We are well aware that rabbits can be bloodthirsty savages when it comes to heads of states, like the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog and the rabbit that attacked the US president in 1979. Another such incident reportedly happened in 1807 when Napoleon Bonaparte, then the Emperor of France, went to war with a horde of a thousand rabbits.

It was supposed to be a hunt, organized by the Prince of Neuchâtel, Alexandre Berthier, on a plot of land Berthier owned in Paris. To make sure the hunt was a success, Berthier arranged for around a thousand rabbits to be brought to the hunt on that day. But when the rabbits were released, they didn't scatter to avoid the party of men shooting at them. Instead, they charged! The men went into battle mode to protect Napoleon and rebuffed the rabbits, but after a while, the rabbits regrouped and charged again. This time, they swarmed onto the emperor himself!

While Napoleon escaped with his life, as well as the rest of the hunting party, they lost the battle. The red-faced Berthier was the subject of an investigation over the incident, which yielded a perfectly logical explanation for the rabbits' behavior. Read the whole story plus the aftermath at Just History Posts. It's a pretty good story, and there's a chance that it might even be true. -via Strange Company 

Kylo Ren chases a fighter from the Resistance into the woods to finish him off- with plastic darts. If the characters in Star Wars fought each other with Nerf guns, there wouldn't be nearly as many deaths. Not that it matters; they all come back sooner or later anyway. But I had no idea that Nerf made lightsabers. They do. Although in this encounter, it's hard to tell which is the business end.

This video from Nukazooka is a throwback to the days when friends got together to cosplay and have lightsaber battles with the excuse that they were making a Star Wars fan film. No budget was necessary, and we had Sweded Star Wars scenes hitting the internet every day. It was fun. -via Geeks Are Sexy

A long, winding journey to find out why companies treat their chicken broth recipes like state secrets https://t.co/A96nskCVgi

— Eater (@Eater) January 29, 2023

When people talk about trying to avoid ultra-processed foods, I tell them to check the ingredients and buy products with the shortest list. That turns out to be not all that helpful. Noah Galuten wondered why cans of chicken broth from the grocery store taste so different from his mother's homemade broth. Canned broth has no gelatin, very little fat and protein, and comes close to the legal limit of 135 parts water to one part chicken. Galuten found the main listed ingredient in chicken broth is "chicken broth," which tells us nothing. How is it made on an industrial scale? He found that canned broth is made from water and chicken broth concentrate, but when he tried to find out where that concentrate came from, he found himself going down a rabbit hole filled with brick walls.

My quest to find the answer started simply enough, and in a state of what was, in retrospect, blissful ignorance. I had no intimation of what was to come: the billion-dollar multinational flavor and fragrance companies, the “spray-dried” broth, the “clean label protein solutions,” the “kitchen-like ingredients,” and the corporate dream of a “fully sustainable chicken stream.” A whole new world, at once surreal, banal, and depressingly inevitable, was hidden in the watery depths of store-bought chicken stock, just waiting for me to jump in.

Galutin found nothing illegal going on, but he brings us a thought-provoking story of how chicken broth is processed for our convenience and food manufacturers' profits. What's even more depressing is that broth is just one product in a world of processed foods we eat every day. -via Damn Interesting

If you've been following Neatorama for years, you can go ahead and guess that this list will contain Post-it Notes, microwave cooking, penicillin, and Viagra. But this video covers 13 different accidental discoveries, and Viagra is not among them (but you can read that story here). I might argue with the inclusion of Nutella, which doesn't seem to have been an accident at all, but it's still an interesting story. They all are! History classes in school have a hard time covering just the important foundational stories they need to go over, so the history of everyday products rarely gets a mention, no matter how good the story is. That's what the Weird History channel is for.  -via Digg

Last month, we linked to a ranking of Nicolas Cage's best nine movies over at Pop Culturista to celebrate the actor's birthday. While any such list is an invitation to argue because it's so subjective, that list mainly suffers from being short. Cage has done more than 100 movies, so why not rank the top 100? The Cage Gauge does just that. Note at the top of the page that the list comes in three links. This list includes feature films, direct-to-video movies, animation, documentaries, and at least one TV pilot.

The Cage Gauge is an ongoing project by Luke Buckmaster. Every time a new Nicolas Cage movie comes out, the list is adjusted, and the bottom movie may fall off the top 100. So when Renfield opens on April 14, Left Behind will probably disappear from the list. We don't know what movie disappeared yesterday.

A new Nicolas Cage movie - The Old Way - means an update to THE CAGE GAUGE: the only world's only comprehensive, up-to-date ranked list of every Cage movie. From yours truly https://t.co/mMKolLwPsf

— Dr Luke Buckmaster (@lukebuckmaster) February 1, 2023

Buckmaster explains how he ranks the movies here. For example, Fast Times at Ridgemont High wasn't left off the list because it was bad, but rather because Cage's role was so small. With the exception of a couple of agreed-upon masterpieces, the ranking is very different from the one we posted for Cage's birthday. -via Metafilter

Felix Colgrave (previously at Neatorama) brings us a surreal and rather colorful animated video with a delightful retro vibe. This cartoon starts out following a shipment of discarded toy parts to the bottom of the ocean. You assume it's some kind of an allegory for microplastic pollution. But they start to take on a life of their own, and self-assemble into weirder and weirder creatures. You then realize this is an experimental animation, and you may as well enjoy it for what it is. Colgrave tells us this is an "exploration of ocean plastic, avatars and adaptive bottom feeders. The musical!" It was inspired by a collection of toy parts belonging to his two-year-old son that he calls donks. Thrown together, they make some pretty interesting toys.

At the end of the credits, he acknowledges the Wurundjeri and the Boonwurrung people who once ruled the part of Australia where Colgrave lives. -via reddit

Groundhog Day, February 2, is supposedly the day that a groundhog will peek outside of its burrow to see if winter is over yet. They say that if the groundhog sees its shadow, it will be frightened and run back to the burrow, and we'll have six more weeks of winter. If it doesn't see its shadow and stays out, that means spring is on its way... in about six weeks. You see, February second is halfway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. The date is akin to Imbolc, the pagan holiday celebrated for just that reason. Imbolc is February first this year. February second is also Candlemas, a Christian feast day marking 40 days after Christmas.

Falling as it does in the middle of our calendar winter, there's no mystery as to why people wanted some sign of spring returning, but why a groundhog? It wasn't always so. Old Celtic poetry speaks of a snake coming out of its hole. In other parts of Europe, a bear, hedgehog, or badger, all being animals that hibernate, were traditionally used as weather forecasters. When Europeans immigrated to America, they found that the groundhog was the most common hibernating animal around, so Groundhog Day it became.  

For a long time, the holiday was just a piece of folklore, and anyone who looked for a groundhog considered it a local event, or just a tale to pass along to children. But Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, keeps a groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil who has been very publicly predicting weather every year since 1887! Phil is ceremoniously awakened every February second to give his opinion on the coming spring to crowds of thousands who make the pilgrimage to the town's Groundhog Day festival. Punxsutawney Phil is the most famous groundhog, but other towns have their own "official" groundhogs as well. Phil is not expected to predict weather conditions outside of Pennsylvania. Even so, his record of accuracy is only around 39%. You can't really blame him. He's just a rodent and he is a little groggy after sleeping for a couple of months. As in the early days of the tradition, an early spring is an exercise in wishful thinking.  

For the past 30 years, Groundhog Day also means the movie. In Groundhog Day, weatherman Phil Connors, played by Bill Murray, visits Punxsutawney for the Groundhog Day festival and becomes stuck in a time loop. He is forced to repeat February second over and over until he gets it right. Many dictionaries now have two definitions for Groundhog Day. The first is the holiday, and the second is a metaphor for being stuck in an endless time loop where every day is the same, inspired by the movie. Watching the film has become a tradition for February the 2nd. For years, some movie channels would show the movie over and over all day long, but in the age of streaming, you can watch it as many or as few times as you like. To celebrate the movie's 30th anniversary, a remastered version of Groundhog Day is being re-released to select theaters this month.

Have a happy Groundhog Day!

(Image credit: Cephas)

If you ever wondered what Lady Gaga would sound like performing in Texas neary 100 years ago, then you are probably pretty unique in your fantasies. Dustin Ballard, better known as YouTuber There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) wondered exactly this, and we know how crazy he is. Ballard remixed her song "Poker Face" with fiddle and steel guitar into a 1940s-style Western swing tune. Whether it sounds good to you depends on your taste in music, but you can't argue with a video featuring vintage poker games from movies where everyone is cheating. The editing is superb. -via Laughing Squid

The website Wonders of Street View is a collection of the best images in Google Street View, whether they are funny, interesting, surprising, odd, beautiful, artful, historic, or superlative. It's not always streets anymore. Street View goes indoors, underwater, into the woods, off road, and into outer space. You might be treated to a glitch, or you might find yourself witnessing episodes of the human condition. Stay with it long enough, and you'll likely see places you've been to. You'll no doubt see places that you want to find out more about, and places that you'll never go.

Just be aware, this is one of those sites that will make your day disappear. But if you want to see any of these places again, you better grab a link from the "share" button at the bottom right, because there is no navigation, just a "random" button to take you somewhere else. -via Metafilter

Slime molds are exceedingly weird. They are even weirder when explained by Ze Frank in a True Facts video. Yeah, the name is awful, and its more descriptive than accurate. Slime molds are more closely related to amoebas than they are to fungi. Slime molds can harness a lot of simple abilities to act like they have brains, which they don't. But they can get around better than some animals that have brains. For some reason I had never learned that slime molds are a single cell. How do they grow so big? Well, according to Ze, they may be one cell, but they have many nuclei, which is another way slime molds are exceedingly weird. This video has plenty of humor without being as prurient as some of his other recent videos. It also has a skippable one-minute ad in the middle.

How long can you keep a cake? Apparently forever, as some of these cakes show us. A better question would be how long can you keep a cake and it still be good to eat? We may never know, since no one wants to taste test a historic artifact. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.

It's a tradition for the top layer of a wedding cake to be eaten for a first anniversary (or the first child's christening in the UK), but those cakes are frozen, and I haven't heard anyone bragging about how good it was. Believe it or not, there are pieces of Queen Victoria's wedding cake that still exist, keepsakes of the 1840 ceremony. We make jokes about the longevity of a Christmas fruitcake, which are borne out by one family that has kept Grandma's last fruitcake for 137 years. But those cakes have nothing on some funerary cakes buried with the dead and unearthed by archaeologists. The oldest cake in the world is more than 4000 years old, buried for the use of a deceased Egyptian king (who obviously never used it) and excavated more than 100 years ago. Check out a list of cakes that have been kept for a long, long time at Messy Nessy Chic.     

Believe it or not, LEGO blocks weren't the first toy that consisted of small interlocking plastic building blocks. That was Kiddicraft blocks, patented by British toymaker Hilary Page in 1947. Over in Denmark, toymaker Ole Kirk Christiansen switched from wood to plastic toys and started making similar bricks in 1949. You might think that a legal war would have ensued, but Page died in 1957, reportedly unaware of the Danish toy, and Christiansen died in 1958. However, the most important part of the story is the patent that Christiansen's son Godtfred filed in January of 1958 that made LEGO blocks a better product.

In the video above, Phil Edwards explains the crucial design innovation that made LEGO the better toy. That's the first four minutes. The rest of the video is about the marketing juggernaut that brought LEGO bricks to the world. 

You have to wonder if any of the original Kiddicraft blocks are still around, and whether they are valuable. I couldn't find any for sale online, but I did find a 3D printing pattern. -via Digg  

The leading causes of death in the US are, as always, heart disease and cancer. COVID-19 is third. Accidental death is scarier, because that could happen at any age. People are afraid of sharks and plane crashes, but the most likely accidental death is traffic accidents. After all, we get in our cars almost every day, but fly only occasionally and rarely see a shark. Visual Capitalist took data from the National Safety Council to compile your lifetime odds of dying by the most common accidental causes. There are other factors that feed into these odds, like your age. Drowning is the leading cause of accidental death for children ages one to four. Accidental firearm discharge makes up only 1% of gun deaths; the rest are suicide and homicide. Remember, the stats are for the US only. Read more on the statistics pertaining to accidental deaths at Visual Capitalist. Anything you find hard to read on the graphic will be in text there. -via Boing Boing

Considering the way we've been treating our planet, testing air quality is crucial. That doesn't mean just testing for pollutants, but also the basic components of the atmosphere that can change over time. At Kennaook/Cape Grim in Australia, the cleanest air in the world blows in from the Southern Ocean. The Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station is constantly testing this air, but they also keep samples in the Cape Grim Air Archive. Every few months a new tank is added to the collection. Sure, we have air testing results for the last 50 years, but what if, sometime in the future, we need to test for something we never tested before? The archive means this historic air will be available for new tests. Tom Scott gives us a look at the archives and explains how these samples are bottled, stored, and used.

Tom also added a link at the video page to give us some background on Cape Grim, particularly the massacre of 1828. It is indeed grim.

Neuroscientists, and people in general, have noticed a disturbing phenomena in that many folks have trouble recalling what they did during the pandemic. It's not widespread amnesia, but individual, day-to-day things like who came to Christmas dinner last year or whether you took your books back to the library. It can't be blamed on COVID-19 specifically, because this lack of memory can occur before infection and in people who never caught the disease.

Speculation from brain researchers tells us that two factors will do this: monotony and stress. Many people went home and stayed there, working online, taking classes from home, or supervising children 24/7 (or all three). Long-term memories are formed by the outlines of how different an event is from life around it. When every day is the same, it's difficult to form new memories. Then there was the stress of lifestyle changes, new safety protocols, social upheavals, and fear of the disease. This reminds me of what's colloquially known as "mommy brain" or "widow brain," in which focusing on new priorities makes previously-important parts of your life fade into oblivion.

Read about the factors that may contribute to the impairment of making new memories during the pandemic, whether it's just inconsequential forgetting or full-blown brain fog, at the Walrus. -via Damn Interesting