If you see a tiny building standing by itself, check the door. If there's a crescent moon cutout there, you know it's an outhouse. We all know that, just the way we know a barber shop has a striped pole and a pawn shop has three balls outside the door. But why a crescent moon? And how did that custom begin? There are a lot of explanations, some more plausible than others.

For example, in Outhouses, it’s claimed that “it’s a widely held historical view” that the crescent moon is a holdover from a time when illiteracy was rife. Supposedly before the adoption of the more familiar male and female bathroom symbols, it was common to use a crescent moon to denote that an outhouse was for women and a sun to denote that it was an outhouse for men. This supposedly being a nod to the fact that women have long being associated with the moon and men supposedly with the sun.

From here, opinion is divided on why the crescent moon rather than the sun caught on as the defacto symbol for an outhouse, with perhaps the most common explanation being that men’s outhouses fell into disrepair because men would just do their business in the great outdoors as God intended, without need of such an enclosure. Thus, only the women’s outhouses were left regularly used and the others went the way of the dodo.

As you might have guessed from the number of “supposedlies” in our previous paragraphs, there is absolutely no evidence supporting that being the origin of the crescent moon on outhouses. And, in fact, the evidence we do have seems to indicate that that hypothesis is about as accurate as the contents of that political chain-letter forwarded to you by your great-grandmother.

The true story behind the crescent moon on an outhouse will surprise no one who's had to live with an outhouse, nor anyone who has struggled to use a scroll saw. And besides answering that question, we get a bonus history of the act of "mooning," at Today I Found Out.

(Image credit: Javier Robles)

What if you just want one kernel of popcorn? Then all you need is a blowtorch and a hairdryer. This film by Zita Bernet and Rafael Sommerhalder, under the name CRICTOR, shows us how it's done. If you're interested in the physics, this is an example of the Coandă effect. The rest of us just think it's pretty neat. If you prefer to oil-fry your single kernel of popcorn, that will take a little longer. -via Metafilter

Counterculture lifestyles grow slowly, and are almost completely over by the time the general public becomes aware of them. The Beat Generation flourished in the 1950s, and was explained to the public in a 1959 spread about the beatniks of Venice Beach, California, in Life magazine.  

The Manhattan editors at “Life” could have saved themselves the trouble of flying a team of reporters and photographers clear across the country by simply hopping a subway car for Greenwich Village, the East Coast capital of beat culture. And their first stop may well have been a coffeehouse called Café Bizarre, which had opened in 1957 to cash in on the folk and poetry scene. By 1959, café owner Rick Allmen was hawking copies of a private-label LP titled “Assorted Madness,” which promised “Beat Erotica” on its cover and featured earnest poetry and desultory music by some of the café’s most infamous denizens.

One of those denizens was Rafio the Mad Monk, a.k.a. Walter Brooks, who preached his occasionally sacrilegious love poems to customers sharing a “Suffering Bastard Sundae” ($4.75, serves four) or tucking into a “Cannibal” sandwich (raw chopped steak and a raw egg on your choice of rye, white, or Russian pumpernickel for $1.50). A few of Rafio’s poems are featured on “Assorted Madness.” They are among the most listenable minutes on the otherwise forgettable album.

Take a trip back to Cafe Bizarre in its heyday, and meet the beats who ran it, at Collectors Weekly.  

The Volkwagen Beetle ceased production in 2019. Volkswagen USA produced an animated video tribute to say goodbye to the iconic car after an eventful 70 years. In the crowd watching the little bug drive its last mile, you may spot Kevin Bacon, Andy Warhol, and Andy Cohen. -via Laughing Squid

Beth Bays of Huddleston, Virginia, was asked to enter a hay bale art competition some years ago. It turned out to be so fun that she continued making hay bale sculptures each year, even after the competition was no more. It's become a local tradition to take one's family out to her farm to get a holiday photo with her annual creation. This year, she made a 15-foot-tall Willie Nelson!

Bays said Will-Hay Nelson was easier to assemble than some of her past sculptures but was more difficult in terms of details.

“The basic shape was easy and only took three bales to do,” Bays said. “However, there was a lot of detail work with sculpting the arms out of chicken wire and making the guitar from a huge piece of Styrofoam I came across a few years ago and saved in my barn. I also had to make a nose out of chicken wire because Willie has a very prominent nose and I wanted to get that right.”

She got it right, and Nelson even posted a link to the sculpture's video on Facebook, as you can see above. Read more about Bays and her hay sculptures at the News & Advance. -via Boing Boing

Size is relative, but at some scales, it's also irrelevant. This video is one of many we've seen that try to make the size of something we aren't familiar with, well, familiar, by scaling it to a size we can understand. That would be a scale of 670,000,000x, making an atom the size of a tennis ball. It gets weird from there.

But it also adds another dimension to the scales that make us seem either unique or random. Humanity hasn't been around that long on the cosmic time scale. We only exist in a world that has moderate temperature, gravity, and atmosphere, which is unique yet mediocre. And this video shows that we can only understand size within narrow parameters in which we and our world fit, while everything much smaller or much larger is beyond our ken. Could we be missing on other intelligent life because they are microscopic to us, or because we are microscopic to them? -via Digg

You can thank Arnold Schwarzenegger for bringing the Humvee to the civilian market. The big, tough military vehicle was perfect for a big man who could afford whatever vehicle he wanted. But what was the draw for the public? The Hummer was uncomfortable, difficult to manuever in traffic, drank gasoline like crazy, and was too expensive to take off-road. But General Motors had a marketing strategy.

The vehicle’s outlandishly masculine aesthetic made marketing rather simple for the company — all it had to do was prey on a man’s fear of being emasculated. The timing was particularly ripe for this marketing tactic: The word “metrosexual” had been coined in 1994, and the concept of a well-groomed, urbane man was cropping up in both brand campaigns and everyday conversation, threatening traditional masculinity.

“Perceiving the metrosexual as a mockery or threat to ‘real’ masculinity, some have tried to put the notion to rest,” Margaret Ervin writes in her essay “The Might of the Metrosexual,” published in the book Performing American Masculinities. “But the advent of the metrosexual heralds a very real change in the social construction of masculinity.” The creation of the label crumbled the long-held homogenic idea of masculinity as an innate way of being for straight American men. As Ervin went on to explain, the admission that men could choose to be cultured and manicured implicity meant that men were deciding to present as traditionally masculine — it wasn’t an inherent byproduct of having a Y chromosome and being heterosexual. “This marketed set of alternative identities for men — regular, badass, metrosexual — undermines the notion that masculinity is a natural, essential category,” Ervin writes.

In the wake of metrosexuality’s rise, men grasped for ways to prove their devotion to traditional masculinity. In ‘06, Hummer ran an advertisement that focused on a man buying tofu and vegetables at the grocery store. He notices that the man behind him is buying massive piles of meat, clocks a Hummer ad on the back cover of a magazine next to the cash register, and races to a Hummer dealership after completing his purchase. “Restore the balance” was the ad’s tagline, which had been changed from the original — “reclaim your masculinity” — following criticism. The Hummer succeeded by making itself look like the obvious choice for heterosexual men.

It worked- for a time. Read about the allure of the Hummer and what killed it at Vox. -via Digg

Intoxicating beverages exist in nature, thanks to fermentation. But somewhere along the way, people figured out how to help Mother Nature along, because alcohol was not only safer than unpurified water, but made a hard life seem a little easier. Learn more in this TED-Ed lesson from Rod Phillips.

This is the story of the military’s “guardian angels”—and the mission of a lifetime. https://t.co/w1JHSIOEAB

— Esquire (@esquire) December 29, 2019

When calamity strikes far from safety, who goes in for the rescue? Who takes care of the elite of the elite, such as the Navy Seals? That would be the PJs, who are trained in all the survival and combat skills of special operations units, plus emergency medical care.

A light by the ramp door turns red, and the airmen ready for departure. They are members of U.S. Air Force Pararescue—parajumpers, PJs for short—elite Special Operations soldiers whose name few know. Their mission entails rescuing personnel caught in ambushes, injured in IED explosion, trapped behind enemy lines. Trained to jump from planes and perform surgery aboard helicopters, they are the airmen who arrive when the Navy SEALS call 9-1-1. The seven PJs aboard the aircraft tonight, members of the 103rd Rescue Squadron, a unit of the New York Air National Guard's 106th Rescue Wing, represent one of the military’s few reserve Special Ops units. Many of these PJs have served together in Iraq, Afghanistan, and North Africa. When they are not deployed overseas, these PJs are back home, on call, offering emergency support to the maritime community and the U.S. Coast Guard in particularly challenging missions. Which is what these PJs, based out of Westhampton Beach, Long Island, are doing on this April night, 2017—nineteen hundred miles east of home.

Learn about the PJs as we follow one member through a daring mission to treat gravely injured crewmen from a ship too remote for any other rescue unit, at Esquire. -via Damn Interesting

On an episode of Antiques Roadshow in 2016, glass specialist Andy McConnell was inspecting a bottle dated to the 1840s. It was corked, and contained liquid, presumably some kind of wine.

Inserting a syringe in the bottle’s cork, McConnell tasted some of the “very brown” liquid and remarked: “I think it’s port – port or red wine... or it’s full of rusty old nails and that’s rust.”

Well, he was right about the rust. An analysis of the liquid has been completed since then. In a newer episode of the show, it was revealed that the bottle was a witches bottle, and contained a very small amount of alcohol, but also urine, brass pins, and one human hair. You can see the revealing clip at the Independent.  -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Antiques Roadshow)

There was no shortage of health and wellness movements at the turn of the 20th century. One of them was Ralstonism, a completely made-up set of rules for living that was promoted by by one Webster Edgerly, who also went by the name Everett Ralston. He walked on the balls of his feet and never in a straight line -all in the name of health. At one time, he had over 800,000 adherents.  

The Ralston Health Club had no formal location. It existed mostly in Ralston’s head, which also conjured a series of self-help titles such as Lessons in Artistic Deep Breathing and Sexual Magnetism. Written under the pen name Edmund Shaftesbury, these tomes were verbose and offered dubious advice, like picking up a marble from a table and swinging it around in order to increase one’s “personal magnetism,” or what Edgerly believed was a person’s energy and charisma. Young men were advised to bed women old enough to be their grandmothers and then marry women 20 years their junior. (Edgerly, already married once, married again at age 42 to an 18-year-old.) He also propagated a new language he called Adam-Man Tongue. He promised that continued study of this assorted wisdom might ultimately result in the power to control the thoughts and actions of others—or even achieve immortality.

There were other, more sinister beliefs associated with Ralstonism. Read about Edgerly, his health movement, and how it influenced the Ralston Purina company, at Mental Floss.

Halloween 2020 is a Saturday.
New Years and Christmas are a Friday.
4/20 is technically the entire month.
2 Friday the 13th, March and November.
July 4th is a Saturday.
Cinco de Mayo is on a (Taco) Tuesday

2020 about to be litty titty

— edisøn (@ed_omar1) November 1, 2019

You probably haven't thought much about what 2020 will bring outside of personal plans and the US presidential election. You may be surprised to learn all the oddities of the calendar coming. For example, February 2 is Super Bowl Sunday, but it's also Groundhog Day and Palindrome Day. The date will be 02/02/2020 no matter which side of the pond you are on. Other things to keep in mind:

For one thing, the two Friday the 13ths; the one in March is the day before Pi Day (3.14), and the one in November is exactly midway between Halloween and Thankgiving.

The Lunar New Year is Saturday, January 25th and begins the Chinese Horoscope Year of the Rat (or more specifically, the Year of the Metal Rat... as opposed to a ProgRock or HipHop Rat?)

The month of November is especially complicated. Daylight Savings Time ends at 2AM on November 1st, which is essentially Halloween night, so the Witching Hour gets an extra hour. The 1st is also the New York Marathon, so runners get an extra hour of sleep.

There are also come offbeat holidays and anniversaries of historical milestones to celebrate, as you can see in an extensive post at Metafilter.

World-renowned escape artist Harry Houdini was also famous for his hobby- unmasking fraudulent spiritualists and mediums. During a stay in Montana in 1920, he was approached about a local medium suspected of chicanery. Houdini attended a seance with the medium under an assumed name, and observed the methods that could be used to fake a spiritual presence. He found how a collaborator could enter the room under cover of darkness through a window. But that wasn't what made this seance so exciting.

When he returned to the seance, he found a scene of complete chaos. He learned that in his absence, the grocer had taken out a flashlight he had hidden in his pocket and shined it on the humanlike “phosphorescent glow.” Someone immediately knocked the flashlight from his hand, but it was too late. The “manifestation” had been recognized. A young woman threw her arms around the ghost, kissing him frantically and screaming “Marion, Marion! It’s you!” The panicked medium began hitting the girl with a blackjack while the “ghost” endeavored to break the girl’s hold, pleading, “Frances, let go of me; you’re smothering me, Frances.”

The show was definitely over.

“Frances” had attended the seance in a sincere effort to contact the departed. When the guests were asked to concentrate on a deceased loved one, she thought of her fiance, who had died less than a year before. The glowing figure emerged from the cabinet. When the grocer illuminated the “ghost,” Frances recognized it. It was her fiance, the man who was dead and gone, presumably forever. It was hard to say what gave the poor girl the bigger shock: when she thought she was seeing her beloved’s ghost, or when she realized he was quite alive, if not exactly well.

The explanation for Frances' lover's "return" was rather complicated, and hinged on some extraordinary coincidences. The defrauding of the Montana medium had little -actually nothing- to do with Houdini's presence, but because of Houdini's attendance, we now have the entire story to read at Strange Company.

You have a brand-new, clean calendar to hang on the wall for 2020. What are you going to write on it? First, you'll want to mark the celestial events of the year that you don't want to miss. Depending on where you are, or where you are willing to travel, you can take in two spectacular solar eclipses (one during a solstice) and four lunar eclipses in 2020. But what's a "real solstice appulse"?

Here’s something that’s not happened since the year 2000, and won’t happen again until 2040. On December 21, 2020—the exact date of the solstice—Saturn and Jupiter will appear incredibly close together (just 0.06º apart) right after sunset. Astronomer’s call this an “appulse”or a “great conjunction.” It will all be a matter of perspective; Jupiter and Saturn will actually be 733 million miles from each other, as well as being 887 million miles and 1620 million miles from Earth, respectively. However, from Earth, the giant gas planets will appear almost as one.

The schedule for stargazing in 2020 is at Forbes.

The fires in Australia continue to burn, driving animals from their homes, scorching the landscape, and covering major cities in smoke. Not only are the fires widespread, but powerful enough to create "pyrocumulonimbus" clouds, a thoroughly scary-sounding term.

Intense fires generate smoke, obviously. But their heat can also create a localized updraft powerful enough to create its own changes in the atmosphere above. As the heat and smoke rise, the cloud plume can cool off, generating a large, puffy cloud full of potential rain. The plume can also scatter embers and hot ash over a wider area.

Eventually, water droplets in the cloud condense, generating a downburst of rain — maybe. But the "front" between the calm air outside the fire zone and a pyrocumulonimbus storm cloud is so sharp that it also generates lightning — and that can start new fires.

Read more about the way fires can generate a snowball effect and make things much worse at Insider. -via Digg  

(Image credit: Bureau of Meteorology, Victoria)