There are many different reasons why people spend time in a coma: illness, injury, surgery, or a medically-induced coma for various reasons. Their memories of that time vary even more widely. Some don't recall anything. Some were not even aware of the passage of time. Some had very vivid and weird dreams that stayed with them for years. And some had experiences that strangely melded dreams with reality.

"I remember hearing a woman telling me to squeeze her hand. I found out later that they brought me out of the coma to see if I was brain dead. I squeezed her hand, and they put me back under for several more weeks. I remember being taken to a spaceship orbiting Earth so I could be repaired. I found out that I was actually a cyborg. While I was on the ship, something ruptured the hull, and the ship lost atmosphere and everything froze. I was frozen in place but fully aware that I was frozen and could not move. I was now certain that I would spend eternity fully awake and immobile on this ship, never able to shut down." —Keri1986

You'll also read strange cases of people whose personalities changed after a coma, and one patient who recovered to prove his brother wrong, in a list at Buzzfeed. There are even more such stories in the comments.

(Image credit: Mohsen Atayi)

With egg prices still high, the potato industry is looking to scramble up Easter traditions with a budget-friendly alternative: Easter potatoes. https://t.co/fP2M9FEaE2

— Axios (@axios) April 2, 2023

It started out as a joke, an internet meme, then leaked into the real world- potatoes as an alternative to eggs for Easter egg hunts. The price of eggs has been historically high over the past year, but the price of potatoes has risen only 13%. So why not have children decorate potatoes and hunt them for the holiday? Once potato producers heard of the joke, they jumped on it, hoping to sell some potatoes and maybe start a new tradition. There are plenty of tutorials online on how to paint Easter potatoes.

Besides the difference in price, the benefits of using potatoes include less breakage, and the fact that if you use food-safe paint, the potatoes can be cooked and served afterward. People rarely do that with Easter eggs, which are ultimately out of the refrigerator for who knows how long. But overall, it's more of a meme than a reality, as egg hunts have nothing to do with the religious holiday, and so many people use plastic eggs anyway, which are cheap and can be used year after year. Personally, one chocolate egg is enough for me. -via Digg

New York's Hart Island, off the coast of the Bronx, contains the nation's largest cemetery on its 131 acres. But this is no Forest Lawn. This is New York's potter's field, where unidentified or unclaimed bodies are buried, in trenches three coffins deep. The practice has been going on since 1869, and it is estimated that more than a million people are now buried there. Run by the Department of Corrections, the island has been off-limits to the general public for years, except for supervised memorial services twice a month. But that is about to change.

In part by the efforts of the Hart Island Project, the administration of the island was transferred from the Corrections Department to the city's Parks Department. They've been busy cleaning up the island and dismantling some old buildings. Later this year, guided tours will begin as a pilot program, leading to eventual opening of Hart Island as a park. That doesn't mean it will no longer be a potter's field. Burials of New York's more unfortunate deceased will continue. Read about the new park on Hart Island at Smithsonian. -via Fark

When Furbys became the "it" toy 25 years ago, they creeped us out. These little toys spoke a language you couldn't understand, but over time they learned to communicate in the language they heard and said some pretty personal things to you or your child. All these years later, technology has given us open source coding, artificial intelligence, warfare drones, and robots that can shoot guns. But Furbys can still creep us out. Especially when they've been skinned.

i hooked up chatgpt to a furby and I think this may be the start of something bad for humanity pic.twitter.com/jximZe2qeG

— jessica card (@jessicard) April 2, 2023

That little robot had to think about it a minute, but then went ahead and told us exactly what we did not want to hear. In the Twitter thread, Jessica Card told us how she hooked up this nightmare.

hardware:

i’m not a hardware wiz so @kenkeiter really mentored me on this!

skinned the furby, isolated the DC motor wires, soldered on male extension to plug into breadboard. hooked up an h bridge on the breadboard to the pi. control motor via python and run it when it speaks

— jessica card (@jessicard) April 3, 2023

Just because you can do it, doesn't mean that you should. Card also referenced Roko's basilisk, which is another dimension of terrifying. Have we already sealed our fate? -Thanks, Brother Bill!

Every one of the 50 states has a flag, but you probably only know your own state's design. Yeah, Mississippi's flag redesign was featured here, and Utah's new design has been in the news, and New Mexico's flag is often ranked the best, but otherwise, they all seem to run together. You get the idea that they were all done in a hurry by someone with no design experience. Then you rarely saw your state flag because it's ugly, and no one was bothered by it and never thought about making it better. CGP Grey lays out some vexillology rules and standards, and then gives each state's flag a grade. Most of them fail, and deservedly so. A few are good for a laugh.

In the discussion at reddit, the biggest disagreement is with Grey's opinion of purple and the grade that Colorado got. The friend who sent me this video vastly underestimated its length, because he found it so interesting. -Thanks, Bicycle Bill!

The Colôrobètch is a bogey that personifies the bise or icy wind. Known from Namur, Belgium, it nips unprotected children with its red beak until their skin becomes red, cracked, and bleeding.

A Book of Creatures is a project by an artist named Emile. She draws legends, myths, and cryptids from all over the world and tells us their stories. As drawn, they're both whimsically cute and terrifying. You have to wonder at the imaginations that brought these animals to existence.  

Usilosimapundu is a colossal creature from Zulu folklore. He literally carries ecosystems on his back, and his head is an enormous boulder. A swallowing monster, he is a personification of landslides.

The Marool is the anglerfish or monkfish in Shetland folklore. It has many eyes and sings wildly with joy when a ship capsizes.

You can see the full collection of legendary creatures at A Book of Creatures at Instagram. Bored Panda has a roundup of 40 of them plus an interview with the artist.

You don't have to be young to have the wrong idea about the 1980s. Some of us who lived through them only found out the real story later, or else got our timelines mixed up. At the time, it was just the way the world was: stranger danger, mullets, and the ozone layer. Those thing can even be related. The ozone layer was being destroyed by chlorofluorocarbons in aerosol sprays, right? And it took a lot of hair spray to get those big hairdos to fluff up just right, right? So it was vanity that destroyed the atmosphere, right? Wrong. While most of the publicity over the ozone layer was in the 1980s, scientists were way ahead of us, and CFCs were already banned in most aerosol cans in the 1970s. So you can blame the Aquanet, but you can't blame the big hairstyles of the '80s. And that's just one thing that makes sense to us now, but just wasn't so. Read the busting of seven misconceptions about the '80s at Mental Floss. You can also listen to it in video form.

In the 1950s, the CIA launched Project MKUltra, in which they experimented with LSD as a possible truth serum, mind control drug, or biological weapon. The head of the project was biochemist Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who has been compared to "Q" from the James Bond movies as well as a mad scientist. The project began with volunteers, but then moved to unwitting subjects, with nefarious results that you can read about in a previous Neatorama post.

Later in the program, Gottlieb wanted to see how the combination of LSD and sex would affect possible subjects, specifically if they would be more easily interrogated and would release private information. To do this, MKUltra set up apartments and hired sex workers to lure subjects in. They were given LSD without their knowledge. After sex, the women would question the men while CIA agents watched through two-way mirrors and listened through planted microphones. Houses were set up for this in New York City and in San Francisco for Operation Midnight Climax. Hundreds of people were subjects of this experiment, and may not have ever realized anything was amiss afterward. Read about Operation Midnight Climax at Messy Nessy Chic. No nudes, but some images might be considered NSFW.

pic.twitter.com/hZr5NvnUzI

— Amanda (@Pandamoanimum) March 30, 2023

Mushrooms come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Pedro Pascal, the star of The Mandalorian and The Last of Us, has the stylish wardrobe of a man who gets his picture taken a lot. So who wore it better- one of nature's brilliant fungi, or the fun guy?

pic.twitter.com/wfoCQs9AEO

— Amanda (@Pandamoanimum) March 30, 2023

A Twitter thread from Amanda @Pandamoanimum has a dozen of these comparisons. You can enjoy the pretty colors, or just enjoy looking at Pedro Pascal. -via Everlasting Blort

The Royal Navy vessel HMS Bounty set sail from Tahiti to Jamaica in 1789 on the last leg of an arduous mission to import breadfruit to feed enslaved people in the Caribbean. The ship was commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh, a name that has become a metaphor for cruel authoritarianism. Three weeks out, Bligh's second in command, Fletcher Christian, led a mutiny and put Bligh to sea along with 18 loyalists in a small boat. The crew took the Bounty back to Tahiti and then to uninhabited Pitcairn Island to hide out. Bligh and his men rowed all the way to Timor, and eventually made it back to England.

That's what you would know about the mutiny from the movies, made in 1916, 1933, 1935, 1962, and 1984. But what ultimately happened to the people involved? The Bounty's crew fell into several groups: Those who sailed off with Bligh, those who followed Christian to Pitcairn, those who wanted to sail with Bligh but there was no room on the boat, and a group from various factions who decided to remain in Tahiti. Some from each group died or disappeared, and some on Tahiti were arrested for mutiny -and some of them died in a shipwreck. Bligh had a complicated career after the Bounty incident, including another mutiny, this one landlocked, so it was more of a coup. Christian and his men, plus a group of kidnapped Tahitians, disappeared for 35 years. But their descendants were eventually found, having created a strange culture of their own that continues today. Read the multiple complicated outcomes of the Bounty mutiny at Today I Found Out.

International borders can be weird. If you are in Detroit and go south, you end up in Canada (see the comments under this post). Rivers are like that. Near the mouth of the Rio Grande River, the water flow meanders widely, and in 1906 a private irrigation company simplified one of those meanders by cutting a channel across it to shorten the river, essentially changing the US/Mexico border and leaving the American residents of the village of Rio Rico in flux. When that was discovered, the government was like, no big deal, and made the irrigation company pay Rio Rico's residents some money. They were still US citizens, but over the years the oxbow lake left by the re-channeled river dried up and eventually no one knew where the boundaries were. The village made the most of their status during Prohibition, but the anomaly was rediscoverd in the 1960s, which led to further chaos. It's quite a story. -via Damn Interesting

The Habsburgs (sometimes spelled Hapsburg) were a dynasty of Europeans from the same family who ruled over Austria, Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, and eventually countries across the continent for two centuries in the Middle Ages. You can recognize them in portraits by their pronounced jaws, called the Habsburg jaw. You are probably familiar with the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, King Charles II, from a previous Neatorama post. He is shown at the left in the image above, with his father and great-uncle Philip IV on the right. Charles had the most tangled family tree you've ever seen, outside the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. He also had a very pronounced Habsburg jaw, and so many other physical problems he never produced a royal heir. Common sense would tell you that the inbreeding caused the Habsburg jaw to become more pronounced over generations, but now we have science.

A study in the Annals of Human Biology focuses on 15 members of the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs from different generations who had realistic portraits painted. First they gleaned information from the family tree and assigned each of the subjects an inbreeding coefficient. Charles' inbreeding coefficient was so high that he never had a chance. Then separately, they asked mouth and jaw surgeons to examine the portraits and rate facial features that would indicate mandibular prognathism (protruding jaw) and maxillary deficiency (sunken midface). Then they compared the data from the two studies to determine that the Habsburg jaw was, indeed, likely to be the product of inbreeding. Get the details on this study at Smithsonian.

Passover is a Jewish religious observance to commemorate the Hebrews' exodus from Egypt. The name comes from the night the angel of death passed over their homes when killing the Egyptian's firstborn children. The traditional Seder is a meal in which every dish and every procedure has a story behind it, to teach and reinforce that history for the next generations.

However, this was a problem in the Soviet Union. Jews in Russia had suffered under many regimes, and the Bolsheviks were the least oppressive, considering their communist idea of equality. The communists wanted to welcome Jews into the fold, but they also wanted to stamp out religion. Their solution was to make Jews into an ethnic group instead of a religious group, by changing their religious traditions to suit the new ideology. That was the impetus behind the "Red Seder," in which the traditions were bent to reflect communist themes of throwing off the shackles of the capitalist bourgeois. Red Seders were promoted in the 1920s and '30s, after which they were deemed successful and then discarded under Stalin, who had his own feelings about Jews as an ethnic group. Read about the Bolshevik Red Seders at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image source: Hagadah far gloybers un apikorsim, 1923)

Francis Zuber was skiing through the trees at Mt. Baker in Washington state when he ran over an inverted snowboard. The board belonged to Ian Steger, who was still attached to it, but buried upside down in a tree well. Tree wells can have up to 20 feet of soft snow, and if you fall into one head first, you can disappear from sight forever. Steger was snowboarding with two friends, but they were ahead of him going downhill, and they might never have found him. When they called him, he couldn't reach his radio.

Zuber didn't know how long Steger had been buried, and frantically went to work finding his head so he could get air. This video contains NSFW language. Steger tells his side of the story and says he assumed he was going to die. He doesn't mention injuries, so we can assume he's okay now. -via Metafilter

The Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice opened nationwide on March 30, 1988. It seems like just yesterday. It flipped the script on the standard haunted house story by making the ghosts (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) good people who become entangled with a humorous but malevolent ghost-for-hire, Beetlejuice, played by Michael Keaton. The producers didn't much like the title Beetlejuice, and they suggested House Ghost to make the plot more clear. Burton offered a counter suggestion: Scared Sheetless. He was astonished that they took him seriously and even considered it. But it remained Beetlejuice, and upon release, quickly made back five times its budget. Meanwhile, young Winona Ryder hoped the film would raise her status at high school, but it only made the bullying worse. You'll find all kinds of trivia tidbits like that in a list at Cracked celebrating the movie's anniversary.