Götz von Berlichingen, born in 1480, was a notable knight and warrior, whether he was fighting for the Holy Roman Emperor, various kings and nobles, as a mercenary, or for his own purposes. He became a soldier as a teenager and continued fighting and leading armies in various forms until his old age, even after his right arm was amputated on the battlefield. Berlichingen commissioned an iron prosthetic hand, the second of which was so elaborately-designed that his fingers could hold a quill. But it was something else that really made Berlichingen a legend.

Götz von Berlichingen is perhaps best remembered for one of his witty catchphrases. In 1516, during the above-mentioned feud with Mainz, he was laying siege to a castle, attempting to lure the bailiff out on the ramparts. When the bailiff finally appeared, Götz famously said to him after an altercation: “Er solte mich hinden lecken!” or “Er kann mich im Arsche lecken!” Both phrases can be translated to “He can kiss my ass!” Saying this, he defiantly rode away. The phrases remained as an iconic symbol of his willful defiance and became known as the “Swabian greeting.” Today it is used throughout Germany as a witty and light comeback.

Read about the military leader with an iron hand and a witty tongue at Historic Mysteries. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Immanuel Giel)

Winning a gold medal at the Olympics is a great honor, but an even greater honor is to be featured on a box of Wheaties. General Mills is celebrating 100 years of Wheaties cereal with a series they call Century Boxes, featuring the last century's greatest athletes. First in the series was Muhammad Ali. But how did Wheaties become so closely associated with the world's greatest sports figures? It makes sense, as the cereal was developed to be a health food, a more nutritious whole-grain alternative to refined white flour.    

At first, Wheaties wasn’t much of a hit in the market. However, the company came up with a novel concept to market the new cereal. It created a fictional character—Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy, an athlete and all-around good guy—to promote the product. He starred on a national radio program, and the new hero was featured on the cereal box.

Washburn Crosby tried one more thing to sell the cereal: a singing jingle. Sales soared after a barbershop quartet belted out the first-ever song in a radio commercial—with the simple lyrics: “Have you tried Wheaties? They're whole wheat with all of the bran. Won't you try Wheaties?” After that, the cereal became the most popular in America.

But the athletic run of the Wheaties box arose in 1934, when a picture of Lou Gehrig appeared on the back of the cereal box. Read how Wheaties has paid tribute to sports stars through the years at Smithsonian.

The coelacanth is a fish known for its fossils, and was thought to have died out about 66 million years ago. That is, until 1938, when they were discovered to be still around and reproducing in deep waters. Coelacanths became known as "living fossils" since the species goes back so far. But were they really ever lost at all?

And while science only recognized that these critters were not actually extinct as of 1938, it seems fisherman local to their habitats were abundantly familiar with them.  So familiar, in fact, that they knew how to make a meal out of them. Pre-eminent cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson, in reference to ichthyologist James Smith’s 1938 coelacanth-hunting in South Africa, once observed, “There were indications that the native population in this part of the world had fished for and eaten these ‘living fossils’ for several generations. Although not a common item in native diets, there is no doubt that, while Professor Smith dreamed of finding a second coelacanth, a dozen or more had probably been served and eaten” (Sanderson, 1961, p15).  Fisherman off the Comoro Islands, Madagascar, and Mozambique colloquially referred to coelacanth as gombessa (“worthless”) due to the fact that it secreted gallons of oily mucous, and would often ruin the rest of the catch, which makes it even more puzzling that it’s 1938 rediscovery happened when it was found in a pile of other fish headed for the market.

This shouldn't surprise you, as we've posted many stories about rare or even unique animals that were eaten. You might be interested in how one prepares a coelacanth dinner, which you can learn about at Esoterx. Once you do, you probably will swear them off for good. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Dean Falk Schnabel)

Binky Dinky's best bud left for work, so he was already sad. He decided to take a nap, and that's when the nightmare started. Warning: if you are a dog, this may be terrifying. -via reddit

Farms sell produce directly to consumers in farmer's markets and right on the farm during harvest season. Vineyards do that, too, although the laws about selling alcohol are usually more stringent. In Germany, there's a traditional way around those regulations of who can sell alcohol where.

Here in southern Germany’s wine regions, a besen, or a broomstick, signifies something special. For up to 16 weeks, local laws permit winemakers to set up temporary restaurants to serve their latest harvest. So each year, typically in spring and fall, they sweep out their family room or barn, drag tables out from the garage, and recruit family members as servers. Then, they hang a broomstick outside to indicate they’re open.

These broomsticks inspired the name of these pop-up establishments: besenwirtschaften, or simply besens. The limited season creates demand, as does the feeling of being welcomed into a stranger’s home for a rowdy dinner party. As customers sidle up to each other at long communal tables, three-piece brass bands play catchy folk songs and wine is poured by the same hands that picked the grapes. It’s no wonder besen season is a local favorite.

While the pop-up restaurants are in themselves a loophole in the laws, there are strict regulations about them. But why a broom? Read about traditional besenwirtschaften at Atlas Obscura.

Why do people live in Yakutsk? Some are native to the region, some are descendants of Stalin-era exiles, but many are there to make a lot of money in resource extraction industries, from gas and oil to metals to diamonds to mammoth carcasses. When it's this cold, you have to learn an entirely new lifestyle. -via reddit

You may never have heard of the Roman emperor Elagabalus, possibly because the name changed (according to Wikipedia, Elagabalus' royal name was Antoninus) and because he only ruled for four years, from age 14 to 18, then was assassinated in disgrace. Was it because Elagabalus promoted the worship of a sun god ahead of the Roman pantheon? Was it because he was incompetent? Or was it because of his sexuality? There is some evidence that Elagabalus may have been transgender.    

An 18th century English historian Edward Gibbon, wrote that Elagabalus “abandoned himself to the grossest pleasures with ungoverned fury.” Germany’s leading historian of Ancient Rome, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, said that “the name Elagabalus is branded in history above all others” because of his “unspeakably disgusting life.” An example of a modern historian’s assessment is Adrian Goldsworthy’s view that: “Elagabalus was not a tyrant, but […] incompetent, probably the least able emperor Rome had ever had.” Only archaeologist Warwick Ball describes Elagabalus as “innovative” and “a tragic enigma lost behind centuries of prejudice.”

When Elagabalus was alive, a Roman statesman who kept close tabs on the lives of his emperors. In his writings, Cassius Dio notably referred to Elagabalus by feminine pronouns and states that the emperor wanted to marry a former male slave and charioteer named Hierocles. Dio stated that Elagabalus delighted in being called Hierocles’s mistress, wife, and queen. Officially, Elagabalus was married five times (and twice to the same woman) all before he was 18, although there were rumours he also married a man named Zoticus, an athlete from Smyrna.

There were further clues from the written accounts of the teenage emperor's reign. Read what we know about the Roman emperor now known as Elagabalus at Messy Nessy Chic. 

Together, we are all... pic.twitter.com/R5FnT4kv1I

— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 23, 2021

You may have heard by now that the Cleveland MLB team, eights months after announcing they would change their name, will officially be called the Cleveland Guardians at the end of the current season. Now, before you make a joke about Guardians of the Galaxy, there is a perfectly local explanation for the new name, eight sentinels known to all Cleveland residents who pass over the Hope Memorial Bridge, possibly on the way to see a baseball game. They are the Guardians of Traffic.

Flanking either end of the Hope Memorial Bridge from both sides, are 4 towering pylons. Each pylon bears a massive statue on each side representing a "Guardian of Traffic." These winged Art Deco figures wear either winged helmets or winged laurel crowns. Each figure holds a different ground vehicle: a hay wagon, covered wagon, stage coach, passenger car, dump truck, concrete mixer, and two other trucks. The progression of vehicles from hay wagon to semi truck symbolizes the evolution of transport, and the breadth of their protection. They have stood on either side of the bridge protecting all who pass between them since the early 30's.

Henry Hering carved each piece out of a 43 foot tall sandstone slab based on designs by Frank Walker. The Guardians were Hering's first foray into the Art Deco style and they remain the only public Art Deco monument in the city.

-via Metafilter

(Image credit: Erik Drost)

Does anyone remember the Arch Deluxe? It was a fancy hamburger offered at McDonalds beginning in 1996. The company spent $200 million to promote it, and expected to rake in a billion dollars in return. Only they didn't.

It wasn’t entirely unreasonable to expect miracles because on paper, the Arch Deluxe is one hell of a burger: crisp lettuce, mustard-mayo sauce, peppered bacon, tomato, and beef on a bakery-style potato roll. It was the creation of Andrew Selvaggio, a fine dining chef from Chicago’s legendary Pump Room. With all the talent and bona fides a McDonald’s head chef required and then some, Selvaggio spent months coming up with what he now describes as “something unique and different [to] set us apart from everybody. The Arch Deluxe was supposed to be the first entry into a better burger — premium burger — experience for McDonald’s.”

When I read the name of the burger, I confused it with the McDLT, which launched in 1984. So you might be forgiven if you've forgotten the Arch Deluxe, but you can read about it at Eater.  -via Digg

We learned that the ancient Olympics were a big deal in Greece, then were adopted by the Romans, and died out as the Roman Empire turned to Christianity. While it's true that the name fell out of use, sporting competitions inspired by the Olympics became a part of life throughout Western civilization.   

In the West, chariot racing died out rather quickly, but beginning in the second half of the 11th century, knightly tournaments were the spectacle of medieval Europe. At their height, beginning in the 12th century and continuing through at least the 16th, participants would, like their ancient Olympic forebears, travel a circuit of competitions across Europe, pitting their skills against other professionals. (The depiction in the 2001 Heath Ledger film A Knight’s Tale was not far from reality.) In these competitions, armored, mounted men would try to unseat their opponents using lance and shield, or battle on foot with blunted (but still dangerous) weapons to determine who was the best warrior, all for an enthusiastic crowd.

And indeed, these were performances. Lionized in contemporary fiction, and discussed repeatedly in historical chronicles from the period, one scholar has suggested that these were often accompanied—much like the modern Olympics—with theatrical opening and closing ceremonies. An autobiographical set of poems from the 13th century, for example, had the knight Ulrich von Liechtenstein perform a chaste quest for a wealthy (married) noblewoman. Dressed as a woman, specifically the goddess Venus, Ulrich travels across Italy and the Holy Roman Empire defeating all challengers in jousts and hand-to-hand combat.

The legacy of such tournaments continues today, with sports offering nations and individuals an opportunity for fame, glory, and one-upmanship without killing or colonizing each other. Read about the medieval tournaments that grew out of the Olympics at Smithsonian. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Thomas Wriothesley)

It's been pretty hot in Oregon this summer, so the staff at the Oregon Zoo go out of their way to help cool things down for the animals. Watch as a group of ring-tailed lemurs and red ruffed lemurs enjoy some frozen fruit treats! -via Laughing Squid

This terrifying structure is part of an irrigation system used in the Valais region of Switzerland since the 15th century. Some bisses are still in use, while others are designated as historic landmarks. It's a way to get water from the Alpine mountaintops to the dry valley farms that need it.   

Despite being surrounded by some of Switzerland's wettest mountains, the sun-scorched, glacier-carved region receives just 500mm of rainfall a year, presenting a unique engineering challenge for irrigation. Cue gravity-defying bisses, designed to divert glacial meltwater from mountain streams to parched pastures and vineyards at lower elevations. To this day, 200 of them totalling 1,800km in length supply water to 80% of the Valais' irrigated land.

Measuring between 0.5m to 2m in breadth, the most primitive of Valais bisses were hewn out of rock. Others, like the 500-year-old Bisse des Sarrasins in the district of Sierre in central Valais, were hollowed from tree trunks. But the true marvels of bisse engineering were the "hanging channels", designed to guide water from far-off glaciers around gorges and overhangs in the region's wildest corners.

Now imagine the labor and the danger involved in building these in the 15th century. Read about the Swiss bisses at BBC Travel.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Rilaak)

Why do we call a software glitch a "bug"? You've got to call it something, and you may as well ask where the word "glitch" came from. Still, language origin stories are often interesting, and the idea of an insect causing problems in our computers makes sense. Insects love small, protected places to hide, and they reap all kinds of destruction from our point of view. It's also a handy excuse for human error.

According to the most often-repeated origin story, in 1947 technicians working on the Harvard Mk II or Aiken Relay Calculator – an early computer built by the US Navy – encountered an electrical fault, and upon opening the mechanism discovered that a moth had had flown into the computer and shorted out one of its electrical relays. Thus the first computer bug was quite literally a bug, and the name stuck.

But while this incident does indeed seemed to have occured, it is almost certainly not the origin of the term, as the use of “bug” to mean an error or glitch predates the event by nearly a century.

The first recorded use of “bug” in this context comes from American inventor Thomas Edison, who in a March 3, 1878 letter to Western Union President William Orton wrote: “You were partly correct. I did find a “bug” in my apparatus, but it was not in the telephone proper. It was of the genus “callbellum”. The insect appears to find conditions for its existence in all call apparatus of telephones.”

The genus "callbellum" does not exist, and turned out to be Edison telling a joke. But don't take that as Edison coining "bug" for a technology glitch. Edison was in the habit of taking other people's ideas. Read the story of how we came to see "bugs" in the system at Today I Found Out. 

(Image credit: Naval Surface Warfare Center)

While the international Olympic Summer Games are getting started in Tokyo this weekend, Fairbanks, Alaska, is hosting the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, as they have every year since 1961 ...except for 2020. The return of the games this year is particularly exciting. People of all ages will compete in feats of strength and skill that harken back to a traditional way of life such as the ear pull, blanket toss, fish cutting, knuckle hop, greased pole walk, four-man carry, Alaskan high kick, and the Indian stick pull.    

In 1961, two commercial airline pilots, Bill English and Tom Richards, Sr., who flew for the now-defunct Wien Air Alaska, were flying back and forth to some of the state’s outlying communities. During these visits, they watched Alaska Natives perform dances and other physical activities, such as the blanket toss, an event where 30 or more people hold a blanket made of hides and toss one person in the air. The goal is to remain balanced and land on one's feet. (The event stems from the Iñupiaq, an indigenous group from northern Alaska, who would use a blanket to toss a hunter in the air as a way to see over the horizon during hunts.)

“They [English and Richards] had a true appreciation for what they were witnessing and knew that these activities were something that people in the rest of the state should see for themselves to get a better understanding of the value of traditions happening outside Alaska's big cities,” says Gina Kalloch, chairwoman of the WEIO board who is Koyukon Athabascan.

Read about some of the WEIO events and how they descended from traditional indigenous culture at Smithsonian. The 2021 competitions are going on now through Saturday.   

The kitchen may be the heart of the home, but it has always represented a lot of work. The last century or so has given us a continuous race to make that work easier with modern gadgets designed to cook and clean. Since the dawn of the computer age, the idea of a kitchen computer has been tried over and over, with little success. The first one was offered in 1969.

As depicted in this colorful advertisement, the sleek, enormous Honeywell Kitchen Computer would have commanded attention in any kitchen. But it did not actually cook dinner. Rather, its functions included storing recipes, meal planning, and balancing the family checkbook. Though marketed towards housewives, it was very impractical. The advertising campaign’s tagline “If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute!” sought to hide that the Honeywell Kitchen Computer was merely a complicated digital recipe-card box and a calculator.

The department store Neiman Marcus sold the Honeywell Kitchen Computer as a luxury item, pricing it at a kingly $10,600 (around $78,000 today). Buying the computer made little economic sense for the target audience, and required a 2-week coding course on how to properly use the 16 buttons on the front panel. There’s no evidence that anybody actually purchased one.

That was only the first of a series of ideas to get computers into the modern kitchen. But what could a computer actually do in the kitchen that wouldn't take up valuable room and cost more than it's worth? In the end, the solution turned out to be pretty simple. We have a few computerized systems that run through the whole house, for things like energy consumption and security, but getting a computer to help in the kitchen is as easy as making that computer small and portable. My daughter cooks with a recipe displayed on a computer screen while music plays ...on her iPhone. Read a short history of kitchen computers at Atlas Obscura.