Do you recall Rax Roast Beef? The fast food chain had 504 outlets in 38 states in the 1980s, but took a nosedive in the '90s. It now has five remaining locations. Although it wasn't the only reason Rax went under, a disastrous advertising campaign help drive the nails into its coffin, as the Vlogbrothers explain. In case you are interested, the documentary mentioned in this video can be seen here.  -via reddit

When ingested, mushrooms can be delicious, deadly, or downright hallucinogenic, depending on the species. Mushrooms are also decorative, and are often associated with fairies and other magical forest creatures. There may be a connection there. While the first documented case of a mushroom trip in Britain was recorded in 1799, when a father picked liberty caps to feed his family, the hallucinogenic chemicals in these mushrooms weren't isolated until the mid-20th century. In between, they became a Victorian motif for magic realms.    

While the liberty cap’s “magic” properties seemed to go largely unacknowledged, the idea that fungi could provoke hallucinations did begin to percolate more widely in Europe during the nineteenth century — though it became attached to a quite different species of mushroom. In parallel to a growing scientific interest in toxic and hallucinogenic fungi, a vast body of Victorian fairy lore connected mushrooms and toadstools with elves, pixies, hollow hills, and the unwitting transport of subjects to fairyland, a world of shifting perspectives seething with elemental spirits. The similarity of this otherworld to those engendered by plant psychedelics in New World cultures, where psilocybin-containing mushrooms have been used for millennia, is suggestive. Is it possible that the Victorian fairy tradition, beneath its innocent exterior, operated as a conduit for a hidden tradition of psychedelic knowledge? Were the authors of these fantastical narratives — Alice in Wonderland, for example — aware of the powers of certain mushrooms to lead unsuspecting visitors to enchanted lands? Were they, perhaps, even writing from personal experience?

An article at Public Domain Review takes us through a brief history of magic mushrooms in the British consciousness, and then settles on Lewis Carroll. Modern readers are quite aware of what kind of mushroom Alice ate while in Wonderland, but there are still questions as to what Carroll knew about them. Read about the Victorian view of magic mushrooms here. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: John Anster Fitzgerald)

Photoshop and image filters are modern methods of manipulating photographs to improve one's appearance. But even before photography, image manipulation was a tool for those who could afford to have their portraits painted. Artists knew that if their work was not acceptable, they might not receive their commission. But that could backfire, too. When Henry VIII met his bride-to-be Anne of Cleves, he was very upset that she did not look as good as her portrait had led him to believe. The example above shows two different portraits of a monarch we've recently read about.

Take the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V of the Habsburg Dynasty, a powerful lineage of intermarrying monarchs, many of whom shared a distinctive family feature, known amongst art historians as “The Habsburg Jaw”. Despite appearances, the two side by side portraits above are indeed of the same monarch, Charles V, painted just 17 years apart. It would appear that as the monarch matured, he became more familiar with the artful tricks of portraiture, which he could use to draw the attention away from his chin (and redirect it towards his nether regions).

Powerful people understood the importance of portraits, but their approaches varied. Oliver Cromwell wanted his portrait to be realistic, warts and all, while Napoleon didn't care if paintings looked like him at all as long as they conveyed his message. Read about painted portraits that didn't quite tell the truth at Messy Nessy Chic.

For Halloween 2020, Simon Tofield has a hedgehog regaling Simon's Cat with spooky campfire stories. However, the cat is not nearly as scared as he's supposed to be. The hedgehog will have to amp it up a bit.

To be considered for the NASA's astronaut program today, you need to have an advanced degree in science, engineering, medicine, or some other discipline that would be useful for the research done in space. That wasn't the case at all when Russia and the United States first stepped into space. The story of how the qualifications have changed over time is the story of how far we've come in space exploration. At first, the main requirement was bravery and public relations potential.

In the 1950s, when the U.S. and Russian space programs vetted candidates, they just needed individuals who could endure the flights. Little was known then about how the human body would respond to space. NASA’s initial call for astronaut applications included virtually any man shorter than 5’11” who had engaged in dangerous and physically strenuous activities, such as scuba diving or mountaineering. But President Dwight Eisenhower intervened, deciding that only military test pilots would be eligible.

“As a military man, Eisenhower had a great understanding and respect for the process of evaluation and promotion in the military,” says Margaret Weitekamp, chair of the space history department at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Military officers were presumed to be disciplined, loyal to the country, and willing to sacrifice their lives if necessary. And a test pilot already had proven the unique ability “to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment,” as Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1979 book The Right Stuff.

The Russians had somewhat different requirements for cosmonauts, yet they had to be brave to be flung into the unknown -and also have public relations potential. Now space is a workplace, but as we venture beyond the bounds of earth, the requirements for space travelers is liable to combine all the qualifications of the early days and the present. Read the evolution of "the right stuff" required for space explorations at National Geographic. -via Digg

(Image credit: NASA)

The most remote place in Alaska is St. Matthew Island, halfway between the North American mainland and Siberia. The nearest town is a 24-hour boat ride away. The island was "discovered" several times, and there is evidence of a prehistoric home, but no one ever stays there long. Once a home for polar bears, it still teems with wildlife, both on land and in the water. But no humans call it home.

Even after the bears were gone, the archipelago remained a difficult place for people. The fog was endless; the weather, a banshee; the isolation, extreme. In 1916, the Arctic power schooner Great Bear ran afoul of the mists and wrecked on Pinnacle. The crew used whaleboats to move about 20 tonnes of supplies to St. Matthew to set up a camp and wait for help. A man named N. H. Bokum managed to build a sort of transmitter from odds and ends, and climbed each night to a clifftop to tap out SOS calls. But he gave up after concluding that the soggy air interfered with its operation. Growing restless as the weeks passed, men brandished knives over the ham when the cook tried to ration it. Had they not been rescued after 18 days, Great Bear owner John Borden later said, this desperation would have been “the first taste of what the winter would have brought.”

U.S. servicemen stationed on St. Matthew during the Second World War got a more thorough sampling of the island’s winter extremes. In 1943, the U.S. Coast Guard established a long-range navigation (Loran) site on the southwestern coast of the island, part of a network that helped fighter planes and warships orient on the Pacific with the help of regular pulses of radio waves. Snow at the Loran station drifted up to around eight meters deep, and “blizzards of hurricane velocity” lasted an average of 10 days. Sea ice surrounded the island for about seven months of the year. When a plane dropped the mail several kilometers away during the coldest time of year, the men had to form three crews and rotate in shifts just to retrieve it, dragging a toboggan of survival supplies as they went.

Sarah Gilman visited this inhospitable island, and gives us an almost poetic tour along with the history of the Alaskan outpost of St. Matthew Island. -via Smithsonian

When I was young and moving from one rental home to another about once a year, moving meant taking down the TV aerial, the shower head, and the ceiling fans, and re-installing the original overhead lights. A new place always needed some repairs. Now I have kids for those sorts of chores. If you've never replaced a light switch, you might be surprised to find it's easier than you think -just make sure the power is off first.

Lifehacker has instructions for eight household electrical fixes that non-electricians do all the time, from changing a light fixture to replacing an electrical outlet. Just make sure the power is off.

(Image credit: Creidieki)

Than More designed a video game called NENA. He spent two years on it, with the aim of using it to propose to his girlfriend Emily. Here we see the very end, with the proposal. We don't get to see a lot of gameplay in this video, but you can see more of NENA at Twitch. The game is available for sale, through links on the YouTube page. -via reddit

Yandy is notorious for offering sexy Halloween costumes, and every year, in addition to the classic horror and pop culture characters, they come up with the most ridiculous versions of whatever is in the news. This year is no exception. For 2020, behold, the sexy mail-in ballot costume! But that isn't the only new one this year. See the sexy hand sanitizer costume, the sexy murder hornet costume, the sexy postal babe costume, and the sexy Tiger King costume (available for both men and women) at Geeks Are Sexy.

The "Missed Connections" section of Craigslist has been a source of humor and fantasy for years, and maybe some happy endings that we'll never know about. One such ad inspired Patrick Dias to fill in some of the blanks and make an animated short called Missed Connections: "Was that your limb? - w4m".

With narration sourced from a real Craigslist Missed connections ad, and visually wrapped with a fictional narrative—this is a story of a space captain late for his own launch, and the woman who was at the right place but at the wrong time.

I only wish we could get a sequel with a real-life resolution. -via Laughing Squid

The biggest shark ever was Otodus megalodon, now extinct, which could grow up to 50 feet long. And there may as well not even be a second place, as that's twice as big as any other shark. How did this shark get so big, and what makes it so different? For one thing, O. megalodon reproduced with eggs like other fish, but it does not lay eggs. Rather, the eggs hatch inside the mother, who gives birth to them later on. That allowed for larger baby sharks, but wasn't the best environment for some of them.  

A new study, published today in Historical Biology by DePaul University paleontologist Kenshu Shimada and colleagues, suggests that cannibalism in utero may have helped set up the rise of the largest meat-eating shark of all time. The researchers suggest that a biological connection existed between having large, hungry babies, a metabolism that ran warm and increases in size—with the appetites of baby sharks driving their mothers to eat more and get bigger, which led the babies to get bigger themselves.

It's not that unborn sharks developed a taste for meat by eating eggs and sibling in utero, at least not that alone. Read about the evolutionary forces that could have driven megalodon to such great size at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Smithsonian Institution)

Almost all citrus fruits came from three Asian plants: the mandarin, the pomelo, and the citron. The oranges, limes, and lemons we have are products of careful crossbreeding between these base fruits and their hybrids. Then there's the grapefruit. It developed from the various citrus fruits imported to the West Indies, in some haphazard manner that history hasn't properly recorded. Even the origins of the word grapefruit is shrouded in mystery, although there are several theories of how the grapefruit was named.

This is largely guesswork, almost all of it, because citrus is a delightfully chaotic category of fruit. It hybridizes so easily that there are undoubtedly thousands, maybe more, separate varieties of citrus in the wild and in cultivation. Some of these, like the grapefruit, clementine, or Meyer lemon, catch on and become popular. But trying to figure out exactly where they came from, especially if they weren’t created recently in a fruit-breeding lab, is incredibly difficult.

A Frenchman named Odet Philippe is generally credited with bringing the grapefruit to the American mainland, in the 1820s. He was the first permanent European settler in Pinellas County, Florida, where modern-day Tampa lies. (It took him several attempts; neither the swamp ecology nor the Native people particularly wanted him there.) Grapefruit was Philippe’s favorite citrus fruit, and he planted huge plantations of it, and gave grafting components to his neighbors so they could grow the fruit themselves. (It is thought that Phillippe was Black, but he also purchased and owned enslaved people.) In 1892, a Mainer named Kimball Chase Atwood, having achieved success in the New York City insurance world, moved to the 265 acres of forest just south of Tampa Bay he’d purchased. Atwood burned the whole thing to the ground and started planting stuff, and soon he dedicated the land to his favorite crop: the grapefruit. The dude planted 16,000 grapefruit trees.

Grapefruit, though, is wild, and wants to remain wild.

What's weirder than the history of grapefruit is the nature of the fruit itself, due to its strange chemistry. Read how grapefruit can be uniquely dangerous at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Stella Murphy)

Maci Curran is 17 years old, and she is 6' 10" tall. She will be included in the next edition of the Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest legs of any woman, and the longest legs of any teenager.

Her left leg measures 135.267 cm (53.255 in), while her right leg measures 134.3 cm (52.874 in).

Maci’s family, from Cedar Park, Texas, are relatively tall but none of her other siblings or parents quite match her height.  

Standing at 6 ft 10 in tall, her legs actually make up 60% of her total height! She wanted to go after this record title to inspire tall people everywhere to embrace their height.    

In the picture above, she is standing with her mother, the only one in the family who isn't tall. She has always towered over her classmates, which gives her an advantage on her high school volleyball team. Read about Curran and see a video at the Guinness World Records site. -via Boing Boing

Underneath the city of London are tunnels that serve as storage basements, subway trains, utility lines, and sewers, like most cities. Then there are the tunnels built for more secretive reasons. This underground system has grown and shrunk, with passageways connected and then separated, and no definitive map exists of them. Still, data from the 2017 Land Registry tells us there are four million kilometers of tunnels under London, most of them built for communications purposes during the Cold War. Bits and pieces of this network are revealed when old government buildings are sold.

The most intriguing revelation was of the Postmaster General’s secret tunnel beneath the heart of the government at 57 Whitehall. It was built to protect machinery and communications from the threat of atom bombs in the Cold War, and the bunker emerges into the basement of the Old War Office, once used by Winston Churchill. In 2014, the Raffles hotel chain bought the 54,000 sq m Grade II-listed building from the Ministry of Defence for £350 million. Named “The OWO”, the London landmark is set to open as one of the world’s highest-profile hotels in 2022.

More than 30 gears and a dozen lifts – stretching from the working-class East End to the heart of Whitehall – connect the Postmaster General’s tunnel to a secret underground network, which mostly emerges unobtrusively into government buildings and telephone exchanges.

That doesn't mean that you, or the hotel staff, or anyone can follow the tunnels from the now-private properties. But quite a few people are dedicated to exploring the underground system, and even mapping them. Read what we know of these underground tunnels and what we may learn in the future at BBC Travel. -via Damn Interesting

A few years ago, the National Aquarium of New Zealand instituted a Naughty Penguin of the Month award, in which we all got to know the aquarium's penguins as the individuals they are. If you have a favorite penguin, you'll want to vote in the third annual Penguin of the Year competition! Even if you don't have a favorite penguin already, you will soon. Click on a picture at the contest page to read about each of the 14 contenders, and then place your vote. Follow the progress of the competition at Twitter or Facebook. -via Metafilter