My Finances: pic.twitter.com/SasbwqAIRD

— Andrew Hilary but spooky 👻 (@AndrewHilaryUS) October 8, 2021

This is the cutest story you will see today. These kids and their cryptocurrencies!

Andrew Hilary drives an ice cream truck. When a little girl wanted to pay for an ice cream with a blue rock, he couldn't resist. He mentioned that no one should tell his boss, but the viral Tweet that resulted is worth its weight in gold. In the followup comments we find that the rock is plastic and glows in the dark! Speaking of being worth its weight in gold, Hilary has been offered $5 for the rock, and $500 for an NFT of the above picture. I don't think he's going to part with the rock.  

Other commenters admired his shirt and noted he could enter a Seth Rogan lookalike contest. A day later, we learn the rest of the story.

The sun is shining, I’ve got one of my best shirts on, and thanks to a kind stranger who saw my tweet and venmoed me, I just got to give a bunch of kids free ice cream!
(Note: do not send me money, i am super irresponsible😅) pic.twitter.com/lJzwqgLgJh

— Andrew Hilary but spooky 👻 (@AndrewHilaryUS) October 9, 2021

-via Fark

Ze Frank is back with a True Facts video that we know he's been collecting facts and jokes about for a long time. This one is about the most horrible killer animal on the planet: the Moscow-ito, er, the mosquito. We hate them because they are both annoying and dangerous, but they have a rather unique physiology and lifestyle that we should know about. Even the larval stage gives us mosquitos that breath through their butts and cannibalize their neighbors. And then there's the jokes. Anyway, that's why this video is longer than a normal Ze Frank video, but well worth your time, even if you have to watch it in installments. The visual horror show starts after the four-minute mark, when the adults emerge to spread their misery. By the time it when gets to the biting part, you should be ready for it.   

Has anyone ever accused you of relying on ellipses or dashes too much? Have you ever wondered if you use too many exclamation points? We now have a way to visualize the answers to exactly those questions.

Clive Thompson made a tool that strips all the letters from a passage of writing and shows you only the punctuation. Why? Because you can learn a lot about style that way. In explaining the application, Thompson himself realized that he used a lot of parentheticals, long ones with punctuation inside them, which indicates he digresses from the subject more than he would like. In another example, look at the image above. On the left is the punctuation in Adam J. Calhoun's analysis of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. On the right is Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. It only rakes a glance to see how the writing styles differ, just by punctuation.

You'll find the tool called just the punctuation here. I put in some of my own writing, and found that I don't use nearly as much punctuation as I expected to see. This is all the punctuation from an entire Mental Floss feature article from years ago.

' . ' , , , , . ' ? , , . , , , . , - , . , . , ! , , . ' , ' . , , , . , ' , . . ( ) , . , . . . . . , ' . , . , . , , . . , . . . . , ' . . , . . , , . , . ; ' . . ' - , . . , . , ' ' , . . ( ) , .


-via Metafilter 

The hit 1956 movie musical The King and I was based on the 1951 Broadway musical of the same name, which was based on Margaret Landon's 1944 novel Anna and the King of Siam, which was based on the 1870 book The English Governess in Siamese Court by Anna Leonowens. There were also other movies based on the same story, one in 1946, two in 1999, and a TV series in 1972.

With so many iterations of the story over 150 years, you wouldn't be surprised to learn that it has historical inaccuracies. One would think that going back to the original 1870 memoir by Anna Leonowens, who really did work for King Mongkut of Siam (now Thailand), would give us the true story, but even that account was highly fictionalized for dramatic effect and to push Leonowens' feminist and abolitionist views.

Maybe it would be better to simply read about Leonowens life. That's where we find that Leonowens had begun fictionalizing details of her life long before she ever went to Siam! Read about the real Anna Leonowens and how she crafted her own life story at Historic Mysteries. -via Strange Company

Remember when you were a kid, and thought the very idea of combining cheese and cake was ridiculous? Several fellows from a remote area in the province of Punjab, Pakistan, had never eaten a New York cheesecake before, but they were willing to try. While they aren't big on showing surprise in facial expressions, they have a wonderful way of conveying their delight by their word choice. Note- those who speak the language have pointed out that the one guy who wanted to eat a whole cheesecake on a riverbank also said there would be a campfire there (although the subtitles left that out). Such a simple description conveys the idea of "heaven" no matter what language you speak. -via reddit

And now you are craving a slice of cheesecake, aren't you? Sorry.

You might know the word Samhain as the original Halloween, celebrated by ancient pagans in the British Isles. That's the short version. There are four Celtic festivals called Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh, and Samhain which fall halfway between the equinoxes and the solstices. For another example, Imbolc is when people looked for signs of spring and eventually became Groundhog Day. In that vein, Samhain was a harvest festival that had some spiritual overtones. Over thousands of years, that festival became split between a Christian holiday (All Saints Day) and a devil's holiday (Halloween). But neither of those have much to do with the original Samhain. Read about Samhain and how it changed so much at Mental Floss.

It's that time of year again! It only makes sense to share excess seasonal fruits with any animal that will eat them. The Oregon Zoo not only wants to give their animals a variety of food for nutrition, but also uses pumpkins as an enrichment tool. Besides that, they know we are suckers for cute animals eating -or playing with- the symbol of the season. It's like killing two birds with one stone: the animals get a treat, and we get to revel in their cuteness with this video. Then again, the zoo staff probably wouldn't even think of killing birds with a stone. -via Laughing Squid

Remember, you can see more adorable animals and read their stories at Supa Fluffy.

It's difficult to grow vegetables in the Himalayas. It's even difficult to grow feed for cattle. And it's also difficult to carry enough food for long treks through the mountains. But people adapt, and in Nepal, they found ways. A yak-cow hybrid called the chauri can live off the tougher grass available at higher elevations. The milk of the chauri is made into a cheese called chhurpi, which is so dry that it can be eaten for far longer than any other cheese. It is said that chhurpi can last for up to twenty years!  

Chauri milk is boiled, fermented, smoked, and dried for preservation. The chhurpi that results is lightweight and full of protein, with very little fat. That makes it easy to transport and easy to store, but not all that easy to eat. An experienced chhurpi chewer can do it in a few minutes, while an intrepid reporter never got it soft enough to ingest. BBC Travel visited a Nepalese family who produces chhurpi from their own livestock and from those of their neighbors to see how they make it and use it. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Arijit Dasgupta)

We've been to Wild West amusement parks where a gunfight in the street was scheduled for every hour, on the hour. When Palisade, Nevada, did it, those gunfights were scheduled according to when passengers arrived on the railroad train -and those disembarking had no idea it was all staged. See, when the transcontinental railroad opened for business, travelers complained that the Wild West wasn't nearly as wild as it had been depicted in dime novels. In 1870, the tiny new railroad town of Palisade decided to do something about that, and maybe drum up some tourist business.

Their plan worked magnificently. Gunfights broke out in the street every time a train stopped. The town developed a reputation as a "must-see" among tourists, and journalists were eager to describe the carnage, albeit without too many facts about the perpetrators or victims. The town also staged bank robberies and Indian raids, which kept the people coming to town for a few years. Despite all the "killings," the population of Palisade peaked at about 300 people during this period, almost all involved in the performances. Read about the Palisade Wild West show at Messy Nessy Chic.

You know what they say: Nothing succeeds like excess. When something works, you use it again and again, or even steal the idea from someone else. That's how trends start, and they keep growing until people can't help but notice. Book lovers scanning the shelves of their  local bookstore have already noticed, and now they are having trouble distinguishing one new book from another, because they all have that colorful blob cover. They even have a name for it: the Book Blob.

We've seen this happen before. If a romance novel has a shirtless man on the front, it is a bodice ripper. If it has a woman in 18th-century farm dress, it is a more chaste romance. What do these colorful blobs mean?

They are usually fiction and nearly always written by women, often women of color. They have literary sensibility but broad enough appeal to contend for the bestseller list; they’re the sort of books that generate a good deal of buzz and media coverage, likely candidates for an Oprah Book Club nod or a spot on a major literary prize’s shortlist.

All that also means they may be featured on multiple tables at the front of a bookstore. Read about this design trend and the factors that cause all book covers to look alike at Print magazine. -via Kottke

(Image credit: vadlmaster)

Not even considering a few gender reveal parties that have caused death and destruction, the entire custom is suspect. To be honest, no one outside the family cares whether your baby will be born a boy or a girl. Even inside the family, the importance of a baby's sex implies that one is preferable to the other, which can leave scars when someone's disappointment is seen in the video years later. If it's just an excuse to throw a party, there's nothing wrong with that, but there has been a tendency to make a big production out of the reveal in order to score internet points.

(Image credit: Lemongrass29)

Bored Panda has a gallery of images that reveal the cringe factor of gender reveal parties. Some mock the custom, some display truly bad taste, and some are downright disturbing. There are quite a few gender reveal cakes which are beautifully executed, yet show extreme gender stereotypes for the sake of an alliteration. See them all in this list.

This may have flown under your radar, but you don't see much of Ronald McDonald anymore. The McDonald's advertising mascot was everywhere in the 1980s and '90s, encouraging children to bug their parents about going to McDonald's for dinner. Today he's almost fallen off the radar, and is completely gone from advertising in the UK. Well, there was that rash of scary clown sightings, but that was in 2016. Ronald was gone from British advertising in 2014. So what happened to the clown?  

Attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery demonstrate that while Ronald has left our screens, he looms large in our memories. One media man who worked on McDonald’s UK advertising for three years simply said, “I don’t fancy being sued by a clown”. Aye Jaye, an LA-based former Ronald who wrote the official rulebook for playing the character (don’t hug kids, pat them on the back) said, “Unfortunately I’m not allowed [to talk]”. The co-author of a 1972 rulebook named Ronald and How, which warned Ronalds to never tell children that hamburgers are made of cows, also declined to speak, noting that he no longer has a copy of the book after returning his materials to McDonald’s upon his retirement.

So we are left to reconstruct the demise of Ronald McDonald in a roundabout way. It appears to be a confluence of a push for better nutrition for children, the reputation of clowns in general, and McDonald's drive to make their restaurants more upscale to appeal to adults. There have been few missteps along the way, which you can read about at Vice. Ronald is not quite as extinct in the US, which may have something to do with the prominent Ronald McDonald House charities. -via Digg

(Image credit: Simon Burchell)

It's been a few years since someone figured out you can create a picture by combining location tracking and an internet map, creating a genre called Strava Art. Fitness trackers show you where you've been and how far you've run or cycled. By planning a route, you can draw something really neat for internet points. We've seen few of these Strava Art images that go viral, but way more people do this than you ever realized. After all, runners and cyclists love a challenge more than anything, and this combines art with teh pohysical activity they were going to go through anyway. Gary Cordery has collected a ton of these Strava Art map images at his website Stravart.

You can look through images in different categories: people, plants, reptiles, cats & dogs, Christmas, fiction, words & numbers, etc. You can also submit yours, if this inspires you to make your own Strava Art. -via Boing Boing

The Schmid Peoplemover is an elevator/tram that takes you up, across, and down without stopping to change directions. Only three of them were ever put into service, and one has been closed since 2009 "due to economic reasons." Tom Scott went to another, at the Berlin-Rummelsburg Betriebsbahnhof train station. Its design is intriguing.

Tom also talked to its inventor, Emil Schmid, who explains that the peoplemover was built elsewhere and installed over the railway in only three hours! This device is cheaper and takes up less room than bridges with stairs, but it does have some drawbacks. One might assume that the closed Schmid Peoplemover was taken out of service to save money on power and maintenance. The ones that still run really make a difference for people in wheelchairs.

When the clock strikes midnight, weird things begin to happen in this house. The stuff on the walls begin to move, the furniture starts to dance, and monsters pop in from every corner! Kieron Rose went all out constructing his haunted house automaton. He submitted this video to the Facebook group Grayson's Art Club.

This has taken me nearly a year to build, all completely from scratch. Everything inside the room is 3d printed (apart from the ceiling light) and much of the mechanism is 3D printed too. It has 3 computers, 3 smoke machines (also 3D printed), 27 servos, 60 LEDs and 3000 lines of code. It's based on a 1940's haunted house working model by Bolland but mine is a lot more complicated and a third of the size.

I'm seriously impressed with the work that went into this. -via Everlasting Blort