The Romans were all about pomp and circumstance. That's why we have arenas today. However, among the chariot races and gladiator fights, one annual ritual stands out for its bizarreness, in which a lucky duck, er, goose is honored at the expense of a few good bois.

On a warm summer day in August in ancient Rome, a brilliantly decorated litter is carried solemnly in the direction of Circus Maximum. Its occupant is neither a senator nor a highborn lady, but upon arrival at his destination he is revealed to be a humble goose, and he had arrived at the venue, now seated on a luxurious purple cushion, to watch the crucifixion of some dogs.

This macabre ritual, called supplicia canum (or “punishment of the dogs”) is celebrated to commemorate the anniversary of a traumatic episode in the history of Rome—the sacking of the city by the Gauls in 390 BC or 387 BC. Supplicia canum is supposed to serve as warning to dogs not to fall asleep on guard duty. In the same procession, geese were decked out in gold and purple, and carried in honor for alerting the last defenders of the city from falling into the hands of the Gauls.

It's hard to believe anyone took the "warning" to the dogs seriously, but the ceremony might have served some purpose in teaching Rome's military history, which makes us glad we have documentation and schools and books from which to learn history. You can learn the circumstances of the sacking of Rome that led to the supplicia canum at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: Marie-Lan Nguyen)

Richard Branson's trip to near-space in July wasn't quite the picture-perfect flight we were led to believe at the time. The Federal Aviation Administration gave the company notice that all their space flights will be put on hold until an investigation is completed. So what happened?   

Indeed, the Unity 22 flight, as far as we knew until now, seemed to go exactly as planned, but as the New Yorker article reveals, pilots David Mackay and Mike Masucci ignored warning lights during the ascent. Specifically, the pilots brushed off an “entry glide cone warning,” which indicated that VSS Unity wasn’t climbing steeply enough and that the spaceplane wouldn’t have enough energy to glide back to the designated runway at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

And by flying outside of this cone-shaped volume of space, the spaceplane strayed beyond the mandated airspace for the mission, which it did for 1 minute and 41 seconds. This is a big no-no for the FAA, who enforces these rules.

The New Yorker article suggests the pilots should’ve aborted the mission when the warning lights came on. The warning should’ve served like the discouraging Monopoly card: Go directly to runway jail, do not pass into orbital space, and do not collect $200. Had the pilots done that, however, Richard Branson would probably not have been the first billionaire to reach space—especially given that Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos achieved the same feat just a few weeks later. Instead of aborting the mission, however, the pilots allowed VSS Unity’s engines to go at full throttle for the required one full minute.

This grounding will put some would be space tourists, willing to shell out $450,000 each for a flight, on hold for now. Read more about the kerfuffle at Gizmodo.

According to Know Your Meme, the "milk create challenge" got its start on August first and went viral. The problem with the milk crate challenge is that everyone falls, and many have been injured. Engineering professor Dr. Nehemiah Mabry explains how humans aren't made to negotiate this type of structure. Oh, you might be able to stand on two stacked milk crates, as a short person with high shelves can tell you, but anything more is way too risky.

This is a warning: just because a challenge is fairly impossible doesn't mean you'll get any kind of acclaim if you accomplish it. More likely, you'll hurt or possibly kill yourself trying, and even if you are successful, you'll be contributing to other people's injuries as they try to emulate you. -via Digg

Ambergris, the rare effluvia of a tiny minority of sperm whales, occasionally washes up on the beach and makes someone quite wealthy. Although perfumers now use a synthetic version, the real thing is rare enough to be prized. It's been that way for hundreds of years, as ambergris' many uses were known a long time before its origin was pinpointed.

Though ambergris has been traded since at least the Middle Ages, we still know remarkably little about the substance. Even the fact that it originates from sperm whales is a relatively recent discovery. For hundreds of years—even as beachcombers were finding ambergris washed up on shore and sailors were recovering the substance from carcasses—naturalists and physicians treated the theory that whales produce ambergris as outlandish. Ninth-century Muslim travel writers proposed that whales likely consume a substance produced elsewhere and later regurgitate it, a view that remained in circulation for several centuries.

The Hortus Sanitatis, an encyclopedia of herbal medicines published in 1491, cited theories that ambergris was tree sap, a type of sea foam, or some kind of fungus. In the 12th century, reports from China suggested ambergris was dried dragon spittle. It has at various times been proposed to be a fruit, fish liver, or a precious stone. According to a 2015 paper from the Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, “By 1667, eighteen different theories existed on this matter and various animals were considered producers of this substance—including seals, crocodiles, and even birds.”

While we now know that ambergris is produced by a whale's gut, the exact process is still being debated. However, the global trade in ambergris and the clandestine ways it continues today is quite a story in itself, which you can read at Hakai magazine.  -via Smithsonian

Daniel Lambert was born in Leicester, England, in 1770. That was a time when only the rich could always get enough to eat, and stoutness was an admirable quality, since it signaled one's more-than-adequate wealth. But Lambert wasn't upper class; he worked at the local jail, like his father before him. And when he was a young adult, he gained a lot of weight. Lambert became a local celebrity for his girth, and showed off his athletic ability as he participated in sports, especially hunting- until he got too heavy to ride a horse.

Morose about his weight, Lambert became a recluse and shut himself up in his house. In the meantime, stories of his bulk had spread far and wide and curious visitors came to Leicester and used various pretexts to visit his home. Lambert kept away from public eye as much as possible. He also refused to allow himself to be weighed. His friends once tricked him into getting into a carriage on the pretext of going to a cock fight. Once he had squeezed his way into the carriage, the rest of the party drove the carriage onto a large scale and jumped out. By deducting the weight of the previously weighed empty carriage, they calculated that Lambert now weighed 320 kg, making him officially the heaviest person in history, surpassing the previous record-holder, Edward Bright.

That's 705 pounds! In 1806, Lambert decided to make a living by putting himself on exhibition. He become famous nationwide, and even received a visit from King George III. Read the story of Daniel Lambert at Amusing Planet.

Mike Ryan decided to use his lockdown time to catch up on old movies he'd always meant to watch. He thought he would see twenty movies, but as the pandemic dragged on, he caught up on 602 movies! One of the things he noticed is how movies in the 21st century end very differently from older films. Before 2000, the movie went to credits when the plot was resolved. What happened to the characters after that was left to our imaginations. Modern movies can resolve the main plot and spend another 40 minutes tying up every loose end and explaining where the characters then went. Talking to screenwriters and filmmakers, he came up with several reasons for this.

“Well, I think it has a lot to do with CinemaScore and the testing process,” says a screenwriter. “Movies are looking for that little boost at the end to get that final impression up a bit right as people leave the theater. That’s why post-credit sequences work. You can see that movies that end ambiguously score lower in testing and on CinemaScore. So the longer endings remove all ambiguity.”

He continues, “There is a screenwriter guru person. She says people don’t care about victories; they respond to people celebrating the victories. That’s what makes audiences happy. Hence the medal scene at the end of Star Wars. That’s what gives people joy, not the Death Star exploding. I think maybe we’ve overlearned that lesson.”

And that medal ceremony scene at the end of Star Wars? Do you know how long that scene is? It’s one minute and forty seconds long. That’s it. Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star and they wrap everything up in a tidy scene less that two minutes long. It’s perfect. Compare that to the ending of The Rise Of Skywalker that I think is still going. Every little thing had to be resolved, even Chewbacca finally getting a medal from this aforementioned medal ceremony. Think about watching the first Star Wars in a vacuum in 1977, without all the sequels that would come later. Do we think Han will stick around? Darth Vader got away, what’s he up to? What happened to Ben, why did he just disappear? This created discussion and it created a more satisfying experience because, we, the viewer, could think about those questions and it made us think about the movie more.

You know what they say: nothing succeeds like excess. There's more to be said about how movies have changed, which you can read at Uproxx.

Measuring scales go back into antiquity. The act of balancing an unknown quantity with a known quantity of weight is the simplest way to measure weight and assign value to goods for sale. Archaeologists have found evidence of these known quantities all over the world. One such find in Jerusalem appears to have quite a story.

Found in the northern part of the City of David in Jerusalem's Old City and dating back to 2,700 years ago during the First Temple period, the weight in question is just 14 mm. in diameter and 12 mm. in height, and is only the second one of its kind to have been found in Israel. Made of hard limestone, the it contained engravings indicating it has a weight of two gerah, which equals 0.944 grams.

Despite this, however, the weight does not weigh two gerah. Rather, the researchers found that it weighed at least 3.61 grams, over three times as much.

Researchers believe traders used the weight to scam people. For example, if someone brought in their gold jewelry to sell, they could set six gerah of gold on the scale and be paid for only two gerah. This was apparently a problem in the ancient world, as several places in the Bible warn against the sin of using misleading weights and measures. Read more about the find at The Jerusalem Post.  -via Strange Company

Carl Koppelman put his art and tech skills to work in amateur forensics to help police connect seemingly unrelated crimes. Aware of how many dead bodies found in suspicious circumstances were unidentified, Koppelman recreated pictures of the deceased as a living person, hoping that they would be more recognizable by those who knew them. As a volunteer, he was instrumental in solving several cold cases. In 2009, he came across the 1999 case of an unidentified young woman found dead in Racine County, Wisconsin, where nobody knew her. Looking through missing persons reports, he saw the case of Aundria Bowman, who had been missing since 1989. Aundria was considered a runaway. Could she have been murdered ten years later?  

Aundria and the Racine County Jane Doe shared physical characteristics, and their ages aligned: Aundria would have been 25 in 1999, when the Jane Doe was killed. Holland, where Aundria disappeared, sits directly across Lake Michigan from where the Jane Doe was found—it’s just four hours by car from one location to the other, tracing the lake’s southern shoreline and passing through Chicago. To test the possible identification, Koppelman created a composite image, superimposing Aundria’s photo with ones from the Jane Doe’s autopsy. He marked the similarities in red.

Koppelman took his theory to law enforcement, who found it compelling enough to investigate. To determine whether the Jane Doe was Aundria, police would need to compare DNA from the body with that of someone in Aundria’s family. Because Aundria was adopted, authorities had to track down her birth mother. Koppelman knew that could take a while, or that it might never happen, forcing investigators to find other avenues for identification.

But Aundria's birth mother was found. Cathy Terkanian had no idea what had happened to the daughter she relinquished until someone called wanting DNA to identify a dead body. When she learned of the case, she teamed up with Koppelman to find Aundria's killer. Their investigation uncovered a lot of other crimes in a story that is disturbing, to say the least. Read how Aundria Bowman's murder was solved more than 30 years after she went missing at age 14 at Atavist magazine. -via Damn Interesting

When we say pickles, we often mean pickled cucumbers. But any number of vegetables (or meat, or eggs) can be preserved in a solution of vinegar or salt brine. While the process of pickling foods goes back into antiquity, it became very handy for sailors during the Age of Exploration.

Scottish doctor James Lind discussed how pickles could fight scurvy, noting how the “Dutch sailors are much less liable to the scurvy than the English, owing to this pickled vegetable carried out to sea.” The pickled vegetable in question was cabbage. And Captain James Cook was such a proponent of what he called Sour Krout that he gave his officers as much as they wanted, knowing that the crew would eat it as soon as they saw the officers liked it.

But not everyone was a fan. John Harvey Kellogg, who as we’ve previously discussed was deeply concerned about eating food with any known flavor, felt pickles were one of the "stimulating foods" that needed to be avoided.

The history of pickles is full of anecdotes like this, which you can see, or watch in a video, at Mental Floss.

We know that Thomas Jefferson was avid to equip his new country with viable agricultural products. He experimented with crops in his garden, bottled his own wine, and imported livestock. That included a ram that Jefferson thought would improve the bloodline -and the wool- of American sheep.

This was no ordinary ram. Gifted to Jefferson by a DC businessman named James D. Barry, the ram was a Shetland – a small, usually docile breed that has either two horns or no horns. This Shetland had the distinction of having four horns, and two of them pointed forward.

At this point the United States was in the middle of the Embargo Act barring trade with Britain and France, so Jefferson was keen on anything that could boost the country’s manufacturing from within. Since at least 1790, Jefferson had been told that Shetland wool was “reckoned the finest produced in any part of the British Dominions” and he hoped this many-horned ram’s wool would produce “the famous Shetland stockings” which sold for a guinea a pair and were “soft as fur.” He clung his hopes on this ram to bring that fine wool to America, and his hopes caused him to overlook this ram’s less desirable qualities. That negligence proved deadly in February 1808.

Those "less desirable qualities" led to the death of 9-year-old Alexander Kerr, when the ram attacked him as he was walking home from school. Jefferson had owned the ram for eight months by then, and the first thing he did was to write to the boy's father, insinuating that he had ordered the ram to be secured before the attack. Was that an attempted at CYA? It turned out that the ram had attacked someone else already that same month! In fact, there were accounts of the ram being dangerous for months by then. But Jefferson went to great lengths to keep the ram from being put down -and keep himself from blame. Read (or listen to) the story of Jefferson and his killer ram at Plodding Through the Presidents. -via Strange Company

McDonald's inability to serve ice cream has long been the subject of jokes, since their ice cream machines are almost always out of order, so you may as well not order a McFlurry. When you do, odds are that the answer will come back through the drive-through speaker, "Machine's broken." We have all become used to it, so it came as a surprise to learn that the Federal Trade Commission is looking into why these machines are constantly broken. The short answer that's been around for years is that cleaning the machine is so complicated, workers often just skip it. There's more to it than that.

The mystery surrounding the machines has been long documented. They’re notoriously hard to clean, and when their nightly automated maintenance fails, the franchise must wait for a repair technician. There have been some fixes for this. The startup Kytch launched a device that alerts owners to breakdowns, providing them with a clear message for what went wrong. Currently, the machines themselves, produced by Taylor Commercial Foodservice LLC, offer messages that are as clear as a McFlurry with messages like “ERROR: XSndhUIF LHPR>45F 1HR LPROD too VISC.” What a joy it must be to read that message while working a backed-up McDonald’s drive-thru during a global pandemic.

It's possible to be a little too high-tech, I guess. But somehow, Dairy Queen and other fast food outlets manage to serve ice cream all day long. The real question is what can, or will, the FTC, or McDonald's, do about it? Read more at the A.V. Club.

Have you ever heard of the Koreshan Unity? It was another of the many religious sects born in New York in the 19th century, so you will be forgiven for not finding it familiar. Due to the overabundance of fringe groups and communes in New York, the Koreshan Unity moved to Chicago and then ultimately to Florida, where the group grew to around 200 members in their heyday.

It all started with science. Well, ostensibly. Cyrus Teed, an eccentric medical doctor and alchemist from Utica, New York, often experimented with dangerous levels of electric current. During one late night in his laboratory in 1869, Teed was knocked unconscious by his own experimental attempt to turn lead into gold and had a vision –or as he called it, “The Illumination”. A beautiful woman appeared and imparted to Teed the truths of the universe: the secret of immortality, that God was both male and female, and that we live on the inside of the Earth’s crust. The angel told him he was the seventh prophet in a line that included Adam and, most recently, Jesus and that he had been sent to redeem humanity.

The Koreshans settled in a southwest Florida swamp near Ft. Myers and spent years building a rather nice village in Estero, which ultimately became the property of the state of Florida and is now a state park. Read about the Koreshan Unity and their settlement that is now a well-preserved historical site at Messy Nessy Chic.   

The days of early aviation were crazy, man. F. Gerald Phillips was a Hollywood stunt pilot. He recalled that one time he took off before a landing gear wheel was bolted to his plane. Phillips was carrying a cameraman to film an aerial stunt, so there were plenty of guysy aviators around. First, he lined up with another plane, and wing walker Al Johnson walked over to Phillips' plane.

He climbed through the rigging to the step at the side of my cockpit. Leaning in, he shouted over the engine noise, “Hi, Jerry. Cruise around close to the field. They’ll bring up a wheel. I’ll get it and put it on for you.” It was almost casual.

Bob Lloyd, another motion-picture pilot, took off with Ivan Unger, a wheel, and 20 feet of rope. Ivan, in his early 20s, was a professional wingwalker and parachute jumper, short in stature but long on courage. He had flown with me on many a Sunday show, hanging by his feet from the wing skid or landing gear.

At 1,500 feet and 70 mph Al made an extremely difficult job look easy. Grasping the short strut on top of the upper wing, he nimbly hoisted himself up and assumed a crouching position to await the rendezvous with Bob, Ivan, and the wheel. Soon they approached from behind, slightly above and to my left, and Ivan began lowering the rope, the wheel dangling at its end.

It wasn't an easy task. They dropped the first wheel, and the second wheel wouldn't fit. Then the engine died. That's when they had to get creative. You can read Phillips' entire account of the air emergency at Air & Space magazine. -via Metafilter

The finalists for the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards have been selected! See the best of the best submissions that caught wild animals at the wrong moment, or just comically being themselves. The kangaroo practicing his stagecraft above is from Lea Scadden. The jump for joy below is from Roland Kranitz.



See all the finalists here. Once you've decided which one you like best, vote for the People's Choice Award here. The winners of this year's competition will be announced on October 22.

-via Bored Panda

See also: The Funniest Animals From the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards

We know that medieval art can be really weird. It's one thing to find a random jousting snail or an ugly baby Jesus, but when those things happen over and over, you start to wonder what caused those trends. Some of these can be explained by the religious culture of the time, while others are recurring jokes, which we might even call memes. So it's only fitting that they have become memes all over again in the 21st century!