Mackenzie Coffman's cat Simon has become obsessed with a cat who lives in the building facing their apartment. Both cats sit in their windows and watch each other. Coffman put a sign in her window that said, "What is your cat's name? Love, Simon." The answer came back!

The next step was opening their windows so the cats could talk to each other. Coffman chronicled the relationship on Twitter, and when the post went viral, she wanted to let her neighbors know.

YALL DRAGGED THEO FOR SPELLING “YOURE” WRONG AND HE HAD SUMN TO SAY: pic.twitter.com/dCOtV0r4qW

— mac (@kenziecoffman) April 23, 2019

Everyone wanted to know if and when the cats will ever meet face-to-face. There's good news!

For everyone still following this, Theo and Simon will be meeting Thursday!! This is how Simon feels about it pic.twitter.com/T7W6Uv2mC3

— mac (@kenziecoffman) April 24, 2019

You can follow the entire story, which includes videos of Simon, on Twitter. Now that Simon and Theo are getting together, you have to wonder: Where's Alvin? -via The Daily Dot

PS: Both cats now have their own Twitter accounts. Follow Theo and Simon for more of their adventures.

Back in 1986, Marvel Comics came to the screen in the epic Howard the Duck, which was a miserable failure at the box office. I saw that movie in the theater. It was weird, creepy, and not at all entertaining. I cannot imagine anyone watching it twice. It's a bit late, but Howard the Duck finally gets an Honest Trailer. Meanwhile, the new Marvel movie Avengers: Endgame opens this weekend. My, they have come a long way since Howard the Duck! 

Ochre Jelly, also known as Iain Heath, has shown us plenty of his wonderful LEGO creations, from the awesome Freddie Mercury to the minimalist Stephen Hawking. And don't forget his LEGO memes, like Sharknado and Kim Kardashian’s Butt.

Ochre Jelly has taken the next step in his LEGO career, by designing and selling LEGO kits that you can use to make all kinds of neat things, like the Little Totoro and the Loot Llama seen here! His store is called Bricks of Character. Buy them on Amazon, or through his Etsy Shop. Bookmark those links, as he'll be adding new characters over time.

Brazilian artist Butcher Billy illustrated iconic singer Freddie Mercury in comic book style, and designed comic books around them with the themes of Queen songs. You know the songs, you love the singer, but these still make you want to read the story inside.  



See all eleven works in this series at Laughing Squid. You can buy prints of them, too! And see more of Butcher Billly's art at Instagram. 

What is it about the stories of H.P. Lovecraft that give you chills you never knew were possible? He takes you out of the real world, and sets you in a place where you cannot figure your way out, because it's not anything like the world we know. So a lot of that fear is the fear of the unknown, of being stripped of control. Learn about the man behind the horrific sense of dread you feel while reading an H.P. Lovecraft novel in a TED-Ed video from Silvia Moreno-García. -via Geeks Are Sexy

This listing is not a costume, a statue of a T. rex, or a joke. Professional fossil hunter Alan Detrich discovered and excavated the fossilized partial infant Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton on private land in Montana in 2013. Now he's listed it for sale on eBay for $2,950,000. With free shipping. The fossils were on display at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum at the time of the listing, but have been removed and returned to Detrich, who had loaned them out. Paleontologists have decried the sale, saying losing this specimen to a private owner will add difficulty to their attempts to determine whether these small fossils are from T. rex young or a different species.   

The Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology (SVP) has criticised both Detrich, who will be taking an important specimen outside the reach of scientific study, and the university, for helping to inflate the price of the fossil, acting as a shop window for professional buyers.

In an open letter published last week, SVP’s members said that it was regrettable that the fossil was exhibited before it could be studied. “That action, which brought the fossil to the attention of hundreds or thousands of visitors, potentially enhanced its commercial value,” they wrote. “Museums seldom have the budget for purchase of increasingly expensive privately collected specimens.”

Read more about the controversy over the eBay listing at the Guardian. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: PirateGoldCoins)  

This video short called Cracks aired on Sesame Street in the mid-'70s. Jon Armond was six years old and found it traumatizing. But he never saw the short again, and never encountered anyone else who remembered it ...until the rise of the internet. There he found many other people in his situation, who remembered the short but after it disappeared weren't sure if they had imagined it. Together they searched for information on the clip.

But they still couldn’t find the video itself, and Children’s Television Workshop, which produces Sesame Street, was of no help at the time. Still, after making inquiries, Armond eventually got a fax from an unknown, untraceable number promising to send him the copy of “Cracks,” as long as he agreed never to screen it in public, post it online, or send it to anyone else. Armond signed the agreement, and six months passed before he found a manila envelope in his mailbox with a DVD inside. The note read: “We trust this completes your search.” There was no return address, no postmark, and no postage.

Daniel Wilson of the Lost Media Wiki received an email copy of Cracks in 2013, just as mysteriously, but made from a different copy. Since he signed no agreement as Armond did, Wilson uploaded it to YouTube. Slate has the story of the lost and found Sesame Street video in a podcast. They even found the woman who recorded the audio for the short.  -via Metafilter

We've had many posts about the odd gelatin recipes of the mid-20th century, the salads and main dishes made with Jell-O from recipes distributed by the company. They seem quite lowbrow now, an example of of very processed food put together as a craft of sorts. But gelatin dishes were once reserved for the very rich. Napoleon was a fan, and his chef Marie-Antoine Carême made artful creations from gelatin to impress guests. Carême later went on to cook for the kings of Russia and England.

But Carême’s love for gelatin and use of it in high-end cuisine was hardly a culinary aberration. From the early Renaissance through the early-20th century, gelatin “salads” and desserts were prestigious dishes and the provenance of master chefs. “Today, people who want to parade their wealth buy a Porsche,” argues Carolyn Wyman, author of Jell-O: A Biography. “In pre-industrial days, they would instead serve their guests fancy molded ice cream or gelatin desserts.”

The contrast between modern American and historic views of gelatin is striking. So why exactly was it such a valued food for so long? And how did it fall from grace?

The answer is the same as many other examples of conspicuous consumption -the pre-industrial gelatin desserts were difficult to make, and therefore costly. Read about gelatin desserts before Jell-O came along and made it ubiquitous at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Roberta F.)

Tom Scott visits Gibbs Farm in New Zealand, which is a huge private sculpture exhibit. The most famous work there is Horizons by Neil Dawson, a giant illusion that looks like a simple drawing. But this short video is more about Gibbs Farm than any any one piece of art. It's a unique place, that's for sure!  

Margaret Owen was a 22-year-old Manhattan socialite with a wealthy father, so she had access to all that made life good in the 1920s. She loved the color blue, and in fact was so obsessed with blue that her apartment was decorated all in blue, and she wore blue clothing every day. When a pair of her stockings started to yellow, she got the blue dye out to restore them.

Everything was going fine until Lilly, one of Margaret’s two white Angora cats, came bounding into the room. When the curious, eight-month-old kitty dipped a white paw into the blue basin, Margaret clapped her hands in delight!

As it turns out, Margaret had recently bought blue leashes for her cats, because she had heard that women were walking their cats on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. She thought, wouldn’t it be romantic to be the mistress of a very beautiful blue cat that she could parade down the boardwalk? All she had to do was dunk her kitties, Lilly and Otto, in the blue water. Just like her stockings.

Margaret picked up little Lilly and dipped her in the bowl of blue water. Then it was Otto’s turn. Despite the cats’ howls, Lilly held them down in the water for about five minutes until she was sure the dye had taken. She took care not to immerse their heads—she used a piece of cotton dipped in the dye to swab their faces. (How very kind of her.) When she was all done, she wrapped the cats in an old blue towel and placed them on a blue cushion to dry.

Then Otto got sick, and the story became newspaper fodder. Read what happened to Owen and her cats in a guest post at Strange Company.

The latest stop-motion masterpiece from PES, The Fish, illustrates what is happening to the marine ecosystem by showing plastic garbage turning into a fish. It's an ad for the Protect Paradise project, created for Earth Day.  -via Laughing Squid

Every landlord has a tenant horror story, and every tenant has a landlord horror story. But while few people ever become landlords, almost everyone has had to live in someone else's house at one time or another. And the tenant-landlord relationship can get weird really fast.

Although some are definitely weirder than others.

See all 25 stories in Cracked's latest pictofacts list. 

The vet told my dad on the phone (??) that his dog had to be put down and he’d come to his house and do it. My dad dug the dog’s grave AND LET THE DOG WATCH. Then the vet came and checked the dog and said it was a false alarm. Oops! Dog’s fine! Everything about this is insane. pic.twitter.com/sFXKVDk5Vz

— Franklin Hardy (@franklinhardy) April 18, 2019

Franklin Hardy managed to pull us in several directions emotionally with one Tweet. First there was sadness, then horror, then relief, then laughter. Then, of course, there was curiosity. What kind of diagnosis did the dog mistakenly have? Is the dog alright? And how did the dog feel about this misadventure? This response may have pegged it best.

Dog:
TODAY WAS SO AWESOME WE DUG A BIG HOLE I DIDNT EVEN KNOW WE WERE BOTH INTO DIGGING HOLES WE HAVE SO MUCH IN COMMON

— S.I. Rosenbaum (@sirosenbaum) April 18, 2019

You can read the entire Twitter thread here. -via Metafilter

"Earth" by Lil Dicky is more than just a music video. It's a love letter to our planet. It features lush animation and appearances by all kinds of creatures we share the earth with, voiced by a cavalcade of celebrity singers:

Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Halsey, Zac Brown, Brendon Urie, Hailee Steinfeld, Wiz Khalifa, Snoop Dogg, Kevin Hart, Adam Levine, Shawn Mendes, Charlie Puth, SIA, Miley Cyrus, Lil Jon, Rita Ora, Miguel, Katy Perry, Lil Yachty, Ed Sheeran, Meghan Trainor, Joel Embiid, Tory Lanez, John Legend, Backstreet Boys, Bad Bunny, Psy, Kris Wu

Contains NSFW language and adult subject matter. -via Tastefully Offensive

If you drive by the house at 3970 Spencer Street in Las Vegas, you might not think there's anything remarkable about it. But it's what you don't see that matters. And it can be yours for a mere $18 million! See, underneath the one-acre lot is a 15,000 square foot underground bunker. From the real estate listing:

Las Vegas Underground House! Its not just a house, its an subterranean 15,000sqft concrete & steel rectangular shaped doomsday bunker. The 5000 sqft House is built Inside this huge bunker & is finished with pool,spa,waterfall,trees,guest house,BBQ,fountain & 500 linear feet of floor to ceiling illuminated murals of landscapes of wide open spaces simulating day,dusk,dawn & night modes. All Furnishings & 1 year of caretaker & upkeep are included

It's got everything except windows, but to make up for that, there are nature scenes painted on the walls and colored lighting you can adjust for daytime and nighttime moods. It was built in 1978, with the original decor that will take you back to the Cold War era, overlaid with Las Vegas kitsch (think neon, pink, and astroturf).

Whether being underground in this home will keep you safe in the apocalypse would depend on the situation, though -it does use public utilities. See a gallery of pictures of this underground fantasyland at Old House Dreams. And more pictures here. -via Nag on the Lake