The first World's Fair I recall reading about was Expo '67 in Montreal. It seemed so exciting, and I wanted to go, but I was just a kid. Then when the 1982 World's Fair launched in Knoxville, I lived relatively close by, but never bothered to go. Almost 55 million people visited Montreal, but only 11 million went to Knoxville for the fair. So what happened?

The first World's Fair took place in London in 1851. It showcased the reach of the British Empire and astounded people with demonstrations of modern technology and scientific breakthroughs. As other fairs followed, countries around the world came to show off, and there was plenty for visitors to see, including entertainment. A visit to a World's Fair was like a trip around the world. But attendance has declined since Montreal, and cities balk at the expense of reserving the land and building the required architecture. The last World's Fair in America was in New Orleans in 1984- does anyone remember that one? They are still held in other parts of the world. Read about the rise and fall of the World's Fair at Smithsonian.    

(Image credit: Anthony Conti)

Financial crimes can be irresistible to the greedy and the desperate, and there have always been an awful lot of greedy or desperate people. Victor Lustig got away with so many schemes because he conned people who were willing to break the law themselves, so it would be a problem to report him or testify against him. You might already know Lustig's story, but you'll still want to watch this video because it's quite funny in the way it tells the tale of his outrageously successful exploits that went on for a quarter-century before he actually served any time. Seriously, Lustig's life was like a screwball comedy in which so many things are going on that it's hard to keep up. You have to wonder if he might be in the running for the greatest number of crimes committed by any one man. Don't miss his list of ten rules for conmen.  -via Digg

Want to play a game of sorts? Redditor bort-bort-bort shared a picture that his 10-year-old daughter drew. Can you figure out what it is? Leave your guess in the comments, and I'll eventually let you know if you are right. Of course, you can go to the comments at reddit, but that would be cheating and less fun all around. The wrong answers in the forum there are almost as good as what was intended, but remember this is a 10-year-old girl we're talking about. I would have loved to have seen how she presented this to her father, and the laughs that came with it. 

Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos. That gives the planet twice as many solar eclipses as Earth (yeah, it's really more complicated than that). And now we have witnesses. NASA's Perseverance rover recorded the transit of Phobos across the sun on April 2. Mars rovers have been recording eclipses since 2004, but this is the highest-quality video sent back to earth yet. NASA scientists, who received still shots from Perseverance earlier, were tickled with the resolution and color of the video.

Phobos is much smaller than our moon, and its orbit is much more eccentric. It's also shaped like a potato. This video is not a time-lapse; the transit only took 40 seconds, much less time than any solar eclipse on earth. Phobos' orbit is slowly disintegrating, which means it will spiral down to Mars' surface, in a few tens of millions of years. So it's a good thing we have video. -via Boing Boing

When your child asks where the Easter Bunny comes from, you can now give them an exact answer: Cincinnati.

The White House has been hosting the annual Easter Egg Roll since 1878, held on the Monday after Easter. The event returned this year for the first time since 2019. If you've been paying attention, you might have noticed that the same three recognizable bunnies show every year for quite some time now, and you might have assumed that those costumes belong to the White House. But you'd be wrong. These costumes have enjoyed a continuity of care that would most likely be impossible from Washington. They were designed and built by Cincinnati costume shop owner John Schenz, who had a nationwide reputation for quality costumes. He was first contacted for a White House Ester Bunny costume in 1981.

Shenz's first White House Easter Bunny costume was a hit, but a year later he saw that the National Parks Service did not care for the costume to his standards. So when the government called him again, he not only made new costumes, he took charge of their care from year to year. Buzzfeed uncovered the story of John Schenz and his costumes, which have become an American tradition. Read how that all came about. -via Metafilter

The question at AskReddit was aimed toward restaurant servers: What’s the weirdest reason you’ve had someone send food back? Oh, you better believe the stories came out. They could be many years old, but some customers you never forget.

Lady sent her burger back, because it had sesame seeds on the bun, which she insisted are ‘made from pork’ and she didn’t eat pork…

We all started doubting our own sanity after a few minutes of back and forth, but rest assured folks, there is indeed no pork in sesame seeds. -Bleepbloopblurph

Not all of them were servers. A few were customers with confessions.

I did this once out of ignorance. I sent a plate back because I told the waiter that they hadn't rinsed their dishes properly. The food tasted like soap. The waiter looked puzzled and brought me back another plate, which still tasted like dishsoap.

And that was the day I first tasted cilantro. -LeoMarius

And here's one we should all be on the lookout for.

Someone sent a meal back because it “didn’t taste like anything” and it turned out they had Covid. -MagicPants

You can see a rundown of the 30 funniest stories about food that was sent back to the kitchen at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: www.audio-luci-store.it)

Parenting can be so stressful that sometimes you feel it's all you can do just to keep the kids fed and out of the emergency room. Occasionally, you get to slow down long enough to think about what kind of adults you want them to be: happy, independent, successful, caring, or maybe some other goals. But you can't just encourage a kid to be successful, or even nag them into it- you have to teach specific skills that will combine to give your children the best shot at making their own successful life, however they define that. And it's a long, slow process that takes modeling, repetition, practice, and seizing the teachable moment.   

Educational psychologist Michele Borba lays out seven factors that have been identified as skills that children can learn that will lead to a well-adjusted adult life. They are self-confidence, empathy, self-control, integrity, curiosity, perseverance, and optimism. She has some tips on how to teach and nurture each these qualities in your children as they grow up that you can read at CNBC. -via Digg

(Image Credit: Dominic Chavez/World Bank)

The average adult in Japan consumes about twice the sodium recommended by the World Health Organization. But since salt is such a part of traditional Japanese cuisine, reducing the salt in recipes makes food just taste wrong. The food company Kirin teamed up with scientists from Meiji University in Tokyo to tackle the problem. Their latest idea is a set of electric chopsticks. One of the chopsticks, powered by a device worn on the wrist, delivers a weak electrical charge that boosts the flavor of salt in reduced-sodium foods.

The chopsticks use “very weak electricity – not enough to affect the human body – to adjust the function of ions such as sodium chloride and sodium glutamate to change the perception of taste by making food seem to taste stronger or weaker”, Kirin said in a statement.

Taste tests show that people on reduced sodium diets experienced enhanced flavor when using the chopsticks. Read more about electric chopsticks at the Guardian. -via Boing Boing

(Image source: The Guardian via YouTube)

We've brought you some lovely videos of Theo Jansen's amazing Strandbeest kinetic sculptures over the years, but now they've taken the next step. Jansen spends his winters designing and testing new ways to make huge artworks glide across the earth, and then takes them out for a walk in the summer. Last summer, Jansen took his latest set of creations called Strandbeest Evolution 2021 out to the beach to see what they would do. Impelled by the wind, many versions of the walking sculptures gracefully trod the sand, and one even took to the sky on gossamer wings! That moment reminds us of the day the Wright Brothers first flew, although the Strandbeest was unpiloted and had to be tied down to prevent escape. -via Nag on the Lake

We've read before that Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada, and we haven't forgiven Canada for it yet. That's far from the only confusing name that some of our favorite recipes and foods have. Often it's because the inventor wanted to evoke a faraway location to enhance the eating experience, like Philly cream cheese. Or conversely, a food brought back from a faraway place was renamed to steal the credit, like Swedish meatballs. There are also examples of food that traveled and got a new name when the original language was mispronounced, like the Portuguese carne de vinha d’alhos, which came to be called vindaloo in India. Oh, you didn't know vindaloo was Portuguese? Then you should read up on 15 Foods That Aren't From Where We Thought at Cracked.

(Image credit: Adriao)

It is perfect though pic.twitter.com/0EU26odof7

— Zillow Gone Wild 🏡 (@zillowgonewild) April 18, 2022

A home in Onalaska, Wisconsin is for sale. There are plenty of photos at the real estate listing. It doesn't look outrageous or even all that strange, but it is an example of the overused trend of putting words on the walls, the most notable being "Live, Laugh, Love." This house has at least one such word graphic in every room. The sign says "Eat" in the kitchen, and there's the word "Pantry" over the pantry. But then you get to the master bedroom.

And that's how the listing went viral. Lauren Hegenbarth never considered that the sign she made would be the focal point of her home listing, but once Zillow Gone Wild picked up on it, there was no going back. She admits that she's big on signs for the home, and she even runs an online business to sell them. Mel magazine talked with Hegenbarth about her sign.

Hegenbarth created the sign while her husband was gone so she could surprise him when he returned. “He absolutely loved it; it matches our humor to a T,” she explains. “Plus, two out of three of our kids can’t read, and when our oldest read it while I was making it, I just told her it was a funny quote from a movie and she never asked about it again. She doesn’t care; she’s clearly used to the decor.”

The same sense of humor that led Hegenbarth to make the bedroom sign is keeping her sane while it goes viral. Read the rest of the interview here. -via Metafilter

Some of the weirdest plants on earth are those that eat animals, usually insects, but also an occasional spider or slug. We are no longer astonished at this behavior, but scientists are still working out how it came about in the first place. How did plants ever evolve to eat insects? It's hard to imagine that one day, the first plant to do so just decided to try digesting an insect and found it was good, but it must have happened somehow. There are many differences in the types of carnivorous plants, and geneticists know that this skill evolved independently in different plant families at least 12 times. They are getting closer to the mechanism that made the change.

For one thing, all carnivorous plants developed in places that were not nutritionally sound for plant growth, meaning they couldn't get adequate nutrition in the way most plants do. While most species just died off in those conditions, those that became carnivorous discovered a new way to get those nutrients. The latest research indicates that these didn't just change genes that allowed them to eat insects; they instead used genes they already had for new purposes. The parts of the plants that ended up making them predators were originally used in defense against insects or other perils such as microbes and toxic chemicals. Read about the research into carnivorous plant evolution and what scientists have determined so far at Ars Technica. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: NoahElhardt)

Charles Herbert Lightoller was a British sailor who always seemed to be in a place to perform heroic deeds during historic events, and survive. Born in 1874, Lightoller went to sea at age 13. During his apprenticeship, he survived a shipwreck, a cyclone, and a ship fire. As a young man, he worked as a gold prospector and a cowboy in Canada, and became a hobo in order to get back home and return to sea. Lightoller worked his way up the ladder and was Second Officer on the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic.

When the Titanic struck an iceberg, Lightoller went to work deploying lifeboats, enforcing the "women and children first" rule at gunpoint. He went down with the ship, but when the cold seawater hit the ship's boiler, the blast propelled Lightoller to the surface, where he found a lifeboat to cling to. He was the final survivor to board the Carpathia during the rescue operation, and the highest-ranking crew member to survive the Titanic. But that was only Lightoller's second shipwreck.

Lightoller survived two more shipwrecks during World War I, while still managing to garner the Distinguished Service Cross and more promotions. After the war, he tried to retire, but when World War II came about, he used his own yacht to evacuate Allied soldiers from Dunkirk. At age 66. Read about the amazing exploits of Charles Lightoller, the sailor who wouldn't drown. -via Metafilter

Daly's Bridge in Ireland was built in 1926 for pedestrians to cross the River Lee in Cork. It is made of wrought iron, but since it is a suspension bridge, it wobbles a lot in the middle. That's why everyone calls it the Shakey Bridge. Wobble or not, it was an amazing design for its time, and people loved it even with the terrifying (at least until you got used to it) wobbles. But is it an amazing design for the 21st century?

Now, in my neck of the woods, there are quite a few really scary wooden "swinging bridges" built for access to houses on the other side of the river from the main road, but any time one falls apart, a replacement bridge is usually built with a sturdier, more modern design. But the Shakey Bridge is a historic site, and even after almost a century, must be maintained in a historical manner. Tom Scott explains.   

In 1957, Marjorie “Hiddy” Spock, the younger sister of famed pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, was living on Long Island and growing vegetables. Her partner Polly was wasting away from a mysterious malady suspected to be connected with DDT. Long Island was being treated with DDT dropped from planes to combat the invasive gypsy moth caterpillar, which had devastating forests in the US for over half a century by then. One day, an unannounced plane made 14 passes over Spock's property, dropping DDT. Her garden wilted. It became infested with garden pests she'd never seen before. A neighbor lost all the fish he was raising. Bird species disappeared from the neighborhood. Spock decided to sue the government. More than a dozen homeowners, farmers, and wildlife enthusiasts joined her.  

Their case against the government was based on the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which banned the government from taking property and lives without due process, and from taking land without compensation. It also involved the Fourteenth Amendment, which barred trespassing on private property.   

The case reached the Supreme Court, where it was dismissed on a technicality. But it had drawn the interest of Rachel Carson, who used the information collected by the plaintiffs to write her 1962 book Silent Spring, which led congress to ban the use of DDT and also inspired the modern environmental movement. Read an excerpt from the new book How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT by Elena Conis telling the story of how this important lawsuit came about at LitHub. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Xanthis)