Before the California Golf Rush, San Francisco had a population of about 500 people. There were no roads or bridges, and it took six months for goods to arrive by ship. The federal government had plans to build roads and railways, but those were long-term projects. The news of gold changed everything. In 1849 and 1850, one out of every 100 Americans traveled to California, nearly 200,000 people, dreaming of gold. Most of them didn’t find any, but they put San Francisco on the map. The people who really prospered from the Gold Rush were those who sold goods or services to all those newcomers. And they did it in many ways, some far away from California. Three men raised a million dollars to build a railway across Panama, which cut travel time from America’s East Coast to the West Coast in half.

The three men financing and constructing the Panama Railway knew very little about railroads, which is probably the only reason the railway was built. In the unfriendly Panamanian terrain, the men exhausted their capital in a year and laid only 7 miles of track. But the frenzied gold seekers saved the project.

The hundreds of thousands of people headed to California desired nothing more than speed. In 1851, a group of migrants asked to use the seven-mile track to speed their Panamanian crossing. The railroad owners realized they could profitably run trains on their unfinished railway, and the profits from the new passengers, along with new investment from Wall Street, paid for the $8 million construction project that still awes engineers to this day.

When the engineers hammered the last spike to finish the railway in 1855, the company had already been profitable for years. Soon it became the most highly valued company on the New York Stock Exchange. It took a small cut of the value of all cargo, and people returning from California took $500 million worth of gold on the railway in just 10 years.

Others became rich by providing tools, clothing, food, and entertainment for prospectors and miners. But the biggest fortunes were made by real estate speculators. Read about the fortunes that were made by non-miners during the Gold Rush at Pricenomics. -via Digg  

In the 1960s, the city of Glasgow, Scotland, built new housing projects that were far from the downtown shopping district. With no transportation, the residents bought supplies any way they could. The ice cream trucks that served the neighborhoods began to stock groceries and toilet paper along with ice cream -and eventually drugs and stolen goods, too. In the 1980s, ice cream vendors each had their own territory, and when a new entrepreneur wanted in on the action, it led to violence, while the trucks still played music box tunes and attracted children.   

The ice cream gang wars frequently ended up in Glasgow crime blotters. Even a summer job as a server could put you in danger: On September 9, 1989, The Glasgow Herald reported that while serving ice cream in a van, an 18-year-old was shot in the shoulder and permanently disabled by a 23-year-old ice cream gang member, who felt so guilty he attempted suicide over the incident. In 1986 one ice cream van was robbed by two young men with “a plastic bag of two revolvers in it”; they planned to “damage ice-cream vans in Castlemilk,” a district of Glasgow.

By 1984, the violence had graduated to murder. Ice cream man Andrew “Batboy” Doyle infringed on someone else’s territory, and allegedly refused to back away or sell merchandise for the dominant gang’s vans. Another van company began intimidation tactics against Doyle. When the standard glass-breaking and threats didn’t drive him away, they started a fire at his house that ended in the deaths of Doyle and five members of his family, including an infant.

A police crackdown led to arrests, falsified confessions, prison escape, and even hunger strikes. Read about the Glasgow Ice Cream Wars at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Andy Mitchell)

Take a step back in time and watch how drop candy was made in the late 19th century. First, we are introduced to an old drop candy machine that has been restored. The recipe is also a very old one, with a flavor called nectar that we don’t see in stores anymore.

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Lofty Pursuits shows us how the candy is manufactured and why they call it drop candy. This is just plain cool. -via Digg

A photo posted by Sarah Andersen (@sarahandersencomics) on May 11, 2016 at 7:32am PDT

All good things must come to an end. Even if you’re on the decade plan, eventually you either graduate from college or permanently discontinue. And as much as we’d like to go back to those relatively carefree days, life will never be that carefree again. But if you’re going to dream, you may as well dream of going back to kindergarten, when life was so much more carefree than you realized when you were five. This is the latest comic from Sarah Andersen, who graduated two years ago.

Europe was devastated by World War II, and recovery afterward was slow. Journalist and staunch anti-communist Drew Pearson noticed how grateful the French were for food brought in by the Russians. He knew America could do better, and launched a campaign to send relief supplies to France. Americans responded by shipping 700 boxcars to France on what was called the Friendship Train in 1947. Citizens across the country had donated food, fuel, clothing, and more to fill the cars.  

The following year, Andre Picard, a French railroad worker and war veteran suggested that France reciprocate by sending a gratitude train filled with gifts and mementos from his countrymen. Much of 1948 was spent collecting gifts from individual citizens. They ranged from art, wine, needlework, local specialties, furniture, books, homemade toys and children’s drawings, including a jeweled Legion of Honor medal that reportedly belonged to Napoleon. All in all, over 52,000 gifts were collected. These were crammed into 49 railroad cars, meant to be divided amongst the 48 American states with the remaining car to be shared by Washington D.C and Hawaii. Each boxcar was decorated with a painted 'Gratitude Train' ribbon and with 40 coat-of-arms representing the provinces of France.

A ship arrived in New York on February 3, 1949, with “MERCI AMERICA” painted on its side. Railway companies delivered the cars to each designated state, where grand receptions welcomed them. Forty-three of the cars still exist on display in the states. Read the story of the Merci Train and see pictures of the cars at Amusing Planet.  -via the Presurfer

Since Detroit is short of funding for city services, a group of volunteers called the Detroit Mower Gang has been taking care of trimming the grass at city parks and playgrounds. Last Wednesday, they staged a competition they called the Blindfold Mowing Olympics. Each mower vied to see who could cut the straightest line while mowing through overgrown Hammerberg Field without being able to see. The competitors were astonished at how crooked their completed lines were. Two of them even crossed each other’s paths, but luckily not at the same time.

“Safer than a Blindfold Weed Whacker Competition,” said Stephen Cook of Detroit.

Did we mention the drinking commenced after the mowing was done?

Jim Coffman was declared the winner with a crooked line, just not as crooked as the others. Then the entire field was mowed, leaving ten acres that children can now play on. -via Fark

(Image credit: Detroit Mower Gang at Facebook)

A goose came up to a police car in Cincinnati, Ohio, and started tapping at the door with her beak. Sergeant James Givens and Specialist Cecilia Charron got out and saw the goose walking away, but the goose turned to look at them, so they followed her. The goose led them to a gosling that had become tangled in a string that was tied to a Mothers Day balloon among the litter. The officers called the SPCA, but it would be a while before they could come. So Charon took matters into her own hands and untangled the baby bird while Givens recorded the incident on his phone. The mother goose stood by patiently until the gosling was freed. That was unusual, as Canada geese are normally aggressive around humans, even when they don’t have goslings to protect.  -via Arbroath

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Field Trip is the newest animated adventure by Simon Tofield! You can take the title literally. Simon’s Cat is in a field, which is quite overgrown. It’s full of hiding places and fascinating moving creatures! But he’s a house cat, and not altogether used to such things. -via Tastefully Offensive

Sean took a video of the security line at Midway airport in Chicago yesterday. He was trying to find the end of the line so he could get in it. The fact that it takes two minutes just to get to the end of the line is telling. But the lines weren’t any better at O’Hare.

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The comments at reddit are full of TSA horror stories, and speculation on the reasons for the recent longer lines. If you're flying anywhere this weekend, be sure to get to the airport early, or there's a fairly good chance you might miss your flight.

How a bizarre 1970s black comedy turned the soap opera inside out.

Mary Hartman was mopping her kitchen floor, staring intently at the TV, when outside, sirens began to wail. Her neighbor Loretta barged through the door with terrible news: The family around the corner—along with their two pet goats and eight chickens—had been murdered. And that’s just the beginning of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, one of the most inventive and funny—yes, funny—television programs to grace the small screen.

The short-lived ’70s sitcom is remembered as a soap opera parody. But it was more than that: It was a sardonic take on modern life. The titular character, a sexually unfulfilled blue-collar suburban housewife from Fernwood, Ohio, played by Louise Lasser, is consumed by television, to the point of being numb to the world. She swallows advertising as wholesale truth, firmly believing TV commercials are there to improve her life. She’s so focused on finding the right homemaking products that when her neighbors are shot and killed, Mary is preoccupied instead with the “waxy yellow buildup” on her kitchen floor.

The show is populated with equally peculiar characters—Mary’s mother talks to plants, while her grandfather is a serial flasher. Her neighbor Loretta is a God-obsessed country-western singer. And the storylines are typical soap opera tropes—adultery, murder, intrigue—dressed in oddball black humor: At one point, a high school basketball coach drowns in a bowl of chicken soup; an 8-year-old evangelist is electrocuted when a television wire falls into the bathtub. The line between funny and dark is cheerfully blurry.

And at a time when television was in practically every home, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was doing something revolutionary: It was using television to criticize the medium itself.

These are the stories of the royal armpits and other reasons we should be thankful they don't make history books scratch 'n' sniff.

Tycho Brahe was arguably one of the luckiest men in history. The 16th-century astronomer famously lost his nose in a duel during an argument over a math equation. Which, admittedly, can’t have been comfortable. On the other hand, Tycho wore a brass nose for the rest of his life, which meant he would have had more difficulty smelling. And that must have been a blessing, because the past was a putrid place. 

The problem reached all the way to the top: There’s a long history of foul-smelling royals. Queen Elizabeth I proudly declared that she took a bath “once a month, whether she needed to or not.” Her father, King Henry VIII, was even smellier. Later in life, the overweight monarch had a festering wound on his leg that you could smell from three rooms away. The lesion—which some say he got from wearing a too-tight garter—was made worse by the royal doctors. They believed the sore needed to run in order to heal, so they tied it open with string and sprinkled in gold pellets to keep it infected (and putrescent).

Over in France, Louis XIV was famous for his halitosis. (His mistress Madame de Montespan doused herself in heavy plumes of perfume to thwart the smell.) Meanwhile, his predecessor, Louis XIII, proclaimed, “I take after my father. I smell of armpits.”

Dr. Himanshu Bansal and a couple of bioscience companies have received approval in India for a clinical trial in which 20 brain dead patients will be treated in an attempt to bring them back to life. The Reanima Project proposes to use stem cells, peptides, and nerve stimulation to promote brain healing and/or regeneration. This experiment is disturbing to bioethicists for several reasons. First is the murky definition of “brain dead,” and the second is the possibility of success. What could possibly go wrong? Well, the restored brain may or may not be the same person.

Personal identity is generally assumed to involve some form of continuity. For someone to survive, we are generally discontent with mere bodily survival, there has to be a person with some psychological continuity, too. Exactly what kind of continuity is often glossed over in standard philosophical considerations about personal identity since these are more often concerned with the metaphysics of what is going on than the messy issues of radical personality change or brain damage.

Popular Science looks at the many possible outcomes if the trial is successful. The odds of success are long, but “success” might not even be an improvement for the patient. Or the rest of us. -via mental_floss

We’ve examined filmmaking enough to know that editing can make or break a movie. And you can totally change a movie by re-editing the scenes to put shots in different order or length or prominence. It takes real skill to know what will work best.

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Tony Zhou (previously at Neatorama) looks at the process of film editing decisions in the latest installment of his Every Frame a Painting series. It has a lot of very familiar movies as examples. -via Metafilter

Burger Fiction gives us a supercut of birds in movies. While it’s titled "The Greatest Birds in Movies Ever," it is more accurate to say almost all birds in movies, since the compilation includes Mars Attacks, Howard the Duck, and Birdemic (but not the birds in Dumbo, The Three Caballeros, and Song of the South, which is fine). It also stretches the definition of “bird” by including a couple of people acting like birds and toy birds.  

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Still, there are a lot of fine feathered friends here. And plenty of evidence of our 21st-century obsession with penguins. -via Tastefully Offensive

Chris at Lunarbaboon is employing a trick akin to the flashy thing they used in the movie Men in Black to erase memories. That’s a fantasy we all have, because what parent hasn’t realized a little too late that they’ve said exactly the wrong thing to our kids? It would be nice to get an immediate do-over.