In 1782, a merchant built a house that straddled the US/Canadian border where the towns of Beebe Plain, Vermont, and Stanstead, Quebec, met. His idea was to sell goods to both Americans and Canadians, so there are entrances on both sides of the building. It later became a residence and then was cut into apartments, but the border was not a big deal …until September 11, 2001. Since then, border security has become a pain for the current owners, Brian and Joan Dumoulin, who are dual citizens. They are trying to sell the property, which will cost you $109,000 if you pay in US dollars or $147,000 Canadian. The property comes with border agents.  

Troy Rabideau, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection assistant port director for the area that includes Beebe Plain, said the agents know who live there, but keeping track can be a challenge.

“It’s always a fine line,” Rabideau said. “We do the best we can to keep an eye on it. We do what we have to do, security first, but we also want the support of the locals.”

The DuMoulins’ house has entrances from the United States and Canada. Agents have come to know the people who live in the house, currently vacant, and allow them to move back and forth freely as long as they stay in the house or the tiny front or backyard. There’s a small granite border marker just outside the front door.

There is a gate hidden in a backyard hedge. DuMoulin said U.S. agents wanted to be sure the gate was wired shut. It is.

Besides being under 24-hour scrutiny, you have to wonder how much of a nightmare property taxes are. And which laws are in effect for the inside. Read more about this unique house at the Vancouver Sun. -via reddit

(Image credit: Google Maps)

You won't find a more literal illustration of the title Caught Red-Handed. But Emma is not going to readily confess to an obvious transgression.   

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Paul Ross shared this cute video of his daughter practicing for her future political career. -via Tastefully Offensive

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff

Teabagging has recently become a subject of intense interest in the United States. The term applies to many activities. Here are some of them.

Teabagging and Brown Dog Ticks
“Testing Acaricide Susceptibility of the Brown Dog Tick Rhipicephalus sanguineus (Latreille, 1806): II Teabag Method,” M.K. Kigaye and J.G. Matthysse, Bulletin of Epizootic Diseases of Africa, vol. 22, no. 3, September 1974, pp. 279–85.

Teabagging and Maggots
“The Treatment of Suppurative Chronic Wounds With Maggot Debridement Therapy” [article in Turkish], Kosta Y. Mumcuoglu and Aysegul Taylan Ozkan, Turkiye Parazitoloji Dergisi, vol. 33, no. 4, 2009, pp. 307–15. The authors, at Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, Jerusalem, Israel, report:

Maggot debridement therapy (MDT) is the intentional treatment of suppurative skin infections with the larvae of the fly, Lucilia sericata. Today, this treatment modality is being used in over 30 countries and during the last 20 years, more than 60,000 patients have been treated in 2,000 medical institutions. Sterile maggots, produced in university laboratories and by private industry, are usually applied to the wound either by using a cage-like dressing or a tea bag–like cage.

Teabagging with Painkiller

The storytellers that gave us classic fairy tales had plenty of possible inspirations for their dreamy settings. Medieval castles were the place where princes and princesses lived. Forest folk really lived in woodlands. And with some effort, those places look as beautiful as they did hundreds of years ago. For example, Wistman’s Wood in Devon, England, still looks like someone dreamed it up.  

The moss-covered boulders and twisted, ancient brambles of this English wood are associated with tales of druids, ghosts, and supernatural spooks. While that is all myth, it’s not hard to see why Wistman’s is a magnet for such fables. The ancient forest has largely been left to grow wild, free of destruction or shaping by humans or large animals. With unfettered growth, the trees have grown old and gnarled, yet the rocks have stunted their height so the crooked branches hang down in an oppressive canopy. Mystical beasts and wizards only exist in stories, yet Wistman’s Wood makes it seem so very possible that they could be real.

See more such places that are real-life fairy tale settings at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image credit: Flickr user Brian Ralphs)

Want to sell something? Hit the customer right where he lives. Let them know this is what they really want. If he can get a steady supply of cheese balls, it won't matter who is serving them, how much they charge, or what extra information they are gathering from you that they can sell to someone else. This is the latest comic from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Did you ever think it strange that women's breasts must be covered up, but men can bare their entire chests? That we can share pictures of a man's nipples, but a woman's nipples are considered NSFW? Social media censors tear their hair out at some pictures of nipples, because there really isn't much difference between the sexes without context. What if we were to cover up a woman's breasts with a picture of a man's chest? This swimsuit does just that, hair and all. Yes, the backside has hair, too. Watch what happens when this woman models it for her children.

Make 'em say WTF FREE US shipping Link in bio

A post shared by Beloved Shirts (@belovedshirts) on Jun 7, 2017 at 12:37pm PDT

Beloved Shirts sells the Sexy Chest One Piece Swimsuit in several shades for $44.95. It's not for everyone, but it's funny and makes a statement. They are selling like hotcakes. -via Buzzfeed

How many Russian bodybuilders does it take to make you park in a legal space without encroaching on others? The Russian group called Stop a Douchebag patrols the streets of Moscow enforcing parking and traffic laws, mainly by shaming the perpetrator. Recently, they got a little help when the bodybuilders of BodyMania stepped in to do their part. They add a little incentive for scofflaws to fall in line.

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As you can see, it worked, even when they had to take matters into their own hands. Compliance shot way up when these guys arrived in a group! -via Boing Boing

You might think you don't know who Ian Holm is, but you've seen him in many of your favorites movies.

Holm is one of those quiet giants of the acting world; precisely the type which seems to suit the British rather well. Just like other industry stalwarts (the names Jim Broadbent, Mark Rylance, and Stephen Graham come to mind), he’s lauded by critics but rarely plays the fame game.

That said, you'll probably realize that you are a fan when you see clips of Holm's characters in some really big -and not so big- films from the past several decades at TVOM.

Of the eight actors who've portrayed Batman onscreen, there are only five left. Redditor mengocharged arranged his action figures as a tribute to Adam West, who died Friday at the age of 88. He titled the image Farewell Old Chum...  The figures are:

NECA Adam West Batman, NECA Michael Keaton Batman, DC Collectibles Animated Series Batman, Medicom MAFEX Christian Bale Batman (ver 2), Mezco One:12 Ben Affleck Batman.

And explained the ones who aren't there.

Trust me, if they made quality Kilmer and Clooney Batman 6-7" action figures, I'd be all over them.

The numbers add up when you factor in the animated version that got an action figure, too.

Anne Frank was born on June 12, 1929 in Frankfort, Germany. Thirteen years later, she received a book of blank pages from her mother for her 13th birthday. She used it as a diary, which she kept during the years she and her family were hiding from the Nazis in a office building in the Netherlands. After the war, Frank's diary was published and became a worldwide best seller, one of the most-read documents of World War II. There are some things about the book that you might not know, even all these years later. For example, it could have easily been destroyed and never seen at all. Miep Gies, who aided the family, recovered it after their arrest, but before the end of the war.    

7. Had Miep Gies looked at the contents of the diary, we never would have gotten to read Anne’s innermost thoughts.

Gies later said that if she had known what was inside, she would have destroyed the writings because they incriminated everyone who helped hide the Franks, the van Pels, and Fritz Pfeffer. Otto Frank finally persuaded her to read it when the book was in its second printing.

Commemorate the 88th anniversary of Anne Frank's birth by reading the rest of the things you should know about Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl at Mental Floss. The article includes a video of Frank's father.

The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Weird, Weird World: EPIC.

Are you accident-prone? Don’t worry, it could end up making the world a better place.

FIRST GLASS

One day in 1903, French chemist Edouard Benedictus was working in his lab when he accidentally knocked an empty glass flask off his workbench. When he picked it up, he noticed something strange: The glass had shattered into many pieces, but they remained stuck together in the shape of the bottle. Upon further investigation, he found that the flask had been filled with collodion, a syrupy chemical solution that, when evaporated, leaves a clear film. The film had coated the inside of the glass and held the pieces together. (Collodion, though quite toxic, was used in those days to seal cuts after surgery.)

Although Benedictus thought this was interesting, he went back to his regular work. A few days later, he read a newspaper story about a woman who had been killed by a broken windshield in a car accident. Benedictus rushed to his lab. By the next night he had invented the world’s first safety glass, which can be found in virtually every car in the world today.

SUPERPRINTS

You know how instead of typing a squiggly word, Google now has you to just check a box to prove you're not a robot? I did not know how that was supposed to work until tonight. It's all about how you move your mouse! Apparently bots don't move a cursor the same way humans do. But mouse-movement analysis has gone further than that -it may be used to determine identity theft. So I thought, maybe everyone uses a very individual pattern of mouse movement, like fingerprints. No, that's not it. Mouse movement may work more like a lie detector. In an experiment, 40 Italian subjects answered questions by computer. Some were giving straight answers, while others were playing identity thieves, with information they memorized. They were given questions that the identity thieves has rehearsed, and then the subjects were all given unexpected questions. They did not know that the parameters being analyzed were the way they moved their mouses.     

What the researchers found was that the liars had a distinctive average mouse movement that was more circuitous than the truth tellers. Even when the liars were telling the truth, it seems that their overall dishonesty was infecting their movements and they could accurately be identified as lying. The researchers then repeated their full experiment with 20 German-speaking subjects to test for cultural differences and they arrived at the same conclusions.

Read more about the experiment and findings at Gizmodo.

What if animals were round? Not necessarily fat, but spherical instead of the shapes they are. They wouldn't have to move by walking, as they could just roll everywhere. But that isn't always a good thing. As this video shows, it can be a hilarious thing.   

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Swiss-German filmmakers Kyra Buschor and Constantin Päplow tickled our funny bones with a quirky series of 'toons about bouncy critters they did for the 2013 Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film. They continued making them about various round animals of the world under the name Rollin' Wild. In their latest video, we see how the animals of France deal with the physics of roundness. -via Tastefully Offensive

NASA is launching an information-gathering rocket from Wallops Island, Virginia, this evening, that could give those nearby a strange sky show. If you are in Virginia or Delaware, you may see nightly-colored clouds!

The launch is scheduled to occur between 9:04 and 9:19 p.m. EDT. Experts estimate that the flight will take about eight minutes from start to finish. Approximately four or five minutes after the rocket takes off, NASA will deploy 10 soda can–sized canisters full of reactive chemicals. The cans will burst 96 to 124 miles in the air, producing enormous, vibrant blooms of harmless red and blue-green clouds formed by the interaction of barium, strontium, and cupric-oxide. (These are commonly found in fireworks.) If the weather cooperates, these vapor tracers should be visible from New York to North Carolina and westward into Virginia.

That is, if the launch goes according to plan. It may be delayed, as this is the fourth rescheduling of the launch. Mental Floss has more on the rocket and its mission, plus links to follow it if you aren't close enough to watch.

(Image credit: NASA)

My brother does not have cable TV, but he has Netflix. I recommended the erstwhile AMC TV show Hell on Wheels to him one day, and two days later he mentioned on social media that he'd seen the whole series. All five seasons in two days! Binge-watching has become quite popular, but could it be harmful?

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The folks at AsapSCIENCE look into that question for us. -via Viral Viral Videos