Nick Drummond and Patrick Bakker bought an old house in the small town of Ames, New York, and set out to repair and renovate it. The house had once been owned by "Count" Adolf Humpfner, who was rumored to have been a bootlegger, but he died in 1932, so those stories may have been just a legend. Two families lived in the home since then, for decades each. So it was quite a surprise when Drummond and Bakker pulled some wall panels out and found whisky bottles. A lot of them.

“I was in the process of removing this rotted wood skirting that went around the mudroom sort of where the foundation would be if it was a truly finished structure, and as I’m peeling back the boards on one of the sides, all of the sudden all this hay falls out and I was very confused," Drummond said. "And at first, I was like ‘oh this must be insulation’ – of course all this is taking place within a few seconds in my head -- and then I look and I’m like ‘well wait a second, what’s that glass thing? And then I pull it up and I’m looking at this old liquor bottle. And then I’m looking at the other package and there’s these other little tops poking out of the hay. And then I look back at the wall and there’s like the edge of this other package tied up with string and I’m like, ‘Holy crap, this is like a stash of booze.’”

Brown paper packages tied up with string filled with an alcohol lover’s favorite thing.

“I was totally excited and we ended up finding the rest of the mudroom was lined with these packages,” Drummond said.

“At the end of the day we were just sitting, and we were like, ‘We really like the house so much more now,'” Bakker said.

So far, they've found 72 bottles, some empty, but most containing Prohibition-era Gaelic whisky under the name Old Smuggler. The bonanza led them to find out more about Adolf Humpfner, who led quite a colorful life, although much of it is still shrouded in mystery. The house has since been dubbed the Bootlegger Bungalow. Read about Humpfner, the house, and the whisky at the Denver Channel. Find out more at Drummond's Instagram page. -via Laughing Squid

Boston Dynamics gives us a New Year greeting in the form of dancing robots. This is terrifying. If robots can dance this well, is there anything they can't do? -via reddit

Through most of history in general, rich people wore nice clothing and poor people wore what they could afford. But sometimes, an ambitious person from a lower social station could become wealthy and dress in expensive garments. This wouldn't do at all, as it upset the ruling class, who preferred to be identified as separate from the masses. Therefore, in different places at different times, sumptuary laws went into effect to codify who could wear what kind of clothing, in order for everyone to tell what social class one belonged to. China's Ming dynasty tried to encode what everyone would wear. It worked for a while.

As time passed and commerce grew, violations increased. Wealthy commoners dressed in fabrics and styles supposedly reserved for nobler classes. They scorned plain silks and adopted forbidden brocades. They wore off-limits colors, including dark blue and scarlet. They sported gold embroidery. They bought hats and robes that were formally restricted to court officials. "Customs have changed from generation to generation," complained a Ming scholar, writing in the late 16th century. "All people tend to respect and admire wealth and luxury, competing for them without considering the bans of the government."

Nor were commoners the only offenders. Officials and their families dressed above their station. The sons of nobles, themselves in the lowly eighth rank, habitually donned the dress reserved for their high-ranking fathers. "They wear dark brown hats and robes patterned with qilin," a dragon-like creature with cloven hoofs, "tied with golden ribbons, even when they live at home or have been dismissed from official positions," complained another Ming writer. Emperors themselves undermined the rules too, he observed, bestowing robes on favorites without regard to whether their status merited the design.    

As they say, dress for the job (or social class) you want, not the one you have. Meanwhile in Italy, legal dress codes had to do with keeping people from showing off, which didn't work as intended, either. Virginia Postrel looks at the rise and fall of sumptuary laws at Reason magazine. -via Digg

If 2020 were a movie, this is what it would be. And the critics would have a field day with the believability factor. Screen Junkies takes movies we've seen and tells us everything that's wrong with them in their Honest Trailer series -although they are often much longer than a normal movie trailer. They also do the same thing with TV shows and video games, so why not a year? Now that 2020 is almost over, there's plenty of material to go over and illustrate with movie clips. In this case, a lot of horror movie clips, of course. Patton Oswalt steps in to help describe the carnage.  

In the Roaring Twenties, boxing was huge. There were reputations and money to be made, and people came out of the woodwork to watch their favorites go at each other. In Shelby, Montana, real estate developer (and the mayor's son) James “Body” Johnson Jr. was looking for a way to invigorate his town after an oil boom had crested, and was taken with the idea of staging a fight with world champion Jack Dempsey. Johnson and his associates arranged a fight between Dempsey and an upcoming boxer named Tommy Gibbons, although it would cost the town several hundred thousand dollars it didn't have. Up front.

Rather than despair, Johnson’s gang decided to bluff their way through, arranging lines of credit through the town’s three banks: the First State Bank of Shelby; the Stanton Trust & Savings Bank; and the First State Bank of Joplin. Lumber was bought with promissory notes to the tune of $82,000, agents launched a haphazard promotional campaign on the East and West coasts, and hundreds of locals began to swirl around the town in the excitement of the run-up. To accommodate the expected 40,000 attendees, makeshift hotels were hastily thrown up by enterprising locals sure of a healthy profit. The match was scheduled for 4 July 1923, in the hopes of capitalizing on patriotic fervor and the promise of a fight to remember. This was to be a boxing match for the ages.

Well, it was, in the respect that it became a huge story for the town of Shelby, but it didn't turn out the way Johnson hoped it would. Read about the championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Tommy Gibbons and what it did to Shelby, Montana, at Damn Interesting.

Rik Villanueva posted a Star Wars timeline that corresponds with earth years. These aren't the years that these movies actually happened, because we were told right off that it happened "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." It's all about order and perspective. Villanueva apparently used 2019 (the year we saw The Rise of Skywalker) as a starting point and counted back, but some fans are disappointed he didn't use 1977 (when the first Star Wars movie was released) as the anchor year.

While this timeline can be useful, particularly in pegging when The Mandalorian occurs, it still leaves us wondering how Obi-wan Kenobi looked so young when played by Ewan McGregor and so old when played by Alec Guinness. The adventures of the space wizard in Disney's upcoming series may have aged him. That series is supposed to be set ten years after Revenge of the Sith and nine years before A New Hope, which would put it at 1975 in this graph. -via Boing Boing

I don't know what they expected, riding bikes down a ski slope, but you know what to expect, you just don't know when. When it starts, it's all downhill from there, so to speak. You can see the long version here.

Held annually at the Les Deux Alpes ski resort in France, the Mountain of Hell pits 700 racers against a 15-mile course of snow, ice, rocks, and singletrack. The riders descend 8,530 feet in the process. And what’s best is they all start at the same time. So when one rider loses it on the slippery glacier, well, it becomes a pinball machine at full tilt.

-via Bits and Pieces

This time of year you'll find tons of lists of the best and worst things of 2020, but the most interesting are the ones that focus on the odd, strange, and bizarre. A list at LiveScience will entice you to read all ten stories, because they are medical reports of the weird things that can happen to someone's health. Maybe not you. We hope.  

The 54-year-old man suddenly lost consciousness after experiencing a life-threatening heart rhythm problem, according to a report of the case, published Sept. 23 in The New England Journal of Medicine. His family said that the man had a poor diet, and in recent weeks, he had consumed one to two large packages of black licorice every day. Despite receiving multiple treatings in the intensive care unit, the man died 32 hours after arriving at the hospital, the report said.

Black licorice often contains a compound called glycyrrhizin, which is derived from licorice root, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Consuming too much licorice root or candies flavored with licorice root can be dangerous because glycyrrhizin lowers the body's potassium levels. This, in turn, can lead to high blood pressure and abnormal heart rhythms.

So how much licorice is too much?

The FDA says that eating just 2 ounces of black licorice a day for two weeks can cause heart rhythm problems, particularly for people ages 40 and older.

This is the only case in the list in which the patient died. Read more of the strangest medical cases of the year, like the man with green urine, another man with three kidneys, and a woman who shed infectious particles of the novel coronavirus for 70 days straight, at LiveScience. -via Digg

(Image credit: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration)

In 1995, a group of four chess enthusiasts were devastated when their opponents took their queen in a very public New Year's Eve match at Madison Square Garden. Exactly 25 years later, they are staging a rematch, online of course. Phish will present "Dinner and a Rematch" on New Year's Eve, pitting themselves against online participants. You can join in through Chess.com (registration required). In addition to chess, there will be recipe swapping and some music. Drinking is optional, since you'll be at home anyway. And may the best mass player win.  -via Metafilter

Redditor emkay95 made a full-size apple rose tart for Christmas and wanted to show it off. Isn't it lovely? She said it was so labor-intensive she probably wouldn't ever make another. It's a good thing she took a picture before baking it.

That was a heartbreaking twist for readers, who were even more upset that she didn't take pictures of the aftermath. So no apple pie for Christmas dinner?

Well. It had tinfoil over it so it was kind of saved. We still made it and ate it but it wasn’t so beautiful anymore and kind of tasted like defeat

I'm sure it was delicious. Here's the recipe she used, although she did make a few alterations. Your mileage may vary.

As soon as you get over your food coma from eating so many Christmas treats, it's time to get ready for another holiday! In the US, especially the South, it's traditional to serve hog jowl (or ham hocks or just ham) along with black-eyed peas and your favorite greens to celebrate the New Year. It's supposed to auger health and prosperity. But there's no need to limit yourself to only what you've eaten before. You might want to look to other countries if you want to institute new food traditions for the holiday. Here's a sampling:

1. Spain

In Spain, it's customary to eat 12 grapes right at midnight on New Year's Eve, representing good luck for each of the coming 12 months.

8. Turkey

In Turkey, some smash pomegranates in the doorways of their homes. As the tradition goes, the number of seeds that fly out predict how much good fortune you'll have in the coming year.

Read about more New Year food traditions at Food52. -via The Week

Flatscreen television sets have opened up a whole new world to dogs and cats, who used to pay no attention at all to cathode-ray tube TV. Ella is a senior rescue cat who loves to watch TV, but she prefers to see one particular film, every day if possible. You can see more of Ella at her Instagram page.

Mileva Marić Einstein was a brilliant physicist who is little known today, mainly because she was a woman born in 1875. The reason she is known at all is because she was married to Albert Einstein from 1903 to 1919. Their collaboration in both science and life started in 1896 when both were at the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich. In what appeared to be a pattern set for their entire time together, Mileva dragged Albert through his classes.

Albert and Mileva became inseparable, spending countless hours studying together. He attended only a few lectures, preferring to study at home. Mileva was methodical and organized. She helped him channel his energy and guided his studies as we learn from Albert’s letters, exchanged between 1899-1903 during school holidays: 43 letters from Albert to Mileva have been preserved but only 10 of hers remain(5).

Mileva had better grades than Albert, but the professor giving the final oral exam gave her such low marks that she did not graduate. Her four male classmates did. Albert and Mileva went on to collaborate on groundbreaking physics research, but Mileva's name rarely appeared in published papers, possibly because she knew from experience that her participation could diminish those papers and therefore Albert's job prospects. What she felt would advance their future together ended up costing her everything. Read the story of Mileva Einstein at Scientific American. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Unbekannt)

Sven Johnson had to make a video for the final exam in some media class, demonstrating his understanding of different technical aspects of production. What makes Sven's project stand out is that his brother is comedian and successful YouTuber Gus Johnson (previously at Neatorama), who volunteered to help out by appearing on camera. Sven has not revealed what grade he received. -via reddit

It's time for Barry Petchesky's annual list of things people had to go to emergency rooms to have removed from various bodily orifices in the preceding year. That includes the ears, nose, throat, penis, vagina, and rectum.

All reports are taken from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s database of emergency room visits, all descriptions are verbatim, and hey don’t put that in there, you might lose it.

Most of the list is just the object and its size, but there are some quotes from the reports. The reports of earbuds stuck in ears are quite believable, and the things pulled from noses appear to be mostly children, but you can almost hear the skepticism in the quotes about how objects became stuck in rectums -as reported by the patients. See the list at Defector.