In 1865, 17-year-old Mollie Fancher fell from a trolley in New York and was dragged behind by her scarf. She survived the accident, but spent the next 48 years in bed, until her death in 1916. Fancher became rather famous for the psychic abilities she developed in her invalid condition, and she reportedly gave up food and drink, saying she no longer needed it.  

Fancher slowly recovered from basically being declared dead by her physician, and claimed to experience a series of trances. She had lost her sight, but, placing her hands behind her, claimed to see through the back of her head. “I am sometimes conscious of what others are not,” she said, and explains how she stopped eating. “I rejected it. My doctor thought I was insane, but, as a matter of fact, I had never been more rational in my life.”

She claimed she could read, even without use of her eyes, and predict the future; she created beautiful tapestries despite the fact that her hands were paralysed. You can actually find one of her creations on display at a hotel in Lily Dale, New York’s “Village of Psychics”, a blossoming Spiritualist community during the time of Mollie Fancher’s notoriety.

Fancher was never put to a test about her fasting, nor about her psychic abilities. But she was only the most famous of the "fasting girls" of the Victorian era, and others who were put under medical supervision actually died of starvation. Were they frauds, victims of anorexia nervosa, or was it something else entirely? Read about Fancher and the other fasting girls at Messy Messy Chic.

In 1963, Helen Klaben and Ralph Flores crashed their plane into a mountain in Yukon territory. No one could find them in the snow-covered wilderness. They were lost for 49 days, but lived to tell the tale! -via Digg

Many stamp collectors love finding stamps from small, faraway nations to add to their collections. But there are only so many nations on earth. A serious philatelist might wrinkle their nose at a stamp from Molossia, Bumbunga, Tui-Tui, or Sealand, because these are micronations that have no real legitimacy. Molossia, for example, is a neighborhood in Dayton, Nevada. However, there are collectors who love these stamps for what they are.

Laura Steward, curator of public art at the University of Chicago, who organized an exhibition of stamps from micronations and other dubiously defined places, believes that these tiny squares are more than a toss-off: They’re art, proof of imagination, and rather sophisticated bids for public recognition. “A postage stamp is a small but mighty symbolic emissary from one particular nation to the rest of the world,” Steward writes in text accompanying the exhibit. “A functioning postal service, made visible in stamps, is an unmistakable expression of national legitimacy…. As a result, the postage stamp is an excellent vehicle for spurious, tenuous, or completely fictitious states to declare their existence.”

Steward even has stamps from Celestia, which is outer space. Read the story of those stamps and others in an interview with Steward at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Laura Steward)

The latest pictofacts article at Cracked gives us plenty to argue about. While most of the cooking tips are fairly good advice, some of them go on to explain the reasoning behind them, which vary from sensible to something totally made up for the show. And the comment section reminds us that people have very particular opinions on cooking.

This one requires more explanation. You should grate your own cheese for sauces instead of using packaged shredded cheese. The packaged stuff has extra ingredients to keep it from caking. The package I have contains potato starch, corn starch, dextrose, and something hard to spell, all to prevent the shreds from returning to solid form.

Maybe you'll learn something, or at least be ready to experiment, by reading all 26 pictofacts at Cracked.

The Academy Awards Ceremony is this coming Sunday. To get us ready, Screen Junkies gives the mini-Honest Trailer treatment to all nine nominees for Best Picture, with a glimpse at the movie itself, the hype surrounding it, and a punny alternate title for each one. Then there's a look at the trends and similarities among them. Only one of these nine films will win the Oscar, but it won't make a bit of difference for anyone who wasn't involved in making those movies.  

"He was way ahead of his time." Ashley Boone Jr. was the first black president of a major Hollywood studio and helped make George Lucas’ quirky space opera #StarWars a hit — and chances are you’ve never heard of him https://t.co/4XEo9pETgb

— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) February 6, 2020

Ashley Boone worked his way up the ladder at United Artists to become the head of overseas promotion. He was hired away by various studios until he found himself at Fox in the 1970s, working to promote movies that others had trouble believing in. Boone was innovative: it was his idea to resurrect the failed feature film The Rocky Horror Picture Show by staging midnight showings, and he was the first to open a film at many theaters nationwide on the same weekend. Then came Star Wars.

The film had to sell $32 million ($135 million today) worth of tickets for Fox to recoup its investment, though it secured only $1.5 million in guarantees from theaters. But Boone started thinking outside the box. The summer movie season had always begun in late June, after schools let out. Lucas and Boone argued for opening Star Wars a month earlier, around Memorial Day, on just a couple of screens in big cities, betting that it could attract young people who would spread word-of-mouth while they were still in school. John Krier, then president of Exhibitor Relations, would recall: "Ashley was an astute judge of pictures. He said Star Wars would do over $200 million before anyone had seen the picture."

On May 1, about three weeks before its release, a test audience was assembled in San Francisco, and Ladd, Boone and other Fox execs sat in the back row to monitor reactions. Boone Isaacs — who was working on another 1977 sci-fi film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind — also was there as Boone's guest and, 43 years later, recalls the crowd's reaction: "By the time that Millennium Falcon got across the screen, everybody was standing and screaming. I remember the guys — Laddie, Ashley and all of them — were kind of huddled together and hugging."

Star Wars debuted May 25 in 32 theaters nationwide. According to Pollock, "Boone gambled by opening it on a Wednesday rather than the weekend and began shows at 10 a.m. in New York and Los Angeles. By 8 a.m., when the theater doors opened, there were long lines in both cities."
 

Star Wars was only a part of Boone's legacy, as many other films owe their success to his marketing ideas. Yet today few people know his name. Read the story of Ashley Boone at The Hollywood Reporter. -via Digg

I would never be a good lip reader, because everything in this Bad Lip Reading compilation looks infinitely plausible to me, yet it's a string of pure nonsense. Good job!

You know what they say: time flies when you're having fun. Forty years ago should be ancient times, but it was only 1980. That was the year Mount St. Helens erupted. The year you could buy Apple stock for $22 (or if you had way more money, an Apple computer). The year that angelic child star McCaulay Culkin was born. Some of the things that arose in 1980 seem like they happened just yesterday, while others really do seem like ancient history. Take a nostalgic look back at 1980 and the things that will turn 40 years old in 2020 at Considerable.

(Image credit: ryan4637)

The way a cat stretches is so impressive that it inspired Pilates and a long-lived internet meme. In fact, the world is full of longcats!

(Image credit: Stuckurface)

How do they do that? My theory is that a feline spine is constructed like a Slinky. Made of rubber.

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See a collection of the 80 finest longcats found on the internet in a ranked list at Bored Panda.

When a famous person dies, there's a lot to consider for the funeral. For instance: should his wife or his girlfriend attend, or maybe both? Charles Dickens was fabulously famous when he died suddenly of a stroke in 1870. However, he had left explicit instructions for his funeral and burial, which was to be in one of the small, local cemeteries.

Buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner; that no public announcement be made of the time or place of my burial; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity.

But since those rites are carried out by the living, it was not to be. Dickens was interred at Westminster Abbey, in Poet's Corner, where Geoffrey Chaucer, Samuel Johnson, and other literary figures were buried. His grave was left open for three days afterward for the public to pay respects. These changes to Dickens' plans were ascribed to public demand, but that's not all there is to the story. You can read what happened to Dickens after his death at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: User:Jack1956)

Do you save your place in a book by setting it face down, or by inserting a bookmark? The difference between the two says something about how you regard and use books. Anne Fadiman labels those two approaches as "courtly love," as in those who respect the physical aspects of a book as well as the contents and would never cause their literature any harm, and "carnal love," meaning those who value the contents way more than the paper its printed on. People who feel carnal love toward books will fold a page down, allow the spine to crack, jot notes down in the margins, or even split a book in half in order to make the act of reading more efficient and enjoyable. Fadiman's brother explains why he leaves open books face down.   

“They are ready in an instant to let me pick them up,” he explains. “To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you’ve only pressed Pause.” I confess to marking my place promiscuously, sometimes splaying, sometimes committing the even more grievous sin of dog-earing the page. (Here I manage to be simultaneously abusive and compulsive: I turn down the upper corner for page-marking and the lower corner to identify passages I want to xerox for my commonplace book.)

All courtly lovers press Stop. My Aunt Carol—who will probably claim she’s no relation once she finds out how I treat my books—places reproductions of Audubon paintings horizontally to mark the exact paragraph where she left off. If the colored side is up, she was reading the left­hand page; if it’s down, the right-hand page. A college classmate of mine, a lawyer, uses his business cards, spurning his wife’s silver Tiffany bookmarks because they are a few microns too thick and might leave vestigial stigmata. Another classmate, an art historian, favors Paris Métro tickets or “those inkjet-printed credit card receipts—but only in books of art criticism whose pretentiousness I wish to desecrate with something really crass and financial. I would never use those in fiction or poetry, which really are sacred.”

Both types of readers love books, but differ in that one regards books as sacred objects to be cherished as well as read, while the other regards the paper manifestation as something to be used, even used up, to get all the good out of it. Read more about this dichotomy at Slate, and then tell us what you think in the following poll. Calling John Farrier! -via Digg

Adam Koford, also known as apelad, is well-known at Neatorama for his t-shirts and his erstwhile comic Laugh Out Loud Cats. In November, he Tweeted, "Still no word on whether or not they will let me take over Peanuts." The Tweet was accompanied by several comic strips that saw children discussing modern problems with the same cadence and attitude as Charles Schultz's classic comic strip. Now, the strip has been picked up for syndication. You can read Koford's comic Haircut Practice (apparently named for a throwaway line in the first strip) at Go Comics beginning here. See more of them at Instagram.   -via Metafilter

The older something is, the more rare it is, and therefore the more people will pay for it. Very old whiskey, particularly Scotch whisky, can fetch thousands of dollars a bottle from collectors and connoisseurs. But when there is money to be had, someone will try to cheat the system. Some of those very old bottles are not as old as they say they are, as science reveals.  

Nuclear bombs that were detonated decades ago spewed the radioactive isotope carbon-14 into the atmosphere; from there, the isotope was absorbed by plants and other living organisms, and began to decay after the organisms died. Traces of this excess carbon-14 can therefore be found in barley that was harvested and distilled to make whisky.

Carbon-14 decays at a known rate; by calculating the amount of the isotope in a given whisky batch, scientists can then determine if a bottle's contents were produced after the start of the nuclear age — and if that age matches the date written on the bottle's label.

Scientists tested bottles of whiskey dated from 1847 to 1978, and found about half of them were counterfeit. Read how they did that at LiveScience. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: ctj71081)

This really messed with my head for a few minutes before I realised pic.twitter.com/HiFaDG6DCy

— Lesley (@dancingfool75) February 3, 2020

Is this a tiny pig? or maybe a goat? Or maybe some kind of birth defect. Or a picture created by artificial intelligence -they can be pretty crazy, after all.  

If you are still confused, continue reading for a clue.

In case you missed it, there was a third Men in Black sequel released in 2019 that starred Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson instead Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Men in Black: International was supposed to be a summer blockbuster, but performed below expectations both at the box office and in critical reviews. Screen Junkies gives us this Honest Trailer to explain why.