The Simpsons has been running since 1989, and now has 760 episodes in 35 seasons. The prime time animated series always had gags for adults and children, who appreciated different parts of the show. If you are too young to have seen the earliest episodes, you've probably been able to catch them in reruns. There are plenty of jokes you may have missed the first time around because 1. you were too young to get the joke, or 2. the gag may have relied on much older cultural references that you never encountered, and there were also 3. some jokes that relied heavily on current events, which were no longer current when you caught the episode years later. 

In looking through the 13 joke explanations at Cracked, some were always funny to me because I was an adult when the series premiered and I knew the cultural references. Some are just too subtle and may have only gotten a laugh from the production crew. And a few were only funny for that one week 20-something years ago, and only then if you were up on the news. Check them out and see how many you recall.

John Paul Getty was 16 years old when he was kidnapped in Rome in 1973. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of $17 million because Getty's grandfather was oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, the richest man in the world at that time. Some family members thought that the kidnapping was a hoax, but then the kidnappers sent John's severed ear to a Rome newspaper. The only person who had enough money to pay the ransom was J. Paul Getty, but he didn't want to. The young Getty was held for five months before a deal was worked out. His notoriously cheap grandfather negotiated the ransom down to $2.89 million, and insisted that his son, John's father, pay a substantial part of it, which meant getting a loan- from his father. The trauma of the kidnapping stayed with young Getty for the rest of his life.

Other kidnapping stories involved prominent and not-so-prominent people. Frank Sinatra, Jr. was held until his father paid $240,000 for his release. Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of publisher William Randolph Hearst, was taken by the Symbionese Liberation Army and then appeared to have joined forces with them. Adolph Coors III, heir to the Coors Brewing Company, was kidnapped in 1960 for a half a million in ransom, but was never released. Read the details of all these kidnappings and more, nine in total, at Mental Floss.

The US is going through a cold snap right now, but in Antarctica, the sun is up and it's summertime!

You might recall the blogger at brr (previously at Neatorama), who writes so eloquently about his experiences there. After overwintering at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, 14 months on the continent in all, he finally left Antartica in November after the sun came up and regular transportation became available. He's back in the US, where he can experience winter all over again, but it's still quite moderate compared to the South Pole.

Now that he's had time to adjust, he fills us in on the process of leaving Antarctica, which involves waiting for the sun to rise through September and October. Then the station swings from "winter mode" into "summer mode" as the crew prepares for the arrival of the larger summer crew. That means restocking all supplies, checking the infrastructure, and cleaning up. Read how it's all done in part one of his redeployment post. In part two, he explains how airlines work in Antarctica. A Canadian airline comes to ferry people on and off the continent, and it's not all that easy even getting the planes there!  -via Nag on the Lake

The Drunk Men's Choir is just what it says on the tin. YouTuber DougDoug organized a group of singers who do cover versions of well-known songs while drunk. The purpose is to offer the use of their music to any content creators without having to pay royalties or receive DMCA takedown orders, because the filters that find copyrighted music can't detect it. They are that drunk. Yet the songs are recognizable enough to use in place of a protected soundtrack. Their catalog so far is mostly video game songs. They even did the THX sound effect for your listening pleasure.



Each musician has their own link at the YouTube page. These guys are going places. Let's just hope they aren't driving there. -via Boing Boing

In 1990, ex-cop and bodybuilder Tim Todd was looking for a hitman to kill his wife Patti. She had thrown him out of the house for having an affair with a teenager. For help, he turned to his boss, Bill Pagano, who was also his best friend, mentor, and the father of the girl he was having an affair with. Bill, who was the former police chief and the richest man in Festus, Missouri, recorded the conversations and confided in the county prosecutor. At that point, Tim had not committed a crime by talking about the hit for hire, but if Bill could arrange a transfer of money for that purpose, that would be evidence of a crime. Bill facilitated a money transfer, and then arranged to meet Tim at his house, where he planned to arrest him.

However, the meeting did not go as planned. Tim was dead, shot in the head twice. Both the prosecutor and the town's medical examiner knew of the meeting ahead of time, and to them it was surely a case of self-defense. Everyone knew that Tim was taking anabolic steroids and had some crazy episodes in his past. But the prosecutor recused himself from the case and brought in two investigators from Cape Girardeau to look into Tim's death. They determined that the first shot was to the back of Tim's head, so how could it have been self defense? As they looked further into everyone involved in the case, they uncovered a web of connections, crimes, and coverups in Festus. Read a full account of this strange murder in a small town at Truly Adventurous.

We know that snowflakes are ice crystals that form in the atmosphere from water vapor. We've also heard that no two snowflakes are alike, but how would we ever prove that? Only a minuscule percentage of the world's snowflakes will ever be examined, and if they don't melt immediately, they are mashed up with all those other flakes that we shovel from our driveways. Another thing we know is that snowflake crystals form in six-sided shapes, hexagons to be exact, but why is that? Johannes Kepler thought snowflakes had something in common with the hexagons of a beehive, which is an intriguing idea. Physicist Brian Cox explains exactly why snowflakes form in a hexagon, and why we find them beautiful in this pleasantly charming video from the Royal Society.  -via Kottke

 

Amazon has a surprising number of items that are called "I cannot fulfill that request" or something close to that. They have fewer after several websites highlighted the phenomenon yesterday and sent Amazon scrambling to take them down. That's what happens when you use a large language model to name your products, and even worse, write your Amazon ads. While some of these ads may be the result of clueless translation attempts, far more of them are scammers, counterfeiters, and drop shippers who are generating so many ads that they cannot be bothered to actually look at them. And neither does Amazon.

The ads that made it through without encountering any sort of quality control can be hilarious, like when the item name includes a mention of OpenAI's rejection of trademark infringement. After the article was published, Amazon took down all the items that were screenshotted and more, but the same oddities are rampant in social media platforms.



We can laugh, but the real problems come when AI is somewhat supervised and therefore not so easy to detect. Read about the Amazon sellers letting AI run amok at Ars Technica.  -via Fark

(Top image: Amazon via archive.org)

Twenty-five-year-old Lawrence Nelson of Lenoir, North Carolina, went missing in 1906. His body was found a couple of months later, and two men were arrested for his murder. Charles Hampton Kendall and John Vickers were convicted and sentenced to 30 and 26 years, respectively. Soon after the conviction, Nelson's father, the pastor of a local church, erected a tombstone for his son that gave his name and birthdate, then underneath was carved, "Murdered and robbed by Hamp Kendall and John Vickers, Sept. 25, 1906." Most families would have been discouraged from using such an epitaph, but it was his son and his church cemetery.

But Kendall and Vickers were pardoned by the governor ten years later, mainly because there were doubts about the one witness against them. Then the real murderer confessed. But the tombstone remained, because to change it would be grave desecration, which was a crime. That set up a conundrum that went on for decades. Read what eventually happened to the falsely accused murderers, the tombstone, and the laws surrounding gravestones at Atlas Obscura. Yes, there's a picture of the tombstone. 

"Celebrity" is a catchall term for someone who is famous, or at least notable. Usually there is a reason for their fame, some accomplishment in movies, TV, sports, music, politics, business, or even crime. In our modern media-obsessed culture, there are also people who are just famous for being famous. We call them celebrities because there's no other way to describe them, except maybe "influencer."
 
But the phenomena is not new. Giacomo Casanova was born in 1725 in Venice and was neither fabulously wealthy, nor powerful, nor all that talented in any one area. Yet he was definitely a celebrity, always appearing in the news and in gossip. He cultivated that reputation because his greatest goal in life was to be famous. We remember Casanova today mostly because of all the women he was associated with- in fact, his name became a term for a womanizer. He would have appreciated that. But in his time, he was noted for simply being noticed. Read the story of Giacomo Casanova's self-made fame at Jstor Daily. -via Strange Company     

(Image credit: Francesco Narici)

Auralnauts has redone the first Star Wars movie, now known as A New Hope, as if Zack Snyder had been at the helm. The story is familiar, but is now chock full of Snyderesque touches, like the overuse of his signature slow motion shift for dramatic emphasis (executed appropriately and perfectly at 8:50), the camera lingering unnecessarily on the most gory details, and too much nonsensical exposition in the dialogue. That weird explaining is necessary to save time for the slow motion shots. All this comes with an over-the-top score to clearly tell us what we are supposed to be feeling. While these tropes can be tiring over a whole movie, you have to admit that Auralnauts greatly improved the originally lame lightsaber fight between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Oh, and the ending telegraphs the fact that Snyder just ran out of time. Those slow motion sequences sure do eat up cinematic minutes!  -via Boing Boing

On March 10, 2020, Food and Wine informed us that McDonald's was going to start serving Big Macs with four hamburger patties, to be called the Double Big Mac. Do you recall what else happened on March 10, 2020? My kids called me from from school crying because they were told to vacate their dorms by Friday and go home. Their graduation was off because the school was shutting down due to the COVID-19 epidemic. Also, the Double Big Mac didn't get much notice for its limited run.  

Four years later, McDonald's is going to try this again. The Double Big Mac will be on the menu starting on January 24, for a limited time at participating restaurants. If it sells well, this massive meat monster could find a permanent place on the menu. The real question is: how much will it cost? A company spokesman wouldn't say, because prices will vary by location. True carnivores should start saving up. -via Mental Floss

In the latest video installment of his What If? series, Randall Munroe explains the disasters that would follow if our earth stopped spinning on its axis. The hypothetical question included the fact that the atmosphere would continue moving at the same speed, so that part is enough to blow us all away pretty much immediately. We are used to the earth's movement at up to a thousand miles per hour at the equator, so it would be quite disorienting if the rotation stopped, but we wouldn't have time to deal with it because of that atmospheric movement.

Then the long-term consequences would kick in. The oceans would throw a lot of water into the atmosphere, but retain plenty enough to blast the land with tsunamis, and our days would change to years. That makes surviving the effects pretty darn difficult. But all things considered, the earth would eventually start rotating again someday, probably without us. -via Damn Interesting 

J.R.R. Tolkien's world called Middle-earth is vast and varied, with many kinds of sentient creatures interacting through the adventures in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and other works. Swedish chemical engineer Emil Johanssen is a fan who took on the huge project of collating and parsing the information from Tolkien's works in maps, charts, and breakdowns of all sorts. One part of the project is figuring out the demographics of the various kinds of characters.

One thing quite noticeable about those demographics is the dearth of female characters, which are only 18% of the 982 characters mentioned. Hobbits are 30% women, but no other type comes close. There doesn't seem to be any female Orcs at all, but that may be because they were created by sorcery. However, that was only one of several possible Orc origins Tolkien mentioned. The life spans of each type of character vary widely, also. Hobbits live past 100 years easily, but the only two that lived past 130 were both aided by the Ring they carried. The lifespans of Men depended on which age they lived in. Read more about the statistics of Middle-earth at Big Think. -via Kottke

In 2016, the BBC commissioned Aardman Animation Studios to create an animated tribute to biologist and television host David Attenborough on his 90th birthday. They made three stop-motion videos in the style of their Creature Comforts franchise of the 1990s, with wild animals talking about their own impressions upon meeting Attenborough. Rich Webber, who directed the project, recently uploaded a video featuring the best lines from the series featuring the penguins, gorillas, and lyrebirds that have worked with Attenborough. Keep an eye on the crazy stuff going on in the background of each vignette. You can see all three of the original videos in their entirety here. Attenborough, now 97, is still working in television. -via Nag on the Lake 

Strangely, fights to the death staged between gladiators weren't invented in Rome at all. It was an imported custom that was first launched in Rome in the year 264 BCE. That was when Brutus Pera, a powerful member of the Brutus family who ran the Roman Republic, died. His sons held a lavish wake, called a munus, where they distributed meat and wine to the public. They also had six slaves fight each other to the death for entertainment. That began a custom in which the funeral rites of prominent people often included a bloody battle that took more, although less important, lives.

These battles changed and evolved over time. They became so elaborate and popular that the excuse of a funeral became stretched and finally abandoned. The tradition was tweaked to make the fight more horrific, and slaves were trained for the fights. Read the origins of gladiator fights and what they led to at Atlas Obscura.  

(Image credit: Carole Raddato)