Redditor gomets167 always dresses up in a Tom Hanks role for Halloween. This year, he's Walt Disney from the 2013 movie Saving Mr. Banks. Compare his Halloween getup (alongside P.L. Travers) with the lead image at the movie site. Pretty good portrayal, huh? The kicker is that he's been doing Tom Hanks roles for Halloween for 14 years now! He says he's going to keep doing this until Hanks himself notices, but I doubt he would stop even then. After all, Hanks has been in more than a hundred movies plus a few TV roles. Continue reading to see his previous costumes.

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones are the Map Men (previously at Neatorama), ready to explain geography to us and entertain us at the same time. This one is about Netherlands, which jutted out into the sea and resembled Swiss cheese for most of its history. The area of its land rose and fell with the whims of the ocean, and settling there was a problem when you could expect floods at any time. So the Dutch engineered dikes and dams to hold back the sea and create fertile farmland below sea level. It wasn't done all at once, but bit by bit over time. The biggest project was launched in the early 20th century. 

There's an epiphany that comes early in the video when I learned, for the first time, that Dutch windmills aren't there to grind grain. They aren't actually windmills at all, but pumps to control the water level! Along the way, we get plenty of jokes about Netherlands. There' a 90-second skippable ad at 4:25. The last 90 seconds is promotional, too. -via Laughing Squid 

The TV series Columbo ran from 1971 to 2003, which is a long time. But it didn't air every week; instead, it was a part of a rotating lineup of series under the title The NBC Mystery Movie (later The ABC Mystery Movie). You could catch an episode every three weeks or every three months or so. That's very different from the way people consume old TV series today, by binge-watching. That's what Rob Beschizza did recently, and he noticed quite a few things in the Columbo formula that slipped by the original audience who didn't know any better or didn't care.

Lieutenant Frank Columbo (if that is his real name) was beloved by audiences because he was a disheveled public servant who didn't put on airs yet always got his man. But the way he did it is anathema to professional police procedures. He worked alone, manipulated suspects, and never informed them of their Miranda rights, at least until after he conned them into confessing. Beschizza lays out nine points to prove that Columbo was clever, but quite underhanded in his investigations at Boing Boing. 

In the early 12th century, two children, a boy and a girl, appeared in the village of Woolpit in England. According to the scant documentation we have, they spoke a strange language that wasn't English and they had green skin. Strangely, they weren't burned at the stake, and the villagers seem to have accepted them. They just assumed the children were fairies, a perfectly logical explanation. When the girl learned enough English, she told a story that made no sense at all. But as we look back at the incident now, there are (at least) three possibilities.

1. They were aliens from outer space. 

2. They suffered from a rare but real medical condition that made them look green.

3. In the many years between the incident and the surviving written accounts, the story could have changed a lot, growing like legends do. 

Weird History looks at the possible explanations for the green children of Woolpit. 

This adorable face belongs to a tanuki, often called a raccoon dog outside of Japan. Despite the name, it is neither a raccoon nor a dog. Well, it is a canid, but not closely related to wolves or domestic dogs. It's more like a distant cousin of the fox. Native to Japan, tanukis have some adaptations that you wouldn't expect from a canine, like the ability to climb trees, and hibernate in cold climates while not hibernating in milder areas. They live in underground burrows and are monogamous. 

While raccoon dogs do not make good pets, tanukis have learned to live in urban areas like raccoons. They are popular figures in Japanese art and folklore, going back hundreds of years. Tanukis are portrayed as mischievous sprites that can shapeshift, a reputation that probably reflects their shy and nocturnal nature. Read about the tanuki and see plenty of pictures at The Ark in Space.

(Image credit: Cloudtail the Snow Leopard) 

Everyone loves the 1929 cartoon The Skeleton Dance, because few things are funnier than grinning skeletons dancing as if they were alive. We see such things every Halloween, but if you were to put yourself into 1929, the vision of skeletons dancing to music was merely an idea evoked by artworks and silent film. Composer Carl Stalling had pondered the idea of skeletons dancing in time to a soundtrack for years, and presented the idea to Walt Disney. But a cartoon with no story was something that hadn't been done before. Stalling's idea was to have the music driving the animation instead of just filling in the background. Animator Ub Iwerks threw his heart into the idea, and The Skeleton Dance became the very first in a new series called Silly Symphonies. West of Neverland tells us how the short came about. 

You can see the full cartoon The Skeleton Dance in a previous post. 

Those who grew up with digital cameras and later smartphones have no clue how much was involved in getting a simple photograph in earlier times. You could go to a photography studio, but that was expensive and time-consuming. Cameras were expensive, too, but you also had to pay for film, and then pay to have the film developed, which took several days. You only shot a scene once because there were limited frames on that roll of film, and you didn't know if the picture was any good until you got the prints back. 

So it was no wonder that when Anatol Josepho introduced the first practical automated photo booth in New York in 1925, people flocked to use it. For a coin or two, you got to see yourself in a series of permanent photographs in just a few minutes! No photographer, camera, film, or developer needed- that was all automated. Of course, you took your chances on the quality of those photos, but they captured a moment in time that you could always look back on and remember. A new exhibition at The Photographers Gallery in London explores the history and impact of the photo booth. Read an interview with several experts on the subject and see images from the exhibit at It's Nice That. -via Nag on the Lake 

The actual title of this video is "Why Do Pringles Come In A Can?" I thought everyone knew why, but then again, a lot of people weren't around when Pringles first became a thing. A long time ago, I lived in a town with a Pringles factory, and knew people who actually made them. See, potato chips are made by slicing a potato very thin and then frying or baking the slices until they are crisp. That's not how Pringles are made at all. I had assumed they were made from mashed potatoes, but that's not the full story, either. 

Pringles are the only potato chips, er, crisps, that come in a can because real potato chips won't fit in a can. But the can has an advantage in that Pringles can be shipped anywhere and arrive intact. I was in Hong Kong once trying my best to find something to eat that wasn't seafood, and Pringles was the only thing I recognized. I couldn't read the label, but I knew what was in that can. -via the Awesomer 

Nikon Small World has announced the winners of their 51st photomicrography competition. First Place goes to the photo above of a rice weevil perching on a grain of rice. It was taken by Zhang You of China at 5X magnification using image stacking. I was also impressed with the Third Place winner.



These are grains of pollen caught in the web of a garden spider, by John-Oliver Dum of Medienbunker Produktion in Germany. This is at 20X magnification with image stacking. Notice how tiny the dew drops are! You can browse the ranked top twenty images in this gallery, plus the honorable mentions and images of distinction. Click on a photo to bring up its information.  

By the way, there is a difference between photomicrography and microphotography. Wikipedia explains that photomicrography is the art of photographing very small things through a microscope, and microphotography is the art of shrinking photographs down to microscopic size. Google's AI thinks they are the same thing.  

Millions of years ago, North America was the first and only home of camels. The fossil record is full of them, around 100 species of camel that are now extinct. They ranged from tiny little herbivores that stood two feet tall to species that resembled deer to the giant Camelops that stood seven feet tall at the shoulder. When continents shifted and land bridges arose, these North American camels spread to the Old World and became the dromedary and Bactrian camels we have today. They migrated south and evolved into llamas, vicunas, and alpacas. Then camels in North America died out, the last ones disappearing around 13,000 years ago. 

In the 20th century, American camel fossils took a backseat to horse fossils, which also flourished and then went extinct in America. Indeed, many camel skulls were misidentified as horses. But paleontologists are now focusing on the astonishing diversity of extinct American camels. Read what they've found at Smithsonian.   

(Image credit: Jonathan Chen) 

The animated short Chain is about the ferocity of nature and the clever adaptations of predators and prey in the natural world. A cute cicada chomps down on a tiny worm until he's confronted by a praying mantis, obviously an orchid mantis in this case. But then comes a peacock spider who would love to eat them both. This simple scenario even has a sexy dream sequence. The viewer doesn't know who to root for in this standoff because they're all emotionally expressive, but then again they are all bugs. That's when it gets a little Looney Tunes. 

In nature, it's either eat or be eaten, and you can't feel safe no matter how high you are on the food chain. Chain is based on the Chinese proverb “The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind.” It's won an awful lot of film festival awards. -via Nag on the Lake 

Peggy Gavan at The Hatching Cat writes about cats in vintage New York City, but found a tale that was so utterly bonkers that she had to share it, despite the fact that an unnamed cat only made a cameo appearance. To fix a plumbing problem in 1893, workers tore a hole between an upstairs kitchen and a downstairs dining room. The upstairs neighbor shooed the plumbers away, and the hole remained. That seemed okay until the upstairs cat fell onto the dining table below during dinner, and the feud was on. The guy upstairs began throwing objects through the hole on a regular basis, including the cat. 

The story involves neighbors in their underwear, a large saber, harsh words and threats, and finally a police chase before the matter was resolved. The saga made the papers, of course, and that is why we get to enjoy the full story. -via Strange Company 

Simon's Cat encounters a patch of catnip and decides he likes this plant. This scenario seems so familiar to me as I have a catnip patch and it brings all the neighborhood cats to the yard. The cartoon cat is more expressive than mine, so we see the experience from his point of view. It's been a year or so since I've found a Simon's Cat video that was new and not too long, so I'm glad to share it. 

Then I read the top comment from @cricketrox4ever. They got a cat 18 years ago and named it Simon after the cartoon. 

I was 11 at the time and my mom said we’d only keep him until we found him a home. Simon was with me for 17 years. He went with me to college, moved with me 5 times, and lived to be and old man. He just passed last year.   

Could that possibly be true? I went back in the archives and found that the first Simon's Cat video was posted here 18 years ago today. How coincidental is that? 

A manuscript from Isfahan, Iran, was written by a soothsayer about astrology, magic, and demons. You might think the 56 illustrations that accompany it were from the medieval era, especially one that shows a demon riding an elephant that has no ears. But the watercolor images were added to the volume in 1921, ten or twenty years after the text was written. Plenty of these paintings, although not all of them, depict terrifying demons that come to bedevil humans, plucking out their teeth and poisoning their food. A common theme is that of a demon appearing to people as they sleep, like this monster who licks feet, while his tail sports another mouth and tongue. 

These definitely sprang from nightmares. Other beings sport multiple heads, human-animal mixes, and plenty of horns. Read more about the manuscript on demons and see a gallery of pictures at the Public Domain Review.  -via Messy Nessy Chic 

The Spanish band Broken Peach goes all out for Halloween, as we've seen in years before. This year's Halloween video has them performing Metallica's "Enter Sandman" mixed with a bit of "Psycho Killer" by the Talking Heads. The music is good, but the presentation is superb. The costumes are not full body skeleton suits as they were in past years, but convey the idea well with makeup and chains that imply bare ribs. And check out those fingernails! They still have those well choreographed, jerky dance moves that we've come to expect. 

Broken Peach is much more than a cover band, as they've built a reputation for highly entertaining live shows in Spain and around Europe. And they do much more than just Halloween and Christmas songs, but those holiday offerings get them noticed around the world every year. If you enjoyed this, check out Broken Peach's Halloween playlist at Spotify.