ESTO #NoEsRestauración. Es una intervención NO profesional.
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Polémica en Palencia por una restauración que deja hecho un «cristo» el relieve de una fachada https://t.co/18pEBXjKH4

— ACRE (@A_CR_E) November 9, 2020

Spain is full of wonderful art that spans hundreds, if not thousands of years. Why are so many art restorations in the country entrusted to people who aren't art restoration experts? First we had Ecce Homo, then St. George, and even the Virgin Mary. Now a statue in the town of Palencia has gone viral for its new face that resembles a potato or something.

The Palencia statue, which formerly was of a smiling lady placed within a country scene, adorns part of the facade of a bank in this city of some 78,000 in the country's north. The Art Newspaper reports that the statue was originally unveiled in 1923.

In Spain, professional art restorers and conservationists are once again calling for stricter oversight. On Twitter, the Madrid-based organization of professional restorers and conservators, ACRE, deplored the work in Palencia, writing that the rehab was not professional.

Read about the incident, and see what the statue is supposed to look like at NPR.  -via Damn Interesting

In the movie Armageddon, NASA enlisted a team of deep-sea oil drillers to destroy an asteroid that was threatening Earth, turning them into astronauts in the process. The real story of earth-moving engineers who helped NASA is much more plausible. See, the space program built these huge Saturn rockets that weighed 3000 tons (that's six million pounds), and had to somehow get them from the assembly plant to the launch pad. They were not only heavy, but relatively fragile and very expensive. The rocket scientists consulted transportation engineers, but they should have gone straight to the ones who were already doing this kind of work because it's profitable.  

On January 1962, the American Machine & Foundry Company, one of America’s largest recreational equipment manufacturer who produced everything from garden equipment, to atomic reactors, to yachts, presented a plan that involved using a rail-barge combination where the weight of the rocket was supported by barges but propulsion was achieved by rails. The details were still being worked out when the Deputy Chief of the Future Launch Systems Study Office received a phone call from Barry Schlenk, a representative of the Bucyrus-Erie Company, a mining equipment manufacturer. Schlenk had heard about NASA’s transport problems, and offering to help, he sent the Deputy Chief photographs of Bucyrus-Erie's steamshovel crawler used in the Kentucky coal fields. The vehicle seemed suited to NASA’s needs, especially its capability to level and balance a load on uneven terrain.

NASA sent their engineers to the coal town of Paradise, Kentucky, to observe the steam shovel crawler in action, and we're impressed. Read how strip mining technology was drafted to haul Saturn rockets at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: NASA)

This dog named Monkey should be on American Ninja Warrior! Monkey's trainer, Omar von Muller, built an obstacle course that would confound humans and dogs alike, but this dog has it down. He takes on a tightrope, balance bean, seesaw, ladder, and all manner of apparatus, and even throws some mustard on his performance with a sideways walking handstand! That's a good dog. -via Laughing Squid

This may literally be a shaggy dog story, but it doesn't have that kind of punch line. Redditor SwarmTendon told the tale of the time she got to have a dog even though she doesn't have a dog. A stranger thought her dog-friendly office was a dog daycare center and left her Basset hound Otis there all day.

At the end of the day the woman, thank God, came back. She said “Thanks, you’re a lifesaver. How was he?” And I said “He was a champ.” And was about to say “But why is he here” when she said “Thats a relief. Most kennels say he gets anxious around other dogs. I heard you operated at a much higher capacity, I was thrilled to see you had so few clients in the room at one time. So, how much do I owe?” And that’s when I realized she thought we were a dog daycare.

Now, I probably should’ve corrected her. But I loved my day with the office dog and I did want to get paid for supervising this strange dog all day. I just threw out the number that sounded fair and appropriate “That’ll be $20.” I said.

She replied “Reaalllly?!” In this very high tone, and I couldn’t tell if I’d overshot or undershot. But she paid me and left.

But the kicker is that the lady returned and left Otis again and again, for months before she found out what was really going on. In that time, Otis was named employee of the month more often than SwarmTendon was and also appeared in the office Christmas card. Read the story of how the ruse was exposed and what happened to SwarmTendon afterward at reddit. -via Bored Panda 

(Unrelated image credit: Carlos Alejo)

On the Data is Beautiful subreddit, dyqz posted the results of a poll he took in which 1600 people showed how differently they view holes. If you can dig a hole in the ground that is shaped like a bowl, then doesn't a bowl also have a hole? But if there was a hole in your bowl, your soup would leak out! Is a pore in your skin considered a hole? What if it is filled with a blackhead -is it still a hole? How about a coffee cup: is the hole the place where you put the coffee, or the place you put your fingers in to hold it, or both? And then there's the drinking straw, which may have one hole or two (one at each end). Jason Kottke gives us some definitions of a hole from various thinkers, which only raise more questions. A golf course has holes, but a topologist would say they are not holes at all, since they don't go all the way through the earth. In that case, your digestive tract would be a hole, but most people consider the ends to be two different holes. -via Metafilter, where there is a lot more discussion on the subject.

Jon Rahm had the most astonishing golf shot at the Masters in Augusta; too bad it was during a practice round and not actual play. The perfect spin led the ball to skip across the pond, once, twice, onto the green, curving around, and even seems to speed up approaching the hole and it's a hole in one! -Thanks WTM!

Banded mongooses are fearless fighters, and are famous for standing up to venomous snakes. A new study, combining observation and genetic analysis, shows that they'll even go to war with rival groups of other banded mongooses. What's notable about these fights is that they're apparently started as an excuse for sex.

The researchers found that the fights were predominantly started by females, who wield a great deal of influence over the group, according to the research, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This influence is particularly great when females are ovulating and capable of becoming pregnant, which in banded mongooses happens for all female group members at the same time.

Video taken by the researchers revealed that females mated with the males of rival groups during battle, while the protective males in their own group were distracted, per New Scientist. Fights were more likely to occur when females of a group were in the fertile stage of their reproductive cycle, called estrus.

“Estrus females have been observed to lead their group deep into enemy territory, closely followed by mate-guarding males, directly inciting intergroup fights,” write the researchers in the paper.

This is not only a betrayal, but an atrocity as mongooses can get killed, including pups. But it's also a scheme to refresh the gene pool. Mongooses are born into permanent groups of around twenty or so individuals, and inbreeding is assured without some way of mating outside the group. It seems a pity they couldn't find a less violent way to do it. Read about the research on mongoose war and sex at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Charles J Sharp)

The Evil Dead franchise consists of four feature films and a television series, plus another film now in development. It also includes video games, comics, and other media, but Screen Junkies focuses only on the first three movies for this Honest Trailer. That’s just as well, because over almost 40 years, it’s all too much to keep up with.

In 1920, the audacity of one Black man trying to vote in the November election in Ocoee, Florida, led to a riot that left six people dead, and caused all of Ocoee’s black residents to leave forever. The Orlando newspaper covered the incident, highlighting “2 white victims.” Of the four Black people who were killed, only one, July Perry, was ever identified by name. Pamela Schwartz of the Orange County Regional History Center tell the story.      

That invoice and headline illustrate the challenge facing Schwartz and other researchers. They’re typical of what she calls the “intentional obfuscation” of much of Black history, the product of official records that are sketchy or apathetic or worse. As a result, much of the evidence we inherit of such events is indirect and incidental. “You just didn’t go to Ocoee,” recalled Francina Boykin, a Black woman from nearby Apopka, while describing her childhood in an oral history that informed the exhibition. “You just didn’t.” People don’t always know why they were raised to avoid the town, but Boykin’s comments echo “the sentiment from almost every Black person we’ve done an oral history with, [even on subjects] totally unrelated to the Ocoee Massacre,” Schwartz says. That’s the thing about oral history, she adds. It leads to “this whole other world of information that lives in each individual”—information that is not always precise, but is nevertheless revealing.

The Ocoee Massacre left a legacy felt to this day. The Orange County Regional History Center in Orlando declined to do an exhibit on the incident in the early 21st century because it was still too sensitive. But this year, an exhibit about it will run until February. Read about the Ocoee Massacre of 1920 at Atlas Obscura.

The Great Wall of China is a marvel of engineering. Built thousands of miles long over hundreds of years, the purpose was to protect China from Mongolian invaders from the north. Forces on horseback couldn't get over it, and watchtowers along the wall enabled warnings to defensive troops. But was it successful in its purpose?

But the Great Wall was not always effective. Genghis Khan and his armies had no trouble invading Chinese territory, for example, nor did various other tribes from the north. In some cases, the invaders may have simply gone around sections of the wall; in others, they found more ingenious methods. The Tanguts, in 1002, were able to cross the wall easily by filling in trenches along its length when they noticed the guards of the Song dynasty weren’t paying attention.

That incident points to a key weakness in the Great Wall: Defensive fortifications are only as good as the people manning them. This would prove true on more than one occasion during the Great Wall’s history. For example, in 1644, the Ming dynasty was betrayed to invading Manchu forces by a turncoat general who simply let the enemy army in through a gate.

These failures are at least partly why various rulers kept building, extending, and reinforcing the wall over time. There were plenty of successes to keep them going. Read about the defensive capabilities of the Great Wall of China at Discover magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: George Saxton, NESDIS, NOAA)

YouTuber Walter Santi (not his name, but the names of his pets) equipped a special "cat room" for the feral cats who live in his garden. These are cats he feeds in addition to his many pets and rescue cats, some of whom we have featured before. If the length of the video bothers you, you can skip ahead to about 3:30, when the cats come inside. Watching the feral cats discover the joys of indoor living is heartwarming. They'll be domesticated just in time to stay warm for the winter! -via Digg

The pandemic has caused many families to break into smaller groups, and many are either canceling big family feasts or paring back the guest list. This means that farmers who've spent a lot of time and effort growing large Thanksgiving turkeys are facing a very different market. Their customers are asking for smaller turkeys.  

In Pescadaro, California, Dede Boies has had to dig into her wallet to ensure she is prepared for any demand in smaller birds. Boies, whose heritage turkeys were born in May, says by mid-summer she knew Thanksgiving wouldn’t look normal this year.

“It’s a little nerve wracking… If turkey sales are not where we planned them to be, then that’s going to impact us significantly,” she says, adding that if she isn’t able to sell the meat by December, it would put her in the red.

She’s paying her processor an extra dollar per turkey to cut the birds in half, as she is receiving so many inquiries for smaller size turkeys. Boies also decided to harvest half of her 200 birds two weeks early so they didn’t grow anymore. She has needed an extra facility to store them, which has cost an extra few thousand dollars.

So if you are looking for just the right turkey, you may have to pay more per pound. At the same time, if the turkeys don't sell, farmers will be in a spot. Read about the demand for smaller turkeys and how turkey farmers are coping at Smithsonian.

AC/DC has always been a straightforward band. Their songs are about rock ’n’ roll, partying, and sex, with no deeper message. The year 1980 launched them into global stardom, with the death of singer Bon Scott, the new guy Brian Johnson, their biggest album Back in Black, and their biggest hit song ever- “You Shook Me All Night Long.” Forty years later, everyone sings along when the anthem is played at weddings. What made that particular song stand out from the rest? For one thing, it was the first song Brian Johnson wrote for the band.    

What was different, though, was the noticeable affection that Johnson shows to his object of lust. AC/DC reveled in bad-boy sex songs full of locker-room talk. “We were in Australia, which at that time was still a bit outback,” Malcolm Young explained in 1989. “It was just a way of life, a way of talking, and that’s how we communicated with the audience.” Sure, it could be sexist and objectifying — judging by the stories they bragged about, AC/DC was definitely a boy’s club in which women were sometimes treated like playthings — but the band also evinced a sense of humor that suggested that, at least in the music, it was all just a bit of naughty fun, so what was the harm? (As music journalist Phil Stucliffe, who spent time with the band in the mid-1970s, put it decades later, “They stand for everything I disagree with about our chauvinist view of the woman’s role, yet they’re so totally honest, open and funny about it that I got carried away with liking them.”)

“You Shook Me All Night Long” was hardly chaste or sappy, but it felt far more admiring, practically worshiping this woman. It was as close as AC/DC ever got to writing an actual love song, not that it was actually all that close.

There’s more to it. To this day, many believe that the deceased Bon Scott had a hand in creating the song. And some see a feminist message in it. Read about AC/DC’s biggest hit, how it came about, and what it means at Mel magazine.

Every nation has different standards for what can be aired on broadcast TV. European countries are lax about language and nudity, but they are appalled by the American custom of advertising pharmaceuticals directly to consumers. Britain has a few hard and fast rules (imagine a strict limit on the number of advertising minutes on TV!) for somewhat obscure reasons, but the real story is the lengths that some shows have gone to get around those rules.

In the 19th century, when sugar was an expensive treat, Swedish people used candy for important occasions, such as weddings, baptisms, and anniversaries, wrapped in bright colors and adorned with celebratory images. They also used candies for funerals.

But funeral confectionery design was often downright macabre. There may have been sweets inside the wrappers, but the candies did little to sugar-coat the sad occasion, with wrappers carrying lithographs of skulls, graves, and skeletons.

“The thinking was, ‘We’re dealing with death here and a great loss,’ so visually the expressions were gloomy and morbid,” says Ulrika Torell, a curator at the Nordiska Museum and the author of Sugar and Sweet Things: A Cultural-Historical Study of Sugar Consumption in Sweden. “You were not making something milder than it really was.”  

These funeral candies were treated as precious souvenirs, and were not often eaten. But over time, changes in culture changed the custom of funerary candy until it has become a lost art. Read about Swedish funeral candy at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Karolina Kristensson/Nordiska Museet)