During World War II, the Steinway & Sons company switched from producing pianos to glider parts for the military. But then the US government asked the company to design a piano that could be used by the troops serving overseas. It would have to be tough enough to drop from an airplane and still play. And there were other restrictions, according to Jonathan Piper of the Museum of Making Music. The company came up with a model called the Victory Vertical.

The company was famous for its pianos, but those finely tuned models weren’t well-suited to where soldiers were stationed, including in the tropics. “While preserving a high level of craftsmanship, Steinway designed a piano that was rugged and durable,” says Piper, and they had to be economical in their use of materials. That started from the ground up: The Victory Verticals didn’t have legs like most upright pianos, Piper says, because they wouldn’t have withstood an airdrop. Other special features included water-resistant glue and anti-insect treatments, keys covered with celluloid instead of ivory, and bass strings wound in soft iron instead of the traditional copper. They were designed to contain only a tenth as much metal as a normal piano. There were also handles placed under the keybed and the back, so that four soldiers could carry the 455-pound instruments. “And beyond all that, the instrument is visually interesting,” Piper says. “Because of its purpose-built design, the Victory Vertical has an elegant simplicity. Then there’s the colors: Unlike the vast majority of pianos that come in a black or dark wood finish, the Victory Vertical was painted in olive green [like the example at the museum], blue, and gray.”

Read the story of the Victory Verticals, which were shipped all over the world, and see plenty of pictures at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Steinway & Sons Photo Collection/San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive)

The 12th verse of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is an eggplant parm recipe but no one ever includes it in their cover.

— Jenny Jaffe (@jennyjaffe) September 8, 2019

Television writer Jenny Jaffe declared that the 12th verse of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" was an eggplant recipe. Her Twitter followers took that as a challenge, and some of their lyrics are delicious!

You salt the slices til they drain
Their bitterness, like tears of pain,
You dredge with flour, then dip in egg then bread crumbs
Arrange in pan and bake till brown
Then spread the sauce on every round
And sprinkle with the parmesan reggiano
Reggiano
Reggiano
Reggiano
Reggiano

— DrLith, the Good Chaos (@drlith) September 8, 2019

Continue reading to see more of them.

Disney made a live-action version of Aladdin, which has already come and gone from theaters. There was a lot of hype before it opened, but then you didn't hear a thing afterward. Sure, it made a lot of money, but reviews were mixed. Screen Junkies holds nothing back in their opinions in this Honest Trailer.

A miles-wide asteroid struck the earth 66 million years ago and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and countless other species. The impact left behind the 90-mile-wide Chicxulub crater buried miles beneath the Yucatán Peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico. In 2016, a core sample hundreds of feet long was extracted from the peak inner ring of the crater. A team of scientists led by University of Texas at Austin geologist Sean Gulick spent years analyzing the sample to tell the story of what happened on the day of the impact, which ended the Cretaceous and began the Cenozoic period.

Within minutes of the asteroid strike, Gulick and colleagues found, the underlying rock at the site collapsed and formed a crater with a peak ring. The ring was soon covered by over 70 feet of additional rock that had melted in the heat of the blast.

The sea battered against the new hole in the planet, and in the minutes and hours that followed, surges of water rushing back into the crater carried laid down more than 260 additional feet of melted stone atop the already accumulated rock. Then a tsunami hit. The wave, reflected back toward the crater after the initial impact, added another distinct layer of rock—sediments of gravel, sand and charcoal—all within the first 24 hours of the strike.

The planetary collision triggered wildfires inland, burning forests that were later doused by devastating waves. Debris from the charred woods washed out to sea, and some accumulated in the crater.

That was just the beginning. Read how the impact's effects changed the entire world at Smithsonian.

Is anyone surprised? If Michael Lang couldn't pull off a 50th anniversary recreation of Woodstock, what were the chances for a three-day music festival in the middle of nowhere that suddenly grew out of an internet meme? Alienstock in Rachel, Nevada, was to be the musical accompaniment of the Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us event on September 20.  

A notice on the Alienstock website said that due to various hurdles that included “the lack of infrastructure, poor planning, risk management and blatant disregard” for the safety of potential attendees, the event that was supposed to take place in Rachel, Nevada from September 19- 22 has been canceled and a new, 21-and-over event is scheduled for September 19 in Downtown Las Vegas.

Matty Roberts, the creator of the event, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal this week that the cancellation was a “fantastic relief,” adding that he’d “had a lot of concerns leading up to Alienstock.” The notice on the event’s website pointed the finger at Connie West, owner of the Little A’Le’Inn in Rachel—a community with a population of around 50 people—and permit holder for the event as failing to provide adequate proof of contracts and other documentation related to the event.

The new event in Las Vegas is called the Area 51 Celebration Party, and admission is free. Read more on the story at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Photog)

Patent lawyer Jeff Steck keeps an eye on new patents. This one he spotted, issued on September 3, is quite intriguing. It's a decoy keyboard, with warmth, light, sound, and vibrations that are activated by the pressure of a cat on top.

Pet owners, and owners of cats in particular, know that upon sitting down at a computer their pet frequently desires to lay directly on the computer keyboard. While pet owners frequently attribute this behavior to a desire for affection, or conversely to a desire to annoy the pet owner, more likely the draw of the keyboard has more to do with warmth and proximity to interesting activity.

Since people with pets sitting at a computer keyboard typically need to use the keyboard, there is a need for a device that simulates a keyboard but provides for greater warmth and for interesting sound, light and tactile effects to divert their pet. When positioned close to an actual computer keyboard, such a needed device would draw the pet away therefrom and would provide for many hours of warmth, comfort and entertainment of the pet away from the owner's actual computer activities. Such a device would be relatively simple to manufacture and use, and would be safe for use around both pets and children. The present invention accomplishes these objectives.

I know what you're thinking: why didn't I think of that? There's a second version that resembles a laptop included in the patent. -via Boing Boing

When you need to unload a piano on the second floor, you do what you gotta do. But seriously, folks, this image posted at reddit brought out speculation that the truck crashed down from an unseen overpass, or even fell from a plane. The accident occurred in Alban, Ontario, Monday evening. After you've decided how it happened, watch the video.

(Image credit: Léo Deslauriers)

A hundred shortlisted entries in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition are being prepared for exhibit at the Natural History Museum in London. The museum gives us a preview of some of the more stunning images they selected. The image above is titled "Lucky Break," taken by Jason Bantle.

A raccoon pokes her face out of a 1970s Ford Pinto on a deserted farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. In the back seat, her five playful kits trill with excitement. It was a sentiment shared by Jason, waiting silently in a nearby hide, who had been hoping for this chance every summer for several years.

The only access into the car was through the small hole in the cracked safety glass of the windscreen. The gap was blunt‑edged but too narrow a fit for a coyote (the primary predator of raccoons in the area), making this an ideal place for a mother raccoon to raise a family.

Another of the "Highly Commended 2019" images is this battle between a cheetah and a pack of dogs by Peter Haygarth.

Peter had been following the dogs by vehicle as they hunted in Zimanga Private Game Reserve, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. A warthog had just escaped the pack when the leading dogs came across the big cat. At first, the dogs were wary, but as the rest of the 12-strong pack arrived, their confidence grew, and they began to encircle the cat, chirping with excitement.

The elderly cheetah hissed and lunged back at the mob, his left ear tattered, the right one pinned back in the ruckus. As dust flew in the morning light, Peter kept his focus on the cat's face. In a few minutes the spat was over as the cheetah fled.

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibit will open at the Natural History Museum on October 18th, which we presume will also be the date the winners will be announced. It will run through next May. See ten preview images and read their stories here. -via Digg

The 1960 film Psycho is a classic, but nearly 60 years later, we've become so familiar with the movie that we've forgotten how surprised the original audience was with the twist: the identity of the murderer. The modern audience already knows, so we tend more to deconstruct the building of suspense, the artful shower scene, and trivia like the toilet flushing. Back in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock went to great lengths to hide not only the twist, but many other details from the theater audience. Hitch came up with some pretty imaginative tactics, as Simon Whistler explains.

A very small minority of college basketball stars go on to play professionally. Of those, some play in the NBA, some are on minor league teams, and some play overseas. Whoever they play for, they all get to win a game occasionally ...except for the Washington Generals. That's the team whose sole purpose is to lose every night to the Harlem Globetrotters. At age 21, Ryan Gunderson found himself flying to China to start as point guard for the Generals, and later became team captain. You might think that losing every night would be soul-sucking, but Gunderson has fond memories of the experience.

My first game in China, I started at point guard. I was stoked, it was huge crowd, and as PG, I was now the one who’d lead the team out of the tunnel to the crowd. When you run out to places like the Staples Center with 20,000 people, you’re thinking to yourself, How do I get to do this for a living? CRAZY!

But for my first game out of the tunnel, little did I know they always pull a prank on the rookies: Everyone else would stay back as you run out by yourself. So everyone laughs at you, and the rest of the team just runs to the bench. So there I was, alone on the court in front of 18,000 Chinese people, and I swear they couldn’t have laughed harder.

Another tradition for the rookies is a part of the game where you get your uniform ripped off and you have to run around and scream. First game in the books and those two things happen right off the bat.

Gunderson got to travel the world, and in some places, fans appreciated the Generals almost as much as the Globetrotters. Read Gunderson's story at Mel magazine.  -via Digg

Do you think you can tell a photograph of a real human face from one generated by artificial intelligence? It's not that easy! At Which Face is Real, you are presented with two pictures at a time. One of the images is of a real person, nabbed from Creative Commons and public domain collections, and the other is from This Person Does Not Exist, a gallery of algorithm-generated images. Select which you think is the real person. While the site will reveal the answer, it does not keep score for you, as far as I know. However, it will give you the creepy realization that you'll never be able to trust a photograph again. -via Boing Boing

Finnish adventurers Lauri and Anni Vuohensilta (previously at Neatorama) are obviously doing well with their YouTube videos, as their toys get more and more elaborate and expensive. So if they can afford this expensive camera setup, why is Anni wielding an acetylene torch duct-taped to a broom? It's the fame, not the fortune, that got them a Chronos ring of 72 cameras in order to make high-speed videos in a new series they call Bullet Time Show. They begin with blasting oxygen soap bubbles with an acetylene torch.

It was fifty years ago this month that the TV series The Brady Bunch premiered. It ran for five years, and has been in syndication ever since. HGTV is celebrating that milestone with a huge project: renovating the Brady Bunch house to look exactly as it did on your TV screen all those years ago. The six actors who played the Brady kids participated in the project with HGTV stars in A Very Brady Renovation, a four-part miniseries premiering tonight. Now, remember, the show was not filmed at the house, which was only used for establishing exterior shots. The house became way more familiar to the audience than to the actors, who worked in a studio miles away. Therefore, the "renovation" involves a complete gutting and redesign of the interior.

Shepherded by HGTV's favorite camera hogs, "The Property Brothers" (Jonathan and Drew Scott), and with help from the stars of "Restored by the Fords," "Hidden Potential," "Flea Market Flip" and "Good Bones," the project involves turning the one-story house into a two-story house, to add some 2,000 square feet of new living space without changing the essential street view.

"Just know that if any of this is wrong, we'll be put out to dry," Drew Scott warns his HGTV colleagues. "All of America will know exactly what this house is supposed to look like."

In fact, all of America pitched in: The hunt for vintage furnishings became an online group effort, with collectors proudly volunteering their wares - down to the decorative plastic grapes on a coffee table and a curio cabinet that stands between the dining room and kitchen. Other treasures were unearthed in deep storage at Paramount.

And what becomes of the house, once finished? Turning it into a museum won't work for the neighborhood, which has suffered enough Brady mania. HGTV is giving away a week's stay at the house as part of a promotional contest, but beyond that, the network's plans for the property are unknown.

Read more about how the reunion show came together. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: HGTV)

The European Space Agency's Rosetta probe took ten years to reach its target, comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Then it spent two years studying the comet up close, including deploying the Philae lander to the comet's surface. The ESA released 400,000 images of the comet, which motion designer Christian Stangl weaved together to make this video. Composer Wolfgang Stangl created the sound. The Comet gives the mission an epic science fiction feel, one that the mission deserves. You should watch this in full-screen mode. -via Kottke

The next time you travel through New England, or even if you live there, keep your eye out for stone enclosures with nothing inside, except possibly overgrown weeds. These relics of the past are not promoted much, but they are historic. They are town pounds. Not for stray dogs, but for stray livestock.   

If an animal strayed and was found wreaking havoc on private property, it was brought to the pound, where it was corralled with other wayward creatures and watched over by a town-appointed “pound-keeper” (sometimes called a “pound-master,” or “pounder”) until its owner could retrieve it—for a fee.

(Prices varied by time and place. One community, according to Elizabeth Banks MacRury’s book Town Pounds of New England, set the bail of a horse, mule, ass, cow, or pig at 12 cents and 5 mills (a mill was a thousandth of a dollar). For a sheep, it was 1 cent and 4 mills; for a goose, 8 cents. Unclaimed animals could be sold at auction after three days (one day for geese). Stealing an animal from the pound incurred a fine of $7.)

Villages in colonial Massachusetts were required to have pounds, and since a lot of work went into lifting the heavy stones, the structures are with us hundreds of years later. Read about town pounds and see plenty of pictures at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Johnna Kaplan)