As we've said before, people will take any activity at all and make a competition out of it. Joey Chesnut won the annual Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest (again) this past weekend by downing 76 dogs- a new record. Competitive eating has been in the news for about three decades now, but it was also a thing around the turn of the previous century, which grew out of Fat Men's Clubs (FMCs), fraternal organizations in which men could be proud of their girth and socialize with each other. And, of course, eat.

FMCs did not invent eating contests — like most modern social phenomena, the history of competitive eating reaches into mythology — but they certainly popularized them in American culture. When the Manhattan FMC held an all-you-can-eat contest at their East Third Street clubhouse in 1909, several reporters were present to watch Frank Dotzler, a 380-pound alderman, devour 275 oysters, 8 pounds of steak, 12 rolls, 11 cups of coffee and 3 pies. He won $50 and eternal glory.

The considerable media attention enjoyed by these clubs says a lot about the era in which they prospered. “In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” Laura Doan wrote in an engrossing article about Texas FMCs, “attitudes about fat bodies were remarkably different than they are now … As fat men’s clubs were at their peak, people positively associated men of a larger size with wealth and affability.”

Read about the rise of Fat Men's Clubs and their gastronomic achievements at Inside Hook. -via Digg 

People shooting off fireworks in Toledo, OH turned their neighborhood into a war zone when their performative patriotism (or just stupidity), turned their neighborhood into a war zone after the U-Haul truck they rented exploded with the fireworks inside. pic.twitter.com/EQguCzpZWY

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 5, 2021

A block party in Toledo, Ohio, was the scene of a major fireworks mishap Sunday night. A group of teens were seen throwing some kind of incendiary devices into a U-Haul truck filled with fireworks. The truck exploded, and ignited a stack of fireworks that had already been unloaded. Four people were injured. A longer video shows that the explosions went on for several more minutes (linked video contains NSFW language). -via Fark

We had martial arts films before The Karate Kid came out in 1984, but they were mostly considered to be B-movies. The saga of Daniel-san and Mr. Miyagi changed all that. Karate schools sprung up everywhere, martial arts actors Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Jackie Chan became mainstream stars, and there were several Karate Kid sequels, remakes, and even a streaming series that follows the young characters as adults. But how real is the karate of The Karate Kid?

Den of Geek consulted Dr. Hermann Bayer, an expert authority on Okinawan Karate and the author of the upcoming book Analysis of Genuine Karate―Misconceptions, Origin, Development, and True Purpose. Dr. Bayer remembers firsthand how The Karate Kid stimulated the Karate boom in the mid-eighties because he was a practicing Karateka then. But as a martial scholar, he’s pragmatic about his opinions.

“First and foremost, we have to bear in mind that we are talking about a movie, not about a documentation or a piece of research,” says Bayer. “This means that we need to concede that fascinating viewers by something pretty, amazing, or spectacular to look at is more important than authenticity.”

Read and find out how authentic "wax on, wax off" is, and more importantly, how the karate styles give meaning to the characters in the original The Karate Kid.

Let's take a tour of Ocado's automated grocery warehouse in London. The point of this video from Tom Scott is to make us think about how networks of robots may be many individual robots, or one robot made up of a colony of parts, like a Portuguese man o' war. Yeah, but what we are really seeing is the future of humanity, where the robots have taken over the grocery business and eliminated not only shopping, but grocery workers. Still, considering how many cars are in the parking lot, it appears that robots still need a lot of supervision.

Any time you hear the term "monkey glands" in some old movie, you can be sure it's a reference to Dr. Serge Voronoff, whose work became famous in the 1920s. The Russian-born French surgeon was a pioneer in transplanting organs- although the organs he was transplanting were animal testicles, or parts of them, into human scrotums. It wasn't in order to replace a man's gonads, but to "rejuvenate" them.  

The first official transplant of a monkey gland into a human body was performed on June 12, 1920. Three years later, Voronoff’s work was applauded by more than 700 scientists at the International Congress of Surgeons in London. The transplantation of living cells, tissues or organs from one species to another had become a experimental trend in the field of medicine as early as the end of the 19th century. Around this time, Voronoff had been studying the effects of castration in Egypt, which would later inform his work on rejuvenating treatments. By 1920, he was conducting his first transplants between chimpanzees and humans. For a brief time, he was using the testicles of executed criminals to transplant into his wealthy clients, but when the demand eventually became too great, he had to open a monkey farm breeding facility on the Italian Riviera. During his career, Voronoff also performed testicular transplants on more than 500 goats, rams and bulls, claiming the results showed that implanting organs extracted from young specimens into older animals had a revitalising effect on the latter. He proceeded to convince himself (the world’s elite) that he had discovered a method to slow down the process of ageing.

Thousands of men trusted Voronoff enough to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have monkey glands added to their bodies. This enabled Voronoff to expand his experiments to woman. Read about the monkey gland doctor at Messy Nessy Chic.

What makes humans different from our evolutionary cousins, the great apes? Walking upright and big brains are the top differences. When we think of the evolution of mankind, those two things are often regarded as happening together, but it wasn't quite so. Paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva explains that walking upright came first, not because we were smart, but because the trees we lived in died out.

“March of Progress” was an illustration done by a Russian artist, Rudolph Zallinger, in a 1965 Time-Life book called Early Man. It’s this beautiful foldout that shows ancient apes down on all fours, and it has them slowly rising up to modern humans. At the time, with the fossils we had, you could create a narrative like that. But in the last half century we’ve made so many amazing discoveries that show the human family tree is much more diverse. The pace of evolutionary change is quite different and it turns out that upright walking is the earliest of these evolutionary changes. The earliest bipeds on the ground were evolving from things that were upright to begin with in trees. Really all that happened was an ecological change. These hominins were living in environments that had fewer and fewer trees. To continue to get from point A to point B to get your fruit and other food resources, you already are pre-adapted for an upright posture and moving on two legs. In that case, bipedalism wouldn’t be a new locomotion, it’d be an old locomotion. It was just in a new setting on the ground, rather than in trees.

Walking upright put our ancestors into quite a vulnerable position, but it was only later that proto-humans developed large and flexible brains to deal with the situation. Meanwhile, we had to be adaptable and use the environment we had by becoming cooperative and omnivorous. Read how that came about in a fascinating interview with DeSilva at Nautilus.  -via Damn Interesting

Waiting until the last minute is okay, when your team works like a well-oiled clock. While these guys did a wonderful job making this video, I have a few thoughts from experience. There are cups on the floor in the kitchen, but no dishes in the living room? And those cups have no liquid in them? Do these people always use disposable dishes? The only shoes on the floor are in a bedroom? I've never seen a laundry room so free of clothing, and I've never seen anyone vacuum a floor that's already so clean. The lack of dishes with food and liquid is the most nonsensical thing about this scenario- yes, more so than the three vacuum leaners. -Thanks, gwdMaine!

When you think about alcoholic drinks named after a person, you probably first think of Tom Collins. While that origin story is interesting, Tom Collins wasn't a real person. But plenty of whiskeys, wines, and cocktails took their names from real people, and the stories may surprise you.

Many bartenders argue mixology is a science, and in the case of the Dubonnet, a French aperitif, they’d be right. It's said that chemist Joseph Dubonnet was looking for a palatable way to deliver doses of quinine (found in the cinchona tree) to French Foreign Legionnaires in North Africa in order to fight malaria. But writing in the book Just the Tonic, authors Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt speculate that it’s more likely that he was simply in search for a medicinal tonic in general, not specifically anti-malarial. Either way, in 1846 he came up with the perfect concoction: a blend of fortified wine, herbs, spices, and just the right amount of quinine.

Read the stories of six other alcoholic drinks and the real people behind them at Mental Floss.

Good news: I have gathered a bunch of photos of naval ship cats in tiny hammocks. Here are sailors of the HMS Hermione in 1941 surrounding their sleeping cat, Convoy. pic.twitter.com/X1iAaezxk5

— Molly Hodgdon (@Manglewood) July 2, 2021

Ever since boats became big enough to carry people and their food supplies, there have been cats aboard, mainly to control rodents, but also to boost morale during long voyages. When a crew get attached to a cat, they want to treat their mascot right. During World War II, that meant they should have a hammock to sleep in, just like the sailors. Molly Hodgdon presents a collection of images from that era of ship's cats in their custom-made hammocks. There's no word on whether the cats had to sleep in shifts like the sailors. We can assume they were treated much better than that. See nine such pampered ship's cats at Twitter. -via Everlasting Blort

Bonus: Hodgdon also has a thread of old paintings featuring people spoon-feeding cats.

Alasdair Beckett-King (previously) presents a seriously true crime story. Some of the details are a little distracting. In all honesty, you have to feel for the writers who must create pseudonyms for police procedurals that run for twenty years or more- it must be hard to come up with names that don't either repeat or sound completely ridiculous. Beckett-King revealed that his own alias is an anagram: "King Abelard Caketits."

The remains of a young man who died in Latvia 5,000 years ago was unearthed in 1875. Scientists have revisited this specimen, called RV 2039, and a few others from the same archaeological dig in order to sequence their genes more than 140 years later, and found quite a surprise among the bacteria that remained in his teeth. It was a very old strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that caused the plague we call Black Death.  

While three of the individuals were clear of disease, they found traces of Y. pestis in the RV 2039 specimen, who was a 20 to 30-year-old man.

The researchers reconstructed the bacterium's genome and compared it to 41 ancient and modern Y. pestis strains.

They found the man had been infected with a strain that was part of a lineage that first emerged around 7,000 years ago, making it the oldest-known strain of Y. pestis.

The ancient strain of Y. pests was not carried by fleas, and wasn't particularly deadly or contagious. But it may well have killed RV 2039, and now it gives scientists a step in the disease's evolution. Read about the discovery and what it means at ABC Science. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Dominik Göldner, BGAEU, Berlin)

Remember the first time you heard one of your favorite rock songs converted to elevator music by Muzak? You might feel the same way when you hear "Bodies" by Drowning Pool converted to a kid's sing-along. But this isn't being played in kindergartens across the country- it's the latest abomination from Dustin Ballard, the insane genius behind the YouTube account There I Ruined It. -via Laughing Squid 

See also: Animals Sing Drowning Pool

Our understanding of history is shaped by our perspective. Our world history classes are often limited to the history of Western civilization, in which the narrative is centered in Europe. But there were plenty of other civilizations with their own perspectives. When Verena Krebs researched the relationship between Europe and Ethiopia in the medieval era, she found a perspective that changed the entire focus of the book she was writing. Ethiopia was an early adopter of Christianity, and by the 15th century had formed a Christian empire in East Africa.

The Solomonic kings of Ethiopia, in Krebs’ retelling, forged trans-regional connections. They “discovered” the kingdoms of late medieval Europe, not the other way around. It was the Africans who, in the early-15th century, sent ambassadors out into strange and distant lands. They sought curiosities and sacred relics from foreign leaders that could serve as symbols of prestige and greatness. Their emissaries descended onto a territory that they saw as more or less a uniform “other,” even if locals knew it to be a diverse land of many peoples. At the beginning of the so-called Age of Exploration, a narrative that paints European rulers as heroes for sending out their ships to foreign lands, Krebs has found evidence that the kings of Ethiopia were sponsoring their own missions of diplomacy, faith and commerce.

Just as Europe saw Africa as an exotic monolith to be explored and exploited, the kings of Ethiopia regarded Europe as an interesting but less-civilized region of relatively new Christians and possible trading partners. Read about how Krebs' book flips the script on medieval relations between continents at Smithsonian.

"This was the era of the gangster, the bootlegger, the racketeer. Prohibition and a thirst for illicit alcohol were allowing organized crime groups to flourish." https://t.co/5QHEQrpfcX

— Narratively (@Narratively) July 1, 2021

The Duffy brothers, Tommy and Joe, made a living through armed robbery in the Roaring Twenties. After serving a few years in prison, they were deported to Scotland in 1930. The brothers wanted to make enough money to get back to the US, but honest work was hard and not at all lucrative. So they decided to rob a bank.

For the Duffys, Newcastle upon Tyne, in the northeast of England, must have represented an even more appetizing target. It was more compact and less hectic than London, with fewer police officers — none of them armed with anything more than a truncheon. Importantly, the town was situated on the main road and rail routes between the brothers’ primary haunts of London and Edinburgh. The Cattle Market branch of Lloyds Bank seemed particularly vulnerable. It was small but busy. Late on a Friday afternoon, it was likely to be piled high with weekly deposits — including takings from Friday’s wholesale meat market. The Duffys planned to march through the front door, terrify the occupants into submission with their guns, and walk out the back door with the cash.

But Newcastle, a medieval walled city, had a long history of fending off aggressors, from marauding Viking raiders to invading Scottish armies. Proud of its relentless production of coal, ships and Newcastle Brown Ale, neglected by the government and disregarded by the rest of the country, this was a tough-as-nails city that was used to looking after itself. Its residents — known as Geordies — spoke in a dialect that was mostly impenetrable to outsiders. They were fiercely protective of their community. By 1933, the global depression was biting the city hard. Times were tough, and every penny was wrought from sweat and blood. The people of Newcastle would not give up their hard-earned money without a fight.

The Duffy brothers soon found out that robbing a bank in Newcastle was nothing at all like a typical American bank robbery of the 1920s. It was more like those movies where everything that can possibly go wrong happens, which you can read about at Narratively.  -via Damn Interesting

Talk about giving your all for journalism! At a track meet in China, a student cameraman from Datong University ran alongside the 100-meter sprint to get the perfect video.

Despite holding the camera rig (which reportedly weighed over 8.8lbs/4kg), not being appropriately dressed for a sprint, and continually looking over his shoulder, the videographer was apparently able to keep pace with the runners, maintain the gap, and cross the finish line first.

You may think you've seen this happen before, as it was the point of a humorous old Powerade ad. -via Bits and Pieces