European history is a frighteningly big subject, especially for Americans, because it's documented so far back. There were so many cultures always at war with and conquering each other that nations and borders were constantly changing. A kingdom could be just a few hundred people and still have a royal family that ended up in the history books, so that the timeline is a long string of of wars, marriages, and murders that eventually just seem to blend together. But when you look closely, there are episodes that stand out because they are just so bizarre. Weird History does us a favor and highlights just the most outstandingly weird incidents in battle. You don't have to know exactly who these rulers were, or how they fit into the timeline to get a kick out of the odd things that make history worth knowing.

In the 21st century, the term "dude" is just another word for "guy" or "man." I first became aware of the word "dude" in Western movies, when it referred to a newcomer unfamiliar with or incapable of Wild West ways, also called a city slicker. That definition fits in well with the history of the word, which goes back further than you might think. The first appearance of "dude" in print happened in 1883, when it appeared in a poem. But we know that people were saying something long before it ever got to print. The etymology of the word between its origin and the first evidence in print is the subject of some speculation.

One theory that makes sense, but it still surprising, is that "dude" derived from the earlier term "Yankee Doodle Dandy!" It works in the context of the earliest definition of "dude." But the meaning behind the word changed through the 20th century. Read the history of the slang term that went from an insult to a descriptor to a worse insult to a compliment to neutral everyday use at The Art of Manliness. -Thanks WTM!

There was a time when I refused to get any Christmas decorations out before Thanksgiving. But then I settled on a tradition of getting the outdoor lights up just before Thanksgiving in order to impress my family members who traveled to feast with us. The tree goes up whenever a kid or two is here to haul it up from the basement for me, if they are willing to decorate it. This year, I noticed some houses with outdoor decorations on November first. That started during the pandemic, and it seemed like a welcome bit of cheer to folks who couldn't actually visit.

You may call it Christmas creep, but psychologists say there's nothing wrong with putting up Christmas decorations early. In fact, it's a sign of a happy person. Read what psychological studies say about people who put up Christmas decorations as soon as Halloween is over at Mental Floss.  

(Image credit: LoMit)

Gav and Dan, the Slow Mo Guys (previously at Neatorama), teamed up with the Brett and Scott from the YouTube channel How Ridiculous (previously at Neatorama) to bring us a thoroughly disturbing demonstration of wanton destruction. For some reason, they met up in Montana for this stunt. Well, they needed a lot of room. They procured an anatomically-correct model head, made of fake bones and ballistic gel, complete with green blood, and then shot a bowling ball at it with a cannon. The bowling ball is traveling at almost 400 miles per hour, so you know that head is going to be obliterated. Yep, they blew it up real good, as we can see in the slow motion playback. But look! They have more heads, so they get to blow more of them away. I'm glad they chose their heads to be equipped with green blood instead of red. -via Digg  

Hampshire villagers bring street’s apostrophe catastrophe to a full stop.

St Mary’s Terrace in Twyford has regained its lost punctuation after a row that even drew in local author Jane Austen. https://t.co/YWljN0rv4c

— Mom de plume 🇺🇦🕷 #FBPE (@NargisWalker) November 17, 2023

In recent years, there's a tendency for government officials to drop apostrophes from place names, and the residents of Twyford, Hampshire, UK, are having none of it. A year ago, the Winchester City Council posted a new sign for St. Mary's Terrace that said simply St Marys Terrace, with no punctuation at all. The new sign rubbed retired teacher Oliver Gray the wrong way. It was not so much the loss of the full stop after "St,"* but the lost of the apostrophe after "Mary." The apostrophe indicates a possessive, while the lack of one indicates a plural, and in this case, "Mary" is singular. Villagers brought their consternation over the lost apostrophe to the attention of the city council.

Officials argued that place names should not have punctuation, to make deliveries and emergency response easier. While that may be true for computerized services, it is humans who are reading the sign. The controversy over the sign led to a year-long battle in Twyford, but the sign has now been replaced. Read the arguments on both sides at the Guardian. The article has delicious examples of apostrophe misuse from the Apostrophe Protection Society. -via Metafilter

*In the lively discussion at Metafilter, we learn that in British journalism, a period in an abbreviation is only used if the omitted letters are on the back end, so that "St" means saint and "St." means street.

Ruling the galaxy with an iron fist can be stressful. When things get a little rough, Darth Vader takes some personal time for a video consultation with his therapist Master Garian. Vader repeats a series of positive affirmations that we know he has no intention of fulfilling. It only take five minutes before the session is interrupted, but Vader puts an end to that. Throughout this video, I was expecting Vader to slow down his breathing to a point where he just dies, but that doesn't happen. Master Garian's soothing voice may or may not have done Vader any good, but I feel quite relaxed. You can thank Auralnauts for this odd but calming interlude.

Have you seen the latest Godzilla movie, Godzilla Minus One? The giant lizard we all know and love is infinitely recognizable, but if you were to watch that movie and the original 1954 Godzilla, the two titular monsters are very different. You don't normally see movies that are 70 years apart in a double feature. Godzilla fans generally see them when they are new, although the earliest ones make a good weekend binge.

Godzilla stays so familiar to us because while every movie changes him, they only change a little. There are officially 37 movies in the Godzilla franchise (with another one coming next year). It's the longest continually running film franchise ever. Each production aims to improve over those that have gone before, but you can't change the monster too much or fans will rebel. If you look through all the movies, you will be struck by how much bigger Godzilla has become. But the design has also become more like a natural, if fictional, reptile, and therefore more believable. Film technology has advanced so that we see ever more realism and more "bling" at the same time, in order to bring more thrills. Read about the changes in each iteration of Godzilla, movie by movie at Polygon. Then be on the lookout for the differences in the big guy in the TV show Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters starting November 17 on Apple+ TV and the movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, set to hit theaters on April 12, 2024.  -via Digg

(Image credit: Will Joel/Polygon)

Historically, the toughest armies are made up of the fiercest warriors. Modern armies depend on technology and brainpower, but still require tough warriors. Over thousands of years, rulers have shaped their societies to produce brave fighters that will risk their lives for glory, honor, and victory. Weird History highlights eleven of history's fiercest fighting forces of the past and what they accomplished. Not all of them were official armies led by government rulers, but they all had a leader who knew how to motivate their fighters, whether by patriotism, rewards, fear, loyalty, cultural manipulation, or survival instinct. Or some combination of those techniques. Some you know about from history class or the movies, but there will be a couple of armies that are new to you.  

Our Thanksgiving celebration is modeled after the 1621 harvest feast of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag. But there were at least a couple of feasts between Europeans and Native Americans before that. One notable feast occurred in 1566 when the notoriously fierce Calusa people hosted the Spanish governor of Florida, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. The Calusa ruled southwestern Florida from a manmade island now called Mound Key near Fort Myers, where they had built a city of around 4,000 people.

King Caalus hosted the event in a dining hall that could hold 2,000 people, and served a variety of fish and oysters. Avilés brought a retinue that included a band, with fifes, drums, trumpets, a harp, and a guitar. They also brought biscuits, wine, molasses ...and tablecloths. King Caalus gave Avilés his sister as a wife. A good time was had by all.

But it didn't last. The Calusa weren't all that keen on sharing Florida, and the Spanish wanted to rule. Within a year, relations fell apart, and the Calusa would have nothing to do with Europeans afterward. Read about the Calusa culture, the feast, and what ultimately happened to them at Atlas Obscura.      

Science will tell you the only real difference between the earth's species of cats is their size. Let's take a closer look at that, with wonderful footage of leopards in the wild doing the things all house cats do, in a clip from the BBC TV series Planet Earth 3.

Big cats will get high on catnip, too, although that's hard to catch in the wild. However, size makes a big difference. Male leopards typically max out at around 100 pounds, but can reach 200 pounds. A leopard eats things like antelopes and warthogs, and needs a minimum of between six and eight pounds of meat a day. Leopards are just as food-motivated as the typical house cat, so if your leopard doesn't get his daily allowance, well, you are about the right size prey to supplement that. Maybe we should stick to domestic house cats, which are predators just the right size to eat mice. -via Laughing Squid

We know the bunyip as an Australian cryptid whose legend goes back hundreds of years in Aboriginal folklore. Descriptions of the bunyip are varied and murky because it is too scary to observe for long. One of the best known bunyip sightings came in 1879 when three miners went duck hunting at night in Hexham Swamp, near Newcastle, New South Wales. They were startled by a great roar "like that of a lion" and saw two eyes glowing gold. They left immediately. The legend of the Hexham bunyip had begun.  

Hexham Swamp is now a part of Hunter Wetlands National Park, and conservationists there are working to protect the Hexham bunyip, which is in danger of going extinct. This is not a hoax like the wild haggis, because experts have identified what creature the miners saw in 1879. Find out what it was, and read about the status of the Hexham bunyip at ABC News.  -via Metafilter

We know 42 is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It's also the answer when you ask how many national emergencies the US is under right now. Why so many? Can you name any of them? Don't they expire at sometime or another? Well, first we have to define "national emergency." The idea is not in the Constitution at all, and it was only codified in the 1970s, but that bill was quite broad and led to what we have now. The US President can declare a national emergency, and then do all kinds of things that may or may not have anything to do with the emergency at hand. Whether or not that's a good thing depends on the situation, but since we have 42 current "situations," that's an awful lot of power to hand to one person. Half as Interesting takes the regulations the way they exist now and runs them with some utterly ridiculous possible scenarios. Let's hope that cooler heads prevail. The last minute of this video is an ad.    

Redditor DaisyHotCakes found a cookie cutter in her collection that completely stumped her. She thought it was a stand mixer without a bowl or beaters, but that doesn't make sense. It sort of reminds me of a meat grinder. Other redditors had other ideas.

Sid the Sloth by MandiLandi. Bearing a gift!

A pineapple by Carya_spp.

A Rose from FirexJkxFire.

Continue reading for more nonsensical guesses and the correct answer.

BEAKING NEWS: Pūteketeke pandemonium prevails! The pūteketeke Australasian crested grebe has won Bird of the Century 2023 @lastweektonight

Read more: https://t.co/bGKJPTV3AS

📹: Tom Sainsbury pic.twitter.com/Xd7FpaGEmy

— Forest & Bird (@Forest_and_Bird) November 14, 2023

The organization Forest & Bird in New Zealand hosts the Bird of the Year competition annually, and it's always a fierce competition. This year, the contest was renamed to Bird of the Century to celebrate the organization's 100th anniversary. And the winner is: the pūteketeke!

Also known as the Australasian crested grebe, this bird is known for eating its own feathers in order to puke up parasites. The pūteketeke also has a unique mating dance.

But the competition was not without controversy. The record number of votes prior to this year was 57,000, but this year, more than 350,000 votes came in, mostly due to a campaign by talk show host John Oliver, who pushed for the pūteketeke to win. The bird garnered 290,000 of those votes, even after thousands of fraudulent votes were excluded.   



Some Kiwis are upset, citing foreign interference, while Forest & Bird is tickled by the global reach of the campaign. After all, the purpose of the contest is to draw attention to conservation efforts on behalf of endangered birds.

The Bird of the Year contest has ruffled feathers before. In 2020, it was a massive case of voter fraud, and in 2021, bird fans were upset that the winner was a bat.

-via Fark

Extreme pressure is not just what you get from your job. We already knew a few things about pressure, like atmospheric pressure feels pretty normal for us at sea level. At higher altitudes, it get harder for us to breath, and that's why we have to keep airplanes pressurized. Deep sea creatures have evolved to withstand higher pressure that would kill humans. Extreme pressure, the kind that exists at the center of the earth is something we rarely think about.

Under this kind of extreme pressure, solids turn liquid and liquids turn solid, and gas pretty much just disappears. Imagine water turning into a solid. Well, that happens in winter, but at the center of the earth it solidifies under high heat, because of the immense pressure. Adam Cole explains the weird ways extreme pressure warps the way we think about the states of matter when you get outside our normal pressure range. And he makes it both understandable and fascinating. -via Kottke