Matt Shirley asks, "What's the most annoying fruit?" According to his chart, it would be avocados. You keep an eye on those things, because there's about a 15-minute window at one point where they will be perfect for eating. He seems to be a bit confused by pineapple, which is understandable. Like all fruit, a pineapple is at its sweetest right before it falls apart. Knowing when that is before you cut into it is a matter of experience. I like to cut them when they are showing quite a bit of yellow outside. Yeah, that means trimming some brown parts from the flesh, but what's left is very sweet!

Millions of people have used their lockdown time to recreate works of art. Designer Lydia Cambron went a step further and recreated a movie! Well, a part of a movie, anyway, but she chose well. Here she is, remaking the final scene of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, copied shot by shot in her apartment. At first I thought the monolith in the bedroom was a guillotine, but I think it may be an exercise machine. Stay for the credits. -via Nag on the Lake

Deep in the Queensland rain forest, the ruins of a hand-built castle begun almost a hundred years ago still stand, slowly being resurrected from the ravages of time and nature. Paronella Castle was a labor of love the first time around, and also the second.   

It was the impossible dream of an ambitious Spanish immigrant who sailed to Australia in 1913 to make a life for himself and his fiancé waiting back home. José Paronella worked for over a decade worlds away from his homeland, first as a labourer cutting sugar cane, and then slowly building his wealth, buying, improving and selling cane farms. In his first years of travelling around Queensland, he discovered a virgin forest land alongside a waterfall and knew at first sight that he would one day call it his home. Over a century later, the ruins of his incredible story remain in the jungle…

Paronella and his wife Margarita spent ten years building a beautiful castle in the jungles of Australia, complete with fountains, a movie theater, tennis courts, 7,000 exotic trees, and a hydroelectric plant to power it all. They opened it to the public as Paronalla Park in 1935. They endured floods, cyclones, fires, and the creeping jungle, until the Paronellas died and the jungle eventually won. But that's not the end of the story. Read about Paronella Castle and see plenty of pictures at Messy Nessy Chic.

He's just being nice. Maybe a little too nice. If you're not used to "Midwest nice," it can start to seem a little creepy. And then more creepy. With the proper soundtrack, being welcomed into the neighborhood becomes a full-blown horror story. Charlie Berens wrote and stars in this Midwest Horror Film not coming to a theater near you. Check out the many references to earlier horror classics. -via Digg

If you've ever gone through a tunnel underneath a body of water, you probably wondered how on earth they managed to build it. Rivers carry a lot of water, which has a tendency to seep down into the earth. The first such tunnel was the Thames Tunnel, built under London's river in the 19th century. This kind of construction was attempted in 1799, but that was the first of a string of failures. Engineers knew how to build a tunnel, but you have to dig the hole before you build the walls inside, leaving a dangerous gap for flooding or collapse. French engineer Marc Brunel came up with a workaround: a temporary tunneling shield that could move with the diggers and builders.  

Brunel’s tunneling shield consisted of a large, rectangular, grid of iron frame with 36 chambers distributed into three levels. Each chamber was open to the rear, but closed in the front with moveable boards. The front was pressed firmly against the tunnel face, and the workers would remove the boards one at a time and excavate the earth behind it to a predetermined depth. Then the board would be pushed into the hole and screwed back into place before the next one was removed. The whole process was repeated until the earth behind all the boards were excavated. Then the entire iron frame was laboriously moved forward, and the newly excavated section was shored up with bricks and mortar.

The tunneling shield was revolutionary, but the work was slow, progressing at only 8 to 12 feet a week. And although the shield worked well in preventing cave-ins, seep-ins were another problem. The filthy, sewage-laden water from the Thames above dripped down from the roof of the tunnel and poisoned the poorly ventilated space. Many miners including Brunel himself fell ill to a wide range of affliction such diarrhea, headaches and temporary blindness. Pumps worked all round the clock removing water from the tunnel, and when they failed, the whole shaft would flood to a depth of several feet.

The work was not safe, and setbacks meant the tunnel took nearly twenty years to complete, at an expense way beyond what was estimated. Read about the construction of the world's first completed tunnel under a navigable river at Amusing Planet.

A dust devil is a short-lived whirlwind that can form suddenly and dissipate just as suddenly. They are smaller than tornados, and much less dangerous. However, this particular dust devil seemed to have a grudge against a guy running a fruit stand in Haines Junction, Yukon. From the YouTube description:

"I was buying fruit with my girlfriend at this fruit stand that comes every other week to our community. All of a sudden the wind started to get stronger and a table blew over and before we knew it, a huge strong dust devil formed. It lasted about three minutes and the dust devil took all of the guy's cash money and blew it all up into the air. After it ended, people who saw and watched it came to help clean up the big mess, there was fruit and boxes all over the place."

It was not a good day for the poor guy just trying to sell some fresh produce. -via Geekologie

Will Smith is working on a new version of his '90s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, but this time, it will drop the comedy to be an hour-long drama. It will be called just Bel-Air. This may sound a bit familiar to Neatorama readers, as we posted a short that does just that, produced by Morgan Cooper. Will Smith liked it, too.

Bel-Air is described as a dramatic take on the beloved '90s comedy that catapulted Smith to stardom over six seasons starring as the street-smart kid who moved from West Philly to the tony Los Angeles neighborhood. With a reimagined vision, Bel-Air will dive deeper into the inherent conflicts, emotions and biases of what it means to be a Black man in America today, while still delivering the swagger and fun nods to the original show.

Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter that the new Bel-Air has been in the works for more than a year after the four-minute clip went viral when it was posted in March 2019 and caught Smith's attention. Cooper, a Fresh Prince superfan, created and directed the trailer that reimagined the series as if it were a drama. He will co-write the script, direct and be credited as a co-EP.

The series will eventually land on a streaming service, but we don't know yet which one will win the bid. Read more at The Hollywood Reporter. -via Uproxx

BoMcCready crunched the numbers and found out how common each day of the year is for birthdays. It appears that September is the time more people are born, which leads us to believe the cold of the winter solstice and the cheer of holiday parties may have an effect. The interactive version is here, in case you want to click on your birthday and see how far it diverges from the average. My birthday, September 27, is the 27th most common birthday on the calendar. You would think that February 29th is the least common, but it was apparently weighted for how often that date appears on the calendar. We can see that December 25 and 24, January 1, and July 4 are relatively rare ...possibly because inductions and non-emergency cesarians aren't scheduled on those days. -via Digg

The TV series Unsolved Mysteries kept us in suspense in the 1990s, and has been resurrected three times on TV. It's also survived on YouTube, Hulu, and now Netflix. In this parody video by Nerdist, the experts take on a cold case close to our hearts: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Just like the original show, the case is presented with a combination of actual footage, recreations, and expert commentary. -via Laughing Squid

We've seen some amazing homemade and custom-made Halloween costumes for kids who use wheelchairs over the years. Now Disney is getting into the act with wheelchair covers to turn the conveyance into the Incredimobile from the movie Incredibles 2 or Cinderella's magical coach.  

Made from stiff felt printed with custom artwork, the decorative panels include various sections of hidden plastic piping which adds rigidity, and they attach to wheelchairs using adhesive fabric strips. They’re specifically designed for manually-operated wheelchairs with 24-inch wheels, and because they inhibit regular use of the chair, they do require a separate operator to push.

Disney is also offering three adaptive costumes with features that make them easier for special needs children to wear. Read more about them at io9.

(Image credit: shopDisney)

If you've been wondering about all that activity in your attic, it's probably a rave of some kind. All they needed was the right music. And pay no attention to Vlad; he's always showing off. -via Nag on the Lake

Have you ever had a brain fart and couldn't think of a word you really needed? Or more commonly, couldn't think of the word in your second language? It happens all the time, but often people can come up with a description using other words, often painting a delightfully funny picture. The example above wasn't so much a "lost" word, but one that the audience did not know. Others also had to go the long way around to convey their meaning.

Its like that video where this Arabic man try to explain the receptionist that there's mouse in his room. He was like "Jerry here is in my room, please bring Tom" you can find it on YouTube 😂

— ini inggrid (@inggridible) March 8, 2020

You can listen to that video here. See dozens of other funny examples of "what's the word for..." at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: echoingwhisper)

If you can't go on the vacation you planned, the next best thing may be to get a bunch of cheap props and pretend. Steve Price took that fun one step further and made a chain reaction involving his vacation destination (a tropical beach) that went kablooey. The sequence ends at 2:30, then we get a closeup of all the components you missed the first time around, then the testing procedures with failures. That's where we get a taste of hard difficult this kind of thing really is. -via Laughing Squid

For every TV show that makes it onto broadcast (or streaming), there are countless others that went into development but were never aired. Some even had episodes ready to go before the plug was pulled. Commando Nanny sounds like it may have just as well been forgotten even without all the mishaps, since the trope of "family hires funny maid/nanny/butler who shakes things up" trope has been used a million times already. Others just sound like a bad idea from the beginning.

There are plenty of weird TV shows that we never got to see, and almost as many reasons for giving up on them. Read about 21, er, make that 20 of them in a Cracked pictofacts list.

In November, NASA will mark twenty years of continuous occupation of the International Space Station with the anniversary of Expedition 1. Since then, there has always been someone orbiting the earth on the ISS. From the YouTube link:

"What if we built a bridge, between and above all nations, to jointly discover the galaxy's great unknowns?" Join us this fall as we prepare to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the International Space Station. As a global endeavor, 240 people from 19 countries have visited the unique microgravity laboratory, which has hosted more than 2,800 research investigations from scientists  in over 100 nations.

In celebration of the anniversary, NASA has been posting space station news of 20 years ago at their website. Although there doesn't seem to be a tag to load all the historical posts at once, there are links to the left to read more. -via Geeks Are Sexy