Dream of waking up & seeing Antarctica in all its glory? Penguins plodding around, the sun peeping over snow topped mountains. A job like no other. Join us & help protect Antarctica's heritage & conserve its precious environment. Apply by 25 April. https://t.co/NPSf6dKLdi pic.twitter.com/GmJYIq5w1m

— UK Antarctic Heritage Trust (@AntarcticHT) April 4, 2022

The UK Antarctic heritage Trust is looking for people to work in Port Lockroy on Goudier Island off the Antarctic Peninsula. There are three positions open, Base Leader, Shop Manager, and General Assistant. Port Lockroy is a museum and historic site, and one of few tourist stops on the continent. It's been closed for two years due to the pandemic, which is why they are recruiting new employees for the 2022-23 season.

The position of Base Leader is just what it sounds like. You supervise everyone else and will be responsible for everything. The Shop Manager will run the gift shop. Lest you laugh, every year, Port Lockroy receives around 18,000 tourists from cruise ships in the Antarctic summer. You will also run the post office, and are required to monitor the wildlife and environment, with a report due in March. That's the penguin-counting part. You'll also help out with the museum. The third position is that of General Assistant, which means you will help out at the museum, gift shop, and post office, plus monitor supplies and give lectures to tourists when the ships arrive. You'll also keep a blog and do some public relations work and advertising.

These jobs all sound like a neat Antarctic adventure. But be aware that the conditions are fairly spartan. You'll be rooming with the other staff, there is no running water, electricity is limited, and while emails may be sent by satellite, there is no internet access or mobile phone service. You'll also have to do your share of the cooking. The nearest doctor is in Argentina. Showers may be taken when cruise ships are docked. Read more about the recruiting campaign at UPI, and submit your application here. -via Fark

Her name was Louise Weber, but as a dancer in the chic Paris nightclubs, she became known as La Goulue ("The Glutton" in English) because of her habit of drinking up patrons' refreshments as she danced by. She was also called "The Queen of Montmartre." She snuck away from her family's laundry business at age 16 and danced in clubs around the Paris suburbs, building her reputation. La Goulue debuted at the Moulin Rouge in 1891 and reigned as their star for four years. She danced an early version of the can-can called the chahut and charmed audiences with her outrageous behavior. La Goulue became one of artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's favorite subjects.

By 1895, Weber had saved enough money to strike out on her own. She invested in her own traveling show, but she did not dance- she instead became a lion tamer! Read the story of La Goulue at Europeana. -via Everlasting Blort

Digital effects made with computer power opened a whole new world as to what movies can be. But knowing, or just feeling, that the latest action film was whipped up by digital effects companies instead of actors on a set leaves us feeling a bit cynical about the entire entertainment industry. Or does it? TIFF Originals lays out the evidence. In certain movies, digital effects leave us with a bad taste in our mouths, while others sell it so well we don't care. They break down the making of Mad Max: Fury Road as the main example. People loved the practical effects, the real vehicles, the stunt men risking their lives, and the stars who went through hell to make the movie real. However, every scene in the film was enhanced with digital effects. It appears that the difference may be the characters. We know when real people are doing real things, it makes the movie seem more real. -via Kottke

Joseph Mikulec is not a household name these days, but 100 years ago, he was a celebrity that you might meet on the street. He was famous for walking all around the world, collecting autographs. Born in 1878 in Croatia, Mikulec began hiking the world around 1900. He told people he met that a publishing company in Croatia had offered him big money if he would walk 25,000 miles and write about his experiences. We don't know how true that was, but he walked six continents and collected autographs of famous people. The more publicity he received for the stunt, the more access he got to the movie stars, political figures, sports stars, and wealthy movers and shakers whose signatures he sought.

In the 1920s, Mikulec walked across the US, adding autographs and eventually becoming an American citizen. He compiled his autographs, along with travel souvenirs and newspaper clippings, into a huge volume that weighed 60 pounds. Still, relatively little is known about Mikulec, including anything at all after 1929. But the book of autographs has resurfaced, and is now for sale. Read what is known about Joseph Mikulec, the "Globe Trotter," at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Library of Congress)

The movies in The Lord of the Rings trilogy total more than 11 hours. It was an awesome story, though, and many of us sat through the whole thing in theaters without an intermission. But does LOTR pass the Bechdel test? To do so, a book or movie must have three things: 1. at least two women 2. who talk to each other 3. about something other than a man. To show that LOTR indeed passes the test, Eight Foot Manchild made a supercut of the scenes in the movie in which women talk to each other. He said he scanned more than 13 hours of footage, which means the extended versions. That's a lot of work! And I guess that the movie technically passes.

A commenter pointed out there was  there was another scene in which these same two characters, Morwen and Freda, talked as the mother put her child on a horse. And they talked about the child's brother. Other fans pinpointed a couple of scenes in which a woman says the equivalent of "Hi!' to each other. I suppose that would make it better. Yet the top discussion at reddit was about the lack of dialogue between Legolas and Frodo. -via reddit

I recall some serious arguments in the my childhood between kids who insisted wrestling is fake and those who insisted it's real. What did we know- we were kids. According to Simon Whistler, the audience for professional wrestling was pretty much in on it from the beginning. Oh, wrestling was as serious as prizefighting and horse racing back in the day, but in the early part of the 20th century, spectators realized that legitimate wrestling was rather boring. Promoters stepped in to make it more exciting, and it became "staged" (which is a better description than "fake"). Those who produced the matches did anything they could to put butts in the seats. It wasn't long before betting died out of pro wrestling, but there was always money in tickets and later on TV. And there were plenty of other sports one could place a bet on.

This latest video from Today I Found Out goes through the history of wrestling and the steps taken to make it entertainment. You can skip to 1:18 to get to the subject matter. -via Boing Boing

You can also read the story of pro wrestling in our previous articles, The Man in the Mask and The Legend of Gorgeous George.

Nature has given us a wide variety of substances that can act as a medicine, a recreational drug, or a murder weapon, depending on the dosage. There are also a lot of substances that will just plain kill. And since we all eat and drink, poisoning has a long history of the being the easiest way to murder someone. Arsenic was once the easiest way to get rid of a husband, just by serving him dinner. In the Old West, whiskey was sometimes served with a dash of strychnine. During Prohibition, industrial alcohol was imbued with poisonous methanol, to deter -or kill- those who wanted to drink it. Nazi war criminals used cyanide for both killing concentration camp inmates and for suicide.

Read about these poisonings and more, and also the most fashionable way to store your poisons, at Messy Nessy Chic. And when someone pours you a drink, watch how they hold their hand over the glass.

Back in 2010, Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate introduced the world to an adorable seashell named Marcel, or more specifically, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. You can see the original trilogy of shorts here. Over the past five years, the creators have been working on a full-length film in secret, so they could maintain creative control without having to deal with deadlines, a budget, or outside interference. The finished product was unveiled at the Telluride Film Festival last fall, and was picked up for distribution by A24. The movie is a "documentary" that follows Marcel as he searches for his family. The movie stars Fleischer-Camp and Slate, plus Isabella Rossellini, Rosa Salazar, Thomas Mann, and Lesley Stahl. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On will be in theaters on June 24. -via Metafilter

Last fall, we learned about Dylan, who ate all his meals at Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park with  a $150 annual Dining Pass. Over seven years, he saved enough money to pay off his students loans and buy a house. Dylan's story went viral, and he was interviewed on some major TV shows. At the time, he was still eating a meal every day at Six Flags, but that will soon come to an end when his current pass expires. Six Flags is doing away with the $150 all-you-can-eat plan. The park's new pricing structure doesn't have any plan offering unlimited meals. In fact, the most expensive plan will now only come with ten meals for the year.

Did Dylan's viral story have anything to do with the annual pass plans changing? You might guess that the park probably sold a lot of dining passes right afterward. A representative from Six Flags denies that Dylan's story had anything to do with it, stating only that the pandemic caused the pricing restructure. Read about what Dylan's life was like after going viral and how it may have contributed to the scheme's downfall at Mel magazine.

(Image credit: Jeremy Thompson)

There're two types of cats.🐈🦐😅 pic.twitter.com/W9NQWsr5fv

— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) March 28, 2022

Make sure the sound is on for this one. The common perception of cats is that they all like seafood. Cat food producers will tell you that the fishier the smell, the more that cats like it. They have to draw a fine line between appealing to a cat and making the human who serves that cat food sick from the smell. But common perception doesn't tell you that all cats are different, just like humans. I have a white cat like the first one in this video. She is deaf, and I enjoy waking her up with something she thinks smells good. But as you can see here, cats preferences can vary greatly.  -via Fark

Governments used to build underground bunkers to protect people from aerial bombardment in wartime, but after World War II, they backed off because the danger is just too widespread, unpredictable, and devastating to even think they could protect everyone who might someday might need it. The private sector stepped in, because there was money to be made.  

Ever since the dawn of nuclear weapons, there have been companies that specialize in building underground bunkers in which one could survive a nuclear war. They thrived during the Cold War era, and after the fall of the Soviet Union, turned to doomsday preppers for business. But in the five weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, business has been booming. You can get a concrete bunker built underground for around $45,000 and up (way up). You can purchase a space in a converted missile silo so you can hunker down with others. But if you are just starting to think about it, you may have to wait in line. Read about the booming business of bunkers at CBC.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: A. Latina Brown)

The internet is a wonderful place, full of documentation on things you never knew existed. You've probably never considered the testing procedures for manhole covers, grates, and other objects made to be embedded in roads. After all, they have to be tough, or anyone driving over them could meet disaster. The testing process is largely automated and is conducted by a robot that drives over them. This industrial video from the company PAM has no narration and French text, but what information they give is pretty easy to decipher even if you don't read French. The robot drives over the test object ten times a minute, at 50 kilometers per hour, for a total of 5,000 passes, to ensure the manhole covers will last 20 years. At least that's what I think it says. -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Inspired by the Lego Star Wars trench run diorama, which won't even be available until later this month, Evie Rees made a birthday cake. It's quite elaborate, to say the least! The entire artwork is edible, with the exception of the spaceships and their stands. Using real LEGO bricks as molds, she made the LEGOS out of fondant. The blue pieces were picked out of assorted candy sprinkles. It took two days to get it all done- the fondant decorations came first, and the cake was baked on the second day. One side of the trench is Victoria sponge cake, and the other side is carrot cake. Rees could have made it chocolate and vanilla to represent the light side and the dark side, but bowed to what her family prefers to eat. Yes, they ate it. But the photographs are forever. You can see a gallery of ten larger images of the cake in this reddit post. 

When you think about a cat in ancient Egypt, you probably think of the god called Bast. A god pictured as a cat must mean that cats were worshiped, right? That's the popular notion, but it's a lot more complicated than that. Yes, we've found millions of cat mummies, but my first thought on learning that was that they used cats as practice for mummification. However, that's not part of the story, either. SideQuest gives us the longer, more involved story of how cats were regarded in ancient Egypt. Now, just imagine when archaeologists a few thousand years from now dig up and decipher our internet archives of lolcats and catios and crazy cat lady stories and, quite understandably, assume that we worshiped cats. No, we just treat them like they are our masters and we are their servants. And when they eventually discover toxoplasmosis and its effects, they'll understand why. -via Digg

Ukraine is so proud of their wheat fields that they designed their national flag around them. You may have recently read that Ukraine is the world's breadbasket, which might come as a shock to Americans. Yes, America produces a huge amount of the world's wheat grain, too, but Ukraine is the reason we grow that productive wheat to make bread. Before 1880, most American bread was made with rye, corn, or low-gluten soft wheat varieties. The vagaries of history and waves of immigration brought the staple known as Turkey wheat to the Great Plains of the US.

This variety of wheat has roots in Crimea, a peninsula that is recognized as part of Ukraine, which was once under Turkish control—hence the grain’s name. It earned German Mennonite stewards in 1770, after Catherine the Great promoted settlement, promising the group they could keep their pacifist values and language. When regime change and conscription came knocking again, these people needed to find a new home.

Of course, wheat continued to be produced in Ukraine long after it spread to America. Read the history of how Ukrainian wheat came to the US at Modern Farmer.

(Image credit: Сергей Марцынюк)