The marker above has only small excerpts of a speech that has since been called Eulogy of the Dog. It was delivered by attorney George G. Vest in 1870 during a lawsuit over a dog that had been killed. It was, in fact, the fourth trial of a lawsuit between the dog's owner and his brother-in-law over who shot his favorite hunting dog Old Drum. The biggest dispute in the lawsuit was over the amount of damages one should be paid for the loss of a dog. What is the life of a dog worth? During closing arguments, Vest delivered an emotional justification that swayed the jury and no doubt drew a few tears in the courtroom. It has since been published and republished, and led to the erection of two monuments to Old Drum in addition to the historical marker. You should read the statement in full, as well as the story of Old Drum's death and the lawsuits that followed, and then go hug your loyal dog. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Carldaniel)

For five years, we watched Walter White try to keep his meth manufacturing business a secret from his wife, his son, the police, and most importantly, from his brother-in-law the DEA agent on the TV show Breaking Bad. A big part of the show's allure was seeing his panic at the many close calls and wondering how long he was going to get away with his secret double life. But what if he hadn't put so much effort into not getting caught? The series would have been much shorter, but probably a whole lot funnier.

In this fantasy version of Breaking Bad from Alternative Cuts, White not only doesn't care about anyone finding out what he's been doing, no one in the cast cares about gun safety or road safety, either -or anything else for that matter. It's chaotic, but you have to admire the editing that made it possible. Do not miss the driving lesson sequence. -via reddit

Jeff Raw runs a construction company in Atlanta. He bought a vacant lot with no utilities, and ordered a water meter in 2022. The meter was installed, but there was no water line to the property yet. A month later, Raw got a water bill for $8,899, indicating he used 305,184 gallons of water. After five months, the water bill totaled $29,669.43, but there was still no water line. Raw asked for an inspection, and the water department came and found no leak and still no water line. When the water line was finally installed for the new house, the monthly bill sank to $13.12 for a month. But Raw was expected to pay the entire bill of almost $30,000 for around a million gallons of water.

Board Chair Clifford Ice said there are only three options: use of water, loss of water, or theft of water.

I can think of other options: error in installing the meter, error in the billing department, or embezzlement. I'm sure there are other possibilities. There was no evidence of flowing water found, and no one noticed anything that could be attributed to theft. Raw appealed to a higher-up at the Department of Watershed Management, and received an admission that the bill was due to a leak caused by the utility. But then the utility appealed that ruling, and suddenly Raw is on the hook for the bill again anyway! Read how all this came about in a news report. -via Fark

Unrelated image credit: Infrogmation)

Some countries are more addicted to the internet than others. Smartick crunched the data and tell us that people in South Africa lead the world in screen time, spending an average of 9 hours and 38 minutes looking at their devices. That's followed by Brazil in second place and the Philippines in third. Argentina and Colombia round out the top five, also spending more than nine hours a day on average looking at screens.

Amateurs. My desktop pops up occasionally to tell me how much screen time I use, and it's usually 13 to 14 hours. That's because I work online, use my desktop as a TV, and I live alone. Besides, I don't know how they can tell; I'm up and down from my desk constantly, doing other things that wouldn't last long enough for a machine to determine that it's downtime. You can see the above map in a much larger size at Smartnick. They also have graphics that break down screen time by device, whether it's desktop or mobile. I use my phone as mostly just a phone, so I'm only looking at the screen when I'm showing someone photographs. I don't know why watching a TV isn't considered "screen time," especially since so many people get their movies and shows via internet. -via Digg

U.S. President William McKinley was shot in the abdomen at close range in 1901. He was rushed to a clinic where gynecological surgeon Matthew Mann operated on McKinley's wound. The president died eight days later from necrotizing pancreatitis due to infection. Afterward, Dr. Herman Matzinger did a thorough autopsy to determine whether McKinley died from the gunshot wound or the botched surgery, or from some weird theories like the assassin used poison or bacteria on the bullet. He concluded that the gunshot caused the president's death.

More than a century later, Dr. Matzinger's notes from the autopsy were found by his family and were put up on auction earlier this month. They reveal how Matzinger came to conclusions in his report, and revealed the lengths he went to in studying the president's infection. He grew cultures of the bacteria from McKinley's body and injected them into several rabbits and one dog! That experiment was unknown until the discovery of Matzinger's documents. Read about the assassination, the autopsy, and the animal experiments at LiveScience. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Achille Beltrame)

Wherever he goes, Ed People asks folks to show him what their favorite dance moves are. Many are glad to oblige, and then he learns to do them alongside his teacher. You can see a ton of these videos at his YouTube channel. This video is a "best of" compilation, in which people show him salsa, swing, ballet, and waltz dances, trendy dances to contemporary music, dances they do with their family, and traditional dances from cultures all over the world. It's a great way to make friends, showing your interest in something that brings people joy in so many different ways.  -via Nag on the Lake

Ada Blackjack was an Iñupiaq woman who married at 16 and had three children before her husband abandoned her. Only one child survived infancy, and he suffered from tuberculosis. Blackjack walked 40 miles to Nome, Alaska, carrying her son Bennett in order to place him in an orphanage, because she couldn't afford his medical treatment. She desperately wanted him back, and that's why she signed on to the doomed 1921 expedition that Vilhjalmur Stefansson organized to explore the possibility of a colony on Wrangel Island, the uninhabited Russian island in the Arctic Ocean where the last woolly mammoths survived until 4,000 years ago. The plan was iffy, but the $50 a month pay was enticing.

The four young men and one woman (plus a cat) only had six months worth of supplies. As the crew went into its second winter on Wrangel Island, they were starving. E. Lorne Knight was sick with scurvy, and the other three men left to try and reach Siberia, but did not make it. Blackjack was left to care for Knight, herself, and the cat, although she was only hired to be a seamstress for the crew. But she stepped up and hunted game, hauled firewood, built tools, and kept a diary of her experience. When a rescue ship finally reached Wrangel Island in August of 1923, Knight had been dead for 57 days, but Blackjack and the cat were holding on. Read how Blackjack spent two years on Wrangel Island and took on the work of four men to make it back to her son, at Jstor Daily. -via Damn Interesting   

(Image source: Archive.org)

Minnesotastan was naturally proud of his state when the University of Minnesota Dance Team won the College Dance Team National Championship last weekend. It's their 22nd national championship. Minnesota won the title for their pom routine, but their jazz routine (which took second place) was the one that went viral. The sequence that got everyone's attention starts at about 1:30, where all twenty dancers spin on one foot, then do a synchronized aerial flip, then spin on one foot some more. That's a very difficult move for one person, but to get the entire team so precisely synchronized is amazing. They had initially planned for only a few dancers to execute the move, but then went ahead and included everyone. The choice of Aerosmith's "Dream On" for the routine is a throwback to the 2004 team, which used it 20 years earlier. Also, in a case of nominative determinism, their assistant coach's name is Tina Tumbleson. -via TYWKIWDBI

The credit for this picture is NASA/JPL-Caltech, but it was actually taken by the Left Navigation Camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. The date on earth was January 9, but on Mars the date was Sol 4062. What we are looking at is the route uphill to Mount Sharp, or Aeolis Mons, where Curiosity is trying to figure out how water once flowed there. However, what we are seeing is that Starfleet got there first.

I bet the Star Trek fans on the @MarsCuriosity team smiled like Cheshire Cats when they saw this new image appear on their screens... :-)

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech pic.twitter.com/SdWyq4Sc5P

— Stuart Atkinson (@mars_stu) January 10, 2024

There's no way the many Star Trek fans who work at NASA missed the unique and ubiquitous shape of a Starfleet insignia, worn as a badge by all service members, and used as a communicator in Star Trek: The Next Generation and other series. I have one in my jewelry box. You could say it's pareidolia, but considering it's a new planet we're exploring, the first one we've been able to, it might be a sign of something. -via Boing Boing

Airline pilots were asked which airports they'd rather not fly to, and got some wild stories. LaGuardia, Lake Tahoe, and and the Hillary-Tenzing Airport in Lukla, Nepal got mentioned by more than one pilot. Kai Tak gives at least one pilot nightmares even though it closed a quarter-century ago. One is an aircraft carrier, which is quite understandable.

What makes an airport difficult for a pilot? Some runways are very short, and may have a sudden cliff at the end, above or below the runway. Some require you to climb suddenly for noise abatement, like Los Angeles airports. Some are surrounded by mountains or buildings. Skiathos Airport in Greece (pictured above) has a low approach that requires you to fly just a few feet over the heads of gathered tourists. At least one airport made the list because of the staff's attitude. Read the reasons why 35 pilots don't want to fly into certain airports at Bored Panda. Keep in mind, the rankings are from readers of the site.  

(Image credit: Timo Breidenstein)

The first people to fly through the air were balloonists, beginning with the Montgolfier brothers in 1783. The early balloon trips were called flying circuses because they were so novel. Seeing one, or for a few people, going up in one, was pure entertainment, and any flight would draw a huge crowd. But for Thomas Baldwin, the very idea of an aerial balloon offered a chance to advance science, to study the atmosphere, and to see the world from above it.

Baldwin was no balloonist, but when daredevil balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi came to Chester, England, in 1785, Baldwin was ecstatic. Lunardi was injured before his scheduled flight and offered Baldwin the chance to take his place. It was Baldwin's only balloon flight, but he made the most of it, taking scientific instruments with him on his trip to take measurements, and a sketchbook to illustrate what he saw. Read how Baldwin gave us the first aerial maps from human eyesight at Atlas Obscura.

"Weird Al" Yankovic's very first single was "My Bologna." He wrote the song in 1979, the same year that The Knack took over our radios with "My Sharona." Yankovic recorded it in a bathroom for the Dr. Demento Show, and it became so popular that Capitol Records eventually let him record with a backing band, released as a single from his first album in 1983. But there was no official video. In those days when MTV was new, you have to be an established star to justify the expense of making one.  

But now it has one, made by Yankovic fan Isaiah Ferguson. It took him ten months of work to produce this stop-motion video that captures the spirit of Weird Al quite well. It's less than a minute long, while the original song is just over two minutes, but let's be honest, that's about all we can handle. -via Laughing Squid

In the 1500s, cartographer Robert Thorne floated the idea that the North Pole wasn't covered with ice, but merely was protected by a ring of ice around it. In the 19th century, August Petermann resurrected the idea, and thought that ring might have channels through it, so that sailing ships could cross the North Pole and make intercontinental travel shorter. By then, some explorers claimed they had actually seen the North Pole ocean. But two expeditions, in 1869 and 1872, failed to get through the ice.

An American expedition wanted to try reaching the pole through the Bering Strait, and in 1879, the Jeannette sailed out of San Francisco. But upon reaching the Arctic, the ship became encased in ice -for two years. The crew abandoned ship in June of 1881 when the Jeannette fell apart. They carried three boats to the edge of the ice and then tried to reach Siberia. Two boats made it to land, but only one crew survived to reach civilization. Read the story of the Jeannette expedition at Amusing Planet.

Having watched a lot of Saturday morning TV in the 1960s, I was aware of the Easy-Bake Oven, but I never really craved one until I got to elementary school and found out that many of the girls in my class had one. I asked for one, but my parents thought that was silly, since I was already using the regular oven to make tiny cakes in tiny pans whenever my mother baked a full-size cake. Besides, it was too expensive -and so were the tiny packets of cake mix. That was logical, but not easy for a six-year-old to hear. So the most nostalgic part of this video for me is seeing the Kenner Gooney Bird.

Forty years later, my own children never expressed any desire to bake tiny cakes with a light bulb. I honestly didn't know they were still made until I watched this video from Weird History Food. The Easy-Bake Oven turned 60 years old just tecently, and has had a lot of ups and down in its history. The older ones that still work fetch a premium in the vintage toy market, but good luck finding light bulbs that are hot enough to bake a cake.   

In the Star Trek universe, Bloodwine is what Klingons drink, often to celebrate winning battles or during ceremonies. It is twice as potent as whiskey, and will knock non-Klingons for a loop. Believe it or not, Klingon Bloodwine is not available at Star Trek Spirits as they specialize in Romulan liquor, but you can order it through Star Trek Wines. Still, it might not be what you imagined because the title comes with "Cabernet Sauvignon" appended, telling us that it is made with earthly grapes instead of blood.

Firewhiskey figures in the Harry Potter books and movies as a liquor that witches and wizards drink. It's quite a step up from Butterbeer, and leaves one with a burning sensation and expanded courage. Both Jack Daniels and Jim Beam produce Fire Whiskey, but since they use two words for the product, it couldn't be the Harry Potter drink.

So what are fans to do if they want to toast their favorite franchise with someone that will leave you totally tipsy? Make your own at home. The Fresh Toast offers recipes for cocktails that will replicate the imagined taste and the cachet of Firewhiskey and Klingon Bloodwine. The Firewhiskey is literally a "goblet of  fire" and the bloodwine has an extra kick with a dash of tabasco. -Thanks, Hearsetrax!