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

The Eiffel Tower was the centerpiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the world's fair in Paris. Although originally slated to be demolished after 20 years, it still stands, 131 years later, recognizable to folks around the globe. Strange to think it could have been something completely different.

Gustave Eiffel’s Tower was just one of 300 to 700 submitted pitches (estimates vary) vying to be Paris’ world’s fair centerpiece.

Yet the spire that was ultimately erected on the Champ de Mars was an order of magnitude less audacious than one of the most peculiar also-rans: a 1,000-foot-tall guillotine that would have commemorated France’s headless-horseman history, when at least 17,000 people were guillotined during the Reign of Terror, including King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. Little is recorded of the ornamental, Godzilla-sized pillar with a blade — no contemporary illustrations, no manifesto behind its conception, no specs on the size of the cutting edge, only enough stray details to tease us with what might have been.

One can hardly imagine such a structure becoming a permanent part of the Paris skyline. The Eiffel Tower is just one of many iconic buildings that originated from world's fairs, and others were also in competition against some really strange alternatives. Read about the weirdest of those competitors at Ozy. -via Digg

Ben Sizemore was checking for invasive plants in the woods and spotted a camera trap aimed at a moss-covered log. Not one to pass up an opportunity, he posed in front of it and let the motion-sensor camera take a series of pictures. The owner of the camera, wildlife photographer Jeff Wirth, was completely delighted to find clear pictures of the most dangerous animal species: homo sapiens. Click on the right arrow to see the photo that Wirth was really trying for.  

After posting the pictures on Twitter and Instagram, Sizemore made himself known to Wirth. Read the full story and see more of Wirth's camera trap images at Bored Panda.

The YouTuber with the account name There I Ruined It did something you would never, ever think of. He did a bluegrass version of Michael Jackson's "Bad" and made it synch with the original video. As one commenter said, "This is both unforgivable, and amazing." The creator apologized in the YouTube description. -via reddit

The Weekly World News held a unique place in the supermarket tabloid display as the epitome of fake news. What it lacked in celebrities and color, it made up in sensationalism. The headlines were never believable, and rarely had much to do with the actual story, but they worked because they made you want to read more. For 28 years, the Weekly World News worked to outdo itself, because who doesn't want to know more about Bat Boy, aliens hobnobbing with politicians, and the still-alive Elvis? Strangely, but not surprisingly, the genesis of the tabloid was an attempt to make a buck off obsolete equipment.  

Generoso Pope Jr. could be considered the father of the modern supermarket tabloid newspaper. With the aid of a $25,000 down payment reportedly borrowed from the mob, Pope purchased The New York Evening Enquirer (which later became The National Enquirer) in 1952. The lurid paper specialized in tawdry headlines like “Starving Mom Eats Own Child” before softening its content to gain retail space at grocery stores in the 1970s.

When rival tabloid The Star went to a color format, Pope was forced to follow suit. That left him with an unused black-and-white printing press, which he saw as an opportunity to return to the bizarre news of the early Enquirer. In the summer of 1979, a small staff supervised by editor Phil Bunton, stationed inside the Enquirer offices in Lantana, Florida, began work on what would become Weekly World News.

Mental Floss spoke with more than a dozen former editors, managers, and writers to piece together the story of how the Weekly World News became the king of fake news, which you can read here.  

When you hear that a part of the coastline rises and falls twice a day, you surely think, "Yeah, that's the tides. The land is not falling, but the water is rising." And so that's what people thought of the rise and fall of the peninsula of Cornwall. But with precise modern measurements by GPS, we found that the land does indeed rise and fall in that area, in tune with the tides but not just in relation to where the waterline is. Tom Scott explains this anomaly.

The Japanese festival Tanabata is based on the story of Orihime and Hikoboshi, literal star-crossed lovers who are separated across the Milky Way and can only see each other on the seventh day of the seventh month each year. It is celebrated at different times in July and August in different cities of Japan. The biggest festival, in Sendai, was cancelled this year, but while gatherings didn't happen, confectioners in Japan made seasonal treats anyway.

近江屋の上生菓子【天の川】
錦玉制
レモン果汁入り
天の川を手の平に表現するイメージで作りました^o^
星雲を表すために色々と工夫しております！
まずは目で小さな天の川を堪能して
最後は口の中でほんのりレモン味の織姫、彦星の恋愛模様をご堪能下さい。#天の川 #和菓子 #近江屋 pic.twitter.com/HewLdp22R7

— 菓舗 近江屋 (@oumiya_toyota) June 30, 2020

The sweet shop Ōmiya in Toyota produced Tanabata-themed wagashi representing the Milky Way itself!

Done in kingyoku style and flavored with lemon juice, we created a rendition of the Milky Way that can fit into the cusp of your palm! We used multiple colors to imitate the heavenly clouds. First, be sure to enjoy the gorgeous colors with your eyes, and then lastly, enjoy the subtle taste of lemon representing Orihime and Hikoboshi’s bittersweet love with your mouth.”

The transparent sweets are made of agar colored to resemble the heavens, with flecks of gold for the stars. We don't know whether the flecks are actual edible gold, but they sure look nice! Read more about Tanabata and see more artistic treats made for the festival at SoraNews24.  -via Everlasting Blort

We've seen version of the classic plague doctor's mask, shaped like a bird's beak and filled with aromatics to prevent inhaling the deadly miasma. While those did exist during the 17th century, they weren't universal. They were kind of expensive, so doctors and others who were charged with treating plague victims were more likely to wear something akin to what you see above, which resembles a cross between modern medical hazmat suits and Ku Klux Klan robes.  

The sleeves on this get-up are tight to the wrist like modern protective gear, which fits the admonition above to not wear fancy sleeves (Ruisinger questions the 1656 engraving on this basis; the man has voluminous sleeves and may not even be wearing gloves. To this I would suggest that views on miasma were a matter of opinion, not science). The most interesting aspect for me is that the hood has a long bib at the front; a feature shared with two of the Italian beaked masks that I featured in my other article. Perhaps those were the ‘Gucci’ option, or just an alternative view on what would work best?

Read more about the features and variety of the PPE of centuries past at the BS Historian. -via Strange Company

The Batwoman (La mujer murcielago) is a 1968 Mexican superhero wrestling film that harnesses a gender-swapped DC character we all know. Batwoman wears full tights while wrestling, but fights crime in a bikini. If this idea intrigues you, get this- she is fighting mad scientists who are kidnapping wrestlers in order to create a sea monster. It's all explained in another video on the next page.  

“I’ve been keeping bees since 1976, and this is the first time I’ve seen anything like it” https://t.co/5r5cHvfq3t

— National Geographic (@NatGeo) August 7, 2020

Beekeeper Joseph Zgurzynski found a very odd bee with big yellow eyes a couple of months ago. Photographer Annie O’Neill was there to document the bee, which showed features of both male and female bees. Scientists who studied the pictures determined this bee shows mosaic gynandromorphism, meaning it has both male DNA and female DNA throughout its body. How does that happen? You probably know a bit about genetics, reproduction, and mutations in humans and other mammals, but you can throw all that out the window when it comes to honeybees. Entomologist Natalie Boyle of Pennsylvania State University explains.

When a queen and a drone mate, their fertilized eggs only ever generate female bees. That’s because males are created from unfertilized eggs, which means they only have one set of chromosomes—those of the queen. As a result, male bees have no fathers or sons, but they do have grandfathers and grandsons.

“If you think about it for too long, you just wind up in a little bit of a mind pretzel,” says Boyle.

While the development of this particular bee has not yet been determined, there are some possibilities you can read about at National Geographic. -via Damn Interesting

The popular image where you can see either a bunny or a duck is nothing new. This carved illusion is 900 years old! You see two animals, but does the head in front belong to a bull or to an elephant? It was carved into the Airavatesvara Temple in Darasuram, Tamil Nadu, India. The UNESCO World Heritage Site is dedicated to Shiva, but it features relief sculptures of many Hindu gods. -via reddit

(Image credit: KARTY JazZ)