Her life began in the countryside. A skill with poisons brought her to the heart of the empire. Jennifer Wright (@JenAshleyWright) on the world's (potential) first serial killer.https://t.co/Tn1B66oUIj

— CrimeReads (@CrimeReads) November 2, 2021

Some may consider Locusta of Gaul to be the world's first serial killer, but she was probably just the first one that was well-documented. She didn't kill for thrills, though. She was a professional. Locusta was born in the countryside where she learned the powers of plants for both healing and killing. Upon moving to Rome, she found out how many people wanted to kill each other, so she went into business providing poisons.

Locusta came to be so well-known that she was eventually arrested, but then was saved from punishment in 54 CE by Agrippina, who wanted to kill her husband, Claudius, and needed professional help. Then Agrippina's son, Nero, gave Locusta the title of Imperial Poisoner! Read how she carried out her most famous murders, and eventually paid for them, at CrimeReads. -via Damn Interesting

Mr. Andrew Cotter frames this as a bedtime story for his two dogs, Olive and Mabel. Mabel is having trouble sleeping and is very attentive. Note her adorable head tilt! Olive, not so much. Olive falls asleep during the story, but Mabel really gets into it, and so will you, as Cotter (previously at Neatorama) is a Scottish broadcaster for BBC Sports and has a lovely voice that you must listen to carefully or you'll miss his delightful one-liners ("I'm too handsome to die!"). Get ready to be spooked by the pale wolf in the woods.

The story turns out to be truly terrifying for dogs, particularly the final line, which causes Mabel to freak out a bit. Surely that will help her get to sleep. And give her nightmares. -via Laughing Squid

McDonald's is getting into the market for meatless burgers with the new McPlant. It's a hamburger with no ham. Scratch that, it's a hamburger with no beef, either. By this weekend, it should be available at a small number of American McDonald's outlets. It's not the first meatless fast food burger, as Burger King has been selling the Impossible Burger for a couple of years now.

Despite the name, the McPlant is not vegan, although it may be pass as vegetarian. It is normally served with cheese and mayonnaise, and it will be cooked on the same grill as regular burgers, at least in the US. In the UK, the McPlant is grilled on a separate cooking surface, and the cheese and mayo are also made of plants, making it certified vegan burger.

But how does it taste? Mat Smith has tried it and he says, "it tastes like... a McDonald’s burger." Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is entirely up to you. Read the rest of his review at Engadget. -via Fark

On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union tested the world's largest nuclear bomb. Tsar Bomba, as it came to be known, was deployed over an Arctic island and produced a fireball six miles wide. The explosion yielded the power of 50 megatons of TNT, although the bomb was capable of 100 megatons. In comparison, the bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima had the explosive power of 15 kilotons of TNT. Tsar Bomba was 40 times as powerful as any nuclear weapon the US ever built to this day. The test of the bomb brought an end to the nuclear test ban treaty between the US and the USSR that had been in effect since 1958.

The US denounced the test, but publicly downplayed it in the press. The Soviets were obviously ahead the nuclear arms race, but that was because the US at the time deliberately avoided building larger nuclear bombs. The Eisenhower administration didn't think it was ethical, as if small nuclear bombs were. But once the Soviets had tested its Tsar Bomba, scientists were asked to design larger nuclear weapons. And US nuclear testing came back in full swing. Read the story of Tsar Bomba and the American response at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The article includes footage from a Soviet documentary about the bomb.   -via Digg

Get ready for the uproar- the Bird of the Year (Te Manu Rongonui o Te Tau) competition has been won by a bat! The New Zealand organization Forest & Bird stages a poll each year to determine the best bird. This year, the winner is the long-tailed bat, or pekapeka-tou-roa. The announcement of the poll results has people wondering how a bat ever got into the competition, much less defeated the actual birds that were in the running.  

This is the first time New Zealand’s only land mammal has been included in Forest & Bird’s annual contest, and it has flown away with the title.

“I think I’m going to be fired,” says Forest & Bird’s Bird of the Year spokesperson Laura Keown.  

Organizers say they included the bat in order to draw attention to it. In that they have succeeded wildly. On top of that, more votes were cast this year than in any previous year. The 2020 winner, the kākāpō, came in second in the polling. It's not the first time that the Bird of the Year contest was in the news for odd reasons. Last year, the contest had to deal with a case of voter fraud, in which 1500 votes had to be thrown out.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Ian Davidson-Watts)

Owlkitty is back, and starring in a new blockbuster! Well, not exactly new, as Jurassic Park is 28 years old, but the remix is new. Animator Tibo Charroppin has edited his very patient cat Lizzy into so many movies we know and love, but this one is more than just replacing a monster with a cat -it's a masterpiece of VFX. Notice how the lighting and even the lightning flashes are perfectly synched with the original film. And the scene has been altered in other ways to make sense with a giant cat. Lizzy, er, Owlkitty (previously at Neatorama) takes the part of the T-rex that menaces our heroes in their stalled cars, but the action hinges on the one thing a cat will always be drawn to- the sound of a can of Fancy Feast being opened. I know my cats go nuts for it. I'm lucky they aren't twenty feet tall!  -via reddit

General Mills' first monster cereals, Count Chocula and Franken Berry, are marking their 50th anniversary. In celebration, they have released a cereal called Monster Mash in tribute to all five flavors of monster cereals, although the actual cereal is fruit flavored. Otherwise, they only have monster cereals in stores for a few months out of the year, so if you're into that sort of thing, you better get yours before the stores sell out.

You might be interested in the cereals' backstory. It turns out that General Mills already had the products, two oat-based cereals with marshmallows, one chocolate and the other strawberry flavored. The actual names came from the advertising department. But once the characters were named, they took off and never looked back. Mel magazine spoke with the copy writer responsible for the character's names, the artists who gave them character, the voice actors, and the people who developed the advertising juggernaut through the next 50 years. We learn how Boo Berry joined the team, and about the rise and fall of the short-lived Fruit Brute and Yummy Mummy characters -and their cereals. Read an oral history of the monster cereals here.

(Image credit: Mike Mozart)

It's finally Halloween, and it's time for some Ghostbusters! But this isn't Ray Parker, Jr. It's an entire chorus of anthropomorphic electronic devices! The Device Orchestra (previously at Neatorama) consists of 14 electronic gadgets in this song, including several electric toothbrushes (one dressed as a ghost), calculators, a steam iron, razors, card readers, printers of all kinds, and even a nail polishing device. Spare a thought for the impressive wiring and programming that went into producing this song, but also relax and enjoy these cute googly-eyed little gadgets as they sing the song of the season for you. -via Gizmodo

In 1908, competing expeditions to reach the North Pole were undertaken by Robert Peary and by Frederick Cook. Both claimed to have reached the Pole, Cook in 1908 and Peary in 1909. Cook's records were eventually deemed insufficient, and Peary is regarded as the first to reach the Pole, although the ruling is still controversial. A 1914 followup expedition to check the claims would make a compelling movie.

During the Pole expeditions, Peary claimed to have found a new body of land he called Crocker Land. Frederick Cook also identified a previously-unknown land mass he called Bradley Land. Finding those places would go a long way toward confirming the explorers' records, but ultimately, neither piece of land existed. Nevertheless, an expedition led by five scientists set out five years later to find Crocker Land.

As with many Arctic expeditions, anything that could possibly wrong did so. But in this journey, motivations that could be classified as downright evil contributed to the decline in expedition members, particularly among the Inuit guides. These included lust, lying, cultural genocide, and murder. All that was on top of the cold, disease, and thin ice that endangered so many other Arctic expeditions. Read about the ill-fated Crocker Land Expedition at historywithatwist. -via Strange Company

(Image: Expedition leader Donald MacMillan and Inuit guide Minik Wallace, taken from a video of the expedition preparations)

Josh Sundquist has become a legend for his clever Halloween costumes that always incorporate the fact that he has only one leg. We've posted almost all of them over the years. Today he revealed what he's been working on for 2021. He's a microscope!



You have to wonder where the inspiration for this came from. Does it have a hidden meaning, or did he decide to do it because it's difficult? Sundquist has made himself into inanimate objects before, like the leg lamp and the IHOP sign. The Pixar lamp is definitely animated, even though it's a lamp. Oh yeah, and then there was the Christmas tree, which was featured in a rather hilarious video that runs through Sundquist's previous costumes. -via Bored Panda

People who use Ring doorbell and security cameras send in unusual things they've recorded to the company, which then makes occasional compilation videos for our amusement. This is the Halloween edition, in which we see plenty of costumed characters, some acting as expected and others not so much. There are also creepy critters, from spiders and bats to a bear who wants that pumpkin and a coyote who wants that house cat. While the narration can be a bit annoying at times, they also slip in some Halloween trivia in order to avoid any hint of silence. -via Boing Boing

Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills were a patent medicine first manufactured in 1854 and promoted as a cure for dyspepsia, liver trouble, women's ailments, pimples, and a host of other maladies. They were manufactured and sold by various Comstock family businesses and their partners, and are still sold today in Australia.

But what makes them really interesting is the marketing. The advertisement shown above is dated to somewhere between 1870 and 1900. It has a cat and a poem, which draws the attention, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with medicine. It turns out that this is a series of ads, with a much longer complete poem that tells us what happens to the cat. Continue reading to see the rest of the series.

We know that President Theodore Roosevelt was a veteran, a fitness buff, and an outdoorsman. He always tried to stay in shape, and was no stranger to a hard day's work, even while in office. Roosevelt camped outside, even when it rained, and was known to pitch hay with the best of them. This endeared him to working people, except for those he outworked in public. In fact, he managed to leverage his physical strength to influence others in many ways. In other words, he wasn't above making hay out of it. This account quoted from a magazine was published in the Essex County Herald on November 22, 1907.

A delegation from Kansas visited President Roosevelt at Oyster Bay. The president met them with coat and collar off, mopping his brow.

“Ah, gentlemen,” he said, “dee-lighted to see you—dee-lighted! But I’m very busy putting in my hay just now. Come down to the barn with me, and we’ll talk things over while I work.”

Down to the barn hustled president and delegation.

Mr. Roosevelt seized a pitchfork and—but where was the hay?

“John!” shouted the president. “John! Where’s all the hay?”

“Sorry, sir,” came John’s voice from the loft, “but I ain’t had time to throw it back since you threw it up for yesterday’s delegation.”

Oops. The subterfuge is delicious, but it only underscores how fit the president was that he did that day after day. Read about Roosevelt's adventures in hay, camping, and more at Second Glance History.  -via Strange Company 

(Image source: Library of Congress)

Exorcism is a ritual used to remove demons that possess the bodies of people. Casting out demons goes back at least as far as the Bible, and is usually associated with the Catholic Church. However, exorcism has occurred in Pentecostal and Evangelical churches in more modern times. There is no doubt that people will occasionally show symptoms that couldn't be explained any other way in the days before modern medical science, that today would be diagnosed as mental illness or even physical ailments -or a combination. The spiritual belief in demons can go a long way toward making them seem real. But whether or not you believe that demons can possess people, the rituals used to cast them out are very real, and some have been extensively documented. Some appeared to have been successful, while others were lifelong battles, and even more left no documented followup. Read the accounts of six documented historical exorcisms ranging over the past 400 years at Mental Floss.

There are Guinness World Records for everything under the sun, including individual LEGO sets. Paul Ufema set a Guinness World Record in speed for putting together the LEGO Colosseum set in February. That's more than 9,000 pieces, and he did it in less than 14 hours! Well, once you've had the thrill of setting a world record, you want to feel that thrill again, so Ufema plunged ahead, this time tackling the LEGO Millennium Falcon, which has 7,541 pieces. He put the set together in 16 hours, 10 minutes and 29 seconds, which is a world record time. But there was a problem- one piece left in the box.

Did the LEGO company give him an extra brick? Where did that brick belong? Ufema did a thorough investigation and was ultimately disqualified from the record. But he has our respect, nonetheless. -via Laughing Squid