The comedy troupe Foil Arms and Hog portrays two suitcases moving along a baggage conveyor belt at an airport. This time it's just Foil and Hog, because suitcases don't have Arms. One is highly upset about an insult they received. The other is caught in that no-win situation when your partner is pissed off about something, but can no longer respond to the one who wronged them, so they lash out at the closest person. Anything you say will be misunderstood and can well feed the flames, but you can't just say nothing, because that's wrong, too. You could (and should) call this "emotional baggage." Listen closely, because they've included quite a few luggage and airline puns.  

And after I went to all the trouble to keep the main joke here a secret, it's spoiled in the on-screen video title. This performance is from the current Foil Arms and Hog tour. They'll be in the US for four shows in March.  -via Laughing Squid

Lydia Faber and her husband live on a houseboat in Amsterdam. When they adopted a kitten named Nimis, they put him in a feline life jacket, because in some places, the city's canal walls are too steep for a kitten to climb. Some people joked that Nimis' bright yellow life jacket looked like a police jacket, so when Faber found embroidered patches at a surplus store that said "police," she added them to Nimis' uniform. The neighbors thought it was hilarious, tourists took pictures, and even the local cops took a shine to the "police cat." They don't mind the impersonation, because any official law enforcement officer in Netherlands would be labeled politie.



Nimis is three years old now, and can swim and climb as well as any cat who lives on a boat. But he still wears his jacket, because he is a celebrity not only in Amsterdam, but around the world. You can see videos of Nimis, along with his brother Tommy and his humans, at Facebook and Instagram. -Thanks, WTM!

If you've ever had a small fly annoy you in the shower, you've met Clogmia albipunctata. It's a species of drain fly bigger than a fruit fly and smaller than a house fly. You might have wondered where that fly came from, and that would be your drain.

Redditor daisy_bare took the cover off a basement drain and found a writhing mass of drain fly larvae. Before the mass was identified, suggestions included welding the cover back on and burning the house down. While the fly stage of Clogmia albipunctata is generally harmless and several people described the insect as "cute," you really don't want flies in your home. The adult flies are rather waterproof and don't live long, but their main purpose is to lay eggs in your drains, where the larvae can live off the gunk that lines your pipes. The ways to get rid of eggs or larvae in the drains are to 1. pour boiling water down the drain, 2. pour baking soda and vinegar into the drain (that can be dramatic), 3. use a drain cleaning product, or 4. scrub your drains or, if all else fails, call a professional to clean them.

Outside of your home, drain flies are quite useful in treating sewage. I am tickled with the taxonomic name, and had to go check the genus Clogmia to see if there is a species named Clogmia pipe. Alas, there is no such bug.  

(Image credit: Jerzystrzelecki)

Have you ever wondered how in the world audio artists like Bill McClintock and DJ Cummerbund make those marvelous song mashups out of very different songs from different genres? The secret is the chord progression. If two songs have the same chord progression, the melody can be transferred from one to another. Oh, they might be played in slightly different keys or have a different tempo, but those can be manipulated by computer, and if they are close enough to start with no one will notice. Besides, most songs are in the simpler keys anyway.

Pianist David Bennett illustrates how this is done by swapping the music and lyrics of disparate songs that have the same chord progression. Even if you don't know anything about music theory and don't care about chord progressions, you'll enjoy a video in which Michael Jackson sings over a U2 melody, and Celine Dion croons over a Phil Collins tune. The previous video he mentions is here.  There's a 30-second ad at 5:35.

Americans in the early-to-mid 20th century developed a taste for salad that was actually dessert. It wasn't their fault that the manufacturers of Cool Whip, marshmallows, Jell-O, and pudding mix came up with recipes that they labeled as "salad," giving us an excuse to indulge in highly-processed fat and sugar, and who doesn't love that? People today continue to enjoy these bizarre recipes at family gatherings like Thanksgiving and Christmas, because Grandma, or Great-Grandma, always made her signature sweet salad. And since it's "salad," people eat them with the main entree, even if it's just crushed candy bars glued together with whipped topping.

Neatorama readers know about Watergate salad, but have you ever eaten pretzel salad, ambrosia salad, Snickers salad, or frog-eye salad*? They are all regional favorites that you might want to try for some truly decadent occasion, unless your family has its own sweet salad tradition, although you might want to make the kids eat their dinner first. Read about all of them at Atlas Obscura.

*Note: frog-eye salad has nothing in common with frog pizza.

(Image credit: Marshall Astor)

Every year, Babycenter reveals the top names for new babies in the preceding year. How they do this is a bit of a mystery, since the definitive list from the Social Security Administration won't be available until well into the new year. The top 10 baby names (girls on the left, boys on the right) for 2024 are:

1    Olivia         Noah
2    Amelia       Liam
3    Emma        Oliver
4    Sophia       Elijah
5    Charlotte    Mateo
6    Isabella      Lucas
7    Ava            Levi
8    Mia            Ezra
9    Ellie           Asher
10  Luna          Leo

It may appear that the list is the same as its been for the past five or ten years, but there are some changes to the top ten, as Mental Floss explains. They also point out that Luna, number ten for girls, is also the most popular name for dogs and cats. If you are looking for a name that's not so common, but still popular, you might want to check out the full list of the top 100 names for both boys and girls at Babycenter. You might be pleased to see that John is still there at #48, and while Mary is not in the top 100, Maria is holding on at #85.  

Television, before it was fractured into a million channels, was a great language leveler. In elementary school, I noticed that my classmates who did not have TVs couldn't shake their hillbilly accent, while those who watched television learned to code switch at an early age, and speak like Hollywood actors when they wanted. Today, we have TV shows from around the world, so that children pick up words and accents from shows like Bluey and Peppa Pig. Dora the Explorer introduced millions of American children to Spanish. And TV is a boost to anyone learning a second language. Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) explains what is happening when children listen to the language of television.  

But more TV doesn't necessarily mean better language learning in children. Too much television actually hinders their learning, when it cuts into the time they speak with the adults around them. At the end, we find that Dr. Brozovsky is just as cute without the red lipstick.

The Los Angeles Times published an account of a dragon attacking a Southern Pacific Railroad train crossing the Colorado Desert on its way to Los Angeles on January 17, 1882. The dragon resembled a snake with wings, about 30 feet long. The train clipped the dragon's tail when they collided, enraging the monster. The dragon then grabbed the train and shook it, breaking several windows, and then flew away. The newspaper talked to the engineer and fireman aboard the train as well as several passengers for their report. The story was reprinted back east, and caused quite a stir. However, it was only one of many dragon sightings in the late 19th century as people flooded into the western US and saw things they'd never seen before. These dragons were described as snakes or alligators with wings, which only sometimes had feathers. They were all said to be enormous.

The dragon sightings, or at least their documentation, died out as the West was settled, communication improved, and newspapers became somewhat concerned about credibility and fact-checking. But the legends of those sightings live on. Read the accounts of 12 dragon sightings in the Old West at ThunderbirdPhoto.com. -via Strange Company

(Image: The Illustrated Police News, March 18, 1882)

A levitating frog, a necrophiliac duck, taxi drivers’ brains — the Ig Nobel prizes have shined a spotlight on offbeat work

Here’s an inside look at how winners feel about this sometimes unwanted ‘honour’ https://t.co/hryjpzYygE

— nature (@Nature) November 19, 2024

Every fall, we cover the awarding of the Ig Nobel prizes from The Annals of Improbable Research. These lighthearted awards highlight research that seems weird, silly, or outrageous. But that's how science is done, one tiny step at a time to reveal what's going on in our world. Last year, more than 9,000 research papers were nominated for the Igs, and when potential winners are selected, they have the option of turning down the honor. Eleanor Maguire once declined to accept the award, because she was afraid it would hurt her career. But three years later she was up for the award again and decided to accept it. Far from hurting her career, she was later introduced as the “the most famous member” of a science panel, even though that panel included actual Nobel prize winners. Well sure, we may laugh about the Ig Nobel prizes, but we remember them because odd and obscure science studies are more fun to read about than the "serious" science that wins Nobel prizes. An article in the journal Nature tells us how winning an Ig Nobel affected the careers of several scientists, including one who won an Ig Nobel and a few years later won the Nobel prize.  -via Damn Interesting

To understand the context of this Letters Live performance, you need to know the cast of characters.

Dr. Serge Voronoff transplanted glands from monkey testicles into human men in the 1920s, in order to "rejuvenate" them and extend their lives.

Dr. Edward Bach was a bacteriologist who warned in 1928 that not only was Voronoff's surgery a con, but that the patients would take on a chimpanzee's "worst characteristics." While chimpanzees are not monkeys, Voronoff used the glands of both baboons and chimps.

Consul Junior was a chimpanzee at the London Zoo, and a favorite among visitors. A letter from Consul Junior appeared in the London Daily News shortly after Bach's statement.

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw was the actual author of the chimp's letter.

Actor Andy Serkis is a motion capture specialist who played Caesar in the 21st-century Planet of the Apes movies. In this video, he reads that letter from the chimpanzee objecting to what Bach considered a chimp's "worst characteristics." He really gets into the role. -via Laughing Squid 

Imagine you are a chemist, working hard to find a synthetic replacement for shellac. You mix some chemicals together and get a blob of gunk that's not liquid enough for your purpose. But instead of throwing it out, you find you've invented plastic. That was in 1907, and while Leo Baekeland himself called the material "plastic," it became known as Bakelite after its inventor. This kind of thing happens a lot in science experiments, so you need to be open to the idea that your screwups might be useful for something besides what you were aiming for. All of our artificial sweeteners were discovered when a scientist was trying for something else entirely, because you know that scientists can't help but taste what they are studying. Read the stories of five such developments wrestled from laboratory accidents at Cracked, none of them leading to artificial sweeteners.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons) 

Wouldn't it be nice to be as fashionable as a cop? Miami Vice was the hottest show on TV from 1984 to 1989. The series focused on two very stylish police officers fighting the war on drugs in the Art Deco neon glow of southern Florida. There were plenty of established stars in the "drug dealer of the week" role, as well as up-and-coming actors, but as the show went on, famous recording artists wanted to get in on the action, as well as athletes, models, and other notable figures. Many of the "unknowns" who appeared on Miami Vice got noticed and became famous for other roles later. In this supercut, they stand out because they look so young. Well, that was 40 years ago.    

This list of Miami Vice guest stars is far from comprehensive. A few years ago, we posted about a massive Twitter thread that was a Who's Who of Miami Vice characters. You'll find an even longer list at Wikipedia.  -via Laughing Squid

Memento mori translates from Latin to mean "remember that you will die."  It alludes to a common artistic theme that began in the medieval period featuring skeletons and other symbols of death. To bring that idea into the modern age, Mefite condour75 created a generator that compares your lifespan to a movie. It's called Memento Movi. Enter your date of birth and expected lifespan (you can be as optimistic as you like, but the average is 79 years) and then pick a movie. You will get a frame from that movie that corresponds with the present day in your lifespan, like a progress bar. The list of films is alphabetical and extensive, so I picked The Blues Brothers. I got the image above and this explanation.

You are 87.1% through The Blues Brothers (1980).

I had to laugh, because not only am I too far into it, it's a wreck. You can try this with movie after movie, and you don't really have to be truthful about your age, but if you are, it can be jarring. How far is your life into Star Wars, Young Frankenstein, Home Alone, It's a Wonderful Life, or Jaws? -via Metafilter

The science fiction drama Megalopolis was supposed to be Francis Ford Coppola's magnum opus. Coppola wrote, directed, and produced the movie using his own funds, to bring to life an idea he had been nursing since 1977. The plot is presented as an analogy for the fall of the Roman Empire, but set in an alternate present day with supernatural features. It's also a political statement and a drama about a family. Are you still with me? It almost made sense when you watched the trailer, but ended up as a total mess. Even the star power of Adam Driver, Giancarlo Esposito, Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Jon Voight, Laurence Fishburne, Talia Shire, Chloe Fineman, D. B. Sweeney, and Dustin Hoffman couldn't save this movie. Critics and audiences alike were bewildered about what the film was trying to achieve. Megalopolis was made on a budget of $120-136 million, but barely made back 10% of that. It was low hanging fruit for Screen Junkies.

My family always made cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving by putting fresh cranberries and oranges through a grinder, and then adding sugar. My husband and his kids always bought canned cranberry sauce, served in slices, and it was tradition. So I served both, and had way too much left over. That's a story that happens all across America. But you can have have it both ways when you make your own jellied, molded cranberry sauce from fresh cranberries!

The process is simple- cook and puree your cranberries, strain out the skins, then cook some more with sugar and your favorite flavorings until it's jelly, then chill in a mold. The mold can be anything, including a can if you want the traditional experience. It's almost like making homemade preserves, but in a smaller amount. You can even make it days ahead of the feast! The result looks and feels like canned jellied cranberry sauce, but the flavor is fresh and fruity, better than any from a can. Get the recipe and all the instructions, including the science behind making jelly, at Serious Eats.

(Image credit: Serious Eats/Vy Tran)