That photo... Again, compare this cinematically absurd theatrical setup to Zelenskyy's selfie shots in the middle of his people. Putin is dangerously guided by fear, in many ways. pic.twitter.com/Fdodz6Gjgo

— Oliver Reichenstein (@reichenstein) February 27, 2022

Russian president Vladimir Putin has been photographed meeting with various people at either end of a long, long table, leading to plenty of humorous internet memes. Is it covid paranoia or a power play? Probably both, but the end result is ridicule. Tables like these are meant to seat a lot of people, whether for dining or for meetings. When one person is isolated way at the end, it is symbolic of power, wealth, or estrangement.

New Putin table from IKEA, presented by @me_too pic.twitter.com/0wd48j7P7h

— Darth Putin (@DarthPutinKGB) February 15, 2022

The term "cinematically absurd" means a lot. The image of a long table with few people has been used over and over in movies to illustrate a supervillain's power, as explained at Mel magazine. It is such a recognizable symbol that it is used mainly for parody today. Continue reading to see some examples.

Any history of ice cream will be incomplete, because it's so old and hard to define. The Chinese ate a frozen snack made of milk and rice that had been frozen in the snow about 200 BCE. During the Tang Dynasty, the earliest known flavored ice cream was made with flour, water buffalo milk, and camphor (yum!). Centuries later, the Persians were the first to add sugar to frozen treats. But in the summer or in the tropics, frozen desserts were restricted to the rich, as ice had to be transported from far away.

Ice cream really took off when flavorings from the Americas became available: chocolate, vanilla, and molasses. A revolution came when Augustus Jackson, a free Black man who worked as a chef at the White House between 1817 and 1837, developed a method of making ice cream by adding salt to ice in order to freeze the cream. He didn't patent the ice cream maker, but it made homemade ice cream possible. Read about the evolution of ice cream from snow to Rocky Road at Readers Digest.

See also: The history of the ice cream cone, the ice cream truck, and popsicles.

(Image credit: Peachyeung316)

Turn the closed captions on before watching this video. The Dayton Off Road & Outdoor Expo was held this past weekend in Wilmington, Ohio. It has nothing to do with Star Wars or pop culture, but Luke Skywalker was there. Or rather, Fluke Skywalker, who looks a lot like Mark Hammill and makes appearances to benefit children's charities. He will even officiate your wedding! (Hammill calls him a "lukealike.") Anyway, Skywalker met Robert at the expo, and knew just how to communicate. He even signs "May the Force be with you." -via Digg

The Carnival season ends at midnight tonight, with the start of Lent. In the days leading up to the Christian tradition of fasting, celebrations of excess take place all over the world. In Oruro, Bolivia, it's the Carnaval de Oruro. The festival itself pre-dates the arrival of Europeans, but took on Christian traditions over time. The festival features a parade of more than 28,000 dancers and over 10,000 musicians, which takes about 20 hours to complete. Since the city of Oruro is set 12,000 feet high in the Andes, performing in the parade is quite a physical challenge!



Carnaval de Oruro also involves an elaborate dance called the Diablada, or Dance of the Devils. It illustrates a battle between good and evil, or more specifically, a battle between Satan and his minions and the archangel Michael. You can guess who wins in the end. Read more about Carnaval de Oruro and see gorgeous pictures at Atlas Obscura.

You remember Charlotte's Web, the 1952 book that made us all cry about a spider. Oops, spoilers. Even if you haven't read the book, you've probably seen the 1973 animated movie or the 2006 live-action movie. Author E.B. White took a lot of liberties with reality to make a charming book about talking barnyard animals, featuring a spider who could spell words out in her web. What you might find even more unbelievable is that it's based on real life. The farm was a real farm. Wilbur the pig is based on an actual piglet that White loved dearly. Even Charlotte was a real spider, although White only saw her once. But saving her egg sac was a true story. White himself was the hero of that episode.

When he was getting ready to go to New York City for the winter, he decided to take the egg sack with him. He cut it down with a razor blade and put it in a candy box with holes punched in the top. Then he left the box on top of his bureau in his New York bedroom. Soon enough, the egg sack hatched and baby spiders emerged from the box.

Read the rest of that story and nine more about the truth behind the book Charlotte's Web at Mental Floss.

Imagine that just getting to your workplace involved scooting along the face of a rock cliff, hanging onto a chain for dear life. Fighting traffic doesn't seem too bad compared to that! But that's exactly why the Elie Chainwalk was developed, to help fishermen get to their boats in Fife, Scotland. Maybe they have a road by now, but the chain walk is still there, and Tom Scott tries it out so we don't have to. It doesn't look all that difficult going down to the beach. It's even faster if you let go of the chain! But climbing back up, working against gravity, seems quite a bit harder. And if you let go climbing back up, well, you'll either have to start over again, or they'll have to call a helicopter ambulance to come get you.

The Elie Chainwalk is an optional part of the Fife Coastal Path, and should only be used during low tide.

In March of 1980, Mount St. Helens was showing signs of activity such as earthquakes, gas vents, and small eruptions. The mountain was closed off to visitors. That didn't stop Robert Rogers, who had spent his whole life going to places he shouldn't have. He spent that spring exploring Mount St. Helens, bringing back samples for scientists, who didn't ask too many questions. On May 18, the day the top of Mount St. Helens blew off in a huge eruption, Rogers was on the mountainside, getting ready to climb the summit with Francisco Valenzuela, another climber he'd met the night before. Rogers had encountered quite a few other people on the mountain. Some were authorized to be there; some weren't. Some made it back alive, others didn't.

When the eruption happened, Rogers jumped into his car, but became disoriented and took a wrong turn. Both he and Valenzuela drove off the road in a panic, and when they got back on the road, Rogers insisted on going back to their campsite to find a roll of film. All the while, the ash in the air got thicker. Read the story of the serial trespasser who couldn't leave Mount St. Helens alone at Damn Interesting. You can also listen to the story in a podcast at the same link.

(Image credit: Jmkdouglas)

A "useless machine" is one in which you turn it on, and all it does is turn itself off. They can be pretty funny, and the early internet was full of videos about them. We've posted them here before, both plain and fancy, and even political. This one is a bit more dramatic than the simple box that turns itself off. In fact, it has its own personality!

YouTuber fritend1 shares pictures of the inner workings, and the Arduino code that makes it work. -via Fark

You've heard of the infinite monkey theorem. It states that "a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare." It has been used to describe the work here at Neatorama, but we don't have any monkeys. It's really about the idea of randomness. No one expects monkeys to learn how to write, but how much time would elapse before a certain set of words could be produced by random typing? There have been actual experiments to test this theorem.

Getting your hands on infinite monkeys is a bit challenging, let alone hiring infinite zookeepers to clean up infinite piles of feces, so computer programmers have attempted to simulate the monkeys using random text generators. One of the first attempts, in 2004, saw a tiny bit of success when one of the monkeys bashed out the phrase 'VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-‘;8.t', the first part of which was in Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

That took the simulated monkeys 42,162,500,000 billion billion monkey years. The entire works of Shakespeare, it's fair to say, would take a long time.

That's close enough to an "infinite amount of time." That wasn't the only experiment using random text generation to crunch the numbers. Only once has it been tried with actual monkeys, at Paignton Zoo in Devon, England. Learn how that and other such experiments turned out at IFLScience. -via Strange Company

Weird Al has ventured into the world of arcade games with a unique pinball machine themed with his illustrious career. You can get one as a standalone or buy it as an upgrade if you already own a  P3 pinball platform. The name of this machine by Multimorphic is Weird Al’s Museum of Natural Hilarity. It features a video screen, camera, hamster wheel, ball run course, five flippers, and plays 17 Weird Al Yankovic songs.

To really understand how awesome this pinball machine is, you probably need to be at least a little familiar with the Multimorphic P3 pinball system, which is way beyond anything I've ever played. But if you know what you're getting into, the whole machine, upgrades, and various accessories are for sale here. Yeah, it's expensive. If you start from scratch and get all the upgrades and accessories, you're looking at around $13,000. But it sure looks cool, doesn't it? -via Boing Boing

Musician Nahre Sol bought a tiny toy piano that has keys for only two octaves and has the rinky tink sound of a cheap glockenspiel. How do the songs we know and love sound played on this piano? Sol had to rearrange songs to fit into two octaves, and plays a bunch of them for us. Most of the songs are labeled classical, but there are also songs from movies and video games and some surprises. In other words, you've heard them all. Then she rates which ones work on this tiny piano and which don't. There's at least one note on this instrument that's out of tune, but it doesn't get used much. This is one of those videos that may seem long, but once you get started listening to the songs, you can't stop watching. -via Laughing Squid

Here's a list that will really make you want to argue! MSN went to IMDb and found ratings for science fiction TV series, the ranked the top 50. The results may seem a little strange. For one thing, it skews very much toward recent shows, which can be explained by IMDb itself, which wasn't even a thing 50 years ago, and anything internet-based is skewed toward younger users. For another thing, you have to wonder how they defined "sci-fi series," since it includes fantasy, comedy, animation, and superhero series, and especially animated superhero series. There is only one live-action series based on comic book superheroes in the top 50. The highest any Star Trek series placed is #19. And The Twilight Zone, which is mentioned in the introduction, didn't make the list. What were they thinking? Oh yeah, they were thinking that people would check out the list and argue about its contents. See where your favorites lie in this ranking. -via Fark

Sure, that leads us to a whole 'nother question: How exactly does one define science fiction?

When Julius Caesar was 26 years old, he was a long way from commanding the Roman Empire, yet he was an impressive man. He was a Roman prosecutor, known for his way with words, educated and ambitious. Caesar wasn't all that wealthy, but he had plenty of family and political connections. As he was traveling the Mediterranean to further his education, the ship was boarded by Cicilian pirates. Most of the passengers and crew were sent off to be sold in slave markets, but the pirates could tell from his appearance and his demeanor that Caesar would bring more profit by holding out for a ransom. They suggested 20 talents. Caesar was insulted, and insisted that they demand 50 talents. The pirates took him to the island of Pharmacusa, where he lived with the pirates for 38 days while his allies arranged to pay the 50 talents. The pirates thought Caesar was funny, first because of his arrogance in demanding a higher ransom, and then by his bad poetry. But they admired his continual air of authority while in captivity. The ransom finally arrived.

As he prepared to board the ship back to Miletus, Caesar paused to address the pirates. He had no choice, he said, but to bring them to justice. Although they had failed to appreciate his poetry, they had in general treated him well, and individually he bore them no ill will. But they were, after all, pirates. And pirates must be hunted down and executed.

The pirates laughed. They whistled and cheered. He really was a fine speaker.   

Caesar was deadly serious. Seeking the pirates turned him from a lawyer into a warrior, and he hunted them down and captured them. Then he had to do it all over again, as the authorities he gave them to would rather sell them into slavery than crucify them. Read what Caesar did to the pirates at Truly Adventurous.

Ellis Brooks tells us about an accidental experiment with "dystopian food units." What he means is food that comes in shapes, colors, and/or textures that we aren't used to. A buddy gave him some ready-made meals from a delivery service that turned out to resemble astronaut food. A meal of salmon, sweet potato, and asparagus came in six squares in shrink-wrapped plastic. They are packaged that way for portability and ease of cooking, but also to control portions and ingredients. Brooks did not enjoy them.

It was like eating a sad, square-shaped memory of what food once was.

This might remind you of a certain dystopian movie that imagined what eating would be like in the year 2022. Brooks stayed with the packaged food for 24 hours to give it a chance, but ended up eating salad and licking maple syrup off a plate. Read his adventures with real but super-processed square food at OneZero. -via Kottke

(Image: Ellis Brooks)