Brainstorming sessions are designed to be a way for people to throw out ideas, no matter how outlandish, in the hopes that some kernel within them can be adapted and modified into something useful. When it came to ideas on how to win World War II, those brainstorming sessions could get out of hand, and ideas that lacked the devil's advocacy could actually go into production. One such idea from Ed Salinger of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) proposed to harness the concept of kitsune, the folklore of shapeshifting trickster foxes, to scare the Japanese with a literal portent of doom. The whole idea rested on the assumption that Japanese people of the 1940s were superstitious and gullible enough to fall for it.

When it came to the question of how to create fake kitsune, the OSS dreamt up a gaggle of ideas. First, OSS personnel fashioned fox-shaped balloons to fly over Japanese villages and scare the citizens below. They also asked a whistle company to create an instrument that simulated fox sounds. In a memo to the OSS Planning Staff, Salinger said, “These whistles can be used in combat and a sufficient number of these should create an eerie sound of the kind calculated to meet the Japanese superstition.” In addition to the balloons and whistles, the OSS hired another company to create artificial fox odors. Salinger thought that Japanese citizens would somehow recognize this scent—just as he thought that they would recognize a rare fox sound—and cower in fear. But despite Salinger’s best efforts, the balloons, whistles, and odors were abandoned as impractical before being deployed. Instead, the OSS reverted to Salinger’s original plan: Catch live foxes in China and Australia, spray-paint them with glowing paint, and release them throughout Japanese villages.

What could possibly go wrong? When Operation Fantasia went into production, they found out. Read about the effort the US put into fabricating supernatural foxes at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Utagawa Kuniyoshi)

For the 6th year, Katmai National Park and Preserve is staging Fat Bear Week, a tournament to crown the bear with the most successful weight gain of the year. While unhealthy for humans, a substantial layer of fat is crucial for sustaining bears through their winter hibernation. Meet the contenders from the bears that live in Katmai, and place your votes in each matchup between September 30 and October 6. Last year's winner Holly is in the running, although not expected to win as she's been raising her cub this summer. But she's a fan favorite, so Holly is in the bracket, as well as her daughter. -via Metafilter

See also: Fat Bear Week 2018 and 2019.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the house where the Banks family lived was made available to rent out through Airbnb. Will Smith took the opportunity to go visit it himself, and he took along DJ Jazzy Jeff (Jeff Townes), too. The house is set up to appeal specifically to Fresh Prince fans, but it was a nostalgic trip, too. They are eventually joined by other cast members, with the notable exception of Uncle Phil (the late James Avery). You may as well watch the tour, since the actual Airbnb listing is booked for the foreseeable future. -via Digg

Ursula Graham Bower went to visit her brother in India in 1937. While there, the British citizen fell in love with the indigenous Naga people of northern India, and went to live among them. By 1942, the Japanese were making incursions into the area, and the British government which had mostly ignored the Naga now needed their help.    

The British turned to Bower, asking her to use her Naga connections to monitor Japanese troop movement and rescue downed Allied pilots. Bower went further and mustered a 150 man strong guerrilla force who liked the imperialists who mostly ignored them more than the imperialists pressing the Naga into brutal forced labor. Armed primarily with old muskets, they mainly aided refugees escaping Burma, but also harassed Japanese troops to the point where a bounty was placed on the head of a woman with no formal military training leading male warriors who typically frowned on women in the war workplace.

In 1944 the Japanese suffered a backbreaking defeat at Kohima, a battle won with the help of Naga intelligence, and retreated. Bower pivoted to teaching Allied troops jungle survival skills and, in doing so, even found the husband her mother had been hoping for, marrying a British officer in a Naga wedding ceremony.

Read how Bower rose to the occasion, and three other stories from World War II you've never heard before, including Germany's worst defeat by the Soviets, an Italian fascist who became a Spanish diplomat to aid escaping Jews, and a strangely successful Nazi escape artist at Cracked.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was released in the US on September 26, 1975, about six weeks after its British premiere, which means the movie is now 45 years old. It wasn't an immediate hit, but found new life as an audience participation experience, which became almost a rite of passage for a generation of college students. The film was a reworking of the stage version, and there were some differences.   

6. “Science Fiction/Double Feature” had a different singer for the film.

As previously mentioned, Patricia Quinn took the Magenta role just so she could sing “Science Fiction/Double Feature” on the stage, but when it came time to film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it was decided that O’Brien should sing the song instead. Quinn wasn’t happy, but she did get a small consolation: The iconic lips that sing the song in the opening credits are hers.

7. The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s director agreed to a smaller budget in order to keep the original cast.

According to Sharman, 20th Century Fox offered him “a reasonable budget” if he would cast “currently fashionable rock stars” in the lead roles for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Sharman lobbied instead to keep the original stage cast (with some exceptions, like the addition of Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon), and instead got a “modest budget” and a very tight shooting schedule. Sharman now calls the decision “crucial” to the film’s cult success.

Read the rest of the fun facts about The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Mental Floss.

Chick E Poo is a parrot who lives in Woodinville, Washington. She sings her operatic solos constantly. She must have been exposed to lots of arias, but she sings her own version, often incorporating her own lyrics, like her name and "meow." She appears to be quite proud of her vibrato and soaring high notes! -via Laughing Squid

Why would anyone want to climb a tall pole, such as a flag pole, and stay there for any length of time? Fame and fortune, of course! It wasn't so easy to go viral 100 years ago, so to grab attention, one had to do something that was worthwhile to watch in order to draw a crowd. Once one guy succeeded at that, many others looked, thought "I can do that!", and tried it out.  

We can’t talk about pole-sitting without talking about Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly, the original “influencer” for the roaring twenties craze. The aerial stuntman dubiously claimed to have been a survivor of the Titanic and called himself “the luckiest fool in the world.” He was first dared by a friend in 1924 to sit on a flagpole and succeeded in staying up there for 13 hours and 13 minutes. In an era without television, the odd stunt attracted considerable attention, prompting Kelly to travel around America charging admission for the spectacle, as well as earning endorsements for publicity stunts. He helped inaugurate new hotels and shops; attracted crowds for movie premieres and amusement parks, and once sat on a pole for 22 days at Madison Square Gardens during a dance marathon (another endurance fad) until the last dancers dropped.

It didn’t take long before pole-sitting fever had spread across the country, prompting amateur copycats and professional pole-sitters alike to seek out similar fame and fortune….

As the poles got higher and the record time got lengthier, fewer people wanted to compete, and the fad died out. But it wasn't the first time such a fad took hold. Read about pole-sitting in the 1920s and its origin in ancient times at Messy Nessy Chic.

This painting of a Pekingese dog was produced by artrist Friedrich Wilhelm Keyl in 1861. While we don't know for sure whether the dog was male of female, we know its name was Looty. At the time, Pekingese dogs were found in China, where they were bred for their small size and their resemblance to lions.

When Anglo-French invaders stormed, looted, and burned the Summer Palace during the Second Opium War in 1860, they found five of these Pekingese dogs guarding the corpse of a lady who had committed suicide upon hearing the pillaging taking place outside. The dogs were brought back to England, the tiniest of them—historians note she weighed around three pounds—was gifted to Queen Victoria, who renamed her “Looty” in reference to the spoils of war.

The renaming sealed her fate as a stolen object of intense fascination.

To modern ears, the name sounds like a confession of a crime, but the British Empire was downright proud of taking treasures from conquered lands. Read about Looty and what she came to symbolize at Artsy. -via Nag on the Lake  

How could scientists in the UK hear an underwater explosion 19,000 kilometers away in Australia? It's not an experiment you could reproduce in a pool, even a very large one, because the speed of sound is more variable than you may think, and so are the conditions in different parts of the ocean. MinuteEarth explains. I won't guarantee you'll understand it all, but it does remind us that the world is a very weird place, and there's always more to learn about it. -via Digg

The life of a galley slave was miserable, pulling an oar all day long to propel himself to a penal colony. In 1774, a French galley slave named Bazile complained of illness. He was under the care of two different doctors for about five weeks before he died. Not knowing what the problem was, Dr. Fournier did a post-mortem. He found the man's organs in such an odd state that he decided to wait for his colleagues to witness the complete autopsy.

A few hours later, more than fifty people – physicians, surgeons, students and others – were there to watch the autopsy. Dr Fournier began by pointing out that the stomach was an unusual shape, distorted into an elongated cuboid by its contents. Then he made an incision into the organ and removed a catalogue of items so extensive and bizarre that one of his assistants recorded it for posterity.

The man had ingested 54 foreign objects, some large enough alone to cause his death, yet he lived under medical observation for more than a month. See a list of what was found inside, and the investigation that followed, at Thomas Morris. -via Strange Company

What happens when two spaceships have the same registration number? Awkward! Karl Poyzer, Joseph Roberts, and friends worked on this animated sci-fi comedy short during lockdown. Contains NSFW language at the very end. -via Geeks Are Sexy

In 1974, Ernő Rubik built the first Rubik's cube not as a toy, but as a tool to model three-dimensional movement. The colors were to designate that movement, and only afterward did he discover it was also a puzzle.

After creating the cube, he explained, he was faced with a second challenge: how to solve it. At the time, he had no idea if his cube could even be put back into place, let alone how fast — and it took him a full month to solve his own puzzle. It was fiendishly difficult “to find your way back, or to find your target — just to solve it as a combinatorical problem,” he said. “And I was without any background for that, because I was the first who tried.”

The popularity of the puzzle surprised Rubik, and so did its longevity. He assumed it would only be interesting to those with science or engineering backgrounds. Yet here we are 46 years later, and Rubik's cubes still sell like hotcakes. Rubik's new book, Cubed: The Puzzle of Us All, is not so much about the cube itself, but about how people all over the world took it to heart. Read what the book holds and see a video interview with Rubik at Undark. -via Digg

(Image credit: Steren Giannini)

(Image credit: Bubzyyy)

Why do cats follow us into the bathroom? They love to sit in the cool porcelain sink. They are fascinated with flushing. They know you don't have anything better to do while sitting on the toilet than to pet the cat. And they are terrified of baths and showers. Is that it? Or could it be that the things humans do in the bathroom are just so strange to them that they have to watch?

(Image credit: BowChikaMeowMeow)

For whatever reason they do it, once you have a cat, you will not have privacy in the bathroom. See a roundup of 50 cute and funny pictures of cats invading their human's bathroom privacy in a ranked list at Bored Panda. 

Gangsta's Paradise by Coolio was a #1 hit in 1995. For the upcoming Oktoberfest, YouTuber There I Ruined It (previously) turned it into a Bavarian polka. All it took was a couple of tubas, an accordion, some lederhosen, and lots of nerve. (via Laughing Squid)

What do people who live in the Canadian Arctic Circle eat? You might think of the traditional Inuit meat-based diet, but that was destroyed by regulation and the establishment of permanent settlements. Food is imported from lower latitudes, but it is very expensive and rarely fresh. However, in the past couple of decades, greenhouses have sprung up on the Northwest Territories, even inside the Arctic Circle. Ray Solotki is executive director of the Inuvik Community Greenhouse, https://www.inuvikgreenhouse.com/ 120 miles inside the Arctic Circle, and she stays busy all summer.

“We don’t really have a cold problem like a lot of people think we do,” says Solotki. “We have a heat problem, because of the sunlight.” 24 hours of summer daylight keeps the greenhouse balmy, while accelerating vegetable growth. Crops grow so speedily here that in early July, three weeks into harvesting, Solotki merrily reported collecting over 220 pounds of food. The North’s midnight sun makes greenhouse gardening surprisingly productive, with everything from leafy greens, squash, tomatoes, and beds of flowers soaking up the extra light.

This greenhouse has operated since it was built in a converted hockey arena in 1998. Since then, greenhouses have sprung up in many very northern towns. Read about greenhouse gardening in the Arctic at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Inuvik Community Greenhouse)