I made a tuna casserole, and it turns out that I’ve been right all along. The American idea of classic comfort food is often revolting. Like eating sadness. pic.twitter.com/z0PTgLNOyT

— emily nunn (@EmilyRNunn) June 1, 2019

Most of us know about tuna noodle casserole, but does it stand up today? First, Emily Nunn laid out the argument that the dish is a disappointment in her article The Comfort Food Myth. The classic dish began as a desperation meal for those who couldn't afford better, became a convenience recipe using canned soup in the 1950s, and is now only eaten as a nostalgic comfort food. As such, the only recipe many people can enjoy is the exact one from their childhood.

Samantha Irby responded with another article, Tuna Noodle Casserole: It Only *Sounds* Disgusting. Her position is that there is nothing wrong with comfort food, and she even tells us how to make tuna casserole if you don't already know.

First you need to call your mama, ask her to leave the old Corningware baking dish she stole from your grandma on her front steps, then swing by there on your way home from the grocery store and pick it up because tuna casserole just doesn’t taste right unless it’s from a weird, faded glass dish that only old people care about.

Ahem, you can borrow my CorningWare only if you promise to bring it back within a week. Grandma replaced my thievery decades ago. But I'm kidding myself. One kid won't eat tuna and the other won't eat noodles, and neither will touch mushroom soup. Anyway, Nunn's article from July is still getting vehement responses from people on both sides of the tuna casserole debate. -via Metafilter

It might not happen as soon as some people think, but one day, humans will travel from Earth to Mars. It won't be just an exploratory stop, either, so they'll have to produce food. What will people eat on Mars? According to the movie The Martian, it's potatoes. Planetary scientist Kevin Cannon and colleague Daniel Britt crunched the data and published a paper titled Feeding One Million People on Mars. It charts a path toward self-sufficiency for a large colony over the course of a hundred years. Cannon talked to Smithsonian about their plan.

What practical factors did you consider when thinking about food production on Mars?

What turns out to be the real limiting factor is the amount of land that you require. The reason why that's so important on Mars is that when you think about land, you're really talking about building an enclosed structure. You have to pressurize it, you have to heat it and you have to light it to protect against the Martian environment. There's almost no atmosphere. It's very cold. So, land turns out to be the most important driver. The more land you have to use to grow food, then the more construction, the more power, et cetera.

How did you determine which food sources would be well-suited for life on Mars?

We looked at this in a very general way. We thought, okay, let's start from plants, because that's what most people assumed in the past when they thought about what people would be eating on space missions. And let's go a little bit beyond that to some protein sources. So, we looked at what's being done on Earth and we honed in on insect-based foods that turned out to be very efficient for Mars, as well as what's called cellular agriculture. That’s this idea of growing meat from cells in these large bioreactors. It’s something that's actually coming a lot sooner than people think on Earth, and it's very well-adapted for producing food in space.

Read the rest of the interview at Smithsonian.

Where were you in 1979? Wherever it was, you were probably listening to this music. The video is a smoothly-edited mashup of 50 songs from the year 1979, from the Sugarhill Gang to the Talking Heads to Van Halen. And even if you weren't born yet forty years ago, you'll still enjoy it. There's a list of the artists at the YouTube page. Unfortunately, it doesn't include the names of all the songs used. -via Metafilter

Star Wars fans love to pick apart every scene- and for some movies, they've had 40 years to do it. The Empire Strikes Back is still by consensus the best Star Wars film, but one scene has bothered Mike Ryan for years. When Leia, Han, and Chewbacca arrive at Cloud City, they have a nice reunion with Lando Calrission, take time to shower and change, and then they proceed to a banquet room for "a little refreshment." Darth Vader, who'd been there since before our heroes landed, is waiting to arrest them. So why arrange a dinner? No one got to eat anything. Was there food? Was Vader behind that plan? Ryan imagines a deleted scene that explains all that.

Lando: “Do you want us to set the table? With plates and everything?”

Vader: “Yes.”

Fett: “Are we actually going to eat?”

Vader: “No.”

Fett: “So what happens then?’

Vader: “I guess we just capture them.”

Lando: “I swear you could just do all that right now without this choreographed dinner table plan.”

Vader: [Force chokes Lando]

Lando: “Gaaaa … okay, the dinner table plan is a good plan.”

There's more to it, including Vader's rehearsed bon mots to add drama to the scene, at Uproxx.

Ze Frank explores the inner nine lives of cats who are ready to share their concerns with a therapist. It's not easy being a pet. One can only hope that these poor, traumatized creatures can find some peace.

Tammany Hall was the famously corrupt political machine attached to the Democratic Party that ran New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the election of 1898, they backed William Astor Chanler as their candidate for congress in New York's 14th district. His opponent was the incumbent Republican representative Lemuel Ely Quigg. Both campaigns had a lucky cat mascot. For Quigg, it was a black cat they named Lem who walked in and set up house at the campaign headquarters. Tammany Hall used a tiger as their symbol, and there were many cats called Tammany cats in New York. Many of them were even named Tammany, but the one that stood out was named Tiger.   

Tiger was described as a beautiful and intelligent cat with “a cast-iron constitution” who had been attached to the Health Board’s chemical laboratory in the Criminal Courts Building for several years. According to The Sun, the poor cat had been “used and misused by the Health Board’s chemists in making their poison tests.” Tiger reportedly ate a lot of poisoned food that had sickened people and he had “permitted himself to be drugged on a thousand different occasions for the cause of humanity.”

According to The New York Times, Tiger was the one who “had the honor of determining the difference between morphine and atropine” during the Carlyle Harris trial, which I have written about. The two chemicals were placed upon his eyeballs to show how the different drugs affected the dilation and contraction of the pupils. Tiger didn’t seem to mind the morphine, but he did a frantic waltz movement after the atropine was applied. (History is often a hard pill to swallow.)

The unfortunately employed Tiger was known for his ability to bounce back from these experiments, and was never known to be ill until the day he heard the results of the 1898 election, which encompassed more than just the congressional race. Read the story of Tiger the laboratory cat and that of his pampered parallel Lem at The Hatching Cat.  -via Strange Company

The US Census Bureau has all kinds of data on the way Americans live and have lived for many years, and Apartment List has turned some of them into a series of charts. For example, a 26-year-old in America is now more likely to live with his/her parents than to live with a spouse. But the marriage rate has plummeted in the last 50 years, and 26-year-olds are also more likely to live with a partner, or roommates, or alone than they were 50 years ago. The chart pictured above is interactive at the site, so you can plug your own age in to find out how your living arrangement compares with others and with those of that age in past years. Another chart allows you to look up statistics in your metro area. There's also a chart that shows how things have changed since the recession of 2007. And there are more charts that look at the data in different ways. Check them all out at Apartment List. -via Boing Boing

Okay, you probably spent at least $20 on Halloween decorations last year, right? And maybe your cat got to play with the box. What if your Halloween decoration was already a cat toy? This year, the hot Halloween accessory is a cat-sized cardboard haunted house, with two floors that incorporate cat scratching pads. Isn't it cute? Sure, your cat will probably destroy it, but it's only $16.99 at Target, if you're lucky enough to find one in stock. Besides, a distressed house is even spookier. And when the house is chewed completely through, you'll still have the cat scratchers left. -Thanks, WTM!

One hundred years ago, in October of 1919, the Chicago White Sox played the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series. The Reds won the best-of-nine game series, five to three games. Then it came out that some of the Chicago players had conspired to throw the series for money. The eight players involved were acquitted at trial, but were nevertheless banned from professional baseball for life. The scandal is often referred to as the event in which baseball lost its innocence, but in context, it was part of a period of disillusionment all around.

In fact, the timing made perfect historical sense. The recently concluded slaughter in Europe had changed America in ways just becoming apparent. Rather than peace and prosperity, the First World War’s conclusion produced widespread unemployment and dislocation. Fear of anarchism was rampant, and so, too, was racial violence—much of it generated by a reborn Ku Klux Klan. Cynicism was in the air; America’s prolonged age of innocence was over.

Indeed, even as the public grappled with the scandal, the nation’s attention was jolted by the ugly underside of another major cultural institution, with the shocking news that screen beauty Olive Thomas had died after swallowing poison in a Paris bathroom. It was soon revealed that the doe-eyed ingénue was a “drug fiend.” It was the first in a series of Hollywood scandals, including, most notoriously, Fatty Arbuckle’s multiple trials for rape and manslaughter and the murder of hotshot director William Desmond Taylor that recast Tinseltown as America’s Sodom.

An article at City Journal looks back at the Black Sox scandal and its fallout, which helped shaped what baseball is today.  -via Digg

In its promo for season ten, Robot Chicken invites us in to a group therapy session for TV and movie characters who have a habit of breaking the fourth wall. That's not really a sin, and can work quite well for some productions. But seeing several of those characters together, succumbing to their temptation, is a bit ridiculous. -via Geeks Are Sexy

A black leather jacket (BLJ) can mean different things, depending on who wears it and how they present themselves. Leather is tough -and expensive. The black makes it look somewhat menacing. They were first worn by the military, but then appropriated by others.

Bikers were the first outsiders to take note of the black leather jacket’s utilitarian value, as their inevitable brawls with gravel meant wearing road rash on their leather rather than their comparatively feeble flesh. In 1928, New York designer Irving Schott introduced the “Perfecto,” a zipped and belted hunk o’ hide that reigned as the ideal BLJ silhouette for decades to come. As Schott’s design was originally distributed by Harley-Davidson, the “Perfecto” soon became the saucily soiled flag flown by the most vicious of motorcycle gangs, most notably, the notorious Hells Angels.

Tough, cool, and dangerous. It wasn't long before other groups latched on to the look, and made it their own. Read a short history of the black leather jacket at Collectors Weekly, and peruse a gallery of BLJ images.

In July of 1976, three men kidnapped 26 children and their bus driver in Chowchilla, California. They were driven for 11 hours, then forced into a truck that had been buried underground.

If the kidnappers’ intent was to remain tight-lipped in order to keep the kids relatively calm, it worked. But once the children were led out of the vans and saw what was happening, several of them began to scream. One by one, they were led to a hole in the ground and ordered to descend a ladder. Below ground in the quarry was a moving van with an open hatch on top. It was buried in the Woods quarry so that the captives would be unable to pierce the metal walls of the cargo area and to keep it hidden from view. To the kids, however, it was nothing more than an oversized tomb.

The men demanded the names of the kids, along with their addresses, phone numbers, and a small article of clothing, like a piece of a shirt or, in Mike Marshall’s case, a cap. Under protest, they went inside, where they were confronted with mattresses and a paltry amount of food and water. When all of them, along with Ray, were inside, the men pulled up the ladder and dragged a steel plate over the opening, weighing it down with heavy tractor batteries. This was covered with plywood and dirt, which only added to the anxiety of the occupants.  

There was only enough food inside for one meal. Then the ventilation system stopped working. Then the roof started to sag. Meanwhile, the kidnappers were having trouble making a ransom demand. Read the story of the Chowchilla kidnappings at Mental Floss, including some recent updates.

Conde Nast Traveler assembled 50 people from 50 states to talk about the best food in each state. It's all a matter of opinion, but I can't really argue with Kentucky Derby pie, since it's pecan pie with bourbon. -via Digg

Professional chefs are proud of their recipes and techniques, as they should be. But they are professionals, while the rest of us cook during our personal time. JJ Goode co-authors cookbooks, meaning he translates a chef's work into instructions we can follow. He often tries to convince the chef to bridge the gap between the professional and the reader by pulling back on the difficulty of those recipes, with varying results. He tells us some ways we can save time and trouble without making much of a difference in the resulting culinary creations.   

Having already told on myself for having an inferior palate, I will now deliver a broadside against chicken stock recipes. You know the drill: There are the chicken bones, the onions and carrots, the sprigs of thyme and parsley, the 12 peppercorns, and the bay leaf. And there’s the oh-so-gentle simmering and the straining, not to mention the occasional, criminally rude blanching of bones. I suppose some of you might be bothered by a little cloudiness in a stock and can detect the absence of that bay leaf. I’m not, and I can’t. My one-ingredient stock recipe—put rotisserie-chicken carcass in pot, cover with plenty of water, and boil until episode of Succession is over—has enabled countless dinner successes, because it’s twice as tasty and infinitely freer than the boxed stuff, and because its utter thoughtlessness precludes excuses not to make it.

Goode has other tips on how to simplify star-studded celebrity chef recipes at Taste.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Sarah Becan)

Cracked challenged readers to illustrate how their view of pop culture stories have changed over time. It's a question of maturity: they all show the difference between watching a movie as a child and then as an adult. Amazing how your perspective can change, huh? I had to laugh because I was an adult when every one of these movies and TV shows came out, with the possible exception of the example they chose for James Bond.

See all 13 charts ranked at Cracked.