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

If playing Wordle once a day isn't enough for you, you need to try Clickword. It's sort of like a Scrabble game that you can play by yourself. You'll start with a grid that has a few letters on it (orange), and three letters you can place anywhere (blue) -and you have to place them all before you get new letters. When three or more letters form a word vertically or horizontally, they disappear! The game is over when you've placed 60 letters. Like Scrabble, points are based on the letter value. You might be going for a long word, but as soon as three letters that make a word from their dictionary show up, it's gone. On the other hand, there is value in clearing spaces for new words.  

I don't know why the actual game that compares you to other players is limited to once a day; but you can play practice games, which will give you a score. Careful, if you like word games, this could become addictive. -via Metafilter

Nature and fluid dynamics have their own way of doing things, and that's why rivers and streams left to their own devices will change over time. But those changes interfere with human settlements and commerce, so various aspects of the Mississippi River have been engineered one way or another ever since the US was established. This video from Half as Interesting tells us about the time riverboat captain Henry Miller Shreve arranged for a channel to be cut through a particularly difficult bend in the river to make navigation easier. But that cut changed the river's eventual direction so much that authorities added the Old River Control Structure to keep Old Man River from dumping all its water into the Atchafalaya River. The video is only 4:18; the rest is an ad.

However, several Louisiana commenters tell us that the tendency of the Mississippi to spill into the  Atchafalaya was actually due to the clearing of the Great Raft, a 150-mile logjam in the Atchafalaya and Red River that had been there for a few thousand years and was responsible for the bayous. Who cleared that logjam? Why, it was Henry Miller Shreve, who just couldn't keep his hands off the waterways. Yes, Shreveport was named after him, since removing the raft made the Red River navigable. The Great Raft story would make a fascinating video. -via Digg

Every real life love story has a beginning of how we met, and an ending, meaning where we are now, but the important part is when you realize that this is the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. Gifts and memorable dates are nice, but when you hear about that moment, it's usually when your significant other shows their kindness. Sometimes it's putting in effort to make your life easier. Or maybe going out of their way to support you or a family member through an illness. Or even helping strangers in their time of need. These things aren't usually romantic, but it gives you a glimpse into their character.

The question was posed on the subreddit Ask Women: What's the moment with your partner that confirmed that you're gonna spend your life with them? The stories that came out will brighten your day, and maybe raise your standards for finding a partner. You can read an extensive list of the best of them at Bored Panda.  

(Image credit: yue)

The case of Joseph Samuel stands out among Australian executions of the 19th century. Samuel was an Englishman, or rather an English boy, sent to a penal settlement at Sydney Cove for a crime committed in 1795 when he was 14 years old. But he was a man in Australia, and continued to commit crimes at the colony, where security was pretty lax due to authorities with the mindset of "Where can they go?"

After being convicted of the brutal murder of a policeman, Samuel was led to the gallows. Yet despite rope inspections, the hanging failed over and over again. Was it divine intervention after Samuel's last minute prayers? Was it a trick arranged ahead of time? Samuel had already tried a last minute stunt to deflect blame for the crime. What should be the legal remedy in such a case? Read about the crimes of Joseph Samuels, the mysteriously botched execution, and what ultimately became of him at Amusing Planet.  

(Image credit: Joseph Lycett)