Siobhán Gallagher lived with 26 different people who weren't family members in the space of 12 years. She's taken that experience and illustrated it. We get to meet ten of them and learn their foibles, plus some lessons she's learned about smoothing out their differences, at Curbed. -via Nag on the Lake 

There is a pink granite tombstone in Toronto's Prospect Cemetery, with four names inscribed: Pauline Chorna, Annie Hrynchak, Anna Baran, and Nellie Handiak, underneath the word "Friends." The four women buried there are no kin to each other, and they died decades apart. Yet they all four carried out a pledge to spend eternity together after death. What the four friends had in common were that they were all born in the first decade of the 20th century, and all had immigrated to Canada from the Carpathian Mountains.

The Carpatho-Russian identity is one that is deeply complex and divided along religious, national and political lines, according to historian Magocsi, who chairs U of T’s Ukrainian Studies department and is of Carpatho-Rusyn heritage.

While Carpatho-Russians speak a language related to Ukrainian, and come from an area Ukrainians consider within their ethnolinguistic boundaries, many “actively reject identification as Ukrainians,” Magocsi wrote in his 1999 book, Of the Making of Nationalities There is No End. Their poverty-stricken conditions in Canada also “led to strong anti-clerical left-wing political and social attitudes,” he wrote, as well as an affinity for the Soviet Union, the world’s “first worker’s state.”

The outsider status of these immigrants drove them to forge close bonds with each other, mainly through the Alexander Duchnovych Society of Carpatho-Russian Canadians and its cultural center on Queen Street. While their generation considered themselves Communists and friends of the Soviet Union, their children rejected their politics. Each woman had her own fascinating story, and in the 1960s they dreamed up their plan to be buried together. Read how that all came about at the Toronto Star.   -via Metafilter

The Demilitarized Zone is a thick border between North Korea and South Korea. Most of the zone is empty and under constant surveillance. But a couple of existing villages were allowed to remain in the zone, and a new village, controlled by North Korea, sprung up. Apparently, Kijŏng-dong's only purpose is propaganda. Half as Interesting explains. -via Digg

Twenty years ago, we didn't even have a term for "viral" or even "meme." But hampsterdance was both, and more than that. You couldn't go online without encountering the pixelated hamsters dancing to Roger Miller singing in double time. The story of how hampsterdance was born, soared higher and higher, and then went down in history is more dramatic and complicated than you ever knew. It started when Deidre LaCarte felt the temptation to draw as many people as possible to her Geocities website. She was in competition with her sister and Hazel Steenman. Then things got out of hand.

Deidre LaCarte: Not everybody had access to the internet or a computer back then, so we were getting 10,000 letters a month [from] some kids and some teachers.

Hazel Steenman: Pretty well as soon as the mail started coming in, I was answering emails, and I think I was posing as a hampster — Hado the girl hampster, and I'm not a girly person. (laughs)

Deidre LaCarte: One email came across my desk [from a father] saying that his daughter is very ill. She was depressed all the time. And he said, Thank you very much for the Hampsterdance because when she plays it she's happy." Whatever happens, that was the happiest moment of my life. That helped. I clicked with somebody and it made somebody happy.

But fame has its price. Others appropriated hampsterdance, then a dedicated website was formed, then musical groups used it, and then Disney objected over the song. Deidre LaCarte was caught in the middle, trying to protect herself and defend her creation. Read the story of hampsterdance at CBC. 

Hey @TheMerl, here's a quacking duck that's got to be at the top of the bill

It's a cosmetics container made around 1300 BC in ancient Egypt https://t.co/XJPetqlnRQ pic.twitter.com/CU1N0iMuLD

— British Museum (@britishmuseum) January 4, 2019

The Museum of English Rural Life issued a challenge Friday on Twitter. They specifically called out the British Museum and asked for their best duck. Yes, duck. It took a while for the British Museum m to respond, but plenty of other institutions got in on the fun.

We're not @britishmusem but here across the pond we have a bird that is quite duck-like! https://t.co/eYGKog10bp pic.twitter.com/nZyKVLKrKY

— J. Paul Getty Museum (@GettyMuseum) January 4, 2019

The response to the J. Paul Getty Museum's contribution was "Have you ever seen a duck?" But other places had ducks.

Exit, pursued by a duck. pic.twitter.com/6woXvdT4Vd

— National Theatre Bookshop (@NTBookshop) January 4, 2019

Can't. They gave them all to us. pic.twitter.com/Up8TJFp29K

— Natural History Museum (@NHM_London) January 4, 2019

We may not have duck vases or manuscripts but we offer the humble Toilet Duck to this flock of ducks pic.twitter.com/4QHmPIYjOg

— Museum of Brands (@MuseumofBrands) January 5, 2019

This is the kind of thing the internet was made for. You'll see a lot more museum ducks of all kinds in the Twitter thread.  -via Everlasting Blort

A meme popular in Chinese social media has three generations of family members calling out to their parents. This compilation is pretty self-explanatory, and you don't have to understand the language at all. It's just adorable.  -via reddit

You know what they say about the best-laid plans. You also know that criminals often don't think their cunning plans completely through. And sometimes, karma just steps in out of nowhere. In June of 2005, a group of men in Ethiopia kidnapped a 12-year-old girl who was walking home from school. A week later, they tried to cover their tracks by moving her to a different location when they encountered a pride of lions. 

As the seven kidnappers were moving their victim, they unexpectedly bumped into the lions. Confronted with no longer being on top of the food chain, the very ungentlemanly criminals left the girl to fend for herself. But this isn't the story of how police found the licked-clean bones of a tiny lion meal.

For half an hour, the lions just kinda ... hung out with the kid, lounging about with seemingly no intention of devouring her face. When the rescue party finally arrived, the lions simply strolled off, figuring their job was done. A police sergeant Wondmu Wedaj said, it seemed as if the lions had left the child to them as a gift. And with only four of the seven kidnappers later found and arrested, uh, let's not speculate on what the lions got in return.

That's just one of 5 Crimes That Got Hilariously Foiled By Instant Karma that you can read about at Cracked.

(Image credit: Robek)

Yes, this video has goofy animations of cats, but it is also a history lesson from TED-Ed by Eva-Maria Geigl. We learn how cats became domesticated and then traveled the world, without having to change much at all from their wild ancestors.  

The SS Warrimoo was ferrying passengers between Canada and Australia in December of 1899. En route, Captain John Phillips realized he had the opportunity to do something extraordinary, so he commanded that the ship head for the point where the equator crosses the International Date Line. The ship arrived in time to straddle that point as the clock struck midnight on December 30, 1899.  

The forward part of the ship was in the Southern Hemisphere and in the middle of summer. The rear part of the ship was in the Northern Hemisphere and in the middle of winter. Half of the ship was on 30 December 1899, while the forward half skipped a day ahead and into 1 January 1900.

This ship was therefore not only in two different days, two different months, two different years, two different seasons and two different hemispheres but also in two different centuries all at the same time.

But what happened to 31 December 1899? You might ask. Recall that the ship was going from Canada to Australia, thus travelling west, and anytime you cross the International Date Line going west, you automatically move forward by 24 hours because the time zones on either side of the International Date Line have a difference of 24 hours.

Did it really happen? Who knows! But it is certainly possible. You can imagine the experience would be thrilling only if you knew what was happening at the time. Read more about the SS Warrimoo and the New Year's Eve that wasn't at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company 

If you want to capture the world in a nutshell, you begin with the nut itself. But this video by Fabio Friedli quickly expands to encompass a lot of things! Objects, that is. Vimeo takes a closer look at the meaning of In A Nutshell.

“It is such an excessive amount of things, shown in such a short time, you are never able to perceive everything,” Friedli said. “I like to believe it’s one’s subconscious that chooses what you see, hear and feel, depending on what is occupying your head and heart at the moment. No one has the same first ‘In A Nutshell’ experience.”

Whether you follow the thread of ideas or just ride with the artistic animation, you'll enjoy In A Nutshell. One quick image may be NSFW.  -via Nag on the Lake

Dr. M. Donald Blaufox is the chairman emeritus of the department of nuclear medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. He is also a collector of medical devices and artifacts from the past, especially from the era before germ theory. Some of the items look like props for Frenkenstein's leboratory, others make you wonder what on earth they were thinking.

For Blaufox, who runs the virtual Museum of Historical Medical Artifacts and also has a supplementary collection of more than 500 rare books, the primary motivation for collecting was to illustrate the history of medicine, with examples from a range of disciplines. In ophthalmology, he has a tray of glass eyes, circa 1880; in pharmacy, a set of 28 corked vials of various powdered remedies from 1900; and in quackery, a neat little device called a Baunscheidt Lebenswecker from 1870. The Lebenswecker (“life awakener”), developed by Carl Baunscheidt, basically pierced one’s skin with multiple needles, causing a rash of blisters, as a means of counter-irritation, a homeopathic technique (or a bogus one, depending upon whom you ask) predicated on the idea that you can reduce pain in one area of the body by inducing inflammation in another.

That makes sense in a way. As the old joke says, hit your right hand with a hammer and you'll forget about the small cut on your left hand. Around 100 pieces from Dr. Blaufox's collection are on display now at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, in an exhibition called “The Dawn of Modern Medicine,” but if you can't make it to Connecticut, you can see and read about some of these strange items at Collectors Weekly.

More and more people are equipping their front doors with video cameras, so this past holiday season we've seen tons of porch pirates stealing packages. But these cameras occasionally capture heartwarming scenes that happen while we aren't watching. Here's a compilation of some cute delivery folks, most of whom know they are being recorded. The guy with the cat, maybe not, but the cat knows he's a good person. -via reddit 

You should eat more vegetables, but all vegetables are not equal. The number one vegetable in the American diet is French fries, made of white potatoes, which rank rather low in comparison to other veggies. You might try passing off corn as a vegetable, or the iceberg lettuce in your sandwich. Not only is that crunchy leaf a negligible amount, it's also the least nutritious of the many kinds of lettuce. If you're looking for a bigger nutrient punch in your diet, check out how vegetables rank against each other. You need a variety, but leaning more toward the top of the list could be an easy goal fo rate new year. Read the rankings and the reasoning at Mel magazine. -via Digg

We've previously shown you the work of photographer Xavier Hubert Brierre, who set up mirrors in Africa and shot footage of leopards and other wildlife that came upon them. Now we see South American animals finding their own reflections! UK wildlife photographer Mark Fernley set up a mirror in a Brazilian rainforest to give cougars, jaguars, and other forest creatures a good look at themselves. From the purring, you can see that the jaguar really likes what he sees in the mirror. The project is a part of the Mirror Image Stimulation Study.  -via Digg

Half as Interesting explains how the world's shortest international border, at only 278 feet (85 meters), came about. Along the way, we'll also learn about the only place in the world where four countries meet at one point -or maybe they don't. Then there are the weird enclaves where parts of Belgium are completely inside the Netherlands. These interesting stories lead up to the story of Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera, which was once an island but is now a peninsula. -via Laughing Squid