Redditor pepelangelo posted this image of her costume and asked others to rate it. See a side-by-side comparison here. When people started taking a good look, they noticed a few details that made them rather appreciative of the effort. Notice the house slippers on her cheeks. The red hat is a bikini bottom. The headdress incorporates trash bags. This is the kind of thing that happens when you stay inside and look for something to do. Can you find other anomalies?  

The world's gone crazy, not enough over infecting each other, but over toilet paper. Funk Turkey wrote a little song about it, set to the tune of "War Pigs" by Black Sabbath.

I've been quarantined for a week and I'm running out of beanie weenies and Tang, but I made this song for you.

I did this because the "My Corona" suggestions were getting old.

Funk Turkey has plenty of other clever parody songs. He came to my attention recently with his song "The Jedi Went Down to Tattooine."

この子は社会に卒業式を上げられなかった挙句、家庭によって卒業式を上げることを規制されることがなくて良かった

— そるてぃ【定理】 (@salty_cube) March 14, 2020

The coronavirus epidemic has disrupted schools around the world. My two daughters are graduating from college, but will have no commencement ceremony. However, students at an elementary school in Japan have found a way to hold a graduation ceremony without people coming into contact with each other. Not only did they do it online, but in the game world of Minecraft!

The original post was made by Japanese Twitter user @backyennew showing the virtual graduation that his elementary-school son had put together with his friends.

What’s really impressive about this is that it wasn’t something set up by teachers or faculty, it was just something that the students decided to do for themselves!

After all, Minecraft is where a lot of those students get together anyway. See more on this story at SoraNews24. -via reddit

An accident at birth left this golden retriever with only one ear. Strangely, as Rae grew, the single ear migrated to the top of her head! That leaves her looking like a canine unicorn. Rae is only 12 weeks old now, so that might change. But she's already an internet star.



That's a good dog. You can see more of Rae at her Instagram page. -via Laughing Squid

The reviews are in, and the best potato chips are the ones you can't have -unless you are in prison. The brand called The Whole Shebang is made by a supplier to the correctional industry, and you won't find them at your local store.

One inmate told NBC News that “The Whole Shabangs are a ray of sunlight in the very cloudy and drab existence that is prison.”

A former inmate joked (one hopes!) on Facebook, saying “why did I have to go to jail to experience the best chips ever made???? Well…. back to jail it is.”

Another posted to Facebook that although she “won’t do time again” to get the chips, she hopes to find someone on the inside who can send her some: “[I’ll] find out who’s about to get out and send some money so they can bring me at least 10 bags of them. They are delicious.”

Even non-criminals swear by the snacks; according to the Lincoln (Nebraska) Journal-Star, “Nebraska Parole Board members have a standing request for the canteen to hold a couple of bags so they can buy them when they come to the center for hearings.”

Read more about these chips at Now I Know. -via Nag on the Lake

Since the invention of agriculture -and maybe even before- the cycles of nature and the potential of seeds have fascinated the human race. Knowing those cycles is of utmost importance in growing the food we need. Over time, many myths, legends, and superstitions have developed around seeds and the process of growing plants. For example:  

Of many legends relating to seeds, one stands out above all. The many-seeded pomegranate symbolizes life, death and fertility in many cultures. In Greek mythology it sealed the fate of Persephone, captured by Hades and imprisoned in his Underworld. As she mourned her daughter, Demeter, goddess of fertility, halted all growth. To save the planet Zeus, Persephone’s father, ordered her release but Hades tricked her into eating six pomegranate seeds, forcing her, by the power of the Fates, to remain in the Underworld for six months each year. So it came about that the earth has its seasons of growth in spring and summer and dormancy in autumn and winter.

In March, many of us develop spring fever, a strong urge to plant seeds and celebrate the return of the growing season. It's only natural. Feed that urge by perusing a collection of folklore about seeds at Folklore Thursday. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Forest & Kim Starr)

We get older every day, and eventually that fact can astonish you. The website You're Getting Old will spell it out for you. Just enter your birth date, and it will generate a report with all kinds of facts, such as the historical milestones of your life, how many miles you've traveled around the sun, how many people born on the same day are still alive, and even an estimate on how many times your heart has beaten. It's part of Pleated-Jean's roundup of useful websites to keep you busy while you're staying home and practicing social distancing. You might find something else there that's more your cup of tea, or at least less depressing. -via Metafilter

If you've been to a grocery store in the past couple of days, you've probably noticed they are starting to look like a going-out-of-business sale. Shelves are surprisingly empty, so for the foreseeable future, I will be putting shredded cheese on sandwiches and cooking whole wheat fettuccini. What you see now in stores are the things that no one really wants, even in an emergency situation.  

Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley reports that shoppers laid waste to the entire pasta aisle at a Whole Foods in Millburn, New Jersey, save for the chickpea-based options like Banza. The Amazon product page for Banza’s linguine notes, “Banza is bringing the sexy back to pasta.”

Chocolate hummus? Canned asparagus? Slate has a rundown of the orphaned products still on supermarket shelves. If any of these are your favorites, you might want to make a note to check the expiration dates the next time you stock up. -via Digg

(Image credit: Ben Mathis-Lilley)

'Why is it important to wash your hands ? pic.twitter.com/exz0Z3H5kd

— B@$$ 🛡 (@24onlinee) March 13, 2020

Why is it important to wash your hands? Because soap scares away pepper!

Kids love science experiments, and this is one anyone can do at home. It impresses kids, especially those who are too young to learn about surface tension. To them, it's magic. This teacher uses the trick to impress upon children the importance of washing their hands with soap (or detergent). You could go deeper and explain the hydrophilic and hydrophobic aspects of soap molecules, but that would be boring to children young enough to believe in magic. What's important is that they form of habit of washing those grimy hands. -via Fark

Hey! Uranus is sideways! While the other planets in our solar system rotate around an axis that is perpendicular, or just a bit tilted, from the orbital plane, Uranus goes whole hog and rotates around a horizontal axis. Why is the gas giant so contrary?

The leading hypothesis for this weirdness is that something large smacked into Uranus a long time ago, knocking it arse over teakettle. Although that scenario is not impossible, there are some pretty significant holes in this model.

Never fear, though. Astronomers at the University of Maryland have come up with a new scenario that neatly solves those issues. No, Uranus didn't get drunk on comet booze and fall over. But it could have been tilted sideways by a giant ring system.

"Wait a second," you are no doubt thinking, "Uranus doesn't have a giant ring system." And that's correct. Right now, it doesn't - its rings are faint and wispy things compared to Saturn's glorious spread.

But recent evidence from Cassini suggests rings could be temporary and short-lived - so it's possible Uranus had a much more extensive system sometime over its 4.5 billion-year past.

While this idea clears up some holes in the previous theory -that of an impact- it doesn't completely explain Uranus' tilt. However, if you combine the two celestial events, the ring system and the impact, it make more sense. Still, we have no proof either way. Read how rings around Uranus could have affected the planet's tilt, with an animation to help us understand, at Science Alert. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: NASA/Hubble)

Ze Frank introduces us to the wide, weird world of nudibranchs, the fashionistas of the sea. Or at least one the fashionistas of the sea. Nudibranchs are a kind of slug or snail, and they come in quite a variety of colorful, fanciful forms. They have also adapted to their environment in many astonishing ways, which Ze has a lot of fun with. "Because the ocean is weird."

Henry Cyril Paget, the fifth Marquess of Anglesey, was a 19th-century Welsh eccentric who was almost erased from history. While he was well-liked by the local population, his family downplayed or ignored his flamboyant lifestyle. As a young man, Paget inherited his father's wealth and the family estate, and proceeded to blow it all on lavish productions he staged at the theater he built in his home.   

He then hired a professional theatre company, and set about putting on pantomimes and plays for all to see - for free.

Playing centre stage in every performance was Paget, who became known as "The Dancing Marquess" by the newspaper gossip sheets.

He used every show to put on a "butterfly dance" display, adorned by costumes which would literally cost millions of pounds today.

"He didn't understand the concept of costume jewellery - he thought it all had to be real," explained actor and writer Seiriol Davies, who wrote and performed an acclaimed musical show based on the life of the marquess.

Indeed, when Paget wanted a green jacket, he had it encrusted with real emeralds. The lavish costumes were prone to theft, and were mostly sold to pay off debts after Paget's death in 1900. However, one diamond tiara from his collection is now up for auction. Read about the short but notorious life and spending habits of the Dancing Marquess at BBC News. -via Strange Company

Oh look at this cute little white finch riding a skateboard! But the description says it is a Java sparrow. Which I looked up, and it is a finch. Finches are adorable birds, with the cutest little voice. This one is well-trained, too, or else he is just having fun! (via Digg)

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of ancient religious texts discovered in a series of caves at Qumran beginning in 1947. While most of the scrolls are housed at a museum in Israel, some fragments have been circulating through private owners. Between 2009 and 2014, Steve Green, the president of Hobby Lobby, bought 16 fragments for the Museum of the Bible, which he founded. In 2016, doubts began to form about the fragments' authenticity, and an investigative team was consulted.  

In a report spanning more than 200 pages, a team of researchers led by art fraud investigator Colette Loll found that while the pieces are probably made of ancient leather, they were inked in modern times and modified to resemble real Dead Sea Scrolls. “These fragments were manipulated with the intent to deceive,” Loll says.

The new findings don’t cast doubt on the 100,000 real Dead Sea Scroll fragments, most of which lie in the Shrine of the Book, part of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. However, the report’s findings raise grave questions about the “post-2002” Dead Sea Scroll fragments, a group of some 70 snippets of biblical text that entered the antiquities market in the 2000s. Even before the new report, some scholars believed that most to all of the post-2002 fragments were modern fakes.

“Once one or two of the fragments were fake, you know all of them probably are, because they come from the same sources, and they look basically the same,” says Årstein Justnes, a researcher at Norway’s University of Agder whose Lying Pen of Scribes project tracks the post-2002 fragments.

National Geographic follows the investigators and the methods they used to determine the authenticity of the scroll fragments. It's a fascinating story. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Library of Congress)

It's been 75 years since Anne Frank died in a concentration camp. When her father found her diary after the war, he read it and realized he never really knew his daughter. The published version of her notebooks was not the entire diary. When I read it in elementary school, a blurb gave me the idea that some passages were excised because they were about sex. Later, it was revealed that Otto Frank deleted passages that were disrespectful of Anne's mother. But the editing and deletions were varied and changed over time.

Anne herself had begun editing large swathes of her diary with publication in mind after hearing a radio broadcast that called on Dutch people to preserve diaries and other war documents. Otto respected some of those editorial decisions, but overlooked others ­– for example, he included material about Anne’s crush on annexe dweller Peter van Pels.

Otto made his own cuts, too: he removed passages in which Anne was critical of her parents’ marriage, and expurgated sections about sexuality and her often brutal comments about friends, family members and acquaintances. In an early passage from the diary that Otto eliminated completely from the first editions, Anne describes her classmates as everything from “a detestable, sneaky, stuck-up, two-faced gossip” to “pretty boring.”

The unpublished passages that contained judgmental comments and musings about sex came to light in bits and pieces, and make Anne seem all the more relatable as a young girl trying to grow up in extraordinary circumstances. Read about how the full account is being gradually revealed at History Extra. -via Damn Interesting