Unlike house cats, wild animals can't be too picky about their next meal. This encounter between a bobcat and a rattlesnake was caught on a trail cam in the Angeles National Forest. Notice how the cat stops to celebrate her victory before carrying off her lunch. -via Boing Boing

In ancient times, the color purple was reserved for royal clothing, because the dye was so rare and expensive. Purple dye was harvested from the tiny glands of certain mollusks, and had to be processed by experts. Archaeologists had found evidence of the dye in the remains of ancient mollusks and in ceramics, but now for the first time, they've uncovered 3000-year-old royal purple dye on wool fibers. In Israel.  

Biblical stories describe King David and King Solomon clothed in garments of purple—a color long associated with royalty. Now, reports BBC News, archaeologists in Israel have discovered fragments of purple fabric dated to around the time of these ancient monarchs’ purported reigns.

The team discovered the material in the Timna Valley, at a site known as Slaves’ Hill. Carbon dating places its creation around 1000 B.C. Religious lore suggests that David’s reign spanned roughly 1010 to 970 B.C., while Solomon’s lasted from 970 to 931 B.C.

The time period is right, but there is no evidence that the purple wool belonged to either David or Solomon. There were other kings in the Levant, and the Timna Valley was part of the kingdom of Edom at the time. But the find is intriguing, whoever wore the dyed wool. Read more about it at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Dafna Gazit/Israel Antiquities Authority)

I can tell you what it was like, because 1977 is when I first saw Star Wars. I had missed the hype, because I was in college and saw no TV all that year. But some friends I worked with during the summer back in Kentucky insisted I go with them to see Star Wars. I had no particular expectations, but when the Imperial Star Destroyer filled the big screen during the opening scene, and got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, I knew it was something special. We went back to see it again and again, even though that meant an hour-long drive to the theater each time. I was hooked. This video gives the perspective of different people who recall their first impressions.

Each language has its own grammar rules, which means that you cannot translate word-by-word and get anything that makes sense. It's the same with food, as every culture has its own unwritten rules that are easy to learn as you grow up with them, but difficult to understand in a cuisine that's new to you.

Yes, much like language, cuisine obeys grammatical rules that vary from country to country, and academics have documented and studied them. They dictate whether food is eaten sitting or standing; on the floor or at a table; with a fork or chopsticks or with fingers. Like sentence structure, explains Ken Albala, Professor of History at the University of the Pacific, a cuisine’s grammar can be reflected in the order in which it is served, and a grammar can dictate which foods can (or cannot) be paired, like cheese on fish, or barbecue sauce on ice cream.

The classic example is spaghetti and meatballs. In traditional Italian cuisine, the pasta is served first and the meat later, yet Americans put meatballs or meat sauce right on top of their pasta. However, as people and their cuisines move around the world, these rules are broken, either as a misunderstanding or an adaptation to local expectations. Sometimes they lead to arguments, but just as often they lead to delightful new meals. Read about food grammar at Atlas Obscura.

Douglas Hughes built a kinetic sculpture of the TV game show Jeopardy! featuring the late host Alex Trebek. Three notable contestants work their buttons while Trebek moves around reading the questions. Add a little audio track from a real Jeopardy! game, and the whole thing comes to life. You can read the specifications of the build at BrickNerd. -via Boing Boing

Almost all the US presidents had pets in the White House of one kind or another. As you might expect, dogs and cats are the most common, but over the years, presidential pets have included cows, horses, goats, pigs, sheep, rabbits, bears, a hippo, a hyena, a raccoon, all kinds of birds from a macaw to a mockingbird, mice, and silkworms. At least two presidents had pet opossums.

No pet in presidential history embodies America in all its disgusting glory quite like Billy Possum, Herbert Hoover’s possum. A few years before Hoover’s arrival in D.C., pet superfan Grace Coolidge saved a raccoon on its way to the Thanksgiving table, named it Rebecca, and built it a treehouse, where it happily lived out the Coolidge administration. When the Coolidges left the White House, so did their pet racoon, leaving an empty racoon-sized treehouse on the White House lawn.

Enter Billy Possum. In some accounts, he was caught by White House staff on the grounds and then deliberately allowed to live in Rebecca’s treehouse; in others, he just asserted squatter’s rights, possum style.

But even the more mundane pets had their days.

George Washington had several dogs with memorable names—Sweetlips, Drunkard, Tippler, and Tipsy, to name a few—but only one dog who stole an entire ham, making Vulcan the obvious leader of the pack. An account of Vulcan’s heist is found in the memoirs of George Washington’s son George Washington Parke Custis.

Slate ranked all the presidents by their most notable pets. You might disagree with the rankings, but you’ll enjoy many great stories of notorious presidential pets. -via Metafilter

(Image souce: Library of Congress)

What does “working at home” mean for a house cat? An invasion of space, for one thing. That computer-generated voice usually drives me away from a video, but this time it stands in for the cat’s voice, and the cat really has some good things to say. Or at least funny things.

“I’m not sure what I did to deserve having my life ruined. I’ve been a perfectly adequate cat for most of my life.”

Enjoy this feline POV video from The Dodo.

Russian matryoshka dolls fit inside one another. You might be surprised to learn they aren’t all that ancient- the first set was made in 1892. But how many dolls can you fit inside other dolls? The answer at this point is 51. Youlia Bereznitskaia holds the world record for her hand-painted set of Russian nesting dolls, shown above. The largest is one foot, 9.25 inches (53.97 cm) and the smallest is 0.125 inches (0.31 cm) tall. When I first learned that, I wondered why Bereznitskaia didn’t keep building them larger or smaller after gaining the world record in 2003, but there are more than 60 dolls in this picture, so maybe she did. -via TYWKIWDBI

About spells, charms and incantations. #spells pic.twitter.com/ydVXIBUHSB

— Roger Acosta Villanueva (@1989rav) January 29, 2021

The above picture, taken from the 1971 book The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft by Kathryn Paulsen, has been making the rounds of the internet over the past week or so. You have to admit that cheese is magical -it can turn a hamburger into a cheeseburger and make nachos irresistible. The spell as written seems a bit dumb, but it is only out of date. Cheese has been thought of in supernatural terms for a long, long time.

It’s not entirely clear why cheese is seen to have magical properties. It might be to do with the fact it’s made from milk, a powerful substance in itself, with the ability to give life and strength to the young. It might also be because the process by which cheese is made is a little bit magical. The 12th-century mystic, Hildegard von Bingen, compared cheese making to the miracle of life in the way that it forms curds (or solid matter) from something insubstantial.

In the early modern period (roughly 1450-1750) the creation of the universe was also thought of by some in terms of cheesemaking: “all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed – just as cheese is made out of milk – and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” The connection with life and the mysterious way that cheese is made, therefore, puts it in a good position to claim magical properties.

Cheese has been used to produce dreams, to reveal those guilty of crimes, and to tempt people into sin. Witches were blamed for stealing milk or spoiling it, and were accused of using cheese in their nefarious magic.

I like cheese. pic.twitter.com/VxBrxewlVK

— Jay Gravatte (@thatKYWitch) January 29, 2021

Read the details of how cheese and witchcraft go together at The Conversation. -via Strange Company

Also check out the previous post 4 Holy Women Transformed by Cheese.

The TV doctor answers your questions about covid vaccines until the real world starts to creep in. The parody PSA is only 3.5 minutes long; the rest is outtakes. -via reddit

How about a nice relaxing game? The game called Knots is a series of puzzles in which you are challenged to move tiles around to reveal continuous outlines, revealing loops that can take any shape. As you'd expect, they start out simple and become harder as you go. Level eight presents the above mess that you rearrange by clicking a tile and then its destination to reveal this image.

I don't know how many levels there are, since I haven't made it to the end yet, but there are at least 32, and somewhere along the way, you are confronted with more than one shape of the same color. You can turn the music off with a button in the lower left. -via Metafilter

In 2018, an Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to researchers who studied why wombat poop comes out in cubes. The full research paper has now been published in the journal Soft Matter (even though wombat poop is hard matter). The 2018 paper was based on a necropsy of one wombat.

In the new study, the researchers dissected two further wombats and tested the guts’ layers of muscle and tissue, finding regions of varied thickness and stiffness. They then created a 2D mathematical model to simulate how the regions expand and contract with the rhythms of digestion. The intestinal sections contract over several days, squeezing the poop as the gut pulls nutrients and water out of the feces, the team reports today in the aptly titled journal Soft Matter.

The stiffer portions are “like a stiff rubber band—[they’re] going to contract faster than the soft regions,” says David Hu, a biomechanics researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and author on the study. Softer intestinal regions squeeze slowly and mold the final corners of the cube, the team found. In other mammals, the wavelike peristalsis of the intestinal muscles are consistent in all directions. But in the wombat, the grooved tissue and the irregular contractions over many cycles shape firm, flat-sided cubes.

So in short, the wombat's intestines have muscles that squeeze hard on four sides, but less so between those muscles in the region that will become the corners. Read more about wombat poop at Science magazine.

(Imagecredit: JJ Harrison)

Penn Holderness (previously at Neatorama) sings a song about his Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) to the tune of "Under the Sea" from The Little Mermaid. It's the most cheerful description you'll ever hear. He has learned to channel his differences into creativity, which he refers to a "superpower." Holderness is lucky to have a supportive wife to keep him on track. -via Metafilter

Hold your stomach, Kraft macaroni and cheese has a Valentines Day promotion that will turn your dinner into something completely different. Forget steak or homemade spaghetti, or even takeout food, because what your sweetheart really wants is a serving of hot pink macaroni and cheese with sweetener. The limited edition Candy Kraft Macaroni & Cheese is a regular box of mac and cheese that comes with a flavor packet you can add to turn it pink and impart candy flavoring.

So, what makes the powder pink? Is it crushed-up conversation hearts? Is it a special dust from Cupid's arrow? Actually, according to a Kraft-Heinz spokesperson, the vibrant pink hue comes from beetroot and carrot concentrates. As for what makes it tastes like candy, the extra packet of powder contains fructose, natural flavors and vanilla extract, they said.

The company is only making 1,000 boxes, and you'll have to enter a sweepstakes to possibly get one. I'm wondering how many people will enter the contest to really try eating this, and how many just want the box for a future social media post.

If you've ever seen a movie built around your own area of expertise, you most likely cringed at the portrayal of your work. Movies and TV shows are made by writers and actors with an eye toward drama and not so much accuracy. The guy running the YouTube channel Fire Department Chronicles used green screen tech to put himself into the action and give the actors a little lesson in what really happens in a fire.



Once again, I am glad that we'll never see a drama about the life of a blogger, because it would be too boring for broadcast. Or even streaming. Fire Department Chronicles has more of these videos about the real work of firefighters and EMTs vs. the pop culture versions. -via reddit