47 years after she lost it in Maine, Debra McKenna is reunited with her late husband's class ring. But now, she's trying to figure out how it ended up in a forest in Finland. Listen to her speak with @caroloffcbc. Read more, here: https://t.co/jno1GDYHI9 pic.twitter.com/5HiIz7zR0T

— As It Happens (@cbcasithappens) February 18, 2020

When Debra Mckenna of Brunswick, Maine, was in high school, her boyfriend Shawn gave her his class ring before he headed off to college in 1973. She lost it soon afterward. But Shawn and Debra got married, had three children, and stayed together until Shawn died in 2017.

The ring was forgotten until last month when a sheet metal worker in Finland contacted the Morse High School Alumni Association. He wanted to locate the ring’s owner.

According to a Jan. 17 Finnish newspaper story, Marko Saarinen was using a metal detector in a forested city park in Kaarina, a small town in southwest Finland, when he found it.

With the school's name, year, and the owner's initials, it wasn't hard to pinpoint who the ring belonged to. McKenna got it back 47 years after it was lost! How the ring went from Maine to Finland remains a mystery. Read the whole story at the Bangor Daily News. -via Strange Company

The internet has given us glimpses of dogs, cats, and birds beating out a rhythm or offering melodic voices for years. German YouTuber Luksan Wunder remixed some of those viral videos into a virtual band for your listening pleasure. It goes into high gear once the husky starts singing. Pretty good for cats, dogs, and a duck! -via Laughing Squid

Ed Mis tells me this is what his house looked like when he woke up this morning. He says some of the ice has completely frozen over the top of his neighbor’s house and he’s worried about what will happen when it all melts. ⁦@WGRZ⁩ pic.twitter.com/XVrEomdslq

— Karys Belger (@KarysBelger) February 28, 2020

A winter storm along the coast of Lake Erie left homes at Hoover Beach in Hamburg, New York, encased in ice up to three feet thick! Waves up to 18 feet high sprayed freezing water over the neighborhood.

Homeowners on South shore Drive woke to the ice completely covering their doors and windows. In some cases, their homes were dark because of how thick the ice was.

Ed Mis, resident and homeowner in Hoover Beach, says he's never seen conditions this bad before. The front of his home is completely covered in ice that is likely one to three feet thick.

"I actually had to go out a secondary door and then chisel my way back into the house by breaking the ice," he told 2 On Your Side's Karys Belger.

The ice brought down trees and power lines, too. Officials said they cannot estimate the amount of damage until the ice melts. Read more at WTHR. -via Boing Boing

Is pineapple on a pizza a valid choice or an abomination? The "validity" of a pizza topping means different things to different people, so Mel magazine consulted fifteen experts: three Italian chefs, three food historians, three food writers and/or critics, three flavor chemists, and three Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Really. Many of those experts qualified their answers first by saying people should eat whatever they want on a pizza, and then went ahead to give their honest opinion. You can't get any more scientific than that. Find out what they said and how the scales of those opinions tipped at Mel magazine. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Janine)

A new musical remix from Pogo (Nick Bertke) gives us the pleasure of revisiting the 1993 movie Mrs. Doubfire and the genius that was Robin Williams. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Josef Stalin had high hopes for the census taken in the Soviet Union in 1937. Eleven years after the last census, it was sure to give him fodder to brag about the growing and prosperous empire he ruled.

But the results were opposite, and more in tune with the real issues of the Soviet society and the cost of Stalin’s leadership. The census revealed that only 7 million more citizens were added to the country, far less than the projected growth rate—the result of alarmingly high deaths caused by the famine of 1932-34, the World War and the almost ritualistic, politically-driven purges carried out by Stalin against any person and community he disagreed with. Stalin was also surprised when more than half of the population declared themselves to be religious. After a decade of anti-religious persecution, he had hoped that there would be more atheists.

So how did Stalin react? You guessed it- he arrested the census takers and statisticians, and executed some of them. But the failings of the 1937 census went far beyond unexpected results. Read about its poor planning and execution (ahem) and how Stalin changed things for the 1939 census at Amusing Planet.

This guy in Denmark emailed government representatives, embassies, consulates, UN offices, and tourism departments around the world and asked for a flag. My rule of thumb is to skip sharing any video that is more than ten minutes unless it is particularly interesting, and this one certainly made the cut. You will love seeing the responses he got and the swag he received, along with the many flags from all over. The moral of the story is, if you ask nicely, people are pretty cool. -via reddit

For a long time, archaeologists had the idea that the world's first cities were structured on the Mesopotamian model: centralized governments with powerful rulers supervising thousands of working class people and slaves. But more recent discoveries have unearthed large cities elsewhere that were more spread out and egalitarian. One of these is a settlement in Ukraine that dates back around 6,000 years, called Nebelivka after the present day village there.  

Over six years of fieldwork since 2009, the researchers have excavated and mapped Nebelivka structures located over more than a square kilometer. Aerial photos, satellite images and geomagnetic data, supplemented by excavations of 88 test pits, identified 1,445 residential houses and 24 communal structures dubbed assembly houses. Residential houses, some intact and most in ashes after having burned, were grouped into 153 neighborhoods, a majority containing three to seven houses. Neighborhoods, in turn, formed 14 quarters, each with one or more assembly houses situated in an open area.

During about 200 years of occupation, Nebelivka served as both a dwelling site and, oddly enough, a kind of cemetery for incinerated houses, Gaydarska says. About two-thirds of Nebelivka houses had been deliberately burned at different times, creating mounds of charred debris across the site. Sediment and pollen excavated in and around Nebelivka display no signs of wildfire, a clue that the houses were intentionally set aflame.

Why would this community deliberately burn down houses at different times? The experts have their various theories; my first thought was bedbugs. Experts disagree over whether Nebelivka was populated year-round or was a gathering spot for trade or protection. Read about Nebelivka and other ancient cities like it at ScienceNews. -via Metafilter  

(Image credit: Nebelivka Project/M. Nebbia)

Robert Bush set up a camera trap at a log that had fallen across a creek in Pennsylvania. This is  supercut of the different animals who used it as a bridge over a year. You'll see a bird abusing his fish dinner, a beaver contemplating the site's potential, a bear returning again and again, and a bobcat posing for the camera, among lots of other critters. -via reddit

Simon Rich brings us a short story about two pirates, Black Bones the Wicked and his first mate Rotten Pete the Scoundrel. They aren't quite Long John Silver or even Captain Jack Sparrow. They mutinied and took over the ship Delicious, intending to use her to find treasure all over the world. The ship's captain rued the day he hired these men as crew members.

In any case, we made him walk the plank, along with all his hoity-toity educated officers. And that’s when I took out me treasure map. I’d won it in a dice game against Blackjack the Crazy, and it gave us directions to all the buried gold in the known world. I nailed it to the mainmast, where every man could see it, and we all stood around it for a while, staring at it in the boiling midday sun. And after some time, I cleared me throat and said, “So, does anyone here be knowing how to read?” And there were some groans and cursing, and I realized maybe it had been a mistake to be killing all the educated officers.  

The real story starts when the pirates find they have a stowaway on the ship. You can read the whole thing at The New Yorker. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Faye Moorhouse)

The Riverview Cemetery in Trenton, New Jersey, features a unique gravestone designed around The Raven. Each stanza carries the same rhyme: door, implore, more, Lenore, and of course, nevermore. The tombstone, right beside that grave of a New Jersey governor, includes those rhymes   

This tombstone is a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, incorporating elements of the master of the macabre’s most famous poem, “The Raven.” Almost 140 years of weathering on the limestone tablet have made its features are difficult, but not impossible, to decipher. It’s definitely carved in the shape of a door, complete with a jamb, molding, knob and keyhole. The word “Nevermore” is almost undetectable, yet undeniably present across the top of the stone door’s frame. Above the stone once rested a sculpted bust of Pallas Athene (the Greek goddess of wisdom) with a raven perched atop her head (as described in Poe’s verse). It is plain to see the figure was indeed mounted there until fairly recently, but by talking to the superintendent, we learned that the statuette had been stolen in the late 1990s. We were also told that at one time the door even had a marble doorknob, but due to acid rain and deterioration, the knob broke off or withered away.

Though not at first visible to the naked eye, the name “Lenore” became more pronounced on the stone door’s nameplate after we gently rubbed away several years of growth and dark green moss.

One might think that the grave must belong to someone named Lenore, or maybe a close friend or relative of Edgar Allan Poe. Neither is true. Truman F. Betts, MD is buried there. Whether or not he was a fan of Poe or his poem, what we do know about Betts is pretty melancholy. Read about him and his poetic gravestone at Weird N.J. -via Strange Company

February 29th only comes around once every four years, so it's a pretty special day for some people. Those would be the people who were born on February 29th, and only have a real birthday date four times by the time they get their driver's license. But there are traditions celebrated the world over for this rare date. The most common is that February 29 is the one day that women can propose marriage to men.

Where did the tradition begin? Supposedly Ireland in the 5th century. Saint Brigid of Kildare, arguing that women were languishing away waiting for their shy beaux to pluck up the nerve to pop the question, asked Saint Patrick to give a day they might do the deed themselves. A little haggling was involved, with Saint Patrick first suggesting every seven years, but eventually the Leap Year was settled on. According to folklore, Saint Brigid then immediately proposed marriage to the Irish saint.

As the Irish nun would have been around nine or ten years old when St. Patrick died in 461 A.D, this story is a little dubious, but no less charming for it.

Yes, it's an outdated concept, but there are specific traditions centered around the idea, including fines levied against men who turned down such a proposal in various European countries. Read about those traditions, plus what they eat in Taiwan, what they drink in London, and what they publish in France on February 29, at Buzzfeed.

Many homes have some kind of work of art that consists of only a piece of pleasant text, like "Live, Laugh, Love." But look closer... this is not that at all.

When burying nuclear waste, scientists must consider the possibility that future civilizations may uncover it. A lot of thought went into how to warn those future people about the dangers, which you can read about in the previous Neatorama post Ray Cats, Artificial Moons and the Atomic Priesthood. For civilizations still able to read English, a report from Sandia Laboratories offered this suggestion:

   This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!

    Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

    This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

    What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

    The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

    The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

    The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

    The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

    The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

Is that ominous or what? Boy Toy Wonder made this decorative sign, or at least found it. Nuclear engineer Katie Mummah was excited to find it, since she thought she'd have to make her own. There are others almost like it, some you can even buy.  -via Boing Boing

Saba Juancho E Yrausquin Airport on the Caribbean island Saba has the world's shortest commercial runway, only 400 meters (1,312 ft). Only small prop planes are allowed to land there -no jets. So what's the worst that could happen? Swiss001 used a flight simulator to make some test runs on Saba, with results that range from surprisingly okay to disastrous, made quite amusing from his commentary and the fact that no one dies in a flight simulator. -via Digg

When an Icelandic fisherman fell into the close-to-freezing sea, three miles from the shore, he swam for six hours to safety. https://t.co/vr70DqEqUw

— BBC Future (@BBC_Future) February 27, 2020

There are many ways to die from very cold weather. Inadequate clothing can be a killer. Wet clothing can suck your body heat out, and when it dries, the evaporation also sucks heat out. Shock can disorient you and cause you to make mistakes. At high altitudes, the inability to exercise causes a lack of heat generation. And it's easy to get dehydrated, too. The BBC explains all those ways to die of cold and more, and then tells us about Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, who managed to survive everything nature threw at him when his fishing boat capsized off the coast of Heimaey, an island south of Iceland. He swam for six hours to get to shore.

It was here, in the early hours of March 12 1984, that 23-year-old Guðlaugur Friðþórsson stumbled towards salvation. His bare feet were bleeding from deep cuts caused by the volcanic rock hidden beneath the snow, his clothes soaked in seawater and frozen to his body. He should have already died several times over, but something deep inside Friðþórsson propelled him forwards.

The night was clear and cold. The air temperature was -2C (28F) but with strong winds it would have felt much colder. Despite the freezing temperatures, he paused at a bathtub filled with water left out for sheep for a brief respite. Punching through the centimetre-thick ice he began to gulp down water from the trough.

Friðþórsson's survival was a unique case, even at the time, as the four other fishermen on the boat didn't make it. Your mileage may vary. Read his story, and the dangers of hypothermia at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting