Jack Sprat could eat no fat
His wife could eat no lean
And so betwixt the two of them
They licked the platter clean.

You probably first heard this nursery rhyme when you were very young. If it was read from a book, it most likely had an image of a skinny husband and a fat wife. The meaning behind it may be about not being wasteful, or that married couples are better off being complementary instead of agreeing on everything. I was always struck by how odd it was that a couple ate nothing but meat. The rhyme first appeared in print in 1639, although the name Jack Sprat was already being used as a reference to a small man. 

Could this rhyme have a political inspiration? Other nursery rhymes came about that way, but sometimes it's a matter of retrofitting. In any case, there are two theories about English royal family members that the rhyme may have been written about. One was contemporary with the first published version of the rhyme, while the other happened a few hundred years earlier. Read a bit of history that may give you some insight into Jack Sprat and his wife at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: James Edward Rogers)

I learned the word antidisestablishmentarianism as a kid because it was fairly easy to learn for a big word. But it's only 28 letters long, far from the longest in the English language. How about 45 letters? Try pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. There are longer words, but they are chemical names that dictionaries don't count. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is a disease of the lungs caused by inhaling fine dust from quartz or a fine silicate. In real life, doctors call it silicosis. I can't blame them. If you want to pronounce it, it's doable by breaking it into its many Latin parts, pneumo no ultra microscopic silico volcano con iosis. You may think that someone was trying to be funny by slipping "volcano" in the middle, and you'd be right. The word was coined by the then-president of the National Puzzlers' League in 1935. But it turned out to be a useful word for pulmonary doctors, so here we are. And I am thankful for the copy/paste function.   

Learn more about pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis and some other very long words from the English dictionary, including one with 36 letters that means the fear of long words. Appropriate. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: DataBase Center for Life Science (DBCLS))

Matching new archological findings with ethnographic records, we can show ritual fireplaces have been in continuous use for at least 12,000 years. https://t.co/PDHqjG8q5L

— The Conversation - Australia + New Zealand (@ConversationEDU) July 2, 2024

Communities and their cultural and religious practices change over time, as conditions change and cultures split or merge with others. Old rituals are lost to time and new practices rise. But a recent discovery in Australia may peg the Aboriginal GunaiKurnai people as having the oldest continuing cultural practices in the world.

Two fireplaces were discovered buried in Cloggs Cave near Buchan, Victoria. These were not fireplaces for cooking or heating; they are very small and each had a custom-cut stick in it. Modern GunaiKurnai elders recognized an ancient ritual for putting a curse on someone, one that is still taught today. Carbon dating of the sticks and other material place one of the fireplaces at around 11,000 years old, and the other at 12,000 years old! The instructions for the ritual were passed down orally for at least 500 generations. Read about this discovery and what it means at the Conversation. -via Strange Company

If all you know about Norse mythology is Thor, Loki, and Odin from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you have a lot more to learn. The many gods of old Norse paganism weren't perfect, just powerful. In addition to the powerful gods, there were also giants, dwarves, elves, and other supernatural beings. They did as they pleased, with no regard for mere humans nor for each other. Their stories weren't written, but passed down through generations by storytelling, until the Scandinavian countries were converted to Christianity by the 12th century. These stories varied among communities until the rise of the Vikings, which led to some consolidation of beliefs. But they weren't written down until after the rise of Christianity, so our understanding of what they actually believed is still fairly superficial.

Of the many stories of old Norse gods, Weird History picks out the most violent tales, having to do with power struggles, wars, and betrayal. An amusing bonus is hearing Tom Blank pronouncing all those ancient Norse names.

Lỗ Mạnh Hùng was only eleven years old when he begin to run into dangerous situations instead of away from them. That was in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1967. That's how Hùng became the youngest war photographer ever. He came by his skills honestly, as his father was also a photojournalist. But Hùng was small enough to wiggle his way through a crowd to get the best shot of whatever was happening, and he sold his photos to news organizations for more than enough to support the family during wartime. He made a name for himself by getting the images of the Tet Offensive in 1968.

Lỗ Mạnh Hùng managed to board a helicopter and escape Saigon in 1975 when the North Vietnamese triumphantly invaded the city. Read about the life of the world's youngest war photographer and what ultimately happened to him at Rare Historical Photos. -via Damn Interesting

Thieving bastards!!
byu/RogueBromeliad infunny

This gray cat knows exactly what he wants and where to find it. He wasn't all that keen on stopping to pay for his sausage, though. You can imagine him showing off his loot to his friends, and the orange cat doesn't believe him. So for his next caper, he brings his orange buddy along. This time the bin is piled full of sausages, which triggers an orgy of gastronomy right there on the sales floor. Orange cat, being orange, only has one brain cell and really doesn't know what to do with all that bounty.

While you can't really stage a video with cats (they don't take direction well), it's obvious this is not the first time these guys have been in this store. The camera follows them around, and you get the idea that whoever is operating it is enjoying the scene as much as we are. Besides, who puts a bin full of sausages on the floor? Customers are most likely to buy what is at eye level. Which this is, if you are a cat. -via reddit

Americans learn in elementary school that the Continental Army suffered terrible conditions, especially at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777-78. By February, they didn't have enough food nor warm clothing, and influenza swept through the camp. More thorough accounts tell us that the conditions weren't nearly as dire as your fourth grade teacher led you to believe (she was a drama queen), but there were supply line problems, which Washington worked hard to fix.

The truth is that the soldiers of the Continental Army ate pretty good most of the time. The documented rations for troops included a half-pound of beef every day, plus a half-pound of pork. If pork wasn't available, they got a pound and a quarter of beef! They were issued a quart of "good spruce or malt beer or cider." Every day. They were also supplied with bread, vegetables, soup, etc, which you can read about at Cracked, where they compare the revolutionary soldiers' food with the modern barbecues we enjoy today in celebration of their bravery.

Most of what we learned in school about World War II is from this side of the Iron Curtain. What happened in Eastern Bloc countries or Soviet Republics was mostly hidden until the Revolutions of 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union. By then, plenty of local stories were forgotten or otherwise inaccessible. In 1993, caver Chris Nicola found signs of habitation in some Ukrainian caves, and when he inquired, was told that Jews hid in those caves during the Nazi extermination program. It took ten years, but he found six survivors who told the tale of how their families hid in Verteba Cave and Priest’s Grotto.

In October of 1942, after the Nazis invaded Ukraine, two families hid in Verteba Cave. They were joined by other families later, for a total of 28 people. They shared the space with foxes and bats, and a select few ventured out at night to find supplies. They melted snow and caught water from dripping stalactites to drink. Nazis discovered the cave in 1943, but only a few were captured, because the cave system was full of dark passages. The remaining people moved to Priest’s Grotto, a bigger cave with its own underground water supply. When the Red Army liberated Ukraine in 1944, they were able to come out, but the children who hadn't seen sunlight in year and a half were frightened by the daylight. Read the story of those who hid in Ukrainian caves to survive Hitler's Final Solution at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Natalia Parkhomenko)

Have you ever been startled when an electric car snuck up on you while you were walking? That happened to me about ten years ago. I was on a sidewalk, but I immediately thought of what would happen if a cat or a kid were in the road. We are just plain used to loud car engines. So auto manufacturers started adding noises to cars, even though they don't need them to function. But when the sound is superfluous to the vehicle's function, those sounds don't have to mimic a combustion engine. What sounds should a car have to be the safest for pedestrians, cyclists, and animals? Car companies are working with audio engineers and sound designers to perfect the sounds of a quiet car for optimum safety while trying not to annoy everyone who hears them. -via Digg

When someone in this day and age tells you to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," they almost always mean you should work harder to improve your lot. However, the original quote that gave us the phrase can be traced back to 1834, when it was used to mock someone who claimed to have invented the perpetual motion machine. See, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is literally impossible, so the phrase is supposed to refer to an impossible act. The quote has been around so long that people completely misunderstand what it really means.

Another example is the "one bad apple" that you shouldn't judge the rest of the apples by. But the full phrase is "one bad apple spoils the barrel," which is completely opposite of how the phrase is used today. I blame the 1970 song by The Osmonds, where the lyric is "one bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch." But that's just my opinion. Read up on the origins and transformations of ten common quotes that people completely misinterpret at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: ABigCat)

Chile is so long that you can visualize it bending to the curvature of the earth. It's so long that if it were placed in Europe, it would reach from the top of Norway down to the north coast of Africa. The country's climate reflects the same orientation, except backwards. At the bottom, it's very close to Antarctica, and in the north you'll find hot desert. There's also a temperate rainforest in the middle, which is where people actually live. Those people speak a version of Spanish that Spanish-speakers from other places can't understand. What makes Chile so different in so many ways?

The short answer is the Andes mountain range. But those mountains, placed where they are, come with a story behind them and a lot of geographical effects that might surprise you. Chile's climate is affected by both the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic. The mountains left cultural effects of their own. And the main population of Chile is boxed in on four sides by mountains, ocean, desert, and cold. Tomas Pueyo explains why Chile is so different in so many ways because of where it is at Uncharted Territories.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Addicted04)

We saw the finalists a couple of months ago, and now the awards are in. The winners of the Comedy Pet Photography Awards have been announced! The overall winner is Sarah Haskell for the image above, titled Not Just For Cats. Or at least that's what Haskell's dog Hector thought, but he didn't make it all the way through. This photo also won in the dog category. The cat category was won by the picture below, titled Cat in a trap like Super Mario by Kenichi Morinaga.



I see a theme developing, but not all the award-winning photos were of self-trapped animals. The People's Choice winner is titled Tarzan by Kazutoshi Ono.



There are plenty more winners in the different categories, plus highly commended photos as well, that you can see in a gallery at the contest site. They do this every year, so never pass up an opportunity to take pictures of your pets, lest you'll catch them doing something funny. -via Digg

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F hits theaters this weekend. It is the fourth installment of the Beverly Hills Cop franchise that started in 1984. Eddie Murphy returns as Axel Foley, a Detroit police officer who is transported to a different culture in Los Angeles. So Screen Junkies goes back forty years to the movie that started it all. Warning: revisiting the original may ruin the new movie for you. We won't know until someone actually sees it.

In 1984, Eddie Murphy was already quite popular from Saturday Night Live, his standup act, and a couple of movie roles. Beverly Hills Cop was his first as the solo star, and became the biggest movie of 1984, spending 14 weeks at #1. This video makes us remember why. Beverly Hills Cop made Murphy a superstar. The two sequels, from 1987 and 1994, couldn't hold a candle to the original. While Honest Trailers are usually pretty devastating, the parts they pick on in this one are honestly funny.

Movies can be pretty influential, in more ways than you realize. Movies got us all to be afraid of quicksand, but that was because it was used in many movies. A lot of ideas that seem universal came from a single movie that proved strangely influential.

Everyone is used to NASA counting down the seconds before a space flight, as is tradition. But there's no real reason to do it like that, outside of the drama. The idea came from a 1926 German silent film. Yeah, they counted down to liftoff with intertitles. German rocket scientists like Werner von Braun were impressed, and did the same with their rockets, and then brought the idea to NASA. Now it's just what we do. We know that rabbits eat carrots because of Bugs Bunny, except rabbits don't normally eat carrots. Bugs only chomped on a carrot as a reference to another film, but since Bugs Bunny cartoons are in color, they ended up as more influential.

You might be surprised at some of the other stories about something small from a movie that became a part of our culture as explained at Cracked. Video clips of each movie are included.

When you were much younger, all kinds of adventure movies had a scene in which the protagonist or someone close to the protagonist fell into quicksand and had to be rescued before they slipped completely under and immediately drowned. Yeah, those movies still have those scenes, but new movies, not so much. Sinking in quicksand was an easy way for filmmakers to establish dangers lurking around every corner, get rid of minor characters, and give the hero something heroic to do. It happened so often on screen that it became a cliché, and that's why it's rarely used now. The fact that we learned that quicksand is not nearly as common nor dangerous as we were led to believe may have had something to do with it as well. But quicksand is a real thing, and it can kill you if conditions are just right. Weird History explains the difference between the movie version and real life, and how we can avoid dying in quicksand ourselves.