The summer solstice, the longest daylight of the year, is coming up on Tuesday. Our calendars mark it as the beginning of summer, no matter that we've been suffering from the heat for weeks already. Still, the solstice is referred to as midsummer in many cultures, and it's celebrated somewhat like the winter solstice and the two equinoxes, particularly in northern European countries where even in June it's not too torridly hot to enjoy a bonfire. In some countries it's an official holiday, and many stage celebrations on the nearest weekend for convenience. There are places with additional traditions, like the lore that says Icelandic cows can talk and people in Slovenia can understand what animals say. Bulgarians celebrate by walking on hot embers. And many places celebrate the solstice as St. John the Baptist Day, as another example of the Christian church rebranding pagan holidays. Read a roundup of ten midsummer celebrations at Mental Floss.

Étienne-Jules Marey was a cardiologist and a scientist, but he ended up being a pioneer in photography and cinematography, too. Marey was always looking for data, and to get it he invented several instruments to measure heartbeats, muscle movements, respiration, and other physical phenomena. He studied movement in animals as well as humans, and once posited that a galloping horse had all four feet off the ground at one point in its stride. The arguments that ensued from this opinion led to Edweard Muybridge's famous 1878 film of a horse galloping.

Marey developed the chronophotographic gun in 1882, which could capture 12 images per second, overlaying them in one picture, in order to study movement.  

One of Marey's more famous studies was one in which he declared that falling cats always landed on their feet. Did no one notice this before? Or was it just that Marey could prove it with his chronophotographic gun? Marey's 1894 photographs of a falling cat were easily assembled into a one-second film, or later video, of a cat falling, and in the last frames expressing his indignity at such an experiment. If only Marey could see how far cat videos have come in the 128 years since. -via Nag on the Lake

In a mere seven years, between 1346 and 1353, the Black Death swept across Europe and parts of Asia and Africa and killed off 75–200 million people, changing the course of history. This bubonic plague pandemic is now thought to have its origins in Kyrgyzstan in 1338 and 1339, according to a new study. Two cemeteries, Kara-Djigach and Burana, had quite an excess mortality in those two years according to dated tombstones, ten of which actually mentioned a pestilence.

One of the cemeteries had been excavated in the 19th century, so the remains had to be traced to St. Petersburg, Russia. DNA sequencing revealed the presence of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes bubonic plague, on some of the deceased's teeth. It was a very early strain that was an ancestor to the various strains of Y. pestis found in the Black Death pandemic. Other evidence from the cemeteries show that the region was a Silk Road trading spot. Traders could very well have carried plague from Kyrgyzstan into Europe via fleas and rats. War also played a part, as the first large outbreak of the Black Death pandemic was recorded as the Mongol army attacked Crimea in 1346. Read more about this research at Nature. -via Real Clear Science

Mothers Day has been celebrated officially since 1914 in the US, but Fathers Day took much longer to become a thing. It wasn't an official US holiday until 1972! One of the reasons it took that long for Fathers Day to achieve anything near the status of Mothers day is because men thought the entire idea seemed effeminate. They didn't need flowers and cards- especially when they had to pay for them! But eventually retailers found ways to make Fathers day something worth promoting.

The real push to get Fathers Day off the ground came from Sonora Smart Dodd, who knew that fathers were important and should have a holiday of their own. She wanted to honor her own father, William Jackson Smart, who raised six children alone after his wife died. Dodd's campaign took off in Spokane, Washington, in 1910, but took decades to achieve the status of a real holiday. Read how all that came about at Almanac.  -Thanks, WTM!

Reminder: Fathers Day is this Sunday, June 19.

(Image source: Find-a-Grave)

The original Star Trek had a rather small budget, and therefore a small cast of characters. There were the officers of the bridge: Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Sulu, and Chekhov, plus Dr. McCoy, engineer Scott, and nurse Chapel. Then there was a never-ending supply of red shirts, security officers who rarely had lines and only appeared in one episode because they were always killed off. It was a simple way to show that the crew was in danger without harming the core cast. It eventually became a trope farmed for humor even today, more than 50 years later. In California, there are old men all over who can put Star Trek on their resume for that one appearance and death scene. They should form a club.

John DiMarco has given us several Star Trek supercuts already; his latest looks at the fate of the original series' red shirts and their swift and not-so-gruesome deaths early in their sole episode. -via Laughing Squid

You heard the joke about the grandma who thought "LOL" meant "lots of love," and then added it to her social media posts when announcing someone's death. There is value in all of us being on the same page when we create internet shortcuts. And people take those shortcuts all over the world, to make their typed interactions seem more personal and real. If you ever dive into a website in a language you're just learning, or one you thought you were fluent in when speaking, it might be good to know how other people react. This map lays out how people laugh online in other languages.

In English, it's good to know LOL and ROFLMAO, but in actual use, more people type "haha". The actual sound of laughter is spelled differently in other languages, such as “jajaja” in Spanish. But that can change to denote different meanings behind the laughter. In Ukraine, “ахахахах” is a regular laugh, while “азаза” is sarcastic laughter. And in Indonesia, a laugh written as “wkwkwk” has a story behind it that has to do with the layout of a keyboard. Read up on all these methods of laughing in type at Preply. -via Boing Boing

Screen Junkies hopped back in time to bring us an Honest Trailer for Martin Scorsese's 1990 movie Goodfellas. They may have been inspired by the death of star Ray Liotta just a couple of weeks ago, or possibly the recent celebration of Billy Batts Day. At any rate, they point out the superlatives in Goodfellas that so many other movies have tried to emulate and failed at. Goodfellas offers lots of blood, lots of crime, lots of laughs, and lots of F-bombs. True, it's a bit thin on plot, but no one cared, and besides that's what happens when you tell a story based on someone's real life.  

They reference My Blue Heaven at the end of this video. The reason the movies are so similar is because My Blue Heaven was written by Nora Ephron, who was married to Nicholas Pileggi, the author of Wiseguy, the Henry Hill biography that Goodfellas is based on. The comedy premiered a month before Goodfellas.

Current conditions of Yellowstone’s North Entrance Road through the Gardner Canyon between Gardiner, Montana, and Mammoth Hot Springs.

We will continue to communicate about this hazardous situation as more information is available. More info: https://t.co/mymnqGvcVB pic.twitter.com/S5ysi4wf8a

— Yellowstone National Park (@YellowstoneNPS) June 13, 2022

I hope you didn't have reservations at Yellowstone National Park this week. While the rest of the American West is suffering under a drought, intense flash flooding on the Yellowstone River along with rockslides and mudslides have destroyed the road that serves as the north entrance to the park, as you can see in the video above. After inspecting other damaged roads, the National Park Service has closed all five entrances to the park at least through Wednesday, and possibly for longer.

Meanwhile, the community of Gardiner is completely cut off to vehicle traffic (see videos here) and many communities are without power. Tourists are warned not to try to find accommodations in towns near Yellowstone, as there aren't many to begin with and this calamity has filled them. Also, cell service, spotty to begin with, is affected. It will probably be months before the north park entrance is reopened, which has us concerned about the person in that front-end loader stuck on the highway. -via Fark

Renowned 19th-century Japanese illustrator Utagawa Kuniyoshi has made a mark on Neatorama with his illusions and puzzles, and the fact that he may have been a time traveler. Kuniyoshi's artworks even popularized full-body tattoos! And there's always more to explore from such a prolific artist.

'Cats Suggested as the Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido' - Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 1850.#Caturday #ukiyoe #cats #Japan pic.twitter.com/dh6sD9WM2O

— curious ordinary (@curiousordinary) April 16, 2022

Many of Kuniyoshi's ukiyo-e woodblock prints featured cats. He loved cats and often drew with a kitten in the folds of his kimono. His works included cats in the shapes of Japanese kana script, as anthropomorphic stand-ins for real people, and as puns. An example of this is Kuniyoshi's Cats Suggested As The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō. It is a spoof of another artist's series on those stations, but Kuniyoshi drew cats for each station and put them in positions that illustrated the pun opportunities of the station's name. Read about that and other cat-obsessive works from Utagawa Kuniyoshi at Illustration Chronicles. -via Everlasting Blort

What do you do with 35 million tons of sand? If you are smart, you harness it for a side gig as a skiing resort. A kaolin mining operation in Hirschau, Germany, named their slag pile Monte Kaolino and opened it for tourists. That is, after they found that people were already skiing on it.  People use the industrial waste pile, er, mountain, for sand skiing and sandboarding. I didn't even know sandboarding was a thing, but Monte Kaolino is the home of the Sandboarding World Championships. This way, you can ski all year round, and only wear protective clothing instead of layers of fleece. The resort that has grown up around the mountain offers a funicular railway, a roller coaster, swimming pool, camping facilities, and other tourist activities. Now, this is how you take lemons and make lemonade. Tom Scott takes us there to find out how Monte Kaolino came about, and maybe he'll even do a little sandboarding. Or maybe not.

Mel magazine is running a series on the people and events of 1997, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of those things. One was a uniquely strange news blurb about a lawsuit that addressed valid legal and ethical issues, but at the same time implied that police departments were looking for recruits that weren't too smart.

Robert Jordan applied for a job as a cop with the New London, Connecticut, police department. The process included taking a test to measure an applicant's education and general intelligence. When Jordan was rejected, he thought it was because he was 46 years old, but found it was because he had scored a 33 on the test (the average police officer scored 21). The department claimed they rejected him because they thought people who scored that high would be bored by the job and not stay long. So Jordan sued the city for discrimination.

However, the condensed news items about the lawsuit that went nationwide left the public with the impression that police departments wanted dumb police officers for one reason or another, which became a permanent meme. People still argue about that. Read what really happened, and how the courts ruled in the case at Mel magazine.

Ten-month old Nagi and his cat Guinness (previously at Neatorama) live in a high-rise apartment in London. The view out the window is great, but rarely does anyone come up close. So it was quite an adventure when the window washers dropped by, literally, and interacted with the curious kid and cat. Guinness did his best to catch the squeegee, and Nagi thought that was hilarious. The window washers had a good time, too. You can see another, longer video of this wholesome event (with a second cat) at Laughing Squid.

Toilets are a part of life, but they couldn't be shown on TV, or even mentioned, until broadcasting had been around for several decades. Still, the toilet, with its flush action and relatively easy-to-clean surfaces, is a wonder of modern technology that makes life easier all around compared to what was common before its invention a couple hundred years ago. Yet the modern toilet was less "invented" than "developed," as the working components were added and improved one at a time. These developments make certain breakthrough toilets famous. But there are others that have a story behind them.

It might be pop culture’s most famous toilet: On August 16, 1977, Elvis Presley was found by girlfriend Ginger Alden on the floor of his second-floor bathroom in Graceland after falling off the seat. Presley reportedly died due to a heart condition preceded by excessive prescription drug use. Visitors to Graceland, however, aren’t able to peer at the toilet that hosted the King in his final movement: The bathroom and adjoining suite are off-limits.

Read about other toilets that made their mark on history at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Whoisjohngalt)

(Image credit: Another Believer)

Rasmus Petersen was a teenager when his family immigrated from Denmark and settled near Bend, Oregon. As an adult, Petersen began to collect rocks from the countryside and built miniature buildings on his property, for almost 20 years until his death in 1952. By then he had constructed a miniature Danish village, bridges, roads, water features, and sculptures including an American Flag and the Statue of Liberty with local stones. The four-acre Petersen Rock Garden became a popular roadside attraction, drawing 150,000 visitor a year at its peak. The garden has since been designated on the National Register of Historic Places.    

(Image credit: Another Believer)

The garden is still in the hands of Peterson's family, but not for long. It has been listed for sale. The property consists of more than 12 acres, four of them covered with Petersen's artworks. There is also a house, several outbuildings, and a gift shop included in the deal, for a mere $825,000. Oh yeah, the peacocks that stroll the grounds are included, too. -via Fark