It's been 50 years since Stephen King's first novel was published. Carrie was published on April 5, 1974, and adapted for the big screen a couple of years later. But it almost wasn't written at all. In the early 1970s, King was teaching and taking on other part time jobs while writing short stories for magazines. His wife Tabby, also an aspiring writer, was taking care of a baby and working part time when she could. They were barely getting by. King's short stories were often rejected, but were most likely to be accepted by men's magazines, where science fiction and horror were sandwiched between pinups, leading to an accusation that King couldn't write a decent woman character. He took that as a challenge.

King developed the character Carrie from two women he knew in school who were badly treated by their peers. But he didn't like what he wrote, and tossed page after page in the trash. Tabby discovered those pages and offered her help in fleshing out the character. The story ended up being too long for a magazine, so it went to a book publisher. Carrie changed the family's fortunes and set King on a 50-year career trajectory. Read how Carrie came about at Mental Floss.

What an electric performance! Franzoli Electronics synchronized four singing Tesla coils together to form a band. These plasma speakers generate tones by changing their spark output. Hook them through a MIDI and you've got a concert! Here the quartet plays AC/DC's "Thunderstruck." The coils play guitar and vocals, while the percussion and bass are added from elsewhere. This quartet's latest video is a performance of "Billie Jean," but I happen to like "Thunderstruck better. It's such a classic and recognizable song (not to mention rockin') that we've seen it performed on cellos, gayageum, guzheng, tubulum, slapophone, household devices, and baby babbles. It's fun to dance to, as well.

The Drinker’s Dictionary, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, contains a substantial list of synonyms and phrases that mean alcohol intoxication. Drunkenness is seen as a vice, but is also so common throughout human history that using other terms is to be expected. These synonyms, called drunkonyms, can come and go or could have a long life, and the list is being added to daily as new generations produce their own slang, so we have counted thousands of them. You can find a very long list of drunkonyms in the appendix of this paper.

Most of these drunkonyms began as words meaning something else. Can any English word be turned into a drunkonym? Some believe that's possible, although the context would have to be right for others to understand how a new word is being used. There are obvious exceptions. Consider the phrase "I got laid last night." The context is there, but the word "laid" already means something different even in context, which would be understood by most of the people you know. Antonyms are a problem, too, because if you said "I got sober last night," no one would perceive that you are saying you got drunk. Cultural context matters as well, as in the word "pissed," which means drunk in British English and "angry" in American English. But if you know the speaker's language, it can be understood. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Mario Antonio Pena Zapatería)

Norwegian artist Edvard Munch will forever be known for the painting The Scream, even though he produced a large body of work over his lifetime. His paintings often conveyed melancholy, angst, and downright depression, which Munch knew all about because of his troubled childhood in a family plagued with health problems and mental illness. But The Scream stood out as a particularly overt symbol of dispair and existential dread. The scene itself was inspired by a meteorological event that colored the sky, and Munch heard, or maybe felt, a scream pass through nature. The face that Munch painted (several times) is not the one screaming, but rather a person reacting to the scream he heard. This TED-Ed lesson looks into the life of Edvard Munch and his inspiration for an enduring painting that speaks to the fear and anxiety in all of us. -via Damn Interesting   

Back in January, we looked at the rise of celebrity culture in the 18th century by way of Casanova, who became a celebrity for no other reason than being a celebrity. He had a counterpart in England named Kitty Fisher. Fisher's entry into high society and wealth came not from her family, but from the succession of high society lovers she charmed in the 1750s, plus her instinct for self-promotion. Kitty was a master at sparking rumors, and wasn't above staging a publicity stunt, like that time she was thrown from her horse and accidentally exposed her body to rescuers and onlookers. In other words, she became famous for being famous. Portrait artists found her both irresistible and lucrative, as people would buy prints of etchings of Kitty, making her the original pin-up girl. She was even connected to Casanova, although there was no chemistry between them. Or maybe it was celebrity rivalry. Read about the 18th-century celebrity Kitty Fisher at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Nathaniel Hone the Elder)

As customer service shifts rapidly to the customer, the most common place you'll find this new system is at the self-serve payment kiosk. Cashiers, if there are any, don't want to handle your germ-laden card, so it's up to you. But interacting with a machine doesn't get you out of the customary upselling. After you pay for what you've bought, do you want to give us more money? You might think it would be easier to say "no" to a machine, but this guy finds that it's anything but.

And now we have self-serve kiosks asking for tips. A tip for what? No one served me; it's a self-serve kiosk. There's no one around except for the business owner staring at you from a seat ten feet away. You can't tell me he's making a sub-minimum wage. But that's the thing about payment machines- you can't ask questions. You can only answer questions. And you can't refuse to answer questions, or the transaction is liable to be canceled. -via reddit

Millions of people will be converging on towns in the path of the total solar eclipse that will work its way across the US on Monday. If you can't go, hey, the rest of the America will get a partial eclipse. You'll want to look up and see how much of the sun will be blotted out where you live in this chart from NASA-  just enter your zip code to find out how much of the sun will be covered and when. I could see 92% coverage, but it also could be obscured by clouds.

But you don't have to miss the totality, since it will available online. Different organizations will be offering livestreams of the total eclipse on Monday. NASA will offer several, with commentary in English or Spanish, or without commentary. The University of Maine is sending a balloon to the stratosphere to broadcast the eclipse. You can find livestreams geared toward children, or even a feed from Torreón, Mexico, where totality will last four and a half minutes. You can select a feed and time your viewing so you can watch a livestream and also go outside to check out the eclipse in your part of the world -although you will need eclipse glasses if you can find them. Check out the schedule of eclipse livestreams at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: NASA)

While war involves uniformed soldiers shooting each other and airplanes dropping bombs, it also involves multiple networks of people behind the scenes, gathering information right under the enemy's nose, as spies. Some even worked to undermine their own governments when the price was right, or when they believed their own government must be defeated. Many lost their lives doing this work, while some escaped by the skin of their teeth, and others were never found out. In this roundup from Weird History, we learn about nine World War II spies who did audacious things to further one side or the other, including a major league baseball player who was more satisfied with his second career than his first.    

After a person dies, the brain is usually the first organ to deteriorate, turning to liquid rather quickly. But in certain cases, brain tissue is preserved and found hundreds or even thousands of years later. Science has found 4,400 brains that were preserved after burial, representing only a tiny fraction of the dead who are disinterred in the name of science. The reasons for brain preservation are dehydration, freezing, saponification, and tanning. But these causes apply to the whole body. Some brains are found preserved when the rest of the soft tissue in the body is long gone, and we don't know why.

Alexandra Morton-Hayward is an undertaker who became a palaeobiologist at the University of Oxford. She is part of a research team looking into the brains that continue to exist when the rest of the body's flesh doesn't, and it's her job to collect these brains and keep them in refrigerators. Some of them are still soft and wet, hundreds of years after their owner died. It's a morbid but fascinating task you can read about at Atlas Obscura. -via Strange Company

(Image credit:Alexandra L. Morton-Hayward)

Uuhai is a Mongolian folk metal band. That's a hardcore musical genre if I've ever heard one. Their heavy metal songs feature traditional Mongolian throat singing, called khoomei, and their instruments include the morin khuur, or horsehead fiddle. The name Uuhai is a chant, sort of like the English "hoo-rah!" I have yet to find the lyrics to the song "Khar Khulz," much less a translation, so I can't tell if the lyrics are NSFW if you understand Mongolian. It's got a rockin' beat, and I can dance to it. Uuhai's tour dates this year are in Germany and France.

There are many ways to die, but sometimes the cause of death is hard to pinpoint, especially before the modern science of forensics was established. Or further back when medical diagnoses were not always accurate, even the cause of natural deaths could be hard to determine. Then there are the cases in which the cause of death is pretty obvious, like a gunshot wound, but we never find out who did it or why.

The case of Edgar Allan Poe combines all those difficulties in the mystery of his death. Poe was only 40 years old when he was found incoherent and wearing someone else's clothing. He declined over several days before he died. The death certificate and his medical records were lost, although it was said he died of "brain congestion," whatever that meant. Some attribute his death to alcohol poisoning or alcoholism, or it could have been tuberculosis, or possibly murder by poisoning or something. In any case, Poe is only one entry in a mega-list of 25 mysterious deaths that still haven't been thoroughly solved at Mental Floss.

Jagged Edge Productions, headed by director Rhys Frake-Waterfield, celebrated Winnie the Pooh entering the public domain a couple of years ago by making a slasher film titled Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, in which the beloved bear was a slasher killer. Now another character is in the public domain, and we get Bambi: The Reckoning. Here, Bambi is a killer, obviously traumatized by the death of his mother at the hands of a hunter, and out for revenge. We can tell by the teaser trailer who that hunter was.

Why did they make this film? Despite being an awful movie, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey made back ten times the money spent on its production. That set up Jagged Edge to make a series of similar bloody horror films based on beloved characters that are up for grabs in the public domain. The internet was calling the planned series the Poohniverse, but the studio doesn't like that and insists we call it the Twisted Childhood Universe. Future films in the series include horror movies featuring Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, and sequels featuring Winnie-the-Pooh. -via Geeks Are Sexy

People with end stage liver disease can be on a transplant waiting list for years and never receive a new liver. For each of those people, there are even more who do not meet the criteria for even getting on a waiting list for one reason or another. A new groundbreaking experimental therapy aims to ease that shortage of donated livers for transplant. The biotech company LyGenesis has learned to extract cells called hepatocytes from donated livers that will not be transplanted because they have no match. These living cells are then injected into the abdominal lymph nodes of a patient, which act as a bioreactor to help the hepatocytes grow into fully-functioning livers, even in a novel position within the body.  The therapy they named LYG-LIV-001 has moved to the human trials stage, and the first human patient received an injection of hepatocytes on Tuesday. It could be more than a year before the results are determined. If this therapy works, one donated liver could help dozens of patients grow their own new livers. Read about this potential breakthrough at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: LyGenesis)

A lowly bank accountant is just doing her job when she becomes overwhelmed with the power of money and it takes her on a nightmare ride. This claymation animated video for the Pink Floyd song "Money" was made by Kate Isobel Scott for a competition celebrating the 50th anniversary of Floyd's iconic 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon. And it won!

The band announced the contest last year and invited animators to submit a video for any of the ten songs on the album. Ten winners have been selected, one for each song. The videos are being released this week, one per day, in the order the songs appear on the album. Six videos have been released so far, and there are four to go. You can find them all, plus behind-the-scenes videos with the animators in this playlist. The yet-unreleased winning videos are identified and have a release date reminder attached. And if you are really into Pink Floyd music and animated videos, you can see the more than 700 videos submitted for the competition in this playlist. -via Laughing Squid

If you work in the US, or are an American citizen abroad, your income tax returns are due in less than two weeks. Everyone hates tax season, because even if you are getting a refund, the forms are a hassle and you're always worried about getting it wrong. So who do we blame for taxes? It was the ancient Egyptians, beginning around 5000 years ago.

The early Egyptians were the first to have an administrative government, too, which is why taxes were needed. The government would provide services for its citizens, which the people would pay for with a portion of their "income" which was usually in the form of crops, but also involved time and labor. Sure, a lot of those taxes went to support the lavish lifestyles of the rulers, but it also went into supporting an army, which benefitted citizens by providing security in wartime. Taxes were used to build royal monuments and temples, but also public buildings. The same can be said in the modern era, since taxes can be used for expenses you don't agree with, but they also fund roads, schools, and other things we all benefit from. The ancient Egyptians also pioneered cheating on taxes and tax protests. Read how the tax system got its start at Smithsonian.

(Image source: Metropolitan Museum of Art)