Besides fried chicken and a horse race, Kentucky is also known for its bourbon, particularly Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey. It's a common misconception that for a whiskey to be labeled as bourbon, it must be distilled in Bourbon County, Kentucky. This is not true. While there are legal standards for bourbon, the distillery location is not one of them. Bourbon is distilled in North Carolina and other places. Yet most bourbon is indeed distilled in Kentucky, the whiskey was developed there, and the word itself came from Bourbon County.

Kentucky is known as the home of bourbon for its history in the state, and that history comes from the confluence of the state's geography and climate and the people who settled there. Read up on what makes bourbon, how it differs from regular corn liquor, and why Kentucky was the perfect place to make bourbon what it is today.
 
(Image credit: Jackdude101)

In the year 2071, technology has achieve the ability to connect our brains to our computers and other machinery through an implant in our bodies. But that communication goes both ways. The implant called Integrated Intelligence, from the company BrightMind, can also filter one's perception of reality using artificial intelligence, in essence building the reality that we think we want. But is that a good thing? Being disconnected from reality, as comforting as it can be, is not really in line with what it is to be human. Everyone thinks Mina is in need of such manipulation, so she became an early adopter.

The science fiction short film (DIS)CONNECTED from Dust was produced and directed by Karl Stelter. The film explores the upsides and downsides to outsourcing our reality to elevate our emotions. The last few seconds are a twist, leaving us wondering what it means and what will happen next. What do you think?  -via Geeks Are Sexy

Archaeologists are finding out a lot about ancient Egypt from excavations at the Saqqara necropolis in the ancient city of Memphis. They recently uncovered the tomb of the most distinguished physician of his time, a doctor named Tetinebefou. The 4,100-year-old tomb has an inscription on a stone sarcophagus labeling Tetinebefou as "the chief palace physician, priest, chief dentist, director of medicinal plants and conjurer of the goddess Serket." Serket was a deity who cured snake and scorpion bites.

Ancient Egyptian doctors often specialized in treating one body part, and the label Tetinebefou sported as an expert in many specialties elevated him greatly. The title of dentist is especially rare in that culture, so it's no wonder Tetinebefou was tapped to be the pharaoh's personal physician. The tomb had been previously looted, and Tetinebefou's funerary treasures are no longer there, but the rich wall paintings and carvings depict his belongings and the objects he may have used in his practice. Read about Egypt's medical practitioners and see more of this lavish tomb at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Franco-Swiss Archaeological Mission of Saqqara)

If you recall the climactic scene in Star Wars: A New Hope, Luke Skywalker is negotiating a terrifying trench run on the Death Star, risking certain death with one false move. That's the feeling you'll get watching Carl Weiseth flying down a mountainside with a gliding parachute and skis. He speeds through rock formations like it's easy, and even flips around a few times on his way.

Besides wondering about Weiseth's sanity, you might also wonder how this is filmed. There is no cameraman following him; this was all captured from his helmet with a Go Pro Max 360° camera, which has the ability to appear as if it is filming from a distance. Luke Skywalker looked real in the trench run, although it was filmed in a studio with special effects. This video is real, but looks fake because the technology used to capture it is beyond our experience. This sport is also beyond our experience, so hey, don't try this at home. -via Laughing Squid

P.J. Nelson looks back on the mid-century crimes of Anjette Lyles, who poisoned her loved ones for the insurance money. https://t.co/RWRcF7y1fw

— CrimeReads (@CrimeReads) January 11, 2025

Remember the other day when I theorized that arsenic poisonings aren't as common since we developed methods to detect it? There are plenty of exceptions, especially when there's no reason to suspect foul play, and it may take a string of dead family members to draw attention to the perpetrator.

In the 1950s, Anjette Lyles made a name for herself in Macon, Georgia, by running a popular downtown restaurant. She not only served good food, but welcomed and got to know her customers one by one. Anjette was no stranger to tragedy. Her first husband, who had a drinking and gambling problem, died of a mysterious illness. A few years later, her second husband died as well and left Anjette insurance money. Then her mother-in-law died soon after adding Anjette to her will. There were whispers about the deaths, but they didn't come to the attention of the authorities until Anjette's nine-year-old daughter Marcia also died of a mysterious illness. Oddly for a child her age, Marcia had life insurance. She also got a post-mortem exam, which led to the exhumations of Anjette's other three deceased family members. Read the story of Anjette Lyles at CrimeReads.  -via Damn Interesting

If you'd rather just listen to the story, there's a woman who will tell it in a perfect gossipy fashion in a Facebook video.

The iconic home of chemistry teacher turned drug lord Walter White in the TV series Breaking Bad is on the market. The Albuquerque, New Mexico, house that was used for exterior shots in the show is seared into the memories of Breaking Bad fans. The homeowners, Frances and Louis Padilla, never moved out while filming was going on, and became close with the cast and crew. However, in the years since, they had to endure hordes of fans who came to see their home, including dozens that would throw pizzas on their roof to recreate a memorable scene.

Frances Padilla died in 2020, and Louis in 2024. The house is listed by David Christensen of Christensen Group for just under four million dollars. Local real estate experts regard the home as being worth around $350,000 if it weren't for its television fame. One the one hand, it could be a moneymaking opportunity as a bed and breakfast or an event space for Breaking Bad fans. On the other hand, a buyer will inherit the fans who stop by to take pictures and throw pizzas on the roof. -via Nag on the Lake

When I brought my first daughter home, we had a German shepherd. When she first saw him, her eyes widened bigger than I'd ever seen- she'd never seen an animal that big! But it didn't take long for them to become best friends. T.J. learned quickly how much food a toddler will drop to the floor.

Ashley Shell and her husband were dog breeders with five German shepherds and an Estrela Mountain dog named Roman. Then they had a baby. River was born into a family that was mostly huge dogs, so it was no wonder they had an influence on her. She even modeled her behavior after the dogs! Now that River is two years old, she has matured from a wannabe dog to a caretaker, especially to her favorite dog Roman, and then with the foster puppies the family takes in. That caretaking attitude will be tested, because the family also now has a little boy, born just last month. You can keep up with River, Roman, and the family at Instagram.

Texas has a long history with chili, but the tradition of the chili cookoff was born only in 1967, when the reputation of Texas chili was on the line. Publicly, the spark of the war came when a New York author and humorist named H. Allen Smith wrote an article titled "Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do," which riled up Texans. Not only was Allen a New Yorker, but he was born in Illinois! Texans were scandalized that Smith made chili with beans and bell pepper. Smith thought it heresy that Texans added corn flour to their chili to thicken it.

However, Texas columnist Frank Tolbert had already considered a chili cookoff to promote both his book A Bowl of Red and race car driver Carroll Shelby's ranch in Terlingua, a ghost town at the time. Smith's challenge was just what he needed, so the cookoff was planned under the auspices of the Chili Appreciation Society International to be a match between Smith and Wick Fowler, developer of Wick Fowler’s Famous Two-Alarm Chili Kit.   

You can find an account of that first chili cookoff in a 1967 article at Sports Illustrated (contains racist stereotypes in one paragraph). Afterward, Smith moved to Texas permanently, where he was forever branded as an outsider. He also wrote a book about the cookoff, The Great Chili Confrontation, and Tolbert updated his book to include it.

The Original Terlingua International Championship Chili Cookoff is still held every year. You can argue about the "international" part, since the winners are overwhelmingly from Texas. -via Metafilter, where you'll find Tolbert's chili recipe, plus lots of chili recipes shared in the comments.

Artificial intelligence has come a long way in the past few years in generating images and video that, on casual viewing, can fool you into thinking it's a real representation of something that actually happened. This in itself has profound implications for news and information. But what about art? Could artificial intelligence ever create a film that moves you like Casablanca or tickles you like The Blues Brothers? For that matter, can AI even create a photographic image that puts you in the photographer's place? Sure, many of our movies now contain computer-generated imagery, but that CGI work, however fictional, is produced by real people who make creative choices. AI can only reproduce what it has learned from existing imagery, which will eventually include a lot of AI-generated images. It hasn't mastered the art of making the creative choices of human beings who are as real and complex as their audience.   

Andrew at The Art Of Storytelling (previously at Neatorama) discusses the qualities of human-generated art and human-generated photography, and artificial intelligence's chances of ever becoming truly relatable.   

There are thousands of stories of weird events that got their 15 minutes -or a year- of sensation then faded from public memory. Such is the case of a hand that fell from the sky in Bargaintown, New Jersey. In 1916, Henry and Gottlieba Prantl were mourning the death of their 18-year-old son from pneumonia when they witnessed a shooting star fall into their field. The burning object was too hot to touch, and it looked like a hand that was shooting flames out of its wrist. When it cooled, they took it inside and the "flaming hand" was shown to anyone interested. Scientists studied it and offers came in to purchase it, but Gottlieba felt it was a message from their late son Rudolph, and wouldn't part with it. The family, however, made a deal with some businessmen from Atlantic City to display it for profit.

Speculation and legend grew up around the hand, mainly due to its reputation as an omen or a message from Rudolph. Even more interesting were the legal battles between the Prantl family and Dr. Halvor Harley, who treated Rudolph during his illness, over malpractice and their unpaid medical bill. So where is the "flaming hand" now? No one knows, and the facts of the case grow murkier with time. Read what we know about the flaming hand of doom at Thunderbird Photo. -via Strange Company

We've posted quite a few stories about arsenic over the past twenty years here at Neatorama because there are so many things to say about the historic poison. However, you might not have been reading this blog that long, so Neil Bradbury put together a TED-Ed overview giving a brief history of the element and its, uh, "traditional" use in dispatching rivals, wealthy ancestors, and inconvenient spouses. Hence the nickname "Inheritance Powder." That doesn't happen as much these days, or at least we hope it doesn't, because modern chemistry used in an autopsy can detect not only the presence of arsenic, but the amount and the day it was ingested. Arsenic is colorless, odorless, and throughout most of history was undetectable, but it still has legitimate uses in chemistry and industry. There are a lot of stories in this video that you can read more about in our previous posts, going back to 2007.

A group of 226 travelers from the Midwest to California got caught in a terrible blizzard in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. They could go no further, and were snowbound. You think you know this story, because you've heard of the Donner Party. But this wasn't in 1846, it was 1952, and it wasn't a wagon train, but a railroad train.

A 12-foot-tall snowdrift stopped the train called City of San Francisco at 6,880 feet of altitude. The passeners of the 15-car train were buried in snow for three days. Knowing that snowplows would come, they patiently passed the time at first. But then the battery-powered lights went out, and eventually the heat failed as well. Portable heaters belched out carbon monoxide, and the train's food ran out. Meanwhile, the snowplows trying to reach them broke down, as did a rescue train. Read about the ordeal of the City of San Francisco passengers at Smithsonian. The story includes a contemporary newsreel.

Warning: these trailers are bloody and gory.

As of January first, the character Popeye is public domain. Noting the "success" of the movie Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (it wasn't liked, but it made money), two different studios have films ready to go in which Popeye is a crazed killer. ITN Studios is teasing Popeye's Revenge, above. The movie has a standard plot in which a group of young people plan to open a summer camp, but when they investigate the legend of Popeye, they find out he's still around, and not at all happy to see them. Then there's Popeye the Slayer Man, in which young people enter an abandoned spinach factory because legend says it's haunted by Popeye. But it's not haunted; he just lives there, and he's not at all happy to see them.



These movies have more in common than just Popeye and plot. They both look like they were made on a shoestring budget. Both are expected to be released in January, but neither has an official release date. Neither one promises to be in theaters, so you might find them on streaming services instead. -via Geeks Are Sexy

In an early scene in the movie Sergeant York, we see farmer Alvin York shooting turkeys to explain how he was a crack shot. You should also learn about another farmer who rose to the occasion during wartime to become the most successful sniper in history. Simo Hayha (also spelled Häyhä) was a five foot tall Finnish farmer who joined the military during the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union. He brought his own gun and became a sniper.

The war only lasted three and a half months, but in that time, Hayha racked up 505 confirmed kills, and would have killed more Red Army soldiers if he hadn't been wounded toward the end of the war. Hayha earned the nickname "the White Death" for his stealth and accuracy. He did all this without the modern gear any American duck hunter would have. Hayha even refused to use a scope, even though they were available. He just shot enemy soldiers the way he hunted animals back on the farm. Read about Hayha and his accomplishments at Cracked.

(Image credit: Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive/Colorized by Julius Jääskeläinen)

The 1993 movie Jurassic Park had state-of-the-art special effects and convinced us that dinosaurs could be brought back from extinction. But we've learned a lot about dinosaurs since 1993, and now those movie dinosaurs just aren't all that accurate. They've made several sequels, and couldn't change the design of those monsters without seriously damaging the continuity of the franchise. But YouTuber CoolioArt went back and gave those raptors the feathers that we now know they should have. They are of the species Deinonychus Antirrhopus, as they were in the book, only bigger because otherwise the movie wouldn't be as scary. The real dinos were about half the size of these. Oh, they could still kill a person, but they wouldn't have been as menacing on the screen as what we got with Jurassic Park. As it stands, our protagonists are menaced by giant crows. Here they are in a piece of the climactic scene.

Sorry, there's no scientifically accurate T. rex to save the day. Yet. -via Born in Space