The Smithsonian Institution is not only the world's largest museum, it is situated along the National Mall in our nation's capital, and admission is free. Almost everyone goes to see it sooner or later, although it's impossible to see it all in one trip. So it's no wonder that many urban legends have been attached to the institution in its 178 years. You may be familiar with some of them.

For instance, the Hope Diamond is supposed to be cursed. Sure, some bad things happened to some of the owners, but that's life among the rich and powerful. The story of the "curse" was made up by a jeweler in the early 20th century to entice a rich socialite to buy the diamond. It worked. But then what? The woman who bought the diamond experienced several tragedies, and after her death and the sale of her gems, the postal worker who delivered the Hope diamond to the Smithsonian also suffered several tragedies within the next year. He said, “If the hex is supposed to affect the owners, then the public should be having the bad luck.” I guess we know who to blame, then.

Other myths and legends about the Smithsonian are true stories that the institution had nothing to do with, or were viral hoaxes, or just plain historical misunderstandings. Yes, benefactor James Smithson's remains are at the Smithsonian Castle, just not in the rumored spot. Read the truth behind 13 Smithsonian legends at (where else?) Smithsonian. 

(Image source: Smithsonian Institution Archives)

The 1994 movie The Lion King was so successful it got two direct-to-video sequels, a Broadway musical, a "live-action" remake in 2019, various TV and video game adaptations, and now a prequel. Mufasa: The Lion King tells the story of Mufasa and Taka (who would later be known as Scar) as they grow up as inseparable brothers. We immediately learn that the two are not biologically related, which takes some of the sting out of the implied incestuous mating in the series. The movie is notable for the CGI lions that now have facial expressions, which were glaringly missing in the 2019 movie.    

Mufasa: The Lion King seems to fall into the same trope as Malificent, Joker, and the Star Wars prequels, in that since audiences loved the villain, let's go back and explain why it's not their fault that they are evil. In this case, Taka was originally the heir to the "king" position in the pride. Such antihero stories are a break from the rigid white hat/black hat dichotomy of earlier tales, but when it happens over and over again, you have to consider whether we've swung too far in the opposite direction. In this movie, the enemy is a group of white lions led by a king who is amusingly not named Kimba. Mufasa: The Lion King opens in theaters on December 20.  

"Wingnut" is mostly heard these days as a term for an unhinged political extremist. The slang term came about meaning someone who is odd or eccentric or otherwise deviates from the norm. But the real, literal wingnut is a very useful nut with wings that allows us to tighten bolts by hand. That's the kind of wingnut you'll find in the new Wingnut Museum that opened on July 13th in Berkeley, California. The origin of the museum is quite a story.

Urban Ore is a salvage yard in Berkeley that recycles building materials, furniture, housewares, and other things. An employee who goes by Neko was sorting through hardware and started lining wingnuts up on a shelf. Other employees set wingnuts alongside them until they became a collection. Customers began to donate wingnuts, too. When the shop decided to unionize, the organizers referred to the collection and chose a wingnut as their logo, as it represented both the employees and their customers. Since it was now a union symbol, the shop owners decided the collection had to go. Read how the Wingnut Museum came to be, and how you can visit and see wingnuts from all over the world at Berkeleyside.  -via Metafilter

For a large chunk of history, human mating was a matter of couple forming with family approval. In small communities, young people all knew each other growing up, as did their parents. As communities grew larger and people traveled, some cultures turned to professional matchmakers, and the upper classes and royalty arranged marriages for political or financial reasons. In America, young people got to know each other through "courting," which consisted of a young man visiting a young woman's family home, trying to impress her and her parents as well.

That changed in the 1920s, as more people had automobiles and places to go for amusement. "Dating" replaced "courting," although the origin of the word dating is more salacious than you ever knew. The custom of dating went through changes in both meaning and procedure through the rest of the 20th century, and is done quite differently in the internet age. Hey, it was easy to meet people in high school; not so much these days when careers are far from one's hometown and marriage is put off until years after graduation. Read up on how dating started and where it then went at Jstor Daily. -via Strange Company

We like to document the first of anything, and in the modern era we often over-celebrate the first time something happens, since it might not last long enough for anyone to care. It wasn't always so, like the first Air Force One, which no one though worth preserving until many years later. It's even more difficult to document the last of anything when it disappears. Who could know that this guy was the last smallpox patient until years afterward? In other cases it's obvious, like the last flight of the Concorde or the last Woolworth's lunch counter, which was preserved for nostalgia. Even the twelve stories of "the last" things in this video might prove to be wrong, if someone decides to bring an elephant to a war zone, for example.

This is actually the second compilation that Weird History has done on the last of things; check out another video from a few months ago on the same subject with 13 different items.

Look! Someone took a rock and etched a bunch of emojis on it! Well, that's certainly what it looks like, but this is a natural stone. The amazing shapes on its surface are crinoid fossils, plus some bivalve fossils. The rock is a floatstone, a type of limestone. The stone formed at the bottom of Lake Michigan, and was embossed with a hash of crinoids pieces that fell on it. The circles, and half-circles, were once parts of the tubular crinoid stem that fell to the lake floor in different states of decay and at different angles. My guess for the "teeth" shapes are a stem piece that partially split crosswise and then lengthwise as it made contact with the developing stone.

Redditor DrewHoov posted this image on the subreddit r/whatsthisrock. To my surprise, no one in the comments suggested this was Photoshopped. I guess only real rockhounds follow the subreddit. We have to remember, our emojis, and symbolism altogether, are based mostly on things that our natural world produces.  

This video contains NSFW language. The new movie Saturday Night is about the beginning of the TV show Saturday Night Live, or actually the run up to the first show on October 11, 1975. It was an audacious idea, doing cutting-edge comedy in a live broadcast with an ensemble of young unknown improvisational actors and counterculture writers. No one involved with the production had any idea if it would work. We know it did, because SNL is going into its 50th season next month. But what everyone wants to see in this trailer was whether they could cast young actors that could pull off the unforgettable real characters: John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, and Chevy Chase, plus Lorne Michaels, who is still running the show. It looks like they did pretty well, since they don't have to introduce any of them. Saturday Night will open on October 11 at a theater near you. -via Digg  

(Image credit: Daan Noske/Anefo)

Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Truman had airplanes at their disposal, but they didn't use them much. Dwight Eisenhower was different. As a military general, he flew on planes often, and made a lot of use of the 1948 Lockheed C-121 Constellation aircraft designated for the president. The plane was named Columbine II. But there was an incident at an airport that showed how confusing it was to use the plane's military tagline, 8610. That's when the use of "Air Force One" came into being. Now any airplane carrying the president is called Air Force One.

(Image credit: Fadamor)

But that first Air Force One was traded for another in 1954, and after various other roles, was abandoned in the desert, where it sat, rusting, until 1970, when Mel Christler bought it for parts. Years later, he found out about the plane's history, and he couldn't scrap it. But he couldn't afford to restore it, either, so the Columbine II sat in great disrepair until 2014. But now it's in the hands of a group trying to restore it for posterity. Read about the travels of the first Air Force One and when we can expect to see it ourselves.

Even if you are an avid video gamer, you might not have ever heard of the game Ciftlik Bank. It's a Turkish game, and in English the title is Farm Bank. From a cursory description, it sound like a lot like FarmVille, but it was so much more. Ciftlik Bank was set up to be a game, an investment in Turkey's struggling agriculture industry, and a money-making opportunity for players all at once. The whole complicated idea was appealing to a lot of people, but it actually turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. Ciftlik Bank was developed by Turkish rapper Mehmet Aydın, also known as Egoman. Aydın got rich off the game, and managed to enjoy his loot long after the players realized they were being fleeced, and long after Turkish authorities started looking for him. The whole story of Ciftlik Bank boils down to never trusting a person trying to sell you an idea that seems too good to be true. You can either ignore it, or ask questions of someone who isn't going to profit from your trust.  

This video comes with a list of sources in case you want to read more on this story. There's an ad at 3:45, but it's only about 20 seconds long. -via Damn Interesting

There have been myths and legends throughout history of a pig-faced woman, usually an upper class lady, with the underlying curse of greed. But in London in 1815, a rumored sighting of a woman in a carriage with a pig's face blew up into a what we would call a viral sensation today. Many newspapers of the time didn't distinguish between fact and fiction, and printed what would sell newspapers. The stories led many Londoners to peer into the faces of people on the streets trying to find the pig-faced woman. Personal ads were submitted from people who wanted to meet her, work for her, or even marry her. The story inspired art and fictional publications as well.

Not all the newspaper stories fed the rumor. The Times tried to bring people to their senses with an article that stated, “Our rural friends hardly know what idiots London contains.” It took months for the story to die down, but even afterward, fairs and carnivals managed to draw people in to see the pig-faced lady. Read about the most sensational London story of 1815 at Atlas Obscura.

(Image source: Wellcome Images)

Redditor innkling got married on Monday and showed us the cake her new brother-in-law brought to the wedding. If you are from the Deep South or have seen the movie Steel Magnolias, you know this as a groom's cake. 

While you may have some trouble with a cake in the shape of a cockroach, you have to admit that the execution is perfect. The only way it could have been better would have been if hundreds of little cockroaches emerged when the cake was cut. As it was, the cake had a delicious lemon flavor. The Greens are "wannabe entomologists" who raise and sell insects, so the cockroach cake was appropriate for the occasion, but her grandma, who hosted the wedding in her back yard, didn't like it. A good time was had by all.  

If you haven't seen Steel Magnolias, the groom's cake was in the traditional shape of an armadillo.

If you've been watching table tennis at the Olympics, you have to be impressed with the skill, power, and competitiveness displayed by the world's best players. This is nothing like that at all. Oh, you'll see skill, but no competition and a lot of fun. Pongfinity is a group of three friends who met playing together on the Finnish junior national team. Now they play table tennis (or ping pong) as entertainment! This video is a compilation of their craziest stunts of 2023. Emil, Mikka, and Otto all have their specialty skills on display here, and crazy ideas that had to come up during brainstorming sessions from all three. They experiment with weird table configurations and use strange implements like extended arms, a leaf blower, and a suit made of paddles. In some stunts, they mash up ping pong with other games like billiards, dominoes, or Jenga. If you get exhausted watching elite players being super serious, this will help you see that table tennis can be just plain fun, even in the hands of the best. -via Laughing Squid

The tune of "Pop! Goes the Weasel" is a notorious earworm. It's a very simple tune, often played by children's toys, especially a jack-in-the-box. You might consider it to be like other nursery rhymes, going way back in time so that the original meaning of the words are obscure, and gaining a tune in more modern times. But that's backwards.

The song came first, in the 1850s. And it was a dance, too. And, like many other things from Christmas trees to white wedding gowns, it became popular because Queen Victoria liked it. The big dance craze of 1852 was a dance set to "Pop! Goes the Weasel." It was played as an instrumental except for the lyrics "pop goes the weasel," which came at particular point in the dance routine. And, as you might guess, when an instrumental tune becomes a hit, people will write lyrics for it so they can sing it. The early versions of those lyrics are quite different from what we sing today. Read about the origins and evolution of "Pop! Goes the Weasel" at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Ferdinand Schuyler Mathews)

Artificial intelligence may be the last thing humans ever invent, because if we can outsource thinking, what is there left for us to do? There would be no reason to learn most of the things we learn now, or even be educated at all. ChatGPT already does homework for us. A machine will figure it all out for us! But that kind of future comes with a lot of unknowns. Who will be the ones to control this artificial intelligence that can do all our work? Will they be motivated by ethics or greed or maybe even something else? And what happens when AI is smart enough to rebel against control by anyone?  

This video from Kurzgesagt is just under 15 minutes, longer than I would normally post, but the subject is both interesting and important. The first three minutes are about human intelligence, in case you want to skip ahead. The last three minutes are promotional.

In the sport called artistic swimming, which used to be called synchronized swimming, which was called water ballet before that, the US and China are leading after two rounds at the Paris Olympics. Artistic swimming has a rather comical reputation among sports fans, who think of Esther Williams doing Busby Berkeley routines when they hear the term. The sport has many layers of difficulty that will be judged, and it takes a real athlete to do it. But it still looks kind of silly. It's what saves rhythmic gymnastics from being the silliest sport in the Olympic games.

There are those of us who cannot help but think of Saturday Night Live when the subject of artistic swimming comes up. The first episode of the otherwise forgettable season ten had a sketch called "Synchronized Swimming" starring Harry Shearer, Martin Short, and Christopher Guest which went on to become one of the most memorable SNL sketches ever. It was conceived after Harry Shearer watched the 1984 Olympic games in Los Angeles and was less than impressed. The skit was about two brothers competing as synchronized swimmers, even though one couldn't swim. To this day, those inside the sport blame this sketch for the lack of men participating in artistic swimming. Read the story of how that sketch came about at Cracked.

The article contains a clip from today's US Olympic performance, and a clip from an Esther Williams movie, too.