A post at Cake Wrecks featuring the pictured cake of a lamb with a cigarette in its mouth led me to a previous collection of such cakes, which led to a post about the possible meaning of what appears to be a tradition, although not common enough to be well documented. Lamb cakes are baked for both Passover and Easter, and sometimes for a Catholic child's First Communion. The blog Romantoes gathered several theories from commenters.

* It's Joe Camel.

* The lamb is smoking to signify the end of Lent, and the enjoyment of vices one might have given up for Lent, such as smoking.

* The cigarette is supposed to represent a paintbrush, and is colored on the end to suggest the lamb's blood that was used to paint door frames during the original Pesach.

* What looks like a cigarette is actually a scroll, and is in the lamb's mouth to illustrate a passage from Revelations: "Then I saw, between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. The Lamb went and took the scroll from the right hand of the one who was seated on the throne."

I looked around at forums that discussed the matter, but no one knew with authority what the "cigarette" meant. However, a few people mentioned that they had seen such lambs for sale at Jewish delis, which leads me to think the third explanation may be the one. Link

(Image source: Cake Wrecks)

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A substantial snowfall in Wales trapped sheep under a blanket of snow. Farmer Gareth Wyn Jones of Llanfairfechan is on his third day of digging them out. This is definite proof that sheep are tough but stupid, and that farming is hard work. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

He grabbed her butt; she hit him in the face. Can you guess who pays for the crime? The unnamed man who copped a feel at a nightclub in Lund, Sweden, last summer was charged with sexual assault, but the case was dropped due to lack of evidence. However, he suffered a broken nose, which was plenty of evidence to convict the woman of assault.

In its ruling the Lund District Court agreed that the woman was subject to a "serious provocation", but ultimately ruled her actions couldn't be considered as acting in self-defence.

The court convicted the 23-year-old woman of assault, slapping her with a suspended sentence and a 2,500 kronor ($380) fine, the Sydsvenskan newspaper reported.

She must also pay 1,860 kronor in damages to the man, who had originally demanded 25,000 kronor as compensation for the injuries he suffered during the incident.

Link -via Arbroath

I have a 50-year-old box of vanilla extract that I keep around for the novelty and the vintage package design. I don't know what the bottle looks like because I've never opened the box. But that vanilla is downright fresh compared to some unearthed foodstuffs studied by archaeologists. Can you imagine a bowl of soup 2,400 years old?   

While excavating to make way for a new airport, Chinese workers struck liquid gold. Well, liquid gold if you happen to be an archeologist. Or really into soup. The soup, sealed so tightly in its bronze cooking pot that it was still in a liquid state, was discovered in a tomb near Xian. It didn’t look too savory, having turned green from 2400 years of bronze oxidation. It also still contained bones, which delighted archeologists, probably because they didn’t actually have to eat it.

That's one. There are six other examples of food surviving a very long time in a recognizable form (even if only after testing) at mental_floss. Link

Old colorful iMac G3 shells are now overhead lamps at Toronto travel agency G Adventures. Is this brilliantly clever or tragically tacky? Link  -via Gizmodo

Fourteen-year-old Katelyn Norman of LaFollette, Tennessee, has terminal bone cancer. One of the items on her bucket list was to go to the prom. Campbell County High School had their prom early and arranged for her to go, but then Katelyn's declining health landed her in East Tennessee Children's Hospital.

In stable condition and in high spirits, Katelyn was able to have a make shift prom in her room.

The hospital staff decorated the room and her date gave her a corsage and a special sash. Family and friends gathered outside with candles.

Meanwhile, in Campbell County, the celebration of Katelyn was taking place.

The music was blaring, the decorations were hung, it was meant to be Katelyn's perfect night, and she wanted it to go on, even if she wasn't there.

"She contacted me and said prom must go on, that's her, and you can't help but feed off that energy, that life," said Sharon Shepard, an instructor at Katelyn's school and organizer of the prom.

The night was a celebration of Katelyn, featuring all her favorite things.  But most important, the people she loves most.

Link to story.

Link to pictures. -via reddit

(Image credit: Michael Dayah) 

Update: Katelyn passed away the day after this was posted. Link

Now it's time for our collaboration with the awesome What Is It? Blog! Do you know what this thing is? You can win even if you don't know!

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will each win a T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

Check out the What Is It? Blog for more mystery items of the week. Good luck!

Update: the mystery item is a brewer's lamp. Ladybugs knew the correct answer, and wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! The funniest answer came from pismonque, who said "A gaff hook for landing narwhals with a built-in rotary tusk sharpener, used by Inuits in their groom-and-release program, an eco-friendly alternative to cultural whaling practices." So pismonque also wins a t-shirt from the NeatoShop, too! Thanks to everyone who participated, and look for the next What Is It game coming soon to Neatorama! See the answers to all of this week's mysteries at the What Is It? blog.

Those poor children look as if they were waiting for their inevitable doom at the hands of the ghost-faced giant rabbit holding onto little brother. Big brother was told to smile, but he can't quite get that far. Even though this is not an Easter greeting card, it's part of the collection entitled 21 Vintage Easter Cards That Will Totally Creep You Out. Link

With so much press about Easter and Passover, you might not realize that April Fool's Day is Monday. Covering someone's cubicle with tinfoil changing your co-worker's desktop image pale in comparison to the pranks of some folks. Mental_floss looks at six elaborate pranksters and their elaborate schemes. One of them was President Lyndon Johnson, who loved a prank -especially since he could get away with them. One he employed many times involved an amphibious car he kept at his ranch in Texas.

He would invite his visitors to take a drive around the ranch with him in the blue convertible. When they got to a steep hill at the edge of a lake, Johnson would let the car pick up speed. Then he’d yell, “The brakes don’t work! The brakes won’t hold! We’re going in!” As the car entered the lake, the passengers would panic—until they realized that rather than sinking, they were motoring across the lake. One victim of the prank, Special Assistant to the President Joseph A. Califano, Jr., recalled that his boss teased him later for trying to save his own skin instead of the president’s.

Read about the other pranksters in a list at mental_floss. Link

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What's better than cats playing patty cake? Cats playing patty cake en Francais! Here we learn that the French equivalent of "boop" is "poom." -via Metafilter

The Ensemble Studio Theater of Los Angeles has a Tumblr blog starring an action figure of Dr. Beverly Crusher, a character from Star Trek: The Next Generation. The doctor is shown in various situations, from riding a cat to mooning over Captain Picard. Gates McFadden, who portrayed Dr. Crusher, is the Artistic Director of the theater. Link  -via Geeks Are Sexy

Luke Skywalker's planet Tattooine has two suns that rise and fall close together. When Star Wars first came out, it seemed ridiculous that a planet could revolve around two stars at once, but as science fiction often goes, the real world catches up later. French scientists have photographed a heavenly body revolving around a binary star system. The possible planet is named 2MASS0103(AB)b, but is informally called Tattooine.

Philippe Delorme of the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, and colleagues took the picture in November last year using a telescope in Chile. Searches in the telescope's archives turned up data on the object's position in 2002 (marked in the picture by a green arrow), allowing them to trace its orbital motion around the binary stars.

Also known as Tatooines, after a fictional world in Star Wars, planets that orbit binary stars have only been found before through indirect methods. The new object orbits at a distance of about 12.5 billion kilometres, close enough to its stars to have been born from a disc of dust surrounding them, like a planet. But it is 12 to 14 times the mass of Jupiter, placing it near the dividing line between planets and failed stars called brown dwarfs.

Whether this mass is a planet or a star depends on how you define those things, as it appears now to sit on the dividing line between a planet and a star. Read more about Tattooine at NewScientist. Link -via Geekosystem

(Image credit: ESO 2013)

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These two rabbits are playing a game in the backyard. Arbroath called it "opposite of leapfrog," and the video uploader called it the "bunny hop," and said he watched for several minutes before getting his phone to record it. A commenter thinks it's a mating dance. I wonder if they ever switch off and let the other bunny be "it"?  -via Arbroath

Scotch eggs are boiled eggs covered in sausage and breadcrumbs and then fried. This recipe is not that at all -it just looks like a Scotch egg. It's a sweet treat consisting of a Cadbury creme egg covered with a sweet batter and rolled in cookie crumbs. Sweet all the way through! Get the complete recipe at CakeSpy. Link -via Laughing Squid

Redditor JimmyLegs50 noticed some strange similarities between the Toy Story movies and the TV series The Walking Dead. He collected those instances into an extensive imgur album that gets weirder as it goes along. Now I can honestly see Woody as a Georgia zombie killer. May contain spoilers. Link -via Uproxx