Actress and beloved icon Betty White would have turned 100 on Monday, if she hadn't died on New Year's Eve. In her honor, New Orleans residents staged one of the first parades through the French Quarter since the pandemic began two years ago. The Betty White Memorial and 100th Birthday Parade was held on Sunday.

The parade was led by Santa Claus, who organized the event (really). There was a brass band, Betty White fans in costume carrying signs, and plenty of pets. Betty White was a lifelong advocate for animal welfare, and the parade raised funds for the Villalobos Rescue Center in her honor. You can bet there was plenty of music. In addition to the usual New Orleans parade marches, the crowd sang "Happy Birthday," "Thank You for Being a Friend," and ended with an emotional rendition of "I'll Fly Away." Read about the parade and see plenty of pictures at Fodor's Travel. -Thanks, Bicycle Bill!

Turville is a picturesque English village about 35 miles from London. It was there that Ellen Sadler was born in 1859, the youngest of ten children. Ellen was hired out as a nursemaid when she was eleven years old, but a mysterious illness put an end to her employment. The doctor noticed an abscess on her head he called a glandular swelling. Ellen spent four months in the hospital, but was sent home as incurable. She then had a few seizures, laid down to rest, and didn't wake up for nine years.

Naturally, this became village news, and the story spread further. Ellen Sadler put Turville on the map. Scientists, journalists, and the general public wanted to see the sleeping girl, and her parents obliged. The visitors often left small donations, which added a substantial amount to the poor family's earnings. Ellen's mother explained how she fed the girl with a small teapot of port wine and another of milk. As the years went by, some had their suspicions about the girl's condition. The climax of the story came when Ellen's mother died, and she was put into the custody of her older sisters. Within just a few months, Ellen woke up, by then a grown woman, and recovered completely.

There are conditions that can put someone in a coma for years, but no doctor ever had a diagnosis for Ellen Sadler. It seems unlikely that she would have survived, much less recovered completely on the life support her mother described. Read the story of Ellen Sadler at Amusing Planet.

One of the more distinctive features of a house cat is its weird vertical pupils, which don't seem all that weird to us because we are really familiar with cats. Maybe that's why the Pallas' cat seems so strange to us with their round pupils. But pupil shapes vary all along the spectrum of the animal kingdom, and each shape has a purpose for the lifestyle of its owners. In the TED-Ed video, we learn about pupil shapes in a variety of animals, including the extremely weird rectangular pupils of a goat. I was familiar with the shape, but I didn't know goats kept their pupils at the same angle when they moved their heads! And if you think that's weird, wait until they get to praying mantises. -via Laughing Squid

Here's a serious time sink for history nerds, but you don't have to be a history nerd to enjoy it. The Wiki History Game is a free browser game in which you are challenged to place historical events in chronological order. They range from carbon-dated prehistory events to movie premiere dates, but the more of them you get, the harder it is. After you've placed an event, you can turn the card over to get a link to Wikipedia for more information about the event. Win or lose, you are liable to learn something. A few people who've tried it note that 1. you don't have to be good at this game to enjoy it, and 2. you can't get any better at it by playing more. But it is addictive. I once managed to get a string of 15 events before missing one, but I've had a lot of failures, too. 

The game is fairly new. Developer Tom J. Watson asks that any cards that don't make sense be reported to Github. -via Metafilter

Dana Carvey and Mike Meyers! pic.twitter.com/LsIarT7y8E

— 𝘒𝘝17 (@kris417) January 17, 2022

Saturday Night Live has been running for 47 years now. The regular cast turns over every few years to feature a new generation of up and coming comedians. You'll find a list of 159 of them here. Who your favorite is likely depends on your age, whether you prefer John Belushi, Al Franken, Eddie Murphy, Phil Hartman, Chris Farley, Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Leslie Jones, or Kate McKinnon.  

📺THE "FAVORITE
SNL CAST MEMBERS"
BRACKET📺

✍️Fill one out, tweet picks
🏆Final 4 & champ?

Created by @scottb804 & me

Drafted by @Jallyne @CastleShore @KevinPNavarro @TopShotYoda @scottb804 @LiseSFG22

Design by @kuhan

⭐️Round 1 begins Saturday night⭐️#snlcastbracket pic.twitter.com/8eiyupiCEQ

— Joe Manniello (@joe_manniello) January 15, 2022

On Friday, Joe Manniello launched a tournament to determine the best SNL cast member, with a bracket of 64 contenders. The replies to that Tweet have a lot of people filling out the entire bracket, but there is actual voting going on, which you can participate in by using the #snlcastbracket hashtag to find the polls. Voting is still in the first round, so there are inevitable blowouts.   

Elsewhere on Twitter, Eric Alper asked, "Who is the best SNL cast member of all time?" The replies in that thread are brimming with videos and gifs of classic skits featuring favorite cast members, so there is plenty to browse and relive the memories.

Gilda Radner and Bill Murray pic.twitter.com/idYKiSigNK

— Carol Layne (@keddle01) January 16, 2022

Eddie Murphy

SNL would have been canceled long ago if he hadn't become a cast member. pic.twitter.com/NrH735KmLB

— Jesse (@littleBIGman185) January 16, 2022

Which cast member is your favorite?

Here we see a collection of ten physics simulations in which balls are released to bounce around. The astonishing part is the point in the middle of each sequence where the balls arrange themselves in a pattern. That can't really happen, can it? It's really nice to see anyway, and if you want to know how it's done, click on the spoiler quote.

Spoiler Quote

As soon as I saw the latest xkcd comic by Randall Munroe, I had to look up "spinthariscope" to see if it was a real thing. And it is. William Crookes invented it by accident during his nuclear experiments in 1903. He spilled a tiny amount of radium bromide (a radioactive salt) onto a thin screen of zinc sulfide. Since radium bromide was a very expensive material, he carefully picked up every speck, using a magnifying glass to see them. He noticed flashes of light, produced by the radium bromide throwing off alpha particles. This was a pretty neat discovery, so Crookes fashioned an enclosed device for observing the effect. That's how the spinthariscope was born.

As a scientific instrument, the spinthariscope soon became obsolete, but it was still impressive to non-physicists and kids. In 1947, you could order one from the back of a cereal box. In the 1950s, a small spinthariscope was included in the Chemcraft Atomic Energy Lab for children.     

(Image credit: Theodore Gray)

What's more, United Nuclear still sells spinthariscopes, although their modern version uses thorium instead of radium bromide.

It's such a natural idea for a Quentin Tarantino movie- the life stories of Vic Vega (Michael Madsen) from Reservoir Dogs and his brother Vince Vega (John Travolta) from Pulp Fiction. Don't get too excited, The Vega Brothers is not a real movie, but a mashup from Luís Azevedo. Both Madsen and Travolta have plenty of film clips showing them being violent at different ages, now woven into an almost believable narrative. Well, let's say it makes about as much sense as any Tarantino film. The Vega Brothers also features Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, and a slew of other stars. This trailer contains NSFW language. -via Kottke

(Image source: louiseverard)

Creative plating now means getting rid of plates completely. We've brought you images from We Want Plates before, but it's been some years. Since then, the trend in trendy restaurants has only gotten worse. In addition to the website and the Twitter account, there's also a subreddit dedicated to the phenomenon of serving food on random objects instead of plates.



(Image source: nonsonosvizzero)

This is supposed to be a salad, but it more resembles the parts I'd end up throwing away. But that's secondary to the "tree" it's served on. Are you supposed to eat it with your fingers? That gives a whole new meaning to Salad Fingers.

Check out 30 of the more egregious submissions in a ranked list at Bored Panda. The list contains a disturbing number of foods served directly on the table.

Atari held its first arcade world championship tournament on Halloween weekend 1981 in Chicago. Video games were becoming hotter by the day, even though to play them, you had to go to an arcade and feed quarters into a console weighing hundreds of pounds. The hottest of the arcade games that year was Centipede, the first arcade game that appealed to women as much as it did to men. Centipede was the game chosen for the tournament. But that 1981 tournament had a lot more going on than gameplay, and you don't even have to be familiar with Centipede to be sucked into the shenanigans of that weekend.

The tournament story is actually five stories. First, it follows three women who came to dominate the competition. They had very different backgrounds and very different motives. And after the tournament, they went on to very different yet fascinating lives.

Another story concerns the inventor of Centipede. Game developer Dona Bailey was a fish out of water in the male-dominated Atari company, and she designed a game that appealed to her own taste. That it became Atari's hottest game and the tournament choice that year was gratifying, but on that very weekend, she was called out to court to defend her creation from pirates hoping to cash in on the tournament. One of the challenges of that case was a judge who didn't quite understand what an arcade game was.

The final story concerns the organizer of the event, who bluffed his way into the job and hoped to make enough money on the side to cover his house of cards financing before Atari found out they had hired the wrong organizer.

Read all those stories together at Truly Adventurous, or you can listen to it as a podcast at the same link. -via Damn Interesting

What in the world would inspire a Hollywood studio to spend $100 million on a comedy? Sometimes it's because they think they have a sure thing, like the biggest box office star of the era, in the case of The Adventures of Pluto Nash, or maybe a parody of another franchise, which shouldn't cost that much. Or it's a beloved cartoon character getting the live-action treatment, which can work, but it's never a sure thing. Or it's a sequel to a big hit, so of course it will work again, right? Again, there are no guarantees.



The thing is, just because an idea worked once, doing it again is just as risky. It's not the stars, or the familiar characters and setting, or even the special effects that make a good comedy. But those things can add millions of dollars to a movie that should have spent more money on an original idea or a funny script. See 15 comedies where the producers' calculations went completely wrong at Cracked.

The violent eruption a few hours ago of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano captured by satellites GOES-West and Himawari-8. pic.twitter.com/PzV5v9apF6

— Wonder of Science (@wonderofscience) January 15, 2022

The Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano near Tonga has been erupting occasionally for the past month. After a break in the action since January 5, it erupted again Thursday and Friday, but the biggest eruption was on Saturday (January 15), with an explosion that was heard 800 kilometers away in Fiji. A resulting tsunami hit Tonga's largest island Tongatapu, and tsunami advisories went out for parts of Japan, New Zealand's north island, and the US west coast this morning. Here's a video of the tsunami rolling in to Tonga.  

BREAKING: Tsunami hits Tonga as nearby volcano erupts pic.twitter.com/TRM1iKtAft

— BNO News (@BNONews) January 15, 2022

Tonga's next challenge is falling ash and acid rain. Let's see that eruption from another satellite image.

I have never seen satellite imagery of a volcanic eruption quite like this. Incredibly powerful eruption of Hunga Tonga volcano in the South Pacific. Tsunamis impacting nearby islands. Reports of people feeling and hearing the eruption in Fiji, 800 km away! Wow. https://t.co/EG2EYdssBX

— Elizabeth Leitman (@WxLiz) January 15, 2022

The shock wave generated by the recent eruption of Hunga Tonga #volcano is even visible on satellite imagery. Unbelievable. pic.twitter.com/5Hih2mPePs

— CyanideCN (@CyanideCN_) January 15, 2022

To understand how big the eruption was, this one shows the curvature of the earth.

Different perspective shows the waves propagating outward from the eruption. pic.twitter.com/fetNumZnYs

— Dakota Smith (@weatherdak) January 15, 2022

CNN is providing continuing updates on the effects of the eruption. -via Fark

A common trope in Victorian melodrama that survives in stories today is the tale of a husband who comes home early and finds his wife with another man. The enraged husband shoots the interloper, and the question goes to the jury of how culpable he is of murder. Will he be acquitted of this crime of passion as a justifiable homicide? A case in Georgia from 1893 turns that story on its head.

When C. F. Stephens suspected his wife of carrying on with his employee Frank Wilkerson, who lived with the couple, he came home early one day and indeed found the two in the bedroom in a "compromising position." Stephens shot Wilkerson, but only wounded him. Wilkerson was armed (and therefore we can assume, not naked), and shot Stephens, hitting him between the eyes. Stephens, incredibly, lived long enough to jot down a note about the incident. Or did he?

Frank Wilkerson was put on trial. Was it murder or self-defense? There were a surprising number of witnesses for a crime of this sort. Read about the Wilkerson murder case at Murder by Gaslight.  -via Strange Company

Long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the popular monster movies of Universal Studios started doing crossovers, implying that Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and others all lived in the same universe and time frame. It was a way to churn out more and more sequels, because everyone loves a good monster movie. However, even though these monsters could meet each other, their cinema versions were developed over decades.

That's why it's important to know the difference between Lon Chaney and Lon Chaney, Jr. The older Chaney was known as "the man of a thousand faces" in the 1920s. He played Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the title character in The Phantom of the Opera. His son, Lon Chaney, Jr. played the Wolf Man, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and a mummy in three movies. This family had a whole universe of monsters in just two actors!

Find out a lot more movie trivia about the Universal monster movies in a list at Mental Floss.

During the Apollo program, when missions got long enough to require food for astronauts, they had to rely on nourishment like roast beef squeezed from a tube directly intones mouth. Now that astronauts  spend weeks or even months aboard the International Space Station, that fare won't fly. NASA Astronaut Megan McArthur explains how space food is engineered to be as much like normal food as possible, but it still looks like C-rations to us. They don't really cook, because everything they take with them is already fully cooked if needed, but they can warm it up or cool it down in the refrigerator. And since they can't wash dishes, everyone needs to keep up with their own spoon. At about six minutes in, we get to see the chaos of McArthur putting beef in a tortilla and chasing the stray bits around. -via Laughing Squid