We get the big stories in our news, but they fade from the headlines eventually. That doesn't mean it's over for the people involved, it just means that the media has moved on to the next big story. You might recall the Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, who was a former KGB agent and a critic of the Kremlin. He was murdered slowly and painfully in Britain by drinking a cup of tea laced with radioactive polonium in 2006. But you don't know what happened to his body after he died. It was so radioactive that they left it alone, hooked up to medical monitors for two days while arrangements were made to move him safely.

The actual autopsy took place on December 1 at London's Royal Hospital. This time, the crew included Dr. Cary, another pathologist, a cop, a photographer, and a dude whose sole function was to wipe all errant blood drops from people's clothes, lest they become polonized. Nearby, an ambulance staff was watching over them in case someone fainted or collapsed. Everyone was wearing the same two-suit getup as Cary, complete with custom battery-powered, air-circulating hoods. If Litvinenko had against all odds opened his eyes, he'd have thought he'd been abducted by a bunch of extremely nervous aliens.

The story is longer and more involved, as are the four other stories in which the aftermath of a big news story is as interesting as what we already know. Read them all at Cracked. No, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is not included.

Talk about a Labor Day.. #youdidnotsleepthere • photo @evanskoczenski

A post shared by @youdidnotsleepthere on Sep 7, 2016 at 7:05pm PDT

Luisa Jeffery likes to camp out, and when she does, it's usually in the back of her Toyota truck. Jeffery noticed the glut of adventure camping photographs on Instagram that are so perfect they appear to be staged or even Photoshopped. Yeah, that's the trend for just about any facet of life, as people go to great lengths to take the perfect picture of their vacation, their clothing, or their food. Jeffery started an Instagram gallery called youdidnotsleepthere, reposting the most egregious examples of illogical campsites.

I call this one "The Influencer". #youdidnotsleepthere • photo @jeffjohnson_beyondandback

A post shared by @youdidnotsleepthere on Mar 18, 2017 at 6:50pm PDT

National Geographic saw that Jeffery's work was relevant to their interests, and did an interview with her about the trend in faking the perfect Instagram picture.

Our mothers told us, "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything." Socrates (and a lot of other people) said, "Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?" In the radio business, I was told, "What you don't say can't hurt you." That's all true, except that if you say nothing at all, you aren't going to get far in radio. But a little thinking before you say something goes a long way, and saying something nice can make someone else's day go much better. This is the latest comic from Lunarbaboon.

Time for a cuteness break! Spend a few minutes watching Milo the munchkin cat go from a fluffy kitten to a fluffy adult cat. This video was compiled from five months of recording.

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Yeah, he's a young adult now, but he still looks like a kitten. You can see more of Milo at his Instagram page.  -via Tastefully Offensive

Today is Veterans Day, and yesterday the United State Marine Corps celebrated its 242nd birthday. That makes this weekend the perfect time to learn something we didn't already know about the Marines. For example, if you are old enough to have attended an American elementary school back when they had regular music class, you know the lyrics to the Marines' Hymn -at least the first verse. But what do they mean?  

2. THE MARINES'S HYMN REFERS TO THE BATTLE OF CHAPULTEPEC.

The Marines’ Hymn famously begins, “From the Halls of Montezuma...” This refers to the Battle of Chapultepec in 1847, in which U.S. Marines conquered Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City and subsequently occupied the city as part of the Mexican-American War. The battle is also famous (according to Marine tradition) for the establishment of the “blood stripe,” a red stripe sewn into the trousers of the uniform commemorating the Marines killed at Chapultepec.

3. "THE SHORES OF TRIPOLI" IS A REFERENCE TO THE FIRST OVERSEAS LAND BATTLE FOUGHT BY THE UNITED STATES MILITARY.

In 1801, the United States decided to do something about piracy in the Mediterranean so President Jefferson sent in the Navy. In 1805, the Marines finished the job. The Battle of Derne, on the shores of Tripoli during the First Barbary War, was the decisive action of the war, and the first overseas land battle fought by the United States military.

Find out nine other things about the Marine Corps at Mental Floss.

Imagine the emotions you'd experience if you had a chance to see your deceased spouse's face on someone else. That's what happened to Lillian Ross. Her husband, Calen "Rudy" Ross, died last year, and was a designated organ donor. The staff at the Mayo Clinic approached Lillian about using Rudy's face for a patient who was awaiting a face transplant. The clinic team had been practicing for their first face transplant for more than three years. Andrew Sandness received a new face, including facial bones and teeth from Rudy, after ten years of living with profound disfigurement. The surgery required nine surgeons, a crew of 40 medical professionals, and 56 hours. After months of recovery and therapy, Sandness was able to greet Lillian Ross and express his appreciation.    

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The not-so-warm-and-fuzzy side of the story is that both Sandness and Ross were victims of suicide. Ross left Lillian a pregnant, 19-year-old widow. Sandness, on the other hand, got a second chance at life twice. Five other people also received various organs from Ross. -via Laughing Squid  

Claude Monet changed the way people see the world -even when he could no longer see it himself.

As the sun rose over Giverny, France, a gardener paddled a small boat out into Claude Monet’s backyard pond. Then, he began gently submerging lily pads into the water one by one, washing away any dust that had accumulated overnight. Monet watched from the bank, his palette in hand. He was ready to begin the day’s work, but first, as always, he insisted that the lilies be properly dusted.

Monet was captivated by his pond: the distorted reflections on the surface, the swirling weeds below, the way the light played on it all. He hadn’t always paid it so much attention. At first, he said, “I grew [water lilies] without thinking of painting them … then, all of a sudden, I had the revelation of the enchantment of my pond. I took up my palette.”

Now in his mid-70s, the renowned painter had already been attempting to capture the scene for more than a decade when he struck upon an idea in 1914: giant, wall-sized paintings that would fill an entire room, giving “the illusion of an endless whole, of a wave with no horizon and no shore.” But making his vision a reality would be a race against time. The artist was going blind.

You have to wonder how a category like "the most fire-breathing full twist backflips performed in one minute" ever was accepted for the Guinness Book of World Records. He needed eight such backflips for the record, but Australian acrobat Aiden Malacaria managed to do ten of them. Let's see what that looks like.

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You have to wonder whether there was a previous record of seven fire-breathing full twist backflips in one minute, or whether this is new, and they just set eight as a benchmark.  -via Boing Boing

Deadpool is on the cover of Good Housekeeping! It's a special "holiday issue," designed to cover both Thanksgiving and Christmas. This is not the real Good Housekeeping issue, but a marketing tool for promoting Deadpool 2, even though the movie won't be out until next summer. The Deadpool magazines are being handed out to people in some cities now. They contain plenty of Deadpool humor, plus what we assume are real recipes. Oh yeah, and this holiday letter from the man himself.

See the pages that show you how to carve a turkey and some holiday recipes at Collider. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Scandalous behavior in early Hollywood found a place to happen behind walls and away from the press, fans, and families. Silent film star Alla Nazimova converted the home she bought in 1919 into a hotel that became a retreat and party place for Hollywood's elite. The Garden of Allah was a legendary complex in West Hollywood with rooms and cottages for rent nightly, weekly, or permanently. It also had a huge pool to draw tenants together for cocktail parties and skinny-dipping.

Some stayed in between films, some stayed in between marriages– like Humphrey Bogart, who was once attacked with a kitchen knife in his Garden villa by his estranged wife, who had found him living there with Lauren Bacall. Fellow residents gathered around the house to watch the scene as Bacall escaped out the back door.

There was never a dull moment at the Garden. “It Girl” Clara Bow was notorious for pushing hotel butlers off the diving boards and management looked the other way while the original Tarzan actor was said to have satisfied his numerous “Janes” in the hotel pool. One famous Broadway actress answered her bungalow door naked while her pet monkey collected telegrams from startled delivery boys. An inebriated American comedian and writer, Robert Benchley, would often have himself moved in a wheelbarrow between the villas’ endless parties.

A Who's Who of Hollywood actors, musicians, and literary figures found refuge and creative inspiration at the Garden of Allah, but they also found sex, drugs, and alcohol in abundance. This lasted until 1959, when the hotel hosted a huge party just before it was demolished. Read about the heyday of the Garden of Allah at Messy Nessy Chic.

Pianist Nahre Sol shows us how the styles of classical composers vary from each other. The contrast is made clearer as she uses the same song for each: "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

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Some are so stylized that it's hard to hear the original melody, but you get the idea. Those who are intimately familiar with these composers will laugh in places. The rest of us will instantly recognize our favorite composer, whoever it is. The annotations help a lot.  -via Metafilter

We've read about the awful plight of waste disposal as cities grew large before modern sewer systems were installed. A reader asked, "Before sewer systems, did people in England really toss their poop into the streets?" The answer is complicated.   

Now, to be clear, generalizing about what a large and diverse group of people did over a millennium time span is extremely dodgy business, and we’re not saying that some Medieval Britons didn’t sometimes toss their solid waste out the window. (After-all, laws against doing just that, which we’ll talk about shortly, didn’t come from nowhere; and there certainly are many documented accounts of people doing this in said massive time-span, though you’ll note that many of said documented instances describe liquid, rather than solid waste.) We’re simply saying that the documented evidence at hand seems to indicate it was nowhere near as commonplace in Britain as pop culture would have you believe.

What actually happened was that people tried all kinds of ways to get rid of sewage, and some methods worked better than others, while none worked perfectly. Read about the experimentation of necessity at Today I Found Out.

If you are passing through, you can always get pie in Pie Town. Pie Town, New Mexico, was settled like many other towns in the western US when a would-be prospector found no gold and ended up doing something completely different. In this case, it was selling fruit pies to cowboys. The adventurous settlers who established Pie Town were protective of the name.

At this early point in its history, Pie Town displayed the attitude that still defines the town. In the old days, resident Nita Larronde says, Pie Town was barely on road maps. The town had to petition just to get a post office. To secure one, Pie Town residents were asked, in 1927, to suggest three other names for their settlement. “The name was beneath the dignity of the post office,” Larronde says. “But the people of Pie Town decided, ‘No, we’re Pie Town. You can take your post office and go to hell.’”

Pie Town has a population of 67 and three pie shops, all launched in the last 27 years. Oh yeah, you betcha they have a pie festival. Read about this small but quirky town (and its pies) at Atlas Obscura.   

(Image credit: Sophie Putka)

The 1984 movie Gremlins helped usher in the PG-13 rating, along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, another Spielberg film that came out the same year. Gremlins started out as a cutesy kid's movie and escalated quickly into a horror comedy. I don't know whether it traumatized kids or not, but for adults it was a real hoot. There was a lot going on behind the scenes of Gremlins.  

3. There was no CGI in the film.

Every last gremlin was animatronic in cost upwards of $30,000-$40,000 dollars. Each night when the crew went home they had to open their trunks for security to make sure that nothing was being stolen. That’s a lot of money in just one gremlin.

2. Tim Burton was almost selected to direct.

Spielberg liked his work and almost pulled the trigger on hiring him but realized that Burton hadn’t done a full-length feature yet and passed.

Learn more about the movie Gremlins at TVOM.

When Paddington Bear hears a mysterious noise out on the rooftop on Christmas Eve, he manages to save the holiday without even realizing it. His clueless Christmas caper makes him a hero, but he still has marmalade on his mind. 

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While the John Lewis Christmas ad is designed to touch your heart, the Marks & Spencer Christmas ad is designed to make you laugh -and send you to the theater to watch the new Paddington bear movie. Oh yeah, they want you to shop at Marks & Spencer, too. Somehow, I just can't imagine people in the UK watching Christmas ads from the US as entertainment. -via Metafilter