Tom Scott announced some time ago that he will stop making weekly videos at the end of the year. That doesn't mean he will stop making videos; it's just that trying to keep the quality up on such a tight schedule is too much. While all those videos have been enjoyable, they aren't perfect. It's embarrassing to have an error pointed out after all the editing is done and the video is posted, but it's inevitable that someone in the audience will know exactly what you did wrong. Tom regularly owns up to those errors and adds corrections to the YouTube page. Today, however, he is going back through them, or at least ten years of them, and telling us about the times he screwed up. You have to applaud his transparency, but then you realize it's also a restrospective of his videos on a wide range of subjects you haven't seen. If one catches your fancy, you might be able to search for it, or find it at his YouTube channel. The last minute of this video is an ad.

If you want to really see how much Tom has aged, check out the first of his videos that we posted here at Neatorama.

Warner Bros. made a movie called Coyote vs. Acme. It's a combination of animation and live action surrounding a lawsuit that Wile E. Coyote brings against Acme Corporation when one of their mail order products almost kills him. It stars John Cena, Will Forte, and Lana Condor, among others. The movie was filmed in 2022, and completed early this year. Test audiences loved it. It was supposed be released on July 21st, but was bumped in order to release Barbie that weekend.

So when will we see Coyote vs. Acme? Possibly not at all. The completed film was cancelled last Thursday in order for the studio to take a $30 million tax write off (on a $70 million budget), and to avoid millions in marketing costs. Warner bros. has previously canceled two other films, Batgirl and Scoob Holiday Haunt!, but those movies were not completed. The cancelation of Coyote vs. Acme came as a surprise to the producers, cast, and crew who made it, and they are not happy at all.

Following the backlash to its decision, Warner Bros. has now "un-cancelled" the movie. But that doesn't mean they will release Coyote vs. Acme. For now, the studio is allowing the producers to offer the movie to other distributors. So we might see Coyote vs. Acme, but we don't know if, when, or where it will happen. -via Kottke

If you were to walk along the Fitzroy neighborhood of Melbourne, Australia, you might run into the Carrot Man. His name is Nathan, and he's been carrying a giant homemade carrot around for about ten years now. He moved to Melbourne from Brisbane and found that carrying around a giant vegetable was a great way to meet people and make friends. Everywhere he goes, folks want to have their picture made with the Carrot Man.

When the Guardian tried to get an interview with him, he said he prefers to let the carrot do the talking. Nathan is well-known for his friendliness and generosity. He gives gifts to the neighborhood residents, often plants. And he's said that his motivation for carrying the carrot is just to make people smile. Carrot Man's fame is spreading globally. He's even been the subject of street art in Paris! Nathan's fans have a dedicated Instagram gallery to share pictures of Carrot Man sightings. -via Fark

(Image credit: Humans In Melbourne)

It's likely that you only think about cranberries in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, although thankfully for the industry, cranberry juice is sold year-round for the possible benefit of reducing the risk of UTIs. The Pilgrims ate cranberries in some manner at the first Thanksgiving because they were in New England, where cranberries grew wild and ripened at the right time. They were great at preventing scurvy. But cranberries as a crop are relatively new. They weren't cultivated until 1816!

Cranberry plants reproduce by exchanging pollen with other plants, or by fertilizing itself, or by cloning. Each ripe cranberry has four air pockets inside it that allows it to float on water, which makes harvesting them by flooding cranberry bogs a relatively simple matter. It also makes them bounce when you throw them, which is another way to tell if they are fresh. Those are just some of the things that make cranberries unique, but you can learn quite a bit more about this Thanksgiving staple at The Conversation.  

(Image credit: The Agricultural Research Service)

Redditor Grizz1371, a former Marine, posted this photo of his also-former-Marine buddy's new tattoo. Commenters from the USMC jumped in to share their favorite crayon, while others wanted to know what this was all about. The joke is that Marines eat crayons, indicating they are not all that smart. But far from taking offense, most Marines just run with the idea, making it funnier and funnier. Several ex-Marines have even started businesses selling edible crayons. The "dumb Marine" trope goes way back, but when did the joke about eating crayons begin?

A deep dive into the meme by Task & Purpose finds the first mention of Marines eating crayons only as far back as 2010. That explains why my ex-Marine husband never heard of it, while his Marine son was quite familiar with the idea. But it only took off into the wider world of social media in 2016, possibly with this comic.

(Image source: U.S. Army W.T.F! Moments at Facebook)

Marines will tell you to this day that crayons are the best MRE. Grizz1371 said the tattoo was in honor of Veteran's Day yesterday, but it could also be for the USMC's birthday on November 10. The military branch is now 248 years old!  

Between 1854 and 1929, around 250,000 homeless, orphaned, or abandoned children in New York City were shipped to the Midwest to find foster homes. There are many horror stories about the program, of children separated from siblings, taken in as servants, or abused, while their ties with family back in New York were erased. This program came to be known as the Orphan Trains.

The program was launched with the best of intentions, and not merely to relieve the city of a burden. The city did nothing for these children in the first place. It was the brainchild of Charles Loring Brace, a young minister who founded the Children's Aid Society. He attended seminary near the Five Points neighborhood in the mid-19th century (portrayed in Gangs of New York) and witnessed the misery of what was estimated to be 40,000 children fending for themselves in the streets of New York. What he dubbed the Emigration Plan first placed children in foster homes in New York State, then expanded further west when more homes were needed. The massive numbers of children and their far-flung travels led to lax oversight and local officials who did not vet foster homes properly in many cases.

Despite the many horror stories, the vast majority of the children relocated had good outcomes. But the Orphan Trains were not the only way that Brace worked to help the children of New York. Sending children away from the city was pretty much the last resort. Read the story of Charles Loring Brace and his efforts to get children off the streets at The Saturday Evening Post.  

Writer and comedian Tessa Coates went shopping for a wedding dress, and this picture was taken during a fitting. When she looked at the image, she got a big case of the willies. When Coates posted it to Instagram, her fans were at first shocked that she was engaged (she hadn't announced that before), and then shocked at the picture itself. If you can't see it, her arms are in different positions in the two mirrors and on her body. The picture was not Photoshopped, nor was it a Live Photo, nor a panorama. It spooked Coates so badly she almost threw up.  

As Bored Panda tells the story, Coates waited in line for two hours at the Apple Store to ask what happened. The explanation she got was that as the phone scanned from left to right, she raised her hands and artificial intelligence decided to stitch the two images together.  

Digital cameras take images by scanning from one side to another, but artificial intelligence doesn't necessarily factor into it. This kind of glitch has been happening for much longer than AI has been used in digital cameras. As pretty as this dress is, the spooky experience made Coates reject it, and she doesn't ever want to be near it again.  

(Image credit: wheatpraylove)

When doctors transplanted a new eyeball into a human for the first time, they did not expect the patient to be able to see with the eye. But there were other reasons for doing it, and the data gained will help future patients that may actually be able to see.

Aaron James was a high-voltage lineman who was electrocuted in Mississippi in 2021. He suffered multi-organ failure and wasn't expected to survive. But James survived, although he lost his left arm and most of his face. Doctors also removed his left eye because it gave him so much pain. James was left using a breathing tube and feeding tube due to the loss of his nose and mouth.
In two years, James recovered enough to be a candidate for a face transplant. Researchers approached him about transplanting an eyeball as well. While that surgery had never been done and probably couldn't restore his sight, the eye would help support his new face and make him look more normal. James agreed, for those reasons and also because they could learn how to do it.

“I said, ‘Even if it don’t work, I’ll have an eye, and it will be at least normal-looking, and then you all could learn something off of this,’” James tells CNN’s Jacqueline Howard. “You have to have a patient zero.”

The surgery was performed in May. Five months later, James is recovering well, and scientists are studying the signals sent through his optic nerve to his brain. It isn't sight, but it is something. Read about this groundbreaking surgery at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: NYU Langone Health)

In 1865, plantation owner Colonel P. H. Anderson was short on workers after the Civil War. He wrote a letter to the formerly-enslaved Jordon Anderson of Dayton, Ohio, asking him to return to Tennessee to help bring in the harvest and save the farm. Anderson responded with a very polite letter that is a masterpiece of passive-aggressive truth. Anderson's boss, attorney Valentine Winters, who had written the letter Anderson dictated, had the letter published in the local paper, where it became a sensation.

For the Letters Live program from Letters of Note, Laurence Fishburne reads Anderson's letter in the deadpan manner he must have intended. It is both funny and deeply cutting. The first time we posted about the letter, most of the commenters doubted its authenticity. But as the Wikipedia article on Jordan Anderson tells us, every person mentioned in the letter is documented. Winters may have helped construct the letter, but the story was very much real. You can also read what happened to Colonel Anderson afterward. -via Laughing Squid

The internet makes it easy to learn about things you weren't taught in school, and things you don't want to ask your family about. Before the World Wide Web, it wasn't so simple. In the 1980s, people were eager to learn about sex from a 4' 7" Jewish grandmother named Ruth Westheimer. Dr. Ruth was a highly educated sex therapist who made talking about sex both acceptable and entertaining with her positive attitude and no-nonsense, non-judgmental advice.  

Westheimer started out with a radio show that aired after midnight on Sunday so that children weren't listening, as part of a public service commitment required at the time by the FCC. But she became so popular that an expansion to TV was inevitable. Explicit sexual terms didn't seem so prurient when spoken in her high-pitched grandmotherly German accent, often with a laugh. Her fans were even more impressed when they found out that after she lost her parents in the Holocaust, she moved to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine at age 16 and joined the Haganah at 17, where she was trained as a sniper. Westheimer, now 95, is still writing books and making occasional public appearances. Read about Dr. Ruth's meteoric rise as America's sex education teacher in the 1980s at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Rhododendrites)

The British department store John Lewis has a tradition of well-produced tear-jerking Christmas ads every year. We've posted them for more than ten years now. They always manage to revolve around children, love, family or friends, and a magic twist. This year's ad titled Snapper: The Perfect Tree has all that, but served up with a huge dose of weird. A little boy wants to grow his own Christmas tree, but what he gets is nothing like a Christmas tree. You have to wonder if the writers are not-so-subtly mocking the syrupy-sweet ads of past years, or whether they were taking drugs. No, I'm not going to tell you what happens, because you need to watch the video. Even after you figure out what's going on, this will require some suspension of disbelief. You've been warned. -via Fark

Led Zeppelin's fourth album was released on November 8, 1971. The cover features a framed picture of a man carrying a bundle of hazel, hung on a dilapidated wall. The original story was that it was an oil painting Robert Plant bought in an antique store. But it was a hand-tinted photograph, and the original photograph has been found.

Researcher Brian Edwards found the photograph while he was looking for early images of Stonehenge in 2021. It was in an album labeled “Reminiscences of a visit to Shaftesbury. Whitsuntide 1892. A present to Auntie from Ernest.” The man in the picture captioned “A Wiltshire thatcher” is believed to be Lot Long, who lived in the village of Mere and died in 1893. The photographer was Ernest Howard Farmer. The Wiltshire Museum, which now owns the photograph, has included it in an exhibition of Farmer's photographs called Wiltshire Thatcher: a photographic journey through Victorian Wessex scheduled for next spring. Read the story of how the photo came to light at the Guardian.

(Image credit: Wiltshire Museum)

The Minnesota legislature voted to replace the state's flag, which is the state's seal on a field of blue. The current design is both boring and illegible, and almost indistinguishable from dozens of other state flags. But what design will replace it?

In 2020, Mississippi asked for public input on a new state flag and got lots of wonderful, weird, and funny submissions. Minnesota is doing the same, and received 2,123 submissions! Some are seriously good, as if they were designed by trained graphic artists, while others appear to be a required elementary school assignment. And there are plenty of comedians taking advantage of the opportunity.

You can spend all day looking through the official gallery of submissions, or skip to Racket, for a gallery of the 30 goofiest designs. But really, there are a lot more than 30 that will make you laugh.

There is also a separate gallery of suggested designs for a new state seal, which makes incorporating the design of the new seal into the new flag fairly impossible, and that's a good thing according to CGP Grey. The committee tasked with coming up with a new flag is supposed to have it ready for thelegislature to consider by January first. -via Metafilter

How does a family business become an incorporated town? A town is usually defined as a place that provides services like utilities and law enforcement, and is supported by taxes on something like sales, property value, or income. Or all three. So becoming a town involves some serious thinking. Reuben Syrett had a ranch in Bryce Canyon, Utah, and opened a hotel. What was Ruby's Inn for a century is now Bryce Canyon City. Well, it's still a hotel, but it's also a city unto itself. That took a fight, over taxes of course.

If you ever visit beautiful Bryce Canyon National Park, you can't miss Ruby's Inn because it's at the park's northwest entrance, which was very intentional. Even if you never visit Bryce Canyon, the park or the city, you'll get a kick out of the story of how Bryce Canyon City came to be. This video is only five and a half minutes long; the rest is an ad.

When television was new, Hollywood saw it as competition for their movies. Theater owners were even more impacted, as they made no money at all if people stayed home for entertainment. But advertisers loved TV, since it was a way to feed their sales pitches directly to consumers, and programming was just a way to get them to tune in. But then came cable TV. Most of us didn't get cable TV until the 1980s, but HBO launched in 1972 in one town in Pennsylvania. However, the concept goes back to the 1960s. It's strange to think about now, but that concept was that we would pay to have TV brought to our homes, and there would be no advertising on it.  

That idea was horrific for advertisers, none more so than ad executive Don Belding of Foote, Cone, and Belding. He headed up a California ballot initiative to ban pay TV with a campaign called "Save Free TV" in 1964. Subscription TV was only in the testing phase at the time, but the very idea was enough to galvanize advertisers and theater owners. And the public, because of the brilliant slogan. No one wanted to give up free TV! And so the ballot initiative was successful. But California -and the rest of us- got pay TV service anyway, so you need to read the rest of the story at Tedium.