Mental_floss has launched yet another weekly video series, this one called Misconceptions. It’s about things that need to be put straight. In the inaugural episode, host Eliot Morgan goes over some things you may have learned in school that simply aren’t so. Most of these things were never addressed at my school at all. If you like it, watch for a new episode every Friday. -via mental_floss
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Westhaven Funeral Home employees had just taken the deceased inside the St. Thomas Missionary Baptist Church near Jackson, Mississippi, for the funeral Thursday morning when a funeral director’s car was stolen from the church parking lot.
"Once the funeral director went inside with the body to set up, he jumped in the car and took off," said Nathaniel Ford of Westhaven Funeral Home.
Westhaven officials, gave chase to their stolen car,
"High speed chase, 100 miles and hour," said Ford. "Our funeral directors jumped in the hearse, and tried to catch him and he was driving 90 miles and hour and the car went off and left him. Then Sheriff's department got in pursuit."
After a high-speed chase down I-20 into Jackson, the car was abandoned, and the car thief fled on foot. Devarous White was arrested later. Investigators say White signed the funeral registry before the car chase, which will be used as evidence against him. -via Fark
(Image credit: WLBT)
It was 200 years ago today that a neighborhood in London, England, was flooded by beer. The Meux and Company Brewery had several large brewing vats on the roof. The largest was a 22-foot-high vat to brew porter. It held 511,920 liters of beer, or enough to fill 20,000 barrels. On October 17, 1814, after fermenting for months, one of the metal hoops holding the porter vat together gave way, and the beer exploded out, causing the surrounding vats to fail as well.
A total of 1,224,000 litres of beer under pressure smashed through the twenty-five foot high brick wall of the building, and gushed out into the surrounding area - the slum of St Giles. Many people lived in crowded conditions here, and some were caught by the waves of beer completely unaware. The torrent flooded through houses, demolishing two in its wake, and the nearby Tavistock Arms pub in Great Russell Street suffered too, its 14-year-old barmaid Eleanor Cooper buried under the rubble. The Times reported on 19 October of the flood:
The bursting of the brew-house walls, and the fall of heavy timber, materially contributed to aggravate the mischief, by forcing the roofs and walls of the adjoining houses.
Fearful that all the beer should go to waste, though, hundreds of people ran outside carrying pots, pans, and kettles to scoop it up - while some simply stooped low and lapped at the liquid washing through the streets. However, the tide was too strong for many, and as injured people began arriving at the nearby Middlesex Hospital there was almost a riot as other patients demanded to know why they weren't being supplied with beer too - they could smell it on the flood survivors, and were insistent that they were missing out on a party! Calm was quickly restored at the hospital, but out in the streets was a different matter.
At least eight people died from the flood: some drowned, other died of injuries, and one supposedly died several days later of alcohol poisoning, although that story may be apocryphal. Read the rest of the story at h2g2. -via Fark
Tony Dighera of Cinagro Farms devoted four years to perfecting his crop of Frankenstein pumpkins. They’re not cobbled together from different individuals like Frankenstein’s monster, but pumpkins grown in molds that have the shape of the monster’s head. Now that’s a fancy jack-o-lantern right there! This year, Dighera brought in a crop of 5500 pumpkins, and sold every one of them at $75 each. Next year, there will be a bigger crop, plus white pumpkins shaped like skulls. Yeah, you’ve seen molded fruit before, but I can tell you from experience, it’s not easy to get them to come out consistently right. See more pictures at Geekologie.
Have you ever noticed that the models in the J. Crew catalog look drunk? I haven’t either, as I don’t shop for clothing until I have no choice. But someone noticed, and with a few captions that had to come from first-hand experience, created the blog Drunk J. Crew. The blog is only a couple of days old, but I can see it growing because there’s got to be a lot of raw material available. -via Uproxx
Kai Halvorsen loves his dog Igor. But when the family planned a trip to Thailand, they couldn’t take Igor along. He had to stay in a kennel. Kai decided he had to do something to make Igor’s time there a little better, since the dog had never been away from the home or the family overnight. You’ll love what they came up with… I sure did. It wouldn’t have happened if the stunt weren’t sponsored by a paint and tool company, which resulted in a great ad, but it’s an adorable idea for a much loved pet. -via Tastefully Offensive
Skiing at night in LED-suits makes for a beautiful film sequence. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it sure is pretty. I watched and hoped that the skiers could see as far ahead as they needed to. This video is part of the longer film Afterglow, made to promote Philips TV. It wasn’t easy to pull off, according to director Nick Waggoner.
The technical production of the segment involved a MASSIVE amount of energy, 5 weeks of filming, 9,000 lbs of equipment, operating 70 miles from a road at times, in temperatures as cold as -15 in the deepest snow on earth.
It was definitely a logistical nightmare, but one tamed by our 14 person crew to produce what you see here. From Zac Ramras and Max Santeusanio working on the details of production to controlling the camera on the aerial cinematography, all the way to our lighting team, it was a disgustingly big effort. We [pored] over crazy lens diagrams for lights, read over their photometric charts and electrical currents for months, and finally came up with a system that involved 8 main lights, 8 generators, 16-20 light stands, miles of extension chords, colored filters, and a heap more of support equipment.
We topped that off with an optacopter carrying the weight of a Red Epic Camera slung on a Movi Stabilization system. If it sounds high-tech, that’s because it is.
You can read more about it at HuffPo. The full 12-minute Afterglow will be available on Sunday.
The magician is famous for his thrilling escapes. But the feat he should be known for is breaking into a seance.
On July 23, 1924, Boston was suffering from a brutal heat wave. The evening temperature hovered in the high 80s when the famed magician Harry Houdini trudged up to the fourth floor séance room at 10 Lime Street. With him were O.D. Munn, editor of Scientific American, and an esteemed panel of scientists. They had come to witness the psychic feats of the nation’s most credible spirit medium, a pretty 36-year-old flapper with blue eyes and a bob.
Her name was Mina Crandon. Followers called her “Margery”; detractors knew her as the Blonde Witch of Lime Street. And she was renowned for conjuring the voice of her dead brother, Walter, whose spirit rapped out messages, tipped tables, and even sounded trumpets. Even by ghost standards, Walter was unfriendly, answering questions and quoting scripture in a gruff disembodied voice. Margery, by contrast, was charming and attractive—at least when she wasn’t showing off her most convincing psychic talent: extruding a slithery, viscous substance called “ectoplasm” from her orifices. Photos show this otherworldly substance flowing from her nose and ears, but mostly it emerged from beneath a sheer kimono like a string of entrails—an “ectomorphic hand” that Walter used to carry out his commands.
Today we remember the era’s jazz, speakeasies, and glitz, but the ’20s were also the zenith of America’s obsession with the spirit world. Reeling from losing an estimated 15 million people in the Great War and 21 million more to the Spanish-flu pandemic, people were searching for ways to connect with the dead. Spirit guides emerged to help the bereaved, usually for hefty fees. And as reputable magazines and newspapers increased their coverage of paranormal phenomena, mediums became rock stars. Margery herself had become a messiah to hundreds of thousands of Americans.
In the summer of 1924, Margery occupied the red-hot center in the raging national debate over Spiritualism, an 80-year-old religious movement that centered around the possibility of communicating with the dead. The most famous of its 14 million believers was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries and a man of impeccable reputation. Witnessing a séance in his London home, he became convinced of Margery’s supernatural powers. Her refusal to be compensated for her miracles only added to her credibility. It wasn’t long before Doyle had recommended her to the editors of Scientific American, which was offering a $2,500 prize to the first medium who could verifiably demonstrate to its six-man investigative committee a “visual psychic manifestation.”
This was no fly-by-night group of spook hunters. Scientific American’s J. Malcolm Bird chaired the committee, which included psychologist William McDougall of Harvard, former MIT physicist Daniel Comstock, and two members of the Society of Psychical Research, Hereward Carrington and Walter Prince. Bird and Carrington had already examined Margery more than 20 times and were ready to hand over the money. The New York Times reported the development with a straight face: "'Margery' Passes All Psychic Tests Scientists Find No Trickery in Scores of Séances with Boston Medium."
Which would you prefer: carry a couch down two flights of stairs, negotiating tight corners, or would you rather just throw it off the third floor balcony and be done with it? These guys came up with an alternative scheme that’s somewhere in between those two extremes. What could possibly go wrong? I might call this Southern ingenuity, but the lack of accent in the narration makes it seem more like Yankee ingenuity. -via reddit
Well, the cloak of wisdom worked exactly as it should, but it didn’t do him much good at this late date, now, did it? He should have put on his thinking cap instead! This kid must be a sophomore, because that word translates to “wise fool.” Or something like that. The is the latest comic from Up and Out by Jeremy Kaye. -via reddit
Twenty million bats in one cave! Can you imagine being there and not knowing that until it happens? And did you know that a bat’s hearing has to be ignored while it uses its sonar trick, lest it drive them batty? This video from the PBS YouTube series It's Okay To Be Smart has all kinds of fascinating facts about the 1300 or so species of bats on earth. By the time you finish this, you’ll have a new respect of those fearful flying Halloween symbols. Read more about bats at Bat Conservation International, or any of the other links about bats you’ll find at the YouTube page. -via Everlasting Blort
For many people, the idea of a mermaid is shaped by the 1989 Disney movie The Little Mermaid, or possibly the 1984 Tom Hanks film Splash. The myth of a half human-half fish creature wasn’t always as delightful. They were originally considered gods along with other strange chimeras. In the Odyssey, mermaids were deadly sirens that lured men to their deaths.
And so mermaids entered European mythology with conflicting personalities: Sometimes they were portrayed as beautiful, seductive maidens—almost goddesses like Atargatis—greatly desired by lonely sailors, while also being cast as siren-esque beasts that dragged men into the inky-black depths. But whatever the portrayal, mermaids wound their way deep into the nautical lore of the Middle Ages onward.
Really, it was best to avoid mermaids and mermen, just to be sure. Olaus Magnus, the 16th century writer and cartographer whose seminal map Carta Marina obsessively cataloged the many monsters of the seas around Scandinavia, noted that fishermen maintain that if you reel in a mermaid or merman, “and do not presently let them go, such a cruel tempest will arise, and such a horrid lamentation of that sort of men comes with it, and of some other monsters joining with them, that you would think the sky should fall.” Sea-people, it was widely held, were terribly bad luck to see or snag.
Plenty of seafarers saw mermaids, because the sea is full of strange unidentified creatures that are difficult to describe. You can read about quite a few of these sightings over the centuries that added to our mermaid myths at Wired. The linked article contains art nudity. -via Digg
The a cappella group Pentatonix (previously) sing a medley of familiar songs that span centuries. It’s heavy on music from the 20th century, of course, because we have a great archive of recorded songs since the phonograph was invented. There are more songs per decade in the 21st century, but the century is still young. Something tells me Pentatonix is gearing us up for new Christmas music, since that's what they've become most known for. -via Metafilter
Australian folks try out some really odd foods they’ve never encountered before: aerosol cheese, dried meat sticks, and something that night be chips, but are designed to burn your tongue. Described that way, they really do sound weird, don’t they? It’s difficult to suddenly develop a taste for something you’re not used to. If you grew up in Australia and never had ranch dressing on a salad, you would have no idea what to expect from Cool Ranch Doritos. In the same vein, most Americans have never tried Vegemite. Let’s see how that goes.
-via Tastefully Offensive
Coonskin caps were used by Native Americans and pioneers to keep heads warm for hundreds of years, but the fashion faded out in the 20th century. The big exception was in the 1950s, when the furry caps were all the rage. If you can immediately say why, then you are likely older than most of the internet generation.
At the time, Walt Disney was trying to find a way to finance the construction of Disneyland, his grand theme park. In 1954, eager to raise funds, he signed a deal for a television series with ABC, and launched a serial titled “Davy Crockett,” chronicling the life and times of the famous frontiersman who’d died at the Battle of the Alamo. “It’s time to get acquainted, or renew acquaintance with, the robust, cheerful, energetic and representative folk heroes," Disney said in a press statement. “Who better than Davy?”
Airing in five one-hour installments from December 1954 to December 1955, the show was insanely popular: Nearly 12 million viewers tuned in to each episode, a full-length, color feature (Davy Crockett, King of the WIld Frontier) was released, and the show’s theme song -- “Ballad of Davy Crockett” -- rose to become a #1 Billboard hit:
Because Crockett wore a coonskin cap in the show, the coonskin craze took the nation by storm. It was led by children, but plenty of adults bought the caps, too, until a shortage of raccoons led to substitute furs. Read about the history of the coonskin cap, from native tribesmen to today, ay Pricenomics. -via Boing Boing
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