Trick-or-treating as a kid in a small town, I always knew which houses were going to give out the full-size candy bars. I also knew which houses had homemade popcorn balls, peanut-butter fudge, and cookies. One old lady would invite us inside to select our treat from a huge table of candy she made. No one gives out homemade treats anymore, due to the fear of being accused of tampering. But does anyone give out full-size candy bars at Halloween now? Since candy manufacturers started offering "fun size" candies, that's what kids get. I don't even hand out chocolate. For one thing, chocolate is too tempting to save for Halloween. For another thing, I figured every parent is going to confiscate the chocolate from their kids' treat bags, just like I did. This is the latest comic from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.
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Just like two young brothers do, the ferrets Atlas and Orion squabble over their water dish. We know it's just a sibling rivalry, as neither one of them were hurt.
First they chase and slap each other, then one tries to drown the other in the bowl. Then they wrestle for a while. Who won? If you ask the ferrets, they would probably both claim victory. Just like brothers. -via Tastefully Offensive
David Orr made this apple pie for a local competition. He spelled out "No Spiders in Here" with the top crust. Would you trust this pie? Admit it, you hadn't thought about the possibility of spiders in the pie until you got the assurance of their absence. It's like trying not to think about an elephant.
Methinks this pie doth protest too much
— Jessica Eith (@gyozammm) October 15, 2017
Orr's pie won second place in the appearance category. We don't know if this was the one that beat it.
So the funny thing was, this was another pie in the contest! pic.twitter.com/3uOTPjJEU7
— David Orr (@anatotitan) October 15, 2017
While this is a clever idea for the Halloween season, I want to do it for Thanksgiving or Christmas, when no one would be expecting it. -via Boing Boing
The Nicholas Sparks romance novel The Notebook was made into a movie in 2004, starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. The two Canadians played South Carolinians who fall in and out and in love. Gosling was fairly unknown at the time, and McAdams cemented her acting reputation by playing a character quite different the one she played in Mean Girls earlier that same year. If you like The Notebook, you'll want to read some trivia about the movie.
8. Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams didn’t get along during filming.
They would actually have shouting fits that the crew and cast had to endure since they just could not agree on anything.
7. Gosling apprenticed with a cabinet maker for a couple of months before shooting the film.
He did this to build a bit of muscle and get into the part of Noah, who was a carpenter.
Read the rest of the list of things about The Notebook at TVOM.
Tye Lombardi (previously at Neatorama) went to great lengths for a special effect Halloween recipe. These Alien Facehugger Pudding Cups have edible Alien eggs and facehuggers, they fizz, they glow in the dark, and they taste good! The instructions are pretty involved, because it's an art project as well as a food recipe. These eggs are made to impress. At least she uses instant pudding and pre-made pie crust. You can use cooked pudding and make your own crust from scratch if you want. If you make these, be sure to take plenty of photographs before you let anyone eat them!
If this recipe is too complex for your lifestyle, you can just enjoy the images of the finished product. However, the components of the recipe will be handy to learn, like how to make pastry glue, the techniques for sculpting pie crust, and the magic of B-2 tablets. Check out the entire process at the Necro Nom-nom-nomicon.
Margaretha Zelle was a Dutch woman who became the exotic dancer Mata Hari after she lived in the Dutch East Indies with her first husband. She became a sensation in Europe, grew fabulously wealthy, and charmed many lovers in the early 20th century.
As Mata Hari aged and her dancing career began to wind down, she was still in demand as a courtesan and enjoyed the company of rich and powerful men. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 did not alter her extravagance. She seemed not to grasp that ordinary people resented her ostentatious lifestyle while French families were doing without basics: coal, clothing, and foodstuffs. They were sending their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons to be killed in the war while she continued to live in comfort and plenty.
Mata Hari continued to travel, which brought her to the attention of the counterespionage world. The fall of 1915 found her in The Hague, where the exotic dancer was paid a visit by Karl Kroemer, the honorary German consul of Amsterdam. He offered her 20,000 francs—equivalent to $61,000 in today’s currency—to spy for Germany. She accepted the funds, which she viewed as repayment for her furs, jewels, and money the Germans had seized when war broke out. Even so, she did not accept the job.
So Mata Hari was paid to be a German spy, but never spied for them. Later, she was recruited to spy for the French, but was never paid, nor was her efforts taken seriously. It was the French military that arrested and convicted her for spying for the Germans. An article at National Geographic explains how Mata Hari's trial was more about her immoral lifestyle than her actual crimes. -via Digg
A fifth grade class is studying World War II. One homework assignment was to define some of the terms they learned in class. This student, a cousin of redditor LeBronJameson, used Google Search to come up with the answers. Sometimes that helps; sometimes you get busted, especially if you didn't pay attention at all in the classroom. I hope he/she learned to double check and maybe get a second source. -via reddit
In 1972, you'd think that any music festival organizer would try to learn from the lessons of Woodstock. But Tom Duncan and Bob Alexander deliberately set out to stage an event bigger than Woodstock in southern Indiana on Labor Day weekend. The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, Santana, the Allman Brothers, and Black Sabbath were booked. They expected 55,000 people.
But the people of Chandler, a tiny town in southern Indiana, were galled at the prospect of tens of thousands of unwashed ne’er-do-wells descending upon their bucolic utopia. Less than a week before the event, Mayor Russell Lloyd officially barred the festival from taking place within city limits. With flower children from all over the Midwest already arriving, the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival seemed doomed before it had even begun.
The courts, according to Marley Brant in Join Together: Forty Years of the Rock Music Festival, told Duncan and Alexander they couldn’t hold the festival in Indiana. So the men rushed to find a new venue, while acts like Rod Stewart and Black Sabbath began to cancel. The venue they found — a day before doors were scheduled to open — was Bull Island, a peninsula of swampy fields situated on either side of a changing bend in the Wabash River about 50 miles away. Although technically part of Illinois, it was only accessible through Indiana, making Bull Island a lawless wasteland.
A quarter million people showed up. That wasn't as many as attended Woodstock, but the festival certainly outdid Woodstock in bad planning and poor execution. Read what a mess the Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival (better known now as the Bull Island Festival) became at Ozy.
(Image credit: University of Southern Indiana)
We had a video last year about New Mexico's musical road that plays "America the Beautiful." It sounds really nice. California tried the same stunt with "The William Tell Overture," but it didn't quite turn as as well. Tom Scott took a road trip to Lancaster to explain why.
Yeah, that sounds pretty bad, and the story of how it happened is even worse. -via Tastefully Offensive
Astronomers announced today that they have detected a spark that was produced when two neutron stars collided. The spark plus the gravitational waves produced by the collision are evidence of a massive explosion. The gravitational wave evidence of such collisions (possibly by black holes colliding) has been observed before, but the event detected on August 17th of this year was the first time such an event was accompanied by a flash, which indicates it was caused by neutron stars instead of black holes. The event is called GW170817 after the date, but is described as "a Rosetta stone for astronomy."
Scientists announced Monday they have observed gravitational waves for the fifth time—and they’ve seen the light from the cosmic crash that produced them. The waves came from the collision of two neutron stars in a galaxy called NGC 4993, located about 130 million light-years from Earth.
Neutron stars are strange, mysterious objects, the collapsed cores of stars that exploded in spectacular fashion—supernovae—and died. These stars measure about the size of a metropolitan city, but have about the same mass as our sun. Astronomers had long predicted that when two neutron stars collide, the resulting explosion would produce electromagnetic radiation, in the form of optical light. The afterglow would shine bright enough to be seen through powerful telescopes, the first visible proof of a source of gravitational waves, provided the latter could also be detected.
The resulting explosion is called a "kilonova," which is 1,000 times brighter than a supernova. Physicists believe such collisions are what produced some of the heavier elements of the universe, like gold. Read more about the kilonova at the Atlantic.
You can watch a video about the discovery here.
When you have a day in which everything seems to go wrong, remember that one day Cliff Judkins had in 1963. As a member of the Marine All Weather Fighter Squadron 323, Lt. Judkins was piloting his F-8 Crusader jet across the Pacific en route from California to Hawaii on the first leg of his assignment to Atsugi, Japan. He refueled mid-flight, and then everything fell apart. There was an explosion. Fuel spilled all over the plane, which caught fire. Ordered to eject, he found the ejection seat release did not work. The alternate release procedure did not work, either. He knew he had to exit the plane on his own. Then things got worse.
Then I stood up in the seat and put both arms in front of my face. I was sucked out harshly from the airplane. I cringed as I tumbled outside the bird, expecting the tail to cut me in half, but thank goodness, that never happened! In an instant I knew I was out of there and uninjured.
I waited . . . and waited . . . until my body, hurtling through space, with the 225 knots of momentum started to decelerate. I pulled the D-ring on my parachute, which is the manual way to open the chute if the ejection seat does not work automatically. I braced myself for the opening shock. I heard a loud pop above me, but I was still falling very fast. As I looked up I saw that the small pilot chute had deployed. (This small chute is designed to keep the pilot from tumbling until the main chute opens.) But, I also noticed a sight that made me shiver with disbelief and horror! The main, 24-foot parachute was just flapping in the breeze and was tangled in its own shroud lines. It hadn’t opened! I could see the white folds neatly arranged, fluttering feebly in the air.
“This is very serious,” I thought.
Indeed. Judkins survived the 15,000-foot fall and landed in the Pacific …but he was seriously injured and his survival kit was gone. Read the story of Judkins' fall at the USS Los Angeles website. -via Metafilter
Walden Grove High School in Sahuarita, Arizona, had a pep rally to gear students up for homecoming. The school's dance team did a great routine with a Wizard of Oz theme.
Sure, it's a cheesy idea you'd expect from a high school choreographer, but these kids display some seriously fancy footwork to some truly clever song selections. This may put a smile in your Monday. -via Boing Boing
Ah, life inside the bubble, where the world is divided into two distinct groups: those with agree with us, and those who don't. The internet was supposed to open up the world to global communication, a sharing of ideas. But it also allowed us to limit our communications to like-minded individuals and organizations, because no matter how obscure those beliefs are, you'll find someone on the internet to validate them. So how can we handle those with opposing views?
1. Ignore them. That's what the bubble is for, so you can stay safe inside it and have your beliefs reinforced instead of challenged.
2. Convince yourself your opponents are mentally or psychologically impaired, like this guy.
3. Argue with them. It's not going to change minds, but that's what a lot of folks do.
4. Tell yourself that all viewpoints are equally valid. They are not.
5. Remember the Serenity Prayer.
This is the latest comic from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
'Tis the season …that everyone is re-watching the movie Star Wars: The Force Awakens to brush up on the narrative before Star Wars: The Last Jedi hits movie theaters. I used that as an excuse to watch it last night. But if you are a serious Star Wars fan, you'll easily recognize this pumpkin as a Rathtar, the large carnivorous creatures Han Solo was smuggling when he first encountered Ray and Finn.
Now these aliens can be part of your Halloween! Put this Rathtar-O’-Lantern on your porch and you'll be able to distinguish dedicated Star Wars fans from the casually-costumed by their reaction. However, if they think it's Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors, that's okay, too. You'll find complete instructions for making this jack-o-lantern at Star Wars.
It's hard to believe now, but the 1983 comedy Mr. Mom was a "fish out of water" movie that portrayed a man who stayed home with his young children while his wife went to work. Gasp! Placed in the context of its time, the movie was quite funny, and established Michael Keaton as a comedy star for the rest of the decade. That may also be hard to fathom for younger audiences who know him only from Batman or Birdman. For those of us who recall the funny and strangely groundbreaking movie Mr. Mom, here's some behind-the-scenes trivia.
10. Michael Keaton turned down a role in Splash for this film.
Which would you rather see him, a mermaid movie or a film in which he had to assume the role of mom for a while?
7. This movie came about after the director had to look after his own kids.
Your perspective on family life definitely changes when you have to take on a different role than you’re used to.
Read the rest of the trivia list on Mr. Mom at TVOM.