TV characters come and go from shows for many reasons, but in some cases, the character is unexpectedly killed off so that there's no chance of them ever coming back. If a character is just suddenly dead with no warning, and you know the actor is not, it may have been a "creative" way of firing the actor for any or no reason. In some cases there is still speculation about the real reasons years later.

From 1989 to 2000, voice actor Maggie Roswell portrayed the prim and proper wife of devout family man Ned Flanders on Fox’s The Simpsons. Then, in a highly-publicized episode, Maude was killed when a T-shirt gun propelled her off a set of bleachers and to her death. According to the Los Angeles Times, Roswell claimed she was fired from the show for asking for a raise, from her typical $1500 to $2000 per episode to $6000; Fox argued she quit because she no longer wanted to commute from her home in Denver to the voiceover sessions in Los Angeles.

You can read seven stories of characters killed off because of conflicts with the actor at Mental Floss.

TV is full of real, talented athletes that bring in millions of dollars for the networks. But fictional athletes come with backstories, flaws, and lives outside of the arena bestowed on them by professional storytellers. You probably have a soft spot for some favorite characters whose athletic background you may have even forgot about, like Sam Malone of Cheers. Refresh your memory in a list of favorite fictional athletes from TV at TVOM.  

One of the joys of parenting is the temporary ability to spin crazy yarns to someone who will swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Calvin's Dad took great advantage of that, and so does this fellow. The real payoff comes years later, when the kid calls up and explains how embarrassed he was to be corrected by his peers when the subject came up again. This is the latest from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Look at this beautiful candy! Each piece looks like an antique glass paperweight with a rose blossom inside.  Gregory Cohen of Lofty Pursuits (previously at Neatorama) shows us how they are made. While this batch of candy is cherry-flavored, later batches produced rose-flavored candies.

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A lot of work goes into these, so I don't think you'll be making them at home. But while we watch the magic unfold, Cohen keeps us entertained by talking about everything under the sun. You can buy the candy at Public Displays of Confection. -via Laughing Squid

Watch out, evildoers! The couch is here to restore justice to the city! All it needs is some pizza... Even without the title, that face would be the first thing you saw in this picture, admit it. This couch was spotted on Criaglist Pittsburgh and posted at Boing Boing.

A giant Pacific octopus has learned where to get an easy crab meal -from a crab fisherman's trap! An octopus is about the smartest creature living underwater, so a trap designed for dumb crabs is easy to break into -and then break out of.

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In this video from BBC Earth, we see how the octopus takes advantage of the trapped seafood feast presented to him. Not only does he figure out the trap, but his ability to fit through the smallest of holes serves him well. -via Digg  

In a security video that may remind you of a certain scene from The Blues Brothers, a car is seen driving through the Kazan International Airport in Russia a few months ago, while police officers give chase on foot.  

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Although it appears that the driver got away at the end of the video, he was apprehended and charged with several crimes. You guessed it, alcohol was involved. The video originally had no sound, but everyone instantly knew what the soundtrack should be. -via reddit

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 Xingjian Liu¹, Tinghua Ai², and Yaolin Liu²

In this paper, we apply spatial analytical tool to address the question: Which geographic “panhandle” is more similar to a real panhandle?

Background: Panhandles
“Panhandle” is an informal geographic term for an elongated tail-like protrusion of a geographic entity that is surrounded on three sides by land regions not of the same administration. The term is derived, as an analogy, from the relation between the shapes and relative locations of a cooking pan and its panhandle. For example, the United States has panhandles such as the “Texas Panhandle” and the “Florida Panhandle.” Other countries, too have panhandles, such as the “Panhandle of Austria,” the “New Brunswick Panhandle” and the “Panhandle of North Korea.”

Figure 1. Nine U.S. states with geographic panhandles, where panhandles are marked with red color (unless you are reading a version of this printed in black and white).

To the authors, the geographic term “panhandle” only captures some qualitatively geometry of the corresponding geographies, and there is no previous study addressing how close these panhandles are to a real-world panhandle. Because panhandle is defined in the context of a pan, answering the obvious question “Which geographic ‘panhandle’ is more similar to a real-world panhandle?” is equivalent to answering “Which U.S. state associated with a geographic panhandle looks more like a cooking pan?”

Any time you find a list of funny senior quotes, there will be some you saw last year, and some who got their quote idea from previous lists. That said, there are some quotes you've never seen before in this roundup, funny, clever, and some are even poignant. Congratulations to graduating senior Omotola Omotinugbon, who has a unique quote to reflect her school years with a unique name. And then there's Joesph Kline, who enlisted the help of his twin brother to pull this one off:

See more clever yearbook quotes from the class of 2017, 33 of them in all, at Buzzfeed. Some of them may be NSFW.

Fisherman telling about a great day of fishing sometimes refer to "fish jumping in the boat." This time it happened for real -and it was a great white shark! Seventy-three-year-old Terry Selwood was out fishing off the shore of New South Wales, Australia, when an almost nine-foot shark weighing over 400 pounds leapt into his boat!

"There I was on all fours and he's looking at me and I'm looking at him and then he started to do the dance around and shake and I couldn't get out quick enough onto the gunnel," Mr Selwood said.

"I was losing a fair amount of blood, I was stunned, I couldn't register what happened and then I thought oh my God, I've got to get out of here."

Mr Selwood reached for his radio and called the local marine rescue volunteers at Evans Head.

Marine Rescue Unit commander Karen Brown said a crew was sent out to rescue Mr Selwood and then went back out a second time to retrieve the fisherman's boat and the shark.

Selwood was not bitten, but the shark fin hit him so hard that he was taken to a hospital for treatment of his injured arm. The Department of Primary Industries (DPI) used a forklift to remove the shark from the boat. It was taken away for a necropsy. Selwood says the incident will not stop him from fishing. -via HuffPo

(Image credit: Terry Selwood)

This recipe makes bread that looks like crusty balls of molten lava! But that's just the appearance. It's really just tasty bread that you can use for sandwiches, burgers, or hot rolls for dinner. These rolls are not quite as "hot" as they appear. It's an illusion from Helen Die, aka Tye Lombardi.

When I make this in Hell, I like to roll my dough in the deep pits of sulfur and soul dust and cook them in the hot brimstone vents.  Unfortunately, as you are mortal and have neither access to soul dust or brimstone vents, I’ve had to make a few adjustments to the recipe for you.

The inside is standard bread dough from your favorite mix, colored red. The crust is what makes the magic. Get the recipe and instructions at the Necro-Nom-Nom-Nomicon. Bone appetite!

If you've been to Arlington National Cemetery, you've probably been impressed by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The war dead interred there are representative of the hundreds of thousands of United States military service members who made the ultimate sacrifice, and the respect and reverence shown by the Old Guard sentinels who guard the tomb is unparalleled.   

8. BECOMING A TOMB GUARD IS INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT.

Members of the Old Guard must apply for the position. If chosen, the applicant goes through an intense training period, in which they must pass tests on weapons, ceremonial steps, cadence, military bearing, uniform preparation, and orders. Although military members are known for their neat uniforms, it’s said that the Tomb Guards have the highest standards of them all. A knowledge test quizzes applicants on their memorization—including punctuation—of 35 pages on the history of the Tomb. Once they’re selected, Guards “walk the mat” in front of the Tomb for anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours, depending on the time of year and time of day. They work in 24-hour shifts, however, and when they aren’t walking the mat, they’re in the living quarters beneath it. This gives the sentinels time to complete training and prepare their uniforms, which can take up to eight hours.

9. THE HONOR IS ALSO INCREDIBLY RARE.

The Tomb Guard badge is the least awarded badge in the Army, and the second least awarded badge in the overall military. (The first is the astronaut badge.) Tomb Guards are held to the highest standards of behavior, and can have their badge taken away for any action on or off duty that could bring disrespect to the Tomb. And that’s for the entire lifetime of the Tomb Guard, even well after his or her guarding duty is over. For the record, it seems that Tomb Guards are rarely female—only three women have held the post.

You'll learn more about the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in an article at Mental Floss, as well as everything we know about the service members who are buried there.

He knew he wasn't a winner when the first number was pulled, but redditor dierubikdie found something really odd when he compared his lottery ticket to the winning numbers. Every number is only one digit off! That's got to be super rare, but still a lot more common than hitting the winning number. Commenter dragonfyre173 did the math.

Let's say you can get 1-32 on this. Because you can't get less than 1 or higher than 32, your odds are (2*(30/32)+1*(2/32))5, simplified to (62/32)5. Which is about 27x more common.

Or since we're working with the lottery, we can stop kidding ourselves and just call it zero.   

Oh, well, although he didn't win the $408,000 jackpot, it was probably worth a dollar for the viral picture. Your mileage may vary.  

It was only a split second shot in the most famous space movie of all time. A stormtrooper follows his commander through a corridor and bangs his head against the ceiling. It was a moment that actor Laurie Goode thought would be edited out, but it wasn't. When Star Wars was released in 1977, so many people watched it so many times that he became anonymously famous.

I remember after the first two takes, we were told to hold our guns in our left hands as opposed to our right. So I believe the head bang happened on the fourth take — whatever number of takes we did, the head bang happened on the last take. When it first happened, that day I told my fellow actor on the film, Mark Kirby, that I hit my head, but we didn't go for another take.

Afterward, nobody believed him when he said he was that stormtrooper. It turns out that quite a few people claimed to be the one. He even wrote a song about it. Goode tells the whole story of what happened on that day of filming and why he wasn't quite on his mark in an interview at The Hollywood Reporter. -via The Daily Dot

Convicts in Australia hijacked the British ship the Cyprus in 1829. When they were eventually captured, William Swallow, leader of the pirates, and some of his men were put on trial. They gave an account of sailing to Japan in 1830, but no one believed them. Almost 200 years later, the story was considered a legend -until now. Nick Russell searched through 19th century Japanese writings and found and translated an account from samurai Makita Hamaguchi that confirms a Western ship showed up at Shikoku island on January 16, 1830.  

Hamaguchi wrote of sailors with “long pointed noses” who were not hostile, but asked in sign language for water and firewood. One had burst into tears and begun praying when an official rejected an earlier plea.

A skipper who looked 25 or 26 placed tobacco in “a suspicious looking object, sucked and then breathed out smoke”.

He had a “scarlet woollen coat” with “cuffs embroidered with gold thread and the buttons were silver-plated”, which was “a thing of great beauty, but as clothing it was gaudy”.

Hamaguchi’s watercolour sketch of the coat has what Russell said may be a telling detail on the sleeve: a bird that could be a swallow, the skipper’s own stamp on a British military officer’s jacket taken as a souvenir in the mutiny.

The skipper gave instructions to a crew that “in accordance with what appeared to be some mark of respect” followed orders to remove their hats “to the man, most of them revealing balding heads”.

They “exchanged words amongst themselves like birds twittering”.  

Japan was isolationist at the time, so a few days later, orders came down to repel the foreigners. After some cannon fire, the ship left. Read more of how the Japanese saw the strange foreign pirates at the Guardian. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Courtesy of Tokushima prefectural archive)