The first artificial ice skating rink opened in London in June of 1844, after a few months in a temporary location at Covent Gardens. Strangely, that was before the technology was available to freeze water for the skating surface. The Glaciarium was decorated to resemble a winter wonderland, refreshing in the summer heat. It would have been easier to create the illusion if they had air conditioning.  

But, as Tim Jepson and Larry Porges write ​in the National Geographic London Book of Lists, it smelled noxious.  “At the time, ice couldn’t be manufactured and kept frozen in sufficient quantities to create a proper rink. The appalling smell of the substitute, a mixture of pig fat and salts, would be the project’s undoing,” they write.

Skating on a surface of lard in the summer had to be extremely unpleasant. The Glaciarium only lasted a few months before it closed down. But the technology to build a real rink came about some years later, and Londoners were skating on ice by 1876. Read how that came about at Smithsonian.

Exactly. When my kids were growing up, there was way more complaining about real diversions than the supernatural ones. Too much noise, too much light, and in our case, there was always a sibling to blame it on. This comic is from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.

Yeah, it would be nice to have a serious relationship where there is no arguing. From experience, I can tell you it's possible, but it takes a lot of maturity, the kind you get by making a lot of mistakes over a lot of years. Better to take some advice from The School of Life.    

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So you're going to argue with your partner occasionally. You may as well learn to fight fair so that the scars don't last long. When you feel like attacking, remember who you're arguing with, and maybe attempt to communicate first. After all, it's better to win the war than the battle at hand. -via Digg

The residents of the charming alpine village of Bergün, Switzerland, held a meeting Monday and passed a new law -against tourist photography! Any tourist caught taking a picture would be fined five francs ($5.19).The reasoning behind the law was concern over others on social media.

“It is scientifically proven that beautiful holiday photos on social media make the viewer unhappy because they cannot be there themselves,” said the village tourist office in a statement.
 
Bergün/Bravuogn has a particularly picturesque landscape to offer, so it risks making people particularly unhappy, it feels.
 
“Bergün/Bravuogn is beautiful. We don’t want to make people outside the community unhappy by sharing social media photos of our picturesque landscape, and we cordially invite you to visit Bergün to experience it for yourself,” said mayor Peter Nicolay.

Вы просто не можете не поставить лайк за совершенно безумную историю про то, каков он #беспощадныймаркетинг в Швейцарии! . «Научно доказано, что красивые фото из отпуска, опубликованные в соцсетях, делают других людей – тех, кто просматривает снимки, – несчастными, так как сами они не находятся в этом месте», – говорит администрация и запрещает фотографировать свою деревню из-за её исключительной красоты. . Туристическое ведомство не отрицает, что это часть маркетинговой стратегии, но тут же уточняет, что запрет введён на законодательном уровне и имеет юридическую силу. Отныне тех, кто фоткается в деревне Бергюн, штрафуют. . И лично меня не столько возмущает сам штраф, как учёные, которые занимались исследованием инстаграма на наличие несчастных людей при виде крутых фотографий . Вывод какой? Фотографий из отпуска не будет!!! #снимитеэтонемедленно

A post shared by ЖЕЛЕЗНЫЙ МИР Пишу Пиарю (@propuskova) on Jun 2, 2017 at 2:55am PDT

The village removed photographs from its own Facebook account, and people started talking. Of course, that was the whole point, and the publicity stunt worked exactly as it was intended. Bergün's move and the backlash was covered in papers all over. By Thursday, the village announced it was granting "special permission" for visitors to take pictures, and the ban will be rescinded completely at the next village meeting. -via Atlas Obscura

(Image credit: Adrian Michael)

This is Meg Sullivan and her dad Tom. Tom has been packing Meg's lunch since kindergarten, but now she is graduating from high school. The family had been kidding him about the lunches, because he went so far as to peel her oranges for her up through high school. So it was a bittersweet experience when she unpacked her lunch on the last day of school.

My dad has been peeling oranges for my lunch since kindergarten & on my last day of high school I got this instead pic.twitter.com/N8B2qb43qA

— Megs (@megsullivan07) May 31, 2017

It was bittersweet for Tom, too, as Meg is his youngest child and will be attending Grand Canyon University in Phoenix, Arizona, this fall. The symbolic push into adulthood has gone viral. Oh yeah, Meg had no trouble peeling her oranges, because she read the instructions.  -via Buzzfeed

National Doughnut Day is upon us! The holiday is set for the first Friday in June every year. The history of Doughnut Day is interesting: it was first celebrated in 1938 as a "thank you" to volunteers of the Salvation Army who handed out doughnuts to soldiers fighting in World war I.    

Many national doughnut chains are giving away freebies today. Unfortunately, there are no national doughnut outlets in my hometown. Those doughnuts are sold through the local groceries. But if you live in a larger city, check out the list of freebies at Uproxx. 

Putting your movie underground is the easy way to give half of your audience a taste of big city life. The other half already lives in a city, but if the film is set in their city, it will give them a firm sense of realism. Try to think of a great movie scene that happened in the subway. It's hard to remember one right off the top of your head (besides the one pictured), but you'll enjoy tweaking your memory with film clips of five ranked classic subways scenes you can watch right now at TVOM. You'll probably agree about number one.

Dina Amin is a designer from Egypt. She became concerned about how modern consumer products are meant to be discarded instead of repaired, and the sheer amount of waste prompted her to take a look inside. What she found might surprise you!

I am not an animator, I studied product design, I am astonished by the amount of things we throw away especially when I go to scrap markets here in Egypt, and when I started posting photos of the products I take apart to learn why they break and are thrown away, people often commented saying that they never got to see whats inside the things they use daily, so I showed them, in an unusual way. And I thought I might have discovered the cutest way to talk about consumerism haha.

In addition to looking inside the appliances of modern life, Amin uses those parts to make something new and different and even animates them!

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Taking one step beyond animation, Amin created her first automata out of recycled parts that you can see here. See more of her dismantled products at Instagram.  -Thanks, Dina!

Simon Tofield brought us Simon's Cat's Guide to Boxes a couple of months ago, he omitted a few categories of boxes that he later remembered… and then drew for us.

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This video drives home the notion that cats have great imaginations that they love to indulge in when they aren't spending all their time looking for their next meal. And that makes cats the perfect entertainment for the ones that feed them. -via Laughing Squid

The following article is from the book Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into California.

A wealthy woman cofounds a prestigious university as an homage to her son, but soon finds herself embroiled in a bitter fight with the university’s president over the school’s direction…and then she ends up dead. But who did it?

MIRACLES AND TRAGEDIES

Located in Palo Alto, Stanford University is considered one of the country’s top schools—in 2011, U.S. News and World Report ranked it fifth. But Stanford’s academic reputation isn’t nearly as interesting as the school’s great murder mystery.

New York–born Jane Lothrop married a young lawyer named Leland Stanford in 1850, and the couple meandered across the country until they settled in California. Leland eventually made a fortune, not in law, but by selling supplies to gold miners at exorbitant prices. By the 1860s, Leland was also California’s eighth governor and president of the Central Pacific Railroad. Soon, the Stanfords were one of the wealthiest couples in the nation, and gossips said the only thing their charmed life lacked was a child.

Then, in 1868, when Jane was 39 years old, she gave birth to a son, Leland Jr. At that time, it was uncommon for new mothers to be approaching 40, so the Stanfords called Leland their “miracle baby.” He was a cheerful kid who spent happy days on his father’s horse farm in Palo Alto. The boy also loved antiquities and wanted to be an archaeologist. His parents thought that was a great idea, so they took him to the Mediterranean to visit several archaeological sites. But during the trip, Leland Jr. got typhoid fever. He died in Italy in 1884.

“I WANT YOU TO BUILD A SCHOOL…”

Earlier this year, Crayola announced it would retire the crayon color Dandelion to make way for a new color. That new color is the one you see here, inspired by a new blue pigment discovered at Oregon State University. The YInMn pigment contains yttrium, indium, and manganese, which it is named after, and oxygen. Crayola is looking for a color name that will be a little easier for those who use crayons, so they are running a contest to name it. You can enter your idea for the color name here. Be aware that the best names have already been suggested.

Bluey McBlueface

Blue Ivy

Covfefe

Mystique

Blue Manchu

Indigo Montoya

New Blue

and

The Warriors Blue a 3-1 lead https://t.co/rGZPkC4mSj

— Maneutral Evil (@ManuclearBomb) May 31, 2017

-via Metafilter

(Image credit: Oregon State University)

That's a good dog. Just a little bit more intelligent than his training course was designed for. And he has empathy! He's just not cut out for police work, although he would probably make a wonderful therapy dog. This is the latest from Kevin Kuramura at Pear Shaped Comics.

We have been warned many times that aliens from another planet won't be anything like we ever imagined. But what if they turn out to be more like us than we can imagine? In this video, Dave gets abducted by aliens and must undergo a routine physical and mental exam. At least that what I think is going on.

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The point of the test is to see if humans are really an intelligent life form. By their standards, Dave probably registers somewhere around the level of all those cows they tested earlier. This sketch is from  Chris Smith and Jack De Sena. -via Tastefully Offensive

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Jerich Alcantara left early for his graduation from Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing in New York City. He got on the subway wearing his cap and gown. But wouldn't you know it, the train was delayed and Alcantara, along with a trainload of other passengers, was stuck underground for several hours. So the other passengers held him an impromptu graduation right where they were.

"I was wearing the cap and gown the whole time, and honestly when we were on the train at some point it looked like everyone was kinda upset, tired of everything so I decided I'd just thank everyone for being there for my graduation that it meant a whole lot to me and then they just all started cheering," Alcantara said.

In the video, you see Alcantara being handed his diploma by a friend -which was an image on a phone. He missed the school commencement ceremony, but his family and friends threw their own celebration when Alcantara finally arrived. -via Atlas Obscura

There's a saint for everything, even murderers (although our source says "repentant murderers"). St. Julian the Hospitaller is the patron saint of clowns and circus workers, innkeepers, fiddle players, jugglers, childless people, and murderers. How he got that designation is a story that may remind you of Oedipus Rex. Julian had a curse on him that said he would kill his parents. To avoid this destiny, he walked away from home and kept walking for 50 days. He obviously did not read Sophocles' play, because that was his first mistake. Then he settled down and married.

Throughout all this time, however, his parents had been diligently searching, and their efforts were finally rewarded when they happened upon their son’s castle. Unfortunately, Julian was away on a hunt, but his wife welcomed them with great joy. Indeed, so pleased was she to meet her in-laws for the first time that she honored them with her home’s master bedroom as their quarters.

Returning home much later, Julian discovered the couple in his own sbed and assumed it was his wife with another man. In a mad rage, he killed them both, thus fulfilling the prophetic jinx. When his wife, who’d been to church, informed him of his tragic error, Julian grew despondent and despaired of his salvation. Nevertheless, according to one medieval version of the story, his wife offered unyielding encouragement. “Well I know that God is so merciful and so kind and loving,” she insisted, “that if we serve Him all our lives without anger and without envy, I do surely believe that he will grant us mercy.”

The couple spent the rest of their lives trying to make up for the murders, and became known for hospitality and aid to travelers. You can read the story of St. Julian the Hospitaller at Catholic Exchange.  St. Julian's story is one of 15 Unusual Patron Saints you can read about at Mental Floss.