"When a mommy zombie and a daddy zombie love each other very much...." Well, no, zombies aren't real as a physical manifestation, but they are a real element of folklore and pop culture. Where did the idea come from? Night of the Living Dead may have been the seed of modern zombie mania, but it's far from the first depiction of zombies. Nerdwriter tells the history of this supernatural idea. -via Kottke

In the mid-1960s, Anne Hamilton-Byrne established a religious cult called The Family in Melbourne, Australia. Their beliefs mixed Christianity with Eastern mysticism, and held that Hamilton-Byrne was an incarnation of Jesus Christ. She collected children, both by sketchy adoption practices and by appropriating the children of her followers. Ben Shenton was one of those children. He was told that Hamilton-Byrne was his mother, and she controlled the children by beatings, drugs, and an ingrained suspicion of outsiders. In 1987, police executed a raid and took the children into custody.   

Lying in bed that first night away from Lake Eildon, Ben combed through everything he had said that day, making sure he had divulged nothing that could get him in trouble. Suddenly, he realised - it didn't matter any more. He was not returning to Anne. "I think for the first time in my life, I realised I was free," he says.

But then the real work began.

Ben learned that his mother was not Anne, but an "auntie" he disliked named Joy. The children were not his brothers and sisters - some were the children of other cult members, others were orphans Anne had adopted. He was 15, not 14 as he had been told. And of course Anne was not the reincarnation of Christ.

"Now I'm trying to work out, 'Well, this world I'm in, what are its rules? How do I function, what do I do?'" he says.

Ben Shenton tells of his struggle to adjust to living with people he'd been taught to avoid, and how he worked out his relationships with his biological mother and with Hamilton-Byrne, at BBC News.  -via Digg

(Image source: Ben Shenton)

Filmmaker Nick Cobby and musician Max Cooper made a music video about how people are constantly moving in pursuit of something or other. You can read the artists' statements about the project at the vimeo page. The video is made from artistically enhanced drone footage taken above Mexico City. At first, I thought the artistic enhancements included the pink cars, because I could not believe any place has that many pink cars. Then I looked it up, and taxis in Mexico have been pink since 2014! Anyhow, the video is mesmerizing. -via Laughing Squid

Strange things happen when people try to improve or otherwise modify their kitchens. It's even worse when the landlord does it with little thought as to how their ideas will affect tenants. Really, the kitchen above has to be a rental! And who thought this was a good idea?

The gallery of images includes the way-too-common toilet or shower in the kitchen, which speaks to limited plumbing options. There are also some interesting decor decisions that will make you laugh, in a ranked list at Bored Panda.

And if you're into that sort of thing, they also have 30 bathroom design fails. 

For a long time, scientists looked for the "missing link" that would prove that humans evolved from apes. This missing link would be a midpoint between ape and human. But there's no "midpoint" because that's not how evolution works. We can't even come to an agreement about what "human" really means on the evolutionary scale. The story Piltdown man is only one chapter in the long story of how scientists unfolded the evolutionary history of humans.

Rachael Herron writes novels, but she also spent 17 years manning the phones for emergency services. Her experiences there inspired her new suspense novel, but there are some things she'll tell all of us that might help us understand the work of 911 dispatchers better.

Why Fires Start

In what seems like a hopelessly classist overgeneralization, fires that destroy homes in low-income areas are often started by extension cords. Fires that destroy homes in high-income areas are often started by linseed oil rags (but are they’re frequently less devastating because they usually have in-home fire sprinkler systems). This startling disparity shocked me when I switched agencies from a poorer area to an incredibly wealthy city. Rich folks’ stuff doesn’t burn as much.

Pro-tip: Clothes dryers do start fires (and the two words “dryer fire” are fun to say on the radio). Once, as I advised a caller to exit the residence (for the love of God, always exit the residence! Don’t try any heroics!), I heard a bang. The caller screamed and then said, “Holy crap! My fire extinguisher just exploded! It put out the fire!” I’ve kept my fire extinguisher on top of my dryer ever since.

Read the rest of the list at CrimeReads. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Kevin M Klerks)

Grant Woolard gave us the Classical Music Mashup and the Classical Music Mashup II, as well as other awesome music projects. Now we have a third iteration on the theme, where he seamlessly overlays and meshes different classical tunes. This video contains snippets of 70 pieces from familiar composers like Beethoven and Chopin, branching out to Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and more, including outliers like Scott Joplin and Rick Astley. -Thanks, Grant!   

In 1900, Baron Eduard von Toll led an expedition to explore the Arctic off the coast of Siberia, and to search fo rate legendary island of Sannikov. Their ship, the Zarya, faced continuous danger of being iced in. Toll and three others left the ship to spend the summer of 1902 exploring Bennet Island, which they thought could be made into a base for future explorers.  

Over three months on Bennett, the team ate their way through three bears, countless seabirds, and the island’s small herd of reindeer. Out of optimism that the Zarya would soon retrieve them, they failed to keep anything for the winter. But the Zarya remained stymied by ice for months, and by October, the window for rescue was closed. Toll realized that if they stayed on the island, they wouldn’t survive. And so, he and his team ventured south, back towards the New Siberian Islands, paddling thin-hulled kayaks into a deadly mass of rapidly freezing, razor-sharp ice. They were never seen again.

Toll’s death cemented his legendary status in Russia, which continued to sponsor searches for Sannikov into the 1930s. Toll’s widow published his diaries, and in 1959, a Russian translation meant they were devoured by a new generation of Arctic adventure-lovers.

One page detailed a food store that Toll had buried on the Taimyr Peninsula in September 1900, early in his voyage. First, he described its location: a spot five meters above sea level, marked with a wooden cross. Then he described the hole itself, dug deep through thawed clay, peat, and ice. And finally, the contents: “a box with 48 cans of cabbage soup, a sealed tin box with 15 pounds of rye rusks [dry biscuits], a sealed tin box with 15 pounds of oatmeal, a soldered box containing about four pounds of sugar, 10 pounds of chocolate, seven plates and one brick of tea.”

That passage set off a treasure hunt of sorts, as adventurous Russians tried to find the buried food. It was finally located in the mid-1970s, and taste-tested. Not only was the find a huge victory, but it set Russia on a science project to study the possibilities of harnessing the permafrost for long-term food storage. Read about the original expedition, the soup hunt, and the research at Atlas Obscura. -via Metafilter

This is Russian computer animation from 1968. While the cat itself is drawn, its movements were generated by computer data. It sure looks like a classic cartoon cat, but its leg motion is impressively uncanny. Boing Boing gives us a short translated explanation.

More than 40 years ago in 1968 ... A team led by Nikolai Nikolaevich Konstantinov creates a mathematical model of the motion of the animal (cat). The BESM-4 machine, executing a written program for solving ordinary (in the mathematical sense of the word) differential equations, draws a cartoon "Kitty" containing even by modern standards an amazing animation of cat movements created by a computer.

There's more here, in Russian.

Who cares about the T-206 Wagner or the 1952 Topps Mantle? For my money, Keith Comstock has the greatest baseball card ever. Thirty years after his card’s release, Comstock told me the story. This was the funniest interview of my life. (via @ESPN) https://t.co/VPSz0dVVDy

— Robert Sanchez (@MileHighRobert) August 21, 2019

Keith Comstock played for four major league teams and way more minor league teams in his career. While he was a pretty good pitcher, he is best remembered for a picture. His baseball card for the 1989 Las Vegas Stars is considered the funniest baseball card ever officially issued. It shows him reacting to being hit in the crotch by a baseball! Comstock tells the story of how that image came about.   

The photographer who showed up that day was shooting for the 1989 ProCards set, so we were doing this for next year's cards. He had his hat backward, like you might expect from a photographer. While that guy was setting up for the shoot, my teammates started talking about how they wanted to sabotage their own cards.

One by one, they stepped up and posed. Right-handed batters tried to hold the bat like a lefty; left-handed pitchers wore right-handed gloves. They tried everything. The photographer caught every one of them. He had a sheet, or something, that had our numbers and lefty-righty stuff on it. He was really, really strict. He wasn't having any of it.

Finally, it was my turn. The photographer asked me what I wanted to do, expecting I'd do one of the basic poses. I thought about it for a second, and then it came to me: "I want it to look like a comebacker hit me in the nuts," I said. The photographer didn't like that. "Sorry, man," the guy said to me. "I'm under strict rules. I can't take that picture." I pleaded with him, but the photographer wouldn't budge.

So how did he manage to get the picture taken? That is a great story, told at ESPN. -via Digg

THX has a brand-new "Deep Note" trailer to be shown in theaters that are THX-certified. You won't get the full effect watching it on a small device, or even a home TV set, but the animation and sound are still impressive. If you aren't all that sure what THX means, Gizmodo fills us in.

Originally developed back in 1983 by Lucasfilm’s Tomlinson Holman as a way to ensure that the sound for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi would be accurately reproduced in theaters, THX is a quality control and certification system that takes into account everything from a cinema’s acoustic performance to the screen and projector’s image quality to even the amount of background noise heard inside the theater. Most audiences probably couldn’t hear the difference between a THX-approved theater and one that wasn’t, but what made THX popular among many movie fans was the iconic Deep Note glissando that played ahead of the film, which had originally been created by Lucasfilm’s James A. Moorer.

Few theaters today are up to THX standards, but if you see this trailer on the big screen, you know you've found one.

You've heard the phrase "as American as apple pie." What makes apple pie so American? For one thing, we eat a lot of it, along with other fruit pies. But the history of pie in America shows that the pioneers changed the European idea of pie into something really good.  

The pie tradition of the New England colonies had come from old England with the settlers, who transformed the savory kidney and mincemeat pies of the British Isles into sweet pies filled with fruits that grew well along the Atlantic Coast. The crusts changed, too. They were lighter and flakier because lard from pigs was more abundant in the Colonies than tallow from cows. (Sugar and spices were imported to the Colonies from Britain, which controlled most trade.) In 1892, Rudyard Kipling described the Northeast as “the great American pie belt,” a title that traditionalists claimed proudly. As the population moved west, the pie recipes did, too.

Pie-eating could give one a bad reputation at times, and around the turn of the 20th century there was a campaign against pie. But Americans always return to the pastry we love. Read the history of pie in America at Smithsonian.

Tom Cruise might not make the best president, but he's going to be a great candidate for the office, because he can run! There's even a campaign website. This video was directed by Stephen Vitale, starring Miles Fisher, who does look somewhat like Tom Cruise. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

These flags for each of the planets in our solar system were designed by redditor Weslii. He said it was just something to do during a boring afternoon. The minimalist designs incorporate only circles, lines, and arcs, but still say something unique about each planet. What do think of them?  -via Metafilter

Maru is a large cat. His roommate Hana is also getting to be pretty substantial. Their human, mugumogu, arranged an experiment to see how small a passageway can get before the cats cannot get through. The opening is lowered gradually until we have to laugh at Maru's struggle to fit under eight centimeters. How low can they go? Watch and see- it will remind you of a limbo competition! One thing we can be sure of- they had some kind of powerful incentive to get through. Maybe it's the challenge itself.