In 1865, plantation owner Colonel P. H. Anderson was short on workers after the Civil War. He wrote a letter to the formerly-enslaved Jordon Anderson of Dayton, Ohio, asking him to return to Tennessee to help bring in the harvest and save the farm. Anderson responded with a very polite letter that is a masterpiece of passive-aggressive truth. Anderson's boss, attorney Valentine Winters, who had written the letter Anderson dictated, had the letter published in the local paper, where it became a sensation.

For the Letters Live program from Letters of Note, Laurence Fishburne reads Anderson's letter in the deadpan manner he must have intended. It is both funny and deeply cutting. The first time we posted about the letter, most of the commenters doubted its authenticity. But as the Wikipedia article on Jordan Anderson tells us, every person mentioned in the letter is documented. Winters may have helped construct the letter, but the story was very much real. You can also read what happened to Colonel Anderson afterward. -via Laughing Squid

The internet makes it easy to learn about things you weren't taught in school, and things you don't want to ask your family about. Before the World Wide Web, it wasn't so simple. In the 1980s, people were eager to learn about sex from a 4' 7" Jewish grandmother named Ruth Westheimer. Dr. Ruth was a highly educated sex therapist who made talking about sex both acceptable and entertaining with her positive attitude and no-nonsense, non-judgmental advice.  

Westheimer started out with a radio show that aired after midnight on Sunday so that children weren't listening, as part of a public service commitment required at the time by the FCC. But she became so popular that an expansion to TV was inevitable. Explicit sexual terms didn't seem so prurient when spoken in her high-pitched grandmotherly German accent, often with a laugh. Her fans were even more impressed when they found out that after she lost her parents in the Holocaust, she moved to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine at age 16 and joined the Haganah at 17, where she was trained as a sniper. Westheimer, now 95, is still writing books and making occasional public appearances. Read about Dr. Ruth's meteoric rise as America's sex education teacher in the 1980s at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Rhododendrites)

The British department store John Lewis has a tradition of well-produced tear-jerking Christmas ads every year. We've posted them for more than ten years now. They always manage to revolve around children, love, family or friends, and a magic twist. This year's ad titled Snapper: The Perfect Tree has all that, but served up with a huge dose of weird. A little boy wants to grow his own Christmas tree, but what he gets is nothing like a Christmas tree. You have to wonder if the writers are not-so-subtly mocking the syrupy-sweet ads of past years, or whether they were taking drugs. No, I'm not going to tell you what happens, because you need to watch the video. Even after you figure out what's going on, this will require some suspension of disbelief. You've been warned. -via Fark

Led Zeppelin's fourth album was released on November 8, 1971. The cover features a framed picture of a man carrying a bundle of hazel, hung on a dilapidated wall. The original story was that it was an oil painting Robert Plant bought in an antique store. But it was a hand-tinted photograph, and the original photograph has been found.

Researcher Brian Edwards found the photograph while he was looking for early images of Stonehenge in 2021. It was in an album labeled “Reminiscences of a visit to Shaftesbury. Whitsuntide 1892. A present to Auntie from Ernest.” The man in the picture captioned “A Wiltshire thatcher” is believed to be Lot Long, who lived in the village of Mere and died in 1893. The photographer was Ernest Howard Farmer. The Wiltshire Museum, which now owns the photograph, has included it in an exhibition of Farmer's photographs called Wiltshire Thatcher: a photographic journey through Victorian Wessex scheduled for next spring. Read the story of how the photo came to light at the Guardian.

(Image credit: Wiltshire Museum)

The Minnesota legislature voted to replace the state's flag, which is the state's seal on a field of blue. The current design is both boring and illegible, and almost indistinguishable from dozens of other state flags. But what design will replace it?

In 2020, Mississippi asked for public input on a new state flag and got lots of wonderful, weird, and funny submissions. Minnesota is doing the same, and received 2,123 submissions! Some are seriously good, as if they were designed by trained graphic artists, while others appear to be a required elementary school assignment. And there are plenty of comedians taking advantage of the opportunity.

You can spend all day looking through the official gallery of submissions, or skip to Racket, for a gallery of the 30 goofiest designs. But really, there are a lot more than 30 that will make you laugh.

There is also a separate gallery of suggested designs for a new state seal, which makes incorporating the design of the new seal into the new flag fairly impossible, and that's a good thing according to CGP Grey. The committee tasked with coming up with a new flag is supposed to have it ready for thelegislature to consider by January first. -via Metafilter

How does a family business become an incorporated town? A town is usually defined as a place that provides services like utilities and law enforcement, and is supported by taxes on something like sales, property value, or income. Or all three. So becoming a town involves some serious thinking. Reuben Syrett had a ranch in Bryce Canyon, Utah, and opened a hotel. What was Ruby's Inn for a century is now Bryce Canyon City. Well, it's still a hotel, but it's also a city unto itself. That took a fight, over taxes of course.

If you ever visit beautiful Bryce Canyon National Park, you can't miss Ruby's Inn because it's at the park's northwest entrance, which was very intentional. Even if you never visit Bryce Canyon, the park or the city, you'll get a kick out of the story of how Bryce Canyon City came to be. This video is only five and a half minutes long; the rest is an ad.

When television was new, Hollywood saw it as competition for their movies. Theater owners were even more impacted, as they made no money at all if people stayed home for entertainment. But advertisers loved TV, since it was a way to feed their sales pitches directly to consumers, and programming was just a way to get them to tune in. But then came cable TV. Most of us didn't get cable TV until the 1980s, but HBO launched in 1972 in one town in Pennsylvania. However, the concept goes back to the 1960s. It's strange to think about now, but that concept was that we would pay to have TV brought to our homes, and there would be no advertising on it.  

That idea was horrific for advertisers, none more so than ad executive Don Belding of Foote, Cone, and Belding. He headed up a California ballot initiative to ban pay TV with a campaign called "Save Free TV" in 1964. Subscription TV was only in the testing phase at the time, but the very idea was enough to galvanize advertisers and theater owners. And the public, because of the brilliant slogan. No one wanted to give up free TV! And so the ballot initiative was successful. But California -and the rest of us- got pay TV service anyway, so you need to read the rest of the story at Tedium.

We've got another Ghostbusters movie on the way, titled Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. This will be the fifth film in the franchise that started in 1984, and a direct sequel to the 2021 film Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Once again, the second generation of Ghostbusters must battle a supernatural disaster with the help of Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson. The movie also stars Paul Rudd, Annie Potts, Kumail Nanjiani, and Patton Oswalt. This edition moves back to New York City, and even back to the actual firehouse where the original Ghostbusters set up shop in 1984. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is set to open March 29, 2024.   

In the Cianjur District of the West Java Province in Indonesia, there stands an oddly-shaped mountain with a megalithic stone complex called Gunung Padang on top that has captured the imagination of archaeologists. But now it appears that the entire mountain may actually be manmade! The fact that the mountain's surface was preserved better than the other eroded mountains in the area caused earthquake geologist Danny Hilman Natawidjaja to take a closer look, starting in 2011.

Natawidjaja and his team studied the mountain for years, and have announced that it is a pyramid, constructed over an old lava volcano that was sculpted into shape, then covered with sand, rocks, and megalithic stones (like those pictured above) all placed by hand. The team estimates that the construction began about 25,000 years ago, long before any other manmade pyramid, although the date is somewhat controversial. Read about this discovery at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Tiket2 via Flickr)

In the tradition of Deep Blue Sea and Birdemic, except intentional, comes GCI Gator. Yes, it's a real full-length film, from Charles Band's Full Moon Features, the studio that gave us Puppet Master, but also The Dead Hate the Living! and Gingerdead Man. Bad CGI Gator is exactly what it says in the title. The premise is that a group of college students on spring break throw their laptops into the lake to declare their vacation from school. The electronics shock a real alligator into becoming a computer generated monster that comes after them for revenge. The joke is that the gator changes color, floats in the air, and changes size. That's what bad CGI does. Outside of the alligator, the production values are good, and the cast, while as homogenized as any horror cast, does pretty well with what they have to work with. For a one-joke monster movie, it looks like it could be fun. Bad CGI Gator will be available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video and FullMoonfeatures.com beginning November 24th. -via Digg

A "gravity hole" sounds a lot like a black hole, but that's not what it is. It turns out that gravity is not the same all over the earth, meaning you could weigh more or less in different parts of the world. However, weight is just a number on a scale, and you wouldn't look any different. Water, on the other hand, is very much affected by gravity. There's a spot in the Indian Ocean where the gravity has much less force, and the water level is up to 106 meters (348 feet) lower than in the rest of the earth! See, water flows in the direction of gravity, and the area outside of this gravity hole has more, so the water flows away. That's a lot of water, since this area, officially known as the Indian Ocean Geoid Low (IOGL), covers an area of three million square kilometers (1.2 million square miles)!     

The cause of variations in gravity is the composition and density of the earth, in this case the earth below the ocean. The IOGL was discovered in 1948, but it is only recently that scientists have discovered the reason for it. Its origin goes back 120 million years, when the tectonic plate carrying India crashed into Asia and raised the Himalayas. Read that story at Big Think. -via Atlas Obscura   

(Image credit: ESA – GOCE High Level Processing Facility)

Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Seinfeld character Elaine Benes showed us how to dance in 1996, but her horribly awkward dancing became a meme decades later. The dance was first seen in the Seinfeld episode "Little Kicks," and Elaine was quite proud of the dance she invented. Since then it's become the subject of a meme, tributes, and even dance contests. It's appealing because for one thing, it illustrates the character so well, but more importantly it gave all of us an example of someone who actually dances worse than we do.    

Now The Bell Bros. have liberated dancing Elaine from Seinfeld entirely and have her dancing in pop culture's most iconic dance scenes from West Side Story to The Office to Dirty Dancing (a list of the scenes are posted in a comment at YouTube). What's weird is how well her bizarre dance moves fit in, whether the dancers around her are competent or not. -via Boing Boing

When the family gathers for a traditional holiday feast and everything is delicious, everyone gets along, and we all go home happy, it's just another Thanksgiving. But when the turkey catches fire and your drunk aunt tries hitting on the responding firemen, that's the Thanksgiving you will always remember. Or the time grandma accidentally got so drunk that she was taken to the emergency room. No one will forget that year a cousin left a stolen vehicle in the yard for the police to retrieve. Or the time a child threw up, and it luckily got grandma out of her seat just in time to avoid the ceiling falling on her. Those are the stories that will be told at every family gathering for generations to come.

Thanks to the internet, such stories escaped the family and were posted to reddit for everyone to enjoy. Cracked collected 29 of the most bizarre Thanksgiving family disasters they could find for us to first enjoy, and then give thanks that they didn't happen to us.  

"Linguistic determinism" is the idea that the words you use to communicate have a profound effect on how you think. An example is the Newspeak language of George Orwell's novel 1984. Another example might be your mother threatening to wash your mouth out with soap. But is there any truth to it? Further research shows that what we think and how we feel is fairly innate, no matter what language we speak or culture we originate from. It appears that the inability to express ourselves has more to do with the limits of our language than with the malleability of our thoughts. We have more control over the language than the language has control over us.  "Language relativism" is a whole other subject, and Tom Scott tries to explain the difference to us. It's a deep and complicated subject, but we don't have to understand all the intricacies of it to understand what researchers are finding out.   

It seems like only a few years ago we learned that modern humans carry around genes we inherited from our ancestors interbreeding with Neanderthals. Now there is evidence that we also have genes that originated with another extinct human species, the Denisovans. Actual fossil evidence of Denisovans is scant, but we have enough genetic material to trace back some of our modern human genes to them.

Denisovans evolved to survive in the mountains of Asia, and certain genes made them more adaptable to those conditions. One genetic variant allowed them to thrive in high altitudes, and that variant now only survives in Tibetans. But another genetic adaptation is now found in all populations outside of Africa. A gene called SLC30A9 regulates how zinc moves within a cell, which can have many effects. A mutation in that gene among Denisovans may have helped them adapt to cold climates. But it also appears to have left the rest of us predisposed to depression and other mental health problems. Read more about this research at Neoscope. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Vincent van Gogh)