You may never have heard of the Roman emperor Elagabalus, possibly because the name changed (according to Wikipedia, Elagabalus' royal name was Antoninus) and because he only ruled for four years, from age 14 to 18, then was assassinated in disgrace. Was it because Elagabalus promoted the worship of a sun god ahead of the Roman pantheon? Was it because he was incompetent? Or was it because of his sexuality? There is some evidence that Elagabalus may have been transgender.    

An 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon, wrote that Elagabalus “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury.” Germany’s leading historian of Ancient Rome, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, said that “the name Elagabalus is branded in history above all others” because of his “unspeakably disgusting life.” An example of a modern historian’s assessment is Adrian Goldsworthy’s view that: “Elagabalus was not a tyrant, but […] incompetent, probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had.” Only archaeologist Warwick Ball describes Elagabalus as “innovative” and “a tragic enigma lost behind centuries of prejudice.”

When Elagabalus was alive, a Roman statesman who kept close tabs on the lives of his emperors. In his writings, Cassius Dio notably referred to Elagabalus by feminine pronouns and states that the emperor wanted to marry a former male slave and charioteer named Hierocles. Dio stated that Elagabalus delighted in being called Hierocles’s mistress, wife, and queen. Officially, Elagabalus was married five times (and twice to the same woman) all before he was 18, although there were rumours he also married a man named Zoticus, an athlete from Smyrna.

There were further clues from the written accounts of the teenage emperor's reign. Read what we know about the Roman emperor now known as Elagabalus at Messy Nessy Chic. 

Together, we are all... pic.twitter.com/R5FnT4kv1I

— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 23, 2021

You may have heard by now that the Cleveland MLB team, eights months after announcing they would change their name, will officially be called the Cleveland Guardians at the end of the current season. Now, before you make a joke about Guardians of the Galaxy, there is a perfectly local explanation for the new name, eight sentinels known to all Cleveland residents who pass over the Hope Memorial Bridge, possibly on the way to see a baseball game. They are the Guardians of Traffic.

Flanking either end of the Hope Memorial Bridge from both sides, are 4 towering pylons. Each pylon bears a massive statue on each side representing a "Guardian of Traffic." These winged Art Deco figures wear either winged helmets or winged laurel crowns. Each figure holds a different ground vehicle: a hay wagon, covered wagon, stage coach, passenger car, dump truck, concrete mixer, and two other trucks. The progression of vehicles from hay wagon to semi truck symbolizes the evolution of transport, and the breadth of their protection. They have stood on either side of the bridge protecting all who pass between them since the early 30's.

Henry Hering carved each piece out of a 43 foot tall sandstone slab based on designs by Frank Walker. The Guardians were Hering's first foray into the Art Deco style and they remain the only public Art Deco monument in the city.

-via Metafilter

(Image credit: Erik Drost)

Does anyone remember the Arch Deluxe? It was a fancy hamburger offered at McDonalds beginning in 1996. The company spent $200 million to promote it, and expected to rake in a billion dollars in return. Only they didn't.

It wasn’t entirely unreasonable to expect miracles because on paper, the Arch Deluxe is one hell of a burger: crisp lettuce, mustard-mayo sauce, peppered bacon, tomato, and beef on a bakery-style potato roll. It was the creation of Andrew Selvaggio, a fine dining chef from Chicago’s legendary Pump Room. With all the talent and bona fides a McDonald’s head chef required and then some, Selvaggio spent months coming up with what he now describes as “something unique and different [to] set us apart from everybody. The Arch Deluxe was supposed to be the first entry into a better burger — premium burger — experience for McDonald’s.”

When I read the name of the burger, I confused it with the McDLT, which launched in 1984. So you might be forgiven if you've forgotten the Arch Deluxe, but you can read about it at Eater.  -via Digg

We learned that the ancient Olympics were a big deal in Greece, then were adopted by the Romans, and died out as the Roman Empire turned to Christianity. While it's true that the name fell out of use, sporting competitions inspired by the Olympics became a part of life throughout Western civilization.   

In the West, chariot racing died out rather quickly, but beginning in the second half of the 11th century, knightly tournaments were the spectacle of medieval Europe. At their height, beginning in the 12th century and continuing through at least the 16th, participants would, like their ancient Olympic forebears, travel a circuit of competitions across Europe, pitting their skills against other professionals. (The depiction in the 2001 Heath Ledger film A Knight’s Tale was not far from reality.) In these competitions, armored, mounted men would try to unseat their opponents using lance and shield, or battle on foot with blunted (but still dangerous) weapons to determine who was the best warrior, all for an enthusiastic crowd.

And indeed, these were performances. Lionized in contemporary fiction, and discussed repeatedly in historical chronicles from the period, one scholar has suggested that these were often accompanied—much like the modern Olympics—with theatrical opening and closing ceremonies. An autobiographical set of poems from the 13th century, for example, had the knight Ulrich von Liechtenstein perform a chaste quest for a wealthy (married) noblewoman. Dressed as a woman, specifically the goddess Venus, Ulrich travels across Italy and the Holy Roman Empire defeating all challengers in jousts and hand-to-hand combat.

The legacy of such tournaments continues today, with sports offering nations and individuals an opportunity for fame, glory, and one-upmanship without killing or colonizing each other. Read about the medieval tournaments that grew out of the Olympics at Smithsonian. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Thomas Wriothesley)

It's been pretty hot in Oregon this summer, so the staff at the Oregon Zoo go out of their way to help cool things down for the animals. Watch as a group of ring-tailed lemurs and red ruffed lemurs enjoy some frozen fruit treats! -via Laughing Squid

This terrifying structure is part of an irrigation system used in the Valais region of Switzerland since the 15th century. Some bisses are still in use, while others are designated as historic landmarks. It's a way to get water from the Alpine mountaintops to the dry valley farms that need it.   

Despite being surrounded by some of Switzerland's wettest mountains, the sun-scorched, glacier-carved region receives just 500mm of rainfall a year, presenting a unique engineering challenge for irrigation. Cue gravity-defying bisses, designed to divert glacial meltwater from mountain streams to parched pastures and vineyards at lower elevations. To this day, 200 of them totalling 1,800km in length supply water to 80% of the Valais' irrigated land.

Measuring between 0.5m to 2m in breadth, the most primitive of Valais bisses were hewn out of rock. Others, like the 500-year-old Bisse des Sarrasins in the district of Sierre in central Valais, were hollowed from tree trunks. But the true marvels of bisse engineering were the "hanging channels", designed to guide water from far-off glaciers around gorges and overhangs in the region's wildest corners.

Now imagine the labor and the danger involved in building these in the 15th century. Read about the Swiss bisses at BBC Travel.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Rilaak)

Why do we call a software glitch a "bug"? You've got to call it something, and you may as well ask where the word "glitch" came from. Still, language origin stories are often interesting, and the idea of an insect causing problems in our computers makes sense. Insects love small, protected places to hide, and they reap all kinds of destruction from our point of view. It's also a handy excuse for human error.

According to the most often-repeated origin story, in 1947 technicians working on the Harvard Mk II or Aiken Relay Calculator – an early computer built by the US Navy – encountered an electrical fault, and upon opening the mechanism discovered that a moth had had flown into the computer and shorted out one of its electrical relays. Thus the first computer bug was quite literally a bug, and the name stuck.

But while this incident does indeed seemed to have occured, it is almost certainly not the origin of the term, as the use of “bug” to mean an error or glitch predates the event by nearly a century.

The first recorded use of “bug” in this context comes from American inventor Thomas Edison, who in a March 3, 1878 letter to Western Union President William Orton wrote: “You were partly correct. I did find a “bug” in my apparatus, but it was not in the telephone proper. It was of the genus “callbellum”. The insect appears to find conditions for its existence in all call apparatus of telephones.”

The genus "callbellum" does not exist, and turned out to be Edison telling a joke. But don't take that as Edison coining "bug" for a technology glitch. Edison was in the habit of taking other people's ideas. Read the story of how we came to see "bugs" in the system at Today I Found Out. 

(Image credit: Naval Surface Warfare Center)

While the international Olympic Summer Games are getting started in Tokyo this weekend, Fairbanks, Alaska, is hosting the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, as they have every year since 1961 ...except for 2020. The return of the games this year is particularly exciting. People of all ages will compete in feats of strength and skill that harken back to a traditional way of life such as the ear pull, blanket toss, fish cutting, knuckle hop, greased pole walk, four-man carry, Alaskan high kick, and the Indian stick pull.    

In 1961, two commercial airline pilots, Bill English and Tom Richards, Sr., who flew for the now-defunct Wien Air Alaska, were flying back and forth to some of the state’s outlying communities. During these visits, they watched Alaska Natives perform dances and other physical activities, such as the blanket toss, an event where 30 or more people hold a blanket made of hides and toss one person in the air. The goal is to remain balanced and land on one's feet. (The event stems from the Iñupiaq, an indigenous group from northern Alaska, who would use a blanket to toss a hunter in the air as a way to see over the horizon during hunts.)

“They [English and Richards] had a true appreciation for what they were witnessing and knew that these activities were something that people in the rest of the state should see for themselves to get a better understanding of the value of traditions happening outside Alaska's big cities,” says Gina Kalloch, chairwoman of the WEIO board who is Koyukon Athabascan.

Read about some of the WEIO events and how they descended from traditional indigenous culture at Smithsonian. The 2021 competitions are going on now through Saturday.   

The kitchen may be the heart of the home, but it has always represented a lot of work. The last century or so has given us a continuous race to make that work easier with modern gadgets designed to cook and clean. Since the dawn of the computer age, the idea of a kitchen computer has been tried over and over, with little success. The first one was offered in 1969.

As depicted in this colorful advertisement, the sleek, enormous Honeywell Kitchen Computer would have commanded attention in any kitchen. But it did not actually cook dinner. Rather, its functions included storing recipes, meal planning, and balancing the family checkbook. Though marketed towards housewives, it was very impractical. The advertising campaign’s tagline “If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute!” sought to hide that the Honeywell Kitchen Computer was merely a complicated digital recipe-card box and a calculator.

The department store Neiman Marcus sold the Honeywell Kitchen Computer as a luxury item, pricing it at a kingly $10,600 (around $78,000 today). Buying the computer made little economic sense for the target audience, and required a 2-week coding course on how to properly use the 16 buttons on the front panel. There’s no evidence that anybody actually purchased one.

That was only the first of a series of ideas to get computers into the modern kitchen. But what could a computer actually do in the kitchen that wouldn't take up valuable room and cost more than it's worth? In the end, the solution turned out to be pretty simple. We have a few computerized systems that run through the whole house, for things like energy consumption and security, but getting a computer to help in the kitchen is as easy as making that computer small and portable. My daughter cooks with a recipe displayed on a computer screen while music plays ...on her iPhone. Read a short history of kitchen computers at Atlas Obscura.

With the 2020 Olympics beginning this weekend in Tokyo, all eyes are on the elite athletes of the world. From gymnastics to weightlifting, from the 100-meter dash to equestrian events, the eyes of the world will be on the amazing feats of the human body. How in the world did we ever develop such abilities? You might say, practice and more practice, but looking back into the evolution of human abilities, we find that such skills came along before we were ever Homo sapiens. Archaeologist Anna Goldfield explains what we know about how those abilities came about. Walking upright made us into runners, but it's hardly the only athletic skill we have that differs from other animals.

While the bottom half of our body has evolved away from an arboreal lifestyle, our upper body still retains traits that we inherited from tree-dwellers. Our glenohumeral joint, the ball-and-socket connection between our upper arm and scapula, allows us to swing our arms around in a full rotation. This is a very different type of mobility from that of quadruped animals that don’t swing in trees—a dog or cat’s front legs, for example, primarily swing back and forth and couldn’t perform a butterfly swim stroke. We, on the other hand, can.

Our rotatable shoulder joint also allows us to throw overhand. The ability to throw accurately and forcefully appears to have originated at least 2 million years ago, with our ancestors Homo erectus. Recent research has also shown that Neanderthals might have thrown spears to hunt at a distance. The few known examples of Neanderthal spears were long thought to be used only for thrusting and close-in killing of prey, in part because when researchers tried to throw replicas, they didn’t go far.

Recently, however, researchers put replicas into the hands of trained javelin throwers and were stunned to see the spears fly much farther and faster—more than 65 feet.

Read how evolution got us running, jumping, grasping, and playing ball at Sapiens magazine. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Naoki Nakashima)

This looks like the kind of tropical fish you'd see in someone's salt water aquarium, except this fish is 3.5 feet long and weighs 100 pounds! It is an opah, found washed up on the beach in Seaside, Oregon. The fish was already dead, but was found before the birds could help themselves to it.

Keith Chandler, the general manager of Seaside Aquarium, told CNN that an opah on the Oregon coast is "uncommon to find" and he also added that the fish was "in such great shape."

"They're pretty cool fish, and we don't normally see them on the shore," said Chandler. "It was pretty exciting for locals."

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), little is known about the species since they live deep in the ocean. The species is usually found in temperate and tropical waters.

The Seaside Aquarium took the opah and plan to dissect it to learn more about the species. -via Fark

"It seemed like a good idea at the time..." could be the beginning of every one of the 20 stories in this list. If you think back, you can probably recall a few huge mistakes in movies, TV, advertising, music, video games, and the like, when someone's great idea was actually executed before the target audience turned it down in spectacular fashion. And there are some that may have flown under your radar, like the time that Stephen King's horror story Carrie was turned into a Broadway musical.

Murder stories have a pretty good track record on Broadway—Sweeney Todd, Little Shop of Horrors, etc.—but the 1988 musical adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie bucked the trend. The creative team did include some musical theater heavyweights: Michael Gore, composer of 1980’s Fame, and Debbie Allen, choreographer of the Fame TV series (Allen also appeared in both the film and the show). Alas, their razzle-dazzle ’80s style clashed with all the carnage, and critics’ reviews were their own kind of bloodbath—The New York Times went so far as to compare the production to the Hindenburg disaster. Carrie closed after just five performances.

Almost thirty years after it closed on Broadway, the musical Carrie found a kind of revival in high school theater productions, where you might still be able to catch a glimpse of the carnage. Hear a song from the musical, and read 19 other stories of pop culture gone wrong at Mental Floss.  

Imagine Jason Bourne, Kylo Ren, Batman, and Villanelle all in one movie. And it's directed by Ridley Scott. With a screenplay by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Set in medieval France. Based on a true story involving both complicated ethics and violent action. I'll have to say The Last Duel looks like it might be pretty good.  

You can read the historical account of the duel between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris, which is a pretty exciting story even in plain text.

Flapper fashions from 100 years ago were all about freedom, fun, and flouting society's restrictions on women. But what in the world inspired these young ladies to put faces on their knees? The faces, and other artworks, were an extension of the fad of wearing makeup on one's knees, and that, of course, was to draw attention to what was supposedly forbidden.

As Velma’s character croons, these young women often forwent garters and rolled their stocking down into a bunch, drawing attention to the knee. Dress styles were still too long to show upper legs, but the popular dances of the era, from the Charleston to the Fox Trot, allowed for glimpses of the blushing knees, bringing more attention to that illicit flash of skin. Flappers might have started rouging their bodies because the 1920s was also when cosmetic formulas were first developed for commercial use and many women copied the looks of movie stars, especially Theda Bara’s vamp aesthetic and Joan Crawford’s wide-eyed beauty. As Emily Spivack wrote in Smithsonian, blush had historically been associated with promiscuity, “but with the introduction of the compact case, rouge became transportable, socially acceptable and easy to apply. The red or sometimes orange makeup was applied in circles on the cheeks, as opposed to dabbed along the cheekbones as it is today.”

Once makeup was worn on knees, it took some effort to make them even more outrageous. Read about the rise and fall of decorated knees (with plenty of pictures) at Messy Nessy Chic.

One of the bonuses from last year's lockdown is that we now get Honest Trailers for movies that are still in theaters. The drawback is that this trailer for Black Widow surely has some spoilers, but not so much that you wouldn't still want to see the entire film. Screen Junkies' major criticism is that this Marvel film has a formulaic plot and stereotypical characters, as if that's a real surprise. Nothing could have prevented this movie from being a big hit.