The following is an article from Uncle John's OLD FAITHFUL 30th Anniversary edition.

Do you believe in ghosts? Paris is loaded with them. Here are a few famous spots in the City of Light where believers claim you’re likely to encounter some spirited residents.

THE LOUVRE

Every year, millions of people visit this museum to see the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and other masterpieces. The building dates to the 12th century, when it served as a fortress for Philip II. Since then, the grounds have borne witness to wars, plagues, and other calamities, which is one reason why the Louvre is considered by ghost hunters to be the most haunted place in France. Since it was converted into a museum in 1793, visitors and staff have reported spectral orbs, mysterious shadows, and human-looking figures lingering among the artworks.

French legend also tells of a gnomelike ghoul dressed in red that often appears near the Louvre as a harbinger of national tragedy. Often referred to as “the Little Red Man,” the spirit is supposedly capable of offsetting impending doom… for the right price. If the tales are true, he’s bargained with French rulers including Henry IV, Marie Antoinette, and Napoleon, who failed to heed the Little Red Man’s advice and suffered the consequences at the Battle of Waterloo. The museum’s other ghosts are said to include the spirits of French soldiers and prisoners who were once held captive in its dungeon.

NOTRE DAME

Imagine this: You are working on a horror film, and need a skeleton. You borrow one from a guy you know. It doesn't look authentic enough, so you dress it up a little. The 1978 George Romero film Dawn of the Dead turns out to be a success, and you are proud of your work. Then a few years later, you find out that the skeleton you used was not a plastic prop, but a real human skeleton! See, the skeleton had been sold to a costume shop, which offered it for rent.

In a strange twist of fate, a police officer visited the shop one day looking for a costume and spotted the skeleton, convinced that it was the real deal. Oddly enough, it was the mummified ‘skin’ hanging off of the bones that tipped the officer off, though the faux flesh was actually applied by Savini on the Dawn set, made from a mixture of rubber, cotton and Rice Krispies cereal. A testament to Savini’s talents, to say the very least!

Authorities arrived at the shop and confiscated the skeleton, which the coroner identified as being the remains of a woman in her mid-30s, who had died of unknown causes. Apparently, the woman had passed away 100 years prior, and nobody is quite sure how her body ended up being passed around from person to person, thought to be either a prop decoration or a teaching tool.

While the police did not suspect foul play, they investigated the history of the skeleton anyway. Read the entire story of the discovery and what happened to the skeleton afterward.  -via Strange Remains

In the DC comics universe, Batman has recently become engaged to Selena Kyle (Catwoman). We don't know if they will actually go through with it, but if something prevents the nuptials, there's bound to be some evil mad scientist or super villain involved. Of course, a wedding is always good for ratings, or comic book sales in this case. Batman has taken a walk down the aisle, or come close to it, many times over his almost-80-year history. He's been spotted marrying Kathy Kane, Vicki Vale, Julie Madison, Selina Kyle, Lois Lane, and Wonder Woman.

The Batman and Wonder Woman of the Brave and the Bold animated universe nearly got married in All-New Batman Brave and the Bold #4, having been hit with a spell from Eros, the Greek god of attraction, that makes them fall for each other. The two break out of the spell thanks to Diana’s lasso of truth, but decide to plan a lavish wedding anyway... and use it as a trap to draw out a bunch of supervillains—who couldn’t resist attacking the wedding of Wonder Woman and Batman!—that they then proceed to beat the snot out of.  

Batman went to the altar with many of those famous brides more than once, plus a few other less memorable characters. So far, they've all been stopped at the last minute, annulled, or occurred in a dream or an in alternate universe. Read the short versions of each of Batman's marriages at io9.

The Food Network has a recipe for peanut butter sandwiches. It involves parchment paper, a rolling pin, and kitchen shears. And the prep time is three hours and five minutes. The idea is that you can, I don't know, make better sandwiches by preparing frozen slices of peanut butter ahead of time, then just plop one on a piece of bread …and then wait for it to thaw. While the recipe itself got 5.5 stars out of six, the comments are priceless.  

This is a real life saver. Who has time to get a butter knife and spread peanut butter in the morning. Better to roll it out the night before and using kitchen scissors (but not a butter knife! Burn in hell, butter knife) cut a slab of frozen peanut butter instead.

And even more so on Facebook, where you can see a video of how it's done.

She must be one of those people from infomercials who can't pour milk, and find themselves in an avalanche of Tupperware falling from their cabinets.

I've never met a soul who rips the bread with peanut butter.

-via Mashable

If black cats are bad luck, then this kitten has already used all his bad luck up. However, it was good luck that a geologist working nearby heard him mew. The kitten had fallen 25 feet down a hole in Venice, California. No one knew how long he'd been down there.

The Los Angeles area’s Specialized Mobile Animal Rescue Team (SMART) was called in to rescue the kitten. SMART rescuers Ernesto Poblano and Felix Lopez used an infrared camera attached to the end of a long pole to investigate the pipe and find the kitten. Once it was spotted, and the rescuers assessed the animal’s physical surroundings, they made a plan to safely remove the kitten from the pipe.

They sent down another pole with a camera and a loop attached to grab the kitten. Watch a video of the rescue at National Geographic News.

You know Chris Poole. He has the cats named Cole and Marmalade (previously at Neatorama). He's gotten himself into a career advocating for cats. Poole visited the Emoya Big Cat Sanctuary in South Africa and met a lioness named Serabie who loves to play fetch.

(YouTube link)

To be fair, Serabie doesn't usually bring the stick back to whoever threw it -the would be dangerous- but she does love to chase a thrown stick and chew it to pieces. She's also pretty good at climbing trees, too, just like a house cat. A house cat that could have you for dinner if she chose. -via Tastefully Offensive

Did you know that it is illegal to photograph the Eiffel Tower at night? Taking pictures of the Paris landmark is perfectly fine during the day, but not at night. Or, to be realistic, you can't take photos of the tower at night and use them for commercial purposes. The reasoning is bound up in weird copyright laws.

(YouTube link)

It never occurred to me that a building could be copyrighted. Sure, I understand that you can't just design and build a building by copying some other architect's work, but taking a picture should be okay. And it is, in most places. But not France.  -via Laughing Squid

Have you ever sat down with a nice healthy meal, low in fat and full of vitamins and fiber, and become so depressed halfway through your meal that you decided you weren't hungry? You know what's good for you, and you make decisions on what to eat in the future. When the future becomes now, you find out that you're only human. You can only push a tongue so far before he fights back. This is the latest comic from The Awkward Yeti.

When the movie The Sting came out in 1973, I was pretty excited to see it, since Paul Newman and Robert Redford looked really good in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Sting was charming in its dedication to the 1930s movie aesthetic. The plot was complicated (to a 14-year-old), but believable since it was based on a true story. And Newman and Redford still looked good. If you enjoyed The Sting, you'll want to learn some trivia about the movie. Some of it is painful.

7. Robert Shaw had to incorporate a knee injury into his role.

The actor took a bad spill on a wet patch of ground before filming and as a result tore all the ligaments in his knee. He had to add a hobbling walk to his character to keep it looking natural.

5. Robert Redford broke his thumb before filming and had to work around it.

He broke his thumb during a skiing incident and as a result had to find a way to use his hand without further injuring his thumb.

Read the rest of the trivia list about The Sting at TVOM.

John Banvard is the most successful American artist you've never heard of, probably because his chosen medium was a 19th-century show business gimmick. Banvard was a talented painter at the time when panorama exhibitions were hot. The shows were mechanical moving pictures, in which a canvas painted with interesting scenes was scrolled in front of an audience. Banvard painted and sold these scenes, but he wanted to become his own boss, so he decided to create the biggest and best panorama of them all: a production showing the entire Mississippi River.

In the spring of 1842, he set off in a skiff to capture on canvas some 1200 miles of river, from St. Louis to New Orleans. It took him two years of dealing with blistering heat and yellow fever in the summer, rain and cold in the winter. While he worked, he made a threadbare living by selling and trading whatever small items he could find. It was an arduous adventure, but he did it, and when he was finished, he knew that what he had was very, very good. It may not quite have been, as the advertisements boasted, three miles long, but it came damn close. It was the largest painting in the world.

His next necessity was to create an entirely new system of spools and levers capable of handling this unprecedentedly huge canvas. He succeeded so well that he patented the device. Finally, in 1844, he was able to present his leviathan of a panorama in Louisville. He accompanied the exhibit with his own narration, giving highly-colored but immensely entertaining anecdotes about his travels down the river. He was not only a born panorama painter, but a natural showman. Within a few days, it was a huge success.

Banvard's panorama later went to Boston, New York, and London, where crowds flocked to see it. Banvard became one of the richest men in America, so he built a huge mansion on Long Island and retired from showing his panoramas. But he had other interests, and managed to blow his entire fortune. Read the many ways John Banvard destroyed his bank account and his legacy at Strange Company. Hint: P.T. Barnum was involved.

Every state has places that are said to be haunted by the spirits of those who met an untimely death. Some are legends that grow in the telling while others are enhanced by a historical record of the tragic and violent deaths. And we imagine that some were just made up out of whole cloth. But they are fun to tell people who visit your area. Here's one from Mississippi:

At the center of the historic section of Glenwood Cemetery, Yazoo City’s public burial grounds, there’s a grave surrounded by a chain link fence. Local lore claims that the grave belonged to a witch who lived along the Yazoo River, who used to lure fishermen to the shore to torture them. When the Yazoo County sheriff came to arrest her, she fled into the swamp and fell into quicksand. The sheriff found her half sunk. Before she drowned, she swore to take revenge on Yazoo City. No one thought much of her threat, but they fenced in her grave just in case. Then, on May 25, 1904, a fire nearly wiped out the entire city, spreading quickly on unusually fierce winds. After the fire, Yazoo City residents found the chain link around the witch’s grave cut open.

How does your state's scariest ghost story stack up against that one? Read a ghost tale from each of the 50 states at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flickr user Natalie Maynor)

In 1953, a spate of one-eyed sheep baffled farmers and scientists alike. Almost 60 years later, in 2012, the result of the investigation gave us a new skin cancer treatment. Tien Nguyen connected the seemingly unrelated dots from one event to the other in this TED-Ed lesson.

(YouTube link)

If cyclops sheep isn't weird enough, the story includes hedgehog genes and a protein called smoothened. But it will all make sense as you watch it. And you'll gain more appreciation for all those lab people who spend years working to isolate one protein and will never get credit for curing cancer. -via Laughing Squid

They did the monster math. What's the difference? One has variance, the other has scariance. One is bell curve, the other a boo curve. I think this may be an example of Boo-lean algebra. And it explains why math can be so frightening for some folks.  -via reddit

How superstitious are you? Did you want to go back to bed when you realized that today is Friday the 13th? Would you turn down a job if it meant working on the 13th floor? Would you change your route if you saw a black cat cross your path? Strangely, black cats are considered good luck in the United Kingdom. And not everyone believes in those old superstitions. Whether you do or not, you'll appreciate the story of how the Savoy Hotel in London confronted a superstition and in the process gained its mascot.

The story of Kaspar, the Savoy cat, began in 1898 when another table of thirteen didn’t end very well. Woolf Joel, a South African businessman who often stayed at the Savoy hotel, had a dinner party for some friends. There was supposed to be fourteen of them, but at the last minute one of them was unable to attend. This reduced them to a party of thirteen – an unlucky number. They enjoyed their meal, but at the end, one of the guests brought up the superstition that the first one to leave a table of thirteen would die within a year. They all laughed a bit nervously, then Mr. Joel, the host, got up saying that he didn’t believe in superstitions and that he would gladly be the first to leave.

He left for Johannesburg the next day where he was shot and died within a few weeks. This made people believe even more in the “unlucky thirteen superstition.” The Savoy Hotel was convinced too, and they wanted to make sure it never happened again at their establishment.

The hotel staff eventually came up with a clever workaround. Read the rest of the story at The Curious Rambler.

For a long time, both scientists and the general public assumed that skin color evolved to adapt to local conditions. While that idea hasn't been completely debunked, genetic research tells us skin color is a lot more complicated. Until recently just about all genetic research on skin color came from studies done on people of European descent. A new study, led by geneticist Sarah Tishkoff at the University of Pennsylvania, studied the genomes of over a thousand volunteers from ten ethnic groups in Africa, the most genetically diverse continent. The results upend the traditional idea that dark skin evolved to protect a person from the sun near the equator, while light skin evolved further north to let in scarce sunlight for vitamin D production.

But most of the variants that Tishkoff’s team identified, for both light and dark skin, have an ancient African origin. They likely arose in hominids like Homo erectus long before the dawn of our own species, and have coexisted in balance for hundreds and thousands of years. In many cases, the older variant is responsible for lighter skin, not darker. That’s consistent with an idea from Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist from Pennsylvania State University, who thinks that the ancient ancestors of humans—much like other primates—had pale skin. “As our ancestors moved out of the forest and into the savannah, they lost their hair and evolved darker skin,” says Nick Crawford, a researcher in Tishkoff’s lab.

The study doesn't pretend to answer all questions about skin color, but it opens some doors for further research. Read more details about the genetic study at The Atlantic.   
 
(Image credit: Tishkoff Lab)