The Hectics were a musical group formed by students at a boarding school in Panchgani, India. This picture was taken in 1959 when they were young teenagers. All five members went on to successful adult lives, and you should recognize at least one of them. If you don't, you can surprise yourself and read about them at Wikipedia.-via TYWKIWDBI

If the thought of sitting through 40 versions of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet sounds like torture, you're in for a surprise. This list of 40 Hamlets include movies dating from 1900 to the 21st century plus TV shows, short films, cartoons, skits, and even comic pages. Yes, everyone wants to put their unique spin on the melancholy Dane. Some are full productions, while others have a rather tangental relation with the original play -and many are quite funny. And the best part is that almost all have video clips that show why they are ranked the way they are. Check out 40 wildly different interpretations of Hamlet at Lithub.  -via Metafilter

For a long time, people have been asking if there ever was a real Sweeney Todd, otherwise known as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. As you can see here, there was a Sweeney Todd hair salon at 152 Fleet Street! One has to wonder whether clients had a Guinness to feel better about getting a haircut there. However, we can assume that the hairdresser(s) here did not slice up customers to make pies. The original Sweeney Todd debuted as a fictional character in 1846, while the barbershop pictured above was photographed sometime in the 1920s. Read more about it at Londonist. While there are plenty of Barbershops and salons named after Sweeney Todd today, none of them are on Fleet Street in London. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image source: Old Photos of Essex Kent & London)

We've always known that Mount Everest is the world's highest mountain ...or is it? As with anything else, it all depends on how you measure it. Everest is officially 8,848 meters (29,029 feet) above sea level. But what if you started measuring from somewhere other than sea level? Then it turns out that Everest is not the highest mountain. It's not even the tallest. The video is only 6:30; the rest is an ad. -via Digg

A lava tube is formed when molten lava spews through the earth. The lava on the outside of the tube cools against soil or rock, forming a shell, while the hot molten part rushes through. The result is a cave. But the earth isn't the only place with lava tubes. Mars has really big ones, and on the moon, they are even bigger.  

"The largest lava tubes on Earth are maximum [about] 40 meters [130 feet] of width and height," said study co-author Riccardo Pozzobon, a geoscientist at the University of Padova, Italy. "So like a very large motorway tunnel."

That's certainly big enough space for some people to fit inside. But on Mars collapsed lava tubes tend to be about 80 times larger than Earth's, with diameters of 130 to 1,300 feet (40 to 400 m). Lunar lava tubes seem to be still larger, the researchers found, with collapse sites 300 to 700 times the size of Earth's. Lunar lava tubes likely range from 1,600 to 3,000 feet (500 to 900 m).

A lava tube on the moon, Pozzobon told Live Science, could easily contain a small city within its walls.

The upshot is that these huge caves may offer shelter and protection when humans venture out to the moon and Mars. Read what we know about them at LiveScience. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Dave Bunnell/Under Earth Images)

Serving a long prison sentence is to be cut off from the world. Ten or twenty years later, everything has changed. In a recent Ask Reddit thread, the question posed was "People who did a long time in prison, what was your biggest shock of the outside world?" The answers were quite varied.

5. "My old boss spent seven years behind bars. He said the morning he got out, his grandmother picked him up and they went to Target. He said his eyes were hurting because he hadn't seen the color red in years."

—GOAT1915

 7. "[My uncle] had been in prison for about 30 years and he didn't believe that you can just order stuff from the internet and it would be delivered. So we ordered dinner from Seamless, my treat, and he practically power-walked to the door when the bell rang. He swung the door open and enthusiastically greeted the delivery boy."

—jtrisn1

See 22 of the best answers at Buzzfeed, or read the entire thread at reddit.

Leave it to Ze Frank to come up with the raunchiest possible description of charming little hummingbirds while staying technically SFW. All they're doing is sipping nectar! But the best part of this video is the hummingbird mating dance, which seems too funny to believe. -via Geeks Are Sexy

On the island of Kungshatt, Sweden, there is a tall pole with a large hat on top. It's been there since the 17th century, although it has been replaced a few times. The name Kungshatt translates to "King's Hat," and thereby lies a tale. The king in this tale was the 9th-century Swedish ruler Erik Anundsson, whose reign was long and filled with conquests of nearby lands, which could not easily be explained by mere military strategy, number of troops, and bravery. Well, maybe it could be, but the tale of the hat is a better story.   

The answer to this comes to us in a local legend in the Mälar Valley region of Sweden – the very heartland of the old Swedish kings. According to this tale Erik was so successful on his raids and campaigns because of his allegedly magical hat. We do not know from where he acquired this hat, but we are told of its magical properties. When Erik wore this hat, handily he could control the winds and the weather by simply turning the hat in any given direction. This was, of course, quite useful in the Viking Age when the main way of transportation was by ship and when sudden attacks by sea could be incredibly devastating. The powers of the hat increased the king’s prestige and he would no longer be called “Erik Anundsson” … He became Erik Weatherhat! We’ll leave it to you to decide whether his hat was actually magical or just made him look magically dapper.

Whatever the case, years passed and Erik became a rich and powerful king through plundering and subjugating the east, much due to the magic of his powerful hat. As he grew older, however, his earlier humility had left him and he had become very ambitious, and now sought to rule the west as well. He made plans to greatly expand the Swedish realm by incorporating the disputed regions in modern-day western Sweden, and even to conquer another country – Norway.

Weatherhat’s ambition was to create a kingdom as great as that ruled by the Swedish king Sigurd Ring and his son Ragnar Lothbrok. Apart from western Sweden, this also meant conquering the area of Viken in what was then southern Norway. This land was, however, already ruled by a king called Harald Fairhair, who was to become Erik’s greatest rival- someone with magnificent hair always being greater than one who merely wears a hat, no doubt to hide hideous baldness…

One may think that realms conquered mattered more than a rivalry over headgear, but in any case, the battle between Erik and Harald led to the hat on a pole in Kungshatt according to local legend, which you can read at Today I Found Out.

The Yeronga Devils football club in South Brisbane went out of their way to show love and solidarity to a teammate. Player Jamie Howell is hearing impaired. She has an implant, and wears a helmet on the playing field to protect it, so other players learned some sign language to communicate during games. Recently those other players got together by video chat and rehearsed the team's song in Auslan. When they surprised Howell with the song, she was overwhelmed with emotion. She signs "thank you" over and over after the song. A good time was had by all. -via reddit

The United States has a general election coming up November 3rd. However, the coronavirus pandemic has thrown a wrench into the usual procedures. To make the process of voting safer for US citizens, some states have launched new methods such as early voting and vote by mail, while others have not. How is someone supposed to keep up with all that? Five Thirty-Eight has launched a resource to help out with their state-by-state guide to voting in the age of COVID-19. Click on your state to find out the registration cutoff date, rules for absentee voting, and what's changed since the previous general election. The site will be updated when information changes.  

(Image credit: David Huang)

Often when discussing species that go extinct, someone will say that we could do without mosquitos, which not only bite but also spread disease. We wiped out smallpox, didn't we? There are plenty of other parasites that cause misery, like fleas, ticks, intestinal worms, and those horrible parasites that cause their hosts to become zombies. But like other species, they have their place in the ecosystem, and causing them, or even letting them, go extinct may not be in the host species' best interests.

“We need to reframe how we think about parasites,” says Kayce C. Bell, assistant curator of terrestrial mammals at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. “They are really important animals to keep around. They help host populations, and they are so under-studied that there’s the potential they can go extinct before we know what they are doing in the ecosystems.” Bell studies genetic diversity in ground squirrels, and over time has come to appreciate the role parasites play in keeping squirrel populations healthy. In fact, she says, specific species of parasites have evolved along with their squirrel hosts to help ward off other invading parasites that could kill them.

Find out about several ways parasites may be good for a host species, if not the individual animal, at Wired. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

When people get lost, they often become disoriented. In wilderness settings, this can lead to what John T. Coleman describes as “nature shock,” when "they scramble their brains along with their bearings." It's happened to experienced explorers and trackers, people close to their homes, and those whose confidence outstripped their abilities. In other words, almost anyone. There are plenty of historical accounts of lost people, including some whose survival could be described as miraculous.   

Paul Gasford got lost hunting for sarsaparilla on the shore of Lake Ontario in 1805. Eager to collect the sixpence reward his mother was offering the child who picked the most, he scurried through the brush, eyes peeled and legs pumping, giddy to be free of the small boat his family was using to move their belongings from the Bay of Quinté in Ontario to their new home in Niagara, New York. None of the bigger kids noticed that Paul was missing, a staggering oversight given that, according to The True and Wonderful Story of Paul Gasford, published in 1826, he was “a little over 4 years old.”

After a three-day search, Gasford’s parents gave him up for dead. Chances were slim that a child that young could survive multiple nights exposed in a strange place. But Paul Gasford was no ordinary kid. Instead of falling apart when he realized that he was lost, he remembered the adults saying that Niagara lay 40 miles away and decided to complete the final leg of the journey on his own. He found the lake and followed the coastline. He dug holes in the beach at night and snuggled deep into the sand to keep warm. He jammed a stick in the ground before he slept to stay oriented in the right direction in case he woke confused. He nibbled grapes when he grew hungry, but not too many, for he remembered his mother’s admonition not to gorge himself and sour his stomach. When he sauntered into town, the place exploded in celebration.

Others in this list were eventually rescued, but each account presents a different aspect of what can happen when you get lost in the woods. Read them all at Smithsonian.

BJ Ross from Altoona, Pennsylvania, has a cat named Jordan. Jordan collects shoes. He doesn't buy them, though, he steals them from the neighbors! Jordan will often carry a shoe home and then go back to the victim's home and steal the mate as well. Ross employed technology to investigate Jordan's crimes: a surveillance camera, a GPS tracker, and a Facebook group to help reunite the shoes with their rightful owners. It's all made the cat burglar a feline celebrity. -via Bored Panda

In 1910, 17-year-old Beatrice Sanders went to a drug store in Newark, New Jersey, for an ice cream sundae and was entranced by the young soda jerk who served her, 17-year-old soda La Vere Tallman. She returned to the soda fountain again and again, and the two fell in love. Beatrice's parents objected to the romance, so much that they sent her to school at a seminary to keep the couple apart. But they corresponded by mail, and hatched a plan to run away together. La Vere knew of a cave in the Catskills where they could go live. He'd bring guns and fishhooks and utensils, and they would live off the land, away from their parents prying eyes.  

    It was just the finest cave imaginable, too. A great, big regular robbers’ cave. Why, Captain Kidd himself would have pounded upon it in glee as a bully hiding place from policemen, and might have hid a million dollars in bullion and diamonds in the big black hole that led off to—no one knows where—from the southeast corner.
    – The Spokane Press, December 12, 1910

Beatrice and La Vere fled to their cave in September and lived there for "many happy weeks." They both kept diaries of that time, which later made it into the newspapers. But the teenagers didn't plan for winter weather, and the cave eventually got rather cold. They would have to return to civilization, if not to their families. Read the story of the teenagers who lived in a cave, which was really just the beginning of their adventures, at Second Glance History, part one and part two. -via Strange Company

Yeah, it seems early to talk about Thanksgiving, but Brach's is way ahead of us with their new product Thanksgiving Dinner Candy Corn. It may sound disgusting, but if you will be in isolation for the holiday, here's your excuse to pig out on candy instead of cooking. You can even tell Mom you had a Thanksgiving dinner when she checks in by FaceTime.   

A full course meal presented in a unique mix of candy corn flavors. BRACH’S Turkey Dinner includes all of the traditional Thanksgiving favorites. From roasted turkey, green beans and stuffing to ginger glazed carrots, cranberry sauce and sweet potato pie.
Flavors include Green Beans, Roasted Turkey, Cranberry Sauce, Ginger Glazed Carrot, Sweet Potato Pie & Stuffing.

One has to wonder how savory these sweets really are. The first ingredients are still sugar and corn syrup, while everything else is under "Natural and Artificial Flavor." Then you have to wonder why they didn't mix in some regular candy corn and call it corn flavor. -via Boing Boing