Everyone knows the song, but no one knows the lyrics. The supernatural sitcom Bewitched debuted in 1964 with an animated opening sequence by Hanna-Barbera and a jazzy theme song by composer Jack Keller. Keller collaborated with lyricist Howard Greenfield, but the words Greenfield wrote for the song were dropped in favor of an orchestral arrangement. Bewitched was the second-highest rated TV show in its first year, and the producers of the show thought about using a lyrical version for the second season, but that would have cost money. You have to pay singers, and they already had the orchestra version.  

Greenfield got his day, however, when singers outside of TV recorded the song, such as Steve Lawrence and Peggy Lee. The lyrical version could have become a hit if either of them had ever released it as a single. Read the lyrics and the story behind the Bewitched theme song at Cracked. 

Blahaj wakes up in the middle of the night because he's hungry, and his snacks are all gone. What to do? Waffle House is open 24/7, so he gathers his toys and goes for a waffle. But he's there at 3 AM for the "bad time," and you know what that means. Or maybe you don't. The exact time varies by location, but that's when the bars must legally close, and patrons who don't want to go home gravitate to the only business still open. And that's when the real action starts. 

After watching this charming animation by Atoga, I checked to see if AI was involved, so I clicked "more." Apparently he used Creative Commons images from a great variety of sources, and credited them all! He animated them with Blender software, and created the music himself.  In case you are wondering why the shark is named Blahaj, here's your answer.  -via Metafilter 

In 2016, two cemeteries that were being excavated in France gave up human remains from between 4300 and 4150 BCE. That puts them in the Neolithic era, toward the end of the Stone Age. Some of the mass graves showed evidence of overkill- crushed bones, smashed skulls, and completely missing limbs. Other graves showed no signs of such brutality. These two sites are the oldest European cemeteries that show such destruction during mass killings or desecration shortly afterward, which must be a sign of war.  

New technology allows archaeologists to learn more from these bones. Studying the isotopes in the remains can give us a clue as to where these people were from and where they had traveled. The bones that were smashed were of people that did not live in the local area, determined by coparing the isotopes of those who were buried one at a time. A new study offers a couple of scenarios of what might have happened to them more than 6,000 years ago. Read about the recent discoveries at Mental Floss. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Fanny Chenal, INRAP) 

What do the words woodchuck, cockroach, hangnail, and catty corner have in common? They are examples of folk etymology. You might think that these words have some origin story that has to do with the meaning of their segments, but no. They are all derived from non-English languages, and got renamed because of the way the original words sounded instead of having any common meaning. Groundhog, which is the same animal as a woodchuck, really is derived from ground and hog. Linguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) explains what happened to create these English words and plenty of other examples. It's just a matter of "I can't pronounce your name, so I will call you something that sounds close that I can pronounce." Folk etymology occurs in other languages, too. That's how we ended up with a Mexican city named after a cow horn without an interesting story behind it. 

Russia's far east, an area that Americans call Siberia (although the traditional Siberia is bigger), is a vast area with very few people. How few? Fewer than eight million people. Compare that to London, the small dot on the left, which has more than eight million. New York City also has more than eight million people in the city limits (23 million in the combined metro statistical area). 

Siberia's reputation in the West is that of Stalin's exiles, when millions of people were sent to the far east for political or genocidal reasons. Most of them either died or left when they got the chance. But the far east has been losing people steadily even in the 21st century.   

I once flew over east Russia, and although it took forever, I never saw any evidence of a city or manmade infrastructure. The landscape, however, is both majestic and frightening. Why is there so much empty land in this area? Yes, it's cold, but there are many other reasons, both geographical and historical, laid out in a post at Brilliant Maps. -via Nag on the Lake 

I once asked a talented friend if she could teach me to sing. She determined that I have a problem changing smoothly from the lower register to the soprano or falsetto register. Maybe I should have tried yodeling, which involves rapidly moving from one to the other, but it didn't matter as I can't carry a tune anyway and she gave up on me.  

Yodeling has a long tradition in Switzerland, where a yodel can be heard from one Alpine mountaintop to another. Great Big Story went to the Alps to talk to people about yodeling. In this video we learn of its origins, continued popularity, and the nuts and bolts of how to yodel from Melanie of the famous Swiss band Oesch die Dritten. They also take us to Jodlerfest Altstätten, a yodeling festival that draws world-class yodelers. It was difficult, but our host finally found some yodelers and fans who speak English. -via Laughing Squid 

Ta Prohm is a Buddhist temple complex in Ankhor, the ancient capital of the Kmer Empire in what is now Cambodia. It was built in the 12th century and flourished until the 15th century, when it was abandoned. The buildings of Ta Prohm feature many reliefs carved in stone that depict people, animals, deities, and mythological creatures. One of these carvings, shown above, appears to be of a stegosaurus! 

Well, a stegosaurus is what it looks like to modern eyes, due to the row of plates that grow out of the animal's back. But is this a case of seeing something that isn't there? The head is too large for a stegosaurus, and it doesn't have a thagomizer. There has been plenty of speculation about what the artist meant to portray hundreds of years ago. Is there a mythological animal that looked like this? Did the Kmer people reconstruct fossils long before Western scientists? Some see it as proof that humans and dinosaurs existed together. Read about the Ta Prohm stegosaurus at Amusing Planet. The last picture in the article will make it clear why the carving looks the way it does. 

(Image credit: Harald Hoyer) 

It would have been easy to completely miss the fact that there is another new movie based on H. G. Wells's 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. The 2025 film War of the Worlds is the eighth film based on that novel, not to mention the infamous 1938 radio play by Orson Welles, or the TV shows, or other adaptations. The new movie is only available on Amazon Prime, and I never heard of it until everyone and his brother (including mine) saw it and can't stop talking about how awful it is. Screen Junkies counts the reasons in this Honest Trailer, so you can stop listening to less eloquent screeds.  

The hero is played by Ice Cube, a government surveillance expert who is confined to his cubicle and watches aliens attack earth through his screens. He has a family, who all happen to be involved in earth-changing events. The whole movie is claustrophobic, because it was conceived during the pandemic, as if we want to relive that. And it may strike you as an 89-minute ad for Amazon. Doomed to be a classic.  

Carbonated beverages got their start in pharmacies, because pharmacies were great at combining chemicals, whether it was for refreshment or medicinal use or both. In fact, pharmacies offered the earliest soda fountains. Cincinnati, Ohio, was the site of the Eclectic Medical Institute, a pioneer in pharmacy. It was in that city that the nectar soda was developed, and served as a side story to the history of cream soda.  

While cream soda was flavored with vanilla, it was too sweet for some people, so nectar soda added the flavor of bitter almond to counteract the sweetness. This unique flavor was tinted pink to distinguish it from other sodas, as it mimicked the color of bitter almond flowers. Nectar sodas were so popular they were served at pharmacies, soda fountains, ice cream shops, and candy stores across Cincinnati. It spread to other cities, although the only other place it took permanent root was New Orleans. Read about nectar soda at Gastro Obscura.  

How far can a tire roll when you throw it off a sand dune? The group called Tuk South did just that, and they were ready with a drone to follow it on its adventures. As the tire goes on and on, you have time to contemplate the meaning of all this. Where is this? The description only says that this is one of the tallest sand dunes on earth. How far did the tire roll? Did they go get it? I wouldn't bother. The drone can come back on its own, but let's think about that drone for a minute. It has remarkable range from the controller. Did it have enough power to get back? With live streaming, you don't have to retrieve a drone to have the footage. And after you think all that, you think, goodness, that tire is still rolling.

This may remind you of the movie Rubber that starred a tire going on a murderous rampage. Except the tire above is no villain, but a hero for its perseverance, determination, and sense of adventure. -via Memo of the Air 

(Image credit: Benreis)

It's no wonder there are so many old German folk songs about linden trees. For more than a thousand years, people in German communities used a linden tree as a gathering place. They were even the site of public dances. Then someone got the idea to build a dance floor around a linden tree. If you train the lower side branches outward, you will have a support for an elevated dance floor. But then you built supports for it anyway, because they were quite popular. Those side branches grew upward to provide shade for the dancers. This is a Tanzlinde, or a dancing tree. The plural is Tanzlinden, because Germany still has a few of these charming arboral structures, some hundreds or even a thousand years old. 

(Image credit: Benreis) 

See and read about Tanzlinden in Sachsenbrunn, Effeltrich, Galenbecker, Gößweinstein, Limmersdorf, Peesten (shown above), and in Schenklengsfeld, where the linden tree is 1265 years old! -via Metafilter 

New, creative ideas in cinema often come from merging two genres. The movie Good Boy is about a dog, but it's a horror film. A guy inherits his grandfather's farm house and moves in with his loyal dog Indy (you know where that name came from). Indy detects malevolent forces before the guy does, as dogs will. It's the first horror film shown from the dog's point of view.  

Indy (the dog's real name as well as the character) belongs to Good Boy director Ben Leonberg. That's how we have that archival footage of him growing up in the beginning of this trailer. We aren't shown much of the horrors. Good Boy got positive reviews at SXSW last spring, and is at 95% among movie critics at Rotten Tomatoes. The one question everyone has is Does the Dog Die? No definite answer so far, but I can't imagine the reviews would be so good if Indy doesn't make it out alive. Good Boy will open in theaters October 3rd. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

 

You know Davy Crockett as a bear hunter, congressman, king of the wild frontier, and hero of the Alamo. His image is instantly recognizable in his coonskin cap and fringed buckskin, played by Fess Parker in a Disney TV series -or was that Daniel Boone? The 1954-55 Disney miniseries Davy Crockett was later released theatrically as two movies and caused a mid-century Crockett craze among young Baby Boomers. While that's where the contemporary image of Crockett came from, he was quite famous in the 19th century as well, because he was a storyteller who knew how to draw publicity. 

You might be surprised to learn that Crockett never went by the name Davy, served three non-consecutive terms as a congressman from Tennessee, and only spent the last year of his life in Texas. He wore a coonskin cap only after people began to expect it. And he was only 49 when he died defending the Alamo under circumstances that historians still argue about. Crockett really was a bear hunter, because bears can provide a lot of food for a hungry farm family. Crockett's life was chronicled by friends, allies, and enemies, so there's a lot of varied opinions on the man. Read what you might not know about David Crockett at Smithsonian. 

A talk box is a musical effects device that you most likely recall from the 1976 Peter Frampton song "Do You Feel Like We Do?" although its been used in a lot of music since it was developed in the 1930s. It makes the singer sound like he/she is singing through an electronic instrument. But that's not the way it works at all, and it's more difficult than you knew. 

In this video, musician Lorenz Rhode sings through a talk box in a song he wrote about using a talk box. You get the idea that a lot of this is him improvising and free-associating, but it's a genuinely catchy tune. He explains that the sound is not coming from your voice at all, but from the musical instrument that's attached to the talk box, in this case a keyboard. The singer is mouthing the words, shaping the instrument's sound into words, but not using his vocal cords at all. It's hard to do, but it also allows you to breathe while holding a note. -via Laughing Squid 

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was released on August 14, 1975 in the UK and on September 25, 1975, in the US. The movie is a science fiction horror comedy musical with a ton of sexual innuendo (but no nudity) starring Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Barry Bostwick, and Meat Loaf. I didn't see it until early 1977, when it was established as a midnight movie in college towns. The Rocky Horror Picture Show seemed shocking and downright deviant to mainstream audiences, but it was a lot of fun and had plenty of catchy songs. It also had quite a few awkward pauses in the dialogue, which led to the custom of audience responses. Over time, going to the movie became an full-on participation event, with thrown props, cosplay, and even shadow casting, in which costumed characters perform the parts along with the movie. It's no wonder it became the biggest cult movie of all time. It never left theaters, even during the pandemic.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its audience traditions spurred the formation of fan clubs and communities of people who appreciated the film's subversiveness and sense of fun. Those who felt excluded from the wider culture found kindred spirits among Rocky Horror fans -and that's been going on for 50 years now. Read more about the legacy of the longest-running theatrical film ever at Ars Technica.