The question was posed to Askreddit, "Parents of reddit, what's the funniest reason you've been called into school to collect your child?" The responses illustrate how sending your child to school means giving up some control over them, with unintended consequences you never considered.

"When my daughter was in 2nd grade, I got a call about a 'present' she brought to school. The night before, she had asked to go to the store to buy some Rolos for her friend's birthday. But turns out, she wrapped each Rolo in red paper, bundled a few together, put little black pipe-cleaner 'fuses' on them, and attached a note that said, 'You're the bomb.' The school was not amused."

—Larsasnor

Everyone has a story, and the only thing they all have in common is embarrassment, for either the child or the parent -or maybe both.

"I had just gotten off work when the daycare called me in a panic. My 4-year-old son decided to put the training potty seat around his neck and it got stuck. I showed up to find the fire department had arrived, they were able to get if off quickly. Fortunately, they also took a picture of him with it around his neck — if he ever gets married, it's going in with the wedding photos!"

—Maxtrt

Buzzfeed has a list of the 19 funniest stories, and you can read the entire reddit thread here.

(Image credit: Larsasnor)

Benjamin Franklin was never president, but he held many other important jobs, including that of minister to France during the Revolutionary War. Franklin was in Paris in 1778, when he received a letter from a stranger supposedly named Charles de Weissenstein that proposed a clandestine meeting at Notre Dame cathedral to arrange for ending the war. Weissenstein made it clear that King George would never allow the Americans to be free of the British Empire, but might accede to some colonial demands, which Franklin could convey to him in a very suspicious cloak-and-dagger fashion. The instructions for dropping off the document were very explicit, and might remind you of a poorly-written spy novel.

“If the Iron Gates above mentioned happen to be shut, you will find him in the aisle of the right hand on going in, on the same side (if I mistake not) where the huge statue of St. Christopher is. For your more certain guidance, I have desired him to stick a rose, either in his hat, which he will hold in his hand up to his face, or else in the buttonhole of his waistcoat, either of which will be remarkable enough, with the other circumstances.”

From the snarky response Franklin wrote, you might imagine that he first had a big laugh at the very idea. Read the whole story of Ben Franklin's brush with a spy at Plodding Through the Presidents. -via Strange Company

This animated TED-Ed lesson from Michelle Brown looks at weird images that we know from medieval art and particularly from the doodles of monks copying and illuminating manuscripts by hand. Certain ideas are found over and over, so they must have some meaning. We know the meaning behind some, but not others. Could it be possible that one person drew a funny image, and others laughed and drew it also, until it became ubiquitous? Happens every day on the internet. You would imagine the medieval version would just be slower.  -via Laughing Squid

There are wild cats in Britain, most notably the Scottish wildcat, which is classified as endangered. However, they are small and hard to distinguish from domestic cats. But big cats have been spotted in the UK for decades, sometimes seen as cougars or lynx. In fact, there have been 155 big cat sightings reported to authorities in the past three years alone!

Where might these cats have come from? One theory suggests they were released by their owners in the months leading up to the 1976 Dangerous Wild Animals Act. Exotic animals had been sold in Harrods; cheetahs could occasionally be seen being walked in Hyde Park. Given the choice of acquiring a costly licence or relinquishing their pets to animal sanctuaries, at least some owners chose a third option: sending cats out into the wild. In 2000, Leslie Maiden, a lion tamer known as One-Eyed Nick, told the Birmingham Post he’d released a panther and a puma in Derbyshire some 25 years before. “At first I was a bit worried about how they would get on,” he said. “But I went up to the moors a few weeks later and saw bones of sheep and pheasants, so I think they adapted pretty well.”

That was forty years ago, so the theory requires that these freed big cats managed to not only survive unseen, but also find mates of their own species and reproduce undetected for generations. There are other theories that hold almost as much water. Read about the continuing big cat sightings in Britain at the Guardian.  -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Midnightblueowl)

Last week, James Holzhauer set a new record for one-day winnings on the game show Jeopardy! He's now on a streak that may break Ken Jennings all-time money-winning record, and even faster than Jennings. How does he do it? Well, it helps that you know a lot of answers, but that's not all it takes to do well on a game show. Every game is different, and Jeopardy! requires a certain set of skills to do well, even if you're very smart.

...what sets apart the really, truly dominant players like James isn’t just luck, smarts, or betting strategy: It’s the buzzer, and James is very, very, very good at using it.

“He had a lot of questions about the subtlety of the buzzer right away,” says Jeopardy! producer Maggie Speak, who oversees contestant coordination and leads an hourlong group orientation for new players each taping day. “Before he ever hit the stage, it was: ‘Well, what if I do this?’ He had a lot of very specific questions about the timing of the buzzer.”

The buzzer isn't the only strategy Holzhauer has going for him. Read an analysis of Jeopardy! star James Holzhauer at The Ringer. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Jeopardy Productions/Ringer)

What did sailors eat in the 1700s? It wasn't all hardtack, even though there was plenty of that. The provisions for each man were strictly enforced, because it could be a long time before the ship took on more supplies. Jon Townsend uses a published sailor's diary to explain how sailors ate, as he recreates a recipe for burgoo.

Kids love their parents, but come to think of them as old and out of touch. Eventually all of us realize that our parents were once young, and have a lifetime of experience that they might never have told us about. Leo_nardo has a picture of his mom casually strolling through a line of armed National Guard troops at a 1969 protest in Berkeley. While pregnant. She met the photographer at an exhibit weeks later and got a copy of the picture. ThomCarn showed us his dad at age 22, when he flew a Mirage F-1 for the French Air Force.

Some were warriors or brave immigrants, others took to the road for adventure. One even pinned Chuck Norris. Some just looked too cool for the next generation to believe. See 76 such pictures in a ranked list at Bored Panda.

Cary Huang of Abacaba made a moving bar graph tracking the popularity of internet memes from 2004 to 2019. As you might expect, it moves dizzyingly fast. The data comes from the site Know Your Meme and from Google Trends. However, Know Your Meme only launched in 2007, and although it is a valuable resource, it's not as widely used as you might think. Huang admitted as much at the YouTube page, where he noted some egregious omissions and other errors. Still, it's neat to see how memes you may have forgotten about zoomed into our consciousness and then disappeared.

Warning: Looking up memes you are not familiar with may bring up NSFW and even offensive material, particularly in the earlier years of this study. Even the text titles of some are NSFW. Many of the safer ones can be brought up through Neatorama's search box.  

-via Laughing Squid

 

Every few years, you may be surprised by the number of Easter egg trees both inside and out. The custom spikes and then fades in America, but its roots go back further than you might know.

In 1890s New York, it was even something of a craze. But despite brief bursts of popularity, Kaufman writes, today “egg trees are a dismal failure when compared to Christmas trees, found only in a few public fora and very scattered homes.”

Much like the Christmas tree, the custom likely came to the United States with German immigrants, entrenching itself among the Pennsylvania Dutch. (Although the Easter egg tree is typically a bare-branched tree hung with eggs, rather than an evergreen.) Across parts of Pennsylvania and Appalachia, Kaufman writes, women considered egg trees a type of good-luck charm, especially when it came to fertility.

But hanging eggs on a tree has never become a widespread tradition in the US. Maybe the Easter egg tree never caught on in a big way because it doesn't serve the purpose of a Christmas tree. In the dark, cold days of winter, an evergreen tree with lights is a delightful respite. By Easter, warmer countries already have plenty of flowers blooming. Read about the varying tradition of the Easter egg tree at Atlas Obscura.

The company Thames Water was working on a pipeline project in Oxfordshire, England, when they discovered the burial spots for 26 people. Archaeologists took over, and declared the find to be quite unusual, showing what might possibly be human sacrifice.

The graves contained the skeletal remains of both men and women, some of whom may have been the victims of human sacrifice, according to the Cotswold archaeologists. As CNN noted in its coverage, one woman was found with her feet cut off and her arms bound behind her back. At another grave, a skull was found placed at the feet of a decapitated skeleton.

The Iron Age skeletons are thought to be about 3,000 years old, and part of the Childrey Warren settlement, the same people who constructed the famous Uffington White Horse. Read more about the bizarre burials at Gizmodo. 

(Image credit: Thames Water)

How strong is the Boston Dynamics quadruped robot Spot (previously at Neatorama)? Maybe we can measure that in horsepower! In this video, a team of ten Spots pull a truck up a one-degree grade. That's pretty strong for their size. And they had to throw in at least one creep factor -only the lead pair have heads. I'm surprised they didn't turn around and laugh at us -as one did in this video. -via Nag on the Lake

IN MICEhttps://t.co/X9Kopd4Uje

— justsaysinmice (@justsaysinmice) April 17, 2019

All the Tweets are the same: a link to a science story and the words "IN MICE." But that's the way it's meant to be. What may seem like an important medical breakthrough, according to the headline, turns out to be the results of an experiment in lab mice (or rats). That doesn't mean the research is bad; it just means that the story is overblown by publishers who want your attention. You've seen it happen before. Study results compete for space in science publications, which issue press releases, the papers take it up, then bloggers, and by the time you hear about it, cancer has been cured. Anyway, data scientist James Heathers came up with @justsaysinmice, launched it last week, and it's already a hit with scientists. He talked to Gizmodo about the idea.

How have people responded to the account?

Heathers: In general, scientists, especially biologists, have written to me and said, “I’m really glad you’ve done this. This is hella funny to me, personally.” And that’s from people who have run cancer centers.

The responses I’ve liked and hated the most have been from people who say they have a kid with a disability, or that they have type 1 diabetes. And they’re saddened every time they have to read about how the next best thing is right around the corner, or their mum sends them something on Facebook, with headlines on how the next cancer cure will be ready in 20 minutes. And I really hate existing in this environment where people are trying to help, and what they think will help just doesn’t work that way. I hate being reminded of that.

But there have also been a few negative responses, not many—the response has been overwhelmingly positive.   

IN MICEhttps://t.co/DwLnlPSsq7

— justsaysinmice (@justsaysinmice) April 12, 2019

Read the rest of the interview at Gizmodo.

Leaving the piano keys open in a house that has a cat is just asking for middle-of-the-night crescendos. Leaving the works open is just one more place for a cat to nap. This cat is out to prove that you do not evict a cat from his chosen napping spot, no matter what goes on around him. -via Laughing Squid

The foods associated with Passover confound modern processed food manufacturers because they notably have to be kosher, but also have to contain no leavening. While changing recipes for one week's supply of food is not worth it for the largest food suppliers, small businesses fill in the gaps. There's an exception, though- candy. And no candy has become more closely associated with Passover than jellied fruit slices. They are kosher and Passover-ready any time of the year. To see why they became traditional for Passover (after all, the Hebrews did not have them), we need to know the history of the candy and how it is made. 

The fruit jelly slice is an American product invented sometime between the two World Wars in either Winnipeg, Manitoba, or in Boston (two companies claim to have invented it). The shape of the jelly, like the shape of the McDonald’s McRib, pays homage to something that it is not. That something happens to be the candied fruit, grandfather of all modern confections.

First, though, we need to know a little bit about sugar, and the first thing we need to know is that sugar is extremely difficult to work with. Even though it’s been cultivated in small amounts for 8,000 years, refining sugar is so laborious that creating it without government support was next to impossible. The first states with the resources for sugar production were Islamic. For centuries, European sugar was all imported; it wasn’t until the late 14th century that it was manufactured locally, and even then quality varied widely from batch to batch.

Whether you celebrate Passover or not, you'll learn something about the history of candy and sugar itself at Forward. -via Metafilter

Bonus: Make your own jellied fruit candy.

(Image credit: michael clarke stuff)

ESPN covered the annual Sasquatch Calling Festival in Whitehall, New York, which of course includes a Saquatch calling competition. What does a Sasquatch sounds like? These folks all have their ideas, but who knows which is most accurate? No Bigfoot responded to any of the calls. The eventual winner sounded a lot like a police siren. -via Boing Boing