You don't see it as much today as you did when I was young, but occasionally you'll encounter a woman of a certain age with white hair tinged blue or purple. What were they thinking? Jill Harness has the lowdown on why some elderly women have blue hair and why the phenomenon is "dyeing" out. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Roland Tanglao)

The bomb squad blew up two World War II hand grenades in Deland, Florida last Tuesday morning.

The man was given the pineapple-style grenade by a neighbor, who used the explosive as a bookend, deputies said.

When deputies arrived in the DeLand neighborhood, they found the man, who told them he had pulled the pin on the grenade, put the pin back and placed the grenade outside.

The man told deputies his neighbor had a second grenade.

That woman told Local 6 the grenades belonged to her deceased husband, who fought in World War II, and were used as bookends for several years.

The explosions left a 2-foot crater in the ground. Link -via Arbroath

Did people actually wear collars like this, or was it a special accessory to wear while sitting for a portrait? Minnesotastan got curious and researched Elizabethan ruffs. They served a purpose: keeping "ring around the collar" away from the shirt. In the 17th century, the upper classes even had special appliances to iron them. The ruffs were starched, dyed, and propped up before they fell out of fashion. Get the whole story and additional links at TYWKIWDBI. Link

Photographer Rafaela Persson has lived in Afghanistan since 2008, and spends time getting to know her subjects.

I had an idea to photograph female drug addicts. Afghanistan is the world’s biggest producer of opium, from which heroin is derived. According to a study made by U.N. Drugs and Crimes Office in 2010, the rate of drug addiction in Afghanistan is twice the global average; Afghans have become the leading consumers of their own opium.  Approximately one million Afghans, or eight percent of the war-shattered country’s total population is suffering from drug addiction, a 75 percent increase since 2005. What is even more alarming is that studies show that 50 percent of Afghanistan’s opium-using parents give the drug to their own children.

Persson shares her photographs and stories in an essay at Camera Obscura. Link -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Rafaela Persson)

The oldest fully wooden churches in the world are also architectural wonders. These are "multi-story, multi-cupola, single-block masterpieces." Built 300 years ago on the Russian Kizhi island, they are called the Church of the Transfiguration and the Church of the Intercession. Read about them and see lots more pictures at Kuriositas. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Jordi Joan Fabrega)

Since kudzu was imported from Japan, it has grown the cover the southern United States. Now another Asian import is flourishing by eating kudzu. The globular stink bug (Megacopta cribraria), native to China and India, has spread across Georgia and has now been found in Alabama. They also come inside during cold weather, and emit a bad odor when threatened.

University of Georgia entomology Professor Wayne A. Gardner said he's found them 30 stories high, coating the window sills of Atlanta condo high rises, and he has seen them swarming in roadside kudzu patches.

"You smell them when you get out of the truck," he said.

More seriously, the bug likes to munch on plants other than kudzu, including soybeans. It also could be a threat to other legume crops such as peanuts, Gardner said.

In November, Auburn University researchers collected two individual specimens in east Alabama border counties, Cleburne and Cherokee. They now expect them to spread quickly across our kudzu-rich state.

Link -via Fark

(vimeo link)

Medieval knights meet a flying saucer, leading to an intergalactic misunderstanding. Joel Fletcher created this stop-motion animation on 16mm film in 1982, long before the computer effects we take for granted were available to everyone. -Thanks, Joel!

When there's snow on the ground, one naturally thinks of Hoth, the icy planet you see in the beginning of the movie The Empire Strikes Back. What better time to haul your LEGO Star Wars creations outside for a photo shoot? Link

The following is an article from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader.

"Milk and kids" are virtually synonymous in our culture with "good health." But that wasn't always the case. Until the early 1900s, milk was often adulterated with foreign substances, taken from sick cows, or mis-handled during milking and storage. As a result, it was often host to tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid fever, and other life-threatening diseases. But few people knew that the milk made them sick. It wasn't until the late 19th century, when scientists began to understand germ theory, that they realized diseases were being transferred through milk -and that they could do something to eliminate the hazard. Here's a fascinating but little-known story from American history.

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

In the days before refrigeration, farmers who lived near towns delivered milk the old-fashioned way: they brought a cow into town and went door to door looking for customers. Anyone who wanted milk could step out into the street with a pitcher or a bucket, and watch the farmer milk the cow right before their eyes.

Since customers were standing only a few feet away, it paid for the farmer to take good care of his cows. Nobody wanted to buy milk from a beast that looked dirty, mistreated, or sick. So although there was a risk of buying bad milk, it was kept to a minimum.

City Slickers

But in cities, where door-to-door cow service wasn't practical or possible, buying milk was another matter. "Milks sellers" acted as middlemen between farmers and townspeople. Like used car dealers today, they were widely mistrusted and said to possess "neither character, nor decency of manner, nor cleanliness." Whether or not the reputation was deserved, they were notorious for diluting milk with water to increase profits. People said their milk came from "black cows," the black cast iron pumps that provided towns with drinking water. And if the pump was broken, horse troughs were always a handy source of water.

Although it actually spread serious diseases, water-down milk was seen as more of an annoyance than a health hazard, and nothing much was done about it. It wasn't until the 1840s that scandals in the liquor industry led to the first demands for milk reform.

THE SWILL MILK SCANDALS

In the mid-1800s, it was common for whiskey and other distillers to run dairy and beef businesses on the side. The manufacture of grain alcohol require huge amounts of corn, rye, and other fresh grains, which are cooked into a mash and then distilled. Once that distillation is complete, the remaining "swill" can be discarded... or, as the distiller discovered, it can be fed to cows.

Profit, not quality, was the priority with "swill herds." As a result, conditions in many distillery-owned dairies were atrocious. The cows spent their entire lives tied up in tiny pens, which were rarely cleaned. They received no food other than the swill -and no fresh water at all, since distillers though there was already plenty of water in the swill.

Spoiled Milk

With no exercise, no real food, and no water, even the hardiest cattle sickened and died in about six months. The failing herds were milked daily until the very end; when a cow became too weak to stand on its own, it was hoisted upright with ropes so that it cold be milked until it died.

Milk produced by swill herds, as muckraking journalist Robert Hartley wrote in 1842, was "very thin, and of a pale bluish color," the kind nobody in their right mind would buy. So distillers added flour, starch, chalk, plaster of Paris, or anything else they could get away with to make the milk look healthy. This adulteration only increased the amount of bacteria in milk that was already virtually undrinkable.

TAKING NOTICE

The toll that adulterated milk took on public health was severe: in New York City, where five million gallons of swill milk were produced and sold each year, the mortality rate for children under five tripled between 1843 and 1856.

No one knew for sure what was causing the child mortality rate to soar, and there was probably no single cause. But people began to suspect that bad milk was at least partially to blame. In May 1858, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, one of the most popular journals of the day, published a series of articles describing in graphic detail the conditions in some of New York's swill dairies.

REFORMS

Public exposure had a devastating impact on the industry. Some distilleries got out of the milk business entirely; other cleaned up their act. Those that remained were forced out of business in 1862, when the state of New York outlawed "crowded or unhealthy conditions" in the dairy industry. Two years later, the state outlawed the industry outright, declaring that "any milk that is obtained from animals fed on distillery waste, usually called will, is hereby declared to be impure and unwholesome."

Several other state followed suit, including Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kentucky, and Indiana. As they took action, the spiraling infant death rate in the U.S. leveled off -and even began to decline. But there was plenty of work left to be done to ensure that milk was safe.

See also: part two of The Fight for Safe Milk: Pasteurization.

_____________________________

Reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Giant 10th Anniversary Bathroom Reader, which comes packed with 504 pages of great stories.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - check 'em out!

The first hamburger franchise opened in Pyongyang, North Korea last summer. The unfamiliar hamburgers have become such a hit that customers must make reservations, and the lines are still long. Samtaesung (Food) and Cool Beverages calls their sandwiches "minced meat and bread" to avoid using the American word "hamburger".

According to rates displayed on the restaurant's menu, the cost of a hamburger is 228 North Korean won, or more than U.S. $2 according to the official exchange rate, putting it outside of the budget of the average citizen.

According to the Pyongyang resident, customers can pay in North Korean won, U.S. dollars, euros, or Chinese yuan.

Initially, the resident said, Samtaesung was frequented only by people who had traveled overseas or those who wanted to try the food out of curiosity, but the hamburger joint soon became very popular.

He said that many Pyongyang residents are now fond of hamburgers, though the greasier taste of the food takes some getting used to.

“The third time you eat a hamburger, you really get to appreciate it. By the time you’ve had your fifth, you’re already addicted to the taste,” he said.

The restaurant is owned by  Kim Jong Il's sister. Link -via Breakfast Links

The Queen Anne's Revenge was the flagship of Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard. The ship was abandoned in 1718 when it wrecked on a sandbar off the coast of North Carolina. Archaeologists have been carefully studying the wreckage for a decade now, and have slowly released photographs of their finds. Recently they reconstructed a sword hilt from found fragments that may have belonged to Blackbeard or one of his companions.

Recovered from the Queen Anne's Revenge wreck site in 2008, the quillon could have been made in England or France, according to Wendy Welsh, conservator of the Queen Anne's Revenge artifacts for the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

Beyond the hilt, only a stump of the blade remains, but Welsh said Jan Piet Puype, a Dutch arms historian, thinks the weapon was probably relatively short and was carried by a gentleman with some status—at least before a pirate got hold of it.

Although it could have been used for self-defense, the sword was mainly a decorative  accessory and was manufactured sometime between the mid-17th century and the early 18th century, according to Puype.

See more pictures and information at National Geographic News. Link

(Image credit: Wendy M. Welsh, North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources)

(YouTube link)

A one-car train pulls into a station in Poland. The passengers get out. They keep coming. Then you start to wonder where they all came from. According to the YouTube comments, this is typical in Poland. -via the Presurfer

DeviantART member Cedarseed constructed a large and thorough chart of house cat colors and patterns. In case you weren't sure whether your Fluffy is a flame point or dilute caliby or a Seychellois Neuvième, this chart will help. Even if you don't have a cat, it's quite interesting. Shown is very small part of this huge chart, which is also for sale as an art print. Click on "Download Image" to see the full size version Link -via Metafilter

(YouTube link)

Parts of Australia are seeing the worst flooding in years. In Brisbane, a video crew paddles through a McDonalds outlet in a canoe. The song is "Fish Heads" {wiki} by Barnes and Barnes. -via the Presurfer

Identical twin sisters Amy Gilbert and Allison Oliverio of Clinton, Michigan grew up together, both married their high school sweethearts, went into the same profession, and then became mothers -on the same day!

Dr. Timothy Kim was back and forth delivering both babies.

"They were kind enough to put rooms next to each other, so not so much running. I've been doing this for 12 years and I never heard of twins having a baby on the same day," said Dr. Kim.

Amy gave birth to baby Claire and Allison gave birth to baby Garrett. The sisters both married their high school sweethearts six months apart to the day. They say they didn't plan on getting pregnant at the same

Only time will tell how alike the cousins who share a January 12th birthday will be. http://www.wxyz.com/dpp/news/region/macomb_county/twin-sisters-give-birth-minutes-apart (with video) -via Arbroath