The Habsburgs (sometimes spelled Hapsburg) were a dynasty of Europeans from the same family who ruled over Austria, Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, and eventually countries across the continent for two centuries in the Middle Ages. You can recognize them in portraits by their pronounced jaws, called the Habsburg jaw. You are probably familiar with the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, King Charles II, from a previous Neatorama post. He is shown at the left in the image above, with his father and great-uncle Philip IV on the right. Charles had the most tangled family tree you've ever seen, outside the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. He also had a very pronounced Habsburg jaw, and so many other physical problems he never produced a royal heir. Common sense would tell you that the inbreeding caused the Habsburg jaw to become more pronounced over generations, but now we have science.
A study in the Annals of Human Biology focuses on 15 members of the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs from different generations who had realistic portraits painted. First they gleaned information from the family tree and assigned each of the subjects an inbreeding coefficient. Charles' inbreeding coefficient was so high that he never had a chance. Then separately, they asked mouth and jaw surgeons to examine the portraits and rate facial features that would indicate mandibular prognathism (protruding jaw) and maxillary deficiency (sunken midface). Then they compared the data from the two studies to determine that the Habsburg jaw was, indeed, likely to be the product of inbreeding. Get the details on this study at Smithsonian.
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Passover is a Jewish religious observance to commemorate the Hebrews' exodus from Egypt. The name comes from the night the angel of death passed over their homes when killing the Egyptian's firstborn children. The traditional Seder is a meal in which every dish and every procedure has a story behind it, to teach and reinforce that history for the next generations.
However, this was a problem in the Soviet Union. Jews in Russia had suffered under many regimes, and the Bolsheviks were the least oppressive, considering their communist idea of equality. The communists wanted to welcome Jews into the fold, but they also wanted to stamp out religion. Their solution was to make Jews into an ethnic group instead of a religious group, by changing their religious traditions to suit the new ideology. That was the impetus behind the "Red Seder," in which the traditions were bent to reflect communist themes of throwing off the shackles of the capitalist bourgeois. Red Seders were promoted in the 1920s and '30s, after which they were deemed successful and then discarded under Stalin, who had his own feelings about Jews as an ethnic group. Read about the Bolshevik Red Seders at Atlas Obscura.
(Image source: Hagadah far gloybers un apikorsim, 1923)
Francis Zuber was skiing through the trees at Mt. Baker in Washington state when he ran over an inverted snowboard. The board belonged to Ian Steger, who was still attached to it, but buried upside down in a tree well. Tree wells can have up to 20 feet of soft snow, and if you fall into one head first, you can disappear from sight forever. Steger was snowboarding with two friends, but they were ahead of him going downhill, and they might never have found him. When they called him, he couldn't reach his radio.
Zuber didn't know how long Steger had been buried, and frantically went to work finding his head so he could get air. This video contains NSFW language. Steger tells his side of the story and says he assumed he was going to die. He doesn't mention injuries, so we can assume he's okay now. -via Metafilter
The Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice opened nationwide on March 30, 1988. It seems like just yesterday. It flipped the script on the standard haunted house story by making the ghosts (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) good people who become entangled with a humorous but malevolent ghost-for-hire, Beetlejuice, played by Michael Keaton. The producers didn't much like the title Beetlejuice, and they suggested House Ghost to make the plot more clear. Burton offered a counter suggestion: Scared Sheetless. He was astonished that they took him seriously and even considered it. But it remained Beetlejuice, and upon release, quickly made back five times its budget. Meanwhile, young Winona Ryder hoped the film would raise her status at high school, but it only made the bullying worse. You'll find all kinds of trivia tidbits like that in a list at Cracked celebrating the movie's anniversary.
Back in 1667, medicine and philosophy were dangerously entwined. What physicians of the time didn't know about the human body was important- some organizations did not yet accept the theory of blood circulation. But French physician Jean Denis did, and after increasingly successful experimental blood transfusions between animals, he began giving the blood of lambs and goats to human patients. He figured that the blood of animals was cleaner and purer because they didn't drink alcohol and were free from sin.
Denis' first patient improved greatly, which may have been because he had already undergone many sessions of bloodletting and desperately needed the volume. His second transfusion patient was already healthy, but displayed renewed vigor. The third patient died. These transfusions sent the medical establishment into a frenzy. Things came to a head when he was sued over the death of his fifth patient in Paris, which ultimately turned out to be a murder. But that was the end of animal-to-human blood transfusions.
Denis was opposed to human-to-human blood transfusions because he assumed that the donor would not survive, which tells us something about how donor animals fared during his "successful" experiments. Read about Jean Denis' xenotransfusions and how they were received at The Public Domain review. -via Nag on the Lake
Mark Hamill has been working with United24, the official fundraising arm of the Ukrainian government, for months now. He's helped to fund their drone program in the defense against Russia, and serves as their ambassador to spread the word of how the rest of the world can help Ukraine. Another collaboration is between United24 and the mobile alert app Air Alert, to send warnings of attacks to citizens' smart phones. The app can be set to local areas and to any of several languages. Hamill is the English voice of the app in his Luke Skywalker persona. His voice will alert local users to missile attacks, shelling, street fighting, radiation, or chemical threat. Hamill's "all clear" announcements are infused with Jedi quotes. However, at no point does he say "I have a bad feeling about this." -via Laughing Squid
Once upon a time, recurring characters on Saturday Night Live would prove to be so popular that they would star in a feature film. It's astonishing that characters could go from two-minute television skits that were often pretty repetitive to a two hour movie, but sometimes it worked. That's how we got The Blues Brothers in 1980 and Wayne's World in 1992. The trend also gave us some pretty horrible movies, too, like It’s Pat in 1994, which was pulled from theaters after only a week.
Then there was Hans and Franz. Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon portrayed two bodybuilders with Austrian accents who host a TV show called Pumping Up with Hans & Franz. It was an obvious parody of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Schwarzenegger got a real kick out of it. He even appeared on the show with Hans and Franz a couple of times. And the three actors set about to make a feature film of the skit. It was a musical, believe it or not. But it was never to be. Read what happened to the proposed Hans and Franz movie at Cracked.
The monk and acclaimed cynic Benito Jerónimo Feijoo told the story of creature who was part man, part fish discovered the Spain's Bay of Cadiz. In 1679, as the story goes, fishermen saw a mysterious creature and managed to lure it out of the water with bread. The "fishman" was shaped like a man, but had gills and some scales. He had red hair and white skin and didn't speak a word. They took him to the local priest who interrogated him, but it was several days before he spoke just one word: “Liérganes.” When word got to the town of Liérganes, María del Casar told them it might be her son Francisco de la Vega Casar, a redhead who vanished five years earlier when he was swimming in the estuary at Bilbao. The fishman was taken to María for a glorious reunion, and lived with her for the next nine years. But he was never the same as when María last saw him in 1674.
If any of this tale is true, what could explain it? There are a couple of medical conditions that could fit the fishman's appearance, explained in the story at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Rafael Tello)
David Friedman of Ironic Sans ran down a mystery peeking out of pictures of Joe Biden in the Oval Office, the president's office in the White House's West Wing. What's the deal with a picture frame that has no picture in it? It's a clever bit of unexpected camouflage. Friedman finds the answer, but then goes down the rabbit hole about presidents and the modern technology they enjoyed in the Oval Office. We won't find out anything really secret, but we learn some really neat tidbits about presidential history in this video. While researching this video, Friedman took a tour of the White House, and it's not the way it used to be. If you'd like to see it yourself, there's a visitor's guide to the West Wing online.
The island of Bali in Indonesia boasts enticing tropical beaches, volcanic mountains, and beautiful terraced rice fields. These terraces provided enough rice for the island for thousands of years, thanks to an invisible system of subaks, which are a sort of farmer's co-op melded with the worship of the water goddess Dewi Danu. It was an ingenius system that few outside of the farmers themselves knew about. But in the 1970s, the rest of the world discovered Bali, and both the population and the tourism industry exploded.
To boost rice production, the government instituted a program called Bimbingan Massal, or “Massive Guidance,” funded by the Asian Development Bank. Rice farmers were provided with the latest agricultural technology: irrigation aids, high-yield varieties of rice seed, and plenty of fertilizers and pesticides. They were encouraged to produce three crops of rice per year instead of the traditional two. You can probably guess what happened. Production rose by a very small percentage, but farmers confronted problems they never had before: plagues of insects, poor yields, and a lack of adequate water. Meanwhile, Bali's beaches suffered from fertilizer runoff.
Strangely, the situation was unmasked and alleviated by another bit of modern technology in the form of computer modeling. Read the story of how Bali's ancient and modern rice production systems worked against each other and why at Damn Interesting. You can also listen to the story as a podcast.
Antarctica is a continent that has no countries. Many countries have settlements there, but the residents of the science stations are rarely permanent. Still, many countries have planted a flag on Antarctica without taking ownership, and they all fly flags to show where they are from. So the people of Antarctica love flags, and have pretty much always wanted to have a flag for Antarctica itself. You can't really blame them. Believe it or not, the first flag specifically designed for Antarctica came about because of a geography video game. If you are going to designate names to all the places on earth with a flag, you've got to have one for the continent with no countries. CGP Grey tells us how Antarctica got a flag in 1929 (which was appropriate, but totally boring), 1997, and in 2018. The 2018 flag, called the "True South" flag, is expected to be permanent. You can even purchase one! -via Laughing Squid
Famous Historical Photos Recreated By The Simpsons 📸
— Criminalsimpsons (@Criminalsimpson) March 22, 2023
-a thread pic.twitter.com/FplImgQuIm
The TV series The Simpsons is now in its 34th season, with 745 episodes and counting. In that time, it has become a vast archive of cultural references. The one we hear about most often is how the show predicts the future, although that is just the writers staying on top of trends -and how our world is becoming more cartoonish. Another you may or may not have noticed is how the characters sometimes strike a pose in homage of a particularly historical photograph. Sometimes it's just a screenshot of a split second, and you have to be very familiar with the photograph to catch it. But if you are, they are unmistakeable. Simpsons creator Matt Groening obviously doesn't expect everyone to get it, but enough audience members do to make it worth the trouble.
— Criminalsimpsons (@Criminalsimpson) March 22, 2023
A Simpsons fan on Twitter who goes by Criminalsimpsons compiled a collection of these instances in which The Simpsons recreated some iconic photographs. They are a treat for those who recognized them.
— Criminalsimpsons (@Criminalsimpson) March 22, 2023
See plenty more of these in the thread at Twitter, or at Thread Reader if you prefer. Criminalsimpsons has also done threads on movie references in The Simpsons, and also art references. -via Everlasting Blort
The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1868. It begins with "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." There's a lot more to it, but the idea was to settle the question of citizenship for formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. Political leaders argued over whether it covered Native Americans as well, but it soon became clear that the federal government really did not want this law to cover Asians.
Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants in 1870. His parents returned to China a few years later, but Wong traveled back to San Francisco with an uncle and grew up to live and work there. He traveled to China occasionally, where he married and conceived children. Wong was 24 when he was denied entry into the US because he wasn't a citizen. Although he was born in California, his parents weren't US citizens, nor could they become citizens because of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Wong lived on ships offshore for months while he fought this decision, and federal authorities came to see him as an important test case for birthright citizenship for people of Chinese ancestry. They wanted to deny his citizenship as a precedent for all Chinese-Americans born in the US, and therefore any of their children, whether born in the US or abroad. The case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898 had far-reaching implications for Asian immigrants and their descendants in the US. Read about the case that went to the Supreme Court and its aftermath at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: National Archives)
Any time we see American cities from above, we are astonished at how much real estate is set aside for cars, both in streets and in parking lots. Sure, we have multi-story parking garages in places, but even they take up a lot of room because there has to be drivable roads to each floor and each space. Tokyo tackled that problem with mechanized and computerized garages that store many cars in much less space. Some of them are even underground, which means they take almost no real estate at all! Those kinds of garages cost an awful lot to install, and pay off in nebulous benefits over a long period of time, which means they are probably out of the question for the US. But when you add charging capabilities for electric vehicles, robotic garages sound like a complete winner.
In other news, Tom Scott is in Japan, so we are liable to see some really cool stuff in the next few weeks.
Smart phones are so smart that a two-year-old can learn to use one in no time at all. And they do. If you've had children in your home in the last 15 or so years, you probably have some pictures of yourself that you would never share, but you keep them because your child took them. One of the women in Kira Cook's online mother's group shared one to lighten the mood during the pandemic, and then others followed. It's heartening to know others have the same experience. The photos are not flattering, but they give us a glimpse into what real life looks like and how children see it. They don't care that mommy doesn't want to have her double chin or droopy morning eyes recorded; they love mommy and think a picture should be taken.
Sharing such pictures brings out the humanity we all share. Life is messy, and kids don't care. Read about how liberating it feels for mothers to know that they are far from alone in their less-than-photogenic moments at Romper. -via Kottke