John Albert Thompson emigrated from Norway and eventually made his way out to the western US during the Gold Rush, where he was a subcontractor for the postal service for 20 years. Thompson was called "The Viking of the Sierras," but everyone knew him as Snowshoe Thompson, because he delivered mail between Placerville and Genoa, Nevada, on skis, which he called snowshoes. His trips took three days to get to Placerville and three days to get back, a punishing trip over the Sierra Mountains in which he followed snow-covered wagon tracks. Thompson made this trip two to four times a month carrying up to 100 pounds of letters and packages -and silver from the mines.

Today, hikers can get a feel for the endurance Thompson had by retracing his route through the mountains, although there are roads in many of the spots now, plus better clothing and equipment and emergency communications. Read about Snowshoe Thompson and his service to the people of Nevada (which he was never paid for) and about the folks who hiked his route recently, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Brent Cooper)

The latest video from Action Lab gave me new things to think about. Somehow I missed the fact that astronauts on the International Space Station are now drinking out of cups instead of squeeze bottles with straws. How does that work? That's what the video is about. Another question is, why? Well, I am very much aware that drinking coffee or hot tea through a straw does not work because hot liquids need to be introduced to your mouth gradually for safety. But it's mainly because you don't get aroma from liquids that have no contact with air, which dulls the taste. That made me think of all these little kids drinking Capri Suns. Maybe if they were getting the full flavor, it wouldn't need so much sugar and artificial flavors. Be that as it may, the new gravity free cups are pretty clever. It makes you think about how different it must be to live in an environment devoid of something as fundamental to our lives as gravity. The video is only 3:45, the rest is an ad.

You meet someone new, and if you are an American, one of your first questions is what do they do for a living. If it's something that sounds really cool, you might be jealous. But if all you know of that profession is what you see in movies or TV, you might be surprised by the truth. Few jobs are as glamorous as they sound, and you have to remember that if it were really that fun, people would do it for free. Some jobs are downright depressing, even if your own role is relatively simple.

And some are completely misunderstood by those outside the profession. Or at least those who have a limited vocabulary.  



So when you meet someone who has a cool-sounding job, go ahead and ask questions, but save your envy until you understand a bit better. Every job has its ups and downs. See a pictofacts list on the hidden truths of 40 careers at Cracked.

What do you do when your cat wails as if the world is going to end? Get the camera, capture a video, and go viral! Maybe you'll end up in a remix and indeed become a star. Meanwhile, ahem, your cat is lonely.

An orange cat named Cala will let you know when she needs attention. She's quite vocal, bordering on English sentence structure. Therefore, her calls are catnip to David Scott, also known as The Kiffness (previously at Neatorama). He was inspired to write a little song around Cala's lyrics, such as they are, based on Pachelbel's Canon in D (as are most songs). The completed lyrics are available at the YouTube page. They make plenty of sense, opening doors is what cats want to do more than anything. It's not that they want out, and it's not that they want in. They just want the door open so they can have options when the mood strikes.

The 30-year hunt to find the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert bus: ‘My jaw was on the ground’ https://t.co/RNqgnPdmKm

— The Guardian (@guardian) April 11, 2024

The 1994 Australian movie The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, was about three drag queens on a road trip across the Outback, but none of them was named Priscilla. The title character was their bus. After the filming, the three lead actors went on to other roles, and the bus was returned to its owner, and was used as a band's tour bus for a few years. But eventually, Priscilla the bus disappeared. Fans looked into tracking it and found nothing but copies. The History Trust of South Australia wanted to find the original bus for the National Motor Museum, but kept coming up empty.

Then in 2019 a man in the tiny town of Ewingar, New South Wales, proclaimed he had the bus, and was afraid that it would deteriorate further unless someone took care of it. Authenticating that he had the real Priscilla was a tough job, but it turned out to be the real thing. The bus had been through a lot: divorce, death, abandonment, an owner who didn't know what he had, bushfires, and floods. Read the gripping story of the lost and found bus named Priscilla at the Guardian. -via Metafilter

Curb Your Enthusiasm wrapped up twelve seasons with the series finale last Sunday night. The episode, entitled "No Lessons Learned" was a callback to the 1998 Seinfeld finale, which David wrote. The Seinfeld finale had a huge audience, but left viewers confused and unimpressed. In Sunday's finale, were the "lessons not learned" about David's character in the show, or about Larry David's decision to write the Seinfeld finale the way he did? We cannot know that, because so much of the show itself is ambiguous and about ambiguity itself. The finale had David inadvertently breaking the law, going to trial, and being sent to jail, just like the characters of Seinfeld. But it was done differently. Was it different enough? The finale garnered 1.1 million viewers compared to Seinfeld's 76.3 million viewers for the finale in 1997, but Curb Your Enthusiasm aired on HBO in the age of streaming, so 1.1 million is now considered a successful episode.  

The reviews of the episode were great, and audiences considered it a step up from the Seinfeld finale it spoofs. But how accurate was it legally? Jill Harness gets a lawyer's opinion on the courtroom drama in the final episode that will show us how Larry David may have learned some lessons about TV writing, but maybe not so much about legal procedures.

A group of biologists from the Thackeray Wildlife Foundation in the field in Tamil Nadu, India, have discovered a new species of gecko with a unique look. The male of the species is dark blue with light blue spots on its body, swirls on its head, and a slim ring of yellow around its neck. Researcher Ishan Agarwal was impressed by the coloration that reminded him of the iconic painting The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. That was in 2022. A new paper has recently been published to describe two new species of gecko, and this one was named Cnemaspis vangoghi, in honor of the painter.

The group thinks they will have identified 50 new species by the time their research is complete, but Cnemaspis vangoghi stands out because everyone recognizes Starry Night when they see it. -via Bored Panda

(Image credit: Akshay Khandekar 

You will recognize quite a few of your favorite Hollywood films in this movie tribute from Yeti Pictures animation studio, even though they only take a few seconds each. These vignettes have a tilt-shift look, making the sets look even smaller for the toys used in recreating the movies as we watch twisted scenes from The Exorcist, King Kong, Jurassic Park, The Addams family, Kill Bill, and Terminator 2. You might think this is stop-motion animation using miniatures, but you'd be wrong. Miniwood is entirely digital! It does seem a bit strange to use computer generated graphics, which can do anything, to recreate the labor-intensive yet unrealistic style of stop motion, but you can't argue that too much because the result is downright adorable. Yeah, stop motion is not realistic, but we like it, even when it is digitally created. -via Nag on the Lake   

Justin Chambers spent nine years as a chef at Mawson Station, Australia's Antarctic research station, and ten years photographing the Aurora Australis. However, it's been eleven years since we've experienced the cyclical solar maximum, which is going on now. As the sun reaches its maximum activity, Chambers has witnessed -and photographed- the best auroras of his life. The photo above captured a rare pink color, which only happens during maximum solar activity. Chambers has also captured photographs of red, green, purple, orange, and blue in the aurora. Physicist Andrew Cole says the period of high solar activity should last most of the rest of this year, but the best time to observe aurora is near the spring and fall equinoxes. In Antarctica, that means sunrise and sunset. Read about how solar activity affects the light show in the Antarctic skies, and see more of Chambers' Aurora Australis photographs at ABC. -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Justin Chambers)

A nuclear storage pool is also called a spent fuel pool. They are used for cooling used fuel assemblies from nuclear reactors, and they are at least 40 feet deep. But with the nuclear stuff at the bottom, I wouldn't even think of swimming in one. You shouldn't, either, because you would probably be arrested. But how dangerous is it? In the latest episode of his What If? series (previously at Neatorama), Randall Munroe collaborated with Henry Reich of MinutePhysics to look into this hypothetical question. You may be surprised at what they learned about nuclear storage pools as they researched this question from a reader. It turns out that people have to go in the water on a pretty regular basis to do their jobs, but they know what they are doing. This video ends with consequences that go beyond being arrested, so maybe you shouldn't consider swimming in spent fuel pool at all. -via Laughing Squid

Remember when you first learned the word "defenestration"? It means throwing someone out of a window. You were probably amused that there was a word for such a specific act, yet you were also appalled because it happens enough to require a word. While the word depends on Latin roots, it is from the Czech language, called Bohemian at the time. In fact, defenestration has a long history in what is now the Czech Republic, or Czechia.

The most famous incident was in 1618, when Prague's Catholic authorities were frustrated with a growing group of Protestants, and wanted to put them in their place by rolling back their rights. But the Protestant group had grown quite large, and descended upon Hradčany Castle to carry out punishment for the two Catholic deputies who were persecuting them. They threw the two men out the window of a tower, 40 feet up, and threw out the secretary that accompanied them for good measure. One held onto the ledge and begged for mercy from the Virgin Mary, yet he ended up defenestrated anyway. But then, the three men got up and walked! The accounts of the event written by Catholics held that the virgin saved them, while other accounts noted that the men fell onto a trash and dung heap, which softened their fall.

There was a lot of art devoted to the 1618 defenestration, but it was neither the first nor the last in Czech history. The act became associated with religious and/or political rebellion, and such acts sometimes ignited full wars. Read about the history of defenestration in Czechia at the Public Domain Review.

(Image credit: Karel Svoboda)

Joaquin Phoenix returns as Arthur Fleck in the sequel to Joker titled Joker: Folie à Deux. The Joker is still seriously mentally ill, of course, but this time he's in love! Fleck is plenty menacing in the trailer, but his presence is overshadowed by Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn. The scenes of the courtship of these two damaged people move from reality to fantasy and back again, a perfect palette for the movie's 15 musical numbers, which The Daily Beast likens to "La La Land meets Batman." Yes, Joker: Folie à Deux is a musical. It's no comedy, so don't expect anything like the Margot Robbie movies. We don't yet know if the relationship between Fleck and Quinn is as co-dependent and abusive as it is in other stories, but the Joaquin Phoenix movies are not connected to any other DC movies, so my guess is that we will see many differences from the comic book version. They sure seem completely smitten with each other. Joker: Folie à Deux will be in theaters October 4, just in time to sell Halloween costumes from this movie. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Cow magnets are rather large and powerful magnets, and people use them for all sorts of things. But they are manufactured for cows to help prevent hardware disease. That may sound nonsensical, but it's a real condition formally known as bovine traumatic reticulopericarditis. See, cows are liable to hoover up nails and other metal parts when they eat grass, and sharp metal bits can perforate their digestive system and even pierce the heart.

At the age of one year, farmers will give a cow a magnet to ingest. The magnet settles in the rumen, where it attracts any stray metal the cow might ingest. It's an intentionally-introduced bezoar that stays with the cow for life, but keeps small metal objects from messing up the more delicate parts of a cow's anatomy. And now we know why UFOs are able to beam cows up into their spaceships- by the power of magnetism! Read about cow magnets at Stanford Magnets, and read about the fun kids can have playing with these magnets at Metafilter.

(Image credit: Wormcast)

Sir Henry Bessemer was a British inventor who got seasick when he crossed the English Channel in 1868. Inventors are primarily problem-solvers, so Bessemer went to work trying to design a ship to accommodate those who suffered seasickness. What he came up with was the design you see above, in which a section of the ship could move to keep those inside level as the ship itself bounced about in the water. Right away, you can see that the saloon section could only move so far when the ship rolls. You also have to wonder how it would deal with the ship's pitch upward or downward. Yaw probably doesn't have that much to do with seasickness. But the real problem was that it did not depend on gravity or gyroscopes to right itself. It had to be moved manually by an operator working the machinery!

But that's not what doomed the SS Bessemer. The ship was apparently hard to control, and only had one public voyage. Read about the short life of the SS Bessemer and its grand swinging saloon at Amusing Planet.

Where’s the last place you want to be during an earthquake? For Justin Allen, it was the urology clinic. https://t.co/0wywGLXPX2

— WIRED (@WIRED) April 6, 2024

Last Friday, a mild but rare earthquake hit the New York area. Just a slight tremor, but enough that everyone called around to make sure it wasn't their imagination. Justin Allen, on the other hand, was in the most delicate situation at the time- in the middle of his vasectomy. The doctor explained the procedure thoroughly, and that it would take around twenty minutes. But ten minutes in, the room started shaking. Allen thought it might be a nearby train, but then the doctor stopped and put his instruments down. The urologist mentioned an earthquake, and Allen thought he was joking, trying to lighten the mood. But it was a singular timing coincidence for Allen.

In an interview with Wired, Allen said that the doctor asked how long does an earthquake normally last. He waited several minutes before resuming the surgery. We are glad that that unnerving moment turned out all right in the end. -via Damn Interesting