The phrase "missionary position" refers to a sexual position in which heterosexual partners lie down facing each other, with the man on top. It has also been called the "English-American position" and it has long been considered the most vanilla sexual position of all, so much that it was endorsed by the Catholic church in the medieval period. But where did the "missionary" part come from?

Dr. Alfred Kinsey used the term in his 1948 book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. He cited research that indigenous communities in Papua New Guinea made fun of missionaries for their sexual practices, and assumed that was where the term came from. When I first heard this story long ago, I couldn't believe that missionaries were trying to teach natives the "correct" way to have sex -and that was a valid question. It turned out that Kinsey had interpreted the research wrong in several ways, and ended up coining the term himself without even realizing it. Read what Kinsey got wrong about the source of this term at Mental Floss.

Ontario horse groomer Autumn Purdy plays music while she works in the stable. One quarterhorse mare really likes the music, and will bob her head and dance -but only to heavy metal tunes. She loves music by Rammstein, Motörhead, Of Virtue, Rob Zombie, Pantera, and Korn, but her absolute favorite music is by Slipknot. Purdy did a little music experiment, and the horse just turned her back when hearing country music! She bobbed a little to Tom Jones, but then soon lost interest. We don't know the horse's real name, but she's become famous as Rock Horse. Some of the bands have actually sent Purdy new songs for the horse to check out and give her opinion. You can see more of her head-banging joy at TikTok. -via Laughing Squid

The most common words to grace a cake are "Happy Birthday." Most people can spell "happy," but when it comes to "birthday," the danger of a brain fart increases. Jen Yates at Cake Wrecks has seen so many cases of bizarre spellings of that one word that she had to split a compilation into two posts, and the misspellings run the gamut of missing letters to completely different words to incoherent jumbles.

 

Having once worked in a supermarket, I know how this happens. Someone buys a blank cake and requests an inscription in icing. The bakery/deli department has as few people on duty as possible, and half of them are new, and the other half have avoided ever learning how to use icing. So a request goes out to the entire store for someone who's done it before, or is at least willing to try. Bob in the loading dock sees a chance to spend a few minutes in the air conditioning with no heavy lifting, and volunteers. And if any volunteer sees a misspelling, it is way easier to pretend not to see it than to fix it. The customer? They have a ready-made submission to Cake Wrecks.

See how people can can misspell "birthday" in ten ways here and eight more ways here.

The legendary Paris cafés where intellectuals met and tourists now flock haven't been there all that long in the grand scheme of things. There weren't many restaurants at all in Paris 150 years ago. But there were migrants from rural France who came to the city to make a living during the industrial revolution. When a railway was built, many of these migrants moved in from the Auvergne region. They settled in a small area of Paris together and were called Auvergnats. They got jobs doing the hard labor Parisians didn't want to do, but eventually settled on the coal and charcoal business. Auvergnats imported coal by rivers and canals and delivered it to city dwellers who increasingly lived in buildings that were heated.

To store the coal before it was sold to individuals, they had to have space, and they put up warehouses for that purpose. But the coal business was slow in summer, so the Auvergnats began to sell refreshments out of their warehouses during warm weather, which customers could enjoy at tables outside. In this roundabout way, the Paris café was invented. But there's a lot more to the story, which you can read at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: MARQUE FRANÇAISE)

An airline for dogs? It sounds like an April Fool joke, and the video makes the whole idea seem like a parody, but Bark Air is real. It was launched by the folks who bring us Bark Toys in Bark Boxes. For those who need to travel with their beloved dog, this is the ultimate in customer service. The dogs are treated better than any economy class passenger on a major airline.

But there are caveats. Bark Air does not operate its own planes. They use planes and pilots from other carriers, and take off from private airports. So far, there are only two routes, New York to London, and New York to Los Angeles. The London route costs $8,000 one way for one person and one dog. The LA route is $6,000. Still, it's a start, and Bark Air hopes to expand service and bring the cost down as they grow. That is, if there's enough demand for them to stay in business long enough to grow.  -via Nag on the Lake

Believe it or not, Cabbage Patch Kids, the dolls that took the world by storm when they became the Christmas gift of 1983, are still a thing. One of their draws is that these dolls have a magical backstory. Each one is "born" at Babyland General Hospital, and the owner "adopts" the doll, with certificates and everything. Furthermore, Babyland General Hospital is a real place, and you can visit it in Cleveland, Georgia. Take a tour, visit the gift shop, and if you have the bucks, you can buy a doll that you can witness being born. If you don't have the bucks, you can watch someone else's doll being born.

The dolls are born from Mother Cabbage with the help of a costumed nurse who engages the crowd to help her through her labor pains. It's not clear whether Mother cabbage is a tree, a mound, or something hidden behind those things, but the ritual is the ultimate in kitsch, meant to engage a five-year-old but still a little beyond their understanding. Joshua Rigsby took his family to Babyland General Hospital and got to witness the birth of a Cabbage Patch Kid. His description of the bizarre ritual at Thrillist will make you want to visit just for the giggles. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Kelly Verdeck)

Every detail of Boba Fett's getup is perfect as he sets out on his adventure. Everyone knows who he is supposed to be, but once he makes it to a galaxy far, far away, he kind of blends in a little too well. There are Wookiees and Cereans and Biths and Jawas everywhere. Where are all his Mandalorian friends?  

This is an ad for Apple's new app called Precision Finding, available for iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro. I don't know anyone who has a 15, or can afford one, but the skit is pretty cool. The music will be stuck in my head for a while. May the fourth be with you. -via Boing Boing

The monument you see above is in the Kensal Green cemetery in London. This is the grave of George Hill, who died in 1864. It has a lot of text carved into it, which was all about his job with the Colonial Civil Service in India. Apparently he was a highly-regarded employee, but rarely do you see much about one's occupation on a tombstone. Was this a case of a man who had no family? They are not mentioned on the monument, but he had plenty of family. George Hill had two wives and had sired 13 children, eight of whom survived to adulthood.

The tale of his first wife was tragic, and after her death, Hill married a woman half his age who had a child, although the circumstances of her first marriage were suspicious. The second marriage was salaciously eventful, and may be the reason all the room on his gravestone was taken up with the boasting of a successful career. Every life has a story, even if that person doesn't want it to be remembered. Read the real story behind the much-admired civil servant George Hill at The London Dead.  -via Strange Company

Neatoramanauts are a particularly well-read bunch, so it stands to reason that you've read a lot of banned books. That means books that were banned or challenged by someone, somewhere, at some time, for some reason. The reasons for challenging a book vary widely, and whether you agree that the books should be restricted or not, some justifications are rather weird. Heaven forbid that adolescents should be exposed to the concept of menstruation! My parents never objected to any book I could get my hands on, and it turned out that the only ones that disturbed me were history books.  

Any type of book ban can entice readers and make a book a bestseller. But books that may be unavailable to some readers are catnip to movie producers, because the cinematic version will draw readers and non-readers alike. Weird History goes through the stories of 13 challenged books that ended up as movies. The vast majority of those movies were critically acclaimed or blockbusters or both.  

Orangutan seen treating wound with medicinal herb in first for wild animals https://t.co/lb4O2D3Sl3

— The Guardian (@guardian) May 2, 2024

A group of scientists studying orangutans in Indonesia have observed an orangutan treating his own facial wound with a the leaves of an Akar Palo vine (Fibraurea tinctoria), which is known to have "antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antioxidant, pain-killing and anticarcinogenic properties," and is used in traditional medicine. The Sumatran orangutan named Rakus was observed with a fresh facial wound below his eye, possibly from an encounter with another orangutan. Later, he was seen chewing the leaves of the vine and dabbing the juice on his wound. He finished up by sticking the chewed leaves on the wound. Five days later, the researchers saw that the wound had closed up.

This is the first time a wild animal has been seen using a known medicinal plant to treat a wound. Read about Rakus and his feat and what it could mean to the history of medicine at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

The Duke of Richmond would be the first to die trying to build the Rideau Canal, but he would be far from the last.

Canadians used the St. Lawrence River for shipping and traveling, but that river is also their border with the USA. After the War of 1812, our neighbors to the north decided they needed a safer, internal waterway that steered clear of the US. The Rideau Canal was an engineering marvel, 200 kilometers long, built by hand in less than six years, but the cost was high. The Duke of Richmond died of rabies, and a thousand of the workers who built the canal were killed by accidents and disease. The canal as a shipping lane was replaced by rail and road, but is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It also left a living legacy in the form of a rather important city.

This video ends at 8:30, followed by promotional material, then at 10:06 there's a bonus story told over the credits that is well worth the time. -via Digg

In the 1940s, Lali Sokolov met Gita Furman when he tattooed her arm at Auschwitz. The two fell in love, and after liberation, they moved to Australia where they spent the rest of their lives together. Furman didn't want to talk about the Holocaust, so Sokolov didn't, either. After Gita's death in 2003, he told his story to Heather Morris, a non-Jew from New Zealand who didn't know much about the Holocaust. Morris spent three years hearing Sokolov's recollections, and then another ten years trying to option the story as a play. Then she made it into a novel instead. The Tattooist of Auschwitz became a worldwide best seller in 2018.

Although classified as fiction, the book was based on Sokolov's story. Historians from the Shoah Foundation and the the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center, among others, found numerous historical inconsistencies and errors in the account of the tattooist. The story was like a game of telephone, passed from the subject 50 years after the fact, to a young writer with little historical background and no corroboration from Furman. Sokolov died years before the book was published. However, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is far from the only story fictionalized from the Holocaust, and as the generation of survivors disappears, there will only be more.  

The Tattooist of Auschwitz premieres today as a six-episode miniseries on Peacock. The TV adaptation addresses the inconsistencies in Sokolov's story by illustrating how he told it to Morris as an elderly man who suppressed those memories for 50 years. Read up on Sokolov's story, the controversial novel, and the TV series The Tattooist of Auschwitz at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: Martin Mlaka/Sky UK)

It's always fun to see how other countries title American movies. They can be literal translations, but often the marketing team wants to convey what the movie is about, and Hollywood titles often don't do that. So a new title is created to work in whatever country the movie is shown in.

The Norwegians learned a shortcut. For almost a hundred years, American comedies were retitled with the word Help! plus whatever the movie was about. They didn't have to do that with the Beatles' movie Help! The titles became a kind of shorthand to let the viewer know this is an American comedy with just one word. YouTuber SindrElf shows us how many Hollywood comedies got the Norwegian title treatment, which will have you giggling like a little kid eventually. You can read more about the titling trick at Mental Floss. Sadly, they don't do this anymore because almost all Norwegians read enough English to keep the American titles.  

Fingerprints have been used to identify people since at least 220 BC -in China. They weren't used for solving crimes, but for signing documents (and they still do that). The Western world was slow to pick up the importance of fingerprints, but by the late 19th century, the idea of keeping track of criminals by their fingerprints led to printing arrestees for their records, and the concept of finding a perpetrator by fingerprint evidence was beginning to take off.

On June 29, 1892, two children in Necochea, Argentina, were murdered. Their mother, Francesca Rojas, was injured and identified the murderer as her neighbor Ramón Velázquez. Velázquez was arrested, grilled, and reportedly even tortured, but refused to confess to the crime. What's more, he had an alibi.

Then investigators found a fingerprint in blood on a doorway at the crime scene. They had the fingerprint removed by cutting the piece of wood from the doorway. Read how the first murder case was solved by fingerprint evidence, and how that case changed forensics around the world at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: National Library of Medicine)

Dudes playing fruit machine on king's day
byu/Bridimum infunny

Pay your euro and pull the lever! This human slot machine was set up during the Koningsdag (King's Day) celebrations last weekend in the Netherlands. The holiday is observed every April 27th for the king's birthday. Slot machines are called fruit machines in parts of Europe.

It takes a while for the slots to start spinning as the guys say their arms are tired, but they still have their sense of humor. The beer certainly helps. You can tell that most of their patter is jokes, even if you don't understand Dutch. The language has been described as the uncanny valley of languages, halfway between English and German, so both English and German speakers feel they should understand it, but don't, and the effect is that these guys are very talented at speaking gibberish. Is it rigged? That's beside the point, as even a losing player gets a piece of candy.  -via reddit