Eating meat was considered taboo in Japan for 1200 years, for both religious and practical reasons. As an island nation with a lot of shoreline relative to its size, Japan has always relied on fish and seafood, which was never banned. However, avoiding consumption of birds and mammals was never really universal. If a doctor prescribed a meat diet, that was okay. Livestock was more taboo than wild game. And classifying whale and dolphin as fish make them fair game, so to speak. The ban on meat finally died out under the deliberate efforts of Emperor Meiji, who assumed power in 1868. Read about the rise and fall of meatless Japan at Atlas Obscura.
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Director Tim Burton is behind a lot of big hit movies that reuse his favorite tropes over and over, no matter what the subject matter or genre. It's to the point where you could easily figure out that Burton directed a film even if you entered the theater with no advance knowledge after the opening credits, just by the way it feels. Screen Junkies has picked out the elements that make up that Burton feeling and lays them all out in this Honest Trailer. It's not just because Johnny Depp is in all of them, because he's not. Burton's latest is Dumbo, opening nationwide this weekend.
Former Disney artist Twistwood drew a comic in 14 panels over four Tweets involving a conversation between Thor and Fred Rogers, from a script by Matthew Wisner. Both superheroes are being their usual selves, but in the end, it's Rogers that rules the day, just as expected. The real Fred Rogers didn't care for comic book superheroes because of the violence and the unreasonable idea of superpowers, but this is fan fiction for adults (but not "adult fanfiction") so read on. -via Metafilter
If you aren't a trained musician yourself, it's much easier to judge someone else's level of talent when they perform a song that's very familiar. Rob Landes demonstrates the different levels of musical complexity with the ultra-familiar Mario theme. Yes, we recognize and enjoy the theme when it's played as a simple melody by a n00b, but then he ups the difficulty level just like the video games do. By the end, it feels like we're playing the game! -via Boing Boing
Cake artist Claire Ratcliffe created this intricately-detailed iced cupcake illustrating the five stages of body decomposition for an exhibit called Delicious Decay: The Edible Body Farm. She in fact created a whole series of cupcakes for the project, each weirder then the one before. You have to wonder if anyone ever ate this cupcake. One the one hand, the subject matter is disgusting, while at the same time it is artfully detailed and represents what appears to be a lot of work. On the other hand, it's a cupcake and most likely delicious. You can see more of the forensic fare from the show at Remains 2 Be Seen. -via Nag on the Lake
The Pink Trombone is an interactive graphic that shows how the human voice works. The sound is produced in the larynx, and different sounds that produce language are caused by the actions of the tongue, palate, lips, and nasal cavity, all of which you can manipulate onscreen. Click around and explore what happens. You can hear the sounds of consonants changing as you close the oral cavity from the lips on back, from p to d to dr to w to g. Now change the shape of the tongue and do it again. I even managed to produce throat clicks. However, you are warned that the web toy may perform poorly on a Firefox browser, and sure enough, after some time I had to relaunch. Still worth it. -via Kottke
The first half of this video from Epicurious shows clueless cooks trying to poach an egg, beginning with the most clueless. Then we get the lowdown on how it's really done. I have never poached an egg, because I've seen it done and it doesn't seem appetizing. But since I have seen it done, I could do it if there was a reason to. And now you can, too. -via Digg
Edvard Munch's 1893 painting The Scream has become iconic, even inspiring an emoji. Everyone knows the painting, even if they don't know who did it. It's the image of a man screaming. Or is it?
A new exhibit at the British Museum seems to clear up a longstanding debate. The figure in the painting is not screaming, but hearing a scream.
Really? The wide-open mouth led us to believe the figure was screaming, but the hands over the ears could be a reaction to a scream. The terrified face lends itself to both interpretations. The evidence for the person hearing a scream is from Munch's diary, which you can read about at Quartz. -via Nag on the Lake
The 1990 movie Goodfellas was based on the life of mob informant Henry Hill. The film ended when he went into the witness protection program. The 1990 movie My Blue Heaven was also based on Henry Hill's life, except it was a fictionalized comedy that began with Hill's entry into obscurity. Nora Ephron, who wrote My Blue Heaven, got to know Henry Hill while her husband, Nicholas Pileggi, was writing his book Wiseguy, on which Goodfellas was based. It turns out that her comedy was pretty close to the truth. Henry Hill had quite a few adventures in the witness protection program.
With his Goodfellas era over, a man who had never known life outside the mob was unleashed on an unsuspecting world as one of us. In May 1980, when he sat down in the office of Ed McDonald, the prosecutor who was arranging his entrance into Witness Protection (WITSEC for short), Henry brought along two of his mistresses and tried to enroll them in the program along with his wife and children. It was the first in a string of unbelievable stunts he would pull while in the program.
The Hills hoped to be placed somewhere glamorous and warm, but they got Omaha, Nebraska. The lanky man with the thick Brooklyn accent might as well have been from another planet. For their first meal out, Henry took the family to Omaha-based-chain Godfather’s Pizza, as if to dare the Midwest to change him. It felt like he’d arrived at the ends of the earth, all flat land and sky, cows at pasture everywhere he looked. “It was like another country,” Henry recalled later. He claimed his body could never get off New York time, so he would be up an hour too early every morning, dressed to the nines in expensive suit and shiny loafers, nowhere to go. At the grocery store, he and an employee stared each other down over Henry’s request to be directed to the Italian food. He bought out their supply of Ronzoni lasagna noodles.
Hill kept in contact with some New York friends, got arrested rather often, and occasionally got his picture in the local papers, which drove WITSEC agents crazy. But the straw that broke the camel's back was Hill's sudden marriage to a hairdresser, despite the fact that he was already married with two children. Read the story of Henry Hill (aka Martin Lewis), his first wife, his second wife, and the private eye who exposed the arrangement, at Medium. -via Metafilter
It shouldn't take you long to identify who this seafaring hero is. Artist Booster Pang decided to "do a realistic 18th century style naval portrait of the one and only Captain Crunch." He looks as crusty as his signature breakfast, doesn't he? You can buy a print, poster, or accessories featuring the captain here. -via Laughing Squid
This surreal award-winning animation by Vincent Lynen has a lot going on. He says it's about "Macho's, guns, cars, motorcycles and hot girls." There's a lot of playing going on, but you have to wonder who is the winner. It may start slow, but it sure gets going when the shooting starts! -via Digg
North Bergen High School in New Jersey put on their student play, and it was an adaptation of the 1979 film Alien! Yes, complete with xenomorph, made of recycled materials. North Bergen is not a wealthy school, and they don't even officially have a drama department. But English and drama teacher Perfecto Cuervo adapted the play, oversaw the production, and inspired the students.
Steven Defendini, the school’s art instructor, tells EW the play is a collaboration between three teachers — including one music teacher, Brian Bonacci, with knowledge of stage lighting — and approximately 16 students. “We’re a real small drama program, so we’re used to doing small plays for the local community,” he says, adding how the viral attention online is now such a “surreal experience.”
See plenty of pictures and some video clips from the drama at Entertainment Weekly, and more at the A.V. Club.
(Image credit: Paul Owens)
Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines (previously at Neatorama) manages to find the most ridiculously difficult way to automate a simple task, just like Rube Goldberg did. Only Goldberg's machines were merely committed to paper, while Joseph demonstrates his in fairly deadpan manner in the real world. Here, he automates the task of passing the salt down the table. What's especially strange is that most of the process doesn't involve salt much at all, but requires everything else in the kitchen. Eventually you realize that there are two salt containers, both within reach of the people sitting on either end of the table. But the destination is really of no matter, just enjoy the ride. -via Tastefully Offensive
The vast majority of all the wasabi served in the world is made of horseradish, Chinese mustard, and food coloring. The real thing is quite rare, as wasabi is the world's most expensive crop to cultivate. Edwin's Lee's short film Wasabia Japonica follows Shigeo Iida as shows us his 8th-generation wasabi farm, one of the few in the world to grow authentic organic wasabi. Read more about the short film at the Atlantic. -via Metafilter
The first immigration station built on Ellis Island in New York in 1892 was a firetrap from the beginning. The main building was made of over four million feet of resin-soaked lumber, with no effort put into fireproofing. Despite multiple stories, there were no fire escapes. When the inevitable happened just after midnight on June 15, 1897, there were between 180 and 250 immigrants asleep on the island, plus the staff. The fire apparently began in the kitchen, and spread to all the buildings on the island. And since this is an article from The Hatching Cat, there was an animal involved, a heroic dog named Jack.
While all this chaos was going on, one attendant who was not on duty that night slept right through the alarm and continued sleeping in an upstairs room. According to Samuel Peterson, he was sleeping in a room over the restaurant when he was awakened by Dr. Senner’s Newfoundland dog, Jack, who was trying to drag him out of bed.
Jack had reportedly run up the stairs and through the flames and smoke to wake Samuel, who had become overcome by the smoke. The dog also came to the rescue of one of the firemen who worked in the restaurant and slept in a room above Samuel’s room (again, news reports differ on the number of men who were rescued from the rooms above the restaurant).
Jack wasn't the only hero of the fire, and astonishingly, no one died. But the immigration station was a complete loss, as many had predicted. Read the story of the Ellis Island fire and the history of New York City's role in US immigration at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company