It's become common for parents to console children about bad grades by comparing them to Einstein, saying he got bad grades, and look how he ended up. Then the child drops out of school and tells his parents, well, Einstein dropped out, too, and look how he ended up. The myth about bad grades came from a misunderstanding of how numeric grades in Switzerland (and later Italy) worked. Einstein was brilliant in science and math, and okay in other subjects. He just hated school because it was regimented and boring. He did drop out of school at 15, because he wanted to join his parents who were living in Italy. Einstein went on to get a PhD in Zurich.



This myth came about purely because of Hollywood. It's much more exciting to see a body flying as it is shot than to just see the victim slump to the ground. Things are a bit different in wartime, with missiles, bombs, and cannons, and the only way to make a mundane murder by gun look as exciting on screen is to emulate the explosions of war. In fact, a lot of what we think of as "common knowledge" commonly comes from Hollywood or debunked science or someone just making a good story better. Find out the stories behind a bunch of these myths at Cracked. 

Is risking your life to be attractive ever worth it? Maybe, if you've been taught that beauty is the only thing you have to offer, or if everyone around you is doing the same risky thing, or if you have no idea how dangerous an everyday beauty regimen can be. Society has gone through many cycles of less-than-healthy beauty fads, from makeup made of lead to eating disorders. Weird History focuses in on some unhealthy trends of the Victorian era, namely consumption chic, corsets, arsenic baths, and wildly dangerous makeup ingredients. While we can look back and say "What were they thinking?" we also have to wonder what we are doing today that will cause people of the future, say a hundred years from now, to say the same about us.

A lava tube forms when a stream of lava is rolling downhill, and the outside of the flow cools and solidifies before the inner flow. The hot lava inside eventually runs out, and meanwhile more lava and rock has buried the tube, leaving a cave.

It's been almost two years since the Cumbre Vieja volcano erupted in the Canary Islands covered La Palma island with 200 million cubic meters of lava, with an average depth of 50 feet. Hundreds of residents are still waiting to go home, and construction of new communities has begun, even thought the lava is still hot in places. That leaves scientists scrambling to study the eruption and its effects before the lava is moved or destroyed. It's a risky endeavor, as the lava tubes are just barely cool enough to enter with protective gear, and you can't tell if the rock underneath is stable enough to complete the journey. The ceilings can fall, too.

But the research goes on. So far, explorers have found stalactites and stalagmites formed by dripping lava, and mineral deposits that leave streaks of colors behind, all within just two years of the eruption. If these lava tubes survive long enough, they could become home to microorganisms and develop their own ecosystem. Read about the lava tubes of La Palma and the scientists who dare enter them at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

How could you not be drawn to a story headlined "the golfer who married five women and murdered five men"? That was Alvin C. Thomas, better known under his nickname Titanic Thompson. I was halfway through the story and remembered that this was supposed to be about a golfer, and it hadn't mentioned golf yet. Thompson took up golf suddenly as an adult, and discovered he was very good at it. He could have been a professional golfer, but Thompson scoffed at the idea because he already made a better living gambling. In fact, he made an awful lot of money gambling because he cheated.

Thompson didn't kill five men at once; those were three different instances, and he had an indirect hand in a sixth death. Yet he never served time for any of them. The five women he married were all teenagers, between 15 and 18 years old. The 18-year-old was his fifth wife, and he was in his 60s when he married her. So you can see that a timeline of Thompson's life would be pretty complicated. And he got away with it all, dying in a nursing home at age 80. Read his story at Historic Mysteries.  -via Strange Company

As a kid reading Laura Ingalls Wilder stories, I was fascinated to read about making maple syrup and snow candy. It seemed so neat that you could go collect tree juice from the forest and make candy from it! But that was more than 100 years ago, and she saw it from a child's point of view. Making proper grade A maple syrup takes a lot of work and expertise, but more importantly, it takes time. Forty years to grow a sugar maple tree, although you can skip that if you're lucky. Weeks of slowly gathering sap, which must be done at just the right time, and you'd better get a year's worth when you do it. Many hours of filtering and greatly reducing each gallon of sap. It's no wonder then, that grade A maple syrup can cost $200 a gallon, and that tiny bottle at the grocery will cost you $15. In this video, Jeffrey Schad and Ashley Ruprecht of Laurel & Ash Farm in New York take us through the process of producing maple syrup, from the trees to the table.  

(Image credit: Eran Sandler)

In 1968, the Beatles traveled to Rishikesh, India, to spend time with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his Transcendental Meditation Center. It wasn't exactly a "getaway" in the way you or I would think, as they took an entourage of 60 people and were followed by the press. None of the Fab Four stayed as long as they had planned, but John and George were there for a couple of months. The Beatles returned to England with a slew of their most creative songs having been written during their stay.

(Image credit: Daniel Echeverri)

So what happened after that? Rishikesh, which has many ashrams, became quite popular among Westerners who discovered Transcendental Meditation and other Eastern disciplines and religions. The Maharishi died in 1981, and the Transcendental Meditation Center was abandoned and left to be taken over by nature. Yet visitors still came, and in 2015, it was officially opened to the public again. Learn about this unique Ashram, its place in history, and what it's like now at Messy Nessy Chic. 

It wasn't until 1840 that James Marsh developed a test to determine if someone had been killed by arsenic, changing forensic science forever. But the idea has been around for a couple of hundred years already.
 
The career of John Cotta shows us that the idea of forensic toxicology greatly preceded the ability. Cotta was a doctor in the early 1600s, a strange time in which old superstitions overlapped with the scientific study of medicine. He wrote a book about the modern and scientific methods of discovering witches in 1616. Really. Cotta also thought of himself as an expert in forensics. In 1620, he was summoned by Sir Euseby Andrew, who was ill and convinced that he was being poisoned. He suspected his wife's companion, Mistress Moyle, of giving him poisoned "broths and jellies." Andrew made no secret of his worries, but no one believed him but Cotta. A minister who attended Andrew near his death even admonished him not to make false accusations just before he meets his maker. Then Andrew died.  

Cotta and another physician performed an autopsy, and Moyle was eventually charged with murder. But there was no Marsh test at the time. Read about the case of possible poisoning and the trial that followed at Legal History Miscellany. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Wellcome Images)

Home Economics just bought a house, and decided to throw a party. They've invited every subject they know, and a few they've forgotten. They've also forgotten how none of those subjects get along with each other at all. Physical Education thinks Drama is useless, and vice-versa. Science and Religion won't speak to each other, but Geography knows his place. Meanwhile, Latin wants everyone to get off his lawn, and Maths, well, nobody likes him. When there's an emergency, Media Studies has to communicate it, so that's a disaster. Why wasn't Music invited to the party? It's a silly premise, but these interactions will take you back to your school days, or maybe college, as my school didn't offer nearly this many subjects. It's the latest nonsense from Foil Arms and Hogg.

Emergency rooms are often confronted with a case of a penis injury or some object stuck in a bodily orifice, in which the patient has some outlandish explanation for their predicament that no one believes. Can you imagine having to consult a doctor for such an embarrassing problem with a perfectly good scientific explanation and still having trouble making them believe you? Of course that is usually secondary to getting the problem taken care of. The patient in this case was way more frightened than embarrassed, we presume. And in pain.

The strange case was found in the 1857 book A Collection of Remarkable Cases in Surgery. A young man went to a doctor because his penis was stuck in a bottle. The opening of the bottle was only three-quarters of an inch in diameter, but his penis was indeed inside, painfully swollen and turning black. The doctor had to break the bottle in a scary maneuver. The explanation for how it happened was a pure accident, just plausible enough for the doctor to recreate the circumstances to test if it were possible. Well, not all the circumstances- the doctor used his finger in the recreation, and even that seemed ill-advised to me. What happened was an extreme version of this (SFW) video, except it involved volatile chemicals. Read the entire account in a transcription of the case at Boing Boing.

(Image credit: MET)

As someone whose knowledge of world history is mostly self-taught, I must admit that I occasionally mix up Attila the Hun with Genghis Khan. They were both imperial conquerors from the east, both fierce and ruthless warriors, both known by their titles instead of their birth names, both considered barbarians in their time (by those they conquered), and both have unknown burial places thanks to lots of witnesses being murdered. But Genghis Khan lived 600 years later, and had a well-documented life. Not so for Attila. The Huns didn't write anything down, and the people who did write about them hated the Huns. So in this mini-biography of Attila the Hun, you will hear "maybe" and "possibly" a lot. What we know about him is swamped by what we don't know for sure. One thing I learned that's pretty neat is how Budapest, Hungary, is named for Bleda the Hun, although this, too, is disputed.

We've posted about Attila before, but it was mostly about his love life. Weird History fills in the gaps as much as they can. -via Digg

I have long used the term "restless corpse" to tag the many posts in which most of the story takes place after the subject died. Only this time, it's not a human subject.

Ethelbert was the name given to an 13-foot orca that swam 100 miles up the Columbia River in 1931. No one had ever seen a whale so far inland, and people came from miles around to see Ethelbert. But officials didn't know what to do with the orca, slowly dying miles away from salt water. The governor already had to stop people from shooting at it. Businessmen wanted to capture and exhibit it. The Humane Society wanted to put Ethelbert out of its misery. Some wanted to tow the orca back to sea, and others wanted to let nature take its course. Meanwhile, Edward Lesserd and his son got in a boat and harpooned Ethelbert, killing the orca almost instantly.

But then what? Lesserd was arrested, but no one could find a law that he broke. Ethelbert's corpse was preserved in formaldehyde, and the story really takes off after that. Read the whole whale of a tale of Ethelbert the orca at Amusing Planet.

(Unrelated image credit: Liam Quinn)

In the 1940s, around 300 babies were born with the address of P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico. If that happened today, some blogger would be investigating that anomaly, but this was wartime. All the mail that came to that box was transferred further up into the desert to a secret town of several thousand people called Los Alamos. Just a few years earlier, it had been empty desert except for a residential school for cowboys, but it suddenly became the scientific center of the Manhattan Project. No one knew how long the war would last, or how long it would take to develop the atomic bomb, so Los Alamos was home for thousands of secret residents as long as it needed to be.

Today, Los Alamos is a city of 12,000 people, many of whom work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. You can't keep a secret forever.

When a particular shiny rock has its own name, and hundreds of years of documentation, you have to figure that it's quite rare and valuable. You could also guess that its history would involve some question of who the "rightful" owner should be. Many of the world's largest gemstones got where they are today after a long sequence of questionable moves, including gifts bestowed under duress, political ploys, tribute to an overlord, spoils of war, slavery, looting, and outright theft. In between those episodes are also the more benign acts of buying, selling, gifting, and inheritance, which only muddy the rights of ownership further.

As you might also guess, the British royal family ended up with an outsized proportion of the world's largest and most controversial gemstones. Three of them can be seen in the photo above: the Black Prince’s Ruby, on the front of King Charles' crown, the Cullinan II just below it, and the Lahore Diamond on Queen Camilla's necklace. Read about ten gemstones with less-than-wholesome stories behind them at Mental Floss.

Remember Crusoe the Dachshund (previously at Neatorama)? Since we last saw him, he's grown a bit. In fact, in this video he's the size of a respectable government building! This dachshund doesn't know his size, as he tears up the pavement around town just by walking. A wag of the tail can destroy windows! I hope the folks at the cookie factory got out alright, because dachshunds love cookies. Can anyone stop this behemoth before he destroys the entire city? It surely won't be Karen, or will it? This story will remind you of a 1950s B-movie, in which something grows to enormous size due to nuclear radiation. The difference is that this is an adorable little dog, and the special effects are better than those old movies.

It's that time of year! The Iowa State Fair will take place August 10-20. There will be a variety of attractions, but here at Neatorama, we usually focus on the food, because every year food vendors compete to come up with the most outrageous, delicious, artery-clogging combinations to draw in publicity and hungry fairgoers. This year Iowa has 64 new gastronomic offerings from various restaurants who will be set up at the fair. Of those 64, a panel of judges has selected three finalists for the title of Best New State Fair Food.

One is the Grinder Ball, which are bacon balls that are stuffed with mozarella, wrapped in more bacon, and then smoked and dipped in marinara sauce. They make sure to inform us that it's gluten-free.

The Iowa Twinkie is anything but a Twinkie. This is a jalapeño pepper stuffed with pulled pork, sweet corn, cream cheese, and ranch seasoning. It is then glazed with barbecue sauce and ranch dressing.

The third finalist is the Deep-Fried Bacon Brisket Mac-n-Cheese Grilled Cheese. The title is the description.

Strangely, none of the three finalists are served on a stick. If you're going to the Iowa State Fair, you can find the foods you want to try by downloading their app. Then you can vote for the Best New Fair Food online between August 10th and 14th. The winner will be announced August 16th, which leaves several days for everyone else to try it.

(Image credit: Iowa State Fair)