Holy Toledo! This is what you call an impactful security video. On the one hand, this is really scary because there could have been children using the pool or the trampoline. On the plus side, the pool actually saved the car, the driver, and the house as it slowed the vehicle. And the lawn was thoroughly watered. Notice the water flew so high that it took a while to run off the roof and overflow the gutters. As no one was injured in the collision, this ended up on the subreddit IdiotsInCars. -via Digg

Polygon went out and made a list of 25 dumb internet videos. I would have made a much longer list, but that would take quite a bit of time. There are definitely some classics here that will spark nostalgic joy, and some that you may have not yet seen (I was only familiar with videos older than 2018) but are worth checking out, along with commentary on each. What dumb internet videos would you add? -via Boing Boing

Have you ever wondered why the chicken is the go-to poultry of the world today? It wasn't because of Colonel Sanders. No, we need to go back further to see how the chicken supplanted ducks and geese on our tables. Back to Queen Victoria, the trendsetter (see white wedding dresses and childbirth anesthetic) and monarch of the British Empire, who popularized chicken for dinner.  

Queen Victoria, an abolitionist whose title gave her an outsize influence on trends of the day, helped make chicken a food so universally associated with wholesome nourishment that within just a few decades after her death, politicians would start promising would-be voters a “chicken in every pot.” By the time KFC franchises were spreading across the nation after World War II, all Colonel Sanders had to do to sell his deep-fried breasts, wings, drumsticks, and thighs was to promise customers that his birds were so full of fat, they’d happily lick their fingers to keep the tasty grease from running down their elbows.

The crash of hen fever in 1855 made such table manners possible, for the chicken would not have become so universally consumed if its price had remained at $700 for a breeding pair. The collapse was also a boon to Charles Darwin, who was finally able to afford enough chickens to study—Darwin’s work with chickens would inform On the Origin of Species, which was published in 1859.

But what does an evil sea captain have to do with it? That's an interesting part of the story, which you can read at Collectors Weekly.

If you remember the yucky-tasting water at Disney World, you might be tempted to think that the drinking fountains are engineered to make you buy an expensive drink instead. But my experience with central Florida is in visiting relatives in more than one location, so I thought that all of Florida had sulfurous water. Midway to Main Street explains just what happened to Florida water. Yeah, it might spur you pay through the nose for a soda, but that's not the original intent. -via Digg

In June of 1858, a ship named the Mary Russell landed at Cork Harbor in Ireland. It had returned from delivering a shipment of mules to Barbados under the command of Captain William Stewart, who had just bludgeoned seven men to death- six crew members and a sailor who had hitched a ride on the ship. Stewart didn't make any attempt to hide the murders, as he was thoroughly convinced they were planning a mutiny. There were no such plans, but the six-week journey was a descent into extreme paranoia for Stewart.   

As Stewart revealed to Scoresby later, he hadn’t originally planned to harm anyone. He had asked the men to furl the sails so he could sail on without their help, in search of a ship to rescue him from their treachery. But one had already passed them by during the battle with Howes, and a second turned away—possibly thinking the Mary Russell was a pirate ship—despite Stewart’s attempts to flag it down.

And then a new thought struck him: Surely if the crew were innocent, God would have directed the second ship to rescue them. And since death was, in Stewart’s understanding, a punishment befitting the crime of mutiny, that must be what God intended for them. That notion, together with the terror that Howes, still at large, could murder him at any moment, gave way to a sudden, sobering realization.

Stewart must kill his crew.

Read the story of the Mary Russell's journey and the trial that ensued at Mental Floss.

Before movies and television took over entertainment, anything unusual could be made into a show and taken on the road. Clarence Willard did just that, with a performance that consisted mainly up standing up straight. Willard toured with the Barnum and Bailey Circus, and later with Ripley's Believe It Or Not.

While on stage, Willard would invite a volunteer from the audience to join him, usually someone taller than him. Standing next to each other, Willard would stretch himself until he stood taller. Willard was found that he could add seven and half inches to his natural height of 5 feet 10 inches simply by stretching. He was also able to extend the length of his arms by 8 to 15 inches and make one leg 4 inches longer than the other.

In the September 1927 issue of the Science of Invention, the magazine set out to explain how Willard grew on demand. Editors took x-rays of his spine and determined that his spinal curvature is “perhaps greater than that of the average man.”

Most people with spinal curvatures remain that way unless there is some medical intervention, but Willard learned to straighten and relax his spine by his own muscle power. Read the story of The Man Who Grows at Amusing Planet. 

During the World War II Nazi occupation of France, there were many who were desperate to flee the country. Jewish people, exposed French Resistance members, and frankly, anyone who feared the Nazis wanted out. There were organized escape routes, but they were so secretive that many who worked for these networks did not know who else was involved, and they did not use their real names anyway. One of these escape schemes was run by a Dr. Eugène. The French Gestapo investigated, to the point of torturing potential escapees into exposing him, but Dr. Eugène managed to slip through their hands.

Throughout 1943, French Gestapo agents continued to assemble their dossier on this elusive Dr. Eugène. They learned that he had a surprisingly large network of agents combing Paris for Jews seeking extraction, and that the beauty parlor at 25 Rue des Mathurins was the network’s primary clearinghouse for escapees. Whenever an escapee-to-be arrived at the parlor, if the doctor decided he would furnish his services, he would instruct them to return at a specific time and date, prepared for departure. The escapee must have already concluded all of their affairs in France, including goodbyes to loved ones. They were to produce 10 passport-style photos for use in forged travel documents⁠—five portraits and five in profile. No more than two adults could travel together, and no more than two suitcases per person. Escapees were told to amass their cash and valuables, and hide them in their luggage and in their clothing. Part of the cash was for the network’s fee, the rest to pay for travel and to establish a new life. Importantly, escapees must leave behind all identifying documents so they would not be caught with conflicting names or initials. This included any monogrammed clothing or luggage.

As the war dragged on, the story takes quite a turn. Besides setting the stage, it's not even a World War II story. Read about the mysterious and elusive Dr. Eugène and his elaborate scheme at Damn Interesting. Beware that it is pretty gruesome. Also available in podcast form.

We think of flappers as the trend-setting women of the Roaring Twenties, but the style was introduced years earlier. Dancers Vernon and Irene Castle brought jazz music and the dances that go with it to America in 1912. America ate them up.

They popularised dances like the foxtrot, the waltz, the maxixe, the tango, and the bunny hug. They opened a dancing school across from Manhattan’s Ritz Hotel and their supper club, “Castles in the Air”, was located on a Broadway theatre’s roof. They also had a nightclub called “Castles by the Sea” on the Long Beach broadwalk and their own restaurant, the “Sans Souci”.

But the Castles, particularly Irene, did not just start trends on stage. She became a fashion trendsetter in every sense of the word, and came to be known as America’s Best Dressed Woman. What came after her was a fashion revolution – the perspective on style and dress changed completely.

Castle dressed in ways that made dancing easier- shorter skirts, no corset, and a stylish band to hold her hair. When she cut her hair short, suddenly young women all over wanted the "Castle bob." Read about Irene Castle and how her style influenced flapper culture at Messy Nessy Chic.

Once upon a time, animation in feature films was a tedious, expensive process. Each animation cel went through numerous processes. First they were hand-sketched, then cleaned up, then copied, then colored. The 1959 film Sleeping Beauty required a million animated cels that went through numerous hands, at a cost of six million dollars. And then it only made five million in its initial run. Something had to change.

Take a closer look at Walt Disney’s 1961 animated One Hundred and One Dalmatians film, and you may notice its animation style looks a little different from its predecessors. With its dark outlines defining characters from backgrounds, its departure from the subtle and sensitive animation of Sleeping Beauty just two years prior was considered jarring to some.

That’s because the film is completely Xeroxed. The technology, invented by American physicist Chester Carlson in the 1940s, completely streamlined the animation process, and ultimately saved Disney’s beloved animation department.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians proved that a good story and cute animals were more important than beautiful artwork, or at least more cost-effective. Read how Disney adopted Xerox technology and how it changed the industry at Smithsonian.

Russia has always relied on apples for sustenance and delicious treats. One that was particularly popular among 19th-century aristocrats was pastila, a dessert that may remind you of marshmallow, meringue, or divinity, made from apples. And like those fluffy sweets, it once required lots of elbow grease, as Russian food expert Darra Goldstein explains.

In the days before electricity, making pastila was painful labor. Without a mechanical mixer, beating cooked apples into fluff had to be done by hand. One “particularly exquisite” 19th-century variety, says Goldstein, had to be beaten for an agonizing 48 straight hours. “So in Russia, you had serfs and they were in the kitchen and they were whipping the pastila,” notes Goldstein. “So it wasn’t any effort on the part of the people who would be enjoying it.”

Cue the Russian Revolution. Under the restrictions and scarcities of the Soviet Union, pastila slowly faded away. “It wasn’t part of the necessary food groups,” says Goldstein. “It was hard enough for them to get basic foods to market, which they didn’t succeed in doing either.” Many of Russia’s traditional, unusual, or unique foods met the same fate. But recently, there has been a massive upswing of interest in recovering ancestral Russian recipes. A decade ago, my friend Stas took notice that the interest in restoring Russian foodways became mainstream. To him, it was especially poignant. “We always grew up thinking that a lot of our culture had been just completely obliterated,” he says. “Then there’s this wave of people unearthing really old recipes such as Belyov pastila. And so everybody’s like, holy shit, this is what this thing is supposed to look like.”

The rise of electrical appliances has made pastille accessible again. And if you want to try it out yourself, you can get a recipe for pastila at Atlas Obscura along with the history of the dish.

A fellow who goes by ModernDayCaveman was recently released after 26 years in prison. In this video, he goes into a Walmart for the first time. He's just looking for a box of Cheerios, and is astonished to find he can select from ten different kinds. Watch him confront chips, too. The production values are awful, but his reactions are so wholesome it doesn't matter. -via Digg

The Superhero Club at Facebook ran images of Marvel's Avengers through FaceApp to change their gender. The results look eerily believable -except for the Hulk, who is always a cartoon.

The app changes facial dimensions slightly, like widening the cheekbones for females and narrowing them for males. It also adds makeup to female versions, and removes it for male versions. You might notice that when changing a male superhero into a female, the app removes ten years of age. When changing a female into a male, the two characters look the same young age. You can see all 14 of them in a post at Geeks Are Sexy.

While the characters look like the same person or siblings, I could swear that the female version of Captain America is an actress I've seen somewhere.

The game Monopoly can be cutthroat, but its most enduring feature is that it takes a long time. While some of that has to do with how evenly matched the players and their motivations are, the ultimate outcome depends on the roll of the dice. If the dice fall just so, the game can be quite short.

After our recent attempt to play the shortest actual game of Monopoly on record, we started to wonder about what the shortest THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE game of Monopoly would be. That is, if everything went just the right way, with just the right sequence of rolls, Chance and Community Chest cards, and so on, what is the quickest way one player could go bankrupt? After working on the problem for a while, we boiled it down to a 4-turn (2 per player), 9 roll (including doubles) game. Detail on each move given below. If executed quickly enough, this theoretical game can be played in 21 seconds (see video below).

It's been a long time since I played the game, so I had forgotten that a turn can be extended with a double roll. The guys at scatterplot explain how a game can end in sudden death, with a very short bonus video to demonstration it. Personally, if confronted with a group who wanted to play Monopoly, I would go bankrupt as quickly as I could, in order to go do something else. -via Boing Boing

Gruinard Island in Scotland was once a British biological warfare testing area. But that's just a prelude to the story Tom Scott tells us about the island and what happened decades later in 1986. The story doesn't even have much to do with anthrax and nothing at all to do with biological warfare. In fact, it might make you grin.

Medieval artworks, illuminations, and marginalia include some really weird scenes that defy modern interpretation. However, the world is full of people who will give it a try, just to be funny. If you are one of them, you’ll be intrigued by the Medieval Meme Generator. Choose an image from a collection from the KB National Library of the Netherlands, read about the image to find its intended meaning, and add your own punch line. There are 15 images now available (some may be considered NSFW), and they will be switched out every three months or so. Even if you don’t want to create jokes with them, exploring the history of these really weird images is a good use of your free time. -via Nag on the Lake