In September of 1666, the city of London burned to the ground, leaving 80,000 people homeless. This became known as the Great Fire of London. Maybe that title was given to distinguish it from all the other great fires that leveled the city in its history. In fact, London has been destroyed by fire about a dozen times, beginning when the city was only about twenty years old.

1. BOUDICEA GETS HER REVENGE // CIRCA 60 CE

After the death of her husband Prasutagus in the mid-1st century CE, lands that should rightfully have passed to the ancient British queen Boudicea and her daughters were instead claimed by the invading Roman Empire. Before then, Boadicea’s tribe, the Iceni, had been allied with the Romans, but the entire affair soured that relationship.

Enraged, Boudicea sacked the Roman city at modern Colchester and marched her army on towards London—or rather, to the newly founded Roman settlement of Londinium—and burned it to the ground. So total was Boadicea’s destruction of the city that archaeologists working the capital today can still identify a noticeable thin layer of red-brown oxidized ash on the site occupying the original settlement, and Roman coins melted together by the extreme heat have even been found along the muddy banks of the Thames.

The city was rebuilt, only to be leveled again and again by fire. Read about the destruction of six more London fires at Mental Floss. The last conflagration listed was in 1794, so we can assume that building codes and firefighting techniques are protecting the city from such widespread fire now. Knock wood.

We've seen how annoying cats can be when they're hungry, especially if they have a dinner bell. It's not so bad if you're just watching one in a video, but you have to put yourself in the place of someone who owns such a cat. Is it really worth the aggravation for a viral video? Watch the Russian cat Pusic (previously at Neatorama) order his dinner from a menu.

(YouTube link)

Pusic has to be the luckiest cat in Russia. Yeah, what you thought was going to be his dinner choice was just the appetizer! Pusic has to have everything. -via Metafilter

Bonus: Read the story of how Pusic came to live with his cat-loving family.

Sculptor Roberto Benavidez makes piñatas. His piñatas are more than just party props; they are an art form. His latest series is a set of piñatas fashioned after the characters in The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, a painting of "carnal bliss and hallucinatory weirdness."

You don't want to bash these piñatas with a stick, no matter how much candy may be inside! See more of Benavidez' piñatas at Flashbak. -Thanks, Tim!

Movie fans, here's your chance to own a Xenomorph egg, Marty McFly's self-lacing shoes, Conan the Barbarian's sword, or Indiana Jones' bullwhip -all authentic props used in the movies! The Prop Store is auctioning off some the most iconic props ever to grace the silver screen, September 26 in London. Phone and online bids will be taken. They have the Joker's suit, worn by Jack Nicholson in the 1989 movie Batman, a Star Trek red shirt, Peter Venkman's jumpsuit from Ghostbusters, spacesuits, Bond gadgets, and more -600 items in all, from a variety of collectors and Hollywood businesses. Check out the inventory for the auction here. There are twelve pages to look through. See the most famous props in the auction at Wired.  -via io9

This is an ad, but it's so darned silly you might not notice that it's also well-done. Just enjoy He-Man and Skeletor doing their thing, then you can watch it a second time to catch the details. The beginning will remind you of Terminator 2, but it quickly shifts into another very familiar movie.

(vimeo link)

"MoneySuperMarket" sounds like a check-cashing place, but it's actually a site to comparison shop for insurance in Europe. At least that's the idea I got from comments. Anyway, if you liked this, you'll enjoy the one with Skeletor dancing to "Fame," which has some footage explaining the He-Man costume, too. -via reddit

Sure, movies can be copyrighted, but did you know monsters can, too? And even a particular version of a monster? Zombies were around before George Romero's 1968 movie Night of the Living Dead, but he put his own spin on the idea. His version -shuffling corpses that menace humans in order to eat their flesh- became the zombies we see in movies like 28 Days Later, World War Z, and Zombieland, and TV shows like Z Nation and The Walking Dead. It all has to do with copyright.

(YouTube link)

YouTuber kaptainkristian (previously at Neatorama) explains how and why Romero's zombies became ubiquitous under the law of public domain. -via Tastefully Offensive

The city of Paris did not install street lanterns until the 1500s, but cemeteries across France had light hundreds of years earlier. The people of the 12th century built stone towers with platforms on top, sheltered from the wind but with openings for the light to shine out, to illuminate graveyards. Most were destroyed during the French Revolution, but around a hundred or so survive to this day. Why was a lantern in a cemetery deemed more important than lanterns in city streets?   

Superstition, perhaps?  Were these hollow towers, usually no more than two or three meters in height, built to guide the souls of the recently departed to their eternal rest?  Perhaps. It is thought that a lamp would be hoisted up at dusk to be a kind of lighthouse for souls.  It was also believed that the light emanating from these lanterns could restrict death to the confines of the graveyard, to stop its personified form seeking out new victims.

While we don't know the original purpose for the lights, these cemetery towers are sure interesting. Read more about the Lanternes des Morts and see lots of pictures at Kuriositas.

(Image credit: Jack ma)

The craze of making anything and everything taste (or smell) like a pumpkin pie is back, right on schedule, for fall 2017. Some of these products contain pumpkin, while others just have the "spice." While I can understand why you might flavor sweet things, like cookies, this way, I can't even imagine salsa with pumpkin pie spices in it.   

Yes, there really is a dog treat (actually a "vegetarian dog chew") flavored with cinnamon and ginger. I wonder if dogs really like it. There's a cat food featured, too, but it's only chicken and pumpkin soup, with no spices. That makes sense. See 36 odd products that come in the ubiquitous fall flavors at The Chive. Note there are more and more alcoholic drinks in the list every year.

What's the longest road trip in the world? To answer the question, we discount driving in circles, and limit the trip to continuous roadways, i.e. roads that are not interrupted by bodies of water. The YouTube channel Half as Interesting looks into the geography of the world's longest direct road trip, by looking at where the roads are.

(YouTube link)

While not using the exact same direct route, two Russian rally racers, Andrei Leontiev and Anna Zavershinskaya, drove from Cape San Vicente, Portugal, to Magadan, Russia, in 2014 in a Subaru Outback. They set a world record for the 16,000-kilometer trip, finishing in just over seven days (it was expected to take 15 days). You can see their video here. It's twenty minutes long and in Russian, but if you turn the auto-translate on, you may be able to follow it.

Albinism is a condition in humans and animals in which the skin lacks pigment. Who knew that plants can be albino, too? It's very rare. The picture above shows a closeup of an albino redwood tree.  

They're known as "ghost trees," and for good reason: Albino redwoods are extremely rare and nearly impossible to spot. There may be as few as 25 of these trees in the world, yet eight of them are at Henry Cowell Redwood State Park in Northern California. They lack chlorophyll and suck energy from their parent tree.

An interview at NPR tells us about the redwood ghost trees, and how their genetic diversity allows for such strange mutations. While a tree without chlorophyll cannot survive on its own, the trees at the state park have survived by grafting their roots to nearby trees. Minnesotastan explains more about natural grafting at TYWKIWDBI.

(Image credit: Cole Shatto)

Eric Weiss posts some creepy things, but this takes the cake. It's a doll that's been abandoned so long that wasps have built a nest around it! Once you are over the horror of the picture, then you can think about the motives of the person who left the doll up in a tree in the first place.

Wasps built a nest around this doll and now you can show your kids what they're getting for Xmas. #horror pic.twitter.com/LqJV1De1EJ

— Eric Weiss (@ZombieRiot) August 28, 2017

This reminds me of the hornet's nest that formed over a wooden statue. You can see a list of the reactions, replies, and some "oh, you think that's bad, well look at this one" at Distractify. -via Metafilter

The following article is reprinted from the book The Best of the Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The Godfather is considered one of the best movies ever made—the American Film Institute ranks it #3, after Citizen Kane and Casablanca. The story of how it got made is just as good.

BOOKMAKER

In 1955 a pulp-fiction writer named Mario Puzo published his first novel, The Dark Arena, about an ex-GI and his German girlfriend who live in Germany after the end of World War II. The critics praised it, but it didn’t sell very many copies.

It took Puzo nine years to finish his next novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, which told the story of an Italian immigrant named Lucia Santa who lives in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. After two bad marriages, Lucia is raising her kids alone and worries about her daughter, who has become too Americanized, and her son, who is being pulled into the Mafia.

Today The Fortunate Pilgrim is widely considered a classic work of Italian American fiction; Puzo himself considered it the best book he ever wrote. But it sold as poorly as The Dark Arena—together the two books had earned Puzo only about $6,500. By then he was 45 years old, $20,000 in debt, and tired of being broke. He wanted his next novel to be a success. “I looked around and said… I’d better make some money,” he recalled years later.

HIT MAN

Puzo figured that a story with an entire family of gangsters in it instead of only one would have more commercial appeal than The Fortunate Pilgrim had. He titled his third novel Mafia, and in a sign of how his fortunes were about to change, he received a $5,000 advance payment from the publisher. Then, after he’d completed only an outline and 114 pages, Paramount Pictures acquired the movie rights for $12,000 and agreed to pay an additional $50,000 if the movie actually got made.

Puzo’s decision to pack his story with wiseguys paid off. Mafia, by now retitled The Godfather, was a publishing phenomenon. The most successful novel of the 1970s, it spent 67 weeks on the bestseller list and sold more than 21 million copies before it even made it to the big screen.

The most populous nations in the world are China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Pakistan. However, China and India stand way out in front of the pack, with over a billion people each, while the U.S. has just over 325 million. Minute Earth looks into the reasons why. And even though the reasons are speculation, since China and India have always had more people than other countries, together they make perfect sense.

(YouTube link)

Think about it this way: the largest nations in the world by area have relatively few people: Russia and Canada (and Antarctica if it were a country). What do those nations have in common? You guessed it!  

The office Keurig is hungry, and it knows what it wants. Redditor nilicie thinks it might be possessed. The machine stands ready to receive its demands.

It was obviously hacked. Probably be someone named ALF, according to comics_outta_context in a reply to lgtbyddrk's comment, "I'll feed that thing 8 cats if that's what it takes to get my morning coffee."

There have always been rumors that Keurig machines are evil. Now we know just how much.  

The name of the actual post is Who Knew? The History of Baking Powder Is Incredibly Dramatic, but I couldn't help but use the title of the Metafilter link. The development of baking powder was a game-changer for household bakers, who previously dealt with unpredictable yeast and experimental alternate leavening that might or might not work. That's the subject of the book Baking Powder Wars: The Cutthroat Food Fight that Revolutionized Cooking by food historian Linda Civitello. Jezebel talked with Civitello about the importance of baking powder.

So women were looking for something better. Some of the early things they tried interfered, they said you can’t use anything acid with this. You can’t use orange juice or lemon peel, it will negate it, everything interferes with everything. This tastes like ammonia, that one strips the paint off of floorboards. Give me something better. Women had gone as far as they could go and then scientists had to take over and cream of tartar and baking soda show up in the 1840s. That’s another mineral. It’s inert, it doesn’t care about temperature the way that yeast does. But cream of tartar and baking soda, again, had problems. If you didn’t put the cake in the oven right away—Catherine Beecher says you have to get it in immediately and you might have to try a couple of times. You can’t mix the batter and then go oh, where’s my pan? That’s another drawback.

Then you get Eben Horsford at Harvard, who’s got five daughters who are probably in the kitchen a fair amount. His treatise in 1861 on bread making—bang bang, 30 or 40 minutes, foolproof, there you go. That’s it! Absolute revolution.

The book then goes into the rights and marketing of baking powder, which is where the "wars" part comes in. Read the interview with Civitello here.  -via Metafilter