Sada Yacco introduced kabuki theater to the West and became a sensation as the only female member of her troupe. Her life story reads like that of Forrest Gump. Born under unfortunate circumstances, Yacco was sold to a geisha house when she was only four years old. Yet she was singled out to be trained in not only the arts, but martial arts and other manly pursuits as well. She was also taught to read and write, a rarity for Japanese women of the time. In 1893 she married experimental showman Otojiro Kawakami and continued her lifelong series of alternating bad luck and celebrity interactions that made her a star when Kawakami took his kabuki theater to the United States and then Europe.  

A Western fascination with Japan at the time helped launch Yacco into stardom, but it was tinged with pressure to perform stereotypical Japanese tropes to satisfy the audiences' notions of Japanese theater. Eventually, Yacco and Kawakami returned to Japan, where they introduced Western theater, particularly Shakespeare, to their homeland -with an experimental twist, of course. Read about Sada Yacco and her multicultural adventures at Messy Nessy Chic. 

It's an event we look forward to every year. The voting has started in the 2021 Fat Bear Week competition! Every year since 2014, Katmai National Park in Alaska shows off their many brown bears in an online tournament. The bears have spent their summer putting on pounds to help them get through winter hibernation, so for them, fat is a good thing. It's a bit dangerous to put bears on a scale, so weight gain must be estimated by pictures. The fattest bears, plus one fat bear cub that won a play-in poll, are competing for nothing but internet fame, yet the tournament draws human attention to Alaska's wildlife and the challenges they face. Some bears have also gained lifelong fans by packing on the pounds. We're glad to see Otis back, and Holly, a previous winner who took last year off to raise a cub. The daily elimination polls can be found here. The daily matchups will continue through October 5, and the winner will be announced a few days later.

When is a species considered extinct—when it no longer exists in the wild or when it no longer exists at all?

The cactus species Mammillaria tezontle evolved to grow on a mineral produced from lava called tezontle. An exposed piece of tezontle is the only place you will ever find this cactus in the wild. In Mexico, tezontle is extremely useful as a building material because it is strong and lightweight, so it is dug up and used when discovered. In fact, the cactus M. tezontle was discovered and identified as a species at a quarry. With supplies of the rock tezontle dwindling, the cactus is thought to be near-extinct in the wild.

But there are plenty of M. tezontle plants growing all over the world- in clay pots in people's homes. It turns out that the cactus will grow in garden center potting soil formulated for cacti. It has traveled all over by both legal and illegal means. It is not a particularly large, pretty, or useful cactus, but its very rarity drives people to own and propagate it.

That brings up a question of species conservation: Should we keep a species going when its natural environment is completely gone? The cactus Mammillaria tezontle may live forever as a houseplant, but it is only an example that brings up the larger question of polar bears and other familiar creatures. Read the story of M. tezontle at The Walrus. -via Damn Interesting

The new movie version of Frank Herbert's Dune is set to hit theaters on October 22, so it seemed to be a good time for Screen Junkies to revisit the first attempt at turning the sprawling 1965 sci-novel into a film. The 1984 David Lynch version was critically panned and turned out to be a box office failure. However, the disappointment stuck in the consciousness of Gen X so well that another film was inevitable. Anyway, here's a critique pointing out what was wrong with the first Dune so we can be on the lookout for whether it will be fixed this time. Maybe they'll do it justice this time around. Stay tuned, in another month or two we'll have an Honest Trailer for the new Dune.

PS: If you aren't familiar with Alan Smithee, read this.

In 2000, a gamer known as rsln released his Super Metroid Speed Guide and FAQ. Take a look through the whole thing, or even just the disclaimer blurb above, and see if you can figure out what makes it unique. You don't have to know anything about the game, or any game, to see what it is.

Every year or two I remember what’s probably the most scarily/stunningly impressive linguistic feat I’ve ever seen. Every time, I think I must be mistaken, then I read the thing, and I just shake my head in disbelief. It’s been twenty years. Let me tell you about it.

— Matt Gemmell (@mattgemmell) September 24, 2021

You can try to figure it out for yourself, or you can follow the Twitter thread, or you can continue reading to find out what makes this document special.

If you want to run a railway, you've got to train people to control the tracks, so that trains can get where they need to go without crashing into each other, or snarling up traffic for hours at a time. In Germany, these signal operators are trained at the Eisenbahnbetriebsfeld in Darmstadt. The facility has a model train that may not be the biggest or prettiest in the world, but it is probably the most accurate, because it is used to teach rail traffic control.

However, not every train station in Germany uses the same controls. The Eisenbahnbetriebsfeld model train can be controlled by mechanical switches, which can be a hundred years old, or by electronic switching from the mid-20th century, or by computerized systems that only the wealthier cities have. If you want to be a railway signal operator in Germany, you'll have to learn all the systems. Tom Scott shows us how it's done.

Vintage Halloween pictures are often quite unsettling, because the costumes are creepily unprofessional and the lack of color makes them even creepier. It's as if these clowns wanted to inspire laughter, but ended up terrifying the crap out of us. But this isn't a vintage picture.  

Photographer Tara Mapes does beautiful full color portraits, but her heart is in the creepy side of the art. Every fall she stages a photo shoot for halloween to bring out the horrors associated with the holiday. Check out last year's portrait gallery, and a photo shoot at an abandoned asylum.

This year, Mapes went to the cornfield and brought some clowns. What could be more terrifying than that? Oh, you'll find out, when you check out the rest of the gallery for Halloween 2021.

The guy who goes by Backyard Racing has a large back yard and plenty of time on his hands. He spent four months and $9,000 building an enormous Hot Wheels track. Why? So he could strap a camera to some wheels and share a POV video with us! We soar through every corner of the property, including a leap through the air, a couple of underwater sequences, and loop-the-loops.

The effect of watching this is akin to going on a roller coaster ride without waiting in line or tossing your cookies. Keep your eyes on the tracks going around the turns and you'll know what I mean.

There is a planet nearby that is totally populated by robots. But we are going to Mars eventually, or at least of few of us humans will. Therefore, we have to consider all facets of human life as they might be played out on Mars, and that includes death. Sending a dead body back to earth would not be a priority, but what would happen to that body on Mars?

On earth, a dead body that is not embalmed eventually decomposes due to the effects of bacteria and other microbes, insects, fungus, scavenger animals, moisture, and weather. On Mars, there would be no other life forms besides those microbes we carry in our bodies, and the majority of those need oxygen to survive. They also need warmth, and Mars temperatures range from freezing to very much colder.

So what would happen to a deceased human on the red planet? Cremation would be an unnecessary expenditure in oxygen and energy, so burial is a sensible alternative, yet that doesn't mean ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Alison Klesman at Astronomy explains what would likely happen to a dead body in the Martian environment, and offers options for how to deal with it.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Kevin Gill)

Before social media, before iPhones, before YouTube, even, there was Homestar Runner. It was goofy and subversive, but it was funny and innovative. The experimental Flash animation didn't need any promotion because it had no competition on its level. It didn't need search engine optimization because it was shared granularly. If that sounds like jargon to you, what it means is that everyone liked Homestar Runner because it was weird and innovative, so people turned their friends and acquaintances onto it. This video takes a look at how Homestar, Strong Bad, and the other characters took over the early internet to the delight of all who explored the web back when you were desperate to find anything really worth the effort. It succeeded because it was fun, and fun was what we were looking for.

The cartoon survived the demise of Flash. As old (in internet terms) as Homestar Runner is, it's still there, even though the videos are now hosted by YouTube. -via Digg

Vanessa at Messy Nessy Chic presents twenty vintage books on liquor and how to prepare it. Some of them are connected with famous venues of the past, while others have wonderful titles such as So Red the Nose, Here's How to be Healthy, Wet Drinks for Dry People, and For Snake Bites -or Something. The covers are notable, too, as they tend toward Art Deco style.  

The oldest is The American Bar-Tender, published in 1874. The alternate title is "The art and mystery of mixing drinks, together with preservations on the quality of wines, liquors, and cigars, to which is attended several hundred toasts, patriotic, firemen's, political, lovers, sporting, etc."

A particularly intriguing volume is Giggle Water, a book published in 1928 New York during Prohibition that tells you how to ferment your own wine and other drinks at home. Many of the books are from the 1930s, when America needed to re-learn how to use legal liquor, instead of just guzzling what they could get.

You'll find an index of these books with links to read them in full at Messy Nessy Chic.

As we slide into October, we look forward to the Halloween season. It's not just a day anymore, because it take a whole month to watch all those horror films, not to mention planning our elaborate costumes, wearing them to parties, and then posting them on social media. Holiday traditions change all the time, but the Victorians celebrated in some weird ways. For example, young ladies of the time were obsessed with their future husbands, so they used Halloween for games that might predict their love life.

One such game involved a woman walking into a dark room, alone, and standing in front of a mirror. As they peeled an apple—try not to ask why that part was crucial—the woman might be able to see the reflection of the person they would someday marry. Alternately, they’d see a skeleton, in which case they’d die alone.

Another manner of speculation was to bake cakes containing a needle, thimble, dime, or ring. In addition to being an excellent way to choke or injure yourself, the cakes were believed to foretell marriage. A needle or thimble in your slice meant spinsterhood, since you’d apparently have plenty of time to sew; a dime or ring meant good fortune or wedding bells.

Playing games of romance at Halloween may be weird to us, but it's not any weirder than telling ghost stories at Christmas or trick-or-treating on Thanksgiving, which were both traditions in the past. The Victorians didn't have horror films, but they had parties, fancy ones with elaborate invitations and decorations, and even costumes of a sort. Read about seven Victorian Halloween traditions that contrast with the way we celebrate the holiday now at Mental Floss.

Can growing fungus be a beautiful thing? You betcha, but only under the right circumstances. Russian artist Daria Fedorova, who goes by Dasha Plesen professionally, uses petri dishes of growing bacteria, fungus, and slime molds to make art. She often adds inert objects to impede growth (like beads in the above images), or different nutrients to boost growth. It takes weeks to reveal what the finished piece will look like.  



Plesen says her art explores "the relationship between science, religion and art." The petri dishes are an example of nature taking its course while she sets up the conditions from above. They go through stages, but are ultimately ephemeral, surviving only through photographs.  



You must admit that these molds and fungi look much nicer in a petri dish than they do behind your sink. Read more about Plesen's work at Colossal. See more her creations at Instagram. -via Nag on the Lake

The map above comes from Rave Reviews, who crunched the numbers and ranked the most-hated brands in each nation. They have world maps of overall brands, game companies, and big tech companies, but what we all have in common are our feelings about major fast food companies, because we all eat, we are all occasionally in hurry, and the biggest brands are global. They got their data from Twitter, where it's easy for people to vent their frustrations and register their opinions.

As you can see, the most hated fast food company in the US is Domino's. It look like a lot of people are a Noid with the pizza outlet. It makes sense that Mexico hates Taco Bell the most, but I had no idea that Japan and Thailand also have Taco Bell, where they don't like it. Starbucks and Wendy's have a lot of enemies around the world, but the fast food brand that tops more nations hate list than any other is KFC, according to negative Tweets. Maybe it's because it sounds so good when you decide to go, but afterward you regret spending so much to ingest so much salt and grease.

Check out the complete article at Rave Reviews, where you can see a brand breakdown by each of the United States as well, enlargeable maps, and learn about their methodology. -via The Takeout

(Image credit: Rave Reviews/CC BY-SA 4.0)

When Charles Dickens wrote about the squalid poorhouses and workhouses of London, he barely scratched the surface of the horrors that befell poor people of the time. The poorhouse was the last resort for those with nowhere else to go, but it was the only social safety net available. In the 1850s, in Spitalfields, an area in London's East End, the Whitechapel poorhouse had grown so crowded that a new facility was built to house the children, separated from their parents' "bad influence." The new workhouse held up to 900 children at a time, and around 50,000 passed through it over the next 50 years.  

The Forest Gate District School, as it was officially known, was an institution of the kind sometimes called industrial schools, promoted as establishments that taught children trades to keep them from poverty in adulthood. But this was one of many lies. The average age of children was a little over ten years and official reports condemned the ‘industrial’ training as inadequate. In reality, children were employed as free labour – scrubbing acres of floors, peeling tons of potatoes and mending tattered garments – to save staff wages.

In 1875, Henrietta Barnett, wife of the priest and noted social reformer Samuel Barnett, was appointed as an unpaid governor of the children's workhouse. Appalled by conditions, Henrietta set about changing things, although she ran into resistance from the other governors and political figures. So she did the work herself, showing up at the school and insisting on humane treatment for the children. She opened up a smaller home where a dozen girls at a time could receive real training in domestic service. And she continued to work for government regulations that eventually ended up closing Forest Gate District School, although not before a couple of notorious disasters. Read about Henrietta Barnett and the children of London's largest workhouse at Spitalfields Life. -via Strange Company