Where's the best place to celebrate Halloween? In the land of the original Gaelic festival of Samhain, which is where Halloween originated, of course. The city of Derry, Northern Ireland, revived Halloween in a big way in 1986, and today the annual festival is one of the biggest Halloween parties in Europe. Last year, 75,000 people showed up.   

The only remaining fully walled city in Ireland, Derry looks the part for Halloween. The massive stone walls that girdle the city and the Gothic Revival Guildhall just below the ramparts could be a set from a 1960s Hammer Film Productions horror flick. Families were walking about in full ghoulish makeup that would have made George Romero (“Night of the Living Dead’’) proud. We had stumbled into a Renaissance Faire crossed with a nightmare — in the best possible sense, of course.

We followed the throngs to the plaza in front of the Guildhall, where the Haunted Harvest Market was in high gear. We found vendors selling jewelry for every imaginable piercing, face painters who were creating the sunken eyes and random gashes to fit any type of undead character, and the street food vendors of “Hell’s Kitchen.’’ Band after band provided a soundtrack that ranged from traditional Irish music to Irish country to heavy metal rock.

And that was just the first day of the festival. Read more about Halloween in Derry at the Boston Globe.  -via The Week

See also: The official website for Derry Halloween.

(Image credit: Flickr user Greg Clarke)

Kimberly White and the rest of her family were there at the bus stop to see her eldest daughter get off the school bus. Can you imagine what the rest of the students had to say? They'd say that's really weird, but at the same time, they'd wish their families were that much fun. 

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"My family and I decided to dress up in costumes as our oldest daughter came home from school. We encourage our children to work hard, play hard, and not take life too seriously as shown clearly in this video."

This definitely shows Brooklynn that even dinosaurs will band together to watch your back. -via Digg

HoydenCaulfield posted a picture of a fox that found a soft spot for a nap in his garden in London. The fox didn't wake up as the picture was taken. In fact, it came back the next day and napped on the roof of the shed. This cute picture inspired Firefox puns, including the title. Firefox is updating, Firefox has merged with Napster, Firefox is not responding, etc. Sure, he's adorable, but to those who would like to make a wild fox into a pet, remember they are nervous, destructive, and smelly compared to regular dogs. -via reddit

Here's a delightful stop-motion animation in which the frames are carved pumpkins. Sean Ohlenkamp and Rob Popkin carved hundreds of pumpkins over several years (in their free time) to make this video. They made many sequences and discarded most of them, some because the idea didn't work, and some because the finished sequence wasn't great. What's left is a brightly colored pumpkin that dances as its carvings change.  

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The thumping music in the background? That's also made with pumpkins, in process they called "pumpkin orchestration" under the guidance of Igor Correia. You'll get to see what that looks like at the end of the video. -via Laughing Squid

Simone Giertz is famous for building robots that aren't good at anything besides entertaining us. This time she attempts a robot that serves soup. Pumpkin soup, which she hates for reasons she will explain. But the robot stole the show, once it was finally in service. It did its job.  

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Giertz needs to try some really good pumpkin soup. My daughter made pumpkin soup from my mother's recipe and it was nirvana. Lots of onions, heavy cream, and a bit of curry powder. Then she turned vegetarian, and the next time she made it from vegetable broth instead of chicken broth, and coconut milk instead of cream. It was not that good. I noticed Giertz using coconut milk, so she may have the same problem. -Thanks, Edward!

See more of Simone Giertz's projects.

In the 1820s, Japanese artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi illustrated a series of prints called Water Margin featuring warriors covered in artful tattoos. The characters were based on historic fiction, but the colorful full-body tattoos were a detail that he added. Other artists continued the practice. Later, people started getting their bodies inked in this manner. You might have thought that art imitates life, but in this case it's the other way around. While there may have been Japanese men with large, colorful tattoos before Kuniyoshi, evidence shows that most tattoos were small and discreet before Water Margin became so popular. Sarah E. Thompson, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the author of the new book Tattoos in Japanese Prints. She talked to Collectors Weekly about Kuniyoshi's tattooed warriors.    

Collectors Weekly: What types of tattoos did Kuniyoshi depict?

Thompson: Lions and peonies were very common, and this gave the warriors a mildly exotic look since, of course, there were no lions in Japan, or in China either, for that matter. You see them in Buddhist art because that ultimately came from India where there are real lions, but for the Japanese at this time, they were almost imaginary animals used as symbols of courage.

Dragons were also very popular, and other mythical creatures like giant snakes. Often a hero is depicted fighting a monster. There’s another story that crops up a lot about a diving woman who steals a jewel back from the Dragon King, and you see her swimming along, being chased by water creatures. Occasionally, you see something like a courtesan in her full elaborate costume, parading down the street, but that is a bit unusual. Usually, it’s something more violent, something with a lot of action.

Read the rest of the interview with Thompson and learn about the rise of full-body tattoos in Japan at Collectors Weekly.

Take a step beyond the beautiful patterns and massive displays of dominos knocking each other down. Get ready to keep your cursor over the pause button, because through every step of this video, you'll be saying, "Wait, what just happened?" In this video, dominos fall in ways that make you appreciate the physics of falling.  

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Domino masters Hevesh5 (previously) and Kaplamino (previously) spent months working on this video collaboration, and it shows. -via The Kid Should See This

The American Frog Canning Company is a business name you'd expect to be a joke, like a company that would sell antiques or gag gifts. But it was real, and they sold frog legs. The company was founded by Albert Broel, and did really well in a niche business. But the supply of frogs brought in by hunters couldn't keep up with the demand. So Broel wrote a book on how to raise frogs for fun and profit, and advertised the idea of frog farming. In the 1930s, when so many people were desperate for income, this seemed like a wonderful business opportunity.

Broel was on the leading edge of what The New Yorker once called “the frog-farm craze of the thirties.” Newspapers across the country mentioned of the numerous letters they’d received asking for more information about raising frogs, and shared stories about frog entrepreneurs, from “society women” in Tennessee to a Japanese frog-raiser in Los Angeles. After Louisiana, Florida had perhaps the next most ambitious frog-farming operations. One, Southern Industries Inc., offered shares to northern investors in order to expand more quickly.

Among all these frog-minded people, Broel was a giant, “the nation’s largest individual producer of frog legs,” the Central Press reported, and a genius promoter of his product. He canned frog legs and “frog à la king,” and dreamed up recipes for Giant Frog Gumbo, American Giant Bullfrog Pie, Barbecued Giant Bullfrog Sandwiches, Giant Bullfrog Omelet, Giant Bullfrog Pineapple Salad, and more.

But like many get-rich-quick schemes, the one who profited the most was Broel. He created a supply of frogs for his canning business, and he was making money teaching others how to raise frogs. Meanwhile, many investors found that raising frogs is not as easy as they were led to believe. Read about the frog farm craze of the 1930s at Atlas Obscura.

They say history is written by the victors, but that ain't necessarily so. In the United States, the education of children is a responsibility of the individual states, and this shows up most obviously in how the history of our Civil War is taught. If you are of a certain age, what you learned was largely dependent on which state you were in.  

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Vox takes a look at how a deliberate push for "The Lost Cause" by a group called the United Daughters of the Confederacy affected educational materials that have shaped opinions for decades ...and left effects we still feel 150 years after the war.  

In the US, we celebrate August 17 as Black Cat Appreciation Day. In the UK, October 27 is National Black Cat Day, so Simon Tofield and veterinarian Nicky Treverrow of Cat's Protection made a video about black cats. In Britain, black cats are not considered particularly unlucky -or else the populace is not particularly superstitious. However, black cats in shelters still get the short end of the adoption stick.  

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Why don't people select black cats for adoption? Because it's hard to see their facial expressions compared to brightly colored cats. A cat's personality come out in body language anyway, so don't write off the possibility of a wonderful pet when you see a black cat. Tofield lets us in on a secret: both the cat and the kitten in his cartoons are based on real black cats. As usual, this Simon's Cat Logic video is followed by a classic Simon' Cat cartoon.

The 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds preceded the rise of the world wide web, but it foreshadowed our modern sensibilities by at least temporarily making nerdery (or is it nerdism?) cool. The movie fed revenge fantasies for millions of non-jocks who had been shamed or even bullied for not fitting in. Although the film's treatment of women means it will never be remade, many remember the movie fondly for its overall concept. And it had some lasting effects.   

8. Lambda Lambda Lambda actually became a real fraternity.

The fraternity was actually created in 2006 at the University of Connecticut.

7. Poindexter’s glasses were so thick that the actor couldn’t see and had to be led around.

So a lot of those scenes where it really doesn’t look like he knows where he’s going or what he’s doing he’s not really acting.

Read more trivia about Revenge of the Nerds at TVOM.

The curse of the Hope Diamond supposedly affects anyone in possession of the gem. Legend has it that Jean-Baptiste Tavernier stole a much larger blue diamond from the eye of a Hindu statue, and Hindu priests conferred the curse. The 115-carat diamond called the Tavernier Blue was later cut down to the 45-carat Hope Diamond. And terrible things befell those who owned it -or even touched it.

9. EVALYN WALSH MCLEAN

Evalyn Walsh McLean was a spoiled heiress who lived a charmed life ... until she bought the Hope Diamond. She happily wore the diamond, and there are even stories that she would affix the jewel to her dog's collar and let him wander around the apartment with it. But wearing the Hope Diamond came at a steep price: First her mother-in-law died, her son died at the age of nine, her husband left her for another woman and later died in a mental hospital, her daughter died of a drug overdose at 25, and she eventually had to sell her newspaper, The Washington Post, and died owing huge debts. Evalyn's surviving kids sold the diamond to Harry Winston. Nine years later, Winston mailed the gem to the Smithsonian for $2.44 in postage and $155 in insurance.

10. JAMES TODD

James Todd, the mailman who delivered the diamond to the Smithsonian, apparently had his leg crushed in a truck accident shortly thereafter. He also suffered a head injury in a separate accident. Oh, also, his house burned down.

Is the Hope Diamond really cursed? It's possible that there were people who came in contact with it and never had any bad luck. Then again, bad things happen to everyone sooner or later. Read about the rest of the 10 victims of the Hope Diamond curse at Mental Floss. 

(Image credit: Smithsonian Institution Archives)

Australian musician Kirin J. Callinan's song "Big Enough" was released in September. It quickly piqued the attention of the internet, thanks to the sequence below. Fourteen seconds into it, I knew it had to be shared, even before I knew anything else about it.

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The whistler is Molly Lewis, and the raging cowboy is Jimmy Barnes. This audio interlude has been remixed into many familiar video sequences for maximum comedic effect. Check out some of them in this video.

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If you enjoyed that, check out compilation two here. There will likely be a volume three soon. -via Metafilter

Never tell your plans to the internet. That goes double about changing your personal appearance. You'll get a variety of opinions from friends, colleagues, and total strangers. Some of those comments will elicit a response in the back of your mind that could be expressed as "Don't tell me what to do!" And then a change in plans. That's apparently what happened to Chris Hallbeck of Maximumble. That long, flowing hair does look good, at least on a black and white stick figure.

Sury, Noel, Raon, Iz, and Soul are a family of Scottish fold cats in South Korea. One particularly static-y day, their human decides to annoy them with balloons that stick to their fur. The cats are somewhat bumfuzzled. And a bit annoyed.

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Can you imagine how bumfuzzled they'd be if they knew about the speech balloons, too? -via Tastefully Offensive