The city of Gondar was founded in the early 17th century by Emperor Fasilides in Ethiopia. The royal family were previously nomadic. For 400 years, the stone palace and walled enclosure have stood as the city grew around it -including 44 churches. The palace complex is now open to the public, but if you can’t make it to Ethiopia anytime soon, you can read about the city’s history and see plenty of pictures at Kuriositas. -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user Matthew Goulding)
In 1862 the new Bureau of Internal Revenue began taxing whiskey as a means of funding the Civil War. The tax rose for years until the government’s take was more than the the value of the liquor, and distilleries went underground to avoid it. Avoiding the tax was so profitable that even when the rate was cut, it was avoided at all cost. For a couple of years, both the moonshiners and the revenuers got completely out of hand in the Vinegar Hill section of Brooklyn.
Two thousand soldiers had just attacked the neighborhood, targeting moonshiners who were evading taxes on a colossal scale. Since the federal government couldn’t exactly audit the underground operations, it demolished their operations. That morning, November 2, 1870, battalions under the command of Colonel John L. Broome arrived by boat from nearby forts. Guided by the revenue assessors, they left the Brooklyn Navy Yard at 9am and marched through the narrow streets armed with muskets, axes, and crowbars.
It was the latest in a series of raids known as the Whiskey Wars. Illicit distilling had become so widespread, and gangs so violent, that revenue officials and cops needed military backup. One of the first “battles” came in October 1869, when100 army veterans found nine stills after a knife-and-fist fight in an alley. Its success led President Ulysses Grant to authorize more forceful raids, using the army and navy if necessary. The next battle, at dawn two months later, included 500 artillerymen, who landed on the East River by tugboat and wore white-ribbon Internal Revenue badges. They axed barrels and spilled the contents, gushing a stream of rum into the street. Tubs discovered underground were pumped empty. By afternoon they had destroyed stills that could produce 250 barrels of liquor—worth $5,000 in taxes—a day.
Read about how the Whiskey Wars came about, and how they ended, at Smithsonian.
The latest episode in the tiny hamster series from HelloDenizen sees our little friends eating their Thanksgiving dinner. They get mini-tart-sized pies, cranberry sauce from a thimble, and a turkey that I would guess is made of tofu. Hamsters are vegetarian, after all! They are adorable as they (and their bunny friend) eat their dinner wearing tiny Pilgrim hats! -Thanks, John Wilson!
Pixactly is both a game and a quiz that tests your knowledge of graphic space in pixels. You are challenged to draw a box of specified pixel size, both horizontally and vertically. The game keeps track of how many pixels you are off over five attempts.
You’d think I would be good at this after nine years of blogging, but no. My score the first time through was 584. Maybe I can blame that on the fact that I zoom in and out for different websites, depending on the text size. So I tried again and cheated by taking a screenshot, which displays pixel size, before guessing. I got my score down to 136 that way, which is still worse than any graphic artist. You will do better! -via Metafilter
In 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary crowned “selfie” as the Word of the Year. The year before, it was “gif.” Now the folks behind the dictionary have announced the 2014 Word of the Year, and it’s “vape.” Vape is a verb meaning to use an electronic cigarette, although it can also be used as a noun for the e-cig itself. The word is an abbreviation of vapor, and was coined in 1983 in reference to using a hypothetical inhaler as a cigarette substitute. With the introduction of e-cigs, the word took off significantly in 2009.
As e-cigarettes (or e-cigs) have become much more common, so vape has grown significantly in popularity. You are thirty times more likely to come across the word vape than you were two years ago, and usage has more than doubled in the past year.
Usage of vape peaked in April 2014 – as the graph below indicates – around the time that the UK’s first ‘vape café’ (The Vape Lab in Shoreditch, London) opened its doors, and protests were held in response to New York City banning indoor vaping. In the same month, the issue of vaping was debated by The Washington Post, the BBC, and the British newspaper The Telegraph, amongst others.
“Vape” is still new enough that my autocomplete doesn’t recognize it. Other words that were considered are listed at the OxfordWords blog. -via Gamma Squad
(Image credit: Flickr user Daniel Riquelme)
The a cappella group Straight No Chaser teamed up with actress Kristen Bell to bring us a Christmas song for the interconnected wireless gadget generation. "Text Me Merry Christmas" works on two levels: on the one hand, it’s a sly poke at modern communication customs. But it’s a catchy tune that totally speaks to those who would cherish the perfect text from someone they love. Whether this makes you laugh or makes you share your earbuds will all depend on how old you are. That said, Kristen Bell should look into a career as a pop singer; between this and Frozen, her voice is shining brightly. The song is available for download on iTunes. -via Buzzfeed
There are many ways to hide the body, but passing a murder victim off as 2,600-year-old royalty is one few would have thought of. In 2000, a dealer was trying to sell a mummy for $11 million. It had a sarcophagus and engravings in an ancient Persian language declaring the body to be that of a Persian princess, the daughter of King Xerxes. But if was a hoax.
The mummy of the Persian Princess generated a lot of international interest because no remains of the Persian royal family had ever been found and mummies are not generally found in Iran. At one point the mummy caused diplomatic tensions between Iran and Pakistan because both countries claimed ownership. But months later, after examinations by experts in ancient Persian script, CT scans, chemical testing, and carbon dating, the mummy was not only declared a fraud, but there was also evidence that she may have been a modern murder victim.
Read how they came to that conclusion, and what they know about the body so far, at Atlas Obscura.
As fans look forward to Mockingjay Part One, Cinefix gives us some trivia about The Hunger Games franchise. We’ll learn about the special effects, the cast, and how it might even be called a “low budget film” in some circles. -via Tastefiully Offensive
George Corney built a fluid dynamics simulator that makes for a beautiful web toy. Just run your cursor across it, as you’d run your finger trough a tray filled with liquid. You can change some parameters if you want to experiment. Wait long enough and more colors will appear. Just don’t stare at it too long, or you’ll suddenly be late for something! -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Skunk Bear)
The things you do when you think you're all alone? Your cat sees all, knows all. Their redeeming factor is that they don’t speak human languages, so your secrets are safe …for now. If that ever changes, you better be ready to pay the price. The is a cautionary tale from Lunarbaboon.
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
by Laura E. Campbell, Shields Library, University of Califonia, Davis, Califonia, and
Morgan T. Lockwood, Davis, Califonia
The napkins provided in fast food restaurants vary in their abilities to sop up stains. As a service to both the public and the restaurants, we measured the sop-up efficiency of the napkins provided at these establishments.
Assessing the Napkins
We tested napkins from five competing fast food establishments:
Carl's Junior
Taco Bell
Jack in the Box
McDonald's
Burger King
Kentucky Fried Chicken
The tests used maraschino cherries, the juices of which produce red rings on napkins. These rings are easy to measure and compare.
Figure I. Napkins from Carl's Junior. Taco Bell (T), Jack In The Box (J ), McDonalds (M). Burger King (B) and Kentucky Fried Chicken (K ). Each napkin Sopped lip the juices from four half-cherries. For each napkin, the four radius lengths were averaged. The average sop area was then calculated and compared with the total napkin area to obtain the napkin sop factor.
We used cherries that were 19-20 millimeters in diameter. Each cherry was hCllved at its equator. We used a Solingen 20 centimeter French-bladed kitchen knife. When this was completed, 2 cherries- that is, four cherry halves-were placed on each folded napkin (see Figure 1). After 5 minutes had elapsed, we measured the size of the circles of red moisture that had soaked through to the back of each napkin. (see Table 1).
As a counterpart to the supercut of Kids Dancing to Taylor Swift's “Shake It Off,” Robert Jones has compiled a video of older people dancing, this time to “Turn Down for What” by DJ Snake & Lil Jon. Some are classic clips you’ve seen before, while others are just found footage that works. If you want to see more, there’s a list of all the source videos at the YouTube page. -Thanks, Robert!
The 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey gets a kaleidoscopic techno remix by Eclectic Method.
This mix contains almost every scientific prediction in the film mixed with the space age synth sounds that were just around the corner. Much that Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke predicted has come to pass - touch screen portable computers, video phones, Space Stations, in-seat video entertainment, computers beating humans at chess. So far though, Siri hasn’t switched off anybody’s life support.
It strikes me as the other end of the spectrum from sitting through two hours and twenty minutes of bafflement; in this version, you get a all the bafflement in only three minutes. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Italian chef Pasquale Sciarappa speaks English much better than I speak Italian, but his struggle with the pronunciation of Worcestershire sauce is priceless. The sauce is named after the county in England, Worcestershire, meaning the shire of Worcester. An American would sound it out as written if they didn’t know the British pronounce it “WOOStershur.” However, the Italian pronunciation of the phonemes as written is quite different. After Sciarappa struggles with the common pronunciation, he gives us a rundown of how it would sound in Italian.
Chef Pasquale has a recipe website and a YouTube channel devoted to Italian recipes plus a series on Italy. -via Tastefully Offensive
If you want to provoke an argument, just try to tell someone that their favorite video game didn’t make the top 50. Business Insider took that chance, and presents a ranked list.
We did have some parameters, however, when choosing the games: This list includes console video games, spanning from the 1980s to today, and includes only games from more-modern consoles (sorry, Atari and ColecoVision fans!). In most instances, we chose an entire franchise or series of games, rather than just one, as our favorite.
We also took into consideration Metacritic scores, user reviews, as well as our own personal experience to choose the games on this list.
Not being much of a gamer myself, I don’t have specific quibbles with the list. The games at the top (which are at the bottom of the page) are long-lived franchises that people still play like crazy. The comments at the post, of course, contain angry gamers pointing out the omissions. You might have some opinion on the list yourself.
(Image credit: Flickr user Ricardo Alguacil)
