We know that Thomas Jefferson was avid to equip his new country with viable agricultural products. He experimented with crops in his garden, bottled his own wine, and imported livestock. That included a ram that Jefferson thought would improve the bloodline -and the wool- of American sheep.

This was no ordinary ram. Gifted to Jefferson by a DC businessman named James D. Barry, the ram was a Shetland – a small, usually docile breed that has either two horns or no horns. This Shetland had the distinction of having four horns, and two of them pointed forward.

At this point the United States was in the middle of the Embargo Act barring trade with Britain and France, so Jefferson was keen on anything that could boost the country’s manufacturing from within. Since at least 1790, Jefferson had been told that Shetland wool was “reckoned the finest produced in any part of the British Dominions” and he hoped this many-horned ram’s wool would produce “the famous Shetland stockings” which sold for a guinea a pair and were “soft as fur.” He clung his hopes on this ram to bring that fine wool to America, and his hopes caused him to overlook this ram’s less desirable qualities. That negligence proved deadly in February 1808.

Those "less desirable qualities" led to the death of 9-year-old Alexander Kerr, when the ram attacked him as he was walking home from school. Jefferson had owned the ram for eight months by then, and the first thing he did was to write to the boy's father, insinuating that he had ordered the ram to be secured before the attack. Was that an attempted at CYA? It turned out that the ram had attacked someone else already that same month! In fact, there were accounts of the ram being dangerous for months by then. But Jefferson went to great lengths to keep the ram from being put down -and keep himself from blame. Read (or listen to) the story of Jefferson and his killer ram at Plodding Through the Presidents. -via Strange Company

McDonald's inability to serve ice cream has long been the subject of jokes, since their ice cream machines are almost always out of order, so you may as well not order a McFlurry. When you do, odds are that the answer will come back through the drive-through speaker, "Machine's broken." We have all become used to it, so it came as a surprise to learn that the Federal Trade Commission is looking into why these machines are constantly broken. The short answer that's been around for years is that cleaning the machine is so complicated, workers often just skip it. There's more to it than that.

The mystery surrounding the machines has been long documented. They’re notoriously hard to clean, and when their nightly automated maintenance fails, the franchise must wait for a repair technician. There have been some fixes for this. The startup Kytch launched a device that alerts owners to breakdowns, providing them with a clear message for what went wrong. Currently, the machines themselves, produced by Taylor Commercial Foodservice LLC, offer messages that are as clear as a McFlurry with messages like “ERROR: XSndhUIF LHPR>45F 1HR LPROD too VISC.” What a joy it must be to read that message while working a backed-up McDonald’s drive-thru during a global pandemic.

It's possible to be a little too high-tech, I guess. But somehow, Dairy Queen and other fast food outlets manage to serve ice cream all day long. The real question is what can, or will, the FTC, or McDonald's, do about it? Read more at the A.V. Club.

Have you ever heard of the Koreshan Unity? It was another of the many religious sects born in New York in the 19th century, so you will be forgiven for not finding it familiar. Due to the overabundance of fringe groups and communes in New York, the Koreshan Unity moved to Chicago and then ultimately to Florida, where the group grew to around 200 members in their heyday.

It all started with science. Well, ostensibly. Cyrus Teed, an eccentric medical doctor and alchemist from Utica, New York, often experimented with dangerous levels of electric current. During one late night in his laboratory in 1869, Teed was knocked unconscious by his own experimental attempt to turn lead into gold and had a vision –or as he called it, “The Illumination”. A beautiful woman appeared and imparted to Teed the truths of the universe: the secret of immortality, that God was both male and female, and that we live on the inside of the Earth’s crust. The angel told him he was the seventh prophet in a line that included Adam and, most recently, Jesus and that he had been sent to redeem humanity.

The Koreshans settled in a southwest Florida swamp near Ft. Myers and spent years building a rather nice village in Estero, which ultimately became the property of the state of Florida and is now a state park. Read about the Koreshan Unity and their settlement that is now a well-preserved historical site at Messy Nessy Chic.   

The days of early aviation were crazy, man. F. Gerald Phillips was a Hollywood stunt pilot. He recalled that one time he took off before a landing gear wheel was bolted to his plane. Phillips was carrying a cameraman to film an aerial stunt, so there were plenty of guysy aviators around. First, he lined up with another plane, and wing walker Al Johnson walked over to Phillips' plane.

He climbed through the rigging to the step at the side of my cockpit. Leaning in, he shouted over the engine noise, “Hi, Jerry. Cruise around close to the field. They’ll bring up a wheel. I’ll get it and put it on for you.” It was almost casual.

Bob Lloyd, another motion-picture pilot, took off with Ivan Unger, a wheel, and 20 feet of rope. Ivan, in his early 20s, was a professional wingwalker and parachute jumper, short in stature but long on courage. He had flown with me on many a Sunday show, hanging by his feet from the wing skid or landing gear.

At 1,500 feet and 70 mph Al made an extremely difficult job look easy. Grasping the short strut on top of the upper wing, he nimbly hoisted himself up and assumed a crouching position to await the rendezvous with Bob, Ivan, and the wheel. Soon they approached from behind, slightly above and to my left, and Ivan began lowering the rope, the wheel dangling at its end.

It wasn't an easy task. They dropped the first wheel, and the second wheel wouldn't fit. Then the engine died. That's when they had to get creative. You can read Phillips' entire account of the air emergency at Air & Space magazine. -via Metafilter

The finalists for the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards have been selected! See the best of the best submissions that caught wild animals at the wrong moment, or just comically being themselves. The kangaroo practicing his stagecraft above is from Lea Scadden. The jump for joy below is from Roland Kranitz.



See all the finalists here. Once you've decided which one you like best, vote for the People's Choice Award here. The winners of this year's competition will be announced on October 22.

-via Bored Panda

See also: The Funniest Animals From the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards

We know that medieval art can be really weird. It's one thing to find a random jousting snail or an ugly baby Jesus, but when those things happen over and over, you start to wonder what caused those trends. Some of these can be explained by the religious culture of the time, while others are recurring jokes, which we might even call memes. So it's only fitting that they have become memes all over again in the 21st century!

“Generally speaking That looks like a pretty good call. Hey, Pop, how’s the economy going today? I guess I’ll have to move.” pic.twitter.com/HZeLIb5huS

— The Neural Yorker (@NeuralYorker) August 24, 2021

Cartoons in The New Yorker are iconic enough that you easily recognize one outside of the magazine. Even as the jokes are crowdsourced, the same style endures. Could an algorithm learn the style well enough to produce New Yorker cartoons? Introducing: The Neural Yorker.

Paying on their ubiquity and familiarity, comics artist Ilan Manouach and AI engineer Ioannis Siglidis developed the Neural Yorker, an artificial intelligence (AI) engine that posts computer-generated cartoons on Twitter. The project consists of image-and-caption combinations produced by a generative adversarial network (GAN), a deep-learning-based model. The network is trained using a database of punchlines and images of cartoons found online and then “learns” to create new gags in the New Yorker‘s iconic style, with hilarious (and sometimes unsettling) results.

“Are there any stupid people here that don’t need a little paint?” pic.twitter.com/Q0vkdfSvfU

— The Neural Yorker (@NeuralYorker) August 9, 2021

The comics are not conventionally as funny as the real New Yorker cartoons, but their very weirdness may provoke giggles. And when they come a little too close to human experiences, those giggles can become a sense of dread. Read about The Neural Yorker project at Hyperallergic, and follow its Twitter account to see what it comes up with next. -via Damn Interesting

Ella Hawkins uses cookies as an art medium, which is great, except you would feel awful about eating them! These cookies are inspired by vintage Tiffany Studios lamps. She decorated them with stained glass made from gel food coloring and vodka. The "lead" in between is royal icing. Check out each cookie next to the Tiffany lamp from which its design comes. Click to the right to see them all.



See more of Hawkins' lovely art cookies here.

-via Everlasting Blort

In grade school, you probably mixed vinegar and baking soda to make a papier-mâché volcano erupt. Cool when you're six, but lame afterward. The guy from The Action Lab has an alternative that is more realistic. Using amonium dichromate produces heat and ash like a real volcano, and actually builds a volcanic cone and crater out of its own spent material. The weird thing is that amonium dichromate becomes safer as it erupts! The experiment is only three minutes long, the rest is an ad. Oh yeah, in case you haven't figured it out, the "cooler" in the title refers to desirability, not temperature. -via Digg

If you've never tasted Blue Moon ice cream, then you're not from Wisconsin, Michigan, or the adjacent areas. The frozen confection is a Midwest staple, with an unlikely color and a flavor that pleases but defies description. Let's try anyway.

Native to the Midwestern United States and little known elsewhere, Blue Moon’s flavor dances on the tip of your tongue, taunting you into another guess, at turns familiar and elusive. It’s bright, mildly citrusy, and almost fruity, but not in a cloying way. It’s the aftertaste in particular that is, frankly, somewhat infuriating, a flavor layer that seems to say, “you know what this is,” but you don’t—and in fact, very few people do. The Blue Moon ice cream flavoring recipe is proprietary information, and those close to it are tight-lipped.

The flavor of Blue Moon ice cream must be a blend, but a blend of what? Atlas Obscura went so far as to conduct a taste test with a New York ice cream expert. They also looked into the murky origins of the flavor. They also posted a recipe for homemade ice cream that may or may not come close to the flavor of the secret patented flavor formula of Blue Moon ice cream.

As early as 1929, airline executives were arguing about the benefits of seatbelts on airplanes. While air travel was being promoted as a luxury experience, many scoffed at the idea of buckling passengers into their seats. Over time, the safety benefits of seatbelts were considered, particularly after the experience of World War II. But it took until 1972 to have seatbelts mandated on all passenger planes! The biggest stumbling block to universal adoption of seatbelts on planes was a particularly horrific plane crash on Halloween night of 1950. A Vickers VC-1 aircraft hauling passengers from Paris to London crashed on arrival and killed 28 people.

Four hundred yards out, the captain radioed the tower that he was overshooting the landing. But the craft was too low to pull out. Undercarriage retracted, the airplane touched down at a 20-degree angle with an estimated speed between 80 and 120 knots. It skidded over 100 feet, bounced, was airborne again for a half-mile, and finally thudded back to earth before catching fire. Only one flight attendant and one passenger survived.

When official inquiries began, Dr. Donald Teare, the go-to guy for autopsy examinations in celebrity deaths and high-profile transportation accidents, was asked to lead the team. His report to the public, in the September 22, 1951 issue of the British Medical Journal, included a statement that astonished the scientific community and fueled public skepticism over passenger restraints. “The immediate cause of death,” Teare wrote, “in more than half of the victims was acute flexion of the body over the safety belt.”

Suddenly, the seatbelt was considered not just dangerous, but deadly. Read how aviation experts reacted and turned things around at Air & Space magazine.

(Image:DarkStarFTW)

We all recall our parents telling us not to get a tattoo, because it's permanent and we'll regret it some day. But often, tattoo regret is less about the act of getting a tattoo and more about the art of one's ink. Tattoos that are faded, out of style, unfinished, or just plain ugly may haunt you. Tattoos that present something or someone you no longer care for are sad, too. Luckily, there are plenty of clever and talented tattoo artists who can help you out by putting something much better over top of that tattoo you got years ago when you were broke and unwise.

(Image: whitestainedwood)

See a roundup of 30 impressive tattoo fixes at Bored Panda gleaned from the subreddit Fixed Tattoos.

If you'd like to try something a little different for your next getaway weekend or vacation, maybe you should stay in some place that out of this world! Check out accommodations that will take you to outer space in one way or another: maybe a bedroom with a skylight and a working telescope, or sleep in a replica NASA space capsule, or you can indulge your fantasies about living in a science fiction universe! For example, you can inhabit the worlds of Star Wars at Twelve Parsecs in Florida.

For a fully immersive Star Wars experience, look no further than this nine-bedroom galactic detour. Guests can enjoy themed rooms that capture the spirit of the Millennium Falcon, Hoth, or Cloud City. Best of all, you’re just 15 minutes from Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Walt Disney World.

Besides, it couldn't possibly be as expensive as staying at Disney's Galactic Starcruiser at Galaxy's Edge. Read about eight space-themed travel accommodations at Mental Floss.

Plants, fungi, and even animals sometimes develop fluorescence for one reason or another. We're also familiar with animals who are genetically engineered to glow under a black light. But science has apparently not yet looked for all the biological structures that may fluoresce when the opportunity arises. A team of researchers went out after dark looking through the tropical forests of northern Vietnam (which sounds like quite an adventure in itself) with a black light, and were surprised to find wasps nests that glowed green!

The team initially set out to discover unknown fluorescent insects in tropical rainforests, so they'd come equipped with UV LED torches. "We were not searching for wasp nests in particular," Schöllhorn said. "To our knowledge, this phenomenon has not been observed in the past, neither by scientific researchers nor by any photographers."

When exposed to white light, the nest cocoon caps appear bright white. Their verdant fluorescence begins to appear under normal daylight, and at night under a UV torch, the bright green glow of the nests can be seen up to 65 feet (20 meters) away, the authors wrote in their report, published Tuesday (Aug. 24) in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

The wasps were of the genus Polistes, so the scientists checked out other species of the same genus from France and the Amazon rainforest. Those wasp nests also glowed under a UV light, although with slightly different colors and intensities. The next question is why the wasps evolved to build fluorescent nests. They certainly didn't do it waiting for someone to come along with a blacklight! There are quite a few possibilities, which you can read about at Live Science. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Bernd Schöllhorn and Serge Berthier)

There have always been natural disasters, some larger than others, some that we haven't quite figured out, and some that happened so long ago that most of us are not even familiar with them. But then civilization came along, and humans have added quite a few more disasters with our constant resource extraction, manufacturing, and shipping. And the disasters just got more bizarre.

In this list of weird disasters, you'll find some that longtime Neatoramanauts know, one, two, three, four, and five. And there are more you've probably never heard of that you can read about, and find links for more information, in a list of pictofacts at Cracked.