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.

German theorist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach studied and wrote of racial hierarchies more than 200 years ago. He posited that the epitome of racial superiority were the people of the Caucasus Mountains, particularly the region of Circassia, which is why we use the word "Caucasian" today. In the US in the 19th century, putting the word Circassian in front of any beauty product meant it would sell well. In 1865, as Americans were dealing with issues of race at the end of the Civil War, P.T. Barnum debuted his first Circassian Beauty, a woman named Zalumma Agra.    

A staple of dime museums and traveling shows throughout the nineteenth century, Circassian beauties were alleged to be from the Caucasus Mountain region, and were famous for both their legendary looks and their large, seemingly Afro-textured hairstyles. The Circassian beauty was an attraction that required audiences to hold a number of ultimately unresolvable stereotypes in tension with each other. These women were presented as chaste, but were also billed as former harem slaves. They were supposedly of noble lineage but appeared as sideshow attractions. And they were displayed to predominantly white audiences for an exoticism that traded on hair associated with Black women, which came coupled with the paradoxical assurance that, being Caucasian, Circassian beauties represented the height of white racial “purity”.

Zalumma Agra came with a perfectly exotic backstory as a Circassian slave rescued from Turkey, but more likely she was a white performer who had super-curly hair. Or, as seen in later versions of the Circassian Beauty, she altered her hair to fit the part. But the fact that these acts lasted into the 20th century reveals the audience's fascination with race and the politics that surround it. Read the history of the sideshow Circassian Beauties at the Public Domain review. -via Nag on the Lake

A year ago, we told you about a real-life Willy Wonka scheme. David “Candyman” Klein hid golden tickets in each state for a treasure hunt that would lead up to awarding someone with a candy factory. That someone is Andrew Maas, who followed clues for a year and ultimately found the last golden ticket at a park in Kokomo, Indiana.   

Maas registered his find on the treasure hunt website. Twenty minutes later, Klein called him while he was still in Highland Park and told him he had won. He had just won the candy factory.

Maas was floored. He now owned the plant, which makes an edible sand-art treat called Sandy Candy, along with other sweet concoctions. But he knew he couldn’t pick up his wife and two kids and move them to Florida to run the business.

Instead, the two are now working on an agreement in which Klein gives him the factory and then buys it back from him. Maas said he’s fine with whatever the agreement turns out to be.

Maas said the excitement and adventure of the treasure hunt was the real draw, but he's glad to have the money. Read how Kokomo was chosen for the final destination, and how Maas solved the clues to find it at the Kokomo Tribune.  -via Fark 

On the side of a mountain in the north of Italy stood a small village named Consonno. It didn't even have a road leading to it, which is eventually important to the story. Wealthy entrepreneur Mario Bagno had a dream of building the ultimate resort, akin to Las Vegas, in Italy, so he set his sights on Consonno. Bagno built accommodations and entertainment facilities and opened the resort in 1967. Today, all that's left is an impressive collection of abandoned buildings, which we will take a video tour of while we learn the story of Consonno. -via Digg

The Filibuster Movement, or filibusterism, of the 19th century was an outgrowth of the idea of Manifest Destiny. There were many who believed that Americans were destined by their superiority to expand across the continent, or even further, to bring civilization to the New World. Filibusters were men who dared to pursue this by invading other nations with their own private forces independent of the US government. The most noted among them was William Walker. In 1853, Walker decided to claim some land in Mexico.

Now, invading a country with whom the U.S. was at peace may seem like it would be breaking laws, and that would be correct. It was a direct violation of the Neutrality Act. This did not stop Walker, though, who recruited a small group of adventure seekers (who were really just looking for opportunities after failing to get rich from the Gold Rush) and found a ship to sail from the Bay Area to Baja California in Mexico. His original ship was taken by the American military, which was cracking down on filibusters, but the ambitious Walker simply found another and snuck away with a makeshift army of fewer than 50 men.

On November 3, 1853, after landing in Baja California, Walker captured the state capital of La Paz and proclaimed the region the Republic of Lower California. The new country, which was never recognized as a country, needed a leader, and Walker was, naturally, made the president. This invasion may have been viewed as highly illegal by both American and Mexican authorities, but the American public loved it. Filibusters were cool. They embodied Manifest Destiny in a way that no one else did. Because of this support, people actually traveled to Mexico to join Walker’s territory.

Walker's adventures in Mexico ended when he overstepped his bounds, but he had more luck in Nicaragua, where he was recognized as president for a while. He also invaded Honduras. Read the story of William Walker and his temporary conquests at Cracked.

Image: The Costa Rica National Monument depicts five nations chasing William Walker out of Central America. Photo by Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz).

Royal Museums Greenwich, home of the Royal Observatory, has announced the winners of their annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. The grand prize goes to Shuchang Dong, who traveled to Tibet to get this image of the solar eclipse of 2020, titled The Golden Ring. To his dismay, it was a cloudy day, but the heavens opened up just long enough to get this picture of the corona.  

The winner in the Stars and Nebulae category is British photographer Terry Hancock for this image called California Dreamin' NGC 1499. See the winners in each of eight categories plus two other awards, with links to other photographs in the shortlist for each category.

Mike Judge made a pilot for a show called Monsignor Martinez (Las Dias Y Los Noches de Monsignor Martinez) and it's only 20 years later that we get to see it. Well, at least the live-action version. The animated version is a recurring bit in the show King of the Hill. Monsignor Martinez is a Catholic priest who kills drug smugglers. Yeah, it's an action series. I would watch this religiously! -via reddit

Whether a Jeopardy! question is difficult or not all depends on whether you know the answer. If you know a bit of trivia that the three contestants on TV at the time don't know, that makes you a champion, right? Esquire gives us a second chance to outdo those contestants.

Below, we’ve rounded up 20 Jeopardy questions that fall in a rare and ignominious category called “triple stumpers”—a.k.a., legendarily hard questions. A triple stumper is a clue for which no correct response is given by any player. That can mean a few things: either some or all of the players buzz in incorrectly, or no one buzzes in at all.

Be warned that each answer is printed right below the question, so you should control your scrolling to avoid spoilers. I got about half of them, but whether I would be faster than the next contestant is unlikely. See all 20 questions here, and don't miss the video in which three intellectual contestants prove they know nothing about football. -via Digg

If this were a list, you could argue about it. Well, some people will argue about it anyway, even though it's a compilation and should just be enjoyed as such. Looper takes a look at the more ridiculous scenes over the different series of the Star Trek Universe. You may think that the setup for each scene is a little long, but if they didn't explain what was happening, we'd either be confused or else the video would be more than an hour long. -via Laughing Squid