Previously Unpublished Photo, By L7′s Jennifer Finch: Kurt Cobain & Krist Novoselic At An L7 Record Release Party. pic.twitter.com/81aZFKr2dq

— Nirvana (@NirvanaFan1994) April 26, 2017

In 1991, a young band from Seattle named Nirvana released an album called Nevermind. DGC Records had high hopes for the album and threw a release party at a club called Re-Bar on Friday the 13th. From the perspective of 2019, you can imagine that the invitations were coveted and the party was a wild night. And you'd be right, but there was more to it.

The first signal that things at Nirvana’s record release party for Nevermind might get out of hand was it was a strictly “beer only” event. To remedy this, Kurt Cobain’s pal Dylan Carlson of the band Earth snuck in a huge bottle of whiskey (allegedly Jim Beam) served it up covertly in a photo booth inside the infamous Seattle entertainment mecca/gay-friendly watering hole, Re-bar. Smuggling booze into a bar is a thing thrifty drunks do, but you also might be asking yourself why did it have to be smuggled into a bar hosting a party full of industry types from Geffen Records, local label Sub Pop and thirsty musicians? To explain this, we have to consider Seattle’s long, complicated history with hard liquor. Prior to the 1970s, it was illegal for people to drink whilst standing up, and women were not permitted to sit on bar stools.

Even in 1991, the liquor laws were quite strange, including one against serving liquor where food was served. Did the local legislators fear that a food fight might break out? Um, that's exactly what happened. Read about the Nevermind release party at Dangerous Minds.

Some things do not mesh well, like strong winds and substantial eyelashes. As far as I can tell, this woman took a selfie in Lagos, Nigeria, where flooding is in progress. Meaning, she didn't expect to be evacuated by boat when she left for work that morning. My guess is that she felt the chaos on her face and pulled out her phone to see what was happening. What we know for sure is that she had the sense of humor to post it to social media. What everyone wants to know is what kind of eyelash glue she uses. -via reddit 

Before the Industrial Revolution, British shipbuilders depended on wood imported from Baltic nations, which was expensive. Meanwhile, Britain had a colony across the Atlantic that had almost unlimited timber. The problem was that American wood had to be shipped a relatively far distance, which raised its price. The solution would seem to be to establish a ship building industry in America, but that didn't happen, and the American Revolution eventually made the concept moot. Britain tried to regulate timber imports with various tariffs, complicated by several wars.  

In the midst of this frenzied activity, two Glasgow shipbuilders, Charles and John Wood, in search for quick profit, devised a technique to import large quantities of timber. Their plan involved building a huge vessel, many times larger than the largest vessel in operation, which was to be packed to capacity with timer and sailed across the Atlantic. On arrival, the huge cargo was to be unloaded and the vessel itself dismantled and the timbers sold. That way the importers could reap big profit, first from the sale of the large cargo, and second, by evading the duty on timber of the vessel itself.

In 1824, Charles Wood left for Quebec to supervise the construction of the first disposable ship, Columbus. In size, she was immense—300 feet long, 50 feet wide and 22 feet tall. She weighted an astounding 3,690 tons, more than ten times the tonnage of the average vessel operating in the timber trade. The ship was built as cheaply as possible. The hull was made from thick pieces of undressed, squared timber which was not caulked at the seams so that she could be taken apart easily without damaging the timber. The bottom was wider than the deck, and the vessel looked ungainly and crude. In the words of a Times correspondent, “the Columbus was an immense mass of timber knocked together for the purpose of commerce, without any regard to beauty and little attention to the principle of naval architecture.”

Okay, so a shipbuilder built a ship badly in Quebec in order to ship wood to Britain to make good ships. Gotcha. Surprisingly, the Columbus made it to Glasgow, which proved such a scheme could work. However, subsequent events spelled doom for the era of disposable ships. Read the rest of the story at Amusing Planet. -via Damn Interesting

Shay Bradley passed away at his home in Dublin, Ireland, last week after a long illness. He recorded a message to be played at his funeral service, specifically at the graveside. Although it is quite touching, be aware that it contains NSFW language.

Your Dad is a legend. May he RIP

— Niall Collins (@Sloosh14) October 13, 2019

You know what they say... leave 'em laughing. -via reddit

Quebec City was the place to be this past weekend, as the annual Quebec Comiccon welcomed comic book fans, cosplayers, and various fun-loving folks from all over. Our friends at Geeks Are Sexy were there to take it all in and take some pictures of the best cosplayers.

Check out a gallery of con pictures here, and part two here!

Here's a quiz that will separate the Europeans from everyone else! In this quiz, you'll be given an unlabeled map of Europe. Just type in names of cities in any of those countries. Once you get started, you'll be given a unique URL you can bookmark or copy and come back to. So far, I've named 42 cities in about ten minutes without looking any up. You may be surprised at how small a town the quiz will accept- it took Sochi, for example. If it starts to frustrate you, you can try the US version instead (where I named 150 in no time flat). -via Metafilter

Many of the menu items in Chinese restaurants in the USA are recipes that are rarely -if ever- seen in China, because they are the result of adaptations and totally invented dishes made to appeal to American tastes. Knowing that, you will be forgiven if you thought that the ubiquitous fortune cookies that are served with the bill are an American invention. That's not so. But you may be surprised to learn that they aren't from China, either. Baker Takeshi Matsuhisa tells us more.

Fortune cookies—that sweet treat served with a side of pithy wisdom—are such a staple in Chinese-American restaurants that many diners are surprised to learn they are not from China. Often described as an invention of immigrants in California, they can in fact be traced back to Japan, where bakers such as Matsuhisa still make the original version, known as tsujiura senbei or omikuji senbei. “These have been around since the Edo period,” Matsuhisa says.

Read the history of fortune cookies in both Japan and America at Atlas Obscura.

(Top image credit: Selena Hoy)

A hundred years ago, those suffering from juvenile diabetes only had one treatment for the disease: a restricted diet. So restricted that a child could starve to death- it was actually called the starvation diet. Both the disease and the treatment were eventually fatal. The breakthrough in treatment was quite sudden.

In 1922 scientists Frederick Banting (November 14, 1891 – February 21, 1941) and Charles Best (February 27, 1899 – March 31, 1978) arrived at a hospital ward for diabetic children, most of them comatose and dying from diabetic keto-acidosis. This is known as one of medicine’s most incredible moments. Imagine a room full of parents sitting at the bedside waiting for the inevitable death of their child.

The scientists went from bed to bed and injected the children with the new purified extract – insulin. As they began to inject the last comatose child, the first child injected began to awaken. Then one by one, all the children awoke from their diabetic comas. A room of death and gloom became a place of joy and hope.

Read some of the case studies of children brought back from death's door when insulin was made available to them, with pictures, at Flashbak. -via Nag on the Lake

Does this ad make any sense at all? Someone was paid to come up with it. This tagline is part of a collection of 30 advertisements that make you go "Hmmm." Some are just old and display outdated thinking. Others are possibly mistranslations. But many of them are deliberate double entendres that might make you blush. See all of them at Bored Panda.

They're creepy and they're kooky, mysterious and spooky... The Addams Family came to life as a single-panel magazine comic in the 1930s. Then it was a TV series in the 1960s. The family returned for a couple of movies in the '90s. They went to Broadway in 2010. And this weekend, The Addams Family is in theaters in a new animated feature film. What makes us keep coming back to The Addams Family?   

It might stand to reason that the man behind the family, Charles Addams, was a lost soul with a troubled background who brought his pain to the pages of the New Yorker. But in reality, born in 1912 in Westfield, New Jersey, Addams grew up in a warm, loving household as the only child of devoted parents; his father sold pianos. Charles was known to be a scamp who loved a good gag—a favorite being when he would scare his grandmother by popping out of his home’s dumbwaiter. He once told Linda H. Davis, author of Charles Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life, “It would be more interesting, perhaps, if I had a ghastly childhood—chained to an iron bed and thrown a can of Alpo everyday. But I’m one of those strange people who actually had a happy childhood.”

What Addams always had was a love for the macabre (the common descriptor of his work he eventually grew weary of), be it exploring graveyards, trespassing in an abandoned neighborhood Victorian mansion, or drawing German Kaiser Wilhelm II in all manner of graphic death scenes.

Addams' creation exploded in popularity with the TV series, and carved its own niche that outlived him. Read about all the incarnations of The Addams Family and what made them special at Smithsonian.

Alexei Leonov died yesterday at the age of 85. You may not be familiar with him, but he was a hero of the Soviet Union (literally, he was awarded Hero of the Soviet Union twice). Leonov was a cosmonaut who became the first person to perform a spacewalk, or EVA, when he left his Voskhod 2 spacecraft for 12 minutes in March of 1965. While such spacewalks were eventually performed routinely, the first one was touch-and-go.

Leonov’s body temperature spiked, and his spacesuit had inflated so much that he couldn’t control it. He attempted to deflate it, but the quick depressurization nearly gave him the bends. He needed to re-enter the spacecraft the wrong way.

The re-entry didn’t go so well either...

Leonov later participated in another first: the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, a collaboration between the Soviet and American space programs.  

Aaron Brink and Steve Reidell of The Hood Internet are the guys who brought us the awesome mix of songs from 1979. Now they've taken it one year further with 50+ songs from 1980. And they say that 1981 and 1982 are coming later this month! It would be fine with me if they continued this for every year up to the present, if they are all going to be mixed this well. -via Laughing Squid

Those who gamble are more superstitious than the general population because they rely on luck to beat the odds. That's not at all surprising, but the specific superstitions could be gruesome. Gamblers often ascribe their success to lucky charms, which could be the blood, hair, or body parts of someone deceased, or even an instrument of execution, such a hangman's rope. Someone who died while gambling was even luckier, as his spirit was supposedly going to stay at the table until his bad luck was avenged. And then there are cases where people took a winning lottery ticket to the grave with them. How lucky is that?

Brussel, Sept. 10. A romance has just been unfolded in connection with the recent Brussels lottery. For some time the chief prize of $40,000 was unclaimed, and the identity of the winner as just been established in a remarkable manner.

It appears that a young Belgian, aged 19, had purchased a ticket for the lottery, and shortly afterwards he was killed while at work through a stone falling on him. A few days before the result of the lottery was announced he was buried, according to custom, in his Sunday clothes. Some weeks passed and no claimant came forward for the first prize. Then the young man’s friends remember that he had a lottery ticket in the waistcoat pocket of his best suit, and an application was forwarded to the authorities for permission to have the body exhumed. After the usual official delay, the request was granted, and as was expected, the winning ticket was found in the dead man’s clothes. The relatives are now claiming the money. The Oregon Daily Journal [Portland, OR] 11 September 1910: p. 49

There are other newspaper stories of corpses buried, or coming close to being buried, with a winning lottery ticket. Read about these and other tales of morbid gambling superstitions at the Victorian Book of the Dead. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Wellcome Images)

Forty, fifty, sixty years ago, trick-or-treaters roamed around with no adult supervision on Halloween night, because any family that didn't already have four or five kids always had the kids next door to lead you around. There was always that one house where a grandmotherly type invited us in to pick our own treats from a table full of lovingly crafted homemade candies, cakes, and cookies? That doesn't happen anymore, since kids aren't allowed to go into stranger's homes, or take any treat that isn't store bought and individually wrapped. Besides, the parents are choosing which houses to visit now anyway. Halloween is still fun for kids today, but it's different. Some of those changes are for the worse, and some for the better. Read about what changed in a list I wrote for Considerable.

Hayakawa Kintarō didn't set out to be a Hollywood movie star. He traveled from Japan to Chicago to get a degree in economics. But after graduating in 1912, while waiting for a ship to take him back to Japan, he caught the acting bug and became a movie star under the stage name Sessue Hayakawa.

Contemporary reports from the period reveal that screenings of Hayakawa’s films would routinely be filled largely with young women who’d scream incessantly whenever he appeared onscreen- no doubt not only enjoying his good looks, but also his calm and collected portrayals of the bad boy or forbidden lover characters that he so often appeared as.

Despite being a symbol of pure sex, an interesting thing to note was that in the films themselves, Hayakawa was almost never actually allowed to get the girl, even in the ones where he was the primary love interest, nearly always losing the girl in the final act.

You see, at the time Hayakawa was a star, the idea of a Japanese man with a white woman was scandalous to the extreme, despite that the theaters were lined with said white women coming to see the Japanese heartthrob.

Hayakawa raked in the money, but was frustrated with being typecast. His films were not well received in Japan due to the racist way his characters were portrayed. So he took matters into his own hands and opened his own film studio. But the twists and turns of history worked against him in several ways. Read the story of Sessue Hayakawa at Today I Found Out.