The obituary for Margaret Marilyn DeAdder stands head and shoulders above everyday obits you may come across. It begins by describing her as many things, including “self-described Queen Bitch,” and then goes into the highlights of her life.  

Marilyn loved all children who weren’t her own and loved her own children relative to how clean-shaven they were. She excelled at giving the finger, taking no sh!t and laughing at jokes, preferably in the shade of blue. She did not excel at suffering fools, hiding her disdain, and putting her car in reverse. A voracious reader, she loved true crime, romance novels and the odd political book. Trained as a hairdresser before she was married, she was always doing somebody's hair in her kitchen, so much so her kitchen smelled of baking and perm solution. Marilyn had a busy life, but no matter what she was doing she always made time to run her kids’ lives as well. Her lifelong hobbies included painting, quilting, baking, gardening, hiking and arson. Marilyn loved tea and toast. The one thing she loved more than tea and toast was reheated tea and toast. She reheated tea by simply turning on the burner often forgetting about it. She burned many a teapot and caused smoke damage countless times, leaving her kids with the impression that fanning the smoke alarm was a step in brewing tea.

Oh, there’s lots more, including her relationships with her family members. All in all, it’s a loving and memorable tribute to a life well lived. No one will forget Margaret Marilyn DeAdder. Read the whole thing at the website of Cobb’s Funeral Home in New Brunswick.  -via Fark

강아지 방구소리 들을사람 pic.twitter.com/2bPBoqM6OO

— 옹ᯅ̈ (@onging_126) February 2, 2021

Have you ever run across someone who had such an amazing encyclopedic knowledge of everything on the internet that it made you speechless? Maybe it was someone you knew, but you never knew they spent that much time online, or had such a memory for detail. That happened recently during a workplace Slack chat. Most Slack conversations are short and to the point, as people communicate with others about work. But occasionally, someone will share something funny. In this instance, it was the above video of a dog farting. The coworker who uses the display name Samer stole all the thunder, so to speak.  

Samer:

somehow i recognize that audio from the guy who farted into the walmart phone, but it’s still good

Patrick: oh damn really?

Samer: yeah, the brassiness of it is distinct

Patrick: this man knows his toots

David Roth: Tuba Energy

The next 20 minutes gave us a Slack conversation for the books. Everyone in the loop was impressed at Samer’s response, and expressed it in all different ways. You can read a transcript (which contains NSFW language) at Defector. A good time was had by all. -via Kottke

This film experiment shows that you can find pretty much anything you want in stock footage. If you have the time, money, and patience, you can string together whatever you want. Filmmaker Matthew Highton put in the time and effort to recreate every slip of The Simpsons intro scene using available stock footage. Fox Broadcasting really should use this for the show sometime. -via Fark

If by some chance you were planning to show your love to someone this Valentines Day with a curated playlist, congratulations, that is almost as cliche as a heart-shaped box of candy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. A shared love of music is probably healthier than chocolate, anyway. However, before you go choosing messages of undying love from various top 40 lists, you might want to take a second look at the lyrics. Songs that became classic love songs in the past often have rather problematic story lines.

Whether they’re a little too obsessive, written about an inappropriately young love interest or romanticizing a toxic relationship, there are a surprisingly number of songs about love that actually are far creepier than they were intended to be. To help you know which ones you should steer clear of when putting together your Valentine’s Day playlist this year, we’ve rounded up some of the most disturbing examples. (For the purposes of this list, we’re focusing solely on songs that are unintentionally creepy, meaning self-aware depictions of unhealthy relationships or songs that are specifically intended to shock — like The Misfits’ “Die, Die My Darling” or Gnarls Barkley’s “Necromancer” — don’t fit the bill.)

InsideHook spells out what’s wrong with 13 love songs that you might not have noticed when casually listening. After all, you don’t want to send the wrong message, or give the impression that you don’t pay attention to details. Yeah, "EveryBreath You Take" is there, because that's a gimme. The others may surprise you.  -via Digg

The United States officially entered World War II on December 8, 1941, but troop buildups had been going on for some time. The first group of American GIs landed in Belfast on Jan. 26, 1942, to aid the British in the liberation of Europe. Military publicity units on both sides of the pond knew this was a big story, and needed a "hero" to represent those 500 men in the papers. They had disembarked in a hurry after eleven days at sea. Despite being near the end of the line, Private First Class Milburn H. Henke found himself chosen to the the "first."  

Henke was with his company when a Colonel asked for a volunteer. Henke’s Lieutenant put his name forward and the Private expected he was going ashore to unload equipment.

“I was sitting on some barracks bags, and this colonel came up the gangplank, and there were about fifteen of us,” Henke would later recall. “There was a lieutenant there and he said: ‘I want a man from Company B, 133rd,’ and Lieutenant Springer, he turned around: ‘Henke, you go with him.’ When I got by the gangplank, General Hartle came to meet me. He said, ‘Do you think you can talk over a radio?’ And I said, ‘Well, if I have to, I think I can.’”

Henke met with Major General Russell P. Hartle, commanding officer of 34th Infantry Division. There was some surprise when Hartle discovered the ceremonial first soldier to go ashore was from Minnesota rather than his home state of Iowa. Yet Henke had the look of a typical United States doughboy, with an easygoing nature and good looks. The irony that the first American GI in Europe had a German surname was conveniently overlooked.

Henke posed for pictures for some time and gave interviews to the press. But his day in the sun stretched to weeks as his persona as an everyday soldier was harnessed for the war effort. Read the story of  Milburn Henke at Military History Now. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: War Office official photographer, Bainbridge (Lt))

Once upon a time, if you wanted to ski downhill, you had to hike uphill first. There were other ways to get people up a mountain, like trains or horse-drawn carriages, but you can see how this would be rather time-consuming and limited in the number of people served. There had to be a better way.

According to the association, German farmer and innkeeper Robert Winterhalder invented the world’s first overhead cable tow in 1906—skiers hooked handles onto the water-powered continuous cable above their heads, then glided uphill on their skis. Though it was easy to use, Winterhalder’s invention didn’t catch on elsewhere.

In America, the first surface lift—the umbrella designation for uphill transportation that keeps a skier’s skis on the ground—was a steam-powered toboggan tow built in Truckee, California, in 1910 and later adopted by skiers.

Canadian skier Alex Foster built the first working model of the rope tow—a continuous rope that skiers simply grabbed onto and held with their hands—in 1931 outside of Shawbridge, Quebec. By 1934, the tow rope technology had made its way to Woodstock, Vermont.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Swiss ski mountaineer and mechanical engineer Ernst Constam invented the world’s first J-bar in 1934 in Switzerland, followed by the two-passenger T-bar in 1935. Both technologies quickly caught on across Europe and the U.S.

Still, all these methods were designed for athletic people, and they were still limited in how many skiers they could serve at once. Meanwhile, ski resorts were opening in the Western US and needed to accommodate as many people as possible to turn a profit. So James Curran invented the ski chairlift, although he was neither a resort employee nor a skier! He didn't have a college degree, and he never profited from his invention. Read the story of Curran's chairlift at Smithsonian.

A mother parakeet was sold from a pet shop and left an egg behind. Alwyn Wils had raised many birds, most notable a quail chick called Albert you may have heard of. But he'd never hatched a newborn parakeet before, and had to do his research. Wils' hard work and dedication paid off when the egg not only hatched, but his new hatchling grew into a lovely white budgie. -via Digg

Firehouse cats are nothing new, as they are worth their weight in pest extermination and companionship. But Tootsy took her obligations to extreme, from her dedication to a fire horse named Old Babe, in whose stall she was born, to sliding down the fire pole as a regular mode of transportation. She sprang into action when an alarm went off, but was forbidden to ride along to an actual fire.

Tootsy was the beloved feline firefighter of Engine Company 27 on Franklin Street in Lower Manhattan. Born on the Fourth of July in 1895, Tootsy reportedly loved the smell of smoke as much as she treasured a fresh-caught mouse.

She was a genuine fire cat who loved riding on the fire engine, conversing with the firemen, and sleeping in her favorite horse’s harness. She was also quite beautiful, and drew much praise from the public and the press when she appeared in the National Cat Show at Madison Square Garden. According to the New York Press, the firemen adored Tootsy so much, they would have rather parted with their shields than lose their “white-fleeced feline fire fighter.”

Tootsy would have loved nothing more than responding to a real fire along with the firemen and the horses. She managed to do that, twice, despite the disapproval of her human overseers, when she was still a kitten. Read about Tootsy, the famous firefighting cat of Manhattan, at the Hatching Cat.  -via Strange Company

How many times have you read someone correcting pop culture errors and reminding you that you will never see penguins and polar bears in the same place? It's because polar bears live in the Arctic and penguins live in the Antarctic. Last week, the two species kind of met in the middle in St. Louis. The king and gentoo penguins of the St. Louis Zoo went on a field trip to visit the polar bears. Lucky for the penguins, the polar bears were kept behind the glass wall. -via Boing Boing

Genghis Khan founded the Mongol Empire in 1206 CE. When he died in 1227, he was at the height of his power and reportedly healthy for a man in his 60s. He had made arrangements ahead of time to be buried in an unmarked grave at a location that would remain secret. Genghis Khan's grave has never been found.

While the conqueror's influence is well known, his death is shrouded in mystery. Genghis Khan's family and followers were instructed to keep his demise as their most hidden secret, since it happened during a vital stage of their war against the Western Xia, an empire the Mongols had fought for more than 20 years, the researchers said.

To honor or sully Genghis Khan's memory, both friends and foes of the Mongols told a number of legends about his death, the scientists said. One story claims he succumbed to blood loss after getting stabbed or castrated by a princess of the Tangut people, a Tibeto-Burman tribe in northwest China. Others suggested he died of injuries sustained after tumbling from his horse, fell in battle against the Chinese or died of an infected arrow wound during his final campaign against the Western Xia.

In the new study, the researchers suggested that all of these legends were likely invented well after Genghis Khan's death.

So how did he die? A new study can't say for sure, but research gives us the most likely scenario, which you can see at Real Clear Science.

(Image credit: Иван Коржев)

Elmer McCurdy wanted to be an Old West outlaw, but he was particularly bad at it. He and his gang once used too much nitroglycerin during a train robbery and destroyed the safe they tried to break into -and its contents. A bank robbery failed when they couldn't open a safe. And for his last robbery, he targeted the wrong train, which had no money. McCurdy was eventually shot and killed by police in 1911, and that's when his adventures really began.

McCurdy’s body was taken to the Johnson Funeral Home in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. He had no immediate kin to claim the body, so it was preserved in hopes that someone would claim it. Several weeks elapsed, and still, no one showed up to claim the body. The funeral homeowner decided to embalm the body and dress him in a suit. He put up the body for public exhibition, charging people 5 cents just to take a look.

For five long years, Elmer’s body remained in the Oklahoma funeral home, till one day it was claimed. Two men, James, and Charles Patterson showed up at the funeral home and requested the body. They identified themselves as Elmer McCurdy’s long-lost brothers. The funeral director was a bit suspicious of the two, but since the attraction fell out of favor, he decided to let go of the body. He also felt that McCurdy deserved a decent burial after an extended stay in the funeral home.

McCurdy did not get a decent burial until 1977. Read the story of Elmer McCurdy's restless corpse at Sometimes Interesting. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: W. G. Boag)

What we have here is a lesson in flatulence in the animal kingdom. We'll meet a snake that draws in air to make scary noises, insects that kill with farts, and fish that can die if they don't break wind properly. But which farts are the worst? It depends on how you define "worst." -via Digg

Every once in a while, you comes across a name listed as "John Doe, Esquire," or something like that. What does it mean? The short answer is that it means John Doe is a lawyer. However, that pretty much only pertains to American lawyers, and there is no codified rule as to the word's use. The custom descends from British titles of nobility, and to understand it, you have to go back to how other titles came about, such as that of "knight." In medieval Europe, every knight had a "squire."

This is where esquires come into play. The word itself derives from Old French, and in turn from Latin, where it means something like “shield-holder.” In the 1200s and 1300s in England, a variety of languages were used, so such figures might be referred to as the Latin armiger (“arms-holder,”) or scutifer (“shield-bearer”), or the French escuier, which became “esquire.” These terms all refer to roughly similar people. This role was generally considered moderately prestigious for young men of some wealth, but at its core it was a service job. You carry a knight’s stuff, tend to his horses, that kind of thing. “Esquire” and “squire” were names for the same gig for a few hundred years.

In 1363, the esquire’s place as a respectable social rank was codified in the Sumptuary Laws, which were essentially a huge list of what different groups of people could and could not wear. That list included esquires as a social group, alongside gentlemen and anyone else below the level of knight who actually had money and land. This was the same time that the idea of a gentry emerged in England: People who are not noble, but certainly not peasants, either. They were people worthy of being ranked above somebody in the social hierarchy.

But how did "esquire" come to mean lawyer? For the rest of the story, you'll need to go to Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Kenneth C. Zirkel)

My favourite species of birds are the ones named by people who clearly hate birds. (thread) pic.twitter.com/81Ztls7B2O

— Stu Royall (@stu_bot3000) February 3, 2021

There are about 10,000 known species of birds, so it stands to reason that some of them will end up with less-than-noble names. Yeah, we know about tits and boobies, but that only scratches the surface of weirdly-named birds. Stu Royall has been collecting the most head-scratchingly awful names for birds, which he presents in a Twitter thread.  

Excuse me? pic.twitter.com/bvFk5GRh64

— Stu Royall (@stu_bot3000) February 3, 2021

It gets weirder.

If you hate *birdsong* maybe find a different hobby idk pic.twitter.com/k5zMtF9zbe

— Stu Royall (@stu_bot3000) February 4, 2021

And those are just a few of the unflattering bird names Royall shows us. Replies came in with hilarious names for birds, fish, reptiles, and other species. Translations, too, like the Swedish buttdork. Read the whole thread here. -via Digg

You already knew that tardigrades are weird creatures, but you'll get way more weirdness when Ze Frank explains them. For example, they come in all shapes and colors, including transparent. In this video, we get to watch them eat diatoms and poop crystals, come back to life after being dehydrated, and reproduce by various means. Because that's how tardigrades do.