In the Dutch city of Leiden in the 19th century, it wasn't at all rare for people to get suddenly sick and die. The city had no functioning sewer system, and outbreaks of cholera were common. In the poorer neighborhoods, people couldn't even afford to consult doctors. The child death rate was particularly high. That's why we will never known for sure how many local residents were killed by Maria "Goeie Mie" Swanenburg. She had earned the nickname "Goeie Mie" because she was so helpful to her family, friends, and neighbors- always willing to look after children or care for sick people or assist anyone needing help with cooking.

The 44-year-old Swanenburg was arrested in 1883 after a doctor became suspicious of one man's illness. His wife and newborn had just died, but death in childbirth was common. Swanenburg's past came out in the investigation. She was constantly buying arsenic, and had a history of buying life insurance on people who died soon afterward. Swanenburg was eventually convicted of killing 23 people, but is suspected of up to 100 murders. There were also victims who didn't die, but suffered greatly. Read the case of Maria Swanenburg and the trail of dead people she left behind her at Vice. -via Digg

Once upon a time, flying in a jet airliner was a special occasion. People didn't do it often, and they dressed up as if they were going to an event. And they were! Planes had fancy meals served on china, flight attendants who acted as if they were hosting a party, and lounges right there in the plane. It was luxurious. Today, airlines load their planes like cattle cars, there are no meals, you have to pay extra to take luggage, and we do all we can to just endure the time until we land at our destination. What happened? The story takes us through the history of the airline industry and the government agencies that regulate it. -via Digg

There are numerous historical buildings that claim the title of the world's first skyscraper, but that all depends on how you define a skyscraper. There is a good argument that a five-story factory in Shrewsbury, England, should have the title, not because of its height, but because of the engineering inside.

Textile magnates and brothers Thomas and Benjamin Benyon took on John Marshall as a partner in 1793 because Marshall was working to automate labor with steam engines. But there was a problem with textile factories in general- they were very flammable. The group hired architect Charles Bage and challenged him to give them a more fireproof factory. The result was the building now known as the Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings, erected in 1797 and still standing today. It was the first building designed with a cast iron frame instead of wood. That innovation eventually led to the steel frame designs that enabled buildings to soar to new heights. Read about the Shrewsbury Flaxmill Maltings and what made it unique at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Tk420)

Thing has made a real impression in the Netflix series Wednesday, which follows the daughter from The Addams Family. But is the disembodied hand known as Thing a character, a special effect, or a prop? While bringing Thing to life involves all three, he is definitely a character to the producers of the various Addams Family media appearances. But the more tantalizing questions are, where did Thing comes from? Did he once have a whole body? If so, what happened to it? Is he the Addams' servant or pet or family member? Does he get paid in hand-me-downs? Is Thing even a "he"? And whose hand is it? YouTuber Bopping traces what we know about Thing from the original Charles Addams comic, the 1960s TV series, the feature films, Wednesday, and other media incarnations of The Addams Family, both in the fictional world and behind the camera. -via Boing Boing

When you're trying to break into Hollywood or network TV, every bit of experience and exposure is crucial, and you jump at every opportunity. So maybe you get a chance to play on a TV game show, and you jump on it. Thirty years later, when you're a big star, someone will pull that old embarrassing clip out of the archives and show us all. Even if there is no surviving clip, we want to hear the story behind that episode. Especially whether they won!

Check out Arnold's Dating Game segment at YouTube. There's also a clip from Stephen Fry's University Challenge appearance here. When you include talent shows and modern reality-competition shows, the list can get pretty long. Read about 15 stars who had early game show appearances on their resumes at Cracked.

It's that time of year again, in which Barry Petchesky compiles cases from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s database of emergency room visits to bring us a list of things people had in their bodies that required medical intervention in 2022. In other words, things stuck in orifices. The list is divided by orifice: ear, nose, throat, penis, vagina, and rectum. We would suppose that the first half is dominated by pediatric cases, and the second half by adults with red faces. A few of the items listed include a quote from the report to explain how the patient said the object ended up there, which get less plausible as you move down the list. In some cases, it's impossible to tell if the patient was a child or an adult.

“MISTAKENLY USED SHOE GLUE INSTEAD OF EAR DROPS”

“DROPPED HIS OTTERPOP ONTO THE FLOOR WHICH WAS COVERED IN METAL SHAVINGS FROM A DRILL PRESS, AND CONTINUED TO EAT THE OTTERPOP”

“PATIENT SAYS HE FORGOT TO TAKE FOIL OFF FOIL-WRAPPED BURRITO”

An otterpop is a fruit juice popsicle. I also had to look up "monkey noodle." It's a toy. You can read the whole list at Defector. If the list of things stuck in orifices does not give you enough laughter or pain, you can also see Petchesky's report on the penis injuries of 2022 with patient explanations that I don't feel comfortable quoting here. -via Metafilter

See also: the lists from previous years.

It's true that an architect's job is to design buildings, not construct them, but like many other jobs, learning the real-world tasks down the line can make you more knowledgeable about your own work. In other words, architects will learn a lot by actually constructing a building. That's what senior architecture students a California Polytechnic State University do, to gain real-world experience in putting their ideas into action. Hence their slogan "Learn by Doing." That said, these students' ideas can be quite outlandish. You have to wonder how many of these ideas were later replicated elsewhere. Many of the buildings still survive, although not in pristine condition, in the area known as Poly Canyon. Tom Scott takes us on a short tour of the students' projects, although he's a bit reticent to invite people to go there due to the constant vandalism that plagues the stuctures. It's too bad no one really lives there anymore. 

Gregor Mendel was a 19th century Augustinian friar and scientist who is often called "the father of genetics." He didn't know about chromosomes or DNA, but he discovered and documented many of the rules of heritability, including dominant and recessive traits an organism inherits from its parents. Most of the organisms he studied were pea plants.

July 20, 2022, was the 200th anniversary of Mendel's birth. What could the scientific community do to appropriately honor Mendel for the occasion? A team of scientists in the Czech Republic, where Mendel lived and died, decided to sequence his DNA. Mendel always promoted the advance of science, and even requested an autopsy in the event of his death, so we might assume he would be okay with that. But the project was far from simple. They would have to get permission to exhume Mendel from a tomb owned by his Augustinian monastery. Then they would have to accurately identify his remains, which were buried in the same grave as four other monks. Read about the strange but appropriate memorial project and what they learned from the results at NPR.  -via Damn Interesting

In 1959, Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens hitched a ride in an airplane and died when that plane crashed. Those deaths were followed by a whole slew of popular musicians dying in plane crashes, Otis Redding, Jim Croce, John Denver, Ricky Nelson, and several members of Lynyrd Skynyrd among them. But the first music superstar to die in a plane crash was Glenn Miller. Miller and his orchestra logged 16 #1 hits and 69 top ten hits in only four years, a streak that ended suddenly in 1942, when Miller volunteered to entertain the Allied troops fighting World War II, and was commissioned as an officer. By 1944, he was playing concerts and radio broadcasts in England.  

Following the Allied capture of Paris in August 1944, the BBC planned for Miller and his orchestra to travel to the newly-liberated city to perform a special concert on Christmas day. Miller was anxious to fly over to finalize travel arrangements for his bandmates, but unfortunately thick fog and cloud cover made travel inadvisable. As luck would have it, American Lieutenant Colonel Norman Baessell was also in a hurry to get to Paris and offered Miller a ride in his chartered UC-64 Norseman light aircraft. Miller accepted, and on December 15, 1944 he, Baessell, and pilot Flight Officer John Morgan took off from RAF Trinwood Farm outside Bedford and headed out over the English Channel. They were never seen again.

So what happened to the plane? Media coverage of the disappearance was soon eclipsed by the Battle of the Bulge. The Army Air Force report consisted of speculation. Rumors arose with all sorts of wild theories, some more plausible than others, but the mystery remained. Then in 1956, a possible witness to the plane's demise came forward. In 1987, a fisherman encountered wreckage that may have been Miller's plane, but did not recover it. There are plans to search for that wreckage with new technology, but the passage of time puts the possibility of finding anything at great odds. Read what we know and what we don't know about the disappearance of Glenn Miller at Today I Found Out.

Just noticed I made a bit of a mess of that at midnight so here’s the final final version. #sgtpepper2022 update 5b… pic.twitter.com/lOM04mSVAQ

— christhebarker (@christhebarker) January 1, 2023

We lost an awful lot of notable people in 2022. If you were to put the celebrity deaths of 2022 together on a record album cover in the style of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, it would look like this.

This collage is the work of British artist Chris Barker, who revised it several times in the last few days to add more people. This is version 5b, which he hopes is the final version. You can click to enlarge it here. Some people are represented by objects or avatars that are more familiar than their faces. For example, the penguin in front represents Carlo Bonomi, who was the voice of Pingu in the children's television program, and the airplane in the sky represents Johnny Johnson, the last of the World War II Dambusters.  

Barker is already getting pushback for some people not included, mainly Americans he hasn't heard of. If you don't recognize all the people in the picture (and who would?), you can use the key to their names here. There are 196 of them. The key does not yet include Barbara Walters or Pope Benedict. The project was obviously a massive amount of work, but Barker has done it before.

Previous years 2/2 pic.twitter.com/e1lh0FNR8r

— christhebarker (@christhebarker) January 1, 2023

-via reddit

This account is mainly about domestic cats but I needed you to see this happy Cypriot lion. 5th or 4th century BCE. https://t.co/QUzf6qpdpJ pic.twitter.com/0IpM4QLgdf

— Cats of Yore (@CatsOfYore) December 29, 2022

The Twitter account Cats of Yore normally gives us vintage photographs of cats, but also some delightful surprises. Just look at the smile on this lion sculpture! The funerary stele might be 2400 years old, but he looks strangely familiar, doesn't he? It's like we have seen this lion before somewhere.  Hmm, big smile, tongue hanging out, human-like teeth, eyes strangely flat on the face...

(Image source: Lejonet på Gripsholms Slott)

Yes, we've seen this lion before. It is on display at Gripsholm Castle in Sweden. The lion was a gift to King Frederick I in 1731. When it died, the pelt was taken to a taxidermist who had never seen a lion, and he did his best by pure guesswork. Ulrika Good told the story of the lion back in 2011 and the lion, already viral in Sweden, went global. The lion was Photoshopped into so many memes that a Facebook page sprung up to archive them, and it's still active!

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

And now we find out that some sculptor in the fourth century BC had the exact same vision of a lion when he was commissioned to chisel one out of limestone. He had probably never seen a real lion, either.  

The headline makes sense when you learn that Brian May has been knighted by King Charles III. May's new honor was included in the U.K.’s annual New Year’s Honors list. He was recognized for his contributions to music and to animal welfare advocacy. May responded to the honor by saying he hopes the knighthood will give him “a little bit more clout.”

That was tongue in cheek, of course. May is known globally as the guitarist and songwriter for the band Queen, but his interests are wide ranging. He has long advocated for animal rights, and founded the organization Save Me in 2010. He is also an astrophysicist, stereograph collector, gardener, and a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. As such, May already has plenty of clout. Just ask the millions of Queen fans who followed them in the 1970s, witnessed Live Aid in 1985, discovered the band via Wayne's World in 1992, or saw the movie Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018. -via Fark

Laurence Brown (previously at Neatorama) normally brings us humorous and often stinging observations about the differences between Britain and the US in his Lost in the Pond series. Born in England, he's lived in the US for about 14 years now with his American wife, and for seven of those years has been making YouTube videos about the contrast between the United States and his home country. Now he's finally become an American citizen! In this video, he takes us through the process as he experienced it, in his wry and self-deprecating manner. The real excitement is when he finally confronted the citizenship test, covering subjects he's researched and made videos about. He also studied diligently for it. But when the crucial moment arrived, he came close to panicking and forgot everything he learned! Somehow he managed to pull it together just enough to become a dual citizen with the right to vote. Congratulations and welcome to the club, Laurence!

While the New Year holiday really doesn't signal anything more significant than a new calendar, it's a symbolic time of reset and renewal, of looking back and looking forward, like the two-faced Roman god Janus, for which January is named. As such, there are plenty of superstitions connected with the New Year holiday. Many of these involve food! In my neck of the woods, hog jowl, black-eyed peas, and cooked greens are served for luck in the new year, but I alter that to pork chops, black-eyed peas, and broccoli. Each dish represents something good that will happen if you eat it. There are plenty of other food superstitions from all over the globe associated with good fortune for the new year. If we call them traditions instead of superstitions, we can just enjoy them for what they are. Read about eleven traditional good luck dishes for New Year's Eve and New Year's Day and what each is supposed to mean at Thrillist.

When Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians played "Auld Lang Syne" at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan while ringing in the New Year of 1930, it wasn't planned as anything other than a nostalgic song out of their regular repertoire. While the song had a tenuous connection to the show's sponsor, that idea wasn't set in stone. It was just a tune that they sometimes used to end their set. They had no plans to repeat it every year. But it eventually became "the" song of the New Year holiday.  

"Auld Lang Syne" might not have become the tradition that it is if it weren't for the fact that the University of Virginia liked the Canadian orchestra, and hired them for various campus events and celebrations. And the fact that the band would party with the UVA fraternities afterward. Read what happened and how those parties contributed to our holiday traditions at Atlas Obscura.