There's a reason we have a prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The past was full of cruelty, and unusual was only limited by one's imagination. Here's a punishment that wasn't all that cruel, as we would view it now, but it sure was unusual. In Florence, Italy, during the Rennaissance, the Bargello was the building that housed prisoners. If a detainee were to escape, or skip bail, they would add a new fresco to the wall of the Bargello in the image of that person. It wasn't like a mugshot for identification, but a pittura infamante, a punishment in itself, because they would paint the perpetrator in a humiliating way, often hanging upside-down. The face must be recognizable, but often had a silly expression. And details could be added for extra embarrassment, like a defecating dog in the background.

This kind of punishment really only affected elite perpetrators with status, because such humiliation could hurt their social standing or even their business connections. Artists didn't want to do these punitive portraits, because they didn't want to offend their wealthy patrons. But Botticelli painted one, and possibly Leonardo da Vinci, too. Hardly any of these images survive today, as the wall was painted over and over. Read what we know about these pittura infamante at Jstor. -via Strange Company

Denali, in Alaska, is the tallest mountain in the United States. In 1906, Frederick Cook claimed to have reached the summit, which would make him the first to do so. However, no one believed him, especially after his photographic proof was identified as a different location (Cook later claimed to have been the first man to reach the North Pole). Alaskan miner Thomas Lloyd was skeptical about Cook's claims and said he could do better than Cook. The bartender replied,  

"Tom, you are too old and too fat to climb to the top of Denali."

There's nothing that will light a fire under a man like someone telling him he can't do something. And that was the beginning of the Sourdough Expedition of 1910, in which four guys with no climbing experience went up Denali and lived to tell about it. But if a movie were to be made about the expedition, it would be a comedy, as David Friedman of Ironic Sans explains. See, no one believed any of the four had reached the summit, and they had plenty of reasons to be skeptical. -via Laughing Squid

We cover the most popular baby names in the US every year, and have also tracked the popularity of names over time, and you rarely learn anything you didn't already know. In a few years, schools will have to find a way to tell all the Liams and Olivias apart. But when you look around the world, you are in for some surprises. You could probably guess that Mary and its many variations is the top name of choice for girls in the most nations, and Muhammad with a few spelling variation is the top name for boys in more countries than any other. But look closer. I have never met anyone named Isla, which is the number one name for girls in Australia and New Zealand. Is it new? The top baby girl name in Israel is Avigayil, which might be pronounced like Abigail, or maybe not. The most popular name in Japan for boys is Aoi. Does anyone know the proper pronunciation for that?

Letter Solver did research in each country's native language to dig up the data from available sources. Not all sources were for the same time period, but priority was given to the most recent data when identified. See world maps of the most popular baby names (you can click to enlarge them), and a chart that lists each country where data was available. -via Digg

John Koopman spent 25 years as a journalist, including time embedded with a Marine unit in the Iraq War. Then he was laid off as newspapers started to decline. He turned to managing strip clubs, then spent some time ferrying marijuana over state lines, or as he calls it "a modern bootlegger." One of his friends was a marijuana dealer from high school onward. Another friend spent years as a sex worker. He tells their stories, and his, with an emphasis on why they took on those jobs. The three main reasons are: 1. these activities pay significantly better than anything else they could have done, 2. you are your own boss instead of punching a clock and taking orders from someone else, and 3. the danger provides a thrill that makes one feel truly alive. There are definite drawbacks, especially in the case of the prostitute, who had low self-esteem and hated the job. Read the stories of all three people in an essay at LitHub. -via Damn Interesting

A blogger at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica recently told us about their food supplies during winter. He's been there a while now and knows his way around the station, so he's sharing pictures he's taken of the many signs posted at the facility.

Some of the signs are the kind that you might see at any industrial workplace. But there are many unique messages, too. People not only work there, but do all their eating, sleeping, and recreation there as well. And since the population is transient, the signs are necessary for new people arriving who don't know all the quirks of the station. Some are quite ominous. Does anyone know what this one might mean?

One sign is merely a label on a drawer that says THREE HUGE WRENCHES AND A MICROMETER, which will inspire you to sing a bit of a well-known Beck song. You'd have to open the drawer to see what was actually in there, and he did. Many of the signs have been there for years. When you are only spending a short time in an extreme environment, it's often better to warn people so they don't all make the same mistakes, and easier to label a problem than to fix it. See the extensive collection of signs posted all over the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at brr. -via Metafilter

This video contains NSFW language. Last year, Ryan Reynolds made a video of his own colonoscopy experience (without any invasive images) to promote screening for colon cancer. This year, he enlisted Terry Crews to undergo a colonoscopy and make a public account of the procedure for the organization Lead From Behind. Crews arrived at his appointment as United States President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho, the character he played in the 2006 film Idiocracy. Crews stayed in character even under anesthesia! Reynolds said,

We applaud President Camacho for his bravery — and also idiocy.

The fictional future president is running a low-key comedy campaign for the presidency in the 2024 election. So far, it only surfaces to promote something, such as the SXSW festival earlier this year and now the campaign to encourage people to get a colonoscopy. Everyone should have a colonoscopy performed after turning 45, or even before then if you have symptoms.

An excavation site at Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire, UK, is thought to have been the home of a wealthy Roman family who lived there during the Iron Age, around the second century CE. One of the more surprising finds was the skeletal remains of a very short dog- only 20 centimeters, or eight inches tall. Yet it had a long backbone. The villa where it was found was a farm, with livestock and working animals. Small dogs were bred in this period for hunting, but this particular specimen had bowed legs and was more likely kept as a pet. Could it have been the runt of the litter, but saved by its cuteness? The artist's depiction above sure looks like a dachshund (notice the foot in the background for scale), but that breed was developed hundreds of years later in Germany for hunting purposes. However, it could be that the phrase "get a long little doggie" had meaning long before the breed was perfected. Read more about this discovery at BBC. -via Fark

(Image credit: DigVentures)

It's long been a fact of life that if we are lucky enough to grow old, our hair will either turn gray or fall out. Or both. In recent years, the stigma of having gray hair is not as dire as it used to be, and gray hair has become kind of chic among young people. This shift ironically coincides with new research that shows why hair turns gray, and how we can stop it from doing so. Further medical research shows that hair that has already turned gray can, in some cases, start to grow in color again.

Fortunately, most people already know a shortcut to covering gray hair, or changing one's hair color completely. It comes in a bottle and you can even do it at home, as I have off and on since I was a teenager. Now that my hair is partially white, I have expanded my palette to include a range of shockingly unnatural hues. But I can see the value in this research, as it contributes to our understanding of how our bodies work at the cellular level. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Lake Barryessa in California's Napa County holds 1.6 million acre-feet of water, and is a popular recreational area. But before 1957, this was Berryessa Valley. The town of Monticello was here, containing 600 people, mostly ranchers and farmers who grew fruits, nuts, and grains in Napa's fertile soil. Many of them were related, and their families had lived in Monticello for a hundred years. They didn't want to move, but three military bases downstream needed a reliable water supply, so the Monticello Dam was built to maintain a reservoir on Putah Creek.

Dorothea Lange went to Barryessa Valley to document the destruction of Monticello in a photo series called Death of a Valley. Grapevines were ripped up, houses were bulldozed, and trees were burned. The residents of Monticello moved away and lost contact with each other. But the scars remain, both on the land that is now a lake, and in the people who once called Monticello home. Read about the destruction of Monticello for Lake Barryessa at Alta magazine. See more of Dorothea Lange's images here.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Sharon Hahn Darlin)

You know those cute aliens who do everything earthlings do, except they use very literal language that makes us laugh? They love each other, their three-eyed dogs, and their vibrating cats. Their creator, Nathan W. Pyle (previously at Neatorama) has teamed up with Dan Harmon (who created Rick and Morty and Community) to brings those aliens to TV. Voices are provided by Hannah Einbinder, Tunde Adebimpe, Demi Adejuyigbe, Lori Tan Chinn, and Danny Pudi. The series Strange Planet will premiere on Apple+ streaming on August 9th.  -via Fark, where you'll find plenty of favorite Strange Planet comics.

"the other guys" should work for a french audience, right?

france: non. VERY BAD COPS pic.twitter.com/TMMn36J2eJ

— juan (@juanbuis) March 8, 2023

Juan at Twitter... excuse me, X, tells us how French movie distributors often change the title of an American movie. But the new title is still in English. Why? It appears that they are trying to make it more clear what the movie is about, although the French moviegoer would have to know some English to see that. Juan gives ten examples in the Twitter X thread, many of which are so straightforward they are just "Sex" plus whatever makes the movie different from the next feature.

"what's your number?" works well for this cute romcom, right?

france: non. SEX LIST pic.twitter.com/DmSJnOeXrc

— juan (@juanbuis) March 8, 2023

Those are followed by many contributions in the comments, although some are real and some are jokes and parodies of the idea. We find out that The Hangover in Portuguese is titled If You Drink, Don't Get Married, and in Hebrew, it's On the Way to the Wedding, We Stop in Vegas. One contribution from the comments was how the French version of Cool Runnings was called Rasta Rockett. See the original ten examples and some highlights from the X thread at Bored Panda.

PS: Even though Twitter is currently rebranded to X, the transformation seems to be quite incomplete. Posts are still called Tweets and you go to Twitter Publish to get the embed code.

The western part of Kentucky is made up of karst, which means the ground is like Swiss cheese, with holes running through it. The most famous of these holes is Mammoth Cave, the longest cave system in the world. But it's not the only cave. Mammoth Cave was an important saltpeter mine up through the War of 1812, but when the supply of saltpeter petered out, so to speak, it became a tourist attraction. Tourism grew slowly until the advent of the automobile, and then took off substantially. Around the beginning of the 20th century, landowners around the area who also had caves on their property wanted in on some of those tourist dollars, too.

If you owned any property in the area, you searched diligently for a cave entrance, or even the presence of a cave underground, because you can always create an entrance. If you didn't own land, you could work for someone who did. And competition was ruthless. The many tourist caves would employ "cappers," whose job it was to bring in tourists, in any way they saw fit. They would waylay tourists and guide them to a cave, or hand out maps to a cave other than Mammoth. They would also sabotage a competitor's business, up to and including killing them.

The Kentucky Cave Wars lasted for decades. You can still find a lot of caves around the area of Cave City. There's Mammoth Cave National Park, plus Horse Cave, Hidden River Cave, Outlaw Cave, Diamond Caverns, Lost River Cave, Crystal Onyx Cave, Waterfall Cave, and more. If Mammoth Cave is ever fully explored and mapped, they may prove to all be connected. Read about the Kentucky Cave Wars at Smithsonian.

See also: The Man Who Made Mammoth Cave and The 1925 Cave-In That Captivated the Nation.

(Image credit: National Park Service)

The new song from Claud Mintz is "A Good Thing" in more ways than one. The song is a real toe-tapper, but the video is a mini-film featuring Paul Rudd as a clueless mail carrier who has a ferret with an eye problem. Believe it or not, that's not what the video is about at all. It's about Claud, and the gift from their girlfriend. There's a cat who looks exactly like my Marshmallow, and then things get weird. When the song was over, I had to look up the lyrics to see what the song is about. It's a normal angsty love song, but I couldn't follow at the time because I was busy concentrating on what was happening in the video, which is both cute and funny. "A Good Thing" is from the album Supermodels. -via Nag on the Lake

Early in the 20th century, as Americans traveled more and more by train to exotic destinations in their own country, they mailed or brought back novelty "tall tale" postcards to show where they'd been. These are still funny, and charmingly retro. Most were the work of Edward Henry Mitchell. While this type of fantasy image can easily be done in Photoshop today, Mitchell made them the old-fashioned way, in his photo shop in San Francisco.

Mitchell would lay out a picture of a background, often a photograph of the the Southern Pacific Railroad, then cut out  produce from a different photograph and just lay it over top. Then he'd take another photo of the whole thing together. These templates would be offered to various businesses, governments, and Chambers of Commerce, and their name or location added before printing mass quantities.

Ridiculously large produce shipments were just a small part of Mitchell's postcard business. His business published at least 4,000 designs between 1898 and 1915. See a gallery of his tall tale postcards from the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History at Flashbak. -via Everlasting Blort

Yogi, are you ready for your closeup? To understand this story, you'll need to see last week's video in which bears test bear-resistant trash cans at the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center. A bear looting a trash can made off with Tom's GoPro camera, and I made a remark about it being a write-off. But there's more to the story. Someone commented that the camera should be okay since GoPros are fairly waterproof. But are they bear-proof? After all, that's what the testing center is for. And this GoPro was covered in honey and peanut butter, which bears just love. Miraculously, the camera was later recovered from the bear pond, and it more or less worked. So this week we get to see the footage from the camera that the bear chewed on and then dropped in the pond. Strangely, the bear remembered the camera and went back to retrieve it himself!