Twitter user Enfys J. Book (Lucky) accompanied their cousin to the Ax-Man Surplus store in Fridley, Minnesota. They found an odd collection of items, as expected, but what struck them most were the signs labeling the goods, which are well worth sharing.



Staff members have a lovely sense of humor. They see that the goods are odd, and their impressions reflect what customers are thinking anyway. We don't know what these are or what they are for, either, but they are darn cheap!  

See all the pictures and replies in the original Twitter thread, although you can see the images without having to open them at Threadreader. -via Bored Panda

(All images credit: Enfys J. Book (Lucky))

There was a time when all we knew were the nine planets (now eight) that revolve around our sun. Then we developed amazing space telescopes that can capture images outside our solar system. On March 21, NASA confirmed the 5,000th exoplanet. To celebrate this milestone, NASA put together a data visualization, a timeline on a 360° map, showing when each exoplanet was discovered.

As each exoplanet is discovered, a circle appears at its position in the sky. The size of the circle indicates the relative size of the planet's orbit and the color indicates which planet detection method was used to discover it. The music is created by playing a note for each newly discovered world. The pitch of the note indicates the relative orbital period of the planet. Planets that take a longer time to orbit their stars are heard as lower notes, while planets that orbit more quickly are heard as higher notes.

The big blue blob that appears on the left in 2013-14 represents data picked up from the Kepler space telescope. That data confirmed 1,284 exoplanets and hinted at thousands more possible exoplanets. -via Metafilter 

For almost a hundred years, Tavira, Portugal, was a town centered around the tuna fishing industry. When the supply of tuna declined, the town focused on other things, but a remnant of that legacy remains. No one knows who first arranged out-of-service boat anchors on the beach at Praia do Barril, but after they did, it became a custom for others to add to the collection any time they discarded an anchor. Now hundreds of them stand in formation as a monument to bygone days of fishing. It's called the Anchor Graveyard, and draws tourists to Tavira.

The Anchor Graveyard is just one of the many specialty scrapyards, er, cemeteries around the world where old objects go when they are no longer useful. Messy Nessy Chic takes us on a tour of graveyards for bicycles, airplanes, fiberglass statues, concrete statues, phone booths, rickshaws, tanks, firetrucks, and even ice cream.

(Image credit: VITIMan)

Dr. Ernesto Di Maio is a professor of Materials Science and Technology at the University of Naples. He is also allergic to yeast. Naples is the birthplace of pizza. In a confluence of biology and geography, Di Maio was destined to develop a way to make pizza crust without yeast. In a normal pizza crust (and most bread), yeast produced carbon dioxide bubbles as it ferments, which causes the dough to rise, making it light and airy. Di Maio's team looked for a way to infuse raw dough with carbon dioxide artificially.

To artificially aerate the crust, the team placed the dough—a mixture of flour, water, and salt—into an autoclave, a chamber with controlled pressure and temperature settings. They then flooded the golf ball–sized dough with gas at high pressure, similar to carbonating a soda. When they gradually released the pressure and increased the heat inside the chamber, the team watched the dough rise.

They ended up with several mini-crusts, which they declared tasty. This experiment may lead to specialty pizzas and even breads that can be tolerated by people with yeast allergies. Read more about the experiment at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Breville USA)

We take lace for granted in the age of mass produced textiles. Lace in the modern era is priced in the range of other fabrics, although that range can be quite wide. But before machine looms, lace was a precious commodity because it was hand made, and the finest of lace was made in Alençon, France. Point d’Alençon needle lace was very expensive because it was so labor intensive. Every square centimeter (less than half an inch) required around seven hours of painstaking labor. It took entire teams to produce the lace, from the designer who drew it to the finisher who polished it with a lobster claw. Lace was so expensive that wearing it was naturally restricted to the very wealthy or royalty. The lace industry involved so much money that there were importers, smugglers, tariffs, trade wars, and a campaign to produce domestic lace that gave rise to Alençon lace. Read what made Point d’Alençon needle lace so special, which entails a description of how it was made, at Jstor Daily. -via Strange Company

Mass production can be a beautiful thing. This video is a compilation of machines that we rarely get to see, and the amazing way they get things done. You probably won't learn a whole lot from watching this (or you just might), but how they do what they do is almost like art. We get to see materials we don't recognize perfectly formed into things we suddenly recognize. But it's not just manufacturing. Get a close up view of large equipment farming, cooking, street cleaning, earth digging, and more. None of the clips are long enough to get boring. They just move on to the next machine. -via Nag on the Lake

My favourite thing is when people stick trackers on animals and one does literally nothing interesting and sits in 1 place 99% of the time and the researchers are like oh yeah that weird datapoint is Lazy Geoff, he doesn't ever do anything for reasons we don't entirely understand

— Dr Dani Rabaiotti (@DaniRabaiotti) March 23, 2022

Dr. Dani Rabaiotti, author of the book Does It Fart?: The Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence, posted a Tweet that went on to tell the story of tracking an urban fox when she was an undergrad. The fox just sat under a shed for three months, which isn't all that interesting and probably sounded sketchy to her supervising professor. But it is a tale that all animals scientists know, because they have all encountered a "Lazy Geoff."

YouTuber WUZU clay uses polymer clay to construct a Minecraft temple, set in an ocean, encased in acrylic for preservation. The process is painstaking, but in this video it is sped up by edits for our enjoyment, without narration. The precision in planning, measuring, and construction is engrossing. There are just enough bubbles in the acrylic to make it really seem to be underwater! -via Boing Boing

Sportswriter Stefan Fatsis is also a competitive Scrabble player. Earlier this month, he was competing in his 116th Scrabble tournament while contemplating retiring from the game. But one night during the tournament, he and some other Scrabble experts discussed a game that day in which top player Will Anderson could have scored a bingo (using all of one's tiles, for a 50-point bonus) by using the word "highveld" but didn't see it. Highveld is a South African term that is in the Collins list of words used in Anderson's tournament, but not in the North American list used in Fatsis' tournament.

Finally, Sokol, who had told us about Anderson’s miss, pointed out that the North American lexicon includes only one of those -VELD words: bushveld, a veld with “abundant shrubby and often thorny vegetation,” according to Merriam-Webster. Interesting! So what was your record today? Make any fun plays? How’s the salad?

Fatsis has never heard of "bushveld" until that discussion. The very next day, Fatsis played against Anna Miransky. At one point in the game, against all odds, his tiles were DEHLSUV. And there was an open B on the board. You might guess what happened, but you'll enjoy reading the whole story. You don't even have to be a Scrabble player to appreciate it. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Fancy Font Generator)

A new website from the Tolkien Estate has a treasure trove of information about JRR Tolkien, beloved author of The Lord of the Rings. Part of the process of creating his fictional world was envisioning it, and Tolkien painted quite a few landscapes of Middle-earth for both The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings, plus the settings for his other books. Some, but not all were used in the book illustrations.

There's also a section on Tolkien's maps, which kept him going in the right direction in his stories, and another featuring his beautiful calligraphy. That's in addition to information about his life and writing. This site could keep a Tolkien fan busy for a while. -via Kottke

A tornado ripped through Elgin, Texas, on Monday. The storm left plenty of property damage, a few injuries, but no fatalities reported so far. Thousands are still without power. The most viral of images from the storm is a video of a red Silverado pickup truck that crossed paths with the tornado. The twister flipped the truck on its side, spun it around, and then righted it. Astonishingly, the man inside was able to drive away. The owner of the truck has stayed anonymous so far, but we get to see what shape the truck is in, and hear froma couple of witnesses.



The man obviously had his seatbelt on. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Chevy seeks out the footage to use in an ad. Silverados are quite protective. Recall this story from several years ago, in which the truck was destroyed but the driver was fine.

-via Digg

The Academy Awards ceremony is this Sunday night, and once again there are a bunch of movies that you haven't seen up for an Oscar. It was just so much easier to stay at home and binge on a television series you've seen before. In this day and age there may be a lot of movies nominated that you've never even heard of. To alleviate this problem, Screen Junkies presents their annual Oscars Honest Trailer. What that means is that this video has a mini-Honest Trailer for each of the ten films competing for the Best Picture Award. Sadly, Spider-Man is not among them. See all the nominees for this year's Academy Awards here.

Art is often considered a form of worship. Hundreds of small towns in Europe have churches and chapels containing priceless Renaissance (and older) artworks that are not as well-known as those hanging in art museums. The church in Castrojeriz, Spain, had a half-dozen 17th-century Flemish tapestries created by a follower of Peter Paul Rubens named Corneille Schutz. The tapestries depicted the muses of the liberal arts. The largest was 13 feet tall and 20 feet wide! And in November of 1980, a thief came in and took them all.

The tapestries were tracked down one by one over the next few years, and so was the art thief. René Alphonse Ghislain van den Berghe had stolen thousands of artworks, and then spent many years helping police to recover them. But the largest of the Castrojeriz tapestries had been vandalized. It was missing a two-foot-square section of the lower left corner, which depicted an angel. It took more than 40 years for the missing piece to be found, but now it has been turned over to the curators of the collection.

Read the tale of the notorious art thief and the missing piece that has finally been reunited with its puzzle at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Carlospalacios)

Gatwick Airport in London ran into an unforeseen problem that is popping up all over the world. When you shut down for a pandemic, you have no idea how long the closure will be. One or two years later, you return to find the plants dead and the refrigerator moldy because you thought you'd be back in a week or two. Gatwick shut down an entire terminal due to fewer flights and passengers, and are now working to get it back up to snuff. Tom Scott once again takes a rather mundane subject and makes it well worth three minutes of your time.