The unique culture of Japan stands out in many ways. One is that they have the world's most modern mass transit that is used by everyone, especially in the larger cities. Another thing is that those cities have rather compact train cars, sidewalks, passageways, elevators, and apartments in order to serve a huge number of people in the busiest parts of town. Also, Japan is unique for their obsession with kawaii characters that are used for advertising anything and everything.

Now, when humans portray these characters, the costumes are invariably wide to imply their shortness and therefore cuteness. When a mascot goes out in public, there's always the possibility of getting stuck in those narrow turnstiles and elevators. They are forbidden to come out of their costume in public, and often have to rely on the kindness of strangers to make it to work. This series of pictures (click to the right to see them all) documents the hazards of the job. -via Boing Boing

The rule of thumb on the internet these days is that half the participants don't know much at all about proper language use, and the other half are cringing at the errors. It's best for your blood pressure to let those errors slide, but it's really hard not to judge someone for making the same language mistakes that have been pointed out a million times.  

Elle Cordova (previously at Neatorama) illustrates the struggle between a grammarian, who really cares about language and how it should be used, and an errorist, who superficially appears to wax eloquent but is making language errors left and right. You have to really pay attention to get all the humor out of this one, as the errorist touches on every pet peeve you can imagine. When yours shows up, you'll want to rewind and see how many others you can identify. If you can keep up will all the errors the first time through, you'll be impressed with Cordova's extensive knowledge of self-replicating language mistakes endemic to the internet. -via Everlasting Blort

Can you read the document pictured above? Around the turn of the century, many schools quit teaching children how to read and write in cursive, instead using that class time to teach typing skills. While schools are starting to go back to teaching cursive, that still leaves a generation of Americans without those skills. Since much of our history is documented in beautiful handwritten cursive script, the National Archives and Records Administration is going above and beyond to preserve, transcribe, and make accessible the documents that tell the story of America. These include letters, pension grants, land records, and diaries. They want to put a lot of American history online to prepare for America's 250th birthday next year.

So they are seeking your help. If you can read cursive handwriting, you can sign up as a volunteer for the National Archives. Work as little or as much as you like, and help make those handwritten documents accessible to everyone. Read about the project and how you can get involved at Smithsonian.

PS: I had no trouble reading the declaration, but I ran into conflicting advice on whether "National Archives" should be treated as a single entity or a plural.

Frozen Hair Round 2:
(Since everyone else is posting my video on this cesspool of an app, I will too!) pic.twitter.com/LKsdySTuZV

— Voicesofjake (@Fischer3Jake) January 16, 2025

Jake Fischer of Voicesofjake shows us both how cold it is outside and how crazy he is by letting his hair freeze. The viral "wet hair challenge" involves going outside in the freezing cold with wet hair and seeing what kind of wild shape you can achieve when your hair freezes in place. It's not for the faint-hearted. Jake went for the straight-up look, and since he has long hair, that was very far up. But think of how cold it can be on your head to wait for the hair to freeze! I'd have to say no thanks, because my hair is short and it wouldn't look much different. Also because it is currently 5° above zero (-15° Celsius) outside my house, and that's just too cold. There are some challenges that aren't worth "winning." Jake also froze his pants off, meaning they were off when he froze them. -via Laughing Squid

We've talked about viruses as being an outlier that strains the definition of life. Viruses do not have the ability to reproduce on their own, but must harness a host cell of another species to replicate. But now there's a new type of life form that is even more primitive than viruses called obelisks.

Obelisks consist of a viroid-like disc of RNA, but they do not have the protein shell that viruses have. Their genetic information is completely distinct from any known species, putting them into a unique phylogenic group. They reproduce by infecting another cell, like viruses do. They haven't yet been classified into the Tree of Life because scientists aren't really sure where they belong. But obelisks have been found in the microbiome of humans, in the digestive tract. One type of obelisks studied infects the bacteria Streptococcus sanguinis, found in human mouths. The impact of obelisks in the human biome has not been determined, but they've been there all this time and just haven't been found until recently. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Ivan N. Zheludev et al. via Cell magazine)

When you are desperate to cure an illness or heal a wound, you are willing to try anything. And eventually, any substance could be tried as a medicine. If it worked, great. If it didn't, we'd probably find out why in a couple hundred years. But by then, students of history would think us really dumb. Not dumb; just desperate. After all, some of our greatest medical discoveries came about by accident or by someone trying some random substance as medicine.

Rabies is a good example of that desperation. Once symptoms appear, the disease is fatal, so victims were willing to eat burnt hair or the liver of the dog that bit them. After all, it couldn't hurt. For arthritis, people were advised to sit inside of rotting whale carcass and breathe in the fumes emitted by its decaying flesh. Those patients would be mighty relieved to have access to some opioids. Weird History is eager to fill us on bizarre medicines that were once trusted, but now just make us say, "What were they thinking?"

The city with the largest population in the world is no longer Shanghai. The link said, "I bet you can’t name it." I thought, I bet that Guangzhou and Hong Kong were officially merged and got a new name. While I was wrong, that is the way that Chongqing, China, became a municipality with 32,054,159 residents.

Like many superlatives, it all comes down to how you define your terms. The Chinese government designated Chongqing in southwestern China as a "direct-administered municipality" which includes the city of Chongqing proper plus several surrounding cities and the rural areas in between. However, Chongqing proper still has 22 million people, which puts it close to Shanghai's 25 million. Wikipedia still lists Tokyo as the biggest city, but such rankings depend on whether you go by city limits, government designations, or metropolitan areas.

At any rate, Chongqing is massive, the size of Austria, and has more people than many of the world's countries. Read about Chongqing and see some gorgeous pictures at Kuriositas.  -via Nag on the Lake 

(Image credit: Jay Huang)

How does this even happen??? pic.twitter.com/gEHesbYxq8

— Springfield Cardinals (@Sgf_Cardinals) January 15, 2025

This guy had the best seat in the house for a Springfield Cardinals game. He was sitting in the front row, behind home plate. He was ready for the action with a beer that probably cost fifteen dollars. And then a foul ball arced over and landed right in that beer, splashing foam all over him. One in a million shot! He wasn't hurt, and his instant reaction was to laugh at the situation. He knows he'll get over the wet face and the lost beer, but he gained a great new story to tell. One redditor mentioned he surely told at least 38 people before the video hit the internet. But it's not just a story, it's a viral video, which is made even greater by his laughter. It's sure to make the ESPN highlight reel. This is a fellow who knows how to enjoy a baseball game. And a beer. -via reddit

Experts say it's best to clean your winter coat at least twice a season. And the rest of us laugh. As Mitch Hedberg once said, "My jacket says 'Dry clean only' on it. Which means ...it's dirty." That label deters many of us from doing anything about it, but even if your winter coat is completely washable, it's easy to put it off until you don't need that coat anymore in the spring.

But you can get your winter coat clean; it just takes getting around to it and knowing how. If your coat is wool or natural fur, it really should go to a professional cleaner. Down, fleece, and leather can be cleaned at home. But don't just throw them into the washing machine, because different materials require different techniques. And don't be intimidated by the idea of washing a winter coat by hand in the sink. It could take some time, but your friends, family, and co-workers will appreciate you showing up without the smell of coat that is years overdue for a cleaning. Read the best methods for cleaning each kind of winter coat at Mental Floss.

In every movie, there's an extra character that never gets mentioned, but that character's point of view is crucial. That's the camera, because the camera is the viewer. A filmmaker has to make a choice as to what the viewer will see, what they will focus on, and what that point of view means to moving the story along. That decision is also affected by the way the characters in the scene move around, and the way you want the camera to move around, because after all, the camera is representing the viewer.

So many of us watch movies and either enjoy them or not, but never think about the hundreds of different decisions filmmakers have to make with every scene. But those decisions together drive how well a film incorporates the viewer into the story. Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting (previously at Neatorama) takes us into the nuts and bolts of the rigorous decision-making process behind every film. Or at least, every good film. -via Nag on the Lake

In the 1920s, the role of women in public life was changing. They could vote, drive, and hold jobs formerly reserved for men, and they reflected this freedom by wearing short hair and shorter skirts than their mothers. Most noticeable were the party girls who drank and danced and were known as flappers. Rebecca Bradley wasn't that kind of woman. She was a graduate student who also held a job and took care of her elderly mother, but she wore her hair short, so the newspapers branded her as a flapper when she was caught robbing two banks -by herself- in Texas. Her very appearance led bank employees to trust her up until the moment she made off with the money.

Newspapers recognized a sensational story when they saw it. Bradley was pretty and petite, and the sexy headlines about her crime sold a lot of papers. She wasn't even the only "flapper bandit" of the time, because who needs facts when you've got a sympathetic criminal to write about? Even the justice system was confused. How could such a pretty young woman pull of these crimes? Read about Rebecca Bradley and her criminal activities at Atlas Obscura.

Over the history of civilization, rats traveled wherever humans traveled. That is, if you count "civilization" as the time beginning when we started growing our own grains. Rats love those things. But furthermore, rats traveled to places where people didn't migrate as much, so they managed to spread fleas and disease to far-flung populations of people, like the plague, which changed Europe forever. They are also invasive species to places all over the world, takemn there by people, who you have to admit are also an invasive species.

But the misery that rats spread among humans and various ecosystems wasn't because they are evil. They've just become dependent on humans to provide their food, and we are very good at that. This TED-Ed lesson from Max G. Levy tells us the good things about rats, too. The video was directed by Ukrainian illustrator and animator Denys Spolitak. -via Laughing Squid

When you're suffering a cold or flu, you eat nutritious chicken soup to feel all warm inside, and you suck on lemon honey lozenges to sooth your cough. But now Progresso has flipped that idea on its head. For a limited time, they are offering "Soup Drops," which are cough drops that taste like chicken soup. The tag line is "Soup you can suck on."

I wondered if these were like chicken bouillon cubes, or sugary candy with a chicken flavor. Dennis Lee at The Takeout volunteered to try a Soup Drop so we don't have to. He says they resemble candy cough lozenges, but they are made with the sugar substitute isomalt, which is not as sweet as sugar. He didn't exactly describe how sweet the Soup Drops are, because he got busy telling us how they really taste. It's not a pretty picture. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Dennis Lee/The Takeout)

When several inches of snow piles up, many of us just think about how to get to work, or how to even get down the stairs without slipping. Then there are those who take advantage of the situation for fun.

Woodworker Matt Thompson describes himself at his YouTube channel as a "Maker of mostly ridiculous and unnecessary things." He makes things to sell as well. Recently he solidified his reputation as the coolest guy in the neighborhood after a snowfall, rigging up his model train with a snowplow on the front to clear the tracks as any full-size train would do. Only this track is along his fence. When the snow is this deep, what else would you do with a train? Right, most of us would just stay inside to play with our toys. Kudos to Thompson for selecting the perfect music to accompany this video, too.  -via Born in Space

Every two years, the World Monuments Fund releases a list of the cultural sites that are in most danger of disappearing due to war, environmental damage, or other causes. The "other causes" come into play for 2025 because one of the sites listed is the moon.

On a relative scale, there are not that many cultural sites on the moon, but the legacy that humans have left there are is monumentally historic. It's been almost 56 years since Neil Armstrong set foot on Tranquility Base. Will future historians be able to even find that spot after we've landed more missions on the moon? When the space junk calls to the surface? Saving such sites will require international cooperation between myriad organizations.

But the moon is only one of 250 sites listed in the document. Read about the danger to the moon's historic sites and other endangered places at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: NASA/Neil A. Armstrong)