(Image credit: Flickr user Craig Dietrich)

California’s third-largest city by area is an urban-planning disaster, a sprawl of empty grids that aspired to become a megacity—and failed. But as the desert works to reclaim the land, it’s become a mecca of another kind.

It was June in the Mojave desert and the sun was blistering. The land around me was empty, scorched, and flat, dotted by brush and the occasional piece of windswept trash. Judging by the map, the intersection where I’d stopped was a busy crossroads between two major thruways. But when I shifted into park in the middle of the road, no one honked. No one looked at me funny. I hadn’t seen another car in an hour at least.

It was probably the safest intersection in America to pull over and take a nap.

According to the map, I was surrounded by cul-de-sacs and neighborhoods. In reality, there was nothing but sand and more sand—and roads. Endless roads. Roads in all directions, marked by white fence posts and the occasional lonely pole. Some were paved. Some were dirt. Some had long ago been reclaimed by the encroaching sand.

California City, California, is the third-largest city by area in America’s third-largest state, and most of it barely even qualifies as a ghost town—a ghost town needs people to have lived there first.

California City is a ghost grid.

Caring for others is what gives our lives meaning, and keeps us going when life gets us down. Josh Marino suffered PTSD after serving in the Middle East. He got very close to committing suicide when he met a black and white kitten that gave him a reason to live.  

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Once Josh was able to let others affect him, he got his life together. He attributes the beginning of his turnaround to the cat he named Scout. This is his tribute to the cat that saved his life. -via Laughing Squid

We have written instructions for producing a human skeleton from a corpse going back to 1543, which included specific steps for removing the flesh and leaving the ligaments intact. As you can imagine, it's a gruesome read. But the art of skeleton-making didn't become popular until the 17th century, when medical schools started using them to teach anatomy.  

Soon students of both art and anatomy were expected to study human skeletons as part of their training, and the public grew curious as well. By the 1660s, there was a market for them in Europe. By the 18th century, displaying human skeletons became trendy. Guerrini found a 1716 advertisement for “The Moving Skeleton,” a public attraction “which by a mechanical projection performs several very strange and surprising actions, also groans like a dying person, smoaks[sic] a Pipe of Tobacco, and blows the Candle out, as naturally as if alive.”

By this time, anatomists wanted to produce clean, white bones. One physician made sure to leave his bones out for months to bleach in the sun. Another eschewed boiling bones and instead left corpses to rot in water, changed periodically. This “maceration” technique required pulling softened flesh away from the bones and would have required a steely constitution. But the demand for skeletons was high enough that more people were taking on this job: In the early 18th century, one surgeon offered a course in skeleton-making.

Atlas Obscura has more on the history of making skeletons.

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Just about every alcohol brand name comes from a real person, even Crown Royal, although that person often didn't have anything to do with developing the drink. And the ones that weren't named after a real person may surprise you. If you ever wondered where the names of your favorite whiskeys, vodkas, and other distilled beverages came from, John Green probably has that information right at his fingertips. Yeah, and some wines, too. I do have a bone to pick with one throwaway line, though. Sure, everyone in Kentucky was in the whiskey business at one time or another, but Jack Daniels is from Tennessee. However, the name origins are the subject of the latest episode of the Mental Floss List Show.
 

The winners have been announced in the 43rd annual Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. The top prize went to an image by five scientists at the Netherlands Cancer Institute showing immortalized human skin cells (HaCaT keratinocytes) expressing fluorescently tagged keratin.

The image shown here won third place for Jean-Marc Babalian of Nantes, France. It shows a living Volvox algae releasing its daughter colonies, magnified 100 times, although you will be forgiven for recognizing it as Pac-Man. See all the winning images here.

-via Business Insider

The 1968 film Rosemary's Baby brought the concept of Satan into the forefront of horror movies, a trend that continues to this day, although director Roman Polanski designed the film to have more than one interpretation. Produced by William Castle, the movie featured Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes as a couple who move into an apartment building with a history. Then things get weird. Things were weird behind the scenes, too.

According to Farrow, actor Sidney Blackmer (who played coven leader Roman Castevet) once said on set “No good will come of all this ‘Hail Satan’ business,” and apparently he wasn’t the only one who thought so. William Castle later became convinced the film was cursed. Shortly after production he suffered gallstones to such a severe extent that he required surgery. As he recovered from that illness, Rosemary’s Baby composer Krzysztof Komeda suffered an accidental fall that led to a coma and, eventually, his death. Then, in the summer of 1969, actress Sharon Tate—Polanski’s wife—was infamously murdered by the Manson Family. For Castle, it all added up.

"The story of Rosemary's Baby was happening in real life. Witches, all of them, were casting their spell, and I was becoming one of the principal players,” he later recalled.

Learn more of what went into the production of Rosemary's Baby at Mental Floss.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1946, one of the six balloons featured in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was Harold the Baseball Player. The parade was not televised back then, but among the crowd of people watching that day were several units of a Hollywood film crew shooting a movie that was to be 1947's Miracle on 34th Street. People outside of New York City got their first view of the annual parade in that movie, albeit in black and white.

Early in the movie, Susan is watching the parade from a West 77th Street apartment window, not a projection of the parade shot months earlier by a second unit, but the actual November 1946 Thanksgiving Day Parade.

When Fred Gailey (John Payne), Susan's neighbor and her mother's love interest, comments that the balloon handlers appear to be having trouble with the baseball player, Susan remarks that it was a clown last year. That wasn’t movie magic. Harold the Baseball Player had been Harold the Clown at the real parade the year before and Harold the Fireman the year before that.

So 8-year-old Natalie Wood had to nail her lines the first time in that scene, because they couldn't call the balloon back to shoot a second take. Impressive. Harold the Baseball Player will make a return to the 2017 parade. The three-story balloon has been built, this time in black and white (and shades of gray). The original Harold was made in color, but since more people saw him in the black-and-white movie than in person, this new monochrome balloon is a tribute to Miracle on 34th Street. You have to admire the idea of a black-and-white balloon in a parade broadcast in color in reference to a full-color balloon shown on black-and-white film. Read about the return of Harold, and see a video, at Mashable.

When you use Facebook Live, there's a delay of a few seconds between the event and viewing the webcast. The Irish band The Academic harnessed this delay to perform a version of their song "Bear Claws" by layering the different instruments and vocals. The looping effect starts out as just plain odd, but builds to an interesting orchestration.

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-via reddit

Spencer Porter's father worked for a startup company that sold computer hardware. It wasn't profitable, but the workers were enthusiastic. In 1985, when Porter was only a year old, his father took him to his workplace for the day. At the time, the company was considering a demonstration video to advertise their graphics capability.   

At some point during that day, my dad played with me with a tennis ball. John Lasseter, an artist who worked with him, watched us, and suddenly the short film he had been trying to figure out was right in front of him. Using my actions, proportions and personality as a model for his main character, Lasseter created the short film “Luxo Jr.”

The name may not mean anything to you, and you may have never seen the short film,  but you’d probably recognize the title character. He’s a little lamp with a short body and a big head.

The startup that my dad worked at was Pixar. John Lasseter went on to direct many of Pixar’s greatest hits: “Toy Story,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Cars.” And today, before every Pixar movie, that little lamp hops out, jumps onto the “I” in “PIXAR,” squashes it, and looks out to the audience.

In a way, that little lamp is me.

The 1986 demonstration short Luxo Jr. was so impressive that Pixar converted from selling hardware to using their capabilities to tell stories. Porter always thought of the animated short as a home movie, since it perfectly captured the way he and his father moved. Now a television writer, Porter tells how the short encapsulated his relationship with his father, and later on, his relationship with his son, at Salon. -via Metafilter

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

Okay, where exactly did the term "jump the shark" come from? According to Ron Howard, it came from his Happy Days co-star Donnie Most.

One day in 1977, they received the weekly script for the upcoming episode of the show. The episode was actually the third part of a season five three-part episode called "Hollywood." In the episode, the Happy Days gang takes a trip to Hollywood, where Henry Winkler, as Fonzie, clad in swim trunks along with his trademark leather jacket, water skis over a shark to prove how brave he is. The episode was intended to show off Winkler's water skiing abilities.

Most looked over the script and asked Howard, "What do you think of the script?"

Howard shrugged and replied, "People like the show. It's hard to argue with being number one."

Most replied, "He's jumping a shark now?"

Jon Hein claims the term was coined by his roommate, Sean Connolly, at the University of Michigan. According to Hein, "jumping the shark" came from a conversation the two were having regarding the above Happy Days episode, and other TV shows, that had a specific episode or a specific moment in time when they realized the show had peaked and after that moment they had started going downhill. (Image source: TV Tropes)

With the sequel Blade Runner 2049 coming to theaters this weekend, it's time for Screen Junkies to take a cockeyed look at the 1982 film Blade Runner in their Honest Trailer series.

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This Honest Trailer is reassuring to folks like me, who saw Blade Runner in 1982 and don't recall much about it at all because it didn't make any sense. And yeah, I could've seen it again to understand it, but Blade Runner wasn't that pleasant to begin with. Or am I the only one who felt that way?

The following is an article from Uncle John's OLD FAITHFUL 30th Anniversary edition.

(Image credit: Flickr user brett jordan)

If you ever have occasion to visit a children’s school in Japan, use the third stall in the third-floor bathroom at your own risk. Better yet, just wait until you get back to your hotel.

KID STUFF

When you were growing up, did your parents ever scare you with stories about the boogeyman? Tales of a shadowy creature that punishes children for bad behavior is common to many cultures— Spain has El Coco, Slavic countries have Baba Yaga, India has Bihar, Mediterranean countries have Babau, and so on. Moms and dads in Japan have a similar tradition. But where the American boogeyman is usually described in vague and amorphous terms, the stories that Japanese parents tell about scary imaginary beings are more defined— and they’re frequently centered in the bathroom. Traditionally considered unclean even when kept perpetually immaculate by the most fastidious of housekeepers, bathrooms were often hidden away in a dark corner of the house. Ghosts were said to live in the toilet, and parents liked to tease children about a hairy hand rising up out of the water and pulling kids down into the sewage pipes.

SCHOOL SPIRIT

It stands to reason that with such a spooky start, some kids might come up with their own scary legends around the bathroom. And sure enough, they have.

Today we call it "poverty porn." A hundred years ago, the same activity was called "slumming" in Britain and "slum tourism" in the U.S. Wealthy folks would go to the city slums where the other half (actually the majority) lived and saw how they went about their lives. For visitors to New York's Chinatown, there was the added draw of an exotic culture they knew little about. And if they saw illegal and/or immoral activities, that was a bonus that not only gave the tourists a thrill, but also reinforced their sense of superiority. What they didn't know was how much money Chinatown was making off these visits, and how much of the "danger and depravity" they saw was faked.    

Affluent slummers often employed guides or joined organized groups. Industrious young men—independent “slumming guides”—capitalized on the crowds by introducing them to brothels or saloons that were accustomed to hosting slummers, or had sprung up specifically to do so. Usually white and working-class, these “lobbygows,” as they came to be known in Chinatown’s pidgin English, marketed themselves as critical cultural conduits to the exotic, unfamiliar Chinese. They even advertised in local papers and came to be seen as legitimate businesses. In Chicago, for instance, in 1905 a local resident sought police approval to establish “a guide system to escort slumming parties and show strangers the sights.”

Slummers saw strange sites such as opium dens filled with Chinese actors, Chinese restaurants owned by Italian families, and gunfights between gangs that happened right as a tour came through. Read how Chinatown accommodated slum tourists at Atlas Obscura.

Photographer Tim Newton saw a cat outside his home in Anchorage last week, and thought nothing of it, until he noticed it was a lynx. He started shooting photographs through his window, and found it wasn't alone. It was a litter of seven lynx kittens and their mother!

So for the next half-hour, Newton says he just went back and forth, from window to window, photographing them.

At one point, Newton decided to test his luck by going outside to continue photographing the kits. While the mother was cautious and alert, he says she was also very calm with him in her presence. Moreover, some of the kits were very intrigued by Newton.

"I actually had my bathrobe on," says Newton. "So I didn't have legs, as far as the kits could tell. And I didn't have eyes or a head. I just had this big round thing that went 'Click, click, click.' So I think the little kittens didn't have any clue what I might be."

The family stayed for about 40 minutes, then calmly left the yard. You can see the whole collection of photographs at Newton's site. -via Atlas Obscura

(Image credit: Tim Newton Photography)

Movie posters list the stars' names across the top, and then usually a picture of the main characters right in the middle. But unless you already recognize them, you'll never know who is who because the order of the names is never the same as the order of the faces in the picture. What causes this? You're a smart person; I'm sure you can come up with the correct answer before the intro to this video ends. But the video is more than just the answer to the question. There's a lot of Hollywood information and history here, and quite a few interesting anecdotes.

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Austin McConnell asks if there is a better way to design movie posters. My suggestion is that we go back to using real artists and their work for the image on the posters, like the example of Chinatown in the video, instead of the stars' faces. But movie posters are advertising, and studios will go with what works according to box office returns. -via Digg