Yellowstone National Park is celebrating its 150th anniversary. One of the special events of the year is the sale of a special $1500 "Inheritance Pass" that won't be usable for 150 years! The owner of such a pass will have unlimited access to the park in the year 2172. Yeah, no one buying this pass will live to use it, but it can be bequeathed to someone in your will.

The point of the pass is to raise funds so that Yellowstone can survive into the future. The money raised through the campaign will go to "supporting scientific studies, trail maintenance, and wildlife conservation, among other projects." You can consider it a donation, as it is tax deductible. However, once you buy an Inheritance Pass, the park will send you a thank you note with an annual pass for the current year. You can purchase one here. Read about the Inheritance Pass project at Backpacker. -via Kottke  

First off, no this isn't a real series, even though you will be forgiven for thinking so considering how many Star Trek series there are now. Gazelle Automations made a new cartoon in the style of the 1973-74 series Star Trek: The Animated Series and used a scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94), along with its audio. The conceit here is that ST:TAS had ingenious plots and cheap animation, and ST:TNG had awesome visuals and silly plots. This cartoon manages to highlight the worst aspects of each, but it's fun nevertheless. Watch it twice to catch all the details, like the perfect Filmation music, the imperfect lip-voice synchronization, the odd manner in which each character begins moving, the faces that only move one feature at a time, the Kzin, and the pink Borg Cube. Oh yeah, there's also the horror of using two colons in one sentence. -via Metafilter

Here's a tale that will convince you that all your possessions need to be tied down, even if you live far from civilization. A masked bandit thought the object was interesting, so he just took off with it! It was a security camera in use, but that didn't matter at all to this raccoon, criminals that those creatures are. Luckily, the raccoon abandoned his new toy when he realized it didn't taste all that good, and the homeowner was able to retrieve the camera eventually, most likely aided by the video evidence. -via Laughing Squid 

We think of sitting as an activity that isn't active, so how could it ever be a sport? Sitting is something office workers do all day that they know isn't good for them, or a rest and reward for people who stand or movie all day for their job. To Robert Silk, it isn't just sitting that makes it extreme, but where and how you do it. It was an idea that came to him in 1995, but he only developed it in the last few years. The idea is to find an extreme location and sit all day, without electronics or entertainment. Or even a clock. Silk sat in Joshua Tree National Park for 14 and a half hours once. He's sat all day in the desert quite a few times, and even spent the day on a beach in Antarctica in a chair he brought with him on a cruise ship.

As far as competition, it hasn't quite taken off yet, as Silk is the only competitor. But the idea might catch on. Read about Silk's philosophy about sitting and his accomplishments at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Peter Wick)

We've seen delicious Star Trek supercuts about Leonard "Bones" McCoy's familiar catchphrases "He's dead, Jim" and "I'm a doctor, not a..." But McCoy wasn't the only one who had repeating lines throughout the series. John DiMarco reveals another supercut in which Captain Kirk utters those classic words, "Beam me up, Scotty." Or something close to it. The clips aren't limited to Kirk or to the original series, either.

While the fictional technology of Star Trek's transporter was developed to save time and money over having the cast use a shuttle in the series, "beaming up" came to be a handy way to escape danger, or conversely to introduce danger when transporting didn't go well. It also became a classic way to end a scene or an episode. -via Born in Space

John Harvey Kellogg was a gifted man with some really strange ideas. He ran his Battle Creek Sanitarium to promote wellness among his patients, which included feeding them foods he invented. One was cold cereal, which led to the company that bears Kellogg's name. Along with Graham crackers, which he also developed, these bland foods were supposed to keep one's mind away from sexual thoughts and the temptation of masturbation. Kellogg was also proponent of eugenics. And he invented a lot of gadgets to use on the patrons of his sanitarium. These included "exercise" machines that required no effort, a poop chair, an electric horse (shown above), and an enema machine that sounds terrifying in its power. Read about eleven of those lesser-known Kellogg inventions at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user Battle Creek CVB)

With the new Disney+ miniseries Obi-Wan Kenobi ready to drop on May 27, Auralnauts just have to do one better. Besides, they have some more footage to use now that we have trailers for the new miniseries. This is the story of Obi Wan Steven Ben Larry Bongjo Kenobi, explaining how he became a hermit in the desert after a lifetime of partying like it's 1999. The Larry Kenobi character has been seen here and there in Auralnauts' work for years now, most notably in Star Wars Ep 3: Revenge of Middle Management. Is this really a trailer for an upcoming series? Auralnauts hints that it could happen if they get enough Patreon sponsors. I wouldn't hold my breath. Oh, sure, I have no doubt they will work on the most wondrous series ever, but based on experience, it could be a wait of some years before we see it. -via Boing Boing

What happens when a car is pulled over for not using its headlights, and the police see that there's no driver? The short answer is: nothing. San Francisco police signaled a car to stop, then realized it is one of the new Cruise robotaxis that have been serving the city for a couple of months. They couldn't open the door, and the robotic car pulled away briefly and then pulled over to the curb, seeking a safe spot away from traffic. That's what it is programmed to do, although you can imagine how police would respond to a human driver doing the same.

Lacking a driver to provide license and registration, submit to a sobriety test, or give a ticket to, the cops called the Cruise office. No ticket was issued. Which brings up questions that the police will have to work out with robotics companies- what will be the standard procedures for such stops going forward? Read the full story, and see a video of the incident (which is honestly rather boring) at the Verge. -via Digg

Imagine, if you will, that your seven-year-old has developed an obsession with dinosaurs, and you decide to introduce him or her to the Jurassic Park movies. It only make sense to start with the first film, Jurassic Park, which was released in 1993, based on a 1990 novel. By re-watching the film with your child, you start to realize that we've learned a lot about dinosaurs in the past 30 years. Where are their feathers? Your offspring, who has been reading up on the latest dinosaur discoveries, wonders about that, too. But it's far from the only things Jurassic Park got wrong about dinosaurs, particularly the Tyrannosaurus rex, which is both the main antagonist and the hero of the story. Oops, spoilers. Read about the feathers and three other important misconceptions you may have had about T. rex from the original Jurassic Park movie art Cracked. There's also a bonus video of Mark Bolin and his band T. Rex.

(Image credit: JJxFile)

There's a reason why people say "pics or it didn't happen." Way before we had photography, people could tell tales that had no basis in truth and not only would people have no reason to doubt them, their fantasies would often end up in art or even books. We are familiar with exotic animals described by medieval travelers and then badly translated into art. But there were also tales of monsters that never existed at all, yet had some purpose in analogies or in adding to the storyteller's reputation. We know about unicorns and baselisks, but here we also learn about grotesques, the cynocephali, the tarasque, the griffin, blemmeys, and the tree that grows geese. There's a one-minute ad in the middle of this video. -via Everlasting Blort 

1. Johnny Damon, the dude had the sickest flow and beard with the Red Sox. Only to have to stripped when he went to the Yankees. pic.twitter.com/8JtDvTPrrT

— Levi (@GrizzlyShmadams) March 14, 2022

If you watch the New York Yankees play baseball from a distance, meaning the cheap seats, you have to be really tuned into the team to tell the players apart. Their jerseys do not have the players' names on the back, and they don't have distinctive hair. Yankees are expected to shave and keep their hair above their collar. When the team signs a new player, the news comes with a trim (the Tweet above has nine examples in the thread). It's been that way for almost 50 years now.

The clean-shaven era for the Yankees began when George Steinbrenner, along with 11 other investors, bought the team in 1973. At the time, Steinbrenner said that the investors would be hands off. "I’ll stick to building ships," he said. That didn't last long. You might be surprised at what changed Steinbrenner from an absentee investor into a micromanager. It was flowers.

The rules about facial hair that Steinbrenner instigated have a little wiggle room- mustaches and sideburns are allowed, and players have pushed the envelope over the years. But as other teams have relaxed or dropped grooming codes, the Yankees still expect a clean shave and short haircut, even after Steinbrenner died in 2010. Read the story of the clean-shaven Yankees at Mel magazine.

You might like the browser map game Back of Your Hand, in which you are quizzed on the map locations of your own town. But beware, if you normally navigate by GPS, or if you know how to get around but never pay attention to street names, you will not do well. I scored 80% on my town, because there are some subdivisions I've never been to. You can change the location by zooming out on the map and then zooming back in elsewhere, like the place you grew up in. I did much worse for the place I grew up in, because it has changed considerably in the past 40 years or so. Another tip- zoom in and replace your pin on the road before you confirm your choice, because you'll be penalized by how far your guess is away from the correct answer. Good luck.  -via Boing Boing

Wait, wait, before you bail out because of the title, there's a perfectly logical explanation. This is not a recipe.

Placenta cake was a delicious dessert from ancient Greece and Rome. It was made of multiple layers of thin dough, with honey and cheese in between. It sometimes included nuts and figs. After baking, the cake was covered in more honey. The Greek name for the cake was plakous, which in the Roman language became placenta. What you really need to know is that the cake came first. The body organ that mammals develop during pregnancy is named after the cake!

Placenta cake appears to have been quite popular, and was exported to other countries, where it was adapted into many different traditional sweets, such as baklava.  -via Fark

WMT-TV (now KGAN-TV) Channel 2 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, went from broadcasting in black-and-white to color with some ceremony during their local news broadcast on April 14, 1967. I don't know if other stations did that with quite so much aplomb, but news anchor Bob Bruner managed to keep his cool. You must imagine thousands of people at home watching this who wondered what they were talking about because their TVs couldn't receive color signals, and a few dozen homes where the viewers were amazed.  

When I was a child, it never occurred to me that the TV signal went out from the station in black-and-white or color. I just knew that our TV only worked in black-and-white, while my grandparents' TV was in color, as well as that of some of my wealthier friends. But switching to color transmission was a big deal for broadcasters. -via Laughing Squid

Statistics_Data_Facts made a chart showing how living arrangements have changed over the past 55 years for Americans ages 25-34 years old. The data comes from the US Census Bureau. Lifestyles have changed for this age group considerably. The biggest difference from 1967 to 2021 is the decrease in the percentage of those people who live with their spouse. Sure, more people are living with a partner without getting married, which is the pink line, but not enough to explain the plunge. Another chart combines the two, and it still plunges. Other factors include the rising age of first marriage, which has been going on a long time, extended education (with long term loans), and an economy that makes marriage appear out of reach.     

There are other charts that break down the statistics even further by sex. The percentage of people living alone has remained fairly stable over time, but has alway been higher for young men than for young women. This is understandable, for reasons that have to do with both economics and safety. However, men have slightly overtaken women in living with parents or other relatives over time. You can see the full sets of charts at Statistics_Data_Facts. -via Digg