Do you recall the story of The Ugly Duckling? Or the cartoon character Baby Huey? The story of Peawee reminds me of both. Peawee started out as an abandoned peafowl egg, which the farm family snuck into Susan's nest. Susan is a regular hen, and she's kind of a bird brain, but she has a motherly instinct that just won't quit. Susan fiercely protected the odd-looking youngster she hatched, and did her motherly duty in teaching Peawee how to be a chicken. The chick grew quickly and was soon much bigger than Susan. Peawee learned to be a typical chicken except for her size and the fact that she is very attached to her mother at an age when most chicks have moved out on their own. Susan doesn't mind, though, as she is quite attached to her giant baby, too.

You can see more of Susan and Peawee at Instagram. Adaurie Stemshorn wrote a children's book about Peawee that will eventually be available.

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— Cinemark Theatres (@Cinemark) February 5, 2025

In order to get people back in the habit of going to movie theaters, the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO, no kidding) has several promotions planned for 2025. The first was Bring Your Own Bucket Day, meaning popcorn bucket. You could fill your own container with popcorn for just $5, as long as the container would fit through the theater door and would not block anyone from seeing the movie. It was a win-win promotion, since you could fill a bathtub with movie popcorn and that $5 would still be almost all profit.

People showed up with an outrageous range of containers. Several people came into Cinemark theaters with stock pots or actual five-gallon buckets. A backpack or a pair of jeans will hold a lot of popcorn, but do you really want to eat out of them? One guy wheeled in a piece of furniture- a nightstand, to hold a movie's worth of popcorn. Read about Bring Your Own Bucket Day and see the clever containers people brought in at Foodbeast.

Over the past year or so, you may have encountered a video on social media about a strangely accurate apartment that was sized for dogs, but also became smaller for cats, and then increasingly smaller for other animals. I saw it with no narration and no attribution, but now I know who did this. This mini-home is by YouTuber Xing's World, or more specifically, Xing Zhilei, an engineer in Zhongyuan, China. He loves building things, and he made a miniature home as a playhouse for his young children. Then he took things a step further and built one for the family's various pets. You have to be impressed with the architecture, the furnishings, and the appliances -some that work! But more than anything, I had to wonder how he took us on a tour into smaller and smaller spaces. Not too long ago, Xing posted a behind-the scenes look at how he built this unique world.

You can see more videos of Xing's miniatures at YouTube. -via Boing Boing

In 1924, Charles Minear and his family recovered a lead cross from a layer of caliche that had been exposed by mining. The cross turned out to be two crosses stuck together, and when they were separated, there was a Latin inscription inside! Manier and his friend Thomas Bent returned to the site ready to dig for more artifacts. Together, they found eight crosses, nine swords, 13 spears, one fan, and one tablet, all but the tablet made of lead and containing more Latin inscriptions and some in Hebrew. The men were convinced that this was proof of a Roman settlement in the US long before Columbus. The inscriptions led them to believe this would have been between 775 and 900 AD.

But there were some fishy things about the discovery. The artifacts were recovered in an evenly-spread area, and from different depths in the caliche. No other artifacts were recovered from the site, no pottery, no trash, no evidence of architecture. The dates assigned to the artifacts came from the Latin inscriptions, which were surprisingly helpful, written as if the items they graced were manufactured as souvenirs. And the lead alloy they were made of was suspiciously modern. But the real kicker is the sword with a carving of a brontosaurus on it! The Tucson artifacts are generally regarded as a hoax these days, but no one has ever owned up to it. Read the story of the medieval artifacts found in Tucson, Arizona, at Archaeology Review. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Erin, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

An argonaut is also known as a paper nautilus. It's a cephalopod, but it's not a nautilus. Nor is it a squid or cuttlefish, but it has a shell. Argonauts are octopuses with shells. And in case you are wondering, the genus Argonauta was named after crew of the mythical Greek ship. Aristotle, Jules Verne, and others have written about these creatures using their shells like a boat to sail across the sea and their tentacles as sails to catch the wind. That's a myth, but the truth about argonauts is even weirder.

The shells they make are not related at all to other cephalopod shells. The argonauts paper-like shells were developed independently after shell-less cephalopods evolved. But are these shells egg cases, helmets, or flotation devices? The argonauts scoop air into them to make themselves buoyant, which lends some credence to Aristotle's assertions, just with different anatomy. So far, the argonauts are strange even among octopuses, but wait until you hear about their bizarre sex lives. The video is less than ten minutes long, the last part is an ad. -via Laughing Squid

If any storytelling device works in the Star Wars universe, you know it will come up again. The Death Star from 1977 was rebuilt in 1983 for Return of the Jedi. Then it came back again in 2015 for The Force Awakens. But a concept that appears even more often is the missing planet. Planets don't really go missing, but the maps that guide us to them tend to fail a lot in Star Wars. Obi-Wan found Kamino missing from the archives in Attack of the Clones. No one knew where Luke Skywalker was in The Force Awakens because a piece of the galactic map was missing. Missing mystery maps came up again in The Rise of Skywalker, Ahsoka, and Skeleton Crew.    

But while Star Wars fans sigh and lament that the same plot device gets used too often, astronomers here on earth tell us that it happens all the time. Maps have gaps, and planets go missing frequently. How does that happen? In Star Wars, it's often deliberate, when someone does not want to be found. Find out why it happens in real life from those who try to map the stars, at Inverse.

It's always interesting to find out what the rest of the world thinks of your culture. Laurence Brown has been pointing out the differences between Britain, where he grew up, and his adopted country, the USA, in his Lost in the Pond series. Over the years, as Brown has settled in and become an American citizen, his video subjects have become less British and more centered on America. In this video, he focuses on the things that make Americans stand out. We tend to be friendlier than most folks, believe it or not. We'll wave to strangers, greet strangers, and even hold a conversation with strangers. We smile at strangers, too, or maybe we're just showing off our teeth. Anyway, this gregariousness makes people from other countries wonder whether we are trying to take advantage of them or we're just nuts. There are other ways Americans are different that he'll point out for us. The video also features several sequences of Laurence doing his American accent while dressed as a Canadian. Or maybe he's going for an upper-Midwestern look. Be on the alert for a 70-second ad at 3:12.

In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte arrived in Egypt with his army and a contingent of scholars who wrote about the magnificent monuments they visited. That began a global fascination with the pyramids of ancient Egypt. As the 19th century progressed, more and more tourists made it a point to climb the Great Pyramid of Giza while in Egypt. Some of those pyramid climbers included Mark Twain, Amelia Edwards, and Arthur Conan Doyle, all of whom wrote about their experience. It wasn't an easy climb- 479 feet, or 146 meters over large stones- but it was a once-in-a-lifetime achievement they could brag about for years. Some folks even carved their names in the stones, and the Egyptians didn't mind. Or more accurately, they looked the other way because of the tourism dollars. But eventually they came to see what damage all those tourists were doing to their ancient monuments, and the practice of climbing the pyramids was prohibited in 1930. Some folks got away with it even after that, but today the thought of damaging these ancient structures just for a thrill is horrifying to us. Read about the tourists who climbed the pyramids and see plenty of pictures at Danny Dutch.

(Im age credit: Maison Bonfils)

No comic book franchise has ever had so many failed attempts at jumping to the silver screen than The Fantastic Four. Will The Fantastic Four: First Steps break that curse? With a cast led by Pedro Pascal as Mr. Fantastic, gorgeous visuals, a '60s vibe, and a bit of humor, it might just be a hit. You can tell by the first teaser that they are leaning into the family theme pretty heavily.  The Fantastic Four: First Steps is, of course, an origin story, and is the 37th movie of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It will also be the first of the MCU's "phase six," in case anyone is keeping up with that. We'll meet Reed Richards, aka Mr. Fantastic, Sue Storm, aka the Invisible Woman, Johnny Storm, aka the Human Torch, and Ben Grimm, aka The Thing when the movie opens on July 25th, 2025. -via Nag on the Lake

Some precious gems would be boring if they were pure. Both emeralds and rubies in their pure form are colorless, yet we know rubies by their deep red color and emeralds by their rich green. Both colors are caused by a small amount of chromium in the gems, and their differing color has to do with the interaction of chromium with certain crystal structures. In other words, the gemstones' colors are not pigments, but are in the light-absorbing powers of their chemical makeup.

Rubies are composed mostly of the mineral corundum, which in its crystallized form consists of aluminum ions each surrounded by six oxygen ions. Emeralds are made of beryl, which contains beryllium, aluminum, silicon and oxygen. Each aluminum ion is surrounded again by six oxygen ions just like in a ruby, but the beryllium and silicon make the mineral very different. Throw a little chromium into the mix and you can tell rubies from emeralds just by color, because the chromium in emeralds absorbs red light and leaves it looking green. Rubies absorb green light, making its chromium look red. This is explained in much more detail at the Conversation, but they still can't explain why people pay so much for these stones.
 
(Image credit: Vassil)

How do you improve the Star Wars movies? Don't answer that, because we'd be here all day. But one way would be to make them comedies, and put Jim Carrey into various roles to show us how funny they really could be.

There have been around a dozen Star Wars movies and a few TV series, too. Jim Carrey has appeared in 45 feature films over the past 40 years. How hard would it be to find places where Carrey's nonsense would fit in the Star Wars universe perfectly? If you've ever tried this kind of work, you know that the idea is simple, but the execution is a lot of work. It appears that YouTuber Your_Kryptonite7 knows what he's doing here and has a deft hand at editing. I, for one, would go see every Star Wars movie in the theater once again if they were remade to be comedies. -via Geeks Are Sexy

In 1991, the Oakland-Berkeley Firestorm swept through those suburbs and destroyed more than 3,000 homes. One of them belonged to Bill Wright. His family was okay, and the loss of his house and possessions didn't traumatize him, but the process of rebuilding afterward caused him to think hard about the process of acquiring possessions and life building itself. Within a few years he turned that process into a video game called The Sims.

The Sims was a "sandbox" game, which already existed, but it was the first to allow players to create people instead of just architecture and build their daily lives from scratch. Critics expected it to be too boring. Electronic Arts was prepared to see it flop, but crossed their fingers anyway. And The Sims was a runaway hit, becoming the biggest-selling PC game of all time. The Sims has just turned 25 years old, and it's still a hit among both those who first played it a quarter-century ago and those who are just learning about world building. Read how The Sims changed the way we play video games at Smithsonian, and if you're interested, find a ton of links about The Sims at Metafilter.

The movie Gladiator II came out Thanksgiving week last year, a full 24 years after the original, and might as well have been called Gladiator: The Next Generation. It lacked both the originality of the first movie and Russell Crowe. But audiences flocked to theaters to see it, which proves that after 24 years, you can release the same movie again because no one cares about the first one. They introduced novelty into the story by making some characters and scenarios extra bizarre, whether that's historically accurate or not, because historical accuracy doesn't win awards or sell movie tickets. Besides all that, the highlight of Gladiator II was the villain, played by Denzel Washington, who stole the show for himself. And it has plenty of the violence that audiences crave. Screen Junkies pulls apart Gladiator II so you can decide after all this time whether it's something you might want to watch.

Back in the days when we had a lot of patent medicine but few actual cures, there arose one that was rather well-known even though no one talked about it. Redditor little_pwrlftr moved into a very old house and found Orange Lily vaginal suppositories in her attic. Asking about them online, she got a lot of information, including a link-heavy comment from historian gerardmenfin that tells the story.

Orangne Lily was supposed to cure womb diseases of all kinds, including "leucorrhoea, painful periods, irregularities, cancers in their earlier stages, tumors, displacements, lacerations and all ovarian troubles." Usually a medicine effective against such a broad list of maladies would be rumored to also cure pregnancy, and the product would be used as an abortifacient, although probably without much success.

Orange Lily was invented by Dwight Merriman Coonley in South Bend, Indiana, in the 1880s. It started out as a copy of Orange Blossom suppositories, which contained chlorophyl, starch, glycerine, petrolatum, borax, talc, cocoa, and soap. That doesn't sound like it would help any medical problem. Eventually, Orange Lily would also contain chloretone, which is a brand name for chlorobutanol, which is "a preservative, sedative, hypnotic and weak local anesthetic." In that iteration, Orange Lily may have been somewhat useful against bacteria and fungus, as well as pain. These suppositories were actually available in Canada up into the 1960s!

Several photographs at reddit show us the instructions for use and the testimonials that accompanied this medicine.  

KC and the Sunshine Band was big in the disco era because their music, while not all that lyrically  profound, was infinitely danceable. Their 1975 song "That's the Way (I Like It)" topped the Billboard chart twice and became an international hit. It would be easy to mash it up with another hit song, but which one?

DJ Cummerbund went on tour with KC and the Sunshine Band a couple of years ago (yes, they are still working) and had plenty of time to contemplate this mashup. He didn't want to decide between the many songs that could be set to that classic disco beat, so he used all of them. That's why this mashup is credited to Everybody and the Sunshine Band. He isn't kidding about everybody. The singing comes from such diverse musicians as Aerosmith, Dolly Parton, Nine Inch Nails, Hall and Oates, Crazytown, System of a Down, TLC, Bon Jovi, Coolio, and a few other artists who might really surprise you. This is the one song you should save for your daily dance workout, because you won't be bored. -via Laughing Squid