During the Edo period, Japan prohibited foreigners from entering the country, and restricted Japanese citizens from leaving. But there was one tiny exception, a two-acre manmade island in Nagasaki Bay that was connected to Nagasaki by a bridge leading to a military post. This was Dejima, the only place that traders from around the world could do business with Japan between 1636 and 1854. First the Spanish and the Portuguese came, but they were expelled for attempting to spread Christianity. The Dutch East Indies Company then took over. They had to surrender their sails when arriving, and had to ask for them back in order to leave. No Westerners were allowed across the bridge, and the only Japanese to enter Dejima were designated traders, interpreters, sex workers, and various cooks, gardeners, and clerks. There was only room for between 10-20 men to stay on the island at a time. Meanwhile, shiploads of lumber, silk, livestock, and other goods changed hands between countries that weren't allowed to interact otherwise. Narratively tells the story of Dejima with some notable episodes in its history, involving ambition, homesickness, love, prison, science, suicide, war, and gradually-relaxing restrictions in international relations. -via Smithsonian

(Image credit: The British Museum)

You take your seat around a campfire, and the smoke from it makes its way toward your face. You move around to the other side, and the smoke follows you. Someone will say, "Smoke follows beauty!" just to make you feel better. When this happens at fire after fire, you start to say he magic phrase first yourself, although you have to act like it's a joke. But is the smoke really following you around, or is it your imagination? Hank Green explains the scientific forces at work in great detail, but manages to make it interesting anyway. Now what I really want to know is why smoke follows me around, but doesn't follow the next person. Oh well, at least it discourages mosquitos. And suddenly I have a new summer project- adding an air flow to the fire pit in my backyard. The last minute of this video is an ad. -via Laughing Squid 

When we think about marshmallows in cereal, what comes to mind is Lucky Charms. But that is just one cereal that comes with marshmallows. The beginning of the idea goes back to 1938, when celebrity chef Malitta Jensen and Kellogg’s employee Mildred Day were brainstorming to come up with a new treat for the Camp Fire Girls. Inspired by popcorn balls, they mixed Rice Krispies with butter and melted marshmallows to create Rice Krispies Marshmallow Squares, which became a huge hit, especially when Kellogg’s put the recipe right on the cereal box.

But it wasn't until 1963 that General Mills took the lead by actually putting marshmallows into cereal boxes. The story involves Cheerios and Circus Peanuts and a process for dehydrating marshmallows so that they reconstitute in milk. Then we got Lucky Charms, Count Chocula, Frankenberry, and other cereals. Kellogg's followed with Marshmallow Krispies and other cereals. And both companies have been fighting off accusations of feeding children nothing but sugar for breakfast, while raking in tons of money from people buying marshmallow-sweetened cereals ever since. Read how all that unfolded at Mel magazine.  -via Digg

We've read about the resurrectionists and body snatchers of Britain, who dug up corpses from graveyards to sell to medical schools for anatomy class. This went on in the United States as well, and Ohio's most notable body snatcher was a man named William Cunningham, also known as "Old Cunny." He spent decades in the 19th century digging up the recently deceased from Ohio graveyards to sell for $15-25 each. He was a bully, and kept himself out of jail many times by threatening to kill anyone who crossed him and sell their corpses to be dissected.

More than once Old Cunny hid a corpse by sitting it up in the wagon seat beside him with a hat, sort of like Weekend at Bernies. Once he left a body sitting in his wagon as he and his accomplice Bill went into a saloon, when another man discovered it. The man threw the body out, put on its coat and hat, and took the corpse's place, just to see what would happen. Read the rest of that story, plus what happened when Old Cunny finally died and got a taste of his own medicine at DiggingUp1800. -via Strange Company

Neatorama readers are usually pretty good about avoiding the worst clickbait, but even discriminating readers will occasionally fall into a sketchy site that you read nevertheless because you can't believe how bad the grammar or logic is. Up until a few years ago, those spam sites were manned by non-writers (often non-English speakers) who were willing to be paid by click. Now they are more likely to be written by artificial intelligence. Janelle Shane discovered a blog that is entirely written by AI (and if anyone recognizes AI, it would be Shane). CookingFlavr could be a template for AI spam blogs, except that it doesn't appear to have any advertising. It may be an experiment of some sorts, or someone just exploring AI's limits. With a name like CookingFlavr, you would expect the posts to be about cooking. A few of them may be, but the vast majority of the hundreds of posts generated in just the last two days are about anything and everything.

Will I Die If I Get Rabies?

There is no one answer to this question – everyone is different and there is no guarantee that you will die if you get rabies. However, if you think you may have the virus, you should see a doctor as soon as possible. There is no cure for rabies, but there are treatments that can help you delay or stop the spread of the virus.

Is Jus A Scrabble Word?

There is no one true definition of “jus a scrabble word.” However, most experts believe that scrabble is a word that is made up of the letters jus and a scrabble board. This means that it is a word that is made up of words that are together, but not actually spelled out.

What Time Of Year Do Orioles Migrate?

The Orioles migrate from spring training to the Majors in late October.

I would recommend that you peruse CookingFlavr for a laugh, but under no circumstance are you to follow its advice about anything.   -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Alan D. Wilson)

There used to be a saying among actors, "never work with children or animals." I suppose they meant the children or animals will upstage the actor, but so what? Being upstaged is not the end of the world, in fact it can be the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Despite warnings about falling in love with your co-workers, there have been plenty of actors who worked beside an animal in a film and then took it home with them. After all, you can get quite close to someone over a months-long film shoot. This happens with dogs, cat, and horses, but is not limited to them. Audrey Hepburn adopted a fawn that appeared in her 1959 film Green Mansions. The deer named Pippin became more famous for Hepburn's affections than for the movie. Read about eleven actors who took home the animals they bonded with on set at Mental Floss.

You've heard people say it's raining cats and dogs, but sometimes real creatures rain down from the sky. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, people are frightened and/or suspicious. Fish are the most common. How did they get up there in the air? What happens when they fall? Falling birds are bizarre, but there's no confusion as to how they got up there. If you're in the right place, there's a chance an iguana might fall on you. And watch out for the flying ants and spiders! SciShow tell us the stories of animal rain and what we've figured out about it. -via Laughing Squid

Albany, Oregon, was suffering the way many small towns did at the end of the 20th century. Downtown shops were closing, losing business to shopping centers and interstate exits. There have been many types of revitalization projects across the country, some more successful than others. Albany's is a carousel that is both a historical restoration and a local art project. It all began when Wendy Kirbey took a vacation and rode a carousel in Missoula, Montana, in 2002. Why not have one in Albany? She brought her idea to the townspeople, secured a grant, and recruited some local experts.   

A local attorney kept the financing afloat until the grant came in. Woodcarver Jack Giles took responsibility for making the horses. He taught volunteers to carve wood into carousel animals of all kinds. Kirbey got a donation of a 1909 carousel mechanism, and retired engineer Carl Baker supervised volunteers who refurbished every wooden gear cog. As the project grew, the carousel had to be moved five times, but finally has a permanent home downtown. Twenty years later, the carousel is open and busy. So many community members had a hand in building the carousel that they can't help but be proud of their work, as well as the new hobbies they found and the friendships they forged. Read the story of how they all came together around a carousel at Atlas Obscura.

In the information age, we are flooded with bad news, including so many stories about people being horrible to other people. We have to remind ourselves that those stories go viral or even make the news sites because they are unusual, and therefore "news." Meanwhile, the world is full of good folks doing good things and we don't hear about it much. Those are stories we need to see. Buzzfeed gathered some of the top stories from the subreddit HumansBeingBros because we need to read some heartwarming tales of people helping other people out. There's more to the story above that you can read here, about meeting the woman they "sold" the car to and what they left in the glove box. And you can read twenty more heartwarming stories in the Buzzfeed list.

5 minutes into a hike with a 3 year old. And obviously her sister was doing just fine in the pack. pic.twitter.com/BcWjEqGa79

— Rick Crawford (@Rickcrawford63) May 9, 2022

Lucy Huber posted a Tweet musing on the plans of parents-to-be. Really, babies and toddlers are small, and you can just carry them around, right? Experienced parents not only laugh at those plans, they all have stories that illustrate the many ways young children can complicate even the simplest tasks.  

My oldest is 32 and I STILL remember trying to get ready for that first appointment

— Kat H😷 (@katwoman_81) May 10, 2022

You can read the whole thread at Twitter (it's still growing), or read a roundup of the 30 best tales at Bored Panda. The comments there have some great stories, too.

We took our 5-year old on a hike, and she did want to go...complaining and complaining. Then she found a nickle on the trail...and then a dime...another nickle! There was no stopping her. We had a nice 30-minute hike, and it cost me less than $2.50.

Now, that's a story worth passing along!

“I have no idea how to fly the airplane.” Pilot of small plane passes out while flying off the coast of Florida. Passenger, who had never piloted a plane before, successfully lands it after air traffic controller Robert Morgan talks him through the procedure. pic.twitter.com/vDxWSgsPvz

— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) May 11, 2022

An airplane passenger lived through a rare experience, but a common nightmare, and lived to tell about it. A single-engine Cessna 208 was heading to Florida from the Bahamas when the pilot went incoherent, and then went unconscious. None of the passengers had ever flown a plane, but one had seen it done before, so he took to the radio for help. Air Traffic Controller Robert Morgan, who is also a certified flight instructor, pulled up a manual on the Cessna and talked the yet-unnamed passenger through the process of landing the plane at Palm Beach International Airport!



The plane landed successfully, allowing everyone to finally breathe again. We don't yet have word on the condition of the pilot. -via Boing Boing

Update: The pilot had suffered an aortic dissection, a catastrophic cardiac event. He was rushed to a hospital, underwent surgery, and is recovering now!

Various people have been suspicious of coffee ever since its stimulant effects were discovered in Ethiopia. Anything that made you feel this good has to be bad for you, right? But study after study shows that coffee used in moderation is okay, and can even help prevent a second heart attack. In the same paper, we learn about King Gustav III of Sweden. He reigned in the late 18th century, and was convinced that coffee drinking would shorten one's life. In addition to banning the beverage, he ordered a scientific experiment to show coffee's effects on lifespan.

The experiment used two subjects who were identical twins. This was a genius move, as twin studies weren't a thing yet, but it is still a tiny sample and wouldn't really tell us much. These twins had both been convicted of murder, but were offered a life sentence instead of execution in order to carry out the experiment. One was ordered to drink three pots of coffee every day for the rest of his life. The other would drink tea instead.

So how did the experiment turn out? Both men outlived the doctor who was supervising the experiment. They also outlived his assistant, who took over. And they outlived King Gustav. Finally, one of the twins died at age 83, but it was the tea drinker! One has to wonder if the coffee drinker kept drinking three pots a day after everyone else involved in the experiment died, but that's one thing we don't know.   

(Image credit: Julius Schorzman)

Years ago, ZeFrank used to make videos about all kinds of subjects, but he has found his niche in the world as a 21st-century David Attenborough, filling us in on facts about the world's animals that we don't get to see very often. Here he's got a short but rather interesting little video about a platypus that you should watch before you read the spoiler below.

Show spoiler

"Finding things" in this context is not about finding a job, or finding your true love. It's about finding things you have lost, like your car keys or the Scotch tape. You might start your search with a prayer to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. Or you could start by swearing. Professor Solomon has worked out a system for finding things, based on experience, that starts with neither of those steps. Many of them don't even involve looking, because frantically searching only leads to frustration.  

Each of the 12 principles have their own link. Here's the index, but each principle has a link to the next one. It's important to start with the first one and read in order. By the time you get to the 13th (yes, there are really 13), you should have found your item. -via Metafilter, where you'll find further discussion on lost objects.

Bob Mortimer is a storytelling legend. In this episode of the British comedy game show Would I Lie to You? he tells how he keeps a toaster by his bed. The panel has to determine whether it's true or not, so they interrogate him as to the exact procedure involved and the reasons why he does this. Yes, there's also a teakettle. Mortimer makes his morning scenario perfectly plausible, as anyone with several children will understand. You don't want to wake them up until you have to! But in explaining his morning routine, he manages to keep us all in stitches. When he refuses to say how many children he has, you get the impression he can't really remember, but doesn't want to admit it. Commenters who are familiar with Mortimer's humor also recommend we check out the episode called Theft and Shubbery. -via reddit