ours is a wild creation called seafoam salad. i thought this was a normal thing every family made and served for thanksgiving next to the turkey and the stuffing until i was 18. pic.twitter.com/xE7mQ8W99R

— maya kosoff (@mekosoff) November 23, 2019

Maya Kosoff asked Twitter users about their traditional family recipes that are always served at Thanksgiving. She particularly wanted to know about the weird ones that were served only because it was a tradition going way back. She got plenty of wild answers.

i read the recipe, thought “weird, but okay,” and THEN i got to “the creamy chocolate frosting”

— maya kosoff (@mekosoff) November 23, 2019

My Kentucky raised step-Grandma made these. I was 15 when I bit into one thinking it was banana dipped in cool whip..... foul

— ArmyWomanVet (@ArmyWomanVet) November 23, 2019

My dad liked it

— HOMODEMON (@jaymesPRS) November 23, 2019

The recipe for Bologna Cake is at YouTube. The entire Twitter thread is worth reading, if just for the many variations of "salad" made with Jell-o and marshmallows. -via Buzzfeed

A man in Port St. Lucie, Florida, got out of his car in a neighborhood cul-de-sac and left the engine running. He also left his Labrador retriever in the car. The dog somehow put the car into reverse gear and set it in motion, driving circles around the cul-de-sac. For an hour. The car finally hit a mailbox, which slowed it enough so that police could unlock it with a passcode. The dog, happy after his extended car ride, emerged wagging his tail. -via Gizmodo

Viktor Usov of Portland adopted his cat Sasha from the Oregon Humane Society about six years ago. One day Sasha went missing. After a week of searching, Usov assumed that Sasha had been killed by a coyote. That was in 2014. Then a few weeks ago, Usov got a call from an animal shelter that had found Sasha! They got Usov's phone number from Sasha's microchip. The animal shelter was in New Mexico. How did the cat end up 1300 miles from home?

“Cats are notorious for jumping U-Hauls, trains and cars. Somehow it hitched a ride and ended up here,” Murad Kirdar, a spokesman for the shelter, told the Sante Fe Reporter. “How [he] managed to survive to get here is the million dollar question. I can tell you [he] hasn’t missed a meal.”

Usov has his own theory.

“He went on a grand American adventure,” Usov told KGW. “He stopped by the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, he saw the monuments, all the national parks, definitely Redwood Forest.”

Read Sasha's story at Oregon Live. See a video of Sasha's trip home at Facebook. -via Mental Floss

(Image credit: Santa Fe Animal Shelter)

The infant character from the Disney+ series The Mandalorian doesn't yet have a name, but the internet has dubbed him/her/it Baby Yoda, and that tells you pretty much all you need to know. The meme has taken off, which means Parry Gripp (previously at Neatorama) had to sing a little song about Baby Yoda. The artwork is from Nathan Mazur. Here's his drawing process; click to the right for the video.

  -via Geeks Are Sexy

The title of this article made me laugh, because it brings up a picture of someone with trash on their floor trying to convince a roommate or visitor that it's the latest style in home decorating instead of an aversion to cleaning up. And it hits home to anyone who has ever insisted on a woodgrain or cobblestone motif in vinyl flooring because it's harder to see dirt on it. But a floor on display at the Profane Museum at the Vatican is a finely-crafted mosaic that once graced the home of a wealthy Roman. It displays animal bones and feet, shellfish, bits of salad, and other food scraps, as if they were dropped there.

Mosaics like this one formed the floors of triclinia, dining rooms in ancient Rome where party guests lounged on couches, picking at delicacies. This one was unearthed among the remains of a villa on Aventine Hill, and even now it emanates some of the atmosphere of one of those long, dim, boozy Roman banquets. The scraps of food cast long, erratic shadows in different directions, as if lit by the dancing flicker of oil lamps, and even the little mouse, nibbling on a nut in the corner, carries a white glimmer of reflected lamplight in its eye.

This motif is a surprisingly common one, enough so that it has its own name: asarotos oikos, or “unswept room” in Greek. Although Greek artists made the first “unswept room” mosaics, we have only later Roman copies, which were constructed during a craze for Greek culture. But why would an elite Roman go to such effort and expense to make their dining room floor look like it was covered in trash?

The obvious guess is camouflage, so when guests got inebriated and dropped their food, they could pretend it was supposed to look that way. But the real answers are more interesting, if less comical. Find out what those reasons were at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Livioandronico2013)

Let's turn back time, back to an era in which people used paper money for almost everything, offices and businesses had their own cats, and New York had several newspapers to fill twice every day. November 14, 1900, dawned as an ordinary day, until a scrawny stray cat wandered into the Louis Scharlach & Co. bank in order to take a warm nap. The bank already had a cat, a large cat named Isaac, who didn't appreciate an interloper in his territory.

Everything was peaceful until Isaac, described as “the well-fed office cat,” sensed the presence of the would-be cat burglar and started sniffing him out. It wasn’t long before Isaac found the intruder under the safe and began lashing out with his claws. According to The Sun, “Both animals were abusing each other in the worst language cats can command, and the fur on Isaac’s back was standing straight up.”

Bank clerk Max Lubiner made an amateur mistake by thinking he could also reach under the safe and grab the unwanted guest. When the cat sank his claws into Max’s hand, the clerk howled out in agony.

Several other clerks were able to coax out the cat using sticks, but that only made matters worse. Once the two felines were free from the metal safe, “there was the wildest kind of a time in the bank.” The cats went full at it, jumping on desks and scattering piles of paper money and coins that the clerks had been counting for customers.

But that was just the beginning of the mayhem. Bank customers thought there was a robbery in progress. People gathered outside just in case some cash flew out the windows. And the cops wanted to know what was going on. Read the story of the cat burglar and the feline bank guard whose fight made the papers at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

This is Bear. He's a good dog. Bear was abandoned as a puppy due to OCD, which in dogs is usually a sign that they need a job to do. And so Bear was trained as an animal tracker -for a good purpose. And now he's going out in areas of Australia ravaged by fire to seek out wildlife in need of help.

Bear, a Cattle Dog cross-breed, is trained to find both koalas and quolls, another small Australian marsupial, in the wild.

“This is the first year that we have been involved in the fires,” Romane Cristescu, his minder and ecologist at The University of the Sunshine Coast, told Reuters.

“It is a bit more dangerous than what we usually do.”

Bear, who usually looks for sick or injured wildlife for conservation and research purposes in calmer conditions, has been wearing protective socks on his paws to search through areas scorched by fire.

Bushfires have been raging in Queensland and New South Wales, destroying both wildlife and the habitats that sustain them. The fires have also killed four people and burned hundreds of homes.

This is Bear. He was abandoned as a puppy due to his OCD, but quickly found a new life as a koala detection dog. As wildfires devastate Australia’s east coast, Bear is doing his best to locate any injured or misplaced koalas. He’s their unexpected savior, and our thirteenth 15/10 pic.twitter.com/dWe8tWbEJo

— WeRateDogs® (@dog_rates) November 21, 2019

Read more about Bear and the bushfires at SBS News. Good luck, Bear! -via Metafilter

Ze Frank's True Facts series normally focuses on animals, but this time he takes a left turn to a fungus, specifically the stinkhorn mushroom. Why? Because footage of stinkhorns and mushrooms in general give him the opportunity for unlimited double entendres and horrifying grossness at the same time. While this video is technically safe for work, adults will understand his non-stop raunchy allusions. -via Laughing Squid

If you've dreamed about living in an underground bunker, or else are seriously committed to surviving the apocalypse, here's a deal that can take digging out of the equation! A twelve-acre real estate listing in Catalina, Arizona, hides a Titan missile complex beneath your feet. And it's only $395,000!

BOLD opportunity to own a decommissioned underground Titan II missile complex. This property was once one of the most top secret of government assets and is now ready to fulfill a new mission. That mission is for you to define amongst the limitless scenarios. Secure storage facility? Underground bunker? Remarkable residence - literally living down under? The property is situated on a 12 + acre parcel with boundless views. Private yet not too remote. Quick easy access to Tucson and just 20 minutes for supplies.

There are no utilities in place, but hey, it's Arizona, and 12 acres can accommodate a lot of solar panels. If you are wondering what you might do with such a facility, DeviantART member sickkids has some ideas, which you can enlarge here. A guy who bought a similar Titan missile silo did an AMA about it not long ago.  -via reddit

Archaeologists in Ecuador have excavated a burial site dating back to around 100 BC. The unearthed skeletons included the remains of two children, ages six months and 18 months at the time of death. Both had been fitted with helmets around their heads that were fashioned from skulls of slightly larger children. A report stated that the helmet craniums were "still fleshed" at the time of burial.  

This discovery was made at the Salango archaeological dig along the central coast of Ecuador in South America. A pair of burial mounds, dated to around 2,100 years old and belonging to the Guangala people, were excavated between 2014 and 2016. A total of 11 individuals were found buried in the mounds, the most extraordinary of which were two infants adorned with “helmets” or “mortuary headgear,” as termed by the researchers in the study, that were fashioned from the brain case, or cranial vault, of juveniles. Other bits of skull were placed around the heads of the dead infants, which was presumably done at the time of burial.

This is the first time skull helmets have been found, and scientists have no clue as to the meaning of the funerary ritual. Read more about the find at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Sara Juengst)

The Red Bull Formula 1 pit crew set a world record for the fastest pit stop three times this year, the last time at 1.82 seconds. When you've made it to this elite team, there's no limit to what you might be in for. In September, the crew was sent up in a Russian vomit comet to attempt a zero-gravity tire change. You can see a behind-the-scenes documentary about this marketing stunt here. -via reddit

When chocolate is first made, and then again when it is melted and reshaped, it needs to be tempered in order to retain its glossy structure and consistency. This means that the crystals are restructured in a precise way by controlled cooling.

Tempering in metallurgy refers to heating and cooling a metal, normally steel, to improve properties such as consistency, durability or hardness. The same is true for chocolate. [Bristol chocolatier Zara] Narracott passes me an untempered piece for tasting: it has a white coating and looks dry. Once in the mouth, it instantly crumbles rather than melts, but still tastes good. Next up is an extremely smooth and glossy-looking dark chocolate with a caramel centre. Biting into it gives a very satisfying crunch allowing the caramel to ooze out. Delicious.

Cocoa butter – the fat obtained from cocoa beans and mainly consisting of oleic, palmitic and stearic fatty acids – gives chocolate its physical structure. When tempering chocolate, it is the crystal structure of the cocoa butter that chocolatiers are manipulating. ‘Cocoa butter is a six-phase polymorphic crystal,’ explains chocolatier Richard Tango-Lowy, a physics graduate who now runs the Dancing Lion Chocolate shop in Manchester, US. The desirable crystal structure for chocolate is form V.

A dive into the crystallization of chocolate can help us understand why factories with their chemists and experienced chocolatiers produce a consistently better product than a home cook, but there are ways that anyone can learn to temper chocolate with practice. The science underneath the art of chocolate is explained at Chemistry World. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Blackcat)

Porter Wagoner was a huge country music star in the 1950s and '60s. He had a syndicated TV show called The Porter Wagoner Show. In 1967, he hired a "pretty little lady" from East Tennessee named Dolly Parton to be his sidekick for the show. They recorded a string of hit duets. Parton was grateful, but she was more than window dressing.

Appearing on The Porter Wagoner Show was Parton’s big break. But, after several years of working together, Wagoner and Parton’s relationship became acrimonious. Parton, whose star was rising, felt stifled by Wagoner’s terms. She first tried to bargain with her boss, suggesting she could stay and work for him if she could also make her own records, perform solo, and act independently. “I’m not trying to take anything from you or me,” she recalls telling him, as she talks to Abumrad about her and Wagoner’s complicated relationship. With some cooperation, they could both gain from her having more freedom as an artist. Wagoner, however, would not budge.

The struggle between Parton's ambitions and Wagoner's control festered for years. Parton wrote a song about her complicated feelings called "I Will Always Love You," which was a hit in three different decades. Read how Parton's tensions with Wagoner led to her biggest hit at Quartz. -via Digg

(Image credit: Moeller Talent, Inc.)

What do you do with 260 tons of turkey? Make frozen dinners! And so the TV dinner was created as the response to an emergency situation at Swanson. That was just the beginning. Cheddar has the full story.

Special Object 3003 Templewo is an abandoned Soviet military bunker buried under the woods in Poland. It once was a storage and assembly site for conventional and nuclear weapons, and has been empty and unused since 1992. But the ants who make it their home inadvertently play out an illustration of heaven and hell.

On top of a ventilation pipe that juts out from the mostly underground facility, there is big, mound-like nest of wood ants. It is a perfectly normal place for wood ants to live. They feast on the sweet honeydew secreted by aphids dwelling in nearby pine trees, and soak up the rays of post-Soviet sun.

But within the bunker, in a small room at the bottom of that shaft, there was a second colony of ants. These ants had no sun, no warmth, no light, and no honeydew. So they survived on the flesh of their fellow ants. Their colony was the wretched result of individuals falling from the healthier colony above, and with no way to climb out of the bunker, they could never return. It feels like a mirror-horror that could have come straight out of the mind of Jordan Peele, except that instead of a commentary on race and class in America, it’s a testament to one population’s sheer will to survive.

Scientists have known about the ants since 2013. The ants in colony two do not reproduce, but go about their ant lives as best as they can until they die and become food for others. There will always be more new ants that fall from above. But does it have to be this way? Read about the scheme to save the cannibal ants from their unnatural fate at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Stephan Wojciech)