In 2004, the sandwich chain Quiznos enlisted Joel Veitch’s Spongmonkeys for their TV advertisements. What happened then illustrates the great divide at the time between those who were connected with internet culture and those who were not. Before the rise of social media, that was a large chasm. Vetch was a British animator popular among internet insiders for presenting oddball videos. He didn’t even know what Quiznos was when he agreed to the ad campaign using his bizarre characters.   

Months later, Veitch was back in the U.K., working as an animator on a late-night TV show, and not really thinking much about the ads when they first began airing in the U.S. His email blew up immediately. “Nobody around me had a clue what was happening, it was all in another country for a brand they’d never heard of,” he says. Still, the reaction resulted in his website crashing when over a quarter of a million people went to check out his work.

Unfortunately, the backlash was just as swift. Within the first week of the campaign, Quiznos corporate received more than 30,000 calls complaining about the Spongmonkeys. Per a 2004 article from the Denver Business Times, an Alabama Quiznos franchisee even put up signs in his windows saying he wasn’t responsible for the ads, as they were turning away customers and making children cry.

Quiznos wanted to be noticed. The ads delivered, but not in a way that led to people buying more sandwiches. Read how the Quiznos Spongmonkeys came about at Mel magazine.

You've read plenty about COVID-19 and what it did to New York City in early 2020. We've also posted quite a bit about the 1918 influenza pandemic and the Black Death. But disease epidemics strike somewhere in every era. New York was the scene of a yellow fever outbreak in 1795 and again in 1798. Alexander Anderson was a 20-year-old medical student from Manhattan who was drafted into the fight against the fever in its first wave, and came to be the first doctor at Bellevue Hospital. Anderson kept a diary of his work, when around 700 New York City residents died. His diary continued into the second wave, when he was a certified physician and a family man.  

Anderson abandoned that record-keeping on September 4 when a friend arrived at Bellevue to tell him that his wife was sick with the fever; on the following day, his father came to the hospital to say that Sandy’s brother John had fallen ill as well.

For a few days Anderson tried to care for everyone—his wife in Bushwick and the rest of his relations downtown, plus dozens of Bellevue patients. Then, on September 8: “A heavy blow!—I saw my Brother this morning and entertain’d hopes of his recovery. In the afternoon I found him dead!” Yet he could not rest to grieve. “I left my poor parents struggling with their fate and return’d to Belle-vue.” Before setting aside the diary that day, he paused to sketch a small coffin next to the entry.

His father died on September 12. Anderson sketched another coffin next to the entry. In Bushwick, he found his wife in a shocking condition: “The sight of my wife ghastly and emaciated, constantly coughing & spitting struck me with horror.” She died on September 13; he drew another coffin. His mother, the final member of his immediate family, took ill on the 16th and died on the 21st; another coffin. “I never shall look upon her like again,” he wrote.

Get a glimpse of the yellow fever epidemic that caused Anderson to give up medicine for good at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Alexander Anderson Papers/New-York Historical Society Library)

They say the animals of Australia all want to kill us, but even when they don't they can be pretty creepy. It's not so bad when they are cartoons. In a backyard in Tasmania, there are plenty of creatures who have plenty to do in the middle of the night. Throat Notes actually has a plot, involving a possum, a star, and a hapless frog. This trippy animation is from Felix Colgrave, who we've featured before.  -via The Awesomer

Conveyor belt sushi restaurants have been around since 1958, but the concept goes back much further. In 1923, John Moses Baitinger of Minnesota received a patent for a restaurant system that brought food to diners on a sort-of conveyor belt. This would allow the proprietor to do away with servers completely. We assume the diner paid for an all-you-can-eat experience, since they didn’t order, but instead grabbed food off tiny railroad cars that passed by them. Baitinger took his setup to the Minnesota State Fair, where he reportedly made quite a profit.  

Baitinger's Eater was, in many ways, a perfect expression of the mentality of the automation-mad 1920s, obsessed with speed, technology, and efficiency. There were minor drawbacks to the system, however. Diners seated near the end of the line sometimes found that the only cargo left for the eating was boiled cabbage.

Talk about disappointment! That cabbage would be cold, too, by the time you decided to settle for it. Read more about Baitinger’s Automatic Eater at Weird Universe.

The British Museum planned an exhibit called Arctic culture and climate, but was unable to open due to the pandemic. You can take a video tour instead. Part of the exhibit looks at the dogs of the Arctic, which have been more than companions to the people who live there. One fascinating thing that sticks out is how dog sledding varies according to the route. We are used to seeing teams of sled dogs in a double line, taking up little room as they maneuver through the woods, such as in the Iditarod. This style is typical of the Khanty people of Siberia.

Another style of hitching dogs is used by Inuit in eastern Canada and Greenland. The so-called ‘fan hitch’ spreads out dogs and runs in a line like this model from Hudson’s Bay, Canada shows. This style of hitching sled dogs is preferred as it is safer to have a wide spread of dogs when travelling across sea ice. The dogs also have more room to maneuver across rough patches of ice.

Read more about how dogs have made life in the Arctic possible for humans at the British Museum blog. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: The British Museum)

David Friedman of Ironic Sans has always enjoyed stereograms, which you might know as Magic Eye images. They were quite the fad in the 1990s, but existed long before that and are still being generated today. Friedman gives us the history of stereograms and plenty of examples of experimental computer-generated stereograms that you've probably never seen. The above stereogram was created by Scott Pakin. Friedman describes it:

All that stuff is neat and clever. But there’s one Scott Pakin stereogram in particular that really brings a smile to my face because it plays not just with depth perception, but with how our brains perceive color, and it feels more like magic than any other stereogram I’ve ever seen.

You'll see examples of stereograms in history, advertising, video, and art in Friedman's newsletter devoted to the subject. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Scott Pakin)

The stormtroopers of the Star Wars universe were designed to be a multitude of anonymous minions of the villains, a show of power, an ever-present device for instilling fear. Their design was supposed to evoke a cross between Nazis and robots. But there's more to it, as you'll see in this costume breakdown from Behind the Seams that turns out to be a look at all things that stormtroopers mean to us. -via The Daily Dot

We've seen these cats before, when they learned to ring a bell for treats, and when they were enlisted to do a domino fall. Now they've combined their skills (as well as their patience and cuteness) to show us trick shots with ping pong balls and dominos all together. Now, I'm not saying that there's no visual trickery in this video; I'm just saying that it's entertaining either way. -via reddit 

If you are American and have nothing else in the refrigerator, you probably have mustard and ketchup. Even if you don't use them often, it's nice to have them available. But how did they originate? Mustard began as mustard seed, used as a medicine and a spice.

The paste-like form of mustard showed up roughly 2500 years ago. The Greeks and Romans blended ground-up mustard seeds with unfermented grape juice, or must, to make a smooth mixture. The first version of this concoction wasn’t necessarily food—it may have been used more for its medicinal properties, and not completely without reason: Mustard seeds are rich in compounds called glucosinolates, and when these particles get broken down, they produce isothiocyanates, powerful antioxidants that fight inflammation and give mustard its nose-tingling kick.

The Greeks and Romans applied mustard’s medicinal properties to almost every ailment imaginable—Hippocrates even praised its ability to soothe aches and pains. Many of mustard’s historical uses don’t hold up to modern science—for instance, it’s not a cure for epilepsy, as the Romans once believed—but it’s still used as a holistic treatment for arthritis, back pain, and even sore throats.

The whole idea of mustard as medicine reminds one of "mustard plaster," a term that confused me in childhood because that use had already died out by then. Read how both mustard and ketchup were developed and turned into modern condiments at Mental Floss. A video is included if you'd rather watch than read. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Anita Hart)

In the early 20th century, prizefighting was even more uncivilized than it is now. While fights between Black boxers and white boxers drew crowds, heavyweight title fights were segregated. There was the "World Heavyweight Champion," who was by default white, and a separate "World Colored Heavyweight Champion." But Jack Johnson worked for years to get the chance to fight heavyweight champion Tommy Burns, and defeated him in 1908. Former champ Jim Jeffries was brought out of retirement to win the title back.

Their fight, hyped as the “Battle of the Century,” took place in Reno, Nevada, on July 4, 1910, in front of 20,000 mostly-white spectators and nine motion picture cameras. Throughout the nation, many thousands more listened to live telegram bulletins of each round. Johnson beat Jeffries easily, and, as a result, racist mob violence broke out across the country, and Black Americans celebrating Johnson’s win were attacked, and some were killed.

The fight was filmed, the film was banned, and therefore became the movie everyone wanted to see for years afterward. Vox has the story. -via Damn Interesting

She's upset that these guys were following her and trying to get her attention. They just wanted to alert her of the gas hose she's dragging. Real or staged? Yeah, getting this embarrassment on video seems too good to be true, but it's also behavior that doesn't seem too out of the ordinary to have happened somewhere. It reminds me of the movie Trains, Planes, and Automobiles, when a car tried to flag down our heroes going the wrong way on the highway. -via Digg

At the turn of the 20th century, Thomas Edison experimented with an electric car. It was not the first electric car, but Edison's battery was different. This battery had its drawbacks, one which may turn out to be a benefit 120 years later.

Edison had outfitted his car with a new type of battery that he hoped would soon be powering vehicles throughout the country: a nickel-iron battery. Building on the work of the Swedish inventor Ernst Waldemar Jungner, who first patented a nickel-iron battery in 1899, Edison sought to refine the battery for use in automobiles.

Edison claimed the nickel-iron battery was incredibly resilient, and could be charged twice as fast as lead-acid batteries. He even had a deal in place with Ford Motors to produce this purportedly more efficient electric vehicle.

But the nickel-iron battery did have some kinks to work out. It was larger than the more widely used lead-acid batteries, and more expensive. Also, when it was being charged, it would release hydrogen, which was considered a nuisance and could be dangerous.

In the 21st century, you've heard about the possibilities of hydrogen power. The problem is that it's difficult to produce hydrogen. A research team from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands are revisiting Edison's nickel-iron battery to assess its function in both power storage and hydrogen production, and the results so far look pretty good. They named their version of the battery the "battolyser," a gadget that Batman would be proud to use. Read about the potential of the battolyser at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting

The meme that just won't die has gotten the LEGO treatment! LEGO artist Ochre Jelly went ahead and put his toy pixels to work and created sculptures of the Hollywood Housewives, and Smudge the cat.



And then he uses these images to illustrate his own (mostly LEGO-themed) jokes. Click the image to the right to see more.



And since I've discovered Ochre Jelly's Instagram account, you can continue reading to see more of his internet memes in LEGO that you may have missed or haven't seen in a while.

A TikTok video asked people to share the dumbest tattoo they ever got. Leah Holland wins this one, although it was an unfortunate accident of timing.

Leah Holland, 25, had wanted to get this specific tattoo for two years before she finally did it.

"Basically I had a friend that said this quote about me," she told BuzzFeed News. "We were just talking about things that we really admire about the other person, and he said, 'You courageously and radically refuse to wear a mask.'"

She said she's the type of person who thinks it's pointless to pretend you're something you're not, so she liked the quote enough to get it tattooed.

She got it done on March 4, 2020. Two days later, Kentucky announced its first case of COVID-19.

Holland is not anti-mask, and was so mortified as time went on that she spent most of the summer wearing a cardigan. Read her story at Buzzfeed.

(Image credi: Leah Holland)

You might have never heard of the Great Smog of 1952, or you may have been introduced to it by an episode of The Crown on Netflix, like I was. While London is notoriously foggy, it was infinitely worse than usual on December 5, 1952, when a combination of fog and air pollution reduced visibility to only a few feet.     

The smog smothered the city for five days. Transportation came to a virtual standstill. Flights were grounded and trains cancelled. Only the Underground was running. Ambulance services were affected, leaving people to find their own way to hospitals. The fog even seeped indoors though windows and doors. Plays and concerts were cancelled because the audience were unable to see the stage.

Remarkably, there was no panic as Londoners were accustomed to fog. But the death toll increased. Most of the victims were the very young and the elderly with pre-existing respiratory problems. Estimates of how many people died during that period vary from 6,000 to as high as 12,000.

The smog was produced by a combination of weather, geography, and several sources of air pollution. Read about the factors that produced the smog and what's been done about them at Amusing Planet.