I got a 1947 recipe for "Spice Cookies" (that turned out to be gingersnaps) from a screenshot on reddit. It called for a half cup of spry, which confounded me until I searched around and found that Spry was once a popular brand of shortening. If anyone in my family had written that recipe down, it would have said Crisco. But that's not the only danger in using vintage recipes. An inordinate number of grandmas jotted down recipes for people who know how to cook, and don't bother mentioning you need to refrigerate cookie dough because everyone knows that!

If you're using a recipe from a hundred years ago, you may see confusing fractions without a slash. If you see "1-2 cup of water," you should know that is very different from "1-2 cups of water." You might also see the terms gill, saleratus, slow oven, or butter the size of an egg. These are translated for you, along with other tips on how to read obsolete directions in heirloom recipes at Newpapers.com. Now imagine a hundred years from now that someone found a recipe you jotted down, and they cannot figure out why you wrote "click here." -via Strange Company 

"Why'd you even tell me that? I don't wanna know that kind of stuff."

Network cameras can zoom in from the stands and see football players talking on the field as clearly as if we were right in front of them, but we can't hear what they are saying from that distance. So we may as well make something up, something that has nothing at all to do with football. No one is better at that than the folks at Bad Lip Reading, who have been watching NFL games very closely for about ten years now. Those amazing long-distance shots with assumed conversation are interspersed here with a takeoff on Key & Peele's classic East/West College Bowl sketches. Now that football is gone for at least a few months, this nonsense can remind us not to take professional sports too seriously. -via Digg

See more Bad Lip Reading NFL collections from previous years.

The title of this post is the caption beneath the Instagram picture of two boys who look very much alike. Are they twins? Sort of. Mirriam-Webster defines "quaternary" as "of, relating to, or consisting of four units or members." Which brings us to an explanation of these's babies' relationship.

Identical twins Brittany and Briana met identical twins Josh and Jeremy at a twin festival in 2017. A year later, Brittany married Josh and Briana married Jeremy in a double wedding ceremony. Now they are all named Salyers. The sisters became pregnant a couple of months apart. Jett Salyers was born to Brittany and Josh in January of 2021. Jax Salyers was born to Briana and Jeremy in April of 2021. The two boys were produced by different couples, but each couple has DNA identical to the other couple.



So the two boys are listed as cousins on the family tree. Double cousins, to be precise. But since their parent are identical twins on both sides, any genetic analysis would identify the boys as siblings. Their closeness in age, and the fact that they all live in the same house, would lead any future classmates who see them to consider them as twins. Read more about the four Salyers twins and their sons at the New York Post. -via Boing Boing

How towns are founded depends on when and where they started. Many communities in the US were just neighborhoods, and when enough people were clustered there to need a post office, the USPS named the post office, which became the town name. Then city limits, governance, and services grew up around the community as needed. But today, the process is way more formalized. It's almost impossible to start a new town outside the US, and within the US, it depends greatly on which state laws govern the land. Half as Interesting explains how those laws vary.

But why in the world would you want to start a town? Towns are still subject to state and federal laws, and if you want to establish city services (utilities, policing, schools, etc.), you have to tax people and raise money to get those projects off the ground. It's much easier to just join an already-established town nearby instead of starting from scratch, as they can just expand their existing services instead. This video is not as long as you'd think, because the last two minutes are an ad.

The idea that the Bermuda Triangle is a supernaturally dangerous area for ships and aircraft began in the 1950s. It has been reported that the area between Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico had an anomalous number of shipwrecks or disappearances without any explanation that could be gleaned from the evidence. There are plenty of natural reasons for the area's reputation offered- the triangle has an inordinate amount of boat traffic, it has unique and dangerous weather, and some stories are inaccurate in their details, their location, or in their mysteriousness. Some are pretty well documented, though, like the 1921 case of the Carroll A. Deering.

Maybe this vessel was doomed from the start. The captain got sick and had to abandon ship at a port in Delaware. This was apparently considered a bad omen. After delivering its cargo to Rio, the ship started to turn home and stopped in Barbados for supplies. Afterward, it was sighted near North Carolina, and observers noted that the crew was acting strange; the ship wasn't seen again until its wreckage washed up off the coast of Cape Hatteras. The ship's log, navigation equipment, the crew's personal belongings, and lifeboats were gone.

Read more stories of unexplained transportation tragedies in the Bermuda Triangle in a list at Mental Floss.

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Ashley Montagu once said, “The idea is to die young as late as possible.” Rocketman Robert Maddox built a go-kart with a triple valveless pulsejet engine. He named this vehicle the Beast. Then he took it for a ride out in the desert, at speeds up to 90 miles per hour. Okay, what about this video is the scariest? Would it be the red-hot jet engines or the propane tank between Maddox and the engines? How about the fact that he's driving with one hand, so he can record himself with the other? Or could it be the absence of goggles, where one insect could blind him? Well, maybe there aren't too many bugs in the desert in February. Despite all this, it's great to see the sheer joy of a wild man in his 70s getting his speed fix on. If you like this go-kart (and have the bucks), he will build one for you. -via Jalopnik

A webcomic led me down an internet rabbit hole, to an article about the world's deadliest disease: malaria. The mosquito-borne disease is estimated to have killed half the people who ever lived, although that flies under the radar for most of us because 1. It's been around for thousands of years, and 2. Most of the fatalities are in young children. I learned about malaria's role in the rise of sickle-cell anemia, a far-from-perfect evolutionary adaptation to malaria. Malaria had a role in establishing slavery in colonial America. And in 1943, it was the agent of biological warfare. The Pontine Marshes outside of Rome were a historical hotbed of malaria until 1922, when the new prime minister Benito Mussolini ordered a plan to drain the marshes.  

That reduced Italian malarial fatalities by 99.8 per cent between 1932 and 1939, and inspired the occupying Germans to carry out the only known example of biological warfare in 20th-century Europe: in late 1943, the Nazis seized supplies of the anti-malarial medicine quinine, reversed the draining pumps and opened the dikes. Anopheles mosquitoes returned, Allied (and German) soldiers became sick, and Italian civilians began dying. Malarial deaths spiked from 33 in 1939 to 55,000 in 1944.

I had to know more about that, so I went to Wikipedia.

The Battle of Anzio left the marsh in state of devastation; nearly everything Mussolini had accomplished was reversed. The cities were in ruins, the houses blown up, the marshes full of brackish water, the channels filled in, the plain depopulated, the mosquitos flourishing, and malaria on the rise. The major structures for water control survived, and in a few years, the Agro Pontino was restored. In 1947, the province of Littoria, created by Mussolini, was renamed to Latina. The last of the malaria was conquered in the 1950s, with the aid of DDT.

Today, the land is managed by the drainage system without DDT. There are towns, farms, and tourist attractions as well as lakes and canals.

#lesEnquêtesANFR 🕵️‍♂️
« Les dents, le brouilleur et au lit ! », c’est la nouvelle enquête de l'@anfr sur un brouillage qui affectait les services de téléphonie et d’internet dans toutes les bandes de fréquences mobiles, mais uniquement la nuit 🌙… https://t.co/Jqpg5YKjBp pic.twitter.com/RLmOV7iMG5

— ANFR (@anfr) February 10, 2022

What do you do when your children stay on social media all night long? You could take their devices, but that's a fight, and there are always more devices. You could try parental controls, but they are often limited and/or confusing, and children find their way around them. And many places have multiple sources for internet- wifi, the neighbor's wifi, the phone company, etc. To boot his teenagers offline, one man went for the nuclear option.

A mobile phone company in Messanges, France, was getting daily complaints about an outage between midnight and 3 AM. They enlisted the National Frequency Agency to investigate, which sent out a mobile lab truck out to investigate and found the problem was coming from one house. A father was using a multi-band wave jammer to interrupt his children's internet use at midnight so they would go to sleep. He was unaware that he had disrupted all telecommunications in an area that covered two towns!

The use of wave jammers is illegal in France (and the US). The agency put a notice on their website that the range of such devices often far exceeds their claims. The man who used the jammer could get a fine of €30,000 and six months in jail. He will also have to pay the agency €450 for the investigation. Jail time is unlikely in this case, but be warned: trying this can come back to bite you. -via Gizmodo 

Since we all know the plot to the 1979 movie Alien, we don't need to waste a whole lot of time with buildup, exposition, or reveal, so this Sweded version from Folks Films gives us just the action parts. The genius in this one-minute version is the use of everyday objects to recreate the terror. A baseball mitt. A stapler. A mess of noodles. Cantaloupe. And lots of ketchup. You will have to watch it two or three times to catch them all. But nothing is more clever than blowing up the Nostromo by putting silverware in a microwave. That even gives you a proper countdown! Ripley and Jonesy are fine, and most likely are making plans for a sequel. -via reddit

The human immune system is so complicated that it doesn't take a new disease to spark consequential research and discoveries. It has been known for a long time that while a case of measles will confer lifetime immunity against catching measles again, you are then more likely to suffer and even die of some other infectious disease. Public health records show that children who survive a bout of measles (and the overwhelming majority do) lose their ability to fight off different diseases afterward. In 2012, this phenomena was named "Immune amnesia."  

Essentially, when you're infected with measles, your immune system abruptly forgets every pathogen it's ever encountered before – every cold, every bout of flu, every exposure to bacteria or viruses in the environment, every vaccination. The loss is near-total and permanent. Once the measles infection is over, current evidence suggests that your body has to re-learn what's good and what's bad almost from scratch.  

On average, it takes about three years for children to re-develop the immunity to diseases that they had before they contracted measles. Children who are vaccinated against measles apparently don't suffer from immune amnesia. Studies show that the measles vaccine reduces a child's chance of death from all diseases in the next few years by a degree that greatly exceeds the chance of dying from measles itself. And in the years since the discovery of the effect, scientists have found out a lot about how the measles virus rewires our immune systems.

This discovery will interest those of us who contracted measles before there was a vaccine against it. Did the illness negate the effects of the vaccines we got before? It should cause even more concern for parents who opt not to vaccinate their children against measles. Read about measles and immune amnesia at BBC Future. -via Kottke

We've heard a lot of music made by reprogramming odd machines, but it's so much cuter when they are anthropomorphized with googly eyes! The Device Orchestra (previously at Neatorama) is looking altogether goofy as designed. This video features seven devices: two electric toothbrushes, two credit card machines, two typewriters, and one steam iron play the White Stripes' song "Seven Nation Army." There's also a pair of pliers dancing along with a toothbrush, both controlled by a credit card reader. That's what you call multitasking. -via Laughing Squid

We've seen plenty of pictures of European supermarkets and their "American sections." They are filled with candy, marshmallows, Pop Tarts, and other junk foods that are not as available elsewhere. Yes, Americans are used to sweet foods, whereas the rest of the world isn't. But there are genuine American* crops that just aren't grown elsewhere. For example, cornbread and the corn meal to make it. Or corn tortillas or grits. It's hard to get maple syrup in Brazil. And even though canned pumpkin is made of butternut squash, it's not sold everywhere. And there's no celery seed in Finland.  

A list at Buzzfeed tells of foods that visitors liked but cannot get at home in other countries. Sure, there's some junk food items that you'd expect, but also a bunch of spice mixes that we Americans depend on, and foods we never think about as being particularly American*.  

*To be honest, in this post, "America" can also mean North America and South America.   

(Image credit: Douglas P Perkins)

Was Ghostbusters: Afterlife any good? Before we answer that question, be warned that this Honest Trailer has spoilers. Screen Junkies doesn't think so, but they are in the business of picking apart every movie they encounter.  In this Honest Trailer, they lay out the evidence for their opinion of Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which has the same problem as every Ghostbusters sequel, remake, or reboot. It cannot recreate the magic of the first movie, so it relies on references to it. Okay, the secret to enjoying a sequel is to NOT compare it to the original, which is impossible for the Ghostbusters franchise. The franchise as a whole is a lesson in trying to catch lightning in a bottle. It's a miracle that it happened once, but you're not going to do it again. This is the fourth Ghostbusters movie, and the third to be a disappointment. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The yeti is a cryptid, possibly resembling an ape, that roams the higher reaches of the Himalayan Mountains. It was a legend among the Sherpa people going way back, but captured the world's imagination during the first half of the 20th century as mountaineers raced to conquer the summit of Mount Everest. Some mountain climbers brought back pictures of mysterious footprints and shadowy figures, and even bits of skin and fur. The Everest race was won when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first expedition to reach the summit and return alive in 1953. But yeti fever endured for years afterward.  

So Hillary set out to find the yeti. That was one purpose for the nine-month expedition that launched on September 10, 1960. The other purpose was to study the long-term effects of high altitude exposure. The expedition was packed with scientists and mountain experts, including zoologist Marlin Perkins, who you may remember from the TV show Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. The altitude studies drew financing from World Book Encyclopedia, but the hunt for a yeti drew the headlines and public support. The expedition was well-supplied with both tranquilizer rifles and defensive weapons. Read about the expedition, and what the team found at Atlas Obscura.

In 2008 an avid contributor to Wikipedia uploaded a photoshoot illustrating a "high five." He enlisted a couple of friends to pose for the pictures, four of them, entitled Up High, Down Low, Victim Misses, and Too Slow (with finger-guns). The pictures are pretty funny, and the couple is just too cute. The set of pictures managed to capture the hearts of internet users. They've been used as memes for 14 years now.

Annie Rauwerda was taken with the joyous pictures, and wondered who these people were. What made them so happy when the pictures were taken? Why were the pictures taken? Were they a couple? Are they still together? What led to the high fives? Fourteen years later, she managed to track them both down to find the story behind the pictures. Read how Rauwerda found them and what has happened to the two people since the pictures were taken at Input magazine. -via Digg

(Image credit: Bgubitz at English Wikipedia)