The giant fiberglass statues of midcentury American advertising are becoming more and more rare, so it's a treat any time you see one these days. American Giants is a company that finds and restores these iconic statues, but it's not easy. Watch how they take an abandoned, weather-beaten Paul Bunyan statue in two pieces and do a complete refurbishment. They put him back together, patched up the cracks, and filled the holes. They gave him new feet, stronger bones, and a face that could light up a room! The result is stronger and shinier than the original statue, but still very much recognizable as an original Paul Bunyan. While the process is impressive, the before-and-after pictures at the end are amazing. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: nememess)

What is this jumble of letters trying to say? If your first impression was "fart water," you are not alone. That can't be it, but what are those letters at the top all about? Eventually, you figure out that if you start at the second tallest word and read down, it also says free water, which is an attempt at cleverness that ended up just kind of dumb. As signs go, there's a common problem with trying to write a message across divided panels that the eye normally reads within those panels, like the infamous "don't dead open inside" scene in The Walking Dead. Here it not only goes to extremes, but has one unfortunate individual unit that's just sad.

(Image via reddit)  

Some confusing signs offer a challenge to figure out where they went wrong. One sign was made over two panels meant to be read horizontally across both panels. Then a third was tacked on with a different sentence to be read on its own, which confuses the whole message. But then there's this, which is not only nonsense, but you can't even figure out how it went so wrong.  

(Image credit: FreeWillyPete)

Take a look through 50 such signs at Bored Panda and see if you can 1. decipher what they are saying, and 2. figure out how they got that way.

This award-winning animated short walks the line between adorable and terrifying. How do you do that? Simply make it about a cat. Black cats can be sweet as sugar, but they have the reputation of demons from the depths of hell. This is totally undeserved, as Lucy was just acting as cats do. Lucy is a cute black kitten that happens to resemble a void with gold eyes, but like anyone, she can only take so much. This film is from Kate Vaillant of the Ringling College of Art and Design Class of 2022.

This is a dangerous post! Not for any particular reason, but this post has claimed a lot of victims. A four-foot tall bollard in a Walmart parking lot in Auburn, Maine, attracts automobiles into its clutches far more often than probability would predict. They've tried painting it different colors, they've tried changing the traffic flow, but people keep ramming into the bollard. It's already a local legend; and it's beginning to have global notoriety like the infamous 11' 8" bridge in Durham, North Carolina

There's a slideshow at reddit showing 20 of the accidents involving this bollard and the great damage. Why does it keep happening? The Sun-Journal talked to driving instructor Andy Levesque, who said, “People make turns prematurely and cut corners.” That doesn't explain how cars manage to impale themselves on top of the bollard. Who drives fast enough to do that in a parking lot? -via Boing Boing

Warning: this video contains minor explosions, engineer talk, and a certain amount of pain. Maybe a little NSFW language, mostly covered by bleeps.  

Mehdi Sadaghdar of ElectroBOOM (previously at Neatorama) made an electrical device he calls the Photo-BOOM Electro-Pranker 3000. The purpose is to startle passers-by with sound, flashing lights, and explosions. He gets deep into the details of the electrical principles involved in this "ingenius" contraption. But that's not what we are here to see. If you've seen any previous ElectroBOOM videos, you can probably guess that he ends up pranking himself more than anyone else. The last minute of this video is an ad. -via reddit

A clay tablet from ancient Sumer tells quite a story. It is rare that records that old have any name attached to them, and when they do, it's usually royalty. Common people doing common work came and went, leaving no trace of who they were. But Kushim kept track of the barley trade in the city of Uruk, and he put his name on the receipts for shipments, signing them "administrator Kushim." That in itself makes the tablet, dated between 3,400 and 3,000 BC, an important artifact. But once translated, it shows that Kushim wasn't much of an accountant. The barley tallied on the front of the tablet should equal 3,910 bowls (a unit a bit bigger than a gallon). But the total Kushim etched on the back is 3,895 bowls.

Kushim was 15 bowls short. This could be a math error, indicating that he might have been in the wrong job. Or it could mean he was skimming some of the barley for himself. Either way, it's not the only math discrepancy in the ancient tablet, which you can read about at Historic Mysteries. One has to wonder if Kushim would have done anything different if he knew his work would be examined 5,000 years later. -via Strange Company

We know how much fun it is to topple a row of dominoes. What's not so fun is picking them up again, or even worse, stacking them upright again. Could someone design a machine that does that? That would be pretty complicated, because dominoes may fall in exact lines, but they end of on the floor in a jumbled mess. Grant Davis not only made a machine that can reset dominoes even when they misalign, he made it entirely out of LEGO parts! More than 4,000 LEGO pieces, which took him between 300 and 400 hours to conceive, design, and build. It picks up dominoes, stacks them in alignment, and topples them, too. -via Gizmodo

A young girl underwent a DNA test to establish her paternity. The results that came back were so confusing that the science director of the genetic institute in Colombia, Juan Yunis, assumed the sample was contaminated and ordered the test done again. But the results were the same. Some parts of her genome excluded her mother as a parent, while others excluded her assumed father. Further tests found that the child's mother had XY chromosomes in her blood, which indicate a genetic male.

Further research showed that the girl's assumed father was, in fact, her biological father, but only when the mother's DNA was excluded. That drew Yunis' attention to more thoroughly test the mother. The mother had XY chromosomes in her blood and saliva, but her hair and cheek cells had XX chromosomes. Parts of the daughter's genome matched each kind of her mother's mismatched DNA. The daughter had inherited some DNA from her mother which originally belonged to her mother's fraternal twin brother, who was never born. That makes the mother a chimera, the result of an embryo that had absorbed and incorporated cells from a twin who had vanished before anyone knew he had existed. Read the convoluted way this all came about, and how it was found, at Grid. -via Digg

(Image credit: DimitrisSideridis)

After a nice Thanksgiving meal, you may feel like you've eaten too much. But you certainly haven't eaten as much as Charles Domery, and you don't do it every day like he did. Born around 1778, Domery began eating everything in sight when he became a teenager. People who watched him eat were astonished at the amount of food he would put away, and when the "food" ran out, he would eat other things like candles and grass. Domery ate raw meat by the pound, and would also consume dogs, cats, and rats. Once during battle, he tried to consume a man's severed leg before it was taken from him.

Domery served with the Polish army, but since there wasn't enough food, he switched to the French army. Captured by the British, he astonished his guards with his appetite until they were feeding him enough for ten prisoners. He still ate the prison cat. Doctors witnessed Domery's feats of eating, but could offer little help in the early 19th century. Today there are a variety of possible diagnoses for Domery's condition, but 200 years on, it's hard to know which one caused his excessive hunger. Read about the man who was known as "The Glutton" at Amusing Planet.

A poll taken by YouGov tells us some of what we already know: Americans' favorite pie for Thanksgiving is pumpkin pie (followed by pecan, apple, and sweet potato). However, the devil is in the details. If you asked people about their favorite pie for the Fourth of July, few would select pumpkin. It's a traditional thing. The results showed that most people would enjoy any of the top-ranked Thanksgiving pies. In fact, 82% of Americans would really like an apple pie for Thanksgiving. Apple may not be their favorite overall, but it is a good pie to the most people.

I am an outlier. I used to make mincemeat pie for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, since mincemeat is sometimes available early enough. However, since I always ended up eating the whole thing myself, I am now limiting it to Christmas only. No one needs to eat two whole pies by themselves in a month's time. Mincemeat didn't even show up in the "other" category. Maybe it would be more popular if we renamed it cinnamon pie. -via Digg

This is your formal invitation to comment with a video of you singing the first two lines *as written,* good luck! pic.twitter.com/egWpIZyT4b

— Threatening Music Notation (@ThreatNotation) November 21, 2022

You know the song, I know the song, even little schoolchildren know the song "Let It Snow." But just pretend for a moment that you've never heard it before, and you can read musical notation. How would you sing this song? If you don't read music, there are plenty of people who do, and this is what the above sounds like when sung as written.

Haha wonderful, I was trying so hard and my brain just wouldn’t let me screw it up as bad as it was written 😂

— Alex Spencer (@AlexAurlom) November 21, 2022

Oh my ears! Her singing is wonderful, but the rhythm of the song is confounding. The Twitter thread has at least a dozen singers trying to follow the notation. This is from the Twitter account Threatening Music Notation, which deserves a good read.  -via Metafilter

Around twenty years ago, Jason Cowler released a small goldfish into the fishery he owned in Champagne, France. He thought it would be something different for his customers to fish for. The fish grew to be quite large, and was nicknamed "The Carrot" after some rare sightings over the years. Now one of those customers has finally caught the fish at the BlueWater Lakes fishery. British angler Andy Hackett needed 25 minutes to reel the goldfish in, which was weighed at 67 pounds and four ounces! That is almost twice as heavy as the biggest goldfish ever caught previously.

The Carrot is a hybrid goldfish, descended from both leather carp and koi carp. Hackett was happy to pose for pictures with his huge catch. Otherwise, who would believe it? After the weighing and the pictures, the Carrot was released back into the lake. Maybe he'll grow larger before someone else catches him.  -Thanks WTM!

The lifestyles of the rich and famous sometimes include the ability to find and keep a dangerous wild animal as a pet. Sometimes these animals were more of a private zoo resident than a house pet, like the lions and elephants traded among royal families as gifts and tributes. But there have been plenty of folks who like to flaunt that they can afford to hire a handler and buy tons of raw meat for a creature that the rest of us can't even get near.

The animals include bears, venomous snakes, moose, and big cats of all kinds. Some of the celebrities in a pictofacts list of the 15 most extreme celebrity pets at Cracked are still around. We don't know whether their pets are.

A supernova is when a star explodes. If our sun were to go supernova, we wouldn't know what hit us. That's not going to happen in your lifetime. But what about a star outside our solar system? That's been happening since the early days of the universe. Supernova explosions are usually too far away to affect earth much, although they can leave evidence we find millions of years later. Kurzgesagt gives us various scenarios for stars at difference distances from Earth, and what would happen if they exploded into a supernova. As the theorectical distances get closer, the process of a star dying is pretty complicated for relatively nearby planets. There is a distance that's a "sweet spot" that will rain destruction on Earth over the course of centuries, leading to a future dystopia. Closer than that, well, that's it. The last two minutes of this video is an ad.

So you majored in physics and then got a graduate degree in fluid dynamics. What good does that do for the world? The next time someone asks, you can point them to the research that is leading us to a splashless urinal. Mechanical engineer Zhao Pan and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Canada (how appropriate) have designed a urinal that employs the same geometry as a nautilus shell, with a round inner surface that ensures a shallow angle to minimize splashing. The tall fixture also accommodates people of various heights. It is the urinal second from the right in the above image.

The team presented their urinal to attendees of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting in Indianapolis today. If the meeting wraps up with a party featuring liberal libations, they may get a real-world beta test. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: M. Shi and Z. Pan/University of Waterloo)