If you've got a baby bump and a Halloween party to attend, you'll want to put some extra creativity into your costume this year. This opportunity doesn't happen all that often. Check out a roundup of clever pregnancy costumes you might want to try. Most of them are a product of thinking about what spherical object one's belly might resemble, and then going with it. Instagram user isthatcarolyn went with a wrecking ball, specifically the one in Miley Cyrus' video for "Wrecking Ball." Some went in another direction. I kinda love this one.

And the winner is... #happyhalloween #costumecontest #crossfit #crossfitmom #pregnantcostume

A post shared by Elite Progression (@crossfit_mahopac) on Nov 1, 2016 at 9:27am PDT

You'd be forgiven if you thought this was just a guy who didn't want to dress up for the occasion. See 20 Genius Halloween Costume Ideas For People Who Are Pregnant at Buzzfeed.

The Wara Art Festival in Japan’s Niigata Prefecture is a showcase for art, but it's also a harvest festival. Giant sculptures are constructed of rice straw leftover for this year's rice harvest.

The Wara Art Festival all started in 2006 when the local district reached out to Musashino Art University to seek guidance on transforming their abundant amount of rice straw into art. And in 2008, the very first Wara Art Festival was held. Since then, every year the school sends art students up to Niigata to assist in creating sculptures made out of rice straw. The festivities have ended but the sculptures are on display through October 31, 2017.

In this video, watch students from Musashino Art University build one of the sculptures for 2017.   

(YouTube link)

At the end, you'll get a look at the other animals made of rice straw at the festival. -via The Kid Should See This

Barney Smith is an artist with a peculiar medium that's made him somewhat famous. He was inspired both by his career as a plumber and his father' taxidermy work to begin making art out of toilet seats. And he's been doing it for 50 years. That work has grown into a collection of 1317 decorated toilet seats displayed at Barney Smith's Toilet Seat Art Museum. The museum is in his garage in San Antonio.

He didn’t make his collection viewable to the public until 1992, when another artist saw Smith’s seats during a garage sale. After Smith showed off the the full collection, word got around. His phone started ringing off the hook.

“People demanded to see it,” he says. “It’s the people’s museum.”

It’s also the only museum of its kind in the world. His visitors come from all over that world, usually leaving behind a memento for Smith to place on a toilet seat. He has commemorative toilet seats to mark guests from Israel, Brazil, Greece, Japan, and several others.

Smith is 96 years old now, and is looking for a buyer for his collection. Not just any buyer will do; he wants someone to keep the collection together in a museum. That doesn't mean Smith is ready to retire. When the museum is gone, he will still be painting toilet seats. Read about Smith and his toilet seat museum at Atlas Obscura. You'll also see some closeups of the artworks.   

(Image credit: Flickr user juliegomoll)

The Adult Swim series Rick and Morty has just started its third season, but its already racked up a long list of well-known actors and celebrities who lent their voices to characters on the show. At this rate, it will pass up The Simpsons in guest appearances, and The Simpsons has been on TV since back in the 20th century.  But even if you've seen every episode of Rick and Morty, you might not realize who was behind those characters. Check out the list of guest voice actors on Rick and Morty at TVOM.  

Warren Buffett is a successful businessman with a net worth of around $76 billion. He is 87 years old. No one tells a man in his position what he should or shouldn't eat, and the way he eats has become legendary in his circle. A liter of Coke every day. Ice cream. Fast food for most meals. Bob Bryan decided to try eating like that for a week, just to see what it would be like.

There were some basic ground rules — eat three meals a day, don't drink alcohol, and avoid vegetables.

Overall, I just tried to maintain the general attitude by which the man himself defines his diet.

"I checked the actuarial tables, and the lowest death rate is among 6-year-olds, so I decided to eat like a 6-year-old," Buffett told Fortune. "It's the safest course I can take."

There appears to be a large gap in the logic in that statement. Buffett does not ignore logic, but he eats as he wants. Bryan did his best over a week to emulate Buffett's diet, and found it more difficult each day. He posted each day's menu, calorie consumption, and effect on his mood at Business Insider. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Value Walk)

In another example of how humans will turn any conceivable activity into a competition, behold the competitive world of birdsong. Birds sing naturally, some species more than others, but in south Asia, bird enthusiasts will train their pets to sing more melodiously and with greater range than the next bird. For many, it's a lifelong hobby. It sure beats cockfighting.

A dozen cages were suspended high up, while below men with clipboards assessed the singing. In central Jakarta contests can attract hundreds of entrants, passionate bird trainers arriving along with their white-rumped shamas, green bulbuls or hill blue flycatchers. On one level it’s a (largely male) social occasion, on another there’s a lot of prize money at stake. A ten minute video from Phuket in Thailand shows the competitors desperately encouraging their birds from the sidelines, bending the rules by gesturing, whistling or blowing kisses. A bird with potential may be worth as much as a Toyota Fortuner. In fact a belief that it’s unlucky to put a price on a bird means they are more likely to be bartered for goods such as cars. The judges, some of whom are women, are assessing melody, rhythm and volume. One contest in Phuket demands that birds sing eight specific pitches within a defined time period.

Read about the birdsong contests and see a video at The Wire. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Flickr user Adam Cohn)

The person who invented edible googly eyes should win a Nobel Prize. They are the secret to making any kind of food extra fun for kids -and adults get a kick out of them, too. Googly eyes and food coloring make this everyday bundt cake into a hairy Halloween monster! It's got three colors inside, three colors of drippy icing, and plenty of eyes all around, enough so that everyone gets at least one. See, while you look at your dessert, it will be looking back at you! Check out the recipe and icing instructions for the Monster Bundt Cake at Kitchen Fun with My 3 Sons.  -Thanks, hearsetrax!

(Image credit: Flickr user Craig Dietrich)

California’s third-largest city by area is an urban-planning disaster, a sprawl of empty grids that aspired to become a megacity—and failed. But as the desert works to reclaim the land, it’s become a mecca of another kind.

It was June in the Mojave desert and the sun was blistering. The land around me was empty, scorched, and flat, dotted by brush and the occasional piece of windswept trash. Judging by the map, the intersection where I’d stopped was a busy crossroads between two major thruways. But when I shifted into park in the middle of the road, no one honked. No one looked at me funny. I hadn’t seen another car in an hour at least.

It was probably the safest intersection in America to pull over and take a nap.

According to the map, I was surrounded by cul-de-sacs and neighborhoods. In reality, there was nothing but sand and more sand—and roads. Endless roads. Roads in all directions, marked by white fence posts and the occasional lonely pole. Some were paved. Some were dirt. Some had long ago been reclaimed by the encroaching sand.

California City, California, is the third-largest city by area in America’s third-largest state, and most of it barely even qualifies as a ghost town—a ghost town needs people to have lived there first.

California City is a ghost grid.

Caring for others is what gives our lives meaning, and keeps us going when life gets us down. Josh Marino suffered PTSD after serving in the Middle East. He got very close to committing suicide when he met a black and white kitten that gave him a reason to live.  

(YouTube link)

Once Josh was able to let others affect him, he got his life together. He attributes the beginning of his turnaround to the cat he named Scout. This is his tribute to the cat that saved his life. -via Laughing Squid

We have written instructions for producing a human skeleton from a corpse going back to 1543, which included specific steps for removing the flesh and leaving the ligaments intact. As you can imagine, it's a gruesome read. But the art of skeleton-making didn't become popular until the 17th century, when medical schools started using them to teach anatomy.  

Soon students of both art and anatomy were expected to study human skeletons as part of their training, and the public grew curious as well. By the 1660s, there was a market for them in Europe. By the 18th century, displaying human skeletons became trendy. Guerrini found a 1716 advertisement for “The Moving Skeleton,” a public attraction “which by a mechanical projection performs several very strange and surprising actions, also groans like a dying person, smoaks[sic] a Pipe of Tobacco, and blows the Candle out, as naturally as if alive.”

By this time, anatomists wanted to produce clean, white bones. One physician made sure to leave his bones out for months to bleach in the sun. Another eschewed boiling bones and instead left corpses to rot in water, changed periodically. This “maceration” technique required pulling softened flesh away from the bones and would have required a steely constitution. But the demand for skeletons was high enough that more people were taking on this job: In the early 18th century, one surgeon offered a course in skeleton-making.

Atlas Obscura has more on the history of making skeletons.

(YouTube link)

Just about every alcohol brand name comes from a real person, even Crown Royal, although that person often didn't have anything to do with developing the drink. And the ones that weren't named after a real person may surprise you. If you ever wondered where the names of your favorite whiskeys, vodkas, and other distilled beverages came from, John Green probably has that information right at his fingertips. Yeah, and some wines, too. I do have a bone to pick with one throwaway line, though. Sure, everyone in Kentucky was in the whiskey business at one time or another, but Jack Daniels is from Tennessee. However, the name origins are the subject of the latest episode of the Mental Floss List Show.
 

The winners have been announced in the 43rd annual Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. The top prize went to an image by five scientists at the Netherlands Cancer Institute showing immortalized human skin cells (HaCaT keratinocytes) expressing fluorescently tagged keratin.

The image shown here won third place for Jean-Marc Babalian of Nantes, France. It shows a living Volvox algae releasing its daughter colonies, magnified 100 times, although you will be forgiven for recognizing it as Pac-Man. See all the winning images here.

-via Business Insider

The 1968 film Rosemary's Baby brought the concept of Satan into the forefront of horror movies, a trend that continues to this day, although director Roman Polanski designed the film to have more than one interpretation. Produced by William Castle, the movie featured Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes as a couple who move into an apartment building with a history. Then things get weird. Things were weird behind the scenes, too.

According to Farrow, actor Sidney Blackmer (who played coven leader Roman Castevet) once said on set “No good will come of all this ‘Hail Satan’ business,” and apparently he wasn’t the only one who thought so. William Castle later became convinced the film was cursed. Shortly after production he suffered gallstones to such a severe extent that he required surgery. As he recovered from that illness, Rosemary’s Baby composer Krzysztof Komeda suffered an accidental fall that led to a coma and, eventually, his death. Then, in the summer of 1969, actress Sharon Tate—Polanski’s wife—was infamously murdered by the Manson Family. For Castle, it all added up.

"The story of Rosemary's Baby was happening in real life. Witches, all of them, were casting their spell, and I was becoming one of the principal players,” he later recalled.

Learn more of what went into the production of Rosemary's Baby at Mental Floss.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1946, one of the six balloons featured in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was Harold the Baseball Player. The parade was not televised back then, but among the crowd of people watching that day were several units of a Hollywood film crew shooting a movie that was to be 1947's Miracle on 34th Street. People outside of New York City got their first view of the annual parade in that movie, albeit in black and white.

Early in the movie, Susan is watching the parade from a West 77th Street apartment window, not a projection of the parade shot months earlier by a second unit, but the actual November 1946 Thanksgiving Day Parade.

When Fred Gailey (John Payne), Susan's neighbor and her mother's love interest, comments that the balloon handlers appear to be having trouble with the baseball player, Susan remarks that it was a clown last year. That wasn’t movie magic. Harold the Baseball Player had been Harold the Clown at the real parade the year before and Harold the Fireman the year before that.

So 8-year-old Natalie Wood had to nail her lines the first time in that scene, because they couldn't call the balloon back to shoot a second take. Impressive. Harold the Baseball Player will make a return to the 2017 parade. The three-story balloon has been built, this time in black and white (and shades of gray). The original Harold was made in color, but since more people saw him in the black-and-white movie than in person, this new monochrome balloon is a tribute to Miracle on 34th Street. You have to admire the idea of a black-and-white balloon in a parade broadcast in color in reference to a full-color balloon shown on black-and-white film. Read about the return of Harold, and see a video, at Mashable.

When you use Facebook Live, there's a delay of a few seconds between the event and viewing the webcast. The Irish band The Academic harnessed this delay to perform a version of their song "Bear Claws" by layering the different instruments and vocals. The looping effect starts out as just plain odd, but builds to an interesting orchestration.

(YouTube link)

-via reddit