The Sequoia Park Zoo in Eureka, California, has three black bears: Tule, Ishung, and Kunabulilh. But Friday morning last week, they had four bears. Zoo staff arrived to find a juvenile black bear had made its way into the zoo and was hanging around the bear enclosure. The young bear was interacting with all three of the zoo's bears, in a calm and polite manner. 

Zoo staff called the Eureka Police Department and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and then observed from a distance. When reinforcements arrived, they all collaborated to usher the guest out of the zoo and back into the 67-acre Sequoia Park, from which they assumed he had originated. The bear didn't give them any problem about leaving. They never found any breaches in the zoo's fencing, but the zoo's director speculated he may have climbed a tree and made it over the fence. -via Boing Boing

What does a bearded dragon eat? According to Wikipedia, they eat "vegetation and some insects." Lenny wants to expand his palate and eat everything that his human Emily eats. He has learned that the clink of a fork on a dish tells him when she's having lunch, and he comes running to get a taste of whatever she's having. But he's not much on green leafy vegetables, which is what he's supposed to eat the most of. Sharing food with Lenny has expanded Emily's palate, too. 

A lot of people have a hard time wrapping their heads around having a reptile as a pet, because they don't come across as expressive, emotional, or snuggly. Lenny might make you think twice about that, because he has a personality you don't see in backyard lizards. He might be snuggling with Emily for the warmth, but isn't that what cats and dogs do as well? -via Laughing Squid 

The fad of a sunken living room, which later became known as a "conversation pit" was trendy in the 1960s and '70s. They turned a large living room into a cozy, intimate space for socialization. Such a pit was a perfect place for a huge wraparound couch and getting close to your guests. It just seemed cool. But sunken living rooms didn't spring up full blown in the '60s. The idea actually goes back to the 1920s, and was admired by a generation of innovative architects before they hit the mainstream. 

But while the design magazines were full of conversation pits, everyday people saw problems. Digging a pit in one's living room was not only an expensive upgrade, it also assumed that one had a living room that was big enough to add a smaller section. Besides that, you had to consider who these pits were for- cool young adults who threw parties. They certainly weren't practical for anyone who might someday have children or grow old. Read about the rise and fall of this design trend that required a long term commitment at Mental Floss. 

You'll see more than one octopus here, but you should know that the pink one is a ringer. It's a robotic octopus sent to study and film deep sea life. The question that's never really addressed is who is filming the robot? Anyway, the real action comes from a coconut octopus, who lives in a coconut husk. When he goes out, he takes his husk with him, and collects other useful things like seashells and trash. He only leaves his coconut husk long enough to chase down some lunch and get into a fight with another coconut octopus. Meanwhile, we see him (or her) change size, shape, and even color. We see him walking around on his tentacles, carrying his husk, until swimming proves more effective. He seems quite antisocial with the other coconut octopus, but he apparently feels some affection of sorts for his pink robot friend. At least the robot isn't trying to attack him. This scene is from the BBC series Spy in the Ocean.  -via Born in Space

Last week, London, England, hosted the five-day Grand Sumo Tournament at the Royal Albert Hall. It is rare to see sumo wrestling outside of Japan, and this was only the second time the tournament has ever been held in London, the other time being in 1991. Forty sumo wrestlers, known as rikishi, traveled from Japan on the same plane. The flight is somewhere between 12 and 15 hours, so that had to be an ordeal. After five days of wrestling before sold-out crowds, the tournament was won by Yokozuna Hoshoryu, to the delight of fans. 

But the rikishi didn't spend all their time in London wrestling. The massive athletes took in all the London sights that any tourist would, as you can see in the gallery of images above. Click to the right to see the rikishi at Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, Abbey Road, and more, all while drawing plenty of attention from Londoners. -via Kottke 

The latest theoretical question for the What If? series from Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama) is "What's the longest possible sunset you can experience while driving, assuming you are obeying the speed limit and driving on paved roads?" While theoretically intriguing, my first thought was that's the last thing you want to do. It's bad enough driving a few blocks with the sun in your eyes! But once we get past the practicalities, it's a valid question. 

First, we get a definition of "sunset," the length of which can vary depending on where you are. Sunset in Antarctica can take days. However, at the equator, the earth is spinning at about a thousand miles per hour, and you can't drive fast enough to make a perceptible difference. Still, the video finds a place where you might make it happen. And unlike other What If? videos, we don't all die. -via Damn Interesting 

In 1998 in the Australian Outback, 36 miles from the tiny town of Marree, an almost two-mile long drawing of a man appeared in the dessert. The satellite image on the left was taken on May 27, 1998, and the image on the right was taken on June 12th. Sometime in between, a figure of an Aboriginal hunter was plowed into the ground. No one noticed it until July, when a set of faxes were sent to Marree, and a local pilot went out to take a look. 

Who drew the Marree Man? It wasn't the local Aboriginals, who own the land. They were angry that someone had plowed through their ancestral land and damaged the protected native plants. A local man who had a tractor and was said to have access to the then-new technology of GPS was suspected. An American flag was found on the ground at the work, throwing suspicion on American defense workers about three hours away. An Australian artist said he did it, but his story wasn't that credible. Tour operators were suspected, because they would have profited from the art. More clues were unearthed when a hotel owner began to restore the Marree Man in 2015, after erosion had blurred the lines. Although there are plenty of suspects, we may never know exactly who carved the geoglyph into the Outback. 

(Image credit: USGS/NASA) 

It's the season for horror films, and Screen Junkies fans has demanded a retrospective of The Thing. John Carpenter's movie The Thing was not a hit when it was first released in 1982, and barely made back its budget. It was depressing, horrifying, and gross. But what really did it in was the other movies we were seeing at the time- and its R rating. Critics panned it, one saying that it was "bereft, despairing, and nihilistic," which turned out to be appealing for later audiences who watched it on home video. And those special effects! More than 40 years later, The Thing is considered a horror classic, with amazing special effects and psychological themes to give it that added terror. 

Screen Junkies finds plenty to skewer about The Thing, but it does what it set out to do. The movie requires a particular type of viewer to appreciate it. Sometimes you just need to watch a movie that's depressing, horrifying, and gross to forget your problems.  

Redditor gomets167 always dresses up in a Tom Hanks role for Halloween. This year, he's Walt Disney from the 2013 movie Saving Mr. Banks. Compare his Halloween getup (alongside P.L. Travers) with the lead image at the movie site. Pretty good portrayal, huh? The kicker is that he's been doing Tom Hanks roles for Halloween for 14 years now! He says he's going to keep doing this until Hanks himself notices, but I doubt he would stop even then. After all, Hanks has been in more than a hundred movies plus a few TV roles. Continue reading to see his previous costumes.

Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones are the Map Men (previously at Neatorama), ready to explain geography to us and entertain us at the same time. This one is about Netherlands, which jutted out into the sea and resembled Swiss cheese for most of its history. The area of its land rose and fell with the whims of the ocean, and settling there was a problem when you could expect floods at any time. So the Dutch engineered dikes and dams to hold back the sea and create fertile farmland below sea level. It wasn't done all at once, but bit by bit over time. The biggest project was launched in the early 20th century. 

There's an epiphany that comes early in the video when I learned, for the first time, that Dutch windmills aren't there to grind grain. They aren't actually windmills at all, but pumps to control the water level! Along the way, we get plenty of jokes about Netherlands. There' a 90-second skippable ad at 4:25. The last 90 seconds is promotional, too. -via Laughing Squid 

The TV series Columbo ran from 1971 to 2003, which is a long time. But it didn't air every week; instead, it was a part of a rotating lineup of series under the title The NBC Mystery Movie (later The ABC Mystery Movie). You could catch an episode every three weeks or every three months or so. That's very different from the way people consume old TV series today, by binge-watching. That's what Rob Beschizza did recently, and he noticed quite a few things in the Columbo formula that slipped by the original audience who didn't know any better or didn't care.

Lieutenant Frank Columbo (if that is his real name) was beloved by audiences because he was a disheveled public servant who didn't put on airs yet always got his man. But the way he did it is anathema to professional police procedures. He worked alone, manipulated suspects, and never informed them of their Miranda rights, at least until after he conned them into confessing. Beschizza lays out nine points to prove that Columbo was clever, but quite underhanded in his investigations at Boing Boing. 

In the early 12th century, two children, a boy and a girl, appeared in the village of Woolpit in England. According to the scant documentation we have, they spoke a strange language that wasn't English and they had green skin. Strangely, they weren't burned at the stake, and the villagers seem to have accepted them. They just assumed the children were fairies, a perfectly logical explanation. When the girl learned enough English, she told a story that made no sense at all. But as we look back at the incident now, there are (at least) three possibilities.

1. They were aliens from outer space. 

2. They suffered from a rare but real medical condition that made them look green.

3. In the many years between the incident and the surviving written accounts, the story could have changed a lot, growing like legends do. 

Weird History looks at the possible explanations for the green children of Woolpit. 

This adorable face belongs to a tanuki, often called a raccoon dog outside of Japan. Despite the name, it is neither a raccoon nor a dog. Well, it is a canid, but not closely related to wolves or domestic dogs. It's more like a distant cousin of the fox. Native to Japan, tanukis have some adaptations that you wouldn't expect from a canine, like the ability to climb trees, and hibernate in cold climates while not hibernating in milder areas. They live in underground burrows and are monogamous. 

While raccoon dogs do not make good pets, tanukis have learned to live in urban areas like raccoons. They are popular figures in Japanese art and folklore, going back hundreds of years. Tanukis are portrayed as mischievous sprites that can shapeshift, a reputation that probably reflects their shy and nocturnal nature. Read about the tanuki and see plenty of pictures at The Ark in Space.

(Image credit: Cloudtail the Snow Leopard) 

Everyone loves the 1929 cartoon The Skeleton Dance, because few things are funnier than grinning skeletons dancing as if they were alive. We see such things every Halloween, but if you were to put yourself into 1929, the vision of skeletons dancing to music was merely an idea evoked by artworks and silent film. Composer Carl Stalling had pondered the idea of skeletons dancing in time to a soundtrack for years, and presented the idea to Walt Disney. But a cartoon with no story was something that hadn't been done before. Stalling's idea was to have the music driving the animation instead of just filling in the background. Animator Ub Iwerks threw his heart into the idea, and The Skeleton Dance became the very first in a new series called Silly Symphonies. West of Neverland tells us how the short came about. 

You can see the full cartoon The Skeleton Dance in a previous post. 

Those who grew up with digital cameras and later smartphones have no clue how much was involved in getting a simple photograph in earlier times. You could go to a photography studio, but that was expensive and time-consuming. Cameras were expensive, too, but you also had to pay for film, and then pay to have the film developed, which took several days. You only shot a scene once because there were limited frames on that roll of film, and you didn't know if the picture was any good until you got the prints back. 

So it was no wonder that when Anatol Josepho introduced the first practical automated photo booth in New York in 1925, people flocked to use it. For a coin or two, you got to see yourself in a series of permanent photographs in just a few minutes! No photographer, camera, film, or developer needed- that was all automated. Of course, you took your chances on the quality of those photos, but they captured a moment in time that you could always look back on and remember. A new exhibition at The Photographers Gallery in London explores the history and impact of the photo booth. Read an interview with several experts on the subject and see images from the exhibit at It's Nice That. -via Nag on the Lake