Mary Ann Bevan was born in 1874 and worked as a nurse in London. She married and had four children. Then she began to change. Her hands grew bigger, her face started to elongate, and she developed headaches and poor eyesight. Bevan's appearance caused her to lose her nursing job. Then her husband died suddenly in 1914. Bevan took odd jobs to support her children, but even that became difficult. A farmer who hired her told her, “all [she was] fit for [was] the ugly woman competition.”

We know now that Bevan had acromegaly, a pituitary condition that can strike at any time. All she knew was that she needed to support her family, so she indeed entered an ugly woman competition, and won. The publicity led to a career in sideshows, at Coney Island, and with Ringling Brothers. That may seem strange to us today, because she wasn't really ugly, but at the time people with deformities or disabilities were hidden away at home. Bevan's willingness to show herself made her wealthy enough to send all her kids to college, the equivalent of $1.6 million dollars today. Read the story of Mary Ann Bevan at All That's Interesting.

The story was posted today at reddit, but the "before" picture there is not Bevan. Here is a picture of Bevan before she developed acromegaly.

Andi Norton of Phoenix has suffered from sinus problems, asthma, and sleep apnea for many years. Norton assumed it was because of their many allergies. But recently, they had a life-changing experience in the shower. Norton's doctor recommended blowing their nose while in the shower, but this time a tiny hard object came out and clattered on the shower floor. Cleaning it off revealed what it was.

"It was a piece of Lego," they said. "Suddenly, the memory of something I had completely forgotten about in my adult life came flooding back to me."

Back in 1998, when Norton was around six years old, they decided the nose would be a good place to store a LEGO dot piece. But then Norton couldn't get it out again. You might wonder why the parents didn't get involved, but they did. See, young Norton hatched a plan to retrieve the LEGO dot which will remind you of the old woman who swallowed a fly. What better way to get the LEGO piece out than to use more LEGO pieces as a tool? You can read how that mission spiraled out of control at Newsweek. Or listen as Norton tells the story at Instagram. Norton is planning to see a doctor for a followup, but has already reported being able to breathe easier and enjoy clear sinuses for the first time in a quarter century. -via Fark

(Image credit: Andi Norton)

When time is condensed and a million years takes a fraction of a second, you can see how the tectonic plates of the earth's crust make our world look like a living, breathing being. This animation goes back 1.8 billion years, or about 40% of earth's history. The map looks familiar for just a second, then moves to form a supercontinent called Gondwana in the Southern Hemisphere. Further back, these plates form a bigger continent called Pangaea. But further back still, we see the earth as a collection of far-flung islands.

You'll have to watch more than once. Notice how India flies off Asia and heads closer to its origin near the South Pole. Since this is going backwards, it's bye-bye Himalayas! In each viewing, note the color of a present-day continent and follow it back to see where it was a billion years ago. This constant churning of the planet brings materials from the ocean floor and the earth's mantle to the surface, feeding our environment with the chemicals necessary for life.  -via Damn Interesting

The site To Slip One's Mind usually has posts about murders, but they featured the Fawn Hoof Mummy this week. We don't know if there's any evidence that she was murdered, because the mummy was pretty much destroyed in the name of science. I had to find out more.

In 1811, workers were mining saltpeter from Short Cave, a part of the Mammoth Cave system. They struck an anomaly that turned out to be a four-foot-square crypt containing a corpse folded into a fetal position. It was that of a woman with short-cropped hair between 5' 10" and six feet tall. She was wrapped in a decorated deerskin and was accompanied by burial goods, including a necklace made of deer hooves, which gave her the name Fawn Hoof. The mummy was moved to Mammoth Cave, where she was on display for several years. Nahum Ward purchased the mummy in 1815 and took it on an exhibition tour. The American Antiquarian Society acquired the mummy for 59 years, during which time she was displayed at the 1876 World's Fair in Philadelphia and the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Fawn Hoof then went to the Smithsonian Institution, where she was displayed until 1900. But then, the institution decided to remove the mummy's flesh and separate her bones, removing most of what was notable about Fawn Hoof. For more than 100 years, her remains have neither been displayed nor studied, and are far from her designated resting place. Read the story of the Fawn Hoof Mummy and other mummies taken from Mammoth Cave at Great American Hikes. -via Strange Company

In our world with so many cell phones and the internet, anyone can go viral at any moment, resulting in "fame" for a short time, usually referred to as 15 minutes. When millions of people outside of your circle of family and friends have seen you, that's fame, isn't it? Maybe, but the same thing happens to hundreds, maybe thousands of people every year. Unless you have some solid accomplishments, or are able to entertain people on a continuing basis, it's not going to last. There are other people in the pipeline, you know. Meanwhile, there are many folks out there trying to monetize a short, slightly amusing moment as best they can. You can enjoy that fame, but think twice before you quit your day job over it. Being seen by millions of people is not quite the flex it was 50 years ago. Ryan George explains this better than I ever could, by acting it out. -via Geeks Are Sexy

You may recall a couple of years ago when The Ulster County (New York) Board of Elections asked the public to submit designs and vote for a new "I voted" sticker, and they ended up with a purple head with red eyes on six spider legs. This year, the state of Michigan got into the act. Designs were submitted, and nine winners were chosen, three from elementary students, three from high school students, and three from the general public, voted on by internet poll. More than 57,000 votes came in, and the front runner by far was a design by 12-year-old Jane Hynous.

Because when you think of elections in Michigan, you think of a werewolf tearing its shirt off. You can see all nine winners here. County election boards can order any of the stickers, or a generic one. Michigan voters won't know which one they will get until they vote.   

(Top image credit: Dwight Burdette)

You may leave instructions for the disposal of your earthly remains after death, but you really can't control what happens after you die. That goes double if you're famous. It's one thing to bequeath your body to science for the good of mankind and quite another to end up with your body, or a part of it, on display at some museum for people to look at. The danger is even greater when you are a head of state of some kind, beloved or not. Weird History goes through a list of 21 people (if I counted right) who ended up in that predicament. We've covered some of these before at Neatorama, especially in our long-running restless corpse series, but not all of them. I had an immediate reaction to the story about Rasputin (spoiler ahead) because "the organ actually belonged to a cow" doesn't make any sense, because cows are female. Try a bull.

In 1913, Stella Courtright Stimson was an activist working for women's suffrage. She was also heavily concerned about her hometown, Terre Haute, and the growing bar, brothel, and gambling industries. Those were controlled, or actually not controlled, by a political machine run by mayor Donn Roberts. Roberts would pay supporters to go from precinct to precinct, voting in each, and also relied on fraudulent registrations with addresses for businesses or vacant lots. Stimson arranged for women to monitor voting precincts, but were overwhelmed by the number of Roberts' associates. Her research uncovered the fraudulent registrations, but as a woman who couldn't vote, she could bring no legal action against Roberts.

Then an unrelated case sparked the appointment of a special prosecutor, Joseph Roach Jr., a reformed jailhouse lawyer who wanted to clean up Terre Haute for the sake of his newborn son. He teamed up with Stimson to gather overwhelming evidence, but when the case was prosecuted, Roberts' real power was on display when the jury acquitted him.

Rather than give up, Roach and Stimson approached the US courts to intervene. Since the federal government couldn't be involved in local elections, they had to wait until the election of 1914 when a seat in Congress was involved. Soon after, 116 men were arrested in Terre Haute. They had to convert a hotel into a jail to accommodate them. Read about the federal trial that resulted in changes to how elections across the US are done at Smithsonian.         

Butterfly wings display an amazing range of colors, but it's not always from pigments. Rather, these colors, from bright to dark to strangely iridescent, are often caused by the way light bounces off tiny physical structures on the wing's surface. The way a butterfly's colors can change, or iridesce, is due to the angle of that light. The colors are seen differently by other species. What may look invisible to a predator may also be a bright, attractive color to other butterflies, and different still to the human eye. Whatever works to help the butterfly survive long enough to reproduce.

The award-winning film Nanoscapes shows us the structures that produce these colors, from a normal view down to the electron microscope level that magnifies the details up to 50,000 times. At the microscopic level, the surface of a butterfly's wings take on the look of a fantasy alien landscape. -via Nag on the Lake

It's happened time and time again- humans introduce a non-native species to kill another species and then have to confront unintended consequences. Amami Oshima is a subtropical island off the coast of Japan that is home to unique animal species like the Okinawa rail, the Iriomote leopard cat, and the Amami rabbit. But there are also venomous pit vipers called habu. In 1979, officials brought in 30 mongooses to eat the habu. Mongooses are immune to snake venom and will kill and eat snakes. The problem is that mongooses will eat snakes when there aren't delicious rabbits available.  Besides, the pit vipers come out at night, when mongooses sleep. The mongooses helped themselves to the endangered Amami rabbits and the Ryukyu long-furred rat. By 2000, there were 10,000 or so mongooses on the island.  

That's when Japan announced a mongoose-eradication program involving 30,000 traps and trained dogs, deployed by a group called the Amami Mongoose Busters. It took almost twenty years, but this week Amami Oshima has been declared mongoose-free, since no mongoose has been seen for six years. The rabbit population is recovering. However, there is still a danger of mongooses moving in from Okinawa, where mongooses were also introduced to control snakes. -via Gizmodo

(Image credit: Thomas Fuhrmann)

When we talk about the wildlife of Australia trying to kill you, we are usually talking about snakes, spiders, or jellyfish. Occasionally, we warn people away from cassowaries. But kangaroos are everywhere, jumping their way through your golf game or playground, posing for pictures, or getting hit by a car. They aren't predators, and usually mind their own business. However, they can surprise you. On July 13th, Kat Beaton was out running when a kangaroo charged her. She ran behind a tree and to 'roo chased her around it. She flagged down a passer-by who stopped to help. Jason West tried to shoo the animal away with a golf club, and the kangaroo knocked him down. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished. The standoff went on for 40 minutes, and was only resolved when police arrived and chased the kangaroo away with their vehicles.

In light of this attack, Australian wildlife experts explain the kangaroo's behavior, and give us tips on what we should do if a kangaroo attacks. While they seem to think this was an isolated incident, there are several "related articles" at the bottom left of the page that will make you think differently. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: PotMart186)

We play video games for to escape the real world. Still, those video game characters use a lot of resources, and someone has to keep up with all that. Enter the accountant. The poor guy is just doing his job, but his job is annoying. Nobody wants to be told how to spend their money! To be honest, that's what you hired him for. Try to look at it from the accountant's side. He's a professional party pooper, trying to reign in expenses for the benefit of the game's long-term viability. What's wrong with that? It's annoying, because we're all just here to have fun. The poor accountant knows he's not liked, and he knows his job is the opposite of exciting. Surrounded by all the luxurious trappings and odd challenges of video games, the accountant starts to break down. Now we feel for him. This skit from Dorkly is only 2:35; the rest is promotional.

You may know the song "Kumbaya" from singing it around the fire at summer camp. The lyrics are simple and repetitive, the music only has three chords, and it's slow enough to wind down a bunch of rowdy kids and get them ready for a good night's sleep. But where did it come from? From what language does the word kumbaya come from? In tracing the song from your summer camp days backwards, there's a string of people who laid claim to the song and had the backstory to prove it, until an earlier version was found with a different story. The song turns out to be way older than we thought.

Then we trace the history of the song forward. First it was a spiritual, then a camp song, then a protest song, and finally a derisive term for naive idealism. "Kumbaya" has gone through a lot of twists and turns, as you'll see in an article at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Benny Mazur)

Tuariki John Edward Delamere of New Zealand threw a big wrench into the sport of the long jump when he launched into a front flip in competition in 1974. This move can add inches to a jump, although it seems like magic of some sort to us non-athletes. A gymnast would understand, and an article from Wired explains the physics. Anyway, the track and field folks call this a somersault jump instead of a flip, so you know they are completely separated from gymnastics. Delamere made quite a splash when he debuted the move at a championship meet. And officials ultimately deemed the somersault jump to be too dangerous, which also tells you they had never even watched gymnastics. Something tells me the real reason that this move was banned is because everyone would do it until the long jump would be completely out of reach for track and field athletes who weren't also gymnasts. Delamere went on to serve in New Zealand's Parliament. -via Kottke

A kitchen is built for work, and the placement of the tools involved is important to the work flow. For safety and efficiency, a microwave should be placed between waist-high and the user's head level. But that's not the only factor to keep in mind. My microwave is bigger than it should be, and sits too low over the stove. I have to use a light to see the oven controls underneath and I have to pull out the stove to use the canner.

Not everyone puts thought into how an appliance will be used before they decide where to put it, meaning landlords. Homeowners may find they have little choice in where to put a microwave. A fairly new subreddit called Microwave Too High is starting to take off. It chronicles awkward microwave placement from on top of the refrigerator to hanging from the ceiling, and sometimes even near the floor. All these places make a microwave difficult to use and even dangerous when hot food comes out. Check them all out, and keep all this in mind when you arrange your own kitchen. -via Boing Boing

If you enjoyed those pictures, you might also like TV Too High and WTFaucet.

(Image credit: jamesross801)