Do you have one of these in your house? If you open it, what would you expect to find inside? Redditor salvalya posted this picture and said, "These cookies sat, untouched, on the table at work for nearly 2 weeks because it never occurred to anyone that there could be cookies inside." About 98% of the commenters on the photo just knew that there were sewing supplies inside. The other 2% admitted keeping marijuana in theirs. One person had one with sewing supplies that had been passed down for several generations in her family.
Royal Dansk cookie boxes are made of long-lasting metal and their lids fit tightly, so that pins and needles are less likely to fall out of them than other containers. All grandmas know that. You may think that it's an American thing, but people from Greece, India, Swaziland, Singapore, Sweden, France, Uruguay, and other nations all confirmed that these boxes are sewing kits. However, several Danes said that's not right; these boxes contain cookies.
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Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from history buff and Neatoramanaut WTM, who wishes to remain otherwise anonymous.
When one hears mention of the year 1888, it usually concerns something involving Jack the Ripper, but many noteworthy events other than the Whitechapel Murders occurred that year. Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear. The ballpoint pen was patented. George Eastman produced the first Kodak camera, and National Geographic magazine published its first issue. And then there was the winter of 1888, which produced The Great Blizzard of 1888, the worst in US history.
The Great Blizzard, aka “The Great White Hurricane”, was a major winter storm that adversely affected the Northeast, which became literally buried; snow in New York City alone was over fifty feet deep in places. Hundreds of deaths resulted and commerce ground to a halt. The Hudson and East Rivers froze over. As is often the case, though, good comes from bad, and the greatest effect of The Great Blizzard of 1888 was to cause New York City to construct its subway, which first opened for business in 1904.
But just two months earlier than The Great Blizzard of 1888, another major winter storm in the Midwest, the ‘Schoolhouse Blizzard’, aka ‘The Children’s Blizzard’, claimed the lives of more than 200 people, most of them schoolchildren. However, not as many children died as otherwise might have, this due to the heroic efforts of Minnie Freeman, aka Nebraska’s Fearless Maid.
Minnie Mae Freeman was born in Pennsylvania in 1868, and her family moved to Nebraska in 1871. As such, she, like other inhabitants of the Great Plains, grew up to be ‘weather-wise’. Not only is Nebraska deep in the heart of Tornado Alley, its summers can be infernal and its winters as severe as those of the Arctic. Minnie soon came to learn, as did everyone else in the Great Plains, that one didn’t live to old age by not paying attention to one’s surroundings.
Minnie was only nineteen years old when she got a job as schoolteacher in rural Mira Valley, Nebraska, teaching thirteen (or seventeen, accounts vary) children of all ages and grades in a small, isolated sod schoolhouse, the Midvale school.
NASA's Juno mission captured this image of Jupiter on July 10th, at 10,274 miles (16,535 kilometers) above the clouds. The north of the planet is to the left in the image. The image was converted from raw data by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran. What does it look like to you? The lines inside polished marble? Paint swirling in water? A fine detail of a painting by a Renaissance master? A song by Train? You can see this magnificent picture in higher resolution at NASA. -via Gizmodo
(Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran)
We are very used to the comical adventures of a typical American family, from Blondie and Dagwood in the funny papers to dozens of sitcom versions on TV. Putting jokes into everyday family life that readers could relate to was a genius move, brought on by illustrator George McManus over 100 years ago.
In 1904 George McManus ( 1884-1954) scored a job at New York World, Joseph Pulitzer’s innovative and campaigning newspaper – in 1896 the World became the first newspaper to launch a color supplement; it’s biting exposés of tenement abuses triggered housing reform. And there was McManus, who created The Newlyweds, one of the first comic strips to depict the lives of the typical American family. He was plain, thick but kind. She was good looking, well-dressed and a ditz. They had no names. They could have been any number of cartoon and sitcom couples since. When ‘Baby Snookums’ arrived, The Newlyweds became The Newlyweds and Their Baby. The prove popular and New York World compiled the cartoons in a hardcover comic book, which you can read below.
The 1907 compilation is at Flashbak, in large images. The humor is pretty basic, and revolves around the couple's pride in Snookums and their cluelessness about what to do with him. And you'll wonder how this pretty Gibson girl could give birth to such an astonishingly ugly child. -Thanks, Tim!
Unalaska, Alaska (population 4,376) is a rather small island that has an inordinate number of bald eagles. Seeing them may stir a feeling of patriotism in Americans, but for the residents of Unalaska, they are an annoyance.
Great Big Story visits Unalaska to see the birds and the people who have to deal with them. -via Tastefully Offensive
You don't have to use any of the the classic means of expression to make your feelings clear. The world is full of ways to show how you feel about someone. My husband was not all that eloquent, but I truly felt loved the day he got up and came to salt my icy back steps before daylight. That said more than all the greeting cards in the world, because he paid attention and knew what I needed. As long as you get your message across to someone who will benefit, that's what matters. This is the newest comic from Lunarbaboon.
You can always detect a Jim Steinman song by its soaring buildup to an epic vocal showcase, its length, and the fact that it always features several syllables of lyrics stuffed into one musical note. Steinman wrote and produced several hit songs for Meat Loaf, including "You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)," "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad," and "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." Those three all appeared on the album Bat Out of Hell, which catapulted Meat Loaf into stardom. But he didn't handle it very well.
According to a Q Magazine article in 1993, now available in text form on Jim Steinman’s website, Meat Loaf and Steinman’s joint record company and management team distrusted Meat Loaf’s mental stability in the early ‘80s, and initially pushed Steinman to leave the duo in hopes of writing a new hit. “He had a mental block on the new songs,” Steinman said of Meat Loaf at the time, adding that management wouldn’t let Meat Loaf rest his voice. Meat Loaf suffered from severe stress and anger and emotional issues; he then lost his operatic voice, prompting Steinman to leave the team. Meat Loaf accused his former managers of misjudging him during a particularly difficult time, which he got through emotionally by coaching little league softball games for his daughters.
Steinman had already written songs for Meat Loaf's expected followup album, one of which was "Total Eclipse of the Heart," but it wasn't to be. Meanwhile, Bonnie Tyler had seen success with her song "It's a Heartache," but did not want to be stereotyped as a quasi-country music singer. Read the story of how Tyler got the song and made it a classic at Atlas Obscura.
Oh yeah, Tyler will perform the song on a Royal Caribbean cruise ship as the solar eclipse occurs on Monday.
(Image credit: Foto: Stefan Brending /
The 2013 horror film The Conjuring scared audiences enough to make back twice its production budget in its first weekend. It went on to be very profitable as well as frightening. If you enjoyed the movie, you'll want to read trivia from behind the scenes.
8. It was a work in progress for 20 years.
There was actually a bidding war for the movie that was between six different studios. Before and after that the fate of the film was stuck in limbo.
7. It had a different title to begin with.
Originally the title was The Warren Files before producers finally settled on the more well-known name.
There's a lot more to learn about The Conjuring in a list at TVOM.
How do you select the most iconic movie for each state in the US? Some are pretty easy, because there aren't that many movies set in Rhode Island, Delaware, or West Virginia, so you go with what you have. Other movies were chosen because the locale is very much a part of the story, like how A River Runs Through It says a lot about Montana. That said, someone should really make a new movie about Georgia to replace Deliverance. Still, you could argue all day over what movie should represent California, New York, and Washington, DC, since there are so many to choose from. Entertainment Weekly did their best with this new map of the United States with an iconic movie representing each state. How did they do with your state?
This is the story of two who are so clueless that you have to laugh. Dog takes baby's cracker. Baby realizes cracker is gone. Baby cries. Dog cries in sympathy. The world makes no sense.
You have to admit, it's both cute and funny. -via Digg
Sarah has been a bridesmaid five times, which is more than anyone should ever have to endure. This time, she's a guest! It's a liberating experience, as you can see in this video from comedy troupe Above Average. It contains NSFW language.
The things bridesmaids are expected to do these days is just plain crazy. The expenses are outrageous, the events are too numerous, the duties are onerous, and doing it more than once in a lifetime is just too much. The website for the wedding Sarah didn't attend (except for the reception) would easily be confused with real ones. -via Tastefully Offensive
(Image credit: Leszek Kozlowski)
A brief history of humans trying to chill out by any means necessary.
Life in the past was all about blood, sweat, and tears. But mostly sweat. Before the invention of air conditioning, summers felt like one big Bikram yoga studio: hot, sticky, and uncomfortable.
Consider the summer of 1896. It was too infernal for New Yorkers to sleep in their apartments, so many spent their nights snoozing on rooftops and fire escapes- with restless sleepers rolling off the roofs and falling to their deaths (the heat wave’s death toll in New York: 1,500). In an attempt to keep people cool -and alive- an obscure police commissioner named Teddy Roosevelt organized police stations to give out free blocks of ice.
Until the 1920s, much of America shut down entirely when things got too hot, including government: The capital would close its doors. Broadway theaters also went dark, giving birth to summer stock productions held outdoors. Across the pond, to keep babies cool, London moms bought the “baby cage,” a little box they’d attach outside the window of their apartment, dangling babies stories above the pavement.
On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union tested the largest nuclear bomb ever made, the Tsar Bomba. It was deployed 13,000 feet above the Barents Sea north of the USSR. The energy it released was estimated to be equivalent to 57 megatons of TNT, and sent a shockwave around the world three times.
In order to give the two planes a chance to survive – and this was calculated as no more than a 50% chance – Tsar Bomba was deployed by a giant parachute weighing nearly a tonne. The bomb would slowly drift down to a predetermined height – 13,000ft (3,940m) – and then detonate. By then, the two bombers would be nearly 50km (30 miles) away. It should be far enough away for them to survive.
Tsar Bomba detonated at 11:32, Moscow time. In a flash, the bomb created a fireball five miles wide. The fireball pulsed upwards from the force of its own shockwave. The flash could be seen from 1,000km (630 miles) away.
The bomb’s mushroom cloud soared to 64km (40 miles) high, with its cap spreading outwards until it stretched nearly 100km (63 miles) from end to end. It must have been, from a very far distance perhaps, an awe-inspiring sight.
But what was equally astonishing was that the original design was even bigger. The Tsar Bomba was scaled back from having a 100-megaton blast. That design was unworkable because it couldn't have been delivered to any target. As it was, Tsar Bomba turned its creator, Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, completely against nuclear weapons research and into an activist for peace and freedom. Read about Tsar Bomba and its effects at BBC Future.
(Image credit: User:Croquant with modifications by User:Hex)
It was 40 years ago today that Elvis Presley passed away at the age of 42. At the time, people found the news hard to believe. Even after the funeral and all the tributes, some people still found it hard to believe that the superstar was gone. The number of disbelievers grew when reports started coming in from folks who swore that they'd seen Elvis alive and well. The first one was supposedly on the day he died.
On the afternoon of August 16, 1977, a man bearing a striking resemblance to Elvis is said to have purchased a one-way ticket from Memphis International Airport to Buenos Aires. He supposedly gave the name Jon Burrows, a pseudonym Elvis used when checking into hotels. Patrick Lacy, author of the book Elvis Decoded, claims to have debunked this popular and wholly unsubstantiated story by interviewing airport officials and determining that international flights weren’t available from Memphis in 1977. There’s also the question of why the most famous man on the planet would risk going into a public place in his hometown in order to book airfare for the purpose of faking his own death. Maybe Elvis figured his acting skills would help him avoid suspicion.
Even as the funeral proceeded, the medical examiner’s report was issued, and the stories of witnesses came out, fans preferred to think that Elvis faked his death, and looked for every possible clue that it was so. And for the next forty years, the stories and rumors proliferated. Read about Elvis sightings over the years at Mental Floss.
We love watching movies about the pioneers, gunslingers, and cowboys of the Wild West. The historical facts about the settlement of the American West was different from what the movies give us, but is just as interesting. John Green has a bunch of those details about the Wild West in the latest episode of the Mental Floss List Show.