Some 3,000 years ago, the people of what is now Oxfordshire, England, carved a pictogram of a horse on a hillside made of chalk. You can't see the entire horse at the site, but from the valley below, it's quite impressive. All these years later, no one knows exactly why the Uffington White Horse was carved, but they still maintain it, as their ancestors have done for thousands of years.

It’s chalking day, a cleaning ritual that has happened here regularly for three millennia. Hammers, buckets of chalk and kneepads are handed out and everyone is allocated an area. The chalkers kneel and smash the chalk to a paste, whitening the stony pathways in the grass inch by inch. “It’s the world’s largest coloring between the lines,” says George Buce, one of the participants.

Chalking or “scouring” the horse was already an ancient custom when antiquarian Francis Wise wrote about it in 1736. “The ceremony of scouring the Horse, from time immemorial, has been solemnized by a numerous concourse of people from all the villages roundabout,” he wrote.

In the past, thousands of people would come for the scouring, holding a fair in the circle of a prehistoric fort nearby. These days it’s a quieter event. The only sounds are the wind, distant birdsong and the thumping of hammers on the chalk that can be felt through the feet.

In modern times, the National Trust oversees the volunteers who clean the lines that make up the horse. But it's always been a community event. Read about the horse and the people who maintain it at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: NASA)

Montreal Comiccon is going on this weekend at the Palais des congrès. Of course, our Québécois friends from Geeks Are Sexy were there to document the most impressive cosplayers attending. The costumes ranged from the super elaborate (above) to the simple yet completely recognizable (below).

You can see the first of three daily photo galleries, and check back for the rest as they are posted at Geeks Are Sexy.

Denise Wade is the volunteer flying fox coordinator at Bat Conservation and Rescue QLD. She takes in injured or orphaned flying foxes that need care until they can be released. Wade posts videos under the YouTube name Batzilla the Bat. Here she feeds a banana to Miss Alicia, a young rescue bat named for the woman who found her on the road.  

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She loves that banana! Since Miss Alicia was not injured by her traffic experience, she was examined, fed, and given a chance to rest before being released. Oh yeah, and recorded on video for our continued entertainment. -via Metafilter

Situation comedies sometimes feature ridiculous recipes that are good for a laugh …but how would they taste in the real world? Loryn Stone of Cracked was determined to find out, so she prepared some of the most egregious joke foods found on TV, starting with Moon Waffles from The Simpsons. It's a waffle made with pancake mix, caramel, and liquid smoke, wrapped around a stick of butter.

The liquid smoke, a substance apparently made from the runoff from an extinguished house fire, wafted into my eyes, burning them to tears. And just like in the TV show, the mass started oozing out of the sides. The caramels, in fact, started leaking into the mechanical components of the waffle iron, and I wondered for a minute if this was going to be my last time using that machine. Then the caramels started falling out of the waffle iron, jizzing all over my counter.

Right as the burning smell really permeated my kitchen, the waffle iron's green light came on. I knew this had to cool for a while -- those melted caramels looked like little globs of lava that would burn right through my tongue. I let it hang out while I scraped caramel emission off the counter and charred residue out of the maker with a skewer.  

Then she wrapped it around a stick of butter and ate it. That's just one recipe. She also made Breakfast Spaghetti, Seven-Layer Salad, Milk Steak with Jelly Beans, Peanut Butter And Clam Pizza, and Rachel's English Trifle. She is a brave woman. Read her accounts of all of these cooking adventures at Cracked.

Spike is a stag beetle. He lives in Japan, where pet stag beetles aren't all that weird. His human is an English teacher named Mandy. Not long ago, Mandy was taking pictures of Spike picking up various things in his mandibles, but when he lifted some felt-tipped pens, he began drawing with them! Well, "drawing" might be the wrong word, but he did leave his mark on paper.

Some posts have had to be moved around, so here again: Spike's very first piece ever. please be nice to him. pic.twitter.com/IIhOVI0POE

— Spike the Beetle (@SpikeTheBeetle) July 6, 2017

Now Spike has his own Twitter feed, with over 39,000 followers and even has one of his artworks up for sale at eBay. Read more about Spike at Buzzfeed.

This comic starts with a quote from from the Lewis Carroll book Through the Looking Glass. If a speaker (Humpty Dumpty, in this case) ascribes his own meaning to words, he can always change what he meant to say after the fact, and so gives himself an way out of whatever he said earlier. However, if you're not using word definitions that are normally agreed upon and that the listener knows, you may as well be spouting nonsense. Humpty Dumpty wouldn't be the only Carroll character doing that, although Carroll at least insisted that the nonsense be internally consistent. The problem for the speaker is that people will eventually stop listening to nonsense. Randall Munroe took the power of defining words away from the speaker and gave it to the listener, resulting in some karma for messing around with our common language. This is the latest comic from XKCD.

This street art wrapped around two corners of the Chicken Shop in Chicago. It's the work of E. Lee, not to be confused with Wile E. Coyote. At Instagram, Lee tells us about the work.

It was a challenge creating a story-line using two corners with so much distance between them. But I was really happy to do this Wile E Coyote piece. The consummate failure is my favorite character of all time. I love him for knowing what he wants and going after it; for being creative in the pursuit; and for always getting up after he falls and trying again. He's inspired... and a hell of a painter :)

Check out this time-lapse video of the painting process:

A time lapse of "Free Bird Seed" created for @sohohouse Chicago's #graffitiongreen June '17. Time lapse by @planckstudios Produced and edited by @bghood #WorksByELEE #FreeBirdSeed #streetart #chicago #streetartchicago #urbanart #timelapse #video #sohohouse #wileecoyote #popart

A post shared by E.LEE (@_e.lee_) on Jul 8, 2017 at 12:27pm PDT

See more of E. Lee's art at Instagram. -via reddit

Cats know what they want, and if you don't give it to them, they'll find someone who will! This snarky newspaper item was published in The Des Moines Register in 1908. It comes to us courtesy of a Tweet from @HorribleSanity, who runs a history blog called Strange Company that I will have to keep an eye on. -via Nag on the Lake

It's a picture just about everyone on the internet has seen at one time or another: several gamers on their computers at tables and desks, and another hanging from the ceiling, supported by duct tape while he plays Counter-Strike. Hundreds of people have claimed that they were there, but Drew Purvis and his friends know different. Purvis was the guy taped to the ceiling at a LAN party in Mason, Michigan.

“I don’t want to say it’s a closely guarded secret,” said Brian Schaeffer, one of the LAN goers. “But half the fun of seeing that picture pop up on the internet is all the stories where people say, ‘Oh yeah I know the people there.’ No you don’t! It was a small town, a random group of friends, and we literally just got goofy one day.”

The group told me they would hang out together in various houses and, sometimes, even a tire warehouse, lugging computer rigs to locations to play a variety of games. It was the summer of 2002, and at the time, Counter-Strike was the game to play. Others recount games like Command & Conquer, both Renegade and Red Alert 2, as well as Battlefield 1942 (for those with the 512 MB RAM to run it) and StarCraft custom games. Counter-Strike was the great equalizer. It could run on just about anything, and everyone had it.

For the Mason alumni, the night they taped Drew Purvis to the ceiling was just an average day, another LAN party with friends.

Schaeffer and the other friends who recall that party tell the story of why and how they taped Purvis to the ceiling and how the image went viral, at Kotaku. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Brian Schaeffer)

Yeti is in bed, all alone with his thoughts and feelings, yet he still must deal with both Heart and Brain. They usually have conflicting messages, but in this case they've ganged up on him for a night of no sleep. You can blame Brain for that, since he's in charge of both logic and caution. We've all been there. This is the latest from Nick Seluk at The Awkward Yeti. 

Barcelona artist Mari Axel makes all kinds of crocheted amigurumi figures, but has a special affinity for Cthulhu. The elder god is seen in many incarnations at her Etsy shop Kutuleras.

How about a mashup of Cthulhu and Pokemon? Cthulhu and the Minions? Cthulhu and Deadpool? Cthulhu and Totoro? Or even Cthulhu cosplaying as Totoro? Plus, she makes amigurumi figures you won't find anywhere else, like Nosferatu, a plague doctor, and Maneki Neko. Or if you can think of a different one, she does custom crocheting, too. Check them all out at her store. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Disney designers are pretty imaginative, but many of the beautiful locations in their animated movies are inspired by real places. That includes landscapes, fairy tale castles, and urban architecture.

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They get changed a bit to fit the needs of the production, but if you were to visit these places, you'd probably be reminded of the movie they appeared in. -via Tastefully Offensive

We sometimes think of environmental pollution as a modern scourge, but recent research shows that man-made pollutants have been with us much longer. The plague  known as Black Death ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, when it killed around 20 million people. In those five short years, the population took an enormous hit. According to information gleaned from ice cores, in which layers have formed over thousands of years, those dates coincide with a sudden drop in lead in the air.   

Lead pollution is typically considered a hallmark of industrial society, but a growing body of research suggests human activity has been fouling the air with harmful heavy metals for millennia. Results of a new ice core analysis, published last week in the journal GeoHealth, support the idea that in Western Europe at least, mining and smelting activity has tainted the air with lead for at least 2,000 years. In fact, the only sliver of time during which the scientists’ instruments sniffed lead-free air was from 1349 to 1353, when folks were presumably too busy dying in droves to work the mines.

“With the closing of the mines, you can see the levels of lead dropping to zero,” Alexander More, a historian of science at Harvard University and lead author on the new study, told Gizmodo. “We can go down to the month of the arrival of the plague, and you can see the immediate drop, right along mining activity.”

Read more about this research at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Flickr user er madx)

(Image credit: AverageSexGod)

The animals you live with are just waiting for an opportunity to take your stuff, jump on the bed, climb the curtains, or eat the couch …just anything that they aren't allowed to do, and they know it, whether they care or not.

(Image credit: Schumi_jr05)

As a general rule, the dogs seem to regret their actions, or at least they regret being caught, while cats act as if you are in the wrong for confronting them. They only regret that you've stopped their fun. See over 200 images, many of them gifs, of dogs, cats, and a few other animals who were caught in the act at Bored Panda.

Nathan Marshall banned bottle-flipping in his 6th grade class, because after all, that kind of thing is distracting. But what his students didn't know was that Marshall was determined to master the sport. At the end of the school year, he showed this video to his students.

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He certainly got the bottle-tossing skills down! However, his Photoshop skills could use some work. As an aside to the students -Marshall did all this in his spare time, not during class.  -via reddit