Ingesting embalming fluid is a horrible way to die. It's not a death we worry about much these days, but back when funeral wakes were held at the family home, it was a different story. The undertaker would come and do his job at the house, then a wake would be held for days before the burial, often with plenty of drinking to drown the grief. Accidents happened, in an astonishing number of different ways.

    EMBALMING FLUID IN THEIR BEER.

    Mourners at a “Wake” Poisoned, One of Them Fatally.

    Racine, Wis. Oc. 5. Special Telegram.

    While attending an Irish wake last night James Payton, James Callahan and Mrs. George Diven were poisoned by drinking embalming fluid. During the night refreshments were served, and beer was poured into a tumbler which contained embalming fluid left by the undertaker. Payton is not expected to recover. Daily Inter Ocean [Chicago IL] 6 October 1888: p. 9

Whether someone poisoned by embalming fluid survived depended on how much they drank. It didn't take much to kill you. Just using a container that once held embalming fluid was often enough. You'd think people would be put off by the smell, but a child or someone who'd already drank quite a bit of alcohol might not. Honestly, look at the bottles it came in. Read a roundup of 19 different cases of poisoning by embalming fluid at Haunted Ohio. -via Strange Company

Last year, Tom Fitzgerald and Marcus Herring assembled a feature-length remix of a ton of Star Wars fan films, parodies, tributes, knockoffs, behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, and fan reactions for the franchise's 40th anniversary. Star Wars Nothing But Star Wars was shown in a theater for a gala celebration on May 18th, 2017, for the anniversary. Since then, the company that commissioned it folded, and the theater closed. So Herring remixed the remix and added new footage, and made it available to all of us on the internet! Enjoy an extended mix of the weirdest Star Wars stuff there is. It's completely bonkers!

(YouTube link)

This one is the PG edit, with just a couple of scenes excised or censored. If you prefer, there's a somewhat more risqué R-rated version at YouTube.  -Thanks, Marcus!

Following all of Star Wars was a pretty simple task for those of us who have seen every movie in a theater when they were released. That took 40 years, but there was no confusion as to how the story was constructed. It's quite different when you want to introduce your children, or your friend who was never interested until they met you, to the long and ever-expanding Star Wars universe. What's the best order to see them in? George Lucas says to watch them in chronological order, starting with The Phantom Menace. No, no, no.

The problem in getting started with Star Wars is two-sided. First, there's the inconvenient fact that the first three movies to be released, the original trilogy, come in the middle of the current continuity. Then, there's the not-insignificant matter that the prequel movies are widely considered to be terrible. Episode 2, "Attack of the Clones," won a Golden Raspberry award for Worst Screenplay.

Until the release of "The Force Awakens," much of the zeitgeist surrounding the Star Wars saga dealt with the prequels. The conversations were largely negative, along the lines of "are these movies cringe-worthy, or outright detestable?"

There's also the big twist that would be completely spoiled by watching the prequels first -which really only applies to children as viewers. The best way is to show your kids the movies in release order, which is what I did, although back then there were only five movies to catch them up. That's what Mathew Olson recommends, although his list of media in watching order do not include Ewok Adventure or The Star Wars Christmas Special. Even I haven't seen those. Or you might prefer Machete Order. But there's a lot more in the article, including an explanation of the special editions and a look at Disney's vision for the future of Star Wars. And May the Fourth be with you.

The departure screen at Heathrow Airport in London was a little different as May 4th dawned. You can enlarge the picture here. The flight to Hoth has been delayed because of snow on the destination runway. The flight going to Kashyyyk is numbered WOOK1E. And sadly, Flight LE1A to Alderaan has been cancelled.   

Good morning from Heathrow. The force is strong with us today and we've got some special new routes. Will you be travelling to galaxies near... or far, far away? #Maythe4th #MayTheFourth #MayThe4thBeWithYou #StarWarsDay pic.twitter.com/B9IcnMOMxC

— Heathrow Airport (@HeathrowAirport) May 4, 2018

Every departure has a story, but you'll see it only if you're familiar with a galaxy far, far away. -via reddit

(YouTube link)

Dave was abducted by aliens. He wants to tell everyone, but there are some things "they" don't want you to know. However, the warranty on the mind wipe machine has run out, and someone didn't do the scheduled maintenance check. The "man in black" is forced to take matters into his own hands. -via Geeks Are Sexy

You know Carry Nation as the woman who hated alcoholic beverages so much that she vandalized bars with a hatchet and became the symbol of the Temperence Movement. Nation was always religious, but she only became an opponent of alcohol after she found out her first husband was an alcoholic. Her saloon-smashing career began with a voice from God, and soon turned into a lesson on the value of publicity.     

Alone or accompanied by hymn-singing women, she would march into a saloon and proceed to sing, pray, hurl biblical-sounding vituperations, and smash the bar fixtures and stock with a hatchet that she had concealed under her black waterproof cape.

Carry responded with alacrity to appeals from citizens of other towns to close their saloons, as her violent approach, which had received national attention, was getting results. Her behavior provoked a tremendous uproar and sent her to jail repeatedly for disorderly conduct, vandalism, and disturbing the peace in locations where liquor sales were legal.  Between 1900 and 1910, Carry was arrested at least 30 times, in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Arkansas, while many other incidents did not end in arrest simply because the smashed saloons were illegal and the owners just endured the vandalism. She paid her fines from lecture-tour fees and sales of souvenir hatchets and photographs inscribed with "Carry A Nation, Home Defender", or some such, at times earning as much as $3000 per week, this in an age when a typical working man made about $100 a month.

Nation's campaign catapulted her to stardom on the lecture circuit, in vaudeville, and as a publisher. She even portrayed herself in a play, complete with a reenactment of a saloon-smashing. Read about the life and career of Carry Nation and how she influenced the push for Prohibition.

(YouTube link)

When Celine Dion sings a song for your movie, you can expect a big, emotional performance that will rule the charts this summer and be nominated for some Grammys or even an Oscar. She's done it before (Titanic). With "Ashes," the song is exactly all that, and the video has all the required elements, with a stage performance and some movie clips. But this is Deadpool, so there's more. He lends some out-of-character choreography to the stage show, and then offers a critique at the end. The kind of thing you'd expect from Deadpool.  

Dinosaurs, even covered in feathers, are big, dangerous, and fun to make movies about. They are perfect for that purpose because they are more real than space aliens or ghosts, yet we can still go to sleep unafraid of being eaten by one. But what we know about dinosaurs is constantly changing with new discoveries. I just learned that they only grew to enormous sizes because of a mass extinction event -one that isn't as publicized as the mass extinction event that later wiped them out. That information comes from the new book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte. Here's more.  

The first dinosaurs were not brutish monsters like T. rex or earth-shakers like Brontosaurus. Dinosaurs evolved from skinny, long-limbed, cat-sized ancestors called dinosauromorphs, which lived about 250 million years ago. They were sprinters who ran around on four legs, and lived in the shadows of giant amphibians, reptiles, and mammal ancestors who dominated the food chain at the time.

"Dinosauromorphs" should be a Saturday morning cartoon with a toy line, don't you think? Read a list of ten interesting things about dinosaurs from the book at Boing Boing.

The majority of the earth's surface is ocean, and it's a rare soul who wants to stay on it when landfall breaks are possible. But map nerds have studied the question of how far you can go in a ship without steering or running into land. It's hard to decipher on a flat map; that's why we should all have a globe available to study. One redditor proposed such a route in 2012, and now two computer scientists have confirmed his idea.

According to the researchers, the path from Pakistan to Russia is indeed the longest straight path possible without hitting land. It measures 19,939.6 miles, just about 5,000 miles short of the planet's circumference. The researchers also found the longest straight-line path across land, from Jinjiang in China to Sagres in Portugal, measuring 6,984.9 miles.

If you don't have a globe handy, or you can't make it spin against it's own axis (which is likely), you can see a video of the route drawn perfectly straight at Popular Mechanics. -via Metafilter

King Charles XII ascended to the Swedish throne at the age of 15 in 1705, and immediately set out to wage war against the world around him. He earned the nickname "the Swedish Meteor" when he conquered Denmark-Norway and Saxony-Poland-Lithuania in the 18th century.

The meteor, as it happened, fizzled. In 1708, Charles XII decided to make what is now considered a military misstep: invading Russia. After Russian forces destroyed his troops at the battle of Poltava in 1709, Charles fled to the Ottoman Empire, another enemy of Russia. Settling with 1,000 men in what is now Moldova, he spent five years shuttling around the Empire, including Constantinople. In 1710, he convinced Sultan Ahmed III to declare war on Russia.

Though Charles was champing at the bit to get back to Sweden, it’s said he and his men gained a taste for Ottoman Turk cuisine, such as sherbet and what’s now known as Turkish coffee. Voltaire even wrote that a Russian-paid assassin tried to slip poison in Charles’s coffee. While the Swedish government didn’t specify which recipe Charles XII liked so much, the king and his followers likely encountered köfte, the spiced lamb and beef meatballs of Turkish cuisine.

Having made several nations of enemies, Charles did not live a long life. Like a meteor, indeed. It was a while before his favorite meatball recipe slipped into the public eye and became Sweden's pride and joy. Read how that happened at Gastro Obscura.

(YouTube link)

Last Thursday, residents of Zaporozhye, Ukraine, called emergency services about a cat stuck in a tree. The tree was very tall and spindly, and no one could climb high enough to get the cat down. So the fire department brought in a ladder truck. The people on the ground were expecting the firefighter to save the cat. The firefighter, on the other hand, was apparently just told to "get the cat out of the tree." He was determined to do that, by any means necessary. The most you can say is that his method was a bit less drastic than that of a Russian operation we posted a few years ago. -via Digg

Russian artist Anastasia Bulgakova draws fantasy characters, including a series of countries in superhuman form. They are mostly warriors armed and armored with their international reputations, and a lot of symbolism. Above you see the UK as a futuristic super punk with his sidekick English bulldog. Germany gets a mech suit to show their pride in engineering.

"I had this idea for quite a while, but maybe the whole recent political situation in the world has pushed me to actually do it," Bulgakova told BuzzFeed. "I wanted to add some humor into the mix, to lighten up the mood of the real-world situations."  

As you can probably guess, the United States has a cowboy hat, way too many guns, and breast implants. My favorite in the series is Canada -or maybe France. See a selection from Bulgakova's nation series at Buzzfeed and others at DeviantART.

(YouTube link)

The 2003-2006 TV series Arrested Development was produced and narrated by Ron Howard (Opie Taylor, Richie Cunningham). Ron Howard is also the director of the forthcoming Star Wars film Solo. Therefore, it only made sense for Disney to combine the two in a promotional film. So what we have is Ron Howard narrating the story of Star Wars (Episode IV, A New Hope) in the style of Arrested Development. It's not a new idea. You can see a mashup from last summer that uses audio clips from Arrested Development for the narration, and another, longer version without Howard's voice. It's funny, but let's hope that it doesn't foreshadow anything about the style of the film Solo, which hits theaters May 25. -via Metafilter

Scientists have been puzzled by a series of traits found in a mutation (known as V370A) in the human gene called EDAR. The EDAR gene controls early development of hair, teeth, sweat glands, and breasts. The V370A mutation enhances those organs, making hair thick, giving the teeth a shovel shape, and causing more branching in the mammary ducts. A previous study of the mutation focused on sweat glands, but did not answer the question of why people needed enhanced sweat glands during an Ice Age, which is when the mutation arose. A newer study looked at data from 5,000 ancient skeletons to determine who had the mutation by studying their teeth.   

We found that all of the indigenous people living in the Western Hemisphere prior to European colonization had shovel-shaped incisors, which means they all likely had the V370A mutation. In contrast, only about 40 percent of the people in Asia had shovel-shaped incisors, and essentially no one in Europe did.

This pattern suggests that a population ancestral to Native Americans experienced the strong selection for V370A, an interpretation that differed from what my colleagues found when they only looked at genomic variation in living people. Using these ancient teeth, we were able to figure out when and where the selection happened. The next question we needed to address was why this selection occurred. What was going on to make this mutation so helpful and thus so much more prevalent?   

The study focused on people living in Beringia, between Siberia and Alaska, during the last Ice Age. But was it the teeth, the sweat glands, the mammary ducts, or the hair that gave people a genetic advantage that selected for the V370A mutation? Read the story of what they found at Real Clear Science.

(Image credit: Christy G. Turner, II, courtesy G. Richard Scott, CC BY-ND)

(YouTube link)

You may wonder how on earth there could be this much information on how to hold a cat, but Dr. Uri Burstyn, the Helpful Vancouver Vet, doesn't waste any time giving us solid information about cats and their reactions. He shows us his techniques for picking up a cat, restraining a cat, and dealing with a "shoulder cat," in case you have one of those. Squish. That. Cat. None of my cats, as needy as they are, like to be picked up. I attribute that to them being raise in a houseful of clumsy kids. -via reddit