Rhubarb is a plant that can pretty much grow anywhere, but it took centuries for people to figure out it was edible. The leaves are toxic and the stalks are sour, and it was considered a weed, thriving in places like Siberia. And it traveled.

Things started changing sometime in the 17th century when enterprising Britains realised that the fleshy stalks of the plant taste quite nice when dipped in sugar, which had recently begun to be imported to the country in mass quantities. Even with this knowledge, however, it would take another century for Britains to begin cultivating the plant for mass culinary purposes, at which point they realised that- holy crap rhubarb is basically the only thing that loves British weather.

Specifically, it’s noted that rhubarb thrives in cold, wet weather which, jokey stereotypes aside, is pretty much what the weather is like in Britain for several months of the year. In addition, it’s noted that rhubarb grows especially well in nitrogen rich soil which is also quite handily found in abundance in Britain.

It became rather popular in Britain. The farmers of what became known as the Yorkshire Rhubarb Triangle experimented and found that rhubarb can actually be a good thing to eat if you torture it enough. They subject it to frost, cover it with manure, and make it grow in the dark. You have to wonder what kind of experimentation led to such a discovery. Read the story of how the Yorkshire Rhubarb Triangle came about at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: Kellen)

What could the answer be ?
Help me Twitter pic.twitter.com/XyIqQB3fzg

— marty the bear 🐻 (@martythebear34) April 4, 2020

Here's a puzzle about a combination lock and several wrong combinations. Can you figure out the right combination just from the information given? Most people would look at it and say "no." Or more likely, "Are you kidding?" But if you give it a shot, it turns out to be easier than it looks. It just takes a little patience, going through the possibilities step-by-step. If you can't see it, the process of solving the puzzle is at Popular Mechanics. Oh yeah, the answer is there, too.  -via Digg

Remember Star Wars Uncut, The Empire Strikes Back Uncut, and Shrek Retold? Here's another group project that involves all kinds of people doing scenes separately to remake a whole movie. They took Back to the Future Part 2, cut it into 88 pieces, and let people all over recreate the scenes in their own style. But this time, it was done under quarantine, with only what was available at home. So it was a real challenge, and therefore even more Sweded. And since the explainer above was released, the rest of the movie has been finished. Here it is.



Read more about this project at the website. -via Metafilter

In 1926, Ernest Hemingway had a wife (his first, Hadley), a three-year-old son named Jack (who they called Bumby), and was having an affair with heiress Pauline Pfeiffer. Hadley knew about Pfeiffer and was quite upset at the betrayal. When Hadley took Bumby to visit Gerald and Sara Murphy (previously) on the French Riviera, Bumby was diagnosed with whooping cough. They were sent to a nearby house owned by F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to protect the Murphy's children. Hadley and Bumby were eventually joined by Pauline Pfeiffer and then by Hemingway.   

The idea of sharing a two-bedroom house with his mistress, an angry wife, a contagious, sick toddler, and a hovering nanny might have brought a lesser man to his knees, but Hemingway later described the setting as “a splendid place to write.”

The Murphys and the Fitzgeralds did what they could to keep up the morale at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer homestead. In the early evenings at cocktail hour, they would park their cars on the road in front of the house have a drink by the fence lining the small front yard. Hemingway, Hadley, and Pfeiffer held up their end of the party from the veranda.

They were indeed social distancing pioneers, and it gave the Fitzgeralds and Murphys front-row seats to the drama of the Hemingways’ unconventional new arrangement—their “domestic difficulties,” as Zelda put it. At the end of each evening, the group mounted their empty bottles upside down on the fence spikes. By the time the Hemingways and Pfeiffer left a few weeks later, these trophies ran the entire length of the fence.

Read the story of this strange arrangement during that strange summer at Town & Country magazine. -via Damn Interesting

Joel Sutherland got his wife and kids together and pulled out their old Simpsons Halloween costumes for a family project. They made a video re-enacting the opening of The Simpsons TV show! A few changes were necessary, as in there were no other participants besides the family, but they did a pretty good job. -via io9

Peru, Indiana, only has 11,000 people, but an inordinate number of them are circus performers or otherwise have the circus in their blood. The town is the home of the Circus Hall of Fame, a school for children who want to learn everything from putting up a tent to walking the high wires, and an annual right-day circus festival.

Peru got its first taste of the circus in 1884, when Civil War veteran and established livery owner Benjamin Wallace acquired a few rail cars worth of circus equipment and started his own show. It was called Wallace and Company’s Great World Menagerie, Grand International Mardi Gras, Highway Holiday Hidalgo and Alliance of Novelties. While the name wasn’t exactly catchy, the show proved successful. Wallace solidified his victory when he purchased the rights to the famous Hagenbeck Circus and rebranded as The Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. Each spring the tour began in Peru with a parade featuring the circus band and exotic animal menagerie.

Circus troupes and acts like Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show once lived like family at the Winter Quarters where Wallace kept his livery, just outside Peru along the Mississinewa River. Wallace built his village and painted every inch yellow, opening to his circus employees and animals in 1892. There were barns for the elephants and big cat standards, but also for ostriches, giraffes, camels, and even a hippo. There were equipment sheds, wagon shops, a clubhouse, and hospital. The community was quiet in the summer months, but every fall the railcars rolled in and circus migrants strode back through town toward the winter quarters to the tune of “Back Home Again in Indiana” streaming from the calliope.

More than a hundred years later, descendants of those circus performers live in Peru, and some of them carry on the family business. Other circus performers made their way to Peru over the years, and established lives among their kindred spirits. Read about the "Circus Capital of the World" at Atlas Obscura.

The guy from You Suck at Cooking (previously at Neatorma) shows us some culinary tips and tricks for preparing fresh fruits and vegetables. If you start to think this is a one-joke video, keep watching. Not only does he take vegetables apart, he sometimes puts them back together again. His leek actually leaks. And we find out why one asparagus is called a spear. -via Digg

One of the drawbacks of studying history in school is that the major events gets covered so often that they eventually seem boring. Later on in life, we realize that history is so much deeper and richer than we were ever taught. Kings and wars are important, but everything in our civilization has a story behind it, even things as mundane as eating utensils. The website Eating Utensils tells us the stories behind the evolution of table manners, with the stories behind forks, spoons, knives, chopsticks, skewers, toothpicks, and even drinking straws. Follow the links on each page to dive into a wormhole of information on various cutlery and the etiquette that grew up around them. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Cutlery 1)

It's a common story. You find the home of your dreams, but the real estate agent says the bathroom needs to be updated. Yeah, you find it a little weird, but that will have to wait because there are more important things than remodeling a bathroom due to its looks. Then you get used to it, and come to embrace the odd 1950s pastel fixtures or the 1970s neon walls. Or if you are renting, you have a landlord that doesn't see an upside to fixing what ain't broke. The bathroom is a great place to be a little weird, after all.  

Bonus for the above Pepto-Bismol loo: scroll up and down quickly to see the floor bounce. Thirty people have shared their odd and unusual bathrooms that sport delightfully different colors and styles in a list ranked by votes at Bored Panda.

The reason only female cats have calico markings, or almost always, have to do with genetics. The exact story of how those genes work is quite interesting. Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out tells us all about it. He also explains catnip.

We've seen different species produce hybrid offspring, like a horse and donkey producing a mule. Such crossbreeding usually occurs between species in the same genus. But life, uh, finds a way. The common black hawk (Buteogallus anthracinus) normally lives in Central or South America, but one found its way up to the Laguna de Santa Rosa Wetlands Complex in Sonoma County, California. She was all alone, and eventually tried to make friends, and mate, with the red-shouldered hawks (Buteo lineatus) that live there. The natives, being from a different genus, wouldn't have anything to do with her for years.

But, according to a new study published in the Journal of Raptor Research by Moore and Coulson, after years of unrequited courting, someone finally swiped right. In 2012, a bird watcher spotted what appeared to be a hybrid juvenile hawk following the common black hawk. In 2013 and 2014, the common black hawk was seen fraternizing with a red-shouldered hawk, and later on, the two were recorded mating and tending to a nest. In the spring of 2014, Moore spotted their hybrid nestling.

Like its mother, it had dark plumage on its back and was pretty big. But its head was round, its bill was shallowly hooked, and its jaw narrow; all features more like its father.

Read about the hawk hybrid and why it is so rare at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Stan Moore)

Quarantine, day 14. Me and my boyfriend spent the whole day setting up an art gallery for our gerbil. pic.twitter.com/kswEukLc7s

— A happier day (@AHappierDay) April 6, 2020

Pandoro and Tiramisù are lucky gerbils. They live in London with art lovers Filippo and Marianna, who recently took the time to build their gerbils a miniature art museum! Hyperallergic interviewed the couple about the project and their gerbils.  

H: Have they demonstrated a love of art before?

F&M: Not really, this was their first time in a museum. They much enjoyed the display and paid close attention to the quality of the gallery’s props. They can’t read so the sign to advise the visitors to not chew [on the furniture] went completely unnoticed. Overall, it seemed to be a satisfying and engaging experience.

Read the interview, and see more of Pandoro and Tiramisù, including a video of their museum tour, at Hyperallergic.

Remember back in 2016 when Queen Elizabeth wore a green suit and everyone used it to chroma-key in something new? Her majesty addressed the UK on Sunday, once again wearing green. That was the cue for bored people all over to give her a makeover via Photoshop.   

Someone used the Queen's dress as a green screen and edited what she wore 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/dpUSXrr4d9

— The Viral Group (@TheViralGroupUK) April 8, 2020

See a roundup of the many ways people have redecorated the queen at Geeks Are Sexy.

Philipp Klein Herrero was supposed to take his family on a freeride skiing trip, but had to cancel. At home, all he could think about was skiing, so he used his GoPro camera to make a little stop-motion video about it, which probably took as long a climbing up that mountain would have. -via Laughing Squid 

Some of the most memorable characters ever were isolationists, who took social distancing to the next level. That means they spent a lot of time alone, some on purpose, but most were merely victims of circumstance. Mel magazine looks into what caused them to be cloistered, how they dealt with loneliness, and whether any lessons were learned, in a list of ten movie and TV characters who spent a lot of time alone. Yeah, the title says ten, but there are more, because there's a bonus roundup of the many hermits of Star Wars.