It's true that Generation Z, or Zoomers, don't drink as much as their parents did at that age, but those who do have refined the art of binge drinking to a viral recipe called BORG. It stand for "black out rage gallon." The recipe is simple: fill a gallon jug halfway with water, add as much vodka as you think is proper for you, and then use a flavor additive, such as MiO, Pedialyte, or your favorite energy drink. You will probably see this recipe as not so different from other cheap cocktail mixtures that college students have been using forever, like vodka mixed with Kool-Ade, Gatorade, or Tang.  

The idea is that a gallon of BORG should last you all day. The reality is that college students often mix up a gallon and take it to a party. The danger in this trend is the same as with any type of binge drinking: 1. dying of alcohol poisoning, 2. causing a car wreck, and 3. kickstarting a life of alcoholism, among other possibilities.  

However, some folks are looking at BORG as a "wellness trend" or a "harm-reduction strategy." What? For one thing, the water is supposed to keep you hydrated, but we know that's not how binge drinking works. The other idea is that each person keeps to their own gallon, to reduce the danger of a spiked or roofied drink and the danger of sharing germs. It's sad that those things are even considerations. And you wouldn't be surprised if BORG sharing begins after a few drinks at a party.

The real upside of BORG (for us) is that gallons often get labeled with a pun name to tie it to its owner.

Jason Borg
Heisenborg
Borgzilla
Borger Patrol
All Aborg
Pablo Escoborg
Borger King
Borganizational Skills
Borgasm

-via Metafilter

Experience: I gave birth to the world’s ‘8 billionth baby’ https://t.co/conNZAQsDq

— The Guardian (@guardian) February 24, 2023

On November 15th last year, the world population crossed to over eight billion people. Most people who read about it wondered in the back of their minds just who that eight billionth person would be. Now we know. Her name is Vinice, and she lives in the Philippines.

Several new babies in different parts of the world were designated to be the symbolic eight billionth person, but Vinice has become the best known. Her mother, Maria Margarette Villorente, was in labor and on the way to the hospital in Manila as midnight approached on November 14th. The hospital staff turned them away, because the facility was already full! So Maria and Vincent went to another hospital in the San Andres area of the city. Representatives of the Philippines Commission on Population and Development (Popcom) were already at that hospital to welcome the birth of the eight billionth person. Vinice was born shortly after midnight on the 15th, and was immediately lavished with a huge cake, baby supplies, and toys. Maria was obliged to give an immediate interview. It was a total surprise for the couple. Read the story of how Vinice came into the world of eight billion people with much fanfare at the Guardian.  -via Damn Interesting    

LEGO makes a very special kind of brick that can shoot objects out forcefully. These spring-loaded shooters work on the same simple principle as a ballpoint pen that clicks open and shut. Simple, but still fun. And like any cool toy, someone will go way overboard with them for our entertainment. Brickstory Builds collected 400 of these shooter bricks, and just as many projectiles to shoot out of them. How many different ways can he fire them en masse? Who is he going to shoot them at? Anyone who has 400 shooters will have plenty of LEGO figures to select from. He starts with a tower, then a train attacking Star Wars droids, and moves to ever more elaborate artillery constructions until he goes up against a truly menacing monster.

I used to lament how LEGO went from basic brick sets that required imagination to make anything to complex sets that make one thing and you have to follow pages of instructions. But there will always be people who think outside the box, literally, to brings us nonsense like this.  -via Born in Space

The "w" in the English language is an outlier. It is the only letter with a name that's more than a syllable long (it has three), and the only one in which the name is a visual description instead of its sound. Yeah, it would make sense to call it wuh, but it's a bit too late for that. Furthermore, its description doesn't make sense in type. It looks like a double "v." The conundrum is the basis for a children's poem from 1885.

    “Excuse me if I trouble you,”
    Said V to jolly W,
    “But will you have the kindness to explain one thing to me?
    Why, looking as you do,
    Folks should call you double U,
    When they really ought to call you double V?”

    Said W to curious V:
    “The reason’s plain as plain can be
    (Although I must admit it’s understood by very few);
    As you say I’m double V;
    And therefore, don’t you see,
    The people say that I am double you.”

But if you want the real answer, you have to go back to the time when the Latin alphabet collided with the English language in the 7th century, and had to make accommodations for sounds that did not occur in Latin. For the "w" sound in Old English, they used two letters. And those were "u"s. For example, the word "wonder" was spelled "uundra" in Old English. The process of this sound becoming a "w" in English is a bit more complicated. For instance, there was another letter, "ƿ" (or wynn) that tried to take its place, but was ultimately discarded. You can read up on the evolution of the letter "w" at Grammarphobia. -via Strange Company 

The annual Mister Global beauty pageant for men was held a couple of weeks ago in Chaing Mai, Thailand. The winner for 2023 is Juan Carlos Ariosa, from Cuba (shown above). Contestants from 39 countries competed in tuxedos, national costumes, and itty-bitty swimsuits. The most interesting part of the pageant is the national costume competition, because let's face it, all these guys are hot and it would be difficult to judge their looks against each other. Below is the representative from Haiti.



However, the costumes ranged from sublime to baffling. The readers at Bored Panda have judged and ranked all 39 contestants in their costumes, which you can see here. The contestant from the Philippines drove his costume in. 

If you want to see the entire pageant, it's up at YouTube, or you can see just the costume parade, or the swimsuit competition if you prefer. We won't judge you.

(Images from Mister Global at Instagram)

In 1937, February 20 to be exact, composer and bandleader Raymond Scott recorded a jazzy tune called "Powerhouse." You might not recognize the name, but you know the song. Raymond Scott never wrote music for cartoons, and never even watched them, but he sold the publishing rights to his catalog to Warner Bros. Music in 1943. Carl Stalling used "Powerhouse" in 40 classic Warner Bros. cartoons. The first part of the song lent itself to frantic chase scenes, and the second half became known as "assembly line" music due to its industrial, rhythmic beat. Stalling used it any time a factory assembly line was part of a cartoon.

pic.twitter.com/YCvWCV9V2N

— Cartoon Study (@CartoonStudy) February 20, 2023

Even after Stalling, the tune that had become so familiar has been used in cartoons over and over, in The Ren & Stimpy Show, Animaniacs, The Simpsons, and even in the Cartoon Network's promotional bumpers. For the song's 86th birthday, Cartoon Brew has assembled a collection of cartoons that use "Powerhouse," plus the story of the song, and even a video of the Raymond Scott Quintet performing it in 1955. -via Kottke

Experts tell us to use up your spices within a year or so because they lose their flavor over time. Then we get this story in which saffron still smells like saffron after being underwater for 527 years!

The remains of a burned and partially buried shipwreck were first discovered in the 1960s off the coast of Sweden. In the 2000s, experts suspected it might be medieval. An archaeological survey began only in 2019, when the ship was determined to be the Gribshunden, a ship belonging to King Hans of Denmark and Norway. The ship caught fire in 1495 as it was moored off of southern Sweden, and there it has been ever since.

One of the remarkable finds inside the Gribshunden is the remains of 40 kinds of foods and particularly spices that are still recognizable after all this time. They came from near and far and were the expensive kinds of spices a king would own. Experts believe they were carried on the ship to impress Swedish authorities as Hans was on a mission to unite Sweden with Denmark and Norway under his rule. In that, he was successful, even without his flagship, although he used strong arm tactics rather than consent.   

The spices found include ginger, clove, peppercorns, dill, mustard, and caraway. The saffron mentioned above comprised 13 ounces of the spice, which costs around $50 per ounce even today, and was more expensive in medieval times. Read about the 500-year-old spice rack found aboard the Gribshunden at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Mikael Larsson and Brendan Foley/PLOS One)

The Pope's Exorcist is a horror film based on the career of Father Gabriele Amorth, the official exorcist at the Vatican from 1986 until his death in 2016. Amorth claimed to have performed more than 50,000 exorcisms, even after rejecting 98% of the cases referred to him. The movie was adapted from Amorth's two memoirs, An Exorcist Tells His Story and An Exorcist: More Stories. It stars Russell Crowe as Amorth and Franco Nero as the pope, presumably Pope John Paul II, although he wears a beard in the movie. While it is unclear how closely the supernatural horror film follows the books, we can guess that a lot of mustard was thrown on the visuals and action scenes.  -via Digg

Marketing departments love to use the power of the internet to crowdsource decisions, but they tend to not learn from history. Or even research the history of such polls. The classic example is when a British research ship was to be named by online poll. The overwhelming favorite name was Boaty McBoatface, but they didn't give that name to the ship. However, Boaty McBoatface became an enduring meme and a metaphor for internet polls that weren't thought all the way through. Boaty McBoatface is a great name, after all. Other naming polls and crowdsourcing projects have been worse.

But every once in a while, even a joke result works out just fine.

Read 12 other instances of internet polls gone wrong in a pictofacts list at Cracked.

Ryan George (previously at Neatorama) illustrates a few things that TikTok culture has done to the internet video experience. The platform was set up to make remixing videos easy for people who've never done that before, and they've taken off with it, doing weird stuff that you'd never have predicted. The platform assumes that everyone holds their phone vertically to take videos, which they do and I still don't know why. The robotic voiceovers, the text right over what you want to see, and the out of context music can also be annoying. Also, if you watch videos at the TikTok site, you have to be really careful where your cursor is or a new video will start without notice. Also, they won't embed properly on some other platforms -like this one.

But the kids like it, and TikTok has a couple of things going for it, like that fact that the videos are shorter and way less festooned with ads compared to YouTube. Despite its length, the video is only 3:45; the rest is an ad. -via reddit

Laura Spaulding was a cop processing a murder scene when a family member of the victim asked, “Who is going to clean this up?” The police don't do that. Spaulding found no company that specialized in this kind of work, so she founded Spaulding Decon. It's not an altogether pleasant job, but it fills a need, and Spaulding gets satisfaction from helping traumatized and grieving families avoid the horror of cleanup and return to a normal home. Her staff is trained in biological decontamination, interior restoration, and even grief counseling.

Their work involves more than murder. They also respond to suicides, accidents, and even natural deaths that require cleanup. And sometimes they even uncover evidence that the police may have overlooked before they released a crime scene. Buzzfeed News interviewed Spaulding and a few other cleanup professionals about the nature of their work and some of the more bizarre cases they have encountered.

Users of the early version of GPS were haunted by the word "recalculating," which instantly told us we screwed up and didn't follow the directions properly. That voice belongs to Karen Jacobsen, an Australian singer and voiceover artist who became the voice of the Global Positioning System navigational application in 2002. The minute Jacobsen says that word in this video, the memories come flooding back. It's just a word, delivered oh-so neutrally, but over time it seemed to take on a judgmental tone, even though it wasn't my fault I didn't have time to get into the proper lane! Jacobsen had to say the word "approximately" 168 times, but drivers have heard "recalculating" exponentially more. Still, after all this time, it's nice to be able to put a face with that voice, thanks to Great Big Story. They said,

Thank you Karen, we'd be lost without you!

The Great Big Story folks have been silent for three years, and we are glad to see they are back! -via Laughing Squid 

While most of America only recognizes Shrove Tuesday, or Mardi Gras, celebrations of Carnival have been going on since Epiphany (January 6) in many parts of the world. That includes the traditional king cake, once called three kings cake for the Magi that visited baby Jesus on Epiphany. The cake itself was repurposed from a Roman Saturnalia tradition. The most common (and easiest) way to make a king cake in America is to make cinnamon rolls, but instead of cutting the roll, you twist it into a ring and bake it, then cover with purple, green, and gold sugar or icing. You might also put a small plastic baby inside the dough. But other countries have different traditional recipes.

France has cakes called galette and gâteau des rois, Portugal enjoys bolo-rei, Mexico has rosca de reyes, and Germany indulges in dreikönigskuchen, among other versions of king cake. They use different recipes, but they all have some things in common- they are either circular or decorated to represent a crown, and most of them have a surprise hidden inside. Read about the traditional king cakes of the world at Atlas Obscura.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, is known today as Ada Lovelace. She wrote the world's first computer program in 1842, for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a theoretical computer that was never built, but would have worked with Lovelace's programming.

Lovelace was gifted, both genetically and financially, as the daughter of Lord Byron. But her education differed from that of a privileged son born at the time. She was tutored at home in math, science, and logic, which was unusual for girls, but also in art, needlework, music, and languages, as would be expected. This combination of studies in widespread fields contributed to Lovelace's analytical thinking. For example, she saw that the punch cards used in weaving patterns for fabric would be a logical framework for mathematical commands, and that numbers could be converted into musical notes. Read how Lovelace distilled what she learned in disparate fields and how they contributed to her development of computer programming at Gizmodo. While reading, writing, and math are fundamental basics, there's always value in adding the humanities and other subjects.

(Image credit: Antoine Claudet)

We love watching Japanese zoos conduct their emergency drills with dangerous animals portrayed by an zookeeper in an animal costume. The latest is from Hitachi City Kamine Zoo, where the practice scenario is a bear that escapes when an earthquake breaks the glass in the display enclosure. It made no difference that this bear was an adorable teddy bear in a fairly good mascot costume, unlike some of the more ridiculous getups from previous drills. This drill involved not only zoo employees, but the local police, fire department, and the city's "pest damage prevention team." (Now if only US towns had such an agency...) The bear was first blocked in place by vehicles and nets, and then was shot with a tranquilizer dart, which we assume was as fake as the bear.

The drill ended in success, and we can imagine that it was followed by bear hugs all around.  -via Boing Boing