First, the people at Bridge Kaldro Music Store in Christianburg, Virginia, put up a sign challenging the nearby shoe shop to a sign war. Super Shoes responded with an insulting sign declaring that their shoe strings are stronger than Bridge Kaldros' guitar strings. Cute, even if they were a little short on Ss. The signs were even posted online for a laugh.

They went back and forth for a while and then a sign insulted the Kabuki Japanese Steakhouse, which joined in. Before you know it, every business in Christainburg had a sign up referencing the other signs, and a Facebook group was founded to keep up with them all.

See the signs that started it all in chronological order at Bored Panda, and keep up with new ones at the Christiansburg, VA Sign War Facebook group.

The Panama Canal is an engineering marvel and changed shipping for the entire globe. But getting it built was no picnic. Sure, Panama was the natural place to put such a canal, but there was a mountain in the middle of the narrowest part of the place where the two continents meet. This TED-Ed video condenses the long story into a few minutes, which might make you want to study further. -via Damn Interesting

We know how devastating forest fires can be. We also know how hard it is to extinguish underground coal fires, which can burn for decades. In between those two disasters is the underground peat fire, called a zombie fire. Zombie fires can burn for years and spread unnoticed into new areas, ruining the environment as they go.

Just ask the firefighters who battled North Carolina’s Evans Road Fire in 2008, which simmered through swampy peatland. Engineers ended up pumping 7.5 billion liters of water from lakes to flood the area. It took seven months to drown the fire.

If you’ve got a big air tanker that can drop huge amounts of water on a zombie fire, good for you. But it’s not going to work. “No one fights smoldering fires, which are massive, with air tankers,” says Rein. “If they do, they’re doing PR. They’re telling everyone, ‘Don’t worry, we have it!’ But they don’t. They don’t. When I see these airplanes in a smoldering fire, I know they are completely desperate.”

That’s because deluging a zombie isn’t guaranteed to quickly kill it. Say you’re pumping massive quantities across a peatland like firefighters did in North Carolina. That doesn’t mean the water is getting to the right places as it trickles underground. “It creates a channel, and the fire in that channel is suppressed, but then the water doesn’t go anywhere else,” Rein says. Other parts of the fire can fester untouched. And so the zombie lives on.

However, scientists have developed a new weapon in the battle against zombie fires. Read how it can work at Atlas Obscura.

Alex and Junior at Tammy's Oberlin Hobby Farm are exploring a seesaw. For the goats, it's just practicing their balance, but they'll eventually learn how fun it is. We don't know for certain that it's Tammy recording and laughing, but her giggles are contagious. -via Boing Boing 

Back in 2012, we were introduced to a miraculous development that was supposed to make our ketchup slide out of the bottle with no waste. We haven't seen much about the technology since then, but now there's a campaign to roll out LiquiGlide for toothpaste tubes.

Today LiquiGlide, the company spun out of MIT’s Varanasi Research Group to develop ways to manufacture and commercialize the technology, announced a new $13.5 million round of funding. But more importantly for consumers, the company also revealed a new partnership with Colgate, which will be introducing a new recyclable toothpaste container that leverages LiquiGlide so that every last drop of the product can be squeezed out with minimal effort. If there’s a mangled tube of toothpaste in your bathroom that’s still filled with impossible to reach product, you’ll understand why this is so exciting.

Read how it works and see a demonstration at Gizmodo. I wasn't aware that getting the last bit of toothpaste out of a tube was a real problem since we went from metal to plastic tubes, but if you are really concerned about wasted toothpaste, notice that Colgate's advertising gif shows a person squeezing out about four times the amount of paste you need to brush your teeth.

In 1897, mail delivery in New York City sped up tremendously when a system of pneumatic tubes was laid underneath the streets. The same technology that allows multiple lanes at a bank's drive-through was harnessed to deliver messages and some surprising goods in the city in those same kind of cylinders.  

At 24-inches long and 8-inches wide, these cylinders could hold up to 600 letters. A team of 136 “Rocketeers” and dispatchers made sure the
system ran smoothly, transporting upwards of 95,000 letters per day.
The original tubes were less than a mile long, from the old General Post Office to the Produce Exchange. It quickly grew to cover both sides of Manhattan Island with a crosstown line. Extensions were added to the Bronx and Brooklyn using the Brooklyn Bridge. There is even a rumour that a popular Bronx sandwich shop used the system to send their sandwiches – the real submarine sandwiches! It took only 20 minutes for a canister to travel from the General Post Office to Harlem. A 40-minute mail wagon route was reduced to 7 minutes.

There was at least one case in which a cat was sent through the tubes, causing astonishment that the feline survived the trip. The New York pneumatic mail system ran until the 1950s, when it was discontinued due to the high expense of maintaining it. Read about the days of tube mail at Messy Messy Chic.

There's a new roundabout in eastern Kentucky, specifically in Rowan County near the Bath County line. Luckily, traffic was not coming from all directions when this video was taken, because these are NOT one way streets! The roundabout was constructed to improve traffic flow and reduce accidents, so what could possibly go wrong? They will definitely have to improve signage or something. -via Jalopnik

Fish sticks were introduced in 1953 by Birdseye, the company that made frozen food palatable and therefore popular. Fish sticks came to be extremely popular over the decades, believe it or not, because kids like them and families (and institutions) find them so convenient. An article at Hakai magazine explains why fish sticks were developed, how they are made, and why they've stayed with us so long. They are made from various kinds of mildly-favored fish with a battered coating that keeps them from sticking together in the freezer.  

The battered disguise may be needed because, at least in North America, seafood has often been second-tier. “We’ve mostly considered the eating of fish to be beneath our aspirations,” writes chef and author Barton Seaver in American Seafood. Traditionally, fish was associated with sacrifice and penance—food to eat when meat was unaffordable or, if you were Catholic, to eat on the many days when red meat is verboten. Fish also spoils fast, smells bad, and contains sharp bones that pose a choking hazard.

The advent of fish sticks made eating fish easier and more palatable for the seafood wary. “You can almost pretend that it isn’t fish,” says Ingo Heidbrink, a maritime historian at Old Dominion University in Virginia. In his native Germany, where a reported seven million people eat fish sticks at least once a week, companies changed the fish at least three times since its introduction, from cod to pollock to Alaska pollock, a distinct species. “Consumers didn’t seem to notice,” says Heidbrink.

Personally, while I served them to the kids at times, I avoid fish sticks because I ate them at school every Friday from first through sixth grade, and that's enough. But they proved to be quite popular among folks who stocked up for the pandemic. Read everything you ever wanted to know about fish sticks at Hakai magazine. -via Digg

Even if you are used to working alone from home, like cartoonist Simon Tofield, every once in a while you have to communicate with the outside world. That will be the one time the cat decides to butt in, so to speak. And so it is with Simon's Cat in this new animation.

The Academy Awards were bestowed on the movies of 2020 on April 25th. As per custom, the annual Golden Raspberry Awards (Razzies) were announced the night before. If you think the Oscar nominations are full of movies you’ve never heard of, the Razzies took that even further. You have probably heard of Borat Subsequent Movie-Film, which was awarded two Razzies, but those were only because of Rudy Giuliani. The rest of the movies flew under our radars in a year that theaters were mostly closed. A film called Music led the awards with three Razzies, followed by Absolute Proof and Borat: Subsequent Movie Film with two each, and 365 Days and Dolittle each received one award. The year 2020 itself garnered a special award as “The Worst Calendar Year EVER!” Celebrate the worst in film by checking out all the awards at the Razzies site. Scroll down past the winners to see the nominees in each category from other movies you’ve never heard of.

Although Americans tend to think of Sasquatch as a North American phenomena, there are legends of hidden giant apes or ape-men all around the word. These legends are fed by unexplained sightings, which are most surprising when they are made by those unfamiliar with the local legends, such as American troops in Vietnam. Gary Linderer of the 101st Airborne reported seeing a five-foot-tall creature with muscular arms when he was on patrol in the Kontum Province near the borders of Laos and Cambodia.

Like the Yeti in the Himalayas, and the Sasquatch sightings all over North America, the Nguoi Rung is a oft-told tale in the area, but despite endless the sightings and folklore attached to the semi-mythical creature, no concrete evidence exists. Linderer wasn’t the only witness, either. Army Sgt. Thomas Jenkins reported his platoon was attacked by these apes throwing stones.

Toward the end of the war, Viet Cong and NVA soldiers reported so many sightings of the reddish-brown hair-covered Nguoi Rung the North Vietnamese communist party secretariat ordered scientists to investigate.

Dr. Vo Quy, a respected ornithologist and environmental researcher from Hanoi, discovered a Nguoi Rung footprint on the forest floor and made a cast of it. The cast was wider than a human foot and too big for an ape.

Read about the experiences of American troops who believe they spotted the Nguoi Rung at We Are The Mighty. -via Strange Company

Two lions that had just killed a zebra took a break to rehydrate at a watering hole in the MalaMala Private Game Reserve in South Africa. A terrapin swims right up to both of them! Was he curious? Was he trying to run the lions out of his watering hole? Or did he want a taste of that blood on their chins? We don't know, but the lions managed to get a good drink despite the annoyance and left without further violence. -via Metafilter

Right after the Civil War, the US was in flux in many different ways. The country was expanding westward, the transcontinental railroad was being built, and still the Mississippi River remained the easiest route for shipping goods. Meanwhile, Washington, DC, was becoming crowded and plagued by mosquitos. Wouldn't it make sense to move the nation's capital closer to the geographic center? Specifically, that meant St. Louis, where the North, the South, and the Midwest met.   

“They imagined they would move the real buildings themselves,” says Adam Arenson, a historian at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York, and author of The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War. “The image is kind of fantastical but also intriguing.”

The idea of numbering the blocks of the Capitol building for reassembly hundreds of miles away was very much of its time.

“The whole thing is only thinkable in the aftermath of the Civil War, when you have had these kinds of massive logistical innovations and when they’ve moved so many people, but also so much stuff, around on the railroads,” says Walter Johnson, historian at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.

While moving the actual buildings seems ridiculous in hindsight, there were practical reasons to move the seat of government. Read about the push to move the US government to St. Louis at Smithsonian.

You may have wondered at one time or another just how many surfaces does your cat's butthole touch in your house. It's been a Fark meme since 2004, when someone suggested putting lipstick on the cat to find out. But you don't have to, because this is exactly what Tennessee 6th grader Kaeden Griffin did for a science fair project. He used the family's two cats, neither of which are hairless.

1.  Cats with long and medium hair didn’t make any contact with hard or soft surfaces.

2.  Cats with short hair didn’t make contact with hard surfaces . . . but there were smears of lipstick on soft surfaces like the bed.

Well, that's a relief. Read more about Griffin's experiment at WRAT. -via Metafilter

We associate living in a cave with, well, cavemen from many thousands of years ago. We also know of modern cave dwellers who built homes in existing caves here and there as projects that spanned many years. But the village of Langenstein, near Germany's Harz Mountains, is a completely different story. There, in 1855, ten caves were completely carved out from solid sandstone to make living spaces! Wealthy landowner August Wilhelm Rimpau hired workers who traveled there with their families, but had no place to house them.

“That’s when the local council came across the soft sandstone ridge formation on the outskirts of town. Because they knew about the earlier cave dwellings, the idea emerged of letting the workers reside in caves,” says Scholle. Soon after, the rocks were numbered—one to 10—with chalk, and a lottery was held to determine which families would get a spot. “And then each family got started with carving a home out of solid rock,” he says.

The migrant workers arrived in Langenstein from near and far, says Scholle. In exchange for a little over a month’s salary, they were granted the right to reside in the homes they built for as long as they lived.

“The workers spent all day on the fields, and in the evening they worked on their homes,” he says. On average, each family took a year and a half to complete their dwellings. In the early stages, they slept under makeshift roofs at the entrance. “The sooner you constructed your house, the sooner you were out of the cold.”

Five of the ten cave homes still exist, and are protected as historic sites in Langenstein. See more of them at Atlas Obscura.