“Young Goodman Brown” is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, about a Puritan man who dabbles with the concept of evil -the Dark Side, if you will. I wasn’t familiar with the story, so I got the short version from Wikipedia. Kate Beaton at Hark! A Vagrant tackles the story with humor in a series of eight strips. If this piqued my curiosity, wouldn’t it do the same for students who are facing required reading? Some teachers are already using Beaton’s work in that way. She says,

While on book tour, I visited Salem and got to see the House of Seven Gables! So I am pumped on Hawthorne. How many people have had to read this and suffer essays over the pink ribbons and etc? I used to think that for literature to be REAL it pretty well had to be chock-full of allegory and symbols. But for real, I do love it when my comics get used in a classroom setting, and I often hear from teachers who do that to warm the class up to a topic. That's great! I should ask for a list of books to cover for this reason. Feel free to email, teachers!

See the rest of the Young Goodman Brown strips at Beaton’s website.

Flash flooding in Texas this morning caught Kerry Packer off guard. His car was swept down a creek! He escaped the car as it filled with water, and climbed a tree. Packer also got video footage of the incident, which he sent to his wife, who sent it to the local TV station, KVUE. The TV station called Packer during the noon newscast for a live interview about his experience. The news anchors did not know that Packer was still in the tree!

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KVUE sent reporters down to Rinard Creek, but they couldn’t get close to Packer because the water was still too deep. They recorded his eventual rescue by helicopter. Packer is said to be fine now. -via reddit

Homestar Runner is back with a Halloween special! Strong Bad wants to open a haunted house with new and different features that instill a more modern sort of dread. Welcome to St. Cadaverstump’s totally not just an old furniture warehouse Mortuary!

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Pay close attention to the Halloween costumes the regulars wear for this. When it says “end,” it’s not the end. When the credits run, that’s not the end, either.  -via Metafilter

German school children perform “Die Roboter” (The Robots) by Kraftwerk. This awesome project looks like it was a lot of fun! Some of the comments at YouTube, translated from German, praise the project for incorporating German music history into the lower grades. Music history? That can make you feel really old.

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You can see the original 1978 video, or the 2013 version at YouTube. -via b3ta

You’ve no doubt seen pictures of webs built by spiders that were given various drugs. We reported on it years ago, and even posted a wonderful video of the spiders in action. But who came up with the idea of giving drugs to spiders in the first place?

In 1948, a zookeeper wanted to observe spiders building webs, so he asked a druggist to give them something to make them build webs during the daylight hours. The idea didn’t work, but it opened the door to a different project. Pharmacologist Dr. Peter N. Witt was intrigued by the idea that spiders would built a different kind of web due to the drugs they ingested. Could this gimmick be made into a drug test? Or even a diagnostic tool?

It appears Witt imagined a world where all police departments and hospitals have a sort of spider lab. When a patient or inmate behaved strangely, that person's blood would be fed to a spider, which would then be left overnight to build a web. In the morning, a careful look at the spider's handiwork would provide answers. "Aha! My webs indicate this inmate over here is a laudanum addict, and this poor patient is suffering from schizoaffective disorder," a chin-scratching lab technician might have said.

"It obviously didn't work that well," Rayor told me. "That wasn't necessarily the end-all-and-be-all in terms of analyzing what kinds of drugs people had taken." Eventually technologies like mass spectrometry made Witt's spidergraph (my word, not his) unnecessary.

What did they learn? That spiders don't like drinking the urine of schizophrenics. Entomologists were not involved in the project, and they have a different view of the experiment. For one thing, spiders don’t react to drugs the same way humans do, and the way they spin their webs depends of a lot of different things, which you can read about at Vice. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: NASA)

Every Halloween, adults are prompted to reminisce about candies we loved that are no longer manufactured. Most of those are gone because of business decisions: either they didn’t sell well or the manufacturer is gone. But there have been candies that disappeared for more interesting reasons, like consumer complaints or even copyright infringement. You might think the Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Chew Bar shown here disappeared because it was in bad taste (or tasted bad), but the real reason is much more horrifying.

It came as little surprise to many when a candy called “Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge Chew Bars” was recalled in 2011 for being, yes, toxic. Tests by the California Department of Public Health indicated that many of the bars had "elevated levels of lead"–approximately .24 parts per million, more than double the standard US FDA “tolerance” of .1 parts per million. Of course, lead poisoning can be fatal, especially in pregnant women and children under six years old.

As for the culprit, Indianapolis’ Candy Dynamics sold the candy (they are still in business), but it was manufactured in Pakistan, a country notorious for having lax safety and health standards. Luckily, no one reported becoming sick from the candy. The recall was self-imposed, out of what Candy Dynamics called "an abundance of caution."

Read the stories behind five other candy disappearances in a list at Atlas Obscura. 

When you ask psychologists, biologists, and sexuality experts whether humans are meant to be monogamous, the first thing they will come back with is, What do you mean by “meant to be”? Society, culture, and religion affect what we do as much as evolution and biology. So they were asked if monogamy is "natural" for humans. Author and educational consultant Dr. Elisabeth Sheff begins with the facts that most of the experts quoted agree upon.

I'm not sure if there is any intention behind it, but monogamy certainly is not "natural" in that it does not seem to be effortless for anyone. Things that are "natural" for people—like breathing, blinking, and wanting to protect our children—do not need nearly so many social strictures to keep them in place. Monogamy, or any form of sexual exclusivity, however, has many rules and laws governing it.

Rather than the naturalness of monogamy, the fact that cultures around the world and across time have created hundreds or thousands of protocols and punishments to patrol and enforce sexual exclusivity (especially for women) indicates that it is socially constructed and not something humans will do "naturally" without external intervention. If humans didn't crave a variety of sexual experiences with new partners, then cultures would not have to work so hard to keep people from having sex with someone who is not their spouse.

While the experts agree about humanity’s natural urges, some go on to say that monogamy, while unnatural, is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it unachievable for individuals. However, it is not universally enforceable. People have tried so many other types of relationships: polygamy, serial monogamy, public fidelity with private infidelity, etc. and they all have their drawbacks. So human beings will continue to struggle with the desire for a loyal lifelong soulmate vs. the desire for sexual variety. Read what five different experts have to say on the subject at Hopes and Fears. -via Digg  

Chris Poole wanted to take pictures of his cats Cole and Marmalade in their Halloween costumes. Cole is Batcat and Marmalade is Supermarm. He even made an elaborate backdrop for the pictures. But cats don’t like to cooperate with anything a human comes up with. If you get them to look at the camera, they immediately jump at it. If you distract their attention away from the camera, all you see is the rear of the cat. So it goes.

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Cats do much better in video form, where you can watch their movements ranging from graceful to disgraceful to hilarious. -via Tastefully Offensive  

See also: more from Cole and Marmalade.

Some child turned seven years old and really wanted a Star Wars cake. The bakery decided to use all their science fiction decorations and hope they worked. If you don’t have a Millennium Falcon, the Enterprise will just have to do. I got a laugh out of this one, but it’s just one of eight Star Wars cakes singled out for their ugliness, oddness, or just plain wrongness at Cake Wrecks.

Police in Russia pulled over a speeding hearse that was supposed to be carrying a corpse to a funeral in Khabarovsk. The vehicle had signs attached to its windshield: one said “funeral,” while the other had a portrait of the deceased. However, a search found there was no body in the coffin. Instead, they found 1100 pounds of canned caviar -worth about $156,000! The driver and another person in the hearse were arrested, both denying they knew anything about the smuggled caviar.    

The fishing of sturgeon - which are traditionally associated with caviar - is banned in Russia to try to stop a decline in the population. But a study found that in 2010, only 19 out of 244 tonnes of caviar produced in the country were made legally.

The search was captured on a phone video. -via Arbroath

You can fool some of the people all of the time! This guy is obviously suffering from Impostor Syndrome. But that’s okay, because he’s not alone. I get up and start working every morning thinking I have no idea what I’m doing. John McNamee of Pie Comic actually has the answer for those of us who feel this way. When you’re floundering and feeling totally out of your league, take joy in the fact that you’ve got other people fooled into thinking you’re just fine.

It sure beats suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect, in which people are perfectly confident in their abilities because they are too incompetent to know how incompetent they are. Or maybe “suffering” isn’t the right word. They might be the happiest people of all!

The Sacro Bosco in Bomarzo, Italy, is also known as “the Park of Monsters.” It was pretty much an obscure local secret until Salvador Dali discovered it.  

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Dylan Thuras of Atlas Obscura tells us how the bizarre sculpture garden came to be build in the 16th century. Put this one on your bucket list!

Biisuke is a little red ball who lives with his two brothers, Biita and Biigoro, who are also small balls. When two of them are kidnapped, Biisuke has to go on a grand quest to save them.

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This is a tale tale told through a Rube Goldberg contraption, which is impressive even without the story (subtitled in English) and the cute little song that goes with it. From the Japanese kids’ show Pitagora Suitchi (Pythagora Switch). -via The Kid Should See This

Some mysteries linger for years, and the longer they go unsolved, the more likely they never will be solved. People go missing, and are sometimes found, sometimes a body is recovered, and sometimes we never have a clue as to what happened. Some of those people were pretty well-known in life, like New York socialite Dorothy Arnold, who disappeared in 1910.  

On December 12, Dorothy left the house to go shopping for her sister’s “coming out” ball (a phrase with a very different meaning in 1910). She was repeatedly sighted along Fifth Avenue, where she spoke to shopkeepers and exchanged greetings with friends. Then she took a stroll to Central Park, waved goodbye to an acquaintance and was never seen or heard from again.

Predictably, the theories about her fate are too numerous to count. Some think she was murdered in the park, others that she secretly went to an abortion doctor that afternoon and bled to death on the table. It’s been suggested that a possible lover of hers, George Griscom, may have killed her, or she may have been abducted by her own parents after they discovered she was pregnant and forcibly sent abroad to save the family name. But it could be something else entirely. As with many on this list, we’ll probably never know.

That’s just one of ten famous people who were never found that you can read about at Urban Ghosts.

The question is, should you be Cinderella or a Transformer for Halloween? Or maybe a better question is, should you be Cinderella before meeting your fairy godmother, or after? Why not both? Just say, "Bibbity-bobbity-boo!"

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Bumbly Bee is a costume designer and cosplayer. She designed, made, and modeled this award-winning Cinderella transformation. It's downright magical! -via Buzzfeed

(Image credit: Bubbly Bee Cosplays)