While winter is defined by temperature, and summer is defined by activities, autumn means smells and tastes. It’s harvest season, after all, and spices are added to preserve food for winter. That means great recipes! Even alcoholic beverages can have a taste of autumn when you use ingredients like cinnamon, pumpkin, cranberries, ginger, cloves, caramel, and lots of apple cider! And considering the holiday parties coming up the rest of the year, you might want to snag some tasty cocktail recipes from a big list at Buzzfeed. Shown here is caramel apple sangria, from A Night Owl. A toast to autumn!

Twenty years ago, it was rare to run into an adult who hadn’t seen Star Wars. Now, 40 years on, there have been two generations come of age since George Lucas released his space fantasy, and some folks -and their parents- find that watching six movies to catch up is a bit of a hassle. Charley Locke knew some things about the story, or thought he did, without ever seeing the movies. Now he’s finally watched Star Wars, or as they call it these days, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. And he has some revelations to share.

• “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for”—a quote that I have heard for years—IS A LIE. Those were the droids they were looking for! (The greatest trick Obi-Wan Kenobi ever pulled was convincing the stormtroopers they didn’t exist…)

Lingering Questions:

• Will Leia and Han Solo have a romance? She deserves so much better than his sexist bravado: I hope she’s always as dismissive as when she orders him “Into the trash, Flyboy!” Also, I know Luke has his little crush, but I can’t imagine anything happening between them besides that lovely kiss on the cheek. (I am not going to look up what happens ahead of time, even if it makes me look like an idiot to the whole internet, so don’t ruin this for me in the comments, please.)

• If Darth Vader isn’t in charge of the Galactic forces, who does he report to?

His reactions to the experience are a hoot, but it may also make you feel old. Locke delights in the “hokey visual effects” that astounded us in 1977. Read his account of the movie at Wired. Locke will watch the other five movies in order of release, one per week, and report his reactions to each of them. -via Digg

Matthew Buchinger was born in Germany in 1674 with no hands or feet and only parts of his arms and legs, but he did not grow up as an invalid. Instead, he learned to walk, perform everyday tasks, and even fashioned his own devices to facilitate writing and other skills. Buchinger became an accomplished artist, calligrapher, magician, and musician. In 1716, he went to to England to meet the king, and began performing for audiences.  

At the time, England had a fierce appetite for "monsters," with dwarves and limbless attractions of all varieties drawing crowds. Buchinger appeared in multiple places in the London area and promised to demonstrate his mastery of 13 unique skills for one shilling per attendee. In addition to magic, he could deal cards and play dice; load and shoot a firearm; and play instruments, often with the addition of a device that modified it for his needs. Such adaptation was part of Buchinger’s appeal: his mind was innovative, and his physical limitations were circumvented by his intellect.

England was charmed: the shows were popular and there was even demand for him to make house calls for private performances.

Buchinger supplemented his performing income by selling artworks that included ships in bottles. Meanwhile, he married four times and fathered a slew of children. Read about his amazing life and see some of those artworks at mental_floss.

Body parts can go missing after death. Here are some of them, from the new book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids.

ST. NICHOLAS’S BONES

The real Saint Nick (who lived in ancient Greece and had a penchant for secretly giving gifts) was buried in the town of Myra, now a part of Turkey. In 1087, authorities in Bari, a rival town in Italy, hired pirates to steal the saint’s bones. The pirates managed to make off with about half of them, which are still stored in Bari. The rest of the bones were stolen by Venetian sailors ten years later during the First Crusade and deposited in a church there. In 2009 Turkey demanded the bones back from Italy; it’s still waiting.

NAPOLEON’S PENIS

An intimate relationship can be really, really intimate in ways you don’t foresee. That’s not always a pleasant thing, but it strangely tends to bring two people closer together. I’m just glad they didn’t illustrate any zit-popping. This is the latest from Chaos Life.

Avery is out fishing with her dad with her pink Barbie fishing pole. Not only does she catch a fish, it’s a 5-pound, 20 inch bass! And she did it all by herself.

(YouTube link)

Both father and daughter will remember this catch for the rest of their lives.  -via reddit

People across most of North America and Europe, a large part of Africa, and all of South America will be able to follow the total lunar eclipse this Sunday night and Monday morning. The earth will move directly between the sun and the moon, throwing a shadow across the moon. The eclipse will start at 9:07 PM for those living in the Eastern time zone, and reached full eclipse at 10:11. The moon will begin to emerge again at 11:23 Eastern and the shadow will be gone at 12:27 AM.

When the Moon is fully eclipsed it usually turns red, though sometimes the effect is more subtle than other times. This is because from the Moon’s point of view the Earth is blocking the Sun, and sunlight gets filtered through the thin layer of Earth’s atmosphere, reddening it. If you were standing on the Moon, it’s like you’re seeing every sunrise and sunset on Earth all at once!

Dr. Phil Plait has more on the coming lunar eclipse, and a video that explains eclipses in general, at Bad Astronomy.

(Image credit: NASA/Fred Espenak)

Redditor Penguinz90 underwent spinal fusion and has to wear a collar for six weeks. She decided to dress it up a bit, and in the process, made it unobtrusive, steampunk, and downright cool. Now it looks more like an accessory than a medical device! She said,

I had spare foam inserts do I dyed those so I didn't have to take the collar off to do it as I'm supposed to wear it 24/7 with the exception of showers. I did cheat and took it off to color the overall plastic brace with a black oil based paint Sharpie (I rested my head on a recliner while I did it), I then kept it on and hot glued the gears on while looking in the mirror.

That’s what you call taking a pain in the neck and turning it into a fashion statement.

When you hear the term “grammar police,” you probably don’t picture real law enforcement officers. What if those cops really did enforce proper grammar? Juliana Gray and Erica Dawson imagined just that when they slipped grammar police into a film noir script. Of course, the buddy cops are named Strunk and White, as in the authors of the reference book The Elements of Style. It opens, as so many police procedurals do, with a crime scene in a dark alley.

BEAT COP
It’s over here, detectives. The body was found about an hour ago.

STRUNK
Use the active voice, rookie.

BEAT COP
Oh god, it’s horrible. I feel nauseous.

STRUNK
Unless you mean you’re sickening to contemplate, you mean “nauseated.” Now get out of  my crime scene before you puke all over it.   

It gets better from there. Read the entire episode at The Millions, but don’t let them see your participles dangling! Next, they need to do one with grammar nazis. 

If you enjoyed that, here’s a couple of other suggestions from Metafilter: Chicago and Double Negative.  

(YouTube link)

John Green returns to the mental_floss List Show this week to tell us about inventors. They can be a wacky bunch, because you have to think outside the box to think up something completely new and different. The men and women behind those ideas were usually quite outside the norm. You may have read some of these stories on Neatorama before; if not, just slip a name into the search box and learn more! 

“Activewear” is the marketing term for sports or exercise clothing. Everyone wears activewear, but few are actually active. You know who you are.

(YouTube link)

There are two basic kinds of activewear: the body-hugging yoga pants and sports bras that show off one’s physique, figure, or lack thereof, and the loose sweats good for warmth and comfort. Young people want to show off their bodies and look like they work out, and we older folks just want chafe-free covering. The video is aimed at girls, but we all know guys do it, too. This music video was created by the Van Vuuren Bros for the TV show Skit Box. -via Tastefully Offensive

Forget Brad and Angelina. It’s time to put the spotlight back where it belongs—on history’s biggest nerds! Whether it’s sex, drugs, or the propensity for climbing trees in a three-piece suit,  mental_floss has all the juiciest gossip about the world’s greatest minds.

1. Scientist, Editor Duel Over Marie Curie's Honor! Gunshots Barely Avoided as Albert Einstein Weighs In

Marie Curie is well known as the first genius to have snagged two Nobel Prizes. The first came in 1903, when she and her husband, Pierre, were awarded a Nobel Prize in physics for their radiation research. Then, in 1911, she nabbed a Nobel in chemistry for her discovery of radium and polonium. But as her reputation as a brilliant scientist was growing, the Polish-born mother of two found herself at the center of a spectacular sex scandal.

Four years after Pierre Curie died in a 1906 carriage accident, Marie became entrenched in a torrid love affair with one of his former students, physicist Paul Langevin. The two were sharing a love nest in Paris when Langevin’s wife grew suspicious and decided to investigate. She hired a man to break into their pad and steal incriminating letters, which were then leaked to the press.

French newspapers went after the story with gusto. They painted Curie as a home-wrecker and a seductive Jew, even though she wasn’t Jewish. The story played into the xenophobia of the time, and it fanned public outrage. The situation got so bad that one night, Curie returned home from a conference in Belgium to find an angry mob surrounding her house, tormenting her two daughters. She quickly packed up her family and fled to a friend’s home.

Eager to defend Curie’s honor, Langevin challenged one of the newspaper’s editors to a duel. The two men faced off against one another, but no one fired a shot. Meanwhile, another man came to Curie’s defense. Albert Einstein offered a bit of reasoning that seemed both peculiar and offensive. He argued that Curie “has a sparkling intelligence, but despite her passionate nature, she is not attractive enough to represent a threat to anyone.”

In 1911, at the height of the whole scandal, Curie won her second Nobel Prize. The Nobel committee suggested that she skip the awards ceremony, but she went anyway. The furor died down eventually, no doubt aided by Curie’s humble demeanor and blinding dedication to science. Curie ultimately died for her work, succumbing to illnesses caused by her prolonged exposure to radioactive materials. Even now, Marie Curie’s notebooks are too radioactive to be picked up by hand.

2. American Writer Confuses Press with American Jokes

On November 5, 1930, Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature. That morning, a Swedish newspaper called Lewis to interview him about the news. But the witty author, known for such literary staples as Babbitt and Elmer Gantry, felt sure it was a prank call. Instead of answering the questions, he responded by launching into his best Swedish Chef accent and taunting the reporter. Lewis continued his “Bork, bork, meatballs!” ramblings until the man on the other end of the line finally hung up.

A few minutes later, Lewis received a second call, this time from an American who verified the news. When the stunned Lewis went to tell his wife, he got a taste of his own medicine. “How nice for you!” she replied sarcastically. “I have the Order of the Garter!”

This proud hunter is posing with his catch. Something tells me he went over the limit; surely you can’t get a license to bag that many! Of course, in the discussion at reddit, the vegetarians are coming out of the woodwork to disparage this man’s ethics in hunting poor defenseless zucchini, while others are proclaiming the superior taste of free-range zucchini over farm-grown zucchini.

We are surrounded by everyday consumer products and rarely think about how they came about. Some of the origin stories behind them involve people with fascinating histories, but you’d never know until someone digs into their background. Miracle-Gro plant fertilizer was brought to market by Otto Stern and Horace Hagedorn.  

But first, Otto Stern had to escape Nazi Germany. Stern, a German Jew, had been arrested during Kristallnacht, deserted by his non-Jewish wife, and imprisoned in a concentration camp. He held on, dreaming of a post-war life. When he was released from the camps after Hitler's downfall, he left Germany, bouncing from Cuba to America and finally ending up in Geneva, New York. If Gloversville was a glove town, and Danbury a hat city, Geneva was (and is) a plant capital, home to federal and state agricultural agencies, and a capitalist Eden of for-sale trees, flowers and other green stuff. There, Stern began to grow a new life for himself, starting up his own nursery and setting it apart with what was then a novel idea: order from his shop, and he would ship the plants anywhere in the country. You could come home to find a rosebush waiting for you on your porch.

Stern also sold fertilizer to go along with his mail-order plants. But his business didn’t really take off until he met a radio adman who wanted to grow bigger tomatoes. They spent a lot of time together because Stern had such a thick accent that he was uncomfortable talking on a phone, and their conversation often veered from advertising into their mutual interest in gardening. The story of how that led to to phenomena of Miracle-Gro is told at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Flickr user Crinklecrankle.com)

Sillof is a master customizer of action figures. You’ve seen his work before on Neatorama. His latest project is unveiled at just the right time to inaugurate his new website design. It’s a tribute to the works of George Lucas, which of course includes Star Wars, but also his earlier film American Graffiti. You might be surprised to realize how similar the two movies are.  

An average kid who wants to leave home, the cool loner with the fast car, even the final drag race seemed strangely reminiscent of the trench run.  The line is meant to be a kind of combination of films in or about the youth culture of the late 50’s and early 60’s  Most notably American Graffiti with some elements of Rebel without a cause, the Wild One, and the biker exploitation films that attempted to scare the youth away from motorcycle gangs.

The line is set in 1962 in the dry, desert town to Tucson (two suns…get it?) For the town’s teenage residents it is like most other middle sized towns of the era, somewhat boring with not much do except cruise around hoping for something to break the doldrums.

The collection is called Graffiti Wars. Meet each of the characters and learn a bit about them. Although they are Earthlings, there is no doubt about who their analog in the Galactic Empire would be.  -Thanks, Sillof!