This is cute and clever. Kevin Parry made a stop-motion video with just a water hose sprayed at a wall -with him between them. Here's a look at the process.  



Andrea Nesbitt mentioned she had lots of fun spraying him in the face with water. -via Boing Boing

Parents know that once children begin to read for pleasure, their reading skills improve, and so does their entire educational experience. One way to kick-start this process is to let students select their own books, and that's why the Scholastic Book Fair is always a time of celebration at elementary schools. Scholastic, which had sponsored book clubs for decades already, became the go-to publisher for book fairs in the early 1980s.  

Then as now, the events would normally be sponsored by parent-teacher associations or school librarians, and a division of labor was involved. Scholastic and the other companies would drive the books to the school, where volunteers would set up the provided displays, handle payment, and box up the unsold books. Then Scholastic would haul away the unused inventory. Books cost between 75 cents and $3.95, with the schools getting between 20 percent and 33 percent of the gross revenue. In the 1980s, a typical fair might collect $1500.

While the school faculty appreciated the revenue and the promotion of literacy, students were less interested in the economics than the shelves of books that flaunted their unbent spines and promised a break from required reading. In both the book fairs and catalogs, volumes about boy detective Encyclopedia Brown mingled with Garfield collections and Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling. Poster books of BMX bikes and joke books were in plentiful supply.

Read about Scholastic Book Fairs at Mental Floss.

A perfect rocket launch is a thing of beauty, but failures are much more entertaining! Since you learn from your mistakes, we are pretty sure YouTuber BPS.space has learned a lot from these many failures. -via Digg

DNA analysis of prehistoric bones tells us an awful lot about what went on before written records. The genetic profiles of people living in Ireland around 5,000 years ago reveal first-degree incest among the area's ruling elite.

An adult male, buried at Newgrange passage tomb, had DNA consistent with first-degree incest, meaning his parents were siblings or possibly parent and child. The authors of the new study, led by Daniel Bradley from Trinity College Dublin, say this individual was likely a member of the ruling social elite, who used incest as a political tool.

“I’d never seen anything like it. We all inherit two copies of the genome, one from our mother and one from our father,” said Lara Cassidy, also from Trinity and the first author of the paper, in a press release. “Well, this individual’s copies were extremely similar, a tell-tale sign of close inbreeding. In fact, our analyses allowed us to confirm that his parents were first-degree relatives.”

Of course, royal families have practiced incest in many places, to avoid sharing wealth or power with other families. The research at Newgrange also reveals an instance of Down's syndrome, clues about the beginnings of agriculture in Ireland, and a possible oral history connection that harks back to those times. Read about the study at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: L. M. Cassidy et al., 2020)

Singer Rick Astley posted a picture from his first tour in 1989 to reddit. Yes, Astley is a redditor, as has been since 2016. This simple picture went straight to the front page, and the comments rolled in. One from theMalleableDuck will touch your heart.
   


The thing is, that "backstage event" link that you assume is a cherished photo actually goes here. It appears that theMalleableDuck will go down in reddit history for rickrolling Rick Astley. Historical or hysterical? Why not both?

In the year 1515, no one in Europe had seen a rhinoceros since the Roman Empire withdrew a thousand years earlier. Well, maybe except for a few sailors and other world travelers. But that year King Manuel I of Portugal was given a gift of a rhino from a menagerie in India. While the privately-owned beast was seen by relatively few people in Portugal, it was the talk of Europe even before it arrived, and everyone wanted to know what a rhinoceros looked like.

Albrecht Dürer, a German painter and printmaker living in Nuremberg, was captivated by the strangeness of the animal. So he began to a prepare a pen sketch relying on the written description and the sketch made by an unknown artist. Dürer never saw the animal himself, but the woodcut he prepared became so famous that for two centuries it was the only rhinoceros Europeans ever saw.

But Dürer’s representation of the rhinoceros was not anatomically correct. He put armor like plates on the animal’s body, complete with rivets along the seams. He placed a small twisted horn on its back and gave the animal scaly legs. Despite its anatomical inaccuracies, Dürer's fanciful creation became so popular that three hundred years later, European illustrators continued to publish Dürer's woodcut, even after they had seen the real animal.

You have to admit it's a fascinating piece of art. Was Dürer trying to be artistic or as representational as he could? Read about the afterlife of Dürer's rhino and the real rhinoceros named Genda that inspired it at Amusing Planet.

The instructions sometimes warn us against doing something, but do not explain why. We all want to know why. What would happen if we did what we are specifically told not to do? Nick Wibert succumbed to the temptation so that you don't have to. -via Metafilter

Photographs released by NASA are in the public domain, because they are produced by a federal agency. The dozens of photographers that work for NASA therefore rarely get the credit they deserve for the work they do. That's why Maura White of the Johnson Space Center launched the agency's Photographer of the Year awards, now in its second year. This year, the work of around 70 photographers was judged by a panel of experts in order to acknowledge great work. There is apparently not just one photographer of the year, but winning photos in four categories, plus runners-up. The photo above is the winner in the "Places" category.   

Chris Gunn of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland took this shot of the center’s Space Systems Development and Integration Facility. The entire wall is made up of HEPA filters that remove particles smaller than a red blood cell. A thousand times cleaner than a hospital operating room, the facility is used to test high-value instruments like the James Webb Space Telescope’s Optical Assembly.

Gunn also won in the "Documentation" category. See the winners and runners-up at Air & Space magazine.

The Ku Klux Klan was born during Reconstruction, but by 1915, there was only one member left- William Joseph Simmons. He had trouble recruiting new members, so he hired professional fundraisers Mary Tyler and Edward Clarke. They managed to draw five million new members between 1920 and 1925 by expanding the organization's mission, because racism against Black Americans wasn't enough.

So Clarke and Tyler divided the country in eight regions and sent out 1,000 agents to identify the focus of bigotry and fear in their assigned areas: labor-union organizers and communists in the industrial north, Asians on the west coast, Jews and Catholics almost anywhere.

They began to expand the Klan’s mission, stirring hatred against these groups.

The two also tapped into Americans’ anger at accelerated social change. They wanted to channel the disapproval of the media that mocked tradition, the rebellious attitude of young people, the immodest behavior of women, and, of course, jazz.

Having relatively few adherents in cities, the Klan adopted several attitudes popular in rural areas. They helped enforce Prohibition and they denounced motion pictures.

Almost everywhere they found a public yearning for a golden past, where they remembered an America free of foreign influences. Millions were drawn to the Klan’s policy of “America for Americans” as well as its sometimes violent enforcement of fundamentalist Protestant values.

But it didn't last. While the Klan is still with us, membership fell rapidly after 1925. Read about the campaign to build the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s at the Saturday Evening Post. -via Damn Interesting

People are drawn to the rich, and many folks will bend over backwards to please them. If one is perceived as very wealthy, they will be offered free things, loans, and even forgiveness for crimes. Quite a few women have leveraged this perception to their advantage as they posed as heiresses, always waiting for their inheritance to come through, while living a glamorous life at others' expense. And often all it takes is a good story that people want to believe.

Violet Charlesworth made her money gambling a stolen fortune on the stock market. She grew up in Stafford, a town in the West Midlands, where her father worked as a mechanic. On a trip to nearby Derby, a city of silk mills, Violet Charlesworth launched herself as Miss Violet Gordon. It was 1905 and she was 21 years old. To a shopkeeper in the city, Violet explained that she was the goddaughter of the famed war hero General Charles George Gordon. Almost to her surprise, she managed to elicit a number of silk dresses on credit, including a cherry-red motor cloak, designed to be worn in open-top luxury cars. She made the trip to Derby more often.

After several afternoon teas with a patriotic widow, the story solidified: on her 25th birthday, Miss Gordon would inherit £100,000 from the general, who, after amassing a great fortune, had died rather grandly during the 1888 siege of Khartoum. Violet spoke with confidence, holding her teacup with a pinch. By the end, she convinced the widow to lend the dear general’s goddaughter her entire savings.

An article at affidavit tells the tales of several fake heiresses from the 19th century to 2019. -via Digg

Shrek 2 was a sequel that actually deserved to follow in the footsteps of the original. The 2004 movie was deeper than many viewers realized at the time, and still had plenty of fart jokes. What do Screen Junkies think of Shrek 2? Find out in this Honest Trailer made as part of their Summer Blockbuster series, where they look back at the biggest summer movies of past years. There won't be one for 2020, so we may as well wallow in nostalgia, if you can call 2004 nostalgic.

International marketing can be spectacularly profitable if done right. However, language and cultural differences must be smoothed out before a product is rolled out in a different country. This doesn't always happen, and sometimes there's a magnificently embarrassing screwup that people will talk about for years. Auto companies have been particularly egregious about this. But it's not always a matter of translating English to other languages. Sometimes it goes the other way.



To be fair, a lot of these mistranslation events are fairly old, but they continue to happen in the 21st century. How hard would it be to vet these things with a few native speakers before releasing an entire marketing campaign? See all 15 stories in a pictofacts post at Cracked.

In the Israeli town of Safed lies a historical cemetery containing the graves of Jewish holy men among the 40,000 burials. Safed became the center of Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism, several hundred years ago. The cemetery is undergoing some work: an effort to GPS-map the Hebrew epitaphs of Kaballah leaders from the 15th-17th centuries.   

With no money available to renovate it, the cemetery has been neglected for years. No one knew the number of the graves, and the records went missing decades ago. In the early 1990s the Safed municipality decided to renovate it by cleaning old graves and roads, building a staircase, and painting selected gravestones blue. When the excavations began, they were in for a shock: Under the paths leading to the famous graves were thousands of other graves, buried under the dirt because of the rains and the sediment flowing down the mountainside.

The renovation efforts expose a conundrum. Some believe the buried tombstones must be unearthed and documented for posterity. Since the inscribed markers are mostly limestone, that act in itself exposes them to weathering and destruction. The paint used in the 1990s identifies some graves, but also may have damaged them. Therefore, others believe this sacred burial site should be left as is so the dead can rest in peace. Read about Safed cemetery at Atlas Obscura. 

Someone took a train in Switzerland last October and deboarded quite a bit lighter. They left behind a package filled with gold bars worth more than $190,000! You'd have to be pretty oblivious to leave that much behind by accident -and then not go back for it it.  

Despite "extensive investigations," the owner of the high-value package had not been tracked down, officials said in a statement published in the local government Lucerne Canton gazette.

After authorities failed to track down the owner of the precious cargo, the gold bars, worth 182,000 Swiss francs ($191,000), were confiscated by the public prosecutors office.
Now, authorities have decided to publicize their quest to find the bounty's mysterious owner.  

While Switzerland is a banking mecca, it's not like this sort of thing happens every day. The owner of the gold bars must be either so rich that the loss was incidental to them, or more likely did not want the bars traced to some nefarious activity. Read more details of this curious lost-and-found at CNN. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Kotivalo)

Ze Frank gives us true facts about cats in a way that makes it clear that cats are weird. You knew that already, but this video goes into detail about cats' carnivorous tastes, amazing eyes, sensitive whiskers, and scratchy tongues. Of course, there are plenty of jokes along the way, as you'd expect from Ze Frank.