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

One of the most famous haunted houses in America is on the market- again. If you'd like to live in Rhode island, the home at 1677 Round Top Road in Harrisville can be yours -for $1.2 million. The two-story, 3-bedroom home was built in 1836, and lies near the Massachusetts border. It comes with a bit of history, if you can believe it.

The true story of ‘The Conjuring’ started in this very house, in Harrisville, RI. The critically acclaimed original movie was based on accounts taken from inhabitants of this fourteen-room farmhouse. Rumored to be haunted by the presence of Bathsheba Sherman, who in the 1800’s lived in the house, 1677 Round Top Road is one of the most well-known haunted houses in the United States. The chilling stories from this house have inspired dozens of books and movies. Many qualified paranormal researchers have been invited into the home - most famously Ed and Lorraine Warren, who founded the oldest ghost hunting team in New England, and in the 1970’s were hired to rid the home of its evil.

The real estate listing goes on to say that the current owners rent out the home for parties and paranormal encounters, which they say continue to this day. The real mystery is the home's purchase history. When a house truly terrifies its owners, they often sell at a loss, but this house's price has bounced between extremes. In 2012, the house was listed for $64,900. In March of 2013, it sold for $25,000, but there's a note of a "price change" in December to  $49,900. It went on the market again in 2015, but was not sold. In 2019, it was purchased for $439,000, but then was listed in 2020 at only $69,900. The ridiculous explosion in real estate prices might explain some price increase, but the current price is thirty times what it was listed for last year! For reference, The Conjuring came out in 2013, which may have something to to with that "price change." See the real estate listing here. Get more details of the Warrens, the couple behind The Conjuring, and other paranormal investigators connected to the house at Boing Boing.

The 355 is an upcoming movie about a ring of female spies. It's set in the present time, but the unit was named in honor of a brave yet mysterious spy from the American Revolution. Agent 355 was so undercover that the public never learned her name even after the war was over. Nor after her death. Nor 200 years later. We still don't know who Agent 355 was, but we know that she was a woman. As such, she was able to glean and relay information on the British forces to the Continental Army without drawing suspicion. The redcoats didn't consider a woman capable of spying against them. They may not have ever thought about it at all.

Agent 355 was part of the Culper Ring of spies, a unit that was so secretive that its existence only became known in the 1930s, despite being organized by George Washington himself! We can only imagine what it would have been like to risk life and limb for an army of rebels fighting the British Empire, and then keep your contributions to yourself for the rest of your life. Were her exploits considered inconsequential to the Founding Fathers? Or did she prefer to remain anonymous? It's possible she stayed undercover in case she would be needed again. While we don't know who Agent 355 was, there are many theories on who she could have been. Read those theories and find out more about colonial spying at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Harper's Weekly)

In the 1960s, the Soviet MIG-25 was a mystery. US military forces and the CIA were intrigued by its design, and thought it would be the epitome of maneuverability with those long wings. The aircraft set speed and altitude records, but no one outside the USSR knew what was in it. The plane even had a destruct button that pilots were instructed to push in case they ever had to eject and abandon the plane, lest it fall into foreign hands.

Lieutenant Viktor Ivanovich Belenko of the Soviet Air Defense Forces shocked the world when he went on a regular practice drill in 1976 and just took off in a MIG-25. It was a daring escape he had planned for a long time. Belenko landed in Japan intending to defect, but the authorities back home were much more concerned with the plane than they were with Belenko. They demanded their plane back immediately. Read the story of the pilot who just took off with the mystery plane at Amusing Planet.   

(Image credit: Leonid Faerberg)

Only a few decades ago, you could go into the biggest supermarket in town and find only two or three kinds of apples: red delicious, golden delicious (maybe), and Granny Smith. The delicious apples went into the children's lunch bags, and the Granny Smiths made an apple pie. Now supermarkets are much larger, and you'll find a dozen or more varieties of apples. Some are new hybrids, while others are heritage apples from hundreds of years ago, the result of tracing varieties back to their roots or searching for historic trees. 

Doing your own taste test could be fun, but keeping single apples labeled correctly might be difficult, and some must be bought by the bag. Therefore, Thrillist did the work for you, and ranked the 18 most common varieties of apples by their taste. As you might have guessed, the red delicious ranked at the very bottom. They may be red, but they are only delicious to children who don't know how an apple should taste.

There are probably quite a few apples you've never heard of on the list that might be worth seeking out. And there are many varieties that don't appear on the list at all, because they may be only available in certain areas for a limited time. But trying a new variety is the perfect way to celebrate the last few days of September, which is Apple Month. You'll also learn a few tidbits about apples, like who Granny Smiths were named for.

-via Metafilter

(Image credit: Dllu)

Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), this chart shows which jobs will be growing over the next ten years and which will be declining. Once again, "blogger" doesn't show up anywhere, because people still can't believe anyone makes a living at this. But the chart doesn't show us anything we couldn't have figured out on our own. While the job expected to grow the most is wind turbine service technician, understandably, the top ten growth jobs are dominated by positions in health care, which vary widely in expected income.   

Visual Capitalist lists the top twenty jobs that will expand the most in the coming decade, but you have to look at the details. Wind turbine technician got the #1 spot because the position will expand by 68%. But that's only 4,700 jobs, because we have very few of those professionals now. Jobs for home health and personal care aides will expand by more than a million jobs, yet that's only a 32% change. And when you're counseling a young person on what profession to go into, take note that home health and personal care aides do not make much money at all. A nurse practitioner can make four times as much.

The twenty jobs that will decline the most are no surprise. Secretaries and typists aren't in demand when everyone uses a computer. I'm surprised that there are any telephone operators left at all. See the full lists and statistics on these careers at Visual Capitalist. The chart is much larger there.

By the way, this projection excludes those occupations that went through a tremendous swing due to COVID-19, like restaurant workers and movie production. -via Digg

Author Kurt Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod in the 1960s, and so was following the news of the Cape Cod Cannibal with interest, and even writing about the crimes. Four young women had gone missing in 1968 and '69, and while searching for two of them, police found a third. Ultimately four mutilated bodies of young women were uncovered the same area. Police arrested Tony Costa, which drew Vonnegut further into the sensational crime. His 19-year-old daughter Edith knew Costa. Costa had even invited her to come see his marijuana patch, a line he used with many young women.   

Luckily, Edith never took Costa up on his offer, but it wasn’t because she thought he could be dangerous—Edith believed Costa was strange but harmless. Most of the area residents did, too. Despite his run-ins with the law and heavy drug use, Costa was well-liked by many in the community, especially children. He was a fun and friendly babysitter to the local kids whose parents were either too busy or too apathetic to care for their kids during the hot and hectic days of summer.

Which is why so many area residents were shocked to find out Costa was a cold-blooded killer, including Edith. “‘If Tony is a murderer, then anybody could be a murderer,’” Vonnegut reports Edith told him during a phone conversation.

Read up on Tony Costa, Kurt Vonnegut, and the Cape Cod Cannibal crimes at Mental Floss.

Sweet, tropical, and refreshing, the piña colada is a gift to the world from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Which made it worth a weeklong vacation business trip to the island to track down its origins. There are several stories: the drink is the result of a competition at the Caribe Hilton‘s Beachcomber Bar in 1954, that a different bartender there came up with it, and that another bar, Barrachina, is the original home of the piña colada. The name, at least, is even older than those claims.

Before the piña colada became the piña colada, the phrase, which translates to “strained pineapple,” was used in Cuba to indicate a nonalcoholic drink of strained, sweetened pineapple juice, optionally with coconut water. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails even notes that there were piña colada stands in the U.S. in the 1930s. “At least one American journalist suggested the obvious, that the standard pineapple-coconut drink might easily be turned into a ‘grand rum cocktail’ (this was in 1944) … but not until the late 1960s did the alcoholic version become the default one, and then it came as a Puerto Rican import,” Curtis writes.

In 1978, Puerto Rico named the piña colada as its official drink, and a year after that, “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” made its glorious debut. Was I the only one who thought that was a Jimmy Buffett song? It’s by Rupert Holmes. Anyway, in more recent years, the Puerto Rican government has formally recognized Marrero as the inventor and the Caribe Hilton as the laboratory of its creation.

This article on piña coladas is more than a history of the drink, though. It's also a love letter to the piña colada and a primer on how to make a better one. -via Digg

He's a killer queen! You have to hand it to jared531, but be sure you hand it to his right hand. You might be a Queen fan, or you might be a fan of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, or both, and combining Freddie Mercury and Freddy Krueger is simply puntastic. Jared531 wore this costume to the NY Village Halloween parade last year and was such a hit that he posted the instructions for pulling off the costume.

Sure, it's early, but the best Halloween costumes take planning. -via reddit

Disney's latest effort in the Disneyland ride genre is Jungle Cruise, still in some theaters and, of course, on Disney+. The film has made millions of dollars, but performed below expectations. It has yet to break even. This Honest Trailer explains why- the source material is thin, the plot is formulaic, and everything about Jungle Cruise is borrowed from other films that did it better. However, its two hours is filled with puns and dad jokes, which cements its connection with the theme park ride, so it works as a kids movie.

Neatorama readers know plenty about Thomas Edison, but what do you know about Thomas Edison, Jr.? His life turned out completely different from his father's. As you might guess, the inventor, being a very busy man, did not have much time for his son, either in nurturing a relationship or in guiding him to follow his father's footsteps. And since the older Edison was a very famous man, Junior had the added burden of high expectations without the necessary training or talent.  

To mask his sensitivity and deep insecurities, Thomas Jr. took a cue from his father and turned to bravado and self-aggrandizing, and also alcohol. In New York, he soaked up the attention of journalists and reporters and made them believe that he'd be the next best American inventor, even claiming to have fashioned a light bulb better than that of his dad. The man who simply did not have his father's brains (in science) soon got involved with shady enterprises selling all kinds of snake oil products because having a guy carrying the Edison name be the head of your company sure sounded like a good idea at the time. The Thomas A. Edison, Jr. Chemical Co. sold "Wizard Ink" tablets that not only capitalized on Thomas Senior's "Wizard" moniker but were also nothing more than a mediocre writing tool with questionable testing methods behind it.

But mediocre inventions were nothing new, not even back then, and few people beside Wizard Edison batted an eye over Junior's "just add some water" ink. It wasn't until the release of the Magno-Electric Vitalizer invention in 1904 that things really started turning bad for the young Edison. Jumping on the "Woah, electromagnetism!" bandwagon, his company claimed to have invented a machine that could cure everything from paralysis, kidney disease, deafness, and menstrual cramps. Heck, they even claimed that the device could literally make a person smarter.

Read about Thomas Edison, Jr. and how his business ventures turned out at Cracked.

The animated TV series Futurama only aired until 2013, but so many things that happened in it could be set in 2021. It only makes sense, because the show was set in the future and made jokes about how the world changed since the early 2000s. Yet many of those jokes were so precient that you might even believe it really was from the future. However, Futurama writers were just following bubbling trends to their ultimate, if ridiculous, conclusions. -via Digg

All we know about dinosaurs is what we can see in their fossils. And we haven't yet found a fossil showing dinosaurs having sex in the last moments of their lives. But they must have mated, since they reproduced. Still, it's difficult to imagine, what with those armored plates and horns and thagomizers and... well, it might have been like that old joke, "How do porcupines have sex? Very carefully!" Anyway, while scientists don't know much about dinosaur sex, they have figured out a few parts of it.

Thanks largely to the discovery of once-controversial feathered fossils from China in the 1990s, we now know that birds are the only living relative of dinosaurs -- specifically, therapods, part of the same family as T. rex and Velociraptor.

"You go back 20 or 30 years, and you still have scientists saying birds aren't dinosaurs, but now we have so much more evidence that they are. So you can look at the behavior of birds and work out how some of these dinosaurs behaved," Lomax said.

Case in point is a type of scratching that male ground-nesting birds do to signal they are strong and good nest builders. It's part of behavior called lekking, when males, typically in groups, competitively dance and perform other courtship rituals to attract the attention of females.

Dinosaurs engaged in similar mating behavior, according to fossilized "scrapes" left behind in 100 million-year-old rocks in the prehistoric Dakota Sandstone of western Colorado. One site revealed more than 60 distinct scrapes in a single area of up to 164 feet (50 meters) long and 49 feet (15 meters) wide.

There's more, and it gets more explicit, at CNN. -via Fark

People have been using farts to tell jokes, insult others, play one-upmanship, and entertain crowds for as long as there have been people. Neatorama has built a reputation for fart coverage, so a list of the world's most memorable farts is catnip to us! These farts are presented in chronological order, which gives us a kind of history of flatulence, but there are more modern stories because the internet operates without the kind of filter our mothers tried to instill in us. But fart humor goes way back. One butt bomb started a war!

In Egypt in 570 BCE, a fart changed everything. King Apries had angered his people and was worried about a mutiny, sending one of his best generals, Amasis, to calm things down. However, the mutineers decided Amasis would be king instead, and he was into it. When Apries sent a messenger to bring Amasis back, Amasis farted and instructed the messenger to take that back to the king. This led to a battle, a defeat, and a new farting bottom on the throne.

The list of 20 memorable farts at Mental Floss actually has more than 20 fart stories, with links in case you don't believe them.

The Takeout takes Halloween candy very seriously, so they've compiled a seven-week deep dive into the top Halloween treats. Each week, a different facet of the top ten candies will be ranked and explained, and the data will lead to the ultimate ranking before Halloween, so that you can purchase the very best candies for trick-or-treaters. Or yourself. America's top ten most popular Halloween candies are:

Skittles
Reese’s Cups
Starburst
M&Ms
Hershey’s Miniatures (Hershey, Mr. Goodbar, Krackel)
Twix
Snickers
Sour Patch Kids
Tootsie Pops
Jolly Ranchers   

In week one, they ranked the candies by their wrappers, which, you must admit, are part of the experience. In week two, they ranked them by the nostalgia factor. Check back on Friday for the third ranking. Of course, we all know who will win in the overall competition: Reece's Cups. There can be no doubt.