century, while traveling through the Gobi Desert, explorer Marco Polo heard eerie sounds coming from the sand dunes around him. He described the noise as “all kinds of musical instruments, and also of drums and the clash of arms.” After hearing the mysterious noises, Polo came to the “logical” conclusion that he must be in the presence of evil spirits. These days, we know that all that music was nature, not spirits. Of all the sand dunes in the world, only a few have the ability to “sing” in the ways that so startled Marco Polo. Beach sand sometimes makes brief squeaking noises, but it’s rare to find dunes that produce the magnificent instrumentals Polo described. There are actually only about 30 singing sand dunes on earth, and California has four noisy sets of them.

DIY Prophacks found animatronic Yodas with lightsabers at 90% off regular price, and bought them all. There were four, but only three responded to his voice as they were supposed to. The fourth was a "doofus Yoda." So he set them up to battle each other!

(YouTube link)

Yep, right there is $80 worth of fun. I think the cat enjoyed it, too. He may recoup some of that as the video is doing well, and he's going to make more videos with them, even doofus, if he gets it to work. -via reddit

Update: today he posted "The follow up video everyone was asking for…"