Where would you guess that the world's highest concentration of servals lives? Not in the mountains, nor a wildlife refuge, nor a national park. It's inside the fences at the world's largest coal liquefaction plant in northwest South Africa. Among the industrial smokestacks and barbed wire, servals have found a home. The Sasol plant’s ecologist Daan Loock heard rumors of the cats twenty years ago, and began setting camera traps in 2010. Evidence of the reclusive cats was right there, and their numbers are growing.   

The population is “incredibly important,” explains Dr. Sam Williams (one of Loock’s co-authors on a paper about the conservation value of industrialized sites and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Venda) because it “demonstrates how carnivores can coexist with human activities at the extremes of what was thought possible.”

This might be the understatement of the year.  

The cats, which reside in grasslands and wetlands throughout sub-Saharan Africa, are about the same height and weight as a female whippet but they somehow manage to be slighter and more delicate — as their “near threatened” (in South Africa) status shows. Historically, the Highveld — the California-sized, high-altitude plateau where Secunda is located — was littered with wetlands. But mass agriculture (mainly maize and beef) has transformed the landscape and drastically reduced serval numbers.

Read how these cats adapted to the industrial facility at Ozy.

(Image credit: Daan Loock and Sam Williams)

The Ohio State Marching Band did Spongebob during their halftime show at Saturday's game. Yes, TBDBITL told an entire story with their formations. They called their episode "The Great Buckeye Chase." There's a tribute to the real Spongebob Squarepants episode "Band Geeks." The song you didn't get to hear is this one.

What city would you guess to be the halloween capital of the world? Salem, Massachusetts? Derry City, Ireland? Somewhere in Romania? Sleepy Hollow, New York? No, it's Anoka, Minnesota. The story of exactly how Anoka was first bestowed that title was lost when fire destroyed the original documents, but the declaration has been made again since then. There's no doubt that Anoka goes big for Halloween, with celebrations lasting the full month of October, and touches of Halloween available all year long. The origin of these celebrations goes back a full century.

It all began on November 1, 1919, the day after Halloween, when Anoka residents woke up to a prank of epic proportions at the hands of some of the local youth. As the sun rose, community members were greeted by wagons parked precariously on rooftops, overturned outhouses and cows roaming freely throughout downtown and inside the halls of the county jail. To prevent a similar debacle from happening the following year, civic leaders banded together to create a Halloween celebration that would not only prove entertaining for people of all ages, but would also curb any attempts at future hijinks.

“[Before the inaugural event], the pranks were getting bigger and bigger, with kids throwing chickens off of buildings,” says John Jost, who serves as chair of the celebration’s 100th anniversary, which will occur in 2020. “It had to stop. That was the purpose of the celebration, to divert pranksters and keep them busy.”

Anoka has embraced the holiday ever since. Check out the city's Halloween website. Read about Anoka and its Halloween obsession at Smithsonian.

Jen Yates of Cake Wrecks fame and her husband John decided to go with a Ghostbusters theme for their Halloween decorations. It started out with a simple shopping trip, but then turned into a project, which led to another project, and  before you know it, there's ghosts and Ghostbusters all over. Just a mere Slimer decoration wouldn't do, so they  ended up with the proton stream above.  

The proton pack itself (not pictured off to the right) is attached to an adjustable stand, and the wand is held in place with a steel bar. So to take a picture you just have to stand with your back to the pack and act like you're holding the wand. In the low light it will look like you're actually wearing the pack!

 We're still working out some safety details (tripping hazards, etc), but I *think* this is going to work, and I am SO DARN EXCITED.

The real magic is that proton stream, which John made by wrapping a red plastic tablecloth around white LED rope lighting. Then he taped blue EL wire haphazardly down the whole length for the crackly lightning effect.

Check out the doghouse.

But neither of those are the main subject of the blog post. That's a life-sized Stay Puft Marshmallow Man head that they sewed together for the roof. See all their Halloween projects (so far) at Epbot.

Above you see the first Western depiction of witches on broomsticks. It appeared in 1451 on the manuscript of the poem “Le Champion des Dames” by Martin Le Franc. At the time, the concept of witches was that of heresy and sin, women to be feared and even executed. And plenty of women were executed over the next couple of centuries. Medieval artists pictured witches as powerful and frightening. When they were attractive, it was in the context of tempting men to ruin. Then everything changed.

The biggest difference in representations of witches after 1750, according to Millar, is that people stopped believing in the magical creatures. Witch hunts had mostly stopped by the early 1700s. By 1750, all European countries besides Switzerland had decriminalized witchcraft. Depictions of witches from this era, said Millar, “don’t carry the same fear and repulsion as some of the much earlier images.”

That didn't mean the end of witch art. The depictions of witches just switched to fiction and fantasy, leaving the model of religious warnings against heresy behind, and opening up the subject to a wide variety of interpretations. Read about the history of the witch in art at Artsy. -via Everlasting Blort 

The duties of a medieval court jester were to entertain the king, his court, and any visitors the king wanted to amuse. He (or she) was also used to cheer the monarch up when he was down, to act as a confidant, and sometimes as a messenger. The term "jester" wasn't coined until later, so medieval court entertainers were often called fools or buffoons. But the "fool" had to be clever enough to walk the fine line between eliciting laughs and offending those with power over him. That was a line that the famous French jester Triboulet crossed when he served King Louis XII and Francis I.

Legend has it, whether truth or not is impossible to tell, this led to an exchange between himself and King Francis in which he told the king one of the members of the court had threatened to kill him. The King purportedly replied to this, “If he does, I will hang him a quarter of an hour afterward.” To which Triboulet supposedly quipped, “Ah, Sire, couldn’t you contrive to hang him a quarter of an hour previously?”

In another famed instance, he angered the King via making fun of the queen, whereupon his execution was ordered. However, legend has it that given his years of good service, he was given leave to choose the manner of his death. After thinking it over, Triboulet purportedly told the king “Good sire, for Saint Nitouche’s and Saint Pansard’s sake, patrons of insanity, I choose to die from old age.” This so amused the king that he just had Triboulet banished instead of killing him.

Learn a lot more of the ins and outs of life as a medieval court jester at Today I Found Out.

Cinder-Block is an arthritic 22-pound cat who was relinquished to Northshore Veterinary Hospital. She was previously named Cinder for her color, but the hospital staff thought Cinder-Block was more descriptive. They have put her on a regimen of diet and exercise. Here's her first exercise session on the underwater treadmill.



She approaches exercise in a manner that many of us can relate to. Veterinarian Brita Kiffney explains more.

Kiffney acknowledged that in the viral video, the water is too low to really be supporting Cinder-block; the plan is to raise the water gradually so that she becomes used to it. The veterinarian also said that she’s ordered Cinder-block a special harness for the workouts that should be more comfortable and supportive than the one she’s wearing in the clip.

While it’s important for cats to be at a healthy weight, Kiffney noted that it’s equally important that cats lose weight gradually, since cutting a cat’s food too drastically can lead to fatty liver disease and liver failure. She recommends that anyone whose cat needs to lose weight work with a vet to create a health plan.

The treadmill is not Cinder-Block's only exercise. She likes to play, as long as she can do it lying down! You can follow the process of turning Cinder-Block into Cinder-Ella at Facebook. -via The Daily Dot

(Image credit: Northshore Veterinary Hospital)

A couple of years ago, the company that owns Chuck E. Cheese announced that the pizza parlor's famous animatronics would be phased out and replaced with human entertainers. That process has yet to be completed, but as the robotic characters wear out, out they go. People who grew up in the 1980s have vivid memories of birthday parties and family time spent at Chuck E. Cheese. According to those who were there at the beginning, the arcade games were the main point of the business- after all, founder Nolan Bushnell's other business was Atari. The pizza was added to make it kid-friendly, and the animatronics came later. When people get nostalgic about childhood Chuck E. Cheese visits, it's the alternately funny and terrifying animatronics that stand out.

Gene Landrum, Chuck E. Cheese co-founder: Bushnell gave me the money and he gets so much of the credit, but let me tell you how it happened. May 17th, 1977, I opened the first Chuck E. Cheese in San Jose, California and when I was putting it together, I went to Disneyland to do some research — I’m a bit of a research nut, see, so I went to Disney. They had hundreds of games and you could also go to the park and see all these animatronics, like the Country Bear Jamboree, and of course, they had Mickey Mouse! So I said to myself, “I got it! They have Mickey Mouse, I can do Chuck E. Cheese, it’s sounds the same, see? Mick-ey-Mouse, Chuck-E.-Cheese.” So that’s where I got it from. And Nolan had a rat costume in his office, so it worked out.

I wanted to create a place where a kid could be a kid. So often when you take a kid to a restaurant the parents say, “Sit there, be quiet,” and the kid knows that this isn’t a place for them. So with Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theatre, I wanted to create a place where a kid could be a kid, so that’s where that came from.

Strangely, there is no explanation for the rat costume in Bushnell's office. What we do have is the story of Chuck E. Cheese and that of their rival Showbiz Pizza and the creepy characters found at both at Mel magazine.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Sam Howzit)

The three-bedroom apartment pictured above is for sale for approximately $940. Sounds like a bargain, and the only catch is that it's in Vorkuta, Russia, which has the distinction of being "the fourth largest city north of the Arctic Circle and the easternmost town in Europe." The name Vorkuta in the original language means "the abundance of bears." The town was founded as part of the Soviet Gulag system. The real estate listing is here. Read more about this bargain, including an exterior picture, at Boing Boing.

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Johnny Cheung Shun-yee sold his four parking spaces at The Center, a 73-story office tower. The final space was sold for HK$7.6 million (US$969,000). That works out to $7,205 per square foot in US dollars. The unnamed buyer is someone who has an office in the building.

You could buy over a thousand apartments in Vorkuta for the price of one parking space in Hong Kong.

Neatorama has posted about the wacky inventions developed to protect one from being buried alive. There's no evidence that any of them worked, or ever needed to, but there was a time when the fear of premature burial was understandable, because it happened occasionally. Newspapers.com has a list of six such stories, with links to the full newspaper accounts from as far back as 1729. Of course, just because something was printed in a newspaper doesn't make it factual, even more so in the 19th century. However, it does make them part of the historical record.  -via Strange Company

Blues guitarist Robert Johnson recorded only 29 songs in his life, then died in 1938 at the age of 27. His legend has only grown over time. The most famous story about Johnson is that he sold his soul to the devil at a crossroad in Mississippi, which gained him the talent to play guitar like no one else. That tale only arose years after he died, linked to the song “Cross Road Blues,” because a black man from Mississippi couldn't possibly have the talent or practiced enough to play like Johnson did. But that's not the only myth that persists about him.

Some decades later, a new yarn was spun—not about Johnson’s life, but his afterlife. No one seemed to know exactly where his mortal remains were buried, and the idea took hold that there were at least three possible gravesites. Though the actual mystery has been cleared up over the years, the myth rolls on. The New York Times boosted it in September 2019, the National Park Service still provides an outdated account, and the rumor continues to travel easily among tourists and blues pilgrims. It just seems to fit: Robert Johnson, that perfectly unknowable spirit of the blues, can’t find eternal rest.

However, plenty of people who knew Johnson knew the real story, and all it took was connecting the dots to locate his actual burial spot. Read about the myth and the reality of Robert Johnson's grave at Atlas Obscura.

Ten-year-old Anthony Alfano has a reputation to uphold. Anthony has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. His parents, Tony and Deanna Alfano, use their imaginations to make him shine on Halloween by coming up with amazing costumes that incorporate his wheels. For Halloween 2018, they made this elaborate wheelchair costume perfectly reproducing a scene from the movie Beetlejuice. It was another in a long line of clever costumes.

Continue reading for more of Anthony's Halloween wheelchair costumes, including this year's.

Carl Wilhelm Scheele was a German chemist born in 1742. He achieved a long string of scientific breakthroughs in his life, but rarely received any credit for his discoveries. Whether this was because of bad luck or some form of incompetence is a matter of opinion. There is no doubt that Scheele was brilliant, but each of his projects seemed to suffer from one grave misstep that prevented him from benefitting.

Scheele’s discovery of oxygen came three years before Joseph Priestley did, but he took six years to publish his findings. By then, Joseph Priestley had already published his experimental data and conclusions concerning oxygen. Before the gas was named “oxygen”, Scheele called it “fire air” because it seemed to support combustion. Scheele also found that air was a mixture of “fire air” and “foul air”, one of which was breathable and the other not.

Scheele went on to discover at least six more elements—barium, chlorine, molybdenum, manganese, nitrogen, and tungsten— for which he received no recognition. In the case of chlorine, Scheele thought it was an oxide obtained from hydrochloric acid, and called it ‘muriaticum’. It was some four decades later that Sir Humphrey Davy ascertained that muriaticum didn’t contain any oxygen and was in fact an element. Davy gave it the name chlorine. As for barium, Scheele knew it was an element but he was not able to isolate it. It was again Humphrey Davy who isolated the metal. The same with molybdenum. Scheele stated firmly that the mineral molybdena was unique and not an ore of lead. He proposed, correctly, that it contained a distinct new element and suggested the name molybdenum. However, it was Peter Jacob Hjelm who successfully isolated molybdenum and got the credit. Scheele’s run of poor luck continued with manganese, an element he identified but was not able to extract.

The one discovery that Scheele went down in history for was one that ended up inadvertently killing many people. Read the story of Carl Wilhelm Scheele and his many discoveries at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company

Quick, how many horror TV series can you think of? Probably not that many off the top of your head, but in today's lineup of hundreds of cable channels and streaming services, there are plenty running right now. There are also a few dating back as far as the mid-20th century that had decent runs on the Big Three networks and still haunt viewers' dreams, even if you need to be reminded of their existence first. And horror often has less to do with state-of-the-art effects than with its storytelling. In a ranked list at Rolling Stone, there's plenty of both old and new horror TV, a lot of it available for re-viewing or streaming if you choose, from The Outer Limits to The Walking Dead. You might argue with the ranking, but you'll also be tempted by something you haven't seen before.

(Image credit: Ryan Casey)

Manly men eat steak, barbecue, and bacon -just ask Ron Swanson. Women eat yogurt and salads to keep their weight down, but they have a weakness for chocolate. Stereotypes, for sure, but it hasn't always been that way. Up until at least the Civil War, there was no notion of gender-specific foods. Families or other groups ate the same dishes, even when men got first pick. Yale history professor Paul Freedman puts the beginning of the shift around 1870.

As more women spent time outside of the home, however, they were still expected to congregate in gender-specific places.

Chain restaurants geared toward women, such as Schrafft’s, proliferated. They created alcohol-free safe spaces for women to lunch without experiencing the rowdiness of workingmen’s cafés or free-lunch bars, where patrons could get a free midday meal as long as they bought a beer (or two or three).

It was during this period that the notion that some foods were more appropriate for women started to emerge. Magazines and newspaper advice columns identified fish and white meat with minimal sauce, as well as new products like packaged cottage cheese, as “female foods.” And of course, there were desserts and sweets, which women, supposedly, couldn’t resist.

You could see this shift reflected in old Schrafft’s menus: a list of light main courses, accompanied by elaborate desserts with ice cream, cake or whipped cream. Many menus featured more desserts than entrees.

The divide only accelerated as advertisers got involved. Over time, the clash between eating light to maintain her appearance and the obligation to satisfy a man's hearty appetite became a guilt-inducing conundrum for women that advertisers exploited mercilessly. Read up on the history of gendered food at The Conversation. -via Damn Interesting