We all know that blue is not a natural color for food. The exception that proves the rule is blueberries, which have a delicate flavor that belies their dark and dramatic color and doesn't factor into junk food much at all. When we see bright blue candy or blue syrup, that's coded in our heads as raspberry flavor. Or more specifically, artificial raspberry flavor, which is actually pretty good even when it falls short of the real thing. Yeah, yeah, raspberries are red, except when they are black, or white, so how did that flavor become blue? I thought it was just a color assignment because red was already in use for cherry flavoring, but it's a lot more complicated than that. Blue raspberry is its own flavor, even though its artificial. Tom Blank of Weird History Food is glad to share the story of blue raspberry flavoring with us.

The cemetery of Trinity Churchyard in Manhattan had a stone slab engraved with the name of Charlotte Temple. People once made pilgrimages to the graveyard to lay flowers for poor Charlotte, a sympathetic character who died in poverty soon after childbirth, betrayed and forgotten in the city. But she was a character- a fictional character from the novel Charlotte, A Tale of Truth. It's not so well known these days, but it was America's best-selling novel between its publication in 1791 and the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 -and remained quite popular for another hundred years.

Many people who read Charlotte, A Tale of Truth didn't realize it was fiction (the word "truth" in the title could have been confusing). Others knew it was a novel, but also knew that author Susanna Rowson said it was based on a real person. So who is buried beneath the stone slab in New York City? To learn the answer, Atlas Obscura goes into the history of the novel, the churchyard, and the stone, and explains a relatively recent investigation into the mystery of Charlotte Temple's grave.

They're random, and they don't make any sense. That makes them the perfect tool of communication. That's the idea behind crop circles. But let me back up a minute.

It's obvious to any observer that super intelligent aliens have been keeping an eye on Earth for a long time, trying to come up with ways to communicate with us. So far they haven't hit upon a clear method of letting us know they are there, much less that they are more intelligent than we are. But they are brainstorming. Now, the whole idea of brainstorming is to throw ideas out there, no matter how illogical, in the hopes that it may lead the group to come up with something feasible and effective. As Ryan George demonstrates, it wouldn't be logical to assume that super intelligent beings who could travel from distant galaxies to enslave Earthlings can't figure out a better way to tell us about their plans. This video is less than three minutes long; the rest is an ad.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

The UK organization Services Archaeology and Heritage Association posted this "average weekly diet" of a working class family in Oxfordshire in 1912. The graphic comes from the 1917 study "How the Labourer Lives: A Study of the Rural Labour Problem.” This family may have been rural, but they certainly weren't farmers. There are no eggs, fruit, milk, or cheese eaten in the entire week. Meat was included in exactly two meals per week, unless you were the head of the household, in which case you could have boiled bacon on a Friday evening. You really can't count suet pudding or lard as an entree. Most meals were bread, butter, and tea, which might fill you up but isn't conducive to great health. The "lard" mentioned would often be pan drippings saved from the Sunday dinner.  

Commenters who knew tell us that the biggest meal of the day ("dinner") was served at lunchtime, "tea" would be after work at five or six PM, and "supper" was more like a snack before bed. Not that it made much difference when every meal was practically the same. A diet like this should make you feel lucky to have refrigeration and supermarkets with a wide variety of food. -via Nag on the Lake

For about ten years in the early 21st century, there was a craze for competitive cup stacking, also called sport stacking or speed stacking. It consisted up stacking cups in certain forms and unstacking them as fast as you can, and it unleashed the competitive spirit among young people. My children did this in school, and I had no idea until today. Who in the world was responsible for the cup stacking craze? That would be Bob Fox.

Fox was a professional clown and theater teacher turned elementary physical education teacher. He did not invent cup stacking. In fact, Hasbro marketed the cups as a toy in the early '90s, but no one bought them. When Fox discovered cup stacking in 1995, he tried it out on his three children first. It turned out that what the activity needed was a demonstration by someone who knew what they were doing to get kids hooked. You can't just explain it; it has to be seen. Fox and his wife invested their life savings in 10,000 cups. To sell them, they went from school to school, with their three skilled kids showing what can be done with those cups. Kit Fox, former competitive cup stacker and the couple's youngest child, tells us the story of his father and the sport he brought to American schools. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: RogerAcr)

In 1876, General George Custer met his end at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The armies of the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho left no survivors among the US 7th Cavalry Regiment. It was days before the rest of the army knew what had happened, when a Crow scout who worked for Custer named Curley was found traumatized and broke the news. Curley became quite famous for surviving the battle, and later after the turn of the 20th century would travel from town to town in the West, telling the story of the Battle of Little Big Horn and Custer's dying words. As soon as his identity was known, the mayor and other prominent citizens would hurry to make him feel welcome. Curley also made deals that enabled white townspeople to buy fertile tracts of land on the reservation in Montana.

But that kind of activity couldn't last, especially since some of Curley's appearances made the papers. There were those who knew that Curley didn't speak English, and that he rarely ventured from the Montana reservation. Why, this guy, whose name was also Ben McIntosh, didn't even look like Curley the Crow! That was a particular shock for those who bought land and then went to Montana to claim it from Curley. Read the story of the real Curley and the fake Curley at CrimeReads. -via Damn Interesting

When Keira was four years old, she told her father she wanted a billion-story building. Instead of just laughing it off, he started thinking about why it couldn't be done, and turned to Randall Munroe's What If? project (previously at Neatorama) to ask about the nuts and bolts of the idea. So why can't we build a billion-story building? First, there's the instability of architecture as we know it, and then there's the expense. But those are just the beginning. The real story is that people have a hard time imagining how many a billion of anything is, whether you are four years old or an educated adult. A building one hundred stories tall has its own problems; so imagine one a hundred million times taller. No, you can't. So Munroe whips up a theoretical billion-story tower so we can see how ridiculous the idea is, for so many reasons, ranging from elevators to the rotation of the earth.

Humanoid robots are becoming more and more advanced, but most of the time, that just makes them creepier. The uncanny valley gives us the impression that technology is encroaching on what it means to be human. But a robot doesn't have to be humanoid, or canine, or resemble any living thing to be expressive. Pixar made that clear back in 1986. In fact, it was Luxo, Jr., also known as the Pixar lamp, that inspired the robot called ELEGNT, developed by a group of Apple roboticists.  

ELEGNT is a functional lamp, but it also demonstrates personality. It is curious, eager to help, and can demonstrate a sense of fun and even affection sometimes. A video at the robot's site shows us how it "looks" at its user, follows instructions by both words and gestures, and even makes suggestions. It's adorable, just as you'd expect a real-life Luxo, Jr. to be. But is this what we want in a robot? At first you think "take my money!" but then you have to consider the implications of a lamp telling you what to do, or trying to be your friend, no matter how cute it is. You can read both sides of that story in the comments at Metafilter.

Last month we saw Tuco Salamanca from Breaking Bad rushing through the dalgona candy game in Squid Game. The guy responsible for that, YouTuber Alternative Cuts (previously at Neatorama) hinted that he was working on another Breaking Bad/Squid Game mashup involving the red light, green light game. More than a month later, it's here and just as remarkable as you'd expect. Walter White is participating in the game, and displays just the right amount of horror when the truth sinks in. Jesse is in the crowd, too, as well as most of the characters from Breaking Bad, drug dealers or not. You have to admire the way they all fit in so well, but then again, the Squid Game scene is shock, gunfire, and death, and there was plenty of that in Breaking Bad. Besides, we know that Alternative Cuts has every scene from every episode of Breaking Bad memorized. He lives for this sort of thing. -via Laughing Squid

You may have seen advertisements already for the Presidents Day sale at your local car dealer or furniture store. It says Presidents Day on your calendar- right there on February 17th (although it might say President's Day or Presidents' Day). The truth is that there's no such federal holiday. We learned in grade school that George Washington was born on February 22nd and Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12th, and we marked both birthdays in class. But Washington's Birthday has been a federal holiday since 1879. It was moved from February 22nd to the third Monday in February in 1970, and people started calling it Presidents Day under the assumption that it was a combined holiday for Washington and Lincoln. But Lincoln's birthday was never a federal holiday, and what we call Presidents Day is still officially named Washington's Birthday by the federal government.

However, quite a few states recognize the holiday as Presidents Day, and celebrate George Washington, or Washington and Lincoln, or any combination of US presidents they please. The same with local governments, calendar makers, and stores. Read more about the confusion over Presidents Day (and its punctuation) at Mental Floss.

If someone were to ask you when Frank Sinatra sang "New York, New York," you might guess sometime in the 1950s or '60s. The song was Sinatra's signature song, and is synonymous with the city. Mayor Ed Koch declared it the city's unofficial theme song in 1985. The song invited tourists back to New York City after 9/11. It's played at every Yankees home game. You know the song.

The truth is that Sinatra didn't release his version of the song until 1980! The song, actually titled "Theme from New York, New York" was written for a 1977 Martin Scorsese movie that bombed at the box office. Liza Minelli sang it in the film, and her soundtrack version reached #105 on the music charts. Once "Uncle Frank" did the song, Minelli's record was quickly forgotten. Read how a song from a failed movie became the anthem of the Big Apple at Smithsonian. 

A lot of horror films deal with the end of humanity, by war, natural disasters, disease, aliens, or supernatural beings. But what if it happened without gore, panic, heroics, or any action at all? What if we slow-walked into our own destruction so gradually that we just accepted it? What if, instead of fighting for our last chance, we sympathized with our destroyers? Somehow, that scenario is even more terrifying than a violent apocalypse, because there's the possibility that we may already be doing that slow walk in real life.

The short film Quiet Apocalypse by Brazilian horror fan insolitum picks a scenario for the end of things that is a cosmic horror for both the predators and the victims. But even if all these deaths came from some other source, the misery that opens the door for the acceptance of doom is more dreadful than the deaths themselves. He got that idea across in less than two minutes, and now I may have trouble sleeping. -via The Awesomer

In 1944, Germany and other Nazi-occupied territories suffered greatly from new and powerful Allied bombers. They brainstormed for a defense against such bombing attacks, and one project had the benefit of not requiring highly trained pilots. That's because they did not need to take off or land their aircraft, the Bachem Ba 349 Natter. The plane would be launched vertically on its rocket engine, much like later space flights. The plane was made mostly of wood, and wasn't expected to survive a mission. After the pilot launched missiles at the Allied bombers, the pilot would eject and he and the rocket engine would separately parachute to the ground.

Did it work? Not at first, because production was rushed. Not at second, either, because failed tests slowed down development. And then the war was over. But the Bachem Ba 349 Natter proved that vertical aircraft takeoff was possible, so the research that went into this seemingly hare-brained idea wasn't a complete waste. Read about the Bachem Ba 349 Natter at Amusing Planet.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

There are a lot of islands in the Atlantic Ocean around New York City and many are a part of the city. You know about Ellis Island, and Rikers Island, and Hart Island is known as the city's Potter's Field. There's also North Brother Island, which is notorious for several reasons. Its history is filled with misery, calamity, disease, and crime. Is North Brother Island cursed? Or could it be haunted? At any rate, no one lives there now, and it is considered abandoned. Finding a purpose for the island is difficult considering how close it is to the penal colony of Rikers Island. A wildlife refuge seems to be the best use for a place that no one really wants to occupy, and nature is working to reclaim what humans have done to it. Weird History takes us through some of the more notable eras, events, and personalities of North Brother Island. We'll also learn some facts about South Brother Island and Rikers Island as well.

You know the lives of celebrities. You know when their movies came out, when they peaked in the music business, or when they served in office. But do you remember what year they died? That's a tough one, even for history buffs. When I played my first game of When They Died, I could recall learning about each celebrity's death, but I couldn't place the year. I was close but missed the mark for each of them.

For each famous person presented, you move a slider to guess what year they died. They all died between 1950 and today, and there are five people in each game. A perfect guess will get you 1000 points, and getting within 15 years will give you some points. I ended up with 3732 in my first game, and unlocked a few "achievements" at the end. One of them was called Speed Demon, because I gave answers in a hurry so I could decide whether this game was worth sharing. Try it yourself, and let me know if I was right.  -via Nag on the Lake