A geologist in Brazil found a geode that, when split open, has an uncanny resemblance to a Muppet we all know and love- Cookie Monster! Mineral specialist Mike Bowers posted the rock to Facebook in a video with the appropriate musical accompaniment. The blue quartz with the unique cut might fetch a pretty penny.

Mike wrote: “I think this is probably the most perfect Cookie Monster out there.

“I have seen others but here you have it complete on both sides.

“This is very unusual. There are a few famous agates out there: the owl; the scared face. But it is rare to find one so well defined like this.

“Prices can be very high. I was proposed over $10,000 (£7,300) by five different buyers.”

Yeah, that's good enough for me. You can buy a lot of cookies with that kind of dough. -via reddit

(Image credit: Mike Bowers)

Before the world was inundated with the material we call plastic, the word meant "capable of being molded." That was its meaning in early plastic surgery, as surgeons used a person's existing living tissues to replace the parts that had been lost to war injuries. This technique was pioneered by Sir Harold Gillies, a surgeon at the Queen’s Hospital in Kent who worked to restore faces that had been marked by the ordinance of World War I.

Plastic surgery, there is no doubt, was working miracles and giving these badly wounded men a new lease of life, and a new sense of hope. No wonder then that the Linlithgowshire Gazette was calling it in August 1917 ‘one of the greatest scientific triumphs which owes its existence to the war,’ whilst in May 1919 a colonel in the Freeman’s Journal is hailing the practice as a ‘priceless boon to mankind, and one for which we have to thank the war.’

The same colonel goes on to describe the ‘hundreds of ways in which plastic surgery will be invaluable in civilian times.’ And indeed it was to be. In December 1930 the Lincolnshire Standard and Boston Guardian reports on the ‘Miracle of Surgery‘ that was performed on Skegness schoolboy Luke Foster, who was born with a congenital defect affecting his nose. Under the care of ‘one of the foremost plastic surgery specialists in the world,’ one Harold Gillies, Luke was given ‘a completely new nose,’ enabling him to ‘blow his nose for the first time in his life.’

Gillies' techniques were refined to help those with congenital defects, then to "improve" a person's looks in ways never imagined before. From building body parts like Foster's nose, to facelifts, ear tucks, nose jobs, and breast enhancements, you can skim through the history of plastic surgery as told in news stories at the British Newspaper Archive. -via Strange Company

David Friedman, who will always be known as the guy who coined the word "keming," had a little fun with the very commonness of his name by editing a supercut of it from movies and TV. Send it to someone you know, maybe David. -via Laughing Squid

In 1879, English designer Christopher Dresser produced a small silver teapot in a sleek, geometric design. It wasn't practical enough to be mass-produced, so it remained a design concept. The modernistic design was decades ahead of its time, which only became apparent later. The teapot was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and was assumed to be the only one in existence. But in 2007, another turned up in Canada. A man in Quebec (assigned the pseudonym Tremblay) took a small teapot to a filming of Antiques Roadshow.

Before the actual filming of the episode began, the dealers sifted through the possessions of hundreds of guests in search of unexpected discoveries to highlight in the television show. Tremblay pulled out his Chinese bronze figure. The dealers merely looked at it and shrugged their shoulders. Their lack of interest changed to stupefaction, however, when the teapot was set on a table. The specialists formed a circle around the piece. The expert in English silver, Bill Kime, studied it carefully for authentic signs of age and checked its marks, which were clearly impressed on the bottom of the teapot. Kime was familiar with Dresser’s reputation as a late-nineteenth-century English designer and could barely believe the existence of this find. When the cameras started rolling, Kime declared that the teapot might fetch about $20,000 to $25,000 at auction, and perhaps even more. Tremblay beamed. He couldn’t believe his good fortune and returned home to consider the news of this too-hot-to-hold teapot.

When Tremblay signed up to sell the teapot through a British auction house, his actions triggered a Canadian law designed to prevent significant heritage art from leaving the country. Thus began a struggle among the owner, museum curators, appraisers, and the auction house over the tiny teapot. Read that story at the Walrus.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Chris 73)

While many Europeans speak three or four languages, hardly any of them speak all of Europe's languages. But with so many countries in the relatively small area known as the European Union, they do encounter other languages they may or may not understand in speech or text. I don't know who created this map, but when redditor biker_philosopher posted it, he confirmed the perspective of native Dutch speakers. You can enlarge the map here. To answer your questions, "black speech" refers to the Dark Tongue of Mordor in The Lord of the Rings. "Salsa Tequila" is the song you can listen to here. "Our second language" refers to how close Dutch is to English, although some commenters will tell you that Dutch resembles a drunk Englishman trying to speak German. Of course, people in all these nations could make a similar map from their own perspectives that would amuse or offend us just as much -if we could read it.

Great wildlife photographs don't just happen. Besides the skill of taking a good picture, it requires bravery, patience, perseverance, technology, luck, and the willingness to rough it in the pursuit of an unwilling subject. Still, photographers manage to capture amazing images. Greek wildlife photographer Panos Laskarakis tells about the time he watched lions take down buffaloes in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Getting photos of the action was dangerous, but the scene became even more dramatic over the next days.

The best part was yet to come though. In the middle of the next night, the lions came under attack from almost 30 hyenas that were trying to steal the kill from them! It was a rare and cruel scene that I, the guide on the safari, and clients, of course, had never seen before. The ferocity, the sounds of terror coming from everywhere, and the intense darkness made the shots very tough to get.

The next morning, this large male lion returned and peered through the bones, creating this portrait. That was the moment I felt the power of the king in my heart.”

Read Laskarakis' story, and those of five other photographers and their accounts of the toughest wildlife photo they ever took. -via Digg

The RMS Aquitania carried both mail and passengers from Manchester, England, to New York City. When it arrived in New York on December 11, 1920, there was quite a scare when workers unloaded the intercontinental mail.

When the Aquitania arrived in New York that Saturday morning, all of the mail bags were loaded onto the pier. A workman noticed a slight movement in the bag and began yelling. “Help! Murder! A bomb!” All the men on the pier ran for their lives in complete panic.

After the frightened men calmed down, one of the workers approached the mail sack and loaded it onto a truck. The package was rushed to New York’s General Post Office on 8th Avenue at 33rd Street.

After opening the bag, the employees watched in amazement as the kitten jumped out and staggered across the room. He made his way to a radiator, where he stood shivering and chewing on a piece of paper that he had carried from the mail sack.

You'll be glad to know the story of the kitten had a happy ending, although his exact origin was never determined. The story made the papers, and may have overshadowed the bigger story of the Aquitania's return trip to England. Somehow, mysteriously, the president of the Sinn Fein Irish Republic Éamon De Valera managed to travel from America to Ireland, supposedly on the Aquitania without being arrested on its arrival in England. Read both the stories of the stowaway cat and the rumored human stowaway at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

Senator Bernie Sanders made quite an impression at the presidential inauguration on Wednesday, dressed in trendy yet functional Vermont fashion, wearing distinctive mittens made by Jen Ellis. Sanders became an instant internet meme. And now we have an application that puts the senator in your front yard -or anywhere you want to put him, as long as it's on Google Maps.

I made a website where you can put bernie in places using google maps street view. Enjoy!https://t.co/UfY5g9xU2k pic.twitter.com/8rstiEXOHf

— nick (@nick_sawhney) January 21, 2021

Now I have a picture of Bernie sitting in my front yard. The generator, created by software engineer Nick Sawhney, can be found here. -via Laughing Squid

PS: Not content with photo manipulation, our friend Ochre Jelly went ahead and made a LEGO version!



-Thanks, Iain!

An article at History Hit asks the question, "Who invented chess?" That particular question doesn't have an answer, because chess, like many other things, wasn't invented so much as it was developed. It evolved from earlier games, so the question relies on a definition of chess that distinguishes it from earlier games. The earlier game in this case was chaturanga, played in India 1500 years ago. The game was set on board of 8x8 squares, with pieces designed on four types of military forces.

As with both chaturanga and modern chess, winning games of shatranj hinged on the fate of a single piece. When a player’s king was at risk of capture, their opponent would shout “shah!” (“king!”), before calling out “shah mat!” (“the king is finished!”) once they had trumped them – the origin of the word ‘checkmate’.

Ostensibly, though, the early ethos remained much the same wherever the game travelled. As well as a recreational pastime, chess was a strategy tool, adopted by military leaders as a way of sharpening their minds for the battlefield.

What brought chess into its modern form was the addition of a queen. Read how that changed the game in a brief history of chess. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Jorge Royan)

Wildlife photographer Niki Colemont gives us a minute-long tutorial on photographing squirrels. It's a bit light on actual technique and tips, but his attitude and his little friends are so heartwarming that it doesn't really matter. -via Boing Boing

Glitter is a pain in real life, as anyone who's done craft projects with children will tell you. But in the hands of an artist, those sparkles will make you smile. Pakistani artist Sara Shakeel uses glitter, sequins, rhinestones, and crystals both digitally and in real life to give shine and sparkle to some surprising things. Continue reading to see more.

I almost titled this "Why that tune is stuck in your head." Sea shanties have become a thing on TikTok, particularly the song "Soon May the Wellerman Come." Sea shanties are fun to sing, particularly with friends- or even strangers. The video sharing platform TikTok makes it easy for people to join in and add their voice to existing videos. When singer Nathan Evans posted his performance of the Wellerman, many others were inspired to contribute their voices. And the meme took off. The song is so infectious, you can't help but sing along.

2021 is the year of the sea shanty pic.twitter.com/ohOAGvkbtC

— Tim - Poster of Hugo Pics (@Beertheist) January 11, 2021

You can hear more of TikTok's sea shanties (ShantyTok) here. -via Metafilter

When you think of the union suit, or one-piece long underwear, you probably think of cowboys in a Western film, or maybe Santa Claus. However, the popularity of the garment was the result of a push by feminists in the 1800s. The union suit was an answer to the restrictive dress of the time. A properly-dressed woman would numerous undergarments, long skirts, corsets, and in some periods also carried around hoops and bustles to make her skirt stand out fashionably. The union suit simplified that dress in several ways.

According to Patricia Cunningham, author of Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850-1920: Politics, Health, and Art, one of the first union suits was patented in 1868, and called the “emancipation union under flannel.” The garment combined a knit flannel shirt and pants into one piece. The long pants extended to the ankle, nixing the need for long stockings and garters, and later versions would have rows of buttons at the waist to help suspend several layers of skirts, discouraging the use of heavy petticoats that often weighed upwards of 15 pounds. Most importantly, it “emancipated” women from the pinching confines of the corset.

While it sounded like a much more comfortable option than metal crinolines and tight corsets, not many “ordinary” women rushed to buy the undergarment. Instead, it was mostly found in feminists’ wardrobes. During the first wave of the dress reform movement, which was led by prominent suffragists and women’s rights leaders like Amelia Bloomer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck in the northeast, the union suit was part of a packaged deal that would free women from frivolous fashions and make them more equal to men. Some of these activists not only championed comfortable underwear, but they also wanted to change clothing norms as a whole, which included removing bulky bustles, shortening skirts to the ankles and wearing them over pantaloons, often referred to as “bloomers.”

Union suits took some time to become universal, but eventually both men and women saw them as more comfortable, convenient, and affordable than previous underwear. Read how the union suit came about and became ubiquitous at Smithsonian.

Have you ever considered how people made coffee before coffee makers, or even percolators, were available? When I was rather young, an older co-worker told me about his railroad days, when the crew would make a large batch of coffee in an industrial boiler by throwing coffee grounds, water, and eggs into it. This was a common workaround for percolating and filtering, as seen even today in the Lutheran church that sells Swedish egg coffee at the Minnesota State Fair.

Even in the mayhem of the State Fair, those three words on Salem Lutheran’s marquee are enough to stop the uninitiated cold. Yes, egg coffee. Jim Zieba, who’s been brewing the stuff at Salem since the 1970s, explains:

“The egg is mashed into the grounds, and the grounds are boiled in, kind of like campfire coffee,” says Zieba. “The coffee being slightly acid and egg being alkaline, they cancel each other out, and you get a very mild clear cup of coffee. A lot of people, they just love it for some reason.”

Yes, eggshells are included. Get the instructions for making egg coffee, which is not necessarily Swedish, at the Takeout.

A well-preserved fossil of the dinosaur Psittacosaurus found in China has paleontologists waxing poetic about its well-preserved cloaca.  

The dinosaur's derrière is so well preserved, researchers could see the remnants of two small bulges by its "back door," which might have housed musky scent glands that the reptile possibly used during courtship — an anatomical quirk also seen in living crocodilians, said scientists who studied the specimen.

Although this dinosaur's caboose shares some characteristics with the backsides of some living creatures, it's also a one-of-a-kind opening, the researchers found. "The anatomy is unique," study lead researcher Jakob Vinther, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, told Live Science. It doesn't quite look like the opening on birds, which are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs. It does look a bit like the back opening on a crocodile, he said, but it's different in some ways. "It's its own cloaca, shaped in its perfect, unique way," Vinther said.

The rest of the article at LiveScience is not quite so awestruck at the discovery, but has more information on the Psittacosaurus fossil. They used so many different terms for butthole that another dino comes to mind -the thesaurus.  -via reddit

(Image credit: Vinther et al.)