I'm sorry, I don't have any dessert to offer you, how about a nice raw hamburger patty? Yeah, it looks straight out of the butcher shop, but they taste just like Rice Krispy treats- because that's what they are. Michel Devon cooked up this food illusion for Halloween, but there's no reason to restrict such a glorious prank to one day of the year! See the process of making these step-by-step in an imgur gallery. They may come in handy at Thanksgiving. -via Boing Boing

Dogs love to ride in a car. This dog may not be knowledgable about infrastructure and highway standards, but he is incredibly aware of where he is and what's going on outside. Every time the car passes under a bridge, he ducks his head! -via Laughing Squid

A while back, we told you how they were going to raise the 11foot8 bridge in Durham, North Carolina. Now we can watch Norfolk Southern and the NC Railroad Company doing it. How do you raise a railroad trestle? They are jacking it up with a dozen hydraulic jacks resting on top of trellises. Really. Just scooch the whole railroad up eight inches, slip some metal shims in the space between the plinths and the bridge, and then set it down. Next, they have to regrade and align the tracks for some distance from the bridge to make it usable to trains. They have some remarkably specialized machinery for those jobs. I guess we'll have to call the this 12foot4 bridge from now on. -via Boing Boing 

First off, we were supposed to learn as little children that you don't eat gum at all. You chew it, and eventually spit it out. But is chewing a 30-year-old piece of gum any safer than eating it? Brian VanHooker collects vintage baseball cards, which often came in a pack of gum. Baseball cards originated as a premium for buying another product, say, cigarettes, or gum for the kids. Eventually, the cards became more prized than the gum, and finally in 1991, Topps removed the gum from its packs of cards. Hooker usually threw away the gum from vintage packs he bought, but occasionally thought of biting into one.

I don’t really know why. While I fondly recall Big League Chew and Bubble Tape as some of the few bright spots in my embarrassingly bad, miserable days in Little League, I have no such regard for the gum I’d find in trading card packs. While I always ate it, I remember it being hard and brittle and the flavor never lasted nearly as long as I’d hoped. It’s like that shitty Bazooka bubble gum, only not as good. But for some reason, as I open up these trading card packs as a 33-year-old man, I’m tempted.

But first, he decided to contact some food safety experts about the idea. Read what he found out at Mel magazine. -via Damn Interesting

The month of November is here, and that bring three totally-foreseen changes to the internet. 1. You see a ton of great Halloween costumes that you cannot use, either as your own costume or for publishing, since Halloween is over, 2. Mariah Carey is singing that Christmas song non-stop, which will continue the rest of the year, and 3. the movie Blade Runner is no longer set in the future. Yes, as the intertitle told us, Blade Runner takes place in Los Angeles in November 2019. Back in 1982, when the movie was released, that may have seemed to be far in the future, but here we are.

Blade Runner depicts a November 2019 where mega-corporations rule the world with little resistance from the government and the institutions of civil society have been effectively crushed under their boot heels. Instead of scientific advances that benefit humanity, technological innovations in the world of Blade Runner are channeled into fantastical wastes of resources for the sole benefit of an ever-narrowing class of elites who consider themselves akin to living gods. And people themselves? In Blade Runner, human laborers are almost completely devalued, replaced by hostile, artificially engineered simulacra. This should all sound pretty familiar!

But still no flying cars. Or at least no flying cars that anyone can afford. And what about replicants? Tom McKay believes they already walk among us. See an example at Gizmodo.

There are three types of dingos in Australia: tropical, inland, and alpine, not including dogs that are a mix of dingos and domestic breeds. The alpine dingo is the rarest, and the most threatened. So it's quite surprising to find one in a backyard in Wandiligong, Victoria. The residents who found him just considered him a lost puppy.  

At the time the residents thought the animal may have been a fox or dog, but after looking after the animal for 24 hours they took the pup to the Alpine Animal Hospital.

"He was a puppy when he was brought to us, so about eight to ten weeks [of age]," Veterinarian Dr Bec Day said.

"He had a mark on his back [from what is believed to be an eagle's claws] and there were no other pups nearby. The resident hadn't heard any [other dingos] calling. So he was just a lonely little soul sitting in a backyard.

The pup was named Wandi, after the town, although he should have been named Lucky after surviving a kidnapping by eagle and then the drop to the ground. A DNA test shows that Wandi is a purebred alpine dingo, which makes him valuable to the Australian Dingo Foundation. Wandi has a new home at their sanctuary, where he gets to live among other dingos and will become part of their breeding program. Read Wandi's story at ABC.  -via Metafilter

The golden age of piracy was between 1650 and 1730, when plenty of sailing ships were at sea with valuable cargo to plunder. Most of the pirates listed were executed by gunshot, hanging, or beheading, although one drowned. What's really interesting is the varied stories of their lives, like this guy.

Stede Bonnet owned a large sugar plantation in Barbados. He was a wealthy, married man with children, but the lifestyle did not sit well for him and it was recorded that his marriage was rather loveless.

In 1717, Bonnet bought a 10-gun sloop, instead of stealing one like most pirates, and manned his ship. He had no experience at sea, but he was determined to become a pirate. Historians today joke that Bonnet was going through some sort of midlife crisis at this point, but some historians believe he was mentally unbalanced.

His crew did not respect him and eventually they abandoned him to join the crew on Blackbeard’s ship. Bonnet was allowed to remain on Blackbeard’s ship as a guest until he returned to piracy in July 1718. By September, Bonnet was arrested for piracy and transported to Charleston, South Carolina where he was hung at White Point Garden on December 10, 1718.

Read of the lives and deaths of nine other pirates at Strange Ago.  -via Strange Company

We eat chickens, ducks, pigeons, geese, and turkeys. But we don't eat swans. In fact, mention eating a swan and people will look at you like you've lost your mind. Swans aren't all that different from the birds we eat. In fact, once upon a time it was normal to cook and eat swan.

According to food historian Ivan Day, it has not always been frowned upon to eat our long-necked feathered friends. A harrowing recipe from the Victorian Handbook for Housewives recommended not only eating swan, but fattening up cygnets from birth to be consumed as teenagers. “This splendid dish, worthy of a prince's table, [is] a capital and magnificent Christmas dish,” the 1870 journal claims. The recipe suggests removing cygnets from their parents, fattening them up with grass and barley, then roasting them on a spit, garnished with turnips decoratively carved into tiny swans. A 1300 French cookbook, Le Viandier, includes a recipe for roast swan, while a 1685 cookbook used in 17th century England and colonial era America recommends a “swan pye” as a course in a festive banquet.

So why do people feel so strongly that eating swan is wrong today? That's a story that begins with historical facts and moves to feelings over time, which you can read at The Outline.   

(Image credit: Arpingstone)

Get ready for something truly ridiculous. Sean Patrick Daigle has a tradition of doing a couple's costume for Halloween every year. With his pug. This year, they tackled Beauty and the Beast. You may be really impressed by the setting, as I was. He explained that they went to the Driskill Hotel in Austin, and shot the whole thing in six minutes on an iPhone while security was busy trying to remove them from the premises. -via reddit

Shannon Downey is an embroiderer who checks estate sales in order to complete projects that others have started. Recently she found a massive unfinished project in the form of an embroidered patchwork quilt of all the United States. The center square was to be a map of the nation, and squares surrounding it were to be those of each state outline with the state's bird and flower. The quilt belonged to Rita Smith, who died at age 99 and left the plans and the quilt patches behind. Only two of the state patches had been completed, plus an embroidered map of the US in a frame- presumably a smaller prototype of the quilt. While Downey was glad to get the map and squares for $6, she is not a quilter, and the whole thing seemed to be too much. But when she posted it on Instagram, over a thousand people volunteered to help finish the quilt! The volunteers wanted to know more about Rita Smith.

Downey got insights into her life after making contact with Smith's son on Thursday.

"He lives in the area and told me his mother was born in Michigan and worked as a school nurse all her life. He said she loved to undertake big craft projects, some which would last for years.

"He was really excited to learn about the joy people were finding in completing his mother's work."

Downey mailed out the quilt squares, and when they're finished, a group of Chicago quilters will stitch them together. The plan is to donate the completed quilt to a quilting museum. Downey tells the whole story so far in a Twitter thread, and you can follow the quilt's progress through its own Instagram account.  -via Metafilter

From the #EasyFire in Simi Valley - this thoroughbred goes back into the blaze to get his family. Not all heroes wear capes... pic.twitter.com/BsU6PlBq8R

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) October 30, 2019

There are multiple wildfires ravaging California. The one called the Easy Fire struck Simi Valley Wednesday and burned more than 1,300 acres. There are many horse farms in that area, and local residents banded together to take the animals to safety or at least free them from corrals. Above you see the dramatic moment when one horse turned back to lead two others away from the danger. More than a hundred horses were taken to the Ventura County Fairgrounds to wait out the fire. See the extended news video sequence here. -via Nag on the Lake

Five-year-old Charlie had been following the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. For Halloween, her parents build her a Lunar Lander costume! Charlie's little sister, two-year-old Ellie, is an astronaut.

Charlie enters the costume by crawling underneath and there is a pair of shoulder straps that she uses to lift the entire costume.  The costume looks heavier than it is -- it's almost entirely made of foam and foamboard.  The front hatch magnetically closes and magnetically stays open, and doubles as a candy sample input port.  The ascent stage (top part) separates from the descent stage (bottom part with landing pads) as you'll see below.

You can see an image gallery of the lander and its construction at imgur. See a video of the trick-or-treaters in action. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: brandoj23)

You might think that the controversy over the disclosure that a house is haunted is a non-issue, since you don't believe in ghosts. But it's a real conundrum in the real estate business, because there are just enough believers to affect the resale value of such a home. It's not always about the lack of interested buyers. Strangely, the perceived value of a home may go up if it is thought to be haunted. Randall Bell is a real estate appraiser. In addition to judging the physical aspects of a house, he also has to account for its reputation, which can be affected if a murder has taken place on the property, or if previous residents have encountered ghosts.   

It seems likely that living in a house where someone was killed is not much of a draw for the vast majority of potential homebuyers. But a haunted house disclosure is not necessarily a dealbreaker. “For some people, that’s what they want,” says Bell. Sure, sometimes a haunting can be a turn-off, but it all depends on the market and, well, the ghosts. In the case of the Nyack home, the house’s famous paranormal and legal status has probably boosted its price. In the past, it’s sold for significantly more than comparable houses in the area; in 2019 it’s listed for substantially more, per square foot, than other houses in Nyack, though it’s also a very nice house that’s literally on the Hudson River.

In New Orleans, a city absolutely saturated with ghosts, some real estate brokers add an additional little sign to their “For Sale” placards. In other cities, this kind of sign might read “Newly Renovated” or “Price Drop,” but in New Orleans and a few other places, some say “Haunted” or “Not Haunted.” In a city with such a rich history of the supernatural, these haunted houses can sometimes demand a premium. Magnolia Mansion, among the most famous haunted houses in the city, was listed for nearly $5 million in 2016.

There are various laws about property disclosures, and some states even have laws about disclosing hauntings. Read about the business of buying and selling haunted houses at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Infrogmation of New Orleans)

People assume that once they are buried in a cemetery, they will remain buried there. That's not always so. When a piece of land that holds a graveyard is sold, the human remains must be moved before any new building is started. Sometimes a family -or community- wants to repatriate remains to their ancestral home, church, or even a new memorial. Sometimes there are questions about the identity or the circumstances of death. There are plans right now to exhume the bodies of John Dillinger and James Joyce, for different reasons, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco was exhumed just recently. In fact, disinterment happens more often than you might think.  

The very idea of disturbing the dead has been a source of angst and spooky entertainment for much of recorded history. True believers say the “curse of the pharaohs” is responsible for the premature deaths of several members of the team that cracked open King Tut’s tomb. In Mary Shelley’s classic horror novel Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein’s troubles begin when he imbues an assortment of stolen body parts with life. And zombies serve as metaphors for infection, racism, and climate change in books, movies, and TV. Dillinger’s relatives wanted to film the exhumation as part of a macabre History Channel documentary, which has since been scrapped. (The exhumation, however, is plowing ahead; it’s slated for New Year’s Eve.)

But digging up bones remains taboo, in part because many religions forbid the practice lest it disturb the afterlife. Certain Native American tribes believe moving a person’s remains can unsettle their spirit. Rabbis rarely approve the disinterment of Jews, with rare exceptions for things like reburial in Israel. Islam discourages opening, handling, or reusing graves until there are no traces of the original corpse left. And many Christians believe if someone’s body is disturbed or destroyed, they cannot be resurrected. (Even so, the Catholic Church announced it would “not oppose the exhumation of Franco.”)

Exhumations, however, continue across the globe. While no one knows how many are carried out globally each year, forensic experts extract DNA from human remains for criminal investigations, genealogical research, and identification of victims of war; and government agencies can relocate entire cemeteries to make space for a new skyscraper, bigger airports, or hydroelectric dams. And, as in the case of Jimi Hendrix, whose family members moved his remains from a humble grave to a grand memorial in 2002, the living move their dead to new plots, new cemeteries, even new cities.

But what do you find inside?

Vox explains how exhumation works, which varies depending on how long the body has been buried and on other factors that cannot be foreseen. While the article is not illustrated except for one title image, it may be disturbing. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: SNCH)

こども専用写真スタジオのカメラアシスタント #地味ハロウィン #DPZ pic.twitter.com/AI1WoPOYiq

— デイリーポータルZ (@dailyportalz) October 27, 2019

If you want to party on Halloween, but are too shy to dress up in an ostentatious costume, you might be ready for jimi halloween (地味ハロウィン), or “mundane Halloween.” It's a concept that took off in Japan in 2014 and has become an annual tradition. The idea is to come up with a clever yet everyday persona that won't cause people to stare at you on the way to the party. Yeah, they need a caption, which is why they are wearing name tags. At the top is "Camera assistant for children's photo studio." Below see "A man who is about to win Old Maid."

ババ抜きで勝ちが確定した人の仮装#地味ハロウィン pic.twitter.com/54pwx1IU4s

— 野田せいぞ (@nodanosei) October 27, 2019

Find out more about jimi Halloween at Spoon and Tamago, and see the growing number of pictures at Twitter. See if you can guess what the costume is supposed to be before you hit the "Translate Tweet" button. -via Boing Boing