Sportswriter Stefan Fatsis is also a competitive Scrabble player. Earlier this month, he was competing in his 116th Scrabble tournament while contemplating retiring from the game. But one night during the tournament, he and some other Scrabble experts discussed a game that day in which top player Will Anderson could have scored a bingo (using all of one's tiles, for a 50-point bonus) by using the word "highveld" but didn't see it. Highveld is a South African term that is in the Collins list of words used in Anderson's tournament, but not in the North American list used in Fatsis' tournament.

Finally, Sokol, who had told us about Anderson’s miss, pointed out that the North American lexicon includes only one of those -VELD words: bushveld, a veld with “abundant shrubby and often thorny vegetation,” according to Merriam-Webster. Interesting! So what was your record today? Make any fun plays? How’s the salad?

Fatsis has never heard of "bushveld" until that discussion. The very next day, Fatsis played against Anna Miransky. At one point in the game, against all odds, his tiles were DEHLSUV. And there was an open B on the board. You might guess what happened, but you'll enjoy reading the whole story. You don't even have to be a Scrabble player to appreciate it. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Fancy Font Generator)

A new website from the Tolkien Estate has a treasure trove of information about JRR Tolkien, beloved author of The Lord of the Rings. Part of the process of creating his fictional world was envisioning it, and Tolkien painted quite a few landscapes of Middle-earth for both The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings, plus the settings for his other books. Some, but not all were used in the book illustrations.

There's also a section on Tolkien's maps, which kept him going in the right direction in his stories, and another featuring his beautiful calligraphy. That's in addition to information about his life and writing. This site could keep a Tolkien fan busy for a while. -via Kottke

A tornado ripped through Elgin, Texas, on Monday. The storm left plenty of property damage, a few injuries, but no fatalities reported so far. Thousands are still without power. The most viral of images from the storm is a video of a red Silverado pickup truck that crossed paths with the tornado. The twister flipped the truck on its side, spun it around, and then righted it. Astonishingly, the man inside was able to drive away. The owner of the truck has stayed anonymous so far, but we get to see what shape the truck is in, and hear froma couple of witnesses.



The man obviously had his seatbelt on. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Chevy seeks out the footage to use in an ad. Silverados are quite protective. Recall this story from several years ago, in which the truck was destroyed but the driver was fine.

-via Digg

The Academy Awards ceremony is this Sunday night, and once again there are a bunch of movies that you haven't seen up for an Oscar. It was just so much easier to stay at home and binge on a television series you've seen before. In this day and age there may be a lot of movies nominated that you've never even heard of. To alleviate this problem, Screen Junkies presents their annual Oscars Honest Trailer. What that means is that this video has a mini-Honest Trailer for each of the ten films competing for the Best Picture Award. Sadly, Spider-Man is not among them. See all the nominees for this year's Academy Awards here.

Art is often considered a form of worship. Hundreds of small towns in Europe have churches and chapels containing priceless Renaissance (and older) artworks that are not as well-known as those hanging in art museums. The church in Castrojeriz, Spain, had a half-dozen 17th-century Flemish tapestries created by a follower of Peter Paul Rubens named Corneille Schutz. The tapestries depicted the muses of the liberal arts. The largest was 13 feet tall and 20 feet wide! And in November of 1980, a thief came in and took them all.

The tapestries were tracked down one by one over the next few years, and so was the art thief. René Alphonse Ghislain van den Berghe had stolen thousands of artworks, and then spent many years helping police to recover them. But the largest of the Castrojeriz tapestries had been vandalized. It was missing a two-foot-square section of the lower left corner, which depicted an angel. It took more than 40 years for the missing piece to be found, but now it has been turned over to the curators of the collection.

Read the tale of the notorious art thief and the missing piece that has finally been reunited with its puzzle at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Carlospalacios)

Gatwick Airport in London ran into an unforeseen problem that is popping up all over the world. When you shut down for a pandemic, you have no idea how long the closure will be. One or two years later, you return to find the plants dead and the refrigerator moldy because you thought you'd be back in a week or two. Gatwick shut down an entire terminal due to fewer flights and passengers, and are now working to get it back up to snuff. Tom Scott once again takes a rather mundane subject and makes it well worth three minutes of your time.  

You may think of Betty Crocker as the face of a cake mix. She's the picture on the cover of my 1972 cookbook. But Betty Crocker is much older than the cake mix, older even than her parent company, General Mills. She was born in 1921 when the Washburn Crosby company needed a name to sign when giving advice to women who asked questions about Gold Medal Flour.

It wasn't long before Betty Crocker, fictional as she was, became a celebrity. Cooks trusted her advice. Washburn Crosby enlisted an army of women with home economics degrees to teach housewives to cook, whether in person, on radio, or with recipe pamphlets. This group of women eventually founded the Betty Crocker Test Kitchen. While they worked hard to develop and perfect recipes, they were also a tourist attraction, as fans flocked to Minneapolis to watch them work. But while the "Crockettes" were the heart and soul of General Mills by then, company executives still expected them to make their birthday cakes, and got a hard lesson when they went over the Crockette's heads with a product that flopped in the 1970s. Read about the women who manned the Betty Crocker Test Kitchen at Atlas Obscura.

Kids are just kids, and babysitters will tell you the hardest part of their job is dealing with parents. People are picky about how their kids are treated, but some can be just plain bizarre. An AskReddit thread posed the question, "what were the weirdest rules parents asked you to follow?" The question inspired more than 8K comments, which comes out to maybe a hundred stories. Here are a couple of examples.

"I had to change the kid's cloth diaper every 2 hours on the dot. The kid was 6. I assumed it was for some sort of disability or something, but no. His parents just didn't want to potty train him, and the kid was content with being babied. I remember just making the kid put his own diaper on and encouraging him to use the bathroom if he had to go. I never went back."

"A single mom once told me to use the bat by the door in the event the kids' father came by and tried to take them. That was pretty weird and uncomfortable."

You can see all the replies in the original reddit thread, where the top comment is a joke that inspired a poem, or see a roundup of the strangest answers at Buzzfeed.

(Image credit: Flickr user Tom Caswell)

Most Americans are familiar with the Emergency Alert System (EAS), which replaced the Emergency Broadcast System (EBS) in 1997. In the age of 24-hour cable and internet, you will rarely hear the weekly tests anymore unless you are up at 2AM on a Sunday, but you will probably recognize the alert tone. That's the tone that is illegal to broadcast unless you are authorized. I used to do it all the time.  

Let me indulge in a personal story about the Emergency Broadcast System. I once worked at a large radio station that was an EBS relay station, meaning we were authorized to send an alert and take over the signal of all the other stations around us in case of a nuclear attack. This was considered a real possibility during the Cold War. I received the necessary training on how to use the system, and would relay weekly tests ("This is a test. This is only a test"). Then sometime, I like to think 1991, that state decided since the Cold War was over, we would use the EBS to alert people about local emergencies. I received more training.

Meanwhile, my husband at the time worked at a competing radio station, so we never discussed radio business. He was promoted to program director. His very first day on the new job was the day I received my first real EBS emergency, just a few weeks after the criteria was changed. The alert went out with my voice saying "This is not a test." It was a severe storm warning, which I thought was silly because it was obvious by looking out the window and what can you do about it? I learned later that my husband, who had not yet been told about the change in criteria because his station was not a relay station and he wasn't a part of management until that day, almost had a heart attack because the Soviets were launching a nuclear attack on his first day in charge.

-via Boing Boing

Jackie Ormes was the first Black American woman to draw a syndicated comic strip. Still, you might never have heard of her because those strips ran in Black newspapers, which existed in most large cities and covered stories that the bigger newspapers ignored. They also syndicated material among themselves nationwide. Jackie Ormes was still in high school when she went to work as a journalist in Pittsburgh. In 1937, her comic strip Torchy Brown from Dixie to Harlem debuted in the Pittsburgh Courier. Torchy Brown was a sexy character modeled after Ormes herself, and somewhat after her sister who was a torch singer. Torchy was a teenager, smart while still a bit naive, who upended Black stereotypes. The readership loved her.

During World War II, Ormes produced Candy, a one-panel comic about a maid who was much more savvy than her white employer. In 1946, she debuted her most popular comic, Patty Jo ‘n’ Ginger, about a precocious little girl in the care of her older sister, who didn't hold back her opinions on how Black people were treated. In 1950, Ormes revived Torchy Brown, this time older and wiser, in Torchy Brown Heartbeats, which came with a paper doll. Jackie Ormes also designed a doll resembling the Patty Jo character, because Black dolls available at the time were horribly stereotyped. An original Patty Jo doll now fetches big bucks.  

As Black newspapers became rare after the Civil Rights movement, Black comic artists, and especially Black women artists, became rare, too. Those who draw look up to Jackie Ormes as an inspiration. Read about Ormes' life and see her comics at Messy Nessy Chic.

Zaouli is an astonishingly difficult traditional dance in which the dancer doesn't repeat steps, and in an unexpected twist, the drums follow the dancer. Notice that the dancer's top half is static, while his bottom half is moving furiously, creating the effect of floating in the air. In the Guro communities of Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), each village has a Zaouli dancer who performs every few days. The tradition is not as old as you might think, having been codified in the 1950s. The dance incorporates older traditions into one performance.  

Zaouli dancers are men, but wear a mask of a beautiful woman, inspired by Djela lou Zaouli (Zaouli, the daughter of Djela). Seven types of masks are used, each representing a different legend. Zaouli was added to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2017. -via Twisted Sifter

Author Ernest Hemingway was renowned for living life to its fullest, even though that sometimes meant running over other people or nature itself. He had a great appetite for adventure, women, and food. Although Hemingway no doubt went through privations at certain times in his life, he always wanted to enjoy food at its best, and wouldn't think twice about telling a fine restaurant exactly how to prepare his meals. Making a hamburger the Hemingway way must have taken quite some time, but the recipe sounds delicious to me. So does the recipe for campsite corn cakes, despite the need to take a food processor, griddle, two bowls, and half a pantry of ingredients along on the camping trip. He liked roughing it without roughing it too much. But Hemingway would also try foods you and I would never consider, like raw lion meat.

And then there's the Hemingway Daiquiri, born at Havana’s El Floridita bar when Hemingway thought daiquiris needed more alcohol. You'll find the recipes for all these dishes, plus Bacon-Wrapped Trout in an article at Flashbak. -via Nag on the Lake

The title of this video is "When you want to dance but only have 2 points of articulation." The taller dancer is a Knights of a Slice action figure, with joints that were made for dancing. The little guy, not so much. The great thing about this stop-motion animation is how the larger figure isn't making fun of the Playmobil guy, but instead is encouraging him to dance in the way that he can. Adorable. -via reddit

There have been a lot of kings, queens, earls, dukes, etc. in British history, and most have died of illness or other natural causes. But being in power also means a somewhat enhanced risk of dying by murder or by war. In a list of the strangest royal deaths in Britain, the first in chronological order stands out, whether it's technically true or not. Viking Sigurd Eysteinsson was the Earl of Orkney in the 9th century. He battled the Picts, led by the Earl of Moray who was named Máel Brigte the Bucktoothed. You can just imagine what he looked like.

Having challenged the Pictish earl to a battle where each side could have 40 men, Sigurd reneged on the deal and brought 80. Inevitably, Máel Brigte and his army were defeated and suffered the ignominy of having their heads cut off and tied to the Vikings’ saddles. But Máel Brigte and his enormous teeth would have their revenge: As his severed head bounced around on the horse, his teeth scraped  Sigurd’s leg. Infection set in, and the Viking ruler was dead before he made it back to Orkney.

Yes, he was bitten by a dead man. That's only the first of ten royal deaths that are worth reading about at Mental Floss.

For most of us, our image of a European castle in medieval times comes to us from TV and movies. Some who travel take tours of medieval castles and are astonished at their durability (or else they wouldn't still be there), their size, and their emptiness. But if you lived there, it would be quite different. YouTuber Tod's Workshop shows us Dover Castle and its reconstructed interior, as it was in medieval times, with the furniture and accessories found in such fortified homes where people actually lived hundreds of years ago. Since those people were quite wealthy, they tended to have the best furnishings and decorations that were available at the time. Their belongings were brightly-colored to impress anyone who came inside, and even more so to compensate for the less-than-adequate lighting before light bulbs. It isn't what we think of from the movies; it's even more interesting. -via Metafilter