A classic Hollywood story tells of a modern, but not too modern, archaeologist exploring an ancient Egyptian tomb, while more nefarious characters tag along just to rob these ancient graves of the treasures wealthy Egyptians were buried with. Nothing good can come of that scenario, since there is a curse associated with this tomb. But that's fiction, and was inspired by the discovery of King Tut's tomb with all its fabulous treasures in 1922. The real story of Egyptian grave robbing goes back to antiquity.

See, the reason the discovery of King Tut's tomb was such a sensation was because of the surviving burial goods. Other tombs didn't have so many valuable treasures because they'd already been plundered, often soon after burial. An upper-class or royal burial required the work of many people, like stonecutters, builders, craftsmen, undertakers, security guards, and an awful lot of porters. These workers were often quite poor, and saw no reason not to help themselves to buried goods. One of the ways Egyptians tried to protect these tombs was by attaching a curse, so thousands of years later, we have a ready-made horror film plot. Read the history of the wholesale plunder of Egyptian tombs at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Mark Fischer)

When we say that someone talks like a sailor, that usually refers to their swearing. But in reality, we all do it. The English we use today is awash with jargon originally used by sailors, and we can't fathom why. It likely had to do with large crews on long sea voyages who got used to all those nautical terms, and when anchored on land they kept using them. Their children learned the ropes and by and large continued until these terms infiltrated English permanently, the way they infiltrated the first half of this sentence.  

Linguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky of Otherwords (previously at Neatorama) tells us about the seafaring origins of a ton of words, including, strangely, "blog." I like the cut of her jib. Before this video is over, you'll know why so much of a sailor's language became standard parts of English, and you won't be at all surprised. 

One of the more common ways people are scammed out of their money these days is through gift cards. That may sound bizarre, since buying goods with a gift card just adds another layer of work for a scamming ring. But that extra work is well worth it for the safety of the scam, because the transactions involved are anonymous.

In the story of Mae, a real victim who doesn't share her last name, the elderly woman was frightened into withdrawing her savings from her bank, and using it to buy bitcoin. She didn't understand bitcoin, but did as she was told, then the transaction failed because someone at the other end recognized a scam. So the scammers directed Mae to buy gift cards. Mae was never told to give the cards to anyone, because all the scammers needed were the serial numbers or barcodes.

See, retailers rarely have any idea who buys gift cards. They also have no idea who is spending them. And gift cards are not regulated the way banks or credit cards are. In fact, gift cards are exempted from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's consumer protection rules for fraud. Retailers object to regulation because they made money off these cards. But it provides an extra layer of privacy for the scammers. Read what happened to Mae, and how gift cards are the perfect route for separating people from their life savings at the Conversation.

(Image credit: Mike Mozart)

Not long ago, the guys from Planting Peace heard of an elephant that was abandoned in the woods in Laos. Joy was 31 years old, and had spent her life working as a logging elephant. But now she was too old and had health concerns, so they chained her to a tree. One of the organization's missions is to rescue elephants, so they wanted to help Joy. They sent Aaron to get her, and he led Joy out of the logging area to her new home at MandaLao Elephant Conservation, a retirement home for elephants in Laos. This shelter welcomes tourists because they pay for the elephants' upkeep, but they never offer elephant rides or train the elephants to do stunts.

I'm sure you noticed the lump on Joy's shoulder. Elephants rarely get cancer, so it is probably an abscess. The shelter has a veterinarian, and Joy will get the care she needs. You can keep up with Joy at MandaLao Elephant Conservation's Instagram page.

It was bad enough when fictional stories brought back characters that had died. All they had to do was make their death a dream, or the character into a ghost, or switch to an alternate universe. Or just put them in a prequel. That trick may be annoying, but it's mostly harmless and done to please the audience. But it's a totally different thing to use actors who have passed on in real life to resurrect a popular character.

Many of us were surprised and somewhat disturbed when Rogue One used images of Peter Cushing, who had died 20 years earlier, to recreate the character of Grand Moff Tarkin. Cushing obviously had no control over the use of his face. Actor Guy Henry played Tarkin's body, but you have to wonder what will happen to Hollywood when actors are no longer needed and we just see the faces of Hollywood past over and over. The same technique was used in Superman Returns, The Flash, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife. And we see it again in the new movie Alien: Romulus. There's also the creepy technique of using computer technology to make older actors look young again, but at least that is done with the involvement of the actor. Read about the rising trend of casting actors even after they die at Den of Geek. Note: the article contains spoilers for Alien: Romulus, and possibly other films you haven't yet seen.

Redbox arrives in video store heaven! But the afterlife isn't all that great when Redbox meets its predecessors. Could this be video store hell?

The movie rental business follows the course of technology and culture. A rental business thrives until someone else has a better idea, then it dies, and the cycle continues. The current "winners" are video-on-demand and streaming services, but one day someone will figure out how to make that model more convenient or more affordable or better in some way. Redbox, on the other hand, was a victim of mismanagement. The vending machine for movies has been in bankruptcy court for some time. On July 10, they went into Chapter 7 liquidation, which means that all 26,000 Redbox kiosks are defunct. Matt Mitchell single-handedly illustrates how the cycle of video rental businesses works when one company after another leapfrogs to the top with a better idea and then dies. The truth comes out when they all meet in video store heaven.

In March of 1933, the US was sinking further into the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt took office, and Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. It was also the month the Aryan Book Store opened in Los Angeles. It had a restaurant, meeting room, and beer garden on the first floor, which wasn't unusual for bookstores, which were seen as meeting places for intellectuals. This one had a distinct agenda, which they never hid. After all, Americans knew little about Nazis then, and certainly had no idea what their activities would lead to. New customers would be given a free newspaper and were introduced to the group Friends of New Germany. They would be told about antisemitism and anticommunism, which were treated as the same thing, because people suffering from the dire economics of the time would need someone to blame.

Other Nazi bookstores opened in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and the Aryan Bookstore moved to a larger location. American authorities paid little attention to these propaganda outlets, because they were busy fighting communist ideology, and the Nazis were anticommunist. Read about the Aryan Book Store in an excerpt from The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss at LitHub. -via Damn Interesting

All Star Wars fans know what inspired George Lucas' imagery in designing the bad guys. This week, that concept seeped into the real world in a strange little episode in London. The German navy corvette Braunschweig was in Britain, not doing its normal stealth operations, but on a training operation. While transiting upriver on the Thames, the crew stood on deck as the ship passed through London, with the most appropriate (or inappropriate) music playing on its loudspeakers. You will easily recognize "The Imperial March" from Star Wars, also called Darth Vader's theme.     

A spokesman from the German navy told the BBC that there was no message implied in the song selection, and that the boat's commander has free rein to select the music. This shows that the reputation of Germans having no sense of humor isn't true- they just don't laugh at jokes. However, it would have been funnier if the Braunschweig was traveling under its own power instead of being towed backward upriver. -via Ars Technica 

When you think of television programming for Halloween, of course you think of The Food Network. That may sound strange to you (it did to me), but the cable channel and website has been very much into Halloween for years. The Food Network has released its Halloween programming plans for 2024, appealing to both foodies and Halloween fans.

Halloween Baking Championship will return for its tenth season on Monday, September 16th. It's a baking competition series with a Halloween theme that should end by October 31st.

Halloween Wars is a competition show pitting eight teams against one another. The teams each include a pumpkin carver, a cake baker, and a sugar artist, and they create Halloween displays. The season premiere will be on September 22 at 9 PM Eastern time. Leading into the premiere will be a special called Road to Halloween Wars at 8 PM.

The competition called Outrageous Pumpkins, with 14 of the nation's top pumpkin carvers, will return on September 29th. There's also a special titled Kids Baking Championship: Scary Good that will premiere on Monday, October 7th. Some of the channel's regular series will have Halloween-themed episodes as well. These shows could be inspirational, if your Halloween plans include hosting parties or impressing the kids with spooky treats. -via Halloween Daily News

The fine line between male and female intelligence. 😂

pic.twitter.com/p4RlfazsVI

— Figen (@TheFigen_) August 19, 2024

This is a pretty simple party game. The object is to have everyone on the team pass through a hoop without letting go of each other's hands. Which team can do it the fastest? These folks divided up into teams by sex, and the women blew the men away in their efficiency. Some claim that it's because the women are smaller than the men. Sure, I'd like to see all these men trying to walk through this hoop in a hurry. Others argue that at least one of the women has seen this trick before. That could be true, too, but it really boils down to the fact that men tend to think they already know something or can figure it out on their own, while women tend to be more collaborative in solving problems.

We don't know where this party is, but the source Tweet is in Turkish, so that would be a good guess. Or maybe not, since the people in the video are speaking Spanish (thanks, TheBigSleep). And now you have a good idea for a game at your next party, but you'll let the other team go first.   -Thanks WTM!

Update: This is the Gonzales family from Miami, during a Valentines Day party. Read more about this episode here. The original video is at TikTok.

For a time, we could believe what we saw in photographs. That's not always the case now, and before photography, we relied on paintings. However, if you were to study the history of English livestock by looking at paintings, you would be amazed at the shape of those animals. Were these cows really shaped like rectangles, or were they painted by artists who weren't familiar with cows?

The answer is neither. Wealthy livestock breeders commissioned those paintings, and the artists gave their customers what they wanted. Farmers were busy experimenting with breeding stock and with various diets to produce ever-larger animals. A portrait that showed the ultimate in beef would help them sell cattle. The fact that they aren't at all realistic didn't stop the practice. There are consistent inconsistencies in these rectangular cows, such as a beefy, taut brisket on the creature's chest, when a realistic full brisket would be lumpy with extra skin. As they were painted, the brisket became another corner of the rectangle.

And it wasn't just cows, either. Portraits of pigs made them look round and unrealistically enormous, while sheep were large ovals with tiny heads and spindly legs. Read about this art phenomenon and see a gallery of rectangular cows and other livestock portraits at Rare Historical Photos.  -via Everlasting Blort

David Friedman of Ironic Sans (previously at Neatorama) has launched a new daily word puzzle called Gisnep (try to guess how it got that name). To puzzle aficionados, it's very similar to a dropquote or quotefall puzzle. You fill in the letters of a quote by using ta selection of letters for that column shown above the puzzle. This online version also has the source of the quote at the bottom that may help you as you gradually fill it in. Another online innovation is the timer, which might annoy you, so Friedman promises to add a function to turn it off. But the speed of solving this is what you brag about how you compete with other players. The most helpful online function is the "check" button that tells you where you are wrong at any point.

So far, you can only play one puzzle a day. I solved today's puzzle in 5:15, and I'm looking forward to beating that time tomorrow. As of now, you can't play old puzzles, but that will change soon. Try Gisnep out for yourself here. -via Metafilter

Visitors from Europe are always amazed that public restrooms in the US offer so little privacy. The doors on the toilets don't go down to the floor, and usually have notable gaps around the door all the way up. Anyone who is inclined to look can see you doing your business in there. Lucky for us, most people are not inclined to look because that's both rude and creepy. We tell them it's because authorities or business owners want to know if people are in there doing drugs or sleeping or something they shouldn't. But that's not the original reason toilet stalls were designed this way. The first US very public toilet stall design came from architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and his reason for it was a surprise to me.

Yes, we can turn around and ask Brits why their bathroom sinks have separate hot and cold water faucets, which is inconvenient and can be dangerous. We also want to know why public toilets don't have lids, and why the seats have a gap in the front. Read up in the arcane reasons behind these and more burning bathroom questions at Cracked.   

(Image credit: MarkBuckawicki)

Tornados are not just an American phenomenal; they happen all over the world. But there are more of them in the US than any other country, and more in Texas than any other state with an average of 124 a year. There are written accounts of twisters and their damage going back to the 1550s when a tornado sank several ships in Malta. Extrapolating from the reports, modern meteorologists estimate the damage at T7 level, meaning a tornado powerful enough to knock over a locomotive, if there had been such a thing in the 1550s.

The deadliest tornado in US history moved through Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana on March 18, 1925. It was called the Tri-State Tornado, and it left 695 people dead and more than two thousand injured. Its path of destruction went for 220 miles, and left entire towns flattened. But the deadliest tornado anywhere killed 1300 people in Bangladesh in 1989. Tornados tend to kill more people in Bangladesh because of population density and the quality of building construction. Read about all these and more, a total of ten particularly devastating tornados and their aftermaths, in a list at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Jackson County Historical Society, Murphysboro, Illinois)

The saber-toothed tiger (Smilodon fatalis) was a cat that went extinct about 12,000 years ago. It got its nickname (and probably the species name fatalis) from its fangs that could grow up to seven inches long. But it was still a cat, a mammal, and started out life suckling milk from its mother. Picture that, and also picture that cub growing its saber teeth. It's not easy being a mom.

Like other cats, S. fatalis first grew baby teeth, which were replaced by a set of adult teeth. A fossil discovery from the La Brea Tar Pits shows us that the super-long fangs erupted while the baby teeth were still in use, long before a cub could hunt prey on its own. The image above shows the baby fangs are not pushed out by the adult teeth, but erupted alongside them, meaning that a saber-tooth tiger cub had four saber teeth for some time.

A separate study of S. fatalis fossils found in Ecuador gives us evidence that these cats had an extended period of maternal care compared with modern big cats. Modern lions stay with their mother for about a year, while the saber-toothed cubs ventured out on their own at about two years. This is based on the time that the last molars erupted, which are important in chewing meat. Before those molars come in, cubs get nutrition from their mother's milk. So when the kids drive you crazy, you can be glad you're not a saber-toothed tiger mother. Read more about this research at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Jack Tseng)