Sunday was Bastille Day, a commemoration of the storming of the military prison in Paris during the French Revolution. The traditional parade in Paris featured something new- a man flying on a hoverboard (called a flyboard) above the parade, wielding a rifle.
According to The Guardian, its rider was Franky Zapata, a French inventor and former jet ski champion who has been showing off the flyboard for a few years now. Zapata actually set a new Guinness World Record for farthest hoverboard flight on the flyboard in 2016.
People remember the flavors of Jell-O from their childhood differently, depending on who you talk to. Yes, there was a coffee flavored Jell-O. And tomato, and blackberry, and chocolate, and celery, and cola, and imitation apple. You may be tempted to call BS on some of those flavors, but there's proof. RetroRuth at Mid-Century Menu (previously at Neatorama) has been working on a Jell-O timeline for quite a while, to definitely pin down when these flavors were introduced. Check out the timeline and the stories of bygone Jell-O at Mid-Century Menu. -via Metafilter
Every name of every country has a story behind it, but if you look closely, those stories begin to resemble each other. Most country names fall into one of four categories:
a directional description of the country a feature of the land a tribe name an important person, most likely a man
There are plenty of examples from each category, some older than others, and some imposed by outsiders. Under the category of countries named after a feature of the land, you'll find these.
It’s not clear which explorer named Costa Rica (“the rich coast”), but one account suggests it was Christopher Columbus, who saw indigenous people wearing gold and didn’t realize it was imported. The Spanish gave Honduras its name, meaning “depth” or “deep water,” and they also named Barbados, or “bearded ones,” allegedly after the great banyan tree found there, ficus citrifolia, because of their long aerial roots.
Sierra Leone is thought to have been named “lion mountains” by the Portuguese, probably a reference to the roaring sound of thunder in the hills above Freetown, not actual lions. Singapore means “lion city,” and the lion head is a national symbol. But there aren’t any known lions in Singapore. According to legend the Sumatran prince Sang Nila Utama was hunting in Singapore and came across an animal he thought was a lion, “singa” in Malay, and gave the name Singa Pura to the island he was on.
The Golden Age of Piracy gave us unforgettable characters that fed novels and films until we all have a concept of what a pirate of the era was like. The stereotype is so persistent that it gave us Talk Like A Ppirate Day. But reality was far different from what Hollywood gave us. Cheddar takes a look at how pirates really spoke. -via Digg
Far & Wide presents a rather opinionated list of lame tourist traps in each state of the US. While the term "tourist trap" usually means something that exists solely to part you from your money, that's not the unifying factor here. These places are just plain weird. While some are, no doubt, truly lame, there are quite a few that are worth a visit just for the kitsch factor. Who wouldn't want to see the Busy Beaver Button Museum in Illinois, or Lucy the Elephant in New Jersey, or the Dig This heavy equipment theme park in Las Vegas? But many of them are inexplicable, like the Intergalactic Spaceport in Wyoming, or the Desert of Maine, or Anaconda Smoke Stack State Park in Montana.
Black smoke from a copper-extraction operation once poured out the top of this 585-foot tower, but now it simply sits there unused as the anchor of Anaconda Smoke Stack State Park. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the stack — and we’re using “interesting” liberally — is that the Washington Monument could fit inside.
Turtles are strange. Their shells are not just a covering, it's what mainly holds the turtle together. They can breathe from their butts. And then it gets weird. -via Digg
We are used to seeing Victorian photographs as formally staged portraits, so the four portraits of 19th-century women breastfeeding are a rare treat. They each seem like a formal sitting, but when baby's hungry, you do what you gotta do. However, the article at Messy Messy Chic is a lot more, detailing the gradual decline in breastfeeding during that time. Queen Victoria (who had nine children) didn't care for breastfeeding at all. Doctors and inventors developed skeevy-looking bottles as a substitute. And wealthier women had wet nurses to take over the task. For those who were breastfeeding, beer was recommended, and even advertised for recovery from childbirth, as you can see in the image above. Read more about Victorian breastfeeding at Messy Nessy Chic.
Bob Ross was one-of-a-kind. He was a skilled painter, yet he kept it simple in order to inspire everyday viewers to try it themselves. The joy and encouragement he imparted were worth more than any artwork. During his broadcast career, Ross produced 30,000 paintings. You'd think that after his death, they'd be on the market for a pretty penny. But that's not what happened. The New York Times found out where those paintings went. -via Metafilter
When you first see this, you might think, how cute, an artist made tutus for their chickens. But then you realize that it's not just one artist, but a whole bunch of different chicken farmers, artists, photographers, and crafters. Putting a chicken in a tutu is apparently a widespread activity. While it's presumably still a small minority of folks who raise chickens, it's become strangely common.
Even young chicks can wear a tutu, if it's small enough.
Many people collect plastic drink stirrers, or swizzle sticks, but most are souvenirs of a memorable night out. While these are personal memories, there are stories behind the sticks, which serve as marketing gimmicks for establishments that come and go but leave a mark. Pam Ashlund noticed her mother's cup of souvenir swizzle sticks in 2007 and became intrigued by their history. That grew into a hobby and led her to the International Swizzle Stick Collectors Association, for which she now writes the monthly newsletter. She's also writing a book about swizzle sticks, and plans to open a museum eventually.
As Ashlund learned more about swizzle sticks, her collection grew. “Originally, I was just buying and selling,” she says. “I’d buy a number of single sticks on eBay and then sell them in sets. I had no idea of the significance of the individual sticks. It was just, ‘Here’s a cute set of giraffes.’ It wasn’t until almost a year later when I realized that some individual sticks were actually quite rare, and that all of them had great histories behind them.”
Turns out, Ashlund is well-suited for studying the stories behind tens of thousands of disposable drink stirrers. In college, she earned a B.S. in psychology, which means she’s sincerely interested in the human stories surrounding swizzle sticks. As a professional accountant, she’s unfazed by the scope of the collectible—vintage swizzle sticks are plentiful because they were an extremely inexpensive form of advertising. And as a finance director at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, she’s developed an appreciation for cultural anthropology and an eye for how objects are presented to the world, hence her interest in publishing a book and establishing a place to share a portion of her collection with the public. Why should her swizzle sticks, and all their wonderful tales, remain sealed in Tupperware?
As you might expect, very few of the sticks that fill Ashlund’s Tupperware were purchased one at a time, or even in batches of 60. “I purchased two collections,” Ashlund explains, “one that had over 12,000 sticks and another with more than 25,000.” To give you a sense of the scale of that many sticks, at one point, Ashlund had about 27,000 swizzles in her 18-year-old Nissan Pathfinder. “They filled it from top to bottom, back to front,” she recalls with an audible sigh.
The fish genus Cirrhilabrus includes dozens of species of fairy wrasse, which have been found in tropical waters around the globe except in eastern Africa. Now, that "biogeographical puzzle" has been completed with the discovery of a new species. Marine biologist Luiz Rocha found the fish while SCUBA diving off Zanzibar. He consulted collaborator Yi-Kai Tea, who confirmed it as a new species of fairy wrasse. Tea is a Marvel fan, and confronted with a new purple fish in an isolated area of Africa, he and Rocha have named the fish Cirrhilabrus wakanda, to be commonly called the Vibranium fairy wrasse.
C. wakanda joins a growing list of animals named after pop culture figures, a practice that some of the stuffier types in taxonomy are skeptical of. Tea and Rocha wave off such concerns. “I see this as a way to bridge the divide between science and the general public,” Tea said. “Research is important, but it is equally important to convey it to people with more general interests. Taxonomy is often seen as boring, but it has massive implications for biodiversity conservation. Inspiring the next generation of taxonomists by making science sound exciting is our goal.”
They're right: if they had named this fish anything else, I wouldn't have learned about fairy wrasses today, and I wouldn't have realized that vibranium is purple. For those who haven't been keeping up, vibranium is a fictional metal found in the fictional country of Wakanda, where the Marvel superhero Black Panther is from. Read more about the new discovery at Earther.
You've probably read about the difficulties of getting food to look good in still pictures or video for advertising. At least you've noticed that the sandwich you receive doesn't match the enticing picture on the menu. That's where the magic of food stylists come in, to deal with real food and make it look fresh and appetizing despite long photo shoots, hot lights, and human frailty. There are rules governing food advertising, the most important of which is that you cannot misrepresent the food. Professional food stylists know that "misrepresent" is a matter of opinion, and know how far they can go before getting the production into trouble.
For example, let’s say you’re taking a picture of a burrito and the tortilla keeps flopping around. Replacing the tortilla with a piece of stiff fabric is illegal and taking the time to perfectly wrap a burrito so it doesn’t flop is just too much effort for a small crew only getting paid a half a million dollars to do a few day shoot and some pre and post production work. However, gluing the tortilla shut isn’t illegal at all and it’s workarounds like this that are why food stylists get paid the big bucks.
Of course, as bad as spraying four day old meat with oil and gluing burritos together might sound, back in the 1960s the world of food advertising was basically the wild west. Tricks like using motor oil in lieu of syrup were commonplace and completely legal. In fact, in many cases stuff like this was preferable to using the real thing because it lasted longer and was easier to shoot. Another trick is to use mash potatoes covered in resin or Crisco as a stand-in for ice cream. After all, ice cream melts pretty quick, particularly when subjected to being closely lit, and photo shoots sometimes last a long time. Using the real product simply was much harder than faking it, especially when you need a consistent look from shot to shot.
So how did the standards change? That's the story of the marbles in Campbell's soup, specifically chicken and stars. Read about the marbles, the resulting case before the Federal Trade Commission, and the student campaign to end deceptive advertising, at Today I Found Out.
The guy from Casually Explained gives a rather calm and humorous takedown of food fads and extreme nutrition orthodoxy. The truth is, there isn't one silver bullet for healthy nutrition, but making thoughtful choices while consuming a variety of food is pretty healthy. He also covers a bit about exercise, too. -via Tastefully Offensive
The 50th anniversary of the first moon landing is still about a week away, but the celebratory posts are everywhere. Many of them are awe-inspiring and some are a nostalgic trip down memory lane. But this list of 50 facts about Apollo 11 includes some facts that feel right at home here at Neatorama.
7. The Apollo 11 astronauts consumed a lot of fizzy water.
Due to a problem with the spacecraft’s hydrogen-gas filters, the men’s drinking water was always a bit bubbly. “The drinking water is laced with hydrogen bubbles (a consequence of fuel-cell technology which demonstrates that H2 and O join imperfectly to form H2O)," Michael Collins wrote in Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys, his 1974 memoir.
8. All those bubbles meant that there was a lot of farting.
As if being in tight quarters for several days didn’t already present enough challenges, all those fizzy drinks led to some serious flatulence. “These bubbles produced gross flatulence in the lower bowel, resulting in a not-so-subtle and pervasive aroma which reminds me of a mixture of wet dog and marsh gas,” Collins wrote.
9. Normal bodily functions weren’t a thing that NASA had adequately planned for with Apollo 11.
Speaking of bodily functions: NASA hadn’t fully worked out all the challenges the astronauts might face when attempting to go to the bathroom in a zero-gravity situation. One Apollo 11 astronaut spent the entire trip loading up on anti-diarrhea medication so that he could forgo having to deal with that situation altogether (though the identity of that astronaut has never been made public).
At a relatively recent point in our evolutionary history, there were several species of humans. The only species remaining today is homo sapiens, to which all the living people of the world belong. We can tell ourselves that we survived because we were better than the other species, like the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, or because we conquered them, but that's not the whole story. Those other species live on in a way, because they left their DNA in today's homo sapiens. That means that the separate species encountered each other and produced offspring. This video from PBS Eons gives us an overview on the traces of other human species that live in us today.
