More than 40,000 people spent this past weekend at the EY Centre in Ottawa, Ontario, for Ottawa Comiccon- and many of them were dressed to draw attention to their favorite characters from movies, comic books, TV, video games, and folklore. Leading up to spooky season, we have the Victorian werewolf above and his steampunk potential victim. Geeks Are Sexy was there, of course, to document the best cosplay of the con. I was gobsmacked at the costumes, and particularly the intricately -detailed props. Behold out this Swamp Trooper, or mudtrooper, on his speeder bike. 

And check out the axe this character from the game Monster Hunter World carries!  

But don't miss the cosplayer inhabiting the body of Han Solo on a full size tauntaun from The Empire Strikes Back. You can see a gallery of the best costumes from all parts of the galaxy and all different universes at Geeks Are Sexy, plus a video. 

Barney Curley was on track to become a priest when he was sidetracked by tuberculosis and had to find another way to make a living. He became a smuggler, a pub owner, a horse trainer, a band manager, a bookie, and dabbled in a few other activities, but kept being drawn back to his father's profession, which was gambling. 

What made Curley a hero in his native Ireland was a daring scheme in 1975 involving a carefully selected horse race, a network of associates, a talented jockey, an unremarkable horse, and a telephone booth. In a rather complex and secretive manipulation of odds, Curley managed to turn a £15,300 stake into £300,000⁠ in just a few minutes. That was, of course, after a long and convoluted plan was put into place. And it was all legal. 

Read how Barney Curley pulled that off and became a legend in Irish horse racing and a real hero in his later years at Damn Interesting. 

(Image credit: Jonathan Billinger) 

You might think your parents were cheap, but they'd prefer to be called thrifty. That may be all well and good for everyday people who have to live on a budget, but the rich are not like you and me. Once someone decides that acquiring money is their goal, they tend to not want to let any of it get away. Some very rich people in history turned this desire into an obsession, even to the detriment of their own health and well-being. Since money is power, it also worked to the detriment of their families, employees, tenants, and everyone around them. Weird History tells us about ten of these rich misers who wasted their lives hoarding money as if their lives depended on it. Money is no good if you don't use it in some way, and you can't take it with you when you die, so we can assume that these folks were mentally ill. Luckily, this obsession is an illness that most of us easily avoid by not being rich. 

In 2009, the book Star Wars, the Essential Atlas was released. It was full of maps, but the galaxy far, far away was much bigger than anything that could be printed in a book. Eventually, a map of the entire galaxy was posted as an online supplement to the atlas. The internet allows us to zoom in on the galaxy map containing hundreds of planets so that we can actually read their names. You have to wonder how many nights Lucas stayed up late thinking of planet names, but he probably had plenty of help from associates and hardcore fans. 

I found Exegol first, then eventually Alderaan, Coruscant, Kashyyyk, and Jakku, but I had to refer to the index to find Tatootine. I also found a planet named Klatooine. Each square on the grid is supposed to represent 5,000 light years, which is mind-blowing when you think of all the characters who traveled from planet to planet in the same vehicles they used to travel between locations on a planet. Still not nearly as mind-blowing as twins separated at birth running into each other far, far away from their home planets. -via Nag on the Lake 

Maru, the Japanese cat who loved boxes, has gone to the Rainbow Bridge. 

Maru was born in 2007, and soon became internet famous for his antics. He was a chunky cat with an inscrutable expression who tried to fit into any box, no matter how small. Here is our first posted video of Maru. People loved to watch Maru whatever he was doing, from discovering new toys to walking through the grass. Maru was certified by Guinness World Records for having the most views for an animal on YouTube in 2017. The video above is a compilation of Maru's earliest videos from 2008. Maru celebrated his 18th birthday in May of this year. He was diagnosed with lung cancer and died this week.   


You can see the videos we've posted of Maru in our archives. Our hearts go out to Maru's human, known only as mugumogu, and his fellow cats Hana and Miri. 

-via Metafilter 

The National School Lunch Program came about when President Harry Truman signed it into law in 1946. That may seem to be the entire story in a nutshell, but the federal government jumped on the idea at least 50 years after it really started, with private, municipal, and state programs. The idea of children going to school with nothing to eat for six or seven hours sounds awful to us now, but that's the way it was before reform programs began in the late 19th century. Sure, some kids brought lunch or went home to eat, but many just did without because their families were poor. 

The women's reform groups, the same activists who advocated for women's suffrage and alcohol prohibition, organized local support for hot lunches served at school. The local pilot programs, paid for by charities and served by volunteers, showed results immediately as children gained weight and earned better grades. The menus from these early programs show that meat was not served in order to keep costs down. Read about the early efforts that led to American school lunches at Fishwrap. -via Strange Company 

(Image source: Library of Congress) 

You might think it's still early in the year to be posting about bats, but you know how Halloween creep is. Some people celebrate their creepy side all year round. For me, bats are a summertime thing, and they've just now abandoned my house to migrate south for the winter. At any rate, bats are fascinating once you get over the ick factor. 

Bats are masters at flying, although they do it differently from birds. They aren't all that great at walking, but they try. Some can even swim! That phrase "blind as a bat" doesn't mean anything, because bats can see quite well, thank you. They only use echolocation because they fly in the dark. There are so many species of bat that their specialized diets cover just about anything available, which means their biology differs greatly as well. 

This video contains NSFW language. There's a 65-second skippable ad at 5:40 

In 1899, a bar in San Francisco unveiled a new idea to capture customers' money. It was a coin-operated phonograph that would play a song on a wax cylinder. The sound was lousy, but that was the beginning of what we later came to know as the jukebox. In 1927, the first such vending machine with multiple records and amplified sound came out, and America fell in love with the jukebox. 

Playing a song on a jukebox was much cheaper than buying records, much less the equipment to play them on. But the real genius was the machine's ability to tabulate how many times a song was played, and therefore how popular it was. Radio didn't keep track of such things in the 1920s, but caught on eventually. Meanwhile, the Mafia got involved, renting out machines and pushing songs from the studios they also owned. By the early 1940s, there were half a million jukeboxes around the country. But they really exploded after World War II, just in time to track the popularity of a new genre of music called rock and roll. Read up on the history of the jukebox at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Ethan Long) 

Freddie Mercury reportedly once said, "Do what you want with my music darling, just don't make it boring." This is anything but. 

The Ndlovu Youth Choir was formed in 2009 at a childcare facility in Elandsdoorn, Limpopo, South Africa. They are all grown up now, but are not about to change the name. They released their first album in 2019 after appearing on the TV competition show America's Got Talent, when they made it to the final round. 

The Ndlovu Youth Choir got authorization from Queen to cover "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the isiZulu language of the Zulu people of South Africa. Or partially, because some of the song is in English. It is also partially a cappella, with a band joining in halfway through. The singing is sublime, the staging is sumptuous, and the video is pure eye candy. You can see more from the Ndlovu Youth Choir at their YouTube channel. -via Damn Interesting 

The headstone you see above stands in Rushes Cemetery in Wellesley, Ontario. Underneath are buried Henrietta Bean and Susanna Bean, who were not sisters, but the first two wives of Samuel Bean. The women did not know each other, yet share a grave. But what is all that cryptic writing? The stone sat for more than 100 years while people tried to decipher the code. So many took rubbings that the stone became illegible and had to be replaced. Finally the code was cracked in the 1970s. You can read what it says at Atlas Obscura. 

But why did Dr. Bean bury two wives in the same grave? He married Henrietta in 1865, and she died that same year after seven months of marriage. No cause of death was recorded. The next year, Bean married Susanna, who died after only ten months of marriage. Again, no cause of death was recorded. Samuel Bean married a third time and had five children, but by then he'd given up practicing medicine and became a man of the cloth. A bit of historical digging shows that Dr. Bean may not have been a qualified physician at all, which raises more questions than it answers. -Thanks, WTM! 

(Image credit: Mac Armstrong) 

Nordic people are known for growing tall, but Jóhann Kristinn Pétursson was an outlier even in his native Iceland. Born in 1913, Pétursson was a normal child until puberty pulled a fast one. At 15, he started growing quickly, and in just a few years he had reached the height of 7 feet, 8 inches (2.34 meters). All his family, including eight siblings, were of average height. Pétursson had trouble finding a job where he would fit in, so he decided to make a living as an exhibition in 1934. In other words, he ran away to join the circus. 

Pétursson exhibited himself in various European countries until after World War II, when he was discovered by the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus. He moved to the US in 1948 and became known as The Viking Giant or sometimes The Icelandic Giant. Pétursson was not considered to have acromegaly, as his body was perfectly proportioned, just big. He weighed over 350 pounds, which made walking difficult. Read about the career of the Viking Giant and see lots of pictures at Vintage Everday.  -via Memo of the Air 

After many recent videos designed to scare the pants off viewers, Kurzgezagt finally gives us a lighthearted yet interesting video with a look at the sunfish. How dumb can this fish be, compared to other fish in the sea? It's a pretty low bar, so it really doesn't matter, but gives them a great excuse to use all the stupidity jokes they have without hurting someone's feelings. The story of the sunfish is really about the many ways it differs from other fish in its bizarre adaptations in filling a unique niche in the ecosystem. 

The sunfish took a left turn in the development of their biology. They do all the fish things -eat, reproduce, and avoid predators- the hard way. But somehow it works for them, which is why they've been around for so long. Who are we to argue with Mother Nature? This video is 8:45; the rest is advertising. -via Laughing Squid 

Metropolis is a major city in the US where Superman fights crime. The fictional city was always meant to be generic, formed from "metro," meaning city, and "polis," meaning city. But as children reading comic books, we always saw it as New York City. You might be surprised to learn that in the earliest Superman comic book, Clark Kent lived and worked in Cleveland. After relocating to the fictional Metropolis, clues in the comics pointed to it being New York, and it was explained that Metropolis was near Gotham City. Both cities later moved to different states. 

The 2013 movie Man of Steel seemed to place Metropolis in Chicago. But the 2025 Superman has numerous clues that Metropolis is now in Delaware. The map above, enlarged in this reddit post, appears briefly in the film. The city is situated by Delaware Bay. The streets are named after people who worked on the film or on other Superman movies. It is also stamped with "Greater Cleveland Partnership." Those who know recognize a lot of Cleveland in the film, because a lot of it was filmed there. So why Delaware? Read the history of the city that moves from place to place at Big Think. 

Humans as a whole tend to distrust anything new, or anything outside their communities' long-held traditions. Those in power felt particularly threatened by anything outside the norm, because people willing to think outside the box or try something new might just be a threat to them. And in many bygone societies, the punishment might be death. YouTuber Chill Dude Explains (previously at Neatorama) has eleven examples of things that are commonplace today, but were once a threat to civilization. Not all of them would necessarily lead to a death sentence, but they were pretty serious transgressions. Well, maybe not potatoes- the consequence of death was natural if you didn't know how to use them properly. Some of these activities could be overlooked on their own, but were used as additional evidence in a witchcraft trial, which led to death. There is a serious lack of dates connected to each story, and a location is rare, but I've posted about enough of these to know they are real.  

Many people consider fall the best of seasons because we get relief from the heat and see the kids go back to school where they belong. And of course there's Halloween. But when you think about it, the whole season is full of traditions, from bonfires to football to Black Friday shopping. Some are ancient while others were dreamed up fairly recently because anything that's fun tends to be repeated. Many came out of harvest festivals as a way to show off and indulge in a bountiful crop of one sort or another. Others needs some further explanation. For example, the US holds elections on the first Tuesday in November because that made it convenient for farmers to participate. Black Friday is said to be the day that business are finally "in the black" for the year and the rest is profit, but that's not the origin of the tradition or the term. Read about 25 autumn traditions and where they came from at Mental Floss. 

(Image credit: Caleb Zahnd)