The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into History Again.

You’ve heard that clothes make the man? Meet the suit that made the woman.

Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel was born in Samur, France, in 1883. Her life got off to a rocky start. Her mother died shortly after Gabrielle’s birth, and her father took off, abandoning the five Chanel children. Gabrielle was raised in a local Catholic orphanage until she came of age, at which point the nuns found her a job at a local boutique, the House of Grampayre.

TALENT WILL OUT

The little shop assistant honed her skills as a seamstress, and soon she had a faithful following of customers who came directly to her for alterations. She also worked at a tailor shop once a week. And in addition to her two day jobs, did some moonlighting as a café and concert singer for a few years. She used to sing one of those sad French songs about a poor girl who lost her little dog, Coco -that’s where her nickname came from.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MES AMIS

She did very well in the male companionship department: two of her lovers -a military officer and an English industrialist- bankrolled her first millinery shop in Paris in 1909. It didn’t take her long to establish herself as a leading fashion designer.

Back in 1983, we were all anxious to find out what happened to Han Solo after he was frozen in carbonite and taken to Jabba the Hutt. Return of the Jedi wrapped the Star Wars trilogy, beginning with an action sequence where Han is rescued. Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, Lando, and the droids all show up at Jabba's headquarters at around the same time. We get the impression that our rebels had a plan, but no one can figure out what that plan was, since not one step of it worked, or even made sense. Mike Ryan lays out the timeline of what actually occurred. First, Luke gives Jabba the droids. We don't know what he expected to happen. Then Leia shows up.  

Disguised as a bounty hunter named Boushh, Leia strolls in and hands over Chewbacca. So already three of our heroes have been captured as part of this, “Let’s just all surrender,” plan. Later that night, Leia unfreezes Han, but as they start to make their getaway, Jabba and all his friends are literally hiding behind a curtain and capture Leia and Han. (I’d watch a whole A Star Wars Story offshoot movie about Jabba planning this curtain surprise. I’d love to see him explain to Weequay, “And then we will all be super quiet and just wait there behind the curtain all night. It’s going to be great. Okay, yes, it might take a few hours, but the payoff will be worth it. We will all laugh.” I also picture Squid Head back there, “Ohhhh, I think I see someone moving. I think this is it!,” and the rest of the gang all shushing him. “Shhhhhh, Squid Head, you’re going to ruin it!”) Okay, so now, including Han, we have five heroes captured.

There are several more steps that appear to have been made up as they went along before our heroes get away. By the time the third movie arrived, I had given up any illusion that Star Wars would follow any sort of logic, so I didn't think about it much at the time. But trying to parse the sequence 35 years later only makes all the kerfuffle about The Last Jedi seem rather silly. Read the analysis of Han's rescue operation at Uproxx. 

How many horror movies have you seen? All of them? Then you probably have some idea about what makes a movie frightening. The things that scare you can be quite revealing.

In fact, we think we can figure out your most embarrassing secret with nothing more than a list of the horror movies you like. Are you a little too into your family members? Do you cringe at the thought of leaving home? Is your bed still fitted with a waterproof mattress cover? We think this quiz can reveal what you have hiding from the rest of the world.

So pick the flick you prefer and we'll guess what naughty little thoughts you have hidden from even your closest friends and loved ones your whole life. In the end, we may guess wrong, but either way, it should be fun to find out.

There are 60 movies in 30 matchups. Yes, I did the test, but I haven't seen hardly any of the movies, so it wouldn't work on me like it would on a horror movie fan. Try the quiz here. You might find some movies you haven't seen in so long that you'll want to look them up on home video!

What is reality, anyway? It is different for different people? Is it different for the various components of the self? While Brain is busy overthinking it, Heart is busy experiencing it. Heart's reality is nothing like Brain's, nor is it like your reality. Can we create our own reality? Well, we can think about it, or we can try it. But how would you know if you succeed? Whoa, there I am, overthinking it again. This is the latest comic from the Awkward Yeti.

In 1956, an albatross was tagged in Hawaii. She was estimated to be five years old at the time, and she came to be known as Wisdom. She is the world's oldest banded bird, and is still doing her part to replenish the world's supply of albatrosses.

Every year, Wisdom returns along with millions of other albatrosses to their nesting grounds at Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument on Midway Atoll. She's easy to spot - she always returns to the same nest site, and she has successfully hatched a chick every year since 2006.

This year, US Fish and Wildlife Services spotted Wisdom and her mate, Akeakamai, in November, and confirmed in December that the birds were nesting an egg, taking turns caring for it while the other searches for food.

The blessed event has now been confirmed. Bird watchers have announced that Wisdom has successfully hatched an egg at age 67!  The new albatross chick emerged on February 6. Wisdom is estimated to have produced around 36 chicks in her lifetime -so far. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: NOAA)

Gâteau Gato means "cat cake," but this is much more. Artist Alexandre Dubosc (previously at Neatorama) created a beautiful chocolate zoetrope that displays animated cats! Yeah, how could anyone combine chocolate cake, cats, and animation and not have a winner?

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You'll recognize Maneki Neko playing the piano, Felix, Nyan Cat, and Yin-Yang Cat on this cake. There are other cats, plus mice, fish, and a big cat head on top with teeth! Notice the different language spellings of the word "meow" as well. -via Laughing Squid

A group of artists and architects attending the 1933 International Congress of Modern Architecture (CAIM) dreamed of designing the perfect modern city to serve the people living there. They imagined that a planned utopia would function much better than the chaotic way existing cities developed over time.

The subject of this particular congress was city-planning. The members of CIAM thought that cities were too congested, noisy, polluted and chaotic. And they believed some of these problems could be solved by separating out the functions of a city into distinct zones for housing, working, recreation, and traffic.

Zoning wasn’t a new idea, but the architects from CIAM wanted to take it farther. The living spaces would be in high-rise apartments so that the ground-level was open for recreation and collective spaces—live in the sky, play on the ground. Cars would even drive on elevated roads so that pedestrians could have the space below all to themselves. There would also be separate districts for industry and shopping. Where old European cities were winding, cluttered and polluted, this new one would be linear, open, and clean, with everything in its proper place.  

What could possibly go wrong? Due to the Great Depression, the plans were not made public until 1943. Among the entities that tried out the ideas after the war were Amsterdam's city planners, who began construction of a new city called Bijlmer in the 1960s. It wasn't long before unforeseen circumstances led to cascading disasters over several decades. Read about the experimental city of Bijlmer (including a horrible twist in the story) or listen to it in podcast form, at 99% Invisible: Part one and part two.

Let this be a warning to you: if you receive an unsolicited vacuum cleaner, don't turn it on! By the way, the same goes for a mysterious stranger who tells you that pushing a button will bring untold riches.

CHILIK is a comic artist from Belarus whose work you've seen before at Neatorama. Here he tells the story of everything in one wordless metaphysical comic. See more his work at Instagram. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The 1954 film On the Waterfront was about crime and corruption in a gangster-controlled longshoremen's union in New Jersey. The plot centered around rising star Marlon Brando as a young boxer and dock worker who is pulled into doing dirty work for the mob. The movie was a critical and box office smash, winning eight Academy Awards, including Brando's first Best Actor Oscar. Learn some more about the classic film On the Waterfront.

3. A lot of real longshoremen from Hoboken were used as extras.

It makes sense to get extras that know what they’re doing in order to make the film look a little more authentic. There were plenty of extras that wanted to be in the movie just for the experience.

2. Marlon Brando improvised a lot of his lines.

He would improvise a lot and as a result the director would take offense and tell him to knock it off.

Read more movie trivia about On the Waterfront at TVOM.

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Kuzma the Fennec fox and Zima the cat live together in Moscow. Kuzma is small, energetic, and has a little trouble with the slippery floor. Zima is relatively calm and placid, but he does enjoy playing with his fox friend. And in the end, he's bigger and will get his way! -via Tastefully Offensive

While the Americans were hurriedly working on a nuclear bomb, so were the Nazis. If they had succeeded, the outcome of World War II may have been quite different. The Americans used enriched uranium, but the scientists in Germany used un-enriched uranium and heavy water to reach critical mass. They manufactured heavy water at the Vemork chemical plant in occupied Norway. Taking out the plant's heavy water lab was a critical mission for the Allies. British soldiers had attempted a raid, but they had been captured and executed. The Norwegian Royal Army stepped in for another attempt, called Operation Gunnerside. It was carried out 75 years ago, on February 28, 1943.

Rather than repeating the British strategy of sending dozens of men in gliders, flying with heavy weapons and equipment (including bicycles!) to traverse the snow-covered roads, and making a direct assault at the plant’s front gates, the Norwegians would rely on an alternate strategy. They’d parachute a small group of expert skiers into the wilderness that surrounded the plant. The lightly armed skiers would then quickly ski their way to the plant, and use stealth rather than force to gain entry to the heavy water production room in order to destroy it with explosives.

Six Norwegian soldiers were dropped in to meet up with four others already on location. (The four had parachuted in weeks earlier to set up a lighted runway on a lake for the British gliders that never arrived.) On the ground, they were joined by a Norwegian spy. The 11-man group was initially slowed by severe weather conditions, but once the weather finally cleared, the men made rapid progress toward their target across the snow-covered countryside.

The skiing soldiers moved like ninjas to avoid the Germans patrolling the roads and guarding the plant. Read how they carried out their mission at Smithsonian.

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

Callie Khouri, a 30-year-old music-video line producer, was driving home to her apartment in Santa Monica on a spring day in Los Angeles in 1988. She didn't realize it at the time, but during this seemingly routine drive back to her home, Callie was about to experience an epiphany. The words came to her and hit her like a bolt from the blue: Two women go on a crime spree.

"That one sentence!" Callie recalled, "I felt the character arcs- I saw the whole movie."

Unlike so many others in Hollywood, Callie had never even tried to write a screenplay before, but thoughts and ideas kept flooding into her mind. "I saw, in a flash, where those two women started and where they ended up. Through a series of accidents, they would go from being invisible to being too big for their world to contain," she added.

Furiously inspired, Callie began writing, in longhand, and kept going, adding more whenever she had spare time, for the next six months. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, more and more of the story came together for her. She would write whenever possible, at odd, free hours, then type out what she had written on her office computer.

The story gradually fleshed out- two women from Arkansas, one older than the other, one a waitress, one a housewife, both in mediocre relationships, one married, one not. The two women want to escape and go off to a borrowed fishing cabin, have some fun, a few laughs, and maybe find a little adventure and excitement to spice up their fairly tedious, drab lives. On the drive to the cabin they decide to stop off at a roadside cafe and have a drink or two.

But things go off the rails at the cafe, one of the women has a few drinks and a guy she had been innocently dancing with tries to rape her. In what would quickly become a nightmare scenario, her friend sees the attempt and fatally shoots the man. The planned fun but innocent weekend escalates into full scale getaway from increasing numbers of various and sundry lovers, strangers, police and G-men.

If you live in Edmonton, Alberta, you just accept that it's going to be freezing cold all winter. The city embraces the inevitable cold. While other towns have specific vehicles for removing snow and ice from streets (which Edmonton has, too), city workers go out early in the morning and spray water on park paths to make them more slippery! Quite a few layers later, there is a sheet of ice up to a foot thick over park trails. Time to strap on your skates! The man behind the frozen trails is architect Matt Gibbs.  

Gibbs dreamed up a version of the frozen trails concept as part of his master’s thesis in landscape architecture at the University of British Columbia. His idea, which he christened the “Freezeway,” involved even more frozen paths—enough glassy arteries that Edmontonians could strap on some blades and skate to work. That wasn’t quite feasible, but the city adapted the project, named it the “IceWay,” and has paved two frozen paths through parks. There’s a three-loop trail around Victoria Park, a one-and-a-quarter mile path through Rundle Park. The project is growing: Angie Blades, a project coordinator for the City of Edmonton, estimates that the Rundle Park route, which the city piloted last year, is 80 percent longer this season.

The skating trails look really nice with the colored lights shining on them at night. Read more about Edmonton's ice trails at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Matthew Thiessen)

The Oscars will be awarded this weekend. Most of the movies up for Best Picture came out late in 2017, which is the traditional time for epic dramas that get nominated, so Screen Junkies haven't done takedowns on most of them yet. They fixed that, by giving the Honest Trailer treatment to all nine nominees for Best Picture.  

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Oh yeah, the screenshot above actually does appear in this Honest Trailer. It did not fool you into thinking that Justice League was included in the nominations, did it?

We know the Louvre in Paris as an art museum. However, it was once a fortress, and the seat of government. Napoleon III lived there. What many people don't know is that his residence is still there, still furnished in the style of the time. And open to museum visitors.   

You’ll walk past a a stunning series of staircases on your way to the apartments, but try not to get distracted on your quest. A plaque explains that the rooms you’re about to enter were refurbished during the Second Empire, and were part of what was, at the time, a brand-new wing of the Louvre (built between 1852 and 1857). A tremendous amount of artists, decorators, upholsterers and the like were hired to work on the apartments, which were fashioned in the Louis XIV style. By sheer luck (and a lot of restorative genies), they remain exactly the same: dripping in gold…

The apartments are not crowded with tourists, because they are busy looking at the Mona Lisa with everyone else. Take a tour inside the secret apartments of the Louvre at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Mary Frances Knapp)