Rin Tin Tin was a German shepherd who became the star of a series of Hollywood movies in the 1920s, playing himself as a hero of all sorts. His movies were so successful that the dog has been credited for saving Warner Bros. from bankruptcy. You probably already knew that. But you might not know Rin Tin Tin's origins. He was born in France in the midst of World War I.

When the Allies took over a section of northern France from German occupation, American soldier Lee Duncan was among those tasked with searching through what the Germans left behind. In an abandoned military kennel, Duncan found a starving mother dog with five puppies less than a week old. After their rescue, Duncan kept two of the puppies, and snuck them aboard a ship when he returned after the war. One was Rin Tin Tin. Back in California, Duncan entered his dog in shows, but more importantly, showed him to friends involved in the movie business. Rin Tin Tin got his start in film by playing wolves, then worked his way up to top billing. Read the biography of the biggest dog in Hollywood at Vintage Everyday. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Warner Bros.)

If the earth had no predators, then the rest of the animals would live without fear, and flourish in their own ways, right? The lion laying down with the lamb, so to speak. But in the real world, nature tries to balance all animals, plants, and even microbes into their own ecological niche. We can speculate as to the effects of a predator-less world, but it's already happened in real life, with an accidental experiment in Venezuela. Lost predators mess with every layer of the ecosystem underneath them, including plants and insects, in what is called a "trophic cascade." Minute Earth tells that story.

Venezuela is not the only place where this lesson has been learned. Another real-world experiment revealed the massive effects only after predators were re-introduced, when wolves were re-introduced to Yellowstone National Park. The effects become more notable the longer the experiment continues. Sooner or later, we will learn to stop messing with Mother Nature. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Source: CandyStore.com.


The Candy Store has been surveying and tabulating the USA's best-loved Halloween candies for years, and many of those years, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups has reigned at the top of the list. But not this year. They've crunched the numbers to find out what kind of candy is being purchased the most for Halloween. The interactive map above will tell you the top three candies in each state. Strangely, candy corn made the top ten, even though people often cite it as the worst Halloween candy. But that list is based on sales. We are all familiar with the concept of buying much cheaper candy to give away to trick-or-treaters than if we were eating it ourselves.   

If you want to know what people think, there's also the list of the ten worst and ten best Halloween candies by popular opinion. As expected, candy corn made the "worst" list, even though people buy it like crazy. It strikes me that most of the candies on the "worst" list are relatively hard to find, but Baby Boomers buy them out of nostalgia, and young trick-or-treaters are not impressed. As you might guess, the top ten favorites lean heavily toward more expensive chocolate.  -via Fark


 

The colossal sculpture of four presidents on the side of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota is actually titled Shrine of Democracy. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum designed the 60-foot-tall heads and supervised their construction from 1927 to 1941. Everyone who sees it asks "How'd they do that?" Let's take a look at the process of pulling those president's faces out of the sheer rock cliff face. It was far from easy. There was the problem of access, meaning they had to build roads to the site, and even harder, get power to the hydraulic tools used to carve the faces. And imagine the guys who had to spend eight hours a day hanging over the side of a cliff using jackhammers. An ingenious system had to be designed to tell the workers where and how deep to carve. The sculpture on Rushmore was never completely finished, but what was accomplished was a marvel of old-fashioned (meaning non-computer) know-how. There's a 60-second skippable ad at 4:00, and the last half-minute is promotional. -via Laughing Squid

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde can be just a scary yarn about a monster or a deep philosophical exploration. Robert Louis Stevenson's tale looks at the duality of the psyche, the good and evil that reside together in one man. In the story, they came out at different times of the day, the kind and respectable Jekyll in daylight, and the murderous Hyde at night. A true case of murder may have been the inspiration for the story.

Stevenson had an acquaintance in Edinburgh, Scotland, that was a French teacher at an exclusive school. Eugène Chantrelle was a friendly fellow to those around, and obviously loved his children. But he abused his wife for years until she died under mysterious circumstances. The cause of her death was hard to determine as there were so many suspicious circumstances- was it the gas Chantrelle left on, the opiates found in his home, or the poison he hoarded? Read about Eugène Chantrelle and the split personality he displayed at CrimeReads. -via Damn Interesting

Some crimes, and the criminals that made them happen, become globally famous, like Charles Manson, the Menendez Brothers, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Jeffrey Dahmer. But even if you follow true crime novels, movies, and websites, there are plenty of other big crimes that didn't get such publicity.

It's true that those who commit horrific crimes do not deserve to be famous, which is why you can't name any of the mass shooters from the past couple of decades (besides there being too many to keep up with). But you might want to learn about some of the lesser-publicized crimes from the historical record in this video from Weird History. They include not only murder, but fraud, counterfeiting, arms dealing, sexual abuse, and more. If you'd rather read them than listen to Tom Blank tell us these stories, you can do that at Ranker. In fact, that list contains more stories.

Did you know Ray Bradbury wrote the screenplay for John Huston's 1956 film, Moby Dick? Here, they're discussing pages of the script. #RayBradbury #BradburyInHollywood #FunFact #FunFactFriday pic.twitter.com/UV0R3XVPIJ

— Ray Bradbury Official (@raybradbury) June 28, 2024

Even as he became a literary icon in science fiction, Ray Bradbury was an avid fan of John Huston movies. At an opportunity to meet Huston, Bradbury expressed his admiration and gave Huston a few of his books. After reading them, Huston called Bradbury and proposed making a movie out of one of Bradbury's books, but it was not to be. Instead, Huston eventually hired Bradbury to write a screenplay for Moby Dick -a book Bradbury hadn't even read.

That's how Bradbury ended up spending six months in Ireland rewriting the notoriously difficult Moby Dick for the big screen. He made more money than he ever had before, but was treated horribly by Huston. Maggie Bradbury considered conditions so bad that she took their children and went to Italy. The experience was so taxing that Bradbury turned down all the screenwriting offers that poured in afterward. The moral of the story is to never meet your heroes. Read about the screenwriter behind Moby Dick and the ordeal that project turned out to be at the Los Angeles Review of Books.  -via Strange Company

Treasure hunter finally finds Golden Owl after decades https://t.co/UQDzMLc6KM

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) October 3, 2024

Back in 1993, a marketing consultant and an artist designed Sur La Trace de La Chouette d’Or, a treasure hunt in France. The target was a sculpted owl, and the prize was another owl sculpted in gold and silver with gems. But no one found the treasure, and the publicity faded away. Only those most dedicated to finding the owl continued to hunt for it. Then last fall, the undiscovered treasure was in the news again as stories about the people working to find the golden owl went viral. We posted it here, if you recall. That must have motivated a lot more people to get involved, because only a few months later later, the owl was found.

The contest was made difficult by a series of clues that had to be solved. If someone had found the owl by happenstance, using a metal detector, for example, the competition would have been rendered moot. Over the years, the Golden Owl hunt has been the subject of movies, books, and forums. Max Valentin, the founder of the contest, died, and the administration of the hunt was passed to artist Michel Becker, who designed the owl but did not know where it was until Valentin's death.

Someone figured out the exact location from the clues in March of this year. Becker took the time to verify the winner and the solution to the clues that was communicated, and on October 3rd announced that a winner has been determined. The owl was dug up yesterday, and people are urged to stop digging. No, we don't yet know who the winner is.  -via Metafilter

Life as we know it exists on the surface of earth. Life as we are learning more and more about exists in the oceans, even when they are really deep and incompatible with surface life. But there's a whole other biosphere underground, and that means way underground, going down miles under our feet. Down there where it is too hot, dark, and oxygen-depleted for most living things, there are microbes and multicellular life forms that thrive on heat and toxic chemicals. They make their own ecosystems out of whatever they can, including rocks, each other, and even their own bodies. Kurzgesagt shows us some of the bizarre adaptations that living creatures have developed in order to live and even thrive deep in the rocks underground. You might be surprised at the British pronunciation of "methane," which took me off guard. The last two minutes of this video are promotional.

Have you ever eaten a fluffernutter? It's a sandwich made with peanut butter and marshmallow creme, and sugar-craving kids love it. I have made peanut butter fudge with marshmallow creme, but the idea of putting those things between two slices of white bread makes me ill. Be that as it may, the term fluffernutter goes back to the 1960s, but the sandwich was invented in 1918. That's long enough to declare the fluffernutter an American tradition, but you might be surprised to learn that the woman who invented it, Emma Curtis, did so to promote Snowflake Marshmallow Creme. At the time, that was a new product of the Curtis Marshmallow Company, which she founded with her brother. And so it goes. When you develop a new food product, you have to tell people how to use it.

A whole slew of your family's traditional recipes started out as promotional gimmicks. You shouldn't be surprised to find that Grandma's beloved pineapple upside-down cake with nuts came from a recipe on the back of a can of Dole pineapple rings. Read about these and more traditional American recipes that started out as product marketing at Atlas Obscura.  

(Image credit: Kimberly Vardeman)

Shooting baseball on a 130 year-old panoramic film camera ⚾️🎞️ pic.twitter.com/OjzLxnKNNt

— Miles | Expired Film Club (@expiredfilmclub) September 24, 2024

Miles of the Expired Film Club takes wonderful pictures of sports events with vintage cameras. Lately, he's been taking black and white panoramas with a Kodak Panoram from around 1900. This camera was introduced not long after film rolls were invented to replace glass plates. The camera was a box with a swinging lens that moved in the same arc as that of the film roll at the back. This camera was especially useful at taking sharp photos from a distance. Miles also shows us the images he took with this camera of automobile racing and soccer. Even though the camera was a breakthrough for its time, it is mechanically simple compared to what we use now, so it still works well 120 years later. If you're wondering where he gets the film, it's from a specialty supplier in Britain called Analogue Wonderland. They also developed the film. Despite their 2012 bankruptcy, Kodak continues to manufacture film for cameras, which it distributes through Kodak Alaris, one of its spinoff companies.

Every year, the rangers at Katmai National Park in Alaska get the public involved in the conservation of brown bears by holding the Fat Bear Week tournament. Which of the park's bears has put on the most weight during the summer? That extra fat is crucial for sustaining the animals through their winter quasi-hibernation, particularly pregnant bears. There is no safe method for weighing bears to see how they've packed on the pounds, so they are photographed from a safe distance and we get to judge how well they've packed on the pounds during the summer.   

Meet the bears of the tournament and check out the live webcams to see what the bears are doing. This year's contest comes in the wake of a couple of unfortunate incidents. A portion of the Brooks River was closed to visitors after some fishermen were observed to be feeding fish to bears. Human-bear interactions are not safe and make the bears lose their fear of humans. Bear No. 402 was sadly eliminated from the tournament before it began when Bear No. 469 killed her on Monday. Also, fan favorite Otis, who won the tournament four times, is no longer around. At an estimated 28 years of age, he might never return to the Brooks River.

Vote in each round at this page, and watch your favorite bear advance or be eliminated. The matchups will continue through October 8th, and the winner will be announced late that night.  

The bigfin squid (Magnapinna) has rarely been seen or captured on camera, most often on surveillance cameras trained on deep sea oil-drilling operations. An adult bigfin can have tentacles up to eight meters (26 feet) long! But one was recently captured on camera in the Tonga Trench east of Fiji in the Pacific Ocean, the second-deepest ocean trench in the world. A team from the Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre and Inkfish are exploring the Tonga Trench, and caught a glimpse of a bigfin with a remote camera sent to a depth of 3,300 meters (10,827 feet) with a fish as bait. The bigfin walks in from the darkness, using its tentacles as legs against the ocean floor. It's about a half-minute in before you can see it. It doesn't take the bait, instead straightening up before fleeing, as if something spooked the squid. Researchers believe this specimen is a juvenile, as its "legs" are only around 13 feet long. Read more about the bigfin at PetaPixel. -via Damn Interesting

In October of 1809, New York City's Evening Post newspaper had a notice about a missing person. Diedrich Knickerbocker was last seen leaving his home, and readers were encouraged to come forth if they had any clues as to his whereabouts. They later published a letter from a man claiming to have seen Knickerbocker. Then a letter from his landlord appeared. By this time, readers were rather invested in the mystery of the elderly man who went missing, especially New Yorkers who had the historic Knickerbocker name. So when another story updated the public with the news that a manuscript had been found in Diedrich Knickerbocker's apartment, and it would be published, readers were quite curious about it.

The two-volume book was titled A History of New York, and it was supposedly published by Knickerbocker's landlord. He had written a preface to it himself, detailing Knickerbocker's disappearance. But the book wasn't written by Knickerbocker, and the landlord didn't exist. Neither did Diedrich Knickerbocker. The book was written by a young man named Washington Irving, and came with ready-made publicity thanks to the Evening Post. But that didn't mean that the letters about Diedrich Knickerbocker stopped. Read how Irving pulled off the hoax and the fallout that still remains, at Mental Floss.

When someone refers to the King James Version of the Bible, they are referring to King James I of England (also Scotland and Ireland), who commissioned a new standardized translation. James was made king of Scotland as an infant, and was used as a political pawn by the court and his family members. His mother was jailed and eventually executed by Queen Elizabeth I, who later designated James as her successor as the English monarch. It's no wonder that James had some peculiar ideas about women.  

King James led quite an eventful life, so his campaign against witches hardly registers four hundred years later. It was very important to the women who were tortured and burned as a result. Under his rule, witches were put to death whether or not they had ever caused anyone harm. Confessions and accusations were gathered by torturing the victims, so if you were suspected of witchcraft, you couldn't win. This is what happens when leaders are convinced they are ordained by God instead of becoming king by the accident of birth.