Robert E. Jackson collects old photographs, which include quite a few images of people wearing bizarre homemade costumes. They are heavy on the idea of turning people into mundane household objects, like the young lady above who dressed as a TV set (complete with remote on a wire) in 1971. You'll also see cigarette packs, a bottle of glue, cameras from different eras, a packet of dental floss, and a group of boys bizarrely dressed as Tampax. Then there's the robot made from a water heater. See the gallery of odd costumes at Flashbak. See more of Jackson's vintage photos at Instagram. -Thanks, WTM!

Bryan Lee made a fan film using the 2001 song "Wonderboy" by Tenacious D and film clips from all eleven Star Wars movies. Neat idea, but then you watch it and realize the editing is a sublime exercise in paying attention to detail. Well done! See it in widescreen format at YouTube. -via reddit

At one time in history, it was possible to buy a light bulb that would last more than 100 years. We know this because one of those bulbs is still burning at a fire station in California, 119 years after it was first switched on. Once incandescent lighting was unleashed into the public, everyone was working to make a better light bulb. So why aren't light bulbs built to last that way today?   

The early 1920s was both a great and terrible time to be a lightbulb manufacturer,  as the ongoing electrification of the world saw consumers buying electrical appliances like lightbulbs at an unprecedented rate. But this boom came at a price, as hundreds of smaller lightbulb manufacturers popped up around the world, increasing competition and decreasing the market share for any one company. Furthermore, lightbulb technology had reached a point where some bulbs lasted up to 2500 hours, limiting the number of replacements a consumer would have to buy in a lifetime. These developments proved disastrous for manufacturers like German firm Osram, which saw its sales plummet by more than 55% between 1922 and 1923.

What to do? The obvious answer was to organize a cartel, regulate prices, and set a limit on light bulb longevity. Read how that happened, and why your light bulbs never last long enough, at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: LPS.1)

After the disappointment of The Rise of Skywalker, Disney and Lucasfilm gave us a salve to our broken Star Wars fan hearts with a TV series called The Mandalorian. A Star Wars western? Okay. Then they outright stole our hearts by presenting us with a baby Yoda. Not Yoda himself, but a juvenile of the same species that's cuter than he/she has any right to be. But The Mandalorian really redeemed the Star Wars universe by giving us an adventure that has nothing to do with dynasties or death stars. Screen Junkies likes The Mandalorian, too, but they still find ways to poke fun at the series.  

Most of us look at a broom as a mere housekeeping tool, but when you consider the history of the broom as a traditional folk art, a broom can be a thing of beauty. Berea College in Kentucky is a hub of traditional Appalachian crafts, and their hand-woven brooms have been in demand for a hundred years. The brooms are made by students for their work study program, in which they not only produce artful brooms but also learn about the history of Appalachian self-reliance.   

“There’s something very nostalgic and wholesome about a handcrafted broom,” says Aaron Beale, director of student craft at Berea. “It’s an object rich with meaning, beyond its practical purpose.” The roughly 5,000 brooms made each year at the college are sold through a website and distributed to a number of specialty craft shops. According to Beale, Berea’s broomcraft workshop is the only one in the country to dye significant quantities of broomcorn, which requires a lot of time. And the brooms often sell out quickly. “We work at a fever pace to keep up,” Beale says.

Learn what broomcorn is and how brooms became such an integral part of Berea College at Smithsonian. The brooms are available here.

The way laws are written often include some carveouts and exceptions, which we just call loopholes. Tom Scott takes advantage of a loophole in British liquor laws to open a working bar in a moving hovercraft. While this stunt is hilarious (imagine mixing drinks in a moving open air vehicle), he eventually explains the reason the law was written the way it is.  -via reddit

What animals are crabs descended from? More than one. It turns out that various earlier species evolved into crabs at least five different times. This process is called carcinisation, or the tendency for adaptations to push creatures into the shape of crabs. You might call it crabification, which is not really a word. And it's not just the shape of a crab that these different evolutionary lineages share.

“Some of the internal anatomical characters studied herein are structurally dependent on the external characters of a crab-like habitus. Since morphological coherence can also exist between internal anatomical structures, the coherence chains which can be traced back to the external characters of a crab-like habitus are relatively complex in some cases (indirect coherences).”

In other words, the internal organs are crabbish because of the crab shape, which makes the animals crabs no matter what they descended from. Read more about crabification at Popular Mechanics. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Baeza, J. Antonio)

English idioms, similes, catch phrases, and colloquialisms make perfect sense if you've heard them all your life, but are pretty nonsensical when you approach them literally. Grant Kolton illustrates some of them for us to highlight the insanity. -via Laughing Squid

In the early years of the United States, the federal government was a moving target, as Congress met in Philadelphia, New York, and some other towns, until a capital could be built. The town of Washington was a planned city built from scratch with guidance from the Constitution and a design by Peter L’Enfant, who stuck to the guidelines but added interesting details.

Washington, D.C., though, is about as close to that square drawing as any real city gets. It was drawn as a perfect square, with unnervingly straight lines passing at unnatural angles through hills, waterways, and properties. Even stranger, it remains that way today, more than 200 years later—with the notable problem that the city gave away about a third of its land to some angry neighbors. “Of all the planned cities in the world, Washington is probably closer to the original plans than any other,” says Don Hawkins, an architect, historian, and expert on the history of the U.S. capital. But even today, if you look at a map of most cities and then you look at Washington, you think: Wait, does it really have three straight lines, at 90 degree angles, as borders? What the hell?

The plan seemed doable, since the area chosen for the District of Columbia was mostly empty. There were two small towns there, Alexandria and Georgetown, and there was plenty of room to fit the new city of Washington between them. Or there was at the time. While most cities begin small and their borders grow outward, Washington is restricted by its original plan, and by its political differences from other cities. Read how the city and the district started out as different spaces that became one at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image source: Library of Congress)

Brian David Gilbert explains how he makes $20,000 a month by working from home, and you can, too. The video starts off like any multi-level marketing pitch, but soon lapses into a comedy, and eventually becomes a horror film. Contains one NSFW word. -via Boing Boing

Take another look at the headline, then check your 2020 Bingo card. The species Procambarus virginalis, also known as marbled crayfish, arose about 25 years ago, possibly from selective breeding by German pet vendors. These crawfish reproduce asexually, by parthenogenesis, meaning they are all genetic clones and all female. They were banned years ago, but some have managed to escape into the wild, and now they are reproducing at a high rate at Schoonselhof cemetery in Antwerp.  

Hundreds of the duplicating crustaceans, which can dig down to up to a metre and are always female, pose a deadly threat to local biodiversity after colonising a historic Antwerp graveyard.

"It's impossible to round up all of them. It's like trying to empty the ocean with a thimble," said Kevin Scheers, of the Flemish Institute for Nature and Woodland Research.

Marbled crayfish, which travel across land and water at night and eat whatever they can, do not occur in nature and are banned by the European Union.

While these crayfish might be the ultimate invasive species, there's an upside to their existence. Scientists want to study their amazing adaptability for cancer research. Read about the crayfish in the cemetery at the New Zealand Herald. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Jules Grandgagnage)

Steroids have legitimate medical uses, but they are well-known as an enhancement technique for bodybuilders, athletes, and everyday people who believe they will look better by using them. To understand steroid use, it is necessary to look at their history and chemical makeup, how they are used today, and the many side effects that could come with non-medical use.

But why is it so bad to use these drugs? To begin with, people who misuse steroids often use dosages that are 10 to 100 times higher than the doses which are usually prescribed for medical conditions. As side-effects are usually dosage-dependent that makes things even worse.

Long-term effects include kidney problem up to kidney failure, liver damage and tumors, enlarged heart, high blood pressure and changes in blood cholesterol all of which increase the risk of stroke and heart attack – even in young people. And if that wasn’t bad enough, also the risk of blood clots increases. In men, sperm counts also decrease, they go bald, develop breasts, have an increased risk of prostate cancer, and, of course, then there are the balls.

So let’s look at your balls shall we?

And there we get to the real reason you want to read about steroids, which is addressed at Today I Found Out. The effects of steroids on women are also addressed.


For a more humorous and less fact-filled look at the subject, see the previous article Bodybuilders Have Tiny Testes.

James Buggy of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, was at a low point of his life in 1917. His wife had died in childbirth, and he was left to raise his baby daughter Eleanor alone. Now that the girl was three years old, she needed a mother, and he was lonely. That's when he met 23-year-old Annie Compolo, who returned his attentions and doted on Eleanor. They were soon married.

Four weeks later, James would realize that he had made the biggest mistake of his life.

Annie, it seemed, had a fiery temper, and while quarrels among newlyweds are not uncommon, James had decided that he didn't want any disruptions in the peaceful Edgewood home he had fought so hard to maintain. His first wife, Kathryn, had been a kind and gentle woman who rarely, if ever, raised her voice. James himself was known among his friends and co-workers as a kind-hearted fellow, the sort of man who had always put his faith and his family above everything else in his life. He had attended St. Edward's Catholic School as a youth and was an active member of his church. He was proud of his community and never passed up an opportunity to volunteer for a good cause. So when he heard through the grapevine that the former Miss Compolo had been less than faithful as a married woman, a terrible argument ensued. James put his foot down. On the night of Sunday, February 25, he told Annie, in no uncertain terms, that he wanted her out of the house by the time he returned home from work the following day.

On Monday afternoon, James returned to his home at 825 West Independence Street and found that his wife was gone. But, much to his alarm, so was his young daughter.

One has to wonder why James made no arrangements for his daughter to be looked after when he ordered his wife gone before he returned. But anyway, you can tell at this point of the story that no good would come of the child's disappearance. Read the strange story of the Buggy family at Pennsylvania Oddities. -via Strange Company

Talavera Maldonado began building an ornate mansion in Salamanca, Spain, in 1493, but didn't live to see it completed, which wasn't until 1517. Its facade is covered with 300 scallop shells, the symbol of the Order of Santiago.

An enduring legend of Casa de las Conchas is that there is a gold coin (or an ounce of gold, according to some sources) hidden underneath each shell. Another widespread legend is that the family that owned the building hid their jewels under one of these shells that adorn the façade, documenting the amount hidden but not the shell where it was located, and whoever wants to find the treasure must provide the amount stipulated as a guarantee in advance. If they find the treasure, they can take it and get their contribution back, otherwise they lose the money left in pledge.

The shells are the most unique feature of Casa de las Conchas, but it also sports intricate grillwork and filigree, coats of arms, and gargoyles. Read about the mansion and see plenty of pictures at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Flickr user Jose Luis Cernadas Iglesias)

Tombstones commonly contain the name of the deceased and their birth and death dates. If you've ever looked through different stones in a cemetery, you've probably noticed all kinds of symbols that are added for decoration. Some are obvious: tombstones for children are engraved with angels or lambs, and crosses, stars, and crescents denote the deceased's religious faith. But there are manny symbols that aren't so easily interpreted, like the broken chain seen above.

Medieval wisdom once held that a golden chain kept the soul in the body. In death, the chain is broken and the soul is freed. If the chain is unbroken and if it features the letters FLT (for Friendship, Love, and Truth), it probably means the deceased belonged to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, a fraternal organization that seeks to promote charitable causes and offer aid.

The symbols in this list mostly say "it could mean" and "it could also mean" because, while there is traditional symbolism passed down over the years, many tombstones have symbols because those who paid for the stone just liked them. Read the entire list at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user Carl Wykoff)