When a franchise has been running for 49 years, the kids who were fans from the start grow up, and some of them end up with enough clout to talk themselves into being in another movie. Casting a Star Wars film is a big job, but celebrity volunteers for the small roles and the extras just come out of the woodwork. It's as easy as "This is (someone already famous). Can I be in your movie?" Sure thing! Put a movie star into a stormtrooper helmet, and you don't have to give them screen credit. Some of these stars are such avid fans that you wouldn't even have to pay them, but that's probably against union rules. In some cases, you don't even have to be a movie star, if the crew already knows you. 

Read up on 15 of the unlikely cameos and extras that celebrities talked Star Wars producers into at Cracked. 

We've heard plenty of stories about offices, stores, and other work places that adopted a cat or a dog, but this tale is a bit more offbeat. A hen wandered into the Public Works department in Truman, Minnesota, about a year ago, and never left! Employees said she was pretty bedraggled, and they suspect she had been chased there by a dog. But no one in the area seems to have lost a chicken, or at least they didn't claim her. That's understandable. I asked a friend how many chickens she had, and she couldn't say because they won't stand still long enough to be counted. 

Anyway, this chicken decided that the city facility was now her home, and they named her Noodles. She is well loved and fed. Noodles spends her days supervising the staff from a high perch and her nights laying eggs for the utility workers, and they couldn't be happier about it. 

The common brushtail possum is native to Australia, but is an invasive species in New Zealand, where they threaten both agriculture and native bird species. Trapping or poisoning possums is a problem because some are too smart or too shy to approach traps. Wildlife biologist Graham Hickling needed an irresistible bait to lure possums to the traps. He discovered the Selena Gomez limited edition Oreo cookies, which have a layer of cinnamon between the chocolate wafers. Hickling found that Oreos are easy to use, because you can drill a hole in the middle and affix them with a nail, much better than Tim Tams. 

"Oreos are quite a bit cheaper, and they actually stand up to the rain quite well too, which is a little disconcerting.”

Possums found the combination of cinnamon and chocolate irresistible. Traps without the Oreos caught one possum in nine days, while the "Selena Gomez regime" traps caught 15 possums in 20 days. Read how this success came about at the Spinoff.  -via Nag on the Lake 

When you can choose your own name for the internet, the temptation can be overwhelming. Many people learned their lesson years ago about the names they chose for an email address in the 9th grade when they later had to use those addresses to apply for jobs. But usernames for specific platforms are still fair game, and gamertags are part of the creative process in customizing your character. Who's going to care if you sign up as "Poopyfartybum69" to play your favorite online multiplayer fantasy adventure game? The poor NPC who has to introduce you, that's who.

In this video from Viva La Dirt League, the usernames get worse and worse as it goes along. Some are even too salacious for YouTube. You have to admire the stoicism of the actors, because this is just too close to a certain Monty Python routine that we are all familiar with. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

At 42, with three young kids, I got a diagnosis that would have me dead in a year. That was, somehow, just the beginning. https://t.co/KWx2pdbiWo

— Slate (@Slate) March 13, 2026

Longtime Neatorama readers might remember Christopher Ingraham, who crunched the numbers to rank all the US counties by scenery and climate and found that Red Lake County in Minnesota was the worst of them. The reason you might remember that is because Red Lake County invited Ingraham to visit, and the people were so friendly and he liked it so much that he moved his family there in 2016. 

What's happened since then? In 2022, Ingraham received a diagnosis of cholangiocarcinoma, or cancer of the bile duct. This cancer has a survival rate of about 10%, with most patients dying within a year. He was only 42. The best treatment is get a liver transplant, if you are medically eligible. Ingraham has written about the ordeal of facing death at a young age with three young children for Slate. Here is an alternate link. There are two surprises at the end. -via Metafilter 

You've probably noticed that the hair on your head grows a lot longer than the hair on, let's say, other parts of your body. Hair follicles each have their own terminal length, meaning how much time they spend on growing a hair, and how fast, before they give up and let the hair fall out. And then that follicle will start over again, or maybe not. The hair follicles on your body come in different types with different programming, and those on your head are the most productive, up to a point. Believe it or not, these follicles can be transplanted to a different body part! 

But everyone's follicles are different. Some women never cut their hair, and they still have different lengths because their hair follicles are programmed differently. This TED-Ed lesson from Maksim Plikus explains what's going on inside those follicles to give you the hair you have. -via Damn Interesting 

In 1777, a young woman named Jane McCrea was killed in Fort Edward, New York by Native Americans working for the British military. What exactly happened that day will never be truly known, because reports varied from the beginning. We don't know what McCrea thought of the war, and the loyalties of her family were divided. Her fiancé fought for the British, and the brother she lived with fought with the American colonists. 

One account said the Native Americans were hired by McCrea's fiancé to escort her to safety, and others said they were marauding ahead of a British advance. Still others said that McCrea was killed by patriot fire by accident. McCrea was supposedly shot, and possibly scalped or raped in addition. The story of her murder was used to rally support for the American cause, drawing sympathy for the white woman killed by savages under the British. That narrative worked long after the Revolution to instill fear and hatred for Native Americans, and the details became muddier over time. McCrea's body has been exhumed numerous times to check for evidence. Read what we know and what we will never know about Jane McCrea at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Library of Congress) 

This looks a little like the kind of experiment you do in 6th grade, but it never works because your mother threw it out or it started stinking and your mother made you throw it out. Nestor of HabitatForge does a lot of work with natural aquariums, so he is the kind of person who could keep a jar of water alive for a month. For this jar, he collected mud and water from a temporary rain puddle, the kind that's here today and gone tomorrow. You know, the kind your dog drinks from. 

That water was nevertheless full of life! After the mud settled, we get a closeup look at the variety of creatures that thrived in the tiny ecosystem, along with the algae that turned it green. He can't identify all the species confidently enough to tell us, yet I'm surprised at how many he knows. Lest you begin feeling sorry for all these living things taken from their natural habitat, they are still around while that puddle has completely dried up. Except for what your dog drank.    

(Image credit: Skvader) 

Today we are embarking on a strange four-day string of "holidays." The only one with a long history is St. Patrick's Day on the 17th. Before that, we have Friday the 13th today, a day associated with bad luck that comes around at least a couple of times every year. Saturday the 14th is Pi Day, because the date is 3/14. Sunday, March 15th is the Ides of March, remembered as the date that Julius Caesar was assassinated. And Monday, March 16th is Saint Urho's Day. What is Saint Urho's Day?

(Detail of top image)

Saint Urho of Finland was known for drinking sour milk and eating fish soup, which gave him an unusually loud voice. This talent made him a hero when he shouted and drove an infestation of grasshoppers (or possibly frogs) out of Finland, thereby saving the nation's grape crop. The statue of Saint Urho shown up top was erected in Menahga, Minnesota, to commemorate the deed. Saint Urho's day is celebrated in Minnesota and surrounding areas, where there are many Finnish descendants. The colors of the holiday are green (to represent the grasshoppers/frogs) and purple (to represent the grapes). 

(Image credit: Lorie Shaull) 

Except the story told is complete bunk. Saint Urho was created by Richard Mattson of Virginia, Minnesota, in 1956. He and Gene McCavic wrote a poem about Saint Urho and his deeds. Now there's a holiday of sorts in Minnesota on March 16th designed to extend the St. Patrick's Day parties for another day and give some attention to Finland. Read the hilarious account of Saint Urho's Day, its history, and its celebrations at Wikipedia. -via TYWKIWDBI 

A new movie about aliens making contact with us? That happens all the time. It hits different when you say it's a new movie by Steven Spielberg about aliens making contact with us. Indeed, some of the images in this trailer for Disclosure Day will remind you of Close Encounters of the Third Kind from 1977 or E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial from 1982. Just how much has Spielberg thought about alien contact in those 40+ years? After the Jurassic Park and Indiana Jones series, he has nothing he needs to prove, and after his personal passion projects Schindler's List and The Fabelmans, he is free to return to what he does best. 

The new film Disclosure Day was written by Spielberg, based on an original idea by Spielberg, and is produced and directed by Spielberg. John Williams does the music. The trailer gives us little actual plot (good), and more of a feel for what we're in store for. Disclosure Day opens nationwide on June 12. 

You might recall the scene in the 1983 movie A Christmas Story where a young boy puts his tongue on a frozen metal pole and becomes stuck. This has been a dare among kids for as long as anyone can remember, and is called "tundra tongue." Norwegian graduate student Anders Hagen Jarmund remembers when he did it, along with many of his friends. It was such a common experience that Norway outlawed bare metal on playgrounds in 1998.

Jarmund turned his experience into a scientific study that resulted in two papers. One was a review of the literature abut such cases. They found newspaper stories of tundra tongue going back to 1845, with cases ranging from the mundane to the terrifying, and the various methods used to get tongues un-stuck. 

The second paper came from an experiment to determine what happens when a tongue comes in contact with frozen metal. What's the most likely temperature to induce freezing? How much force does it take to detach it? And how much damage is done? You'll be glad to know that they didn't use their own tongues, or anyone else's. They used tongues from recently-slaughtered pigs. Read what they found at Ars Technica. -via Metafilter 

Pro skater Andy Anderson (previously at Neatorama) is known for his work promoting skateboarding worldwide and for his emphasis on safety. In the video The Shape of Paris, he takes a tour of (duh) Paris. That description seems way too straightforward. He's very good at what he does, yet this is no mere skating video. Sure, Anderson is impressive, and finds infinite opportunities for complex tricks in the city, but besides that Paris has never looked so beautiful. Brett Novak's cinematography is off the charts and will make you want to book your tickets. There are aerial shots, looming architecture, and landscape vistas, but most of what you see is from ground level as if you are actually there. Even the rain cannot dampen the mood. The Shape of Paris not only appeals to skateboarding enthusiasts, but anyone who wants a beautiful and soothing look at Paris. -via Nag on the Lake 

In the Color Memory Game posted last month, you were challenged to recall a color you saw a few seconds ago. Another game takes the memory variable out of it, but it's still a challenge. 

In the game What's My ΔE(OK) JND? you are given two colors at a time, and your job is to find the line between them. JND stands for Just Noticeable Difference, and you'll find a rather dense explanation of it here. That doesn't make the game any less fun. 

You'll be given 40 pairs of colors. The first ten are very easy, but the rounds get harder after that as the color pairs become more similar. You will most likely notice that your screen needs to be cleaned. Or your glasses. Like the earlier game, you'll get some snarky comments along the way. Your score at the end may be confusing, but it appears that the lower the number, the better you did. My score was .0054, but you can beat that easily, since I have cataracts. -via Metafilter

How much do you know about the skeleton inside of you? We know bones are hard, but they take a lot of punishment, too, so about half of us break a bone at some time in our lives. But they can heal, and how they do it is much more complicated than just getting a cast and not putting weight on it for however long the doctor tells you (I've never broken a bone). There's a lot going on inside that we can't see. When you break a bone, you're also breaking blood vessels and nerves, and the damage control system goes to work. 

I have a friend currently recovering from a knee replacement, and this video helped me understand why she has so much inflammation and yet no infection. It's part of the healing process. I've also seen what a crushed hip can do to an older person, and that's why I take my calcium supplements and walk around the neighborhood every day. Take it from Dr. Skeleton. 

British builder Tommy Lynch woke up one morning after sleeping for 14 hours straight. A friend woke him up after being concerned that Lynch had slept so long, and found that Lynch was blue. That wasn't anything to do with his mood, but because his skin had turned an alarming shade of blue! They went directly to a hospital, where Lynch was given oxygen while being examined. 

The first thing you think of when someone turns blue is a lack of oxygen. But Lynch didn't seem to have trouble breathing, despite his anxiety over his blue skin. You might assume it was due to colloidal silver, which was touted as a cure-all a few years ago, and turned some people's skin blue. Lynch had not been using colloidal silver. The cause of his malady was discovered in the emergency department, quite by accident. Read his story at People magazine.  -via Fark