It's that time of year! The Iowa State Fair will take place August 10-20. There will be a variety of attractions, but here at Neatorama, we usually focus on the food, because every year food vendors compete to come up with the most outrageous, delicious, artery-clogging combinations to draw in publicity and hungry fairgoers. This year Iowa has 64 new gastronomic offerings from various restaurants who will be set up at the fair. Of those 64, a panel of judges has selected three finalists for the title of Best New State Fair Food.

One is the Grinder Ball, which are bacon balls that are stuffed with mozarella, wrapped in more bacon, and then smoked and dipped in marinara sauce. They make sure to inform us that it's gluten-free.

The Iowa Twinkie is anything but a Twinkie. This is a jalapeño pepper stuffed with pulled pork, sweet corn, cream cheese, and ranch seasoning. It is then glazed with barbecue sauce and ranch dressing.

The third finalist is the Deep-Fried Bacon Brisket Mac-n-Cheese Grilled Cheese. The title is the description.

Strangely, none of the three finalists are served on a stick. If you're going to the Iowa State Fair, you can find the foods you want to try by downloading their app. Then you can vote for the Best New Fair Food online between August 10th and 14th. The winner will be announced August 16th, which leaves several days for everyone else to try it.

(Image credit: Iowa State Fair)

Most simple children's electric toys run on five volts or less. YouTuber Aboringday has time on his hands and a lot of toys, so he took their batteries out and hooked up a WANPTEK DC power supply to various toys to see what boosting that voltage would do, in increments up to 30 volts! What happens? Well, they go faster. They sound like they are screaming, although that's just the moving parts trying to keep up. And sometimes they tear themselves apart. That can be pretty funny, but what's really fascinating is how odd the toys are in the first place. I would love to have the duck slide; that's just cool. The dancing monkey is charming and clever. But the bee sting dog is downright horrific at any speed. Would a child actually get pleasure from it? Oh, but there's more.



The anticipation grows as we wait to see what more power will do to a Thomas the Tank Engine train! It's an illustration of the phrase "going off the rails." But for consistency's sake, he feels he has to show us all the higher voltage levels anyway. The crab had to be tied down! What he did to the dog bank was downright sadistic. We got some laughs, and now all his toys are broken. -via Metafilter

The life story of J. Robert Oppenheimer has been told in several venues, but none have come close to capturing the complexity of the man. The new movie Oppenheimer from Chris Nolan opens this weekend in another attempt. The real Oppenheimer was a superbly intelligent and educated physicist, a nerd from an early age, who answered the call when the US military needed all the superbly intelligent physicists it could round up. Those physicists included Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi, Otto Frisch, Niels Bohr, Felix Bloch, James Franck, and the young Richard Feynman. Amid that distinguished team, Oppenheimer was appointed head of the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, a role he surprisingly excelled in.

Oppenheimer put his heart and soul into his work on the atomic bomb, but that was not all he was. He also had relationships with at least two women who belonged to the Communist Party. And the ethics of the bomb his team created weren't lost on the physicist. Read about the real J. Robert Oppenheimer before you see the movie this weekend, at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: Ed Westcott, U.S. Government photographer)

The sinking of the Titanic was such a momentous disaster that movies are made about it over and over. CaptainJZH collected a dozen of those movies or TV shows and put together clips of the final plunge of the ship as it slipped underwater, out of sight. Theses movies span a hundred years, and you can watch the special effects get better over time. I had to laugh at the first one, but the rest are pretty moving.

You might notice that all the cinematic sinkings before 1985 showed the ship in one piece, and all those afterward show a ship broken in two. The Titanic was gone before any other ships arrived, but most of the 705 survivors said that the ship broke in two pieces before sinking. But those hundreds of eyewitness accounts were not believed! That fact was only confirmed after the wreckage on the sea floor was discovered in 1985. -via Kottke

During the Golden Age of Piracy, any pirate ship that had a surgeon, or any kind of medical practitioner, onboard probably got him by kidnapping him from another ship. But hey, it beat getting slaughtered like so many others.

Mark C. Kehoe has always been fascinated with pirates. He participated in pirate forums, which led to becoming a pirate re-enactor, which led to difficult research on what the life a pirate surgeon was like, as there are few contemporary accounts, and those are hard to find. All this led to the The Pirate Surgeon's Journals. It contains an extensive history of the medical profession itself and how it fits into seafaring, plus articles on how these surgeons dealt with the plague, alcoholism, provisioning and dietary struggles, and other difficulties of taking care of outlaws at sea. We also get a look at the horrific injuries these surgeons confronted, as well as the diseases and disabilities they encountered. Oh yeah, there are plenty of other pirate topics outside of the medical realm, too. You'll want to bookmark the site because there's just so much. -via Boing Boing

The whole world uses the same basic calendar for communication and trade reasons, but there are still cultural differences that go way back. The four seasons are delineated by the solstices and the equinoxes, but you still hear local jokes about five seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter, and mud. The Japanese calendar divides the four main seasons into 72 much more detailed units called ko, each about five days long. If you want to be in tune with nature, each of these ko describe what the world around us will be doing as the weather, plants, and animals go through their annual cycles.

According to the very detailed calendar, the first cherry blossoms will appear March 26–30, frogs begin to sing May 5–9, and praying mantises hatch June 6–10. Keeping up with such things sounds quite pleasant, as long as the world acts normally. Those who follow traditional ko are the first to notice how climate change is affecting the calendar. As a casual gardener, I am well aware of which flowers should bloom each month, and they've been alarmingly off schedule this year.

Read how the Japanese micro-seasons came about and see a list of all 72 of them at Amusing Planet.    

(Image credit: Toshihiro Matsui)

In the past few days, we've had posts about bears eating garbage, and about European visitors to Yellowstone. So it only makes sense that Tom Scott would head to Yellowstone to find out how to keep bears from eating garbage. At the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center, Tom learns how some bears escape euthanasia after helping themselves to picnic baskets or garbage. If they go to live here, they are put to work testing bear-resistant coolers and trash receptacles. We no longer actually say "bear-proof" because we don't want to overpromise.

The bears at the center are encouraged to continue getting into containers to eat human food, so they can never be released back into the wild, lest they teach other bears how to do it. But as far as trash-eating bears go, these are the lucky ones. While Tom got a great video, he now has to explain the business loss of a GoPro camera in some unusual circumstances.

This weekend saw a horde of fictional characters out in full regalia at Montreal Comiccon, and Geeks Are Sexy was there as usual to capture the magic. Folks went all out, like the Valkyrie shown above. Stay out of her way- that wingspan must be about eight feet!

Who knew Rocket Raccoon had a dog? That's not Cosmo the Spacedog, but more like Rocket's "Mini-Me." They're both pretty hairy, so you have to wonder how warm it was in Montreal this weekend. Check out the gallery of cosplay portraits at Geeks Are Sexy, where you'll see characters from TV, movies, comic books, anime, cartoons, and folklore. Click any of the images to bring up a full-size version. If you don't know the character, it will be revealed when you hover your cursor. A good time was had by all.

Let's face it- the only reason in the world to spend a ridiculous amount of money on clothing is so that everyone around you will know that you have enough money to waste it any way you want. Or enough power to get them free. Last month, Balenciaga staged their 52nd couture show during Paris Fashion Week. One of the more astonishing overpriced creations unveiled was a pair of jeans that retail for $27,000.

Ah, but these are no ordinary jeans. They aren't even jeans at all. These are regular cotton and linen pants, hand-painted in trompe l'oeil fashion to resemble worn and faded denim. Each pair represents more than 100 hours of labor, and you can't even throw them in the washer. Let's break this down. Consider that the materials and company overhead could cost as much as $2,000 (a very generous estimate), that means that the artist, or more likely a team of artists, should have earned around $200 an hour to paint the pants and still give the company a $5,000 profit per pair. Nice work if you can get it, but is it believable? And do they have them in stock in a variety of sizes, or would you have to commission them? Read more about Balenciaga's trompe l'oeil jeans and other new fashions at Highsnobiety.  -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Balenciaga)

Have you ever wondered why bubblegum is pink? Why #2 pencils are yellow? Why blue jeans are blue? It is often the story that many brands of the same product end up the same color because new brands want to be recognized as much as the first popular version, riding on their coattails, so to speak. But someone somewhere had to decide what color that original version would be. And there's a story behind each of those decisions. That's just commercials products. Some universal objects have logical reasons for their color. When it works in one place, it works everywhere. Let's learn some of those stories behind universal colors from Weird History.

We've read plenty of stories of the people aboard the Titanic when it sank on April 15, 1912. Let's have a perspective on that night from another ship, the Carpathia. The Carpathia was a much smaller ship traveling east to Liverpool that night. It had only one radio operator, Harold Cottam, and he was in the process of shutting down radio operations for the night -it was after midnight- but decided to go ahead and relay some messages from Cape Cod piling up for the Titanic. In reply, he got a distress signal. The "unsinkable" Titanic had struck an iceberg and was sinking.

Cottam and the first officer ran to wake Captain Arthur Rostron. The captain immediately ordered the Carpathia to change direction and head 58 miles to the northwest to aid the Titanic, at full speed. It would take four hours to get there. As the ship chugged along, the passengers slept and the crew prepared to take on survivors. Meanwhile, Rostron considered the dark night and the field of icebergs he was taking his ship toward. Read the story of the Carpathia, the ship that rescued 706 Titanic survivors, at Singular Discoveries. -via Strange Company 

The question at reddit was "Americans of Reddit, what places in America should foreigners avoid at all cost?" You might expect that there would be a bunch of people telling visitors not to come to America at all due to the danger of gunshot wounds that you can't afford to have treated. But instead the commenters took it seriously, based on foreign visitors they have known who came to the US with the wrong ideas. They had already been warned about the guns and the cost of healthcare, but were completely uninformed about the dangers of Yellowstone, Death Valley, and the Grand Canyon. They're not really saying don't come, but if you do you should be aware of what to expect, and it can be dangerous. Also, many visitors have no concept of how big the US really is. Read all the advice at the reddit thread, which includes warning tourists away from your hometown, or just the highlights that make the most sense for both foreign and domestic tourists at Digg.

(Image credit: Brocken Inaglory)

Of all the meteorites that we have found, two-thirds of them have been recovered in Antarctica. As strange as that seems, those meteorites are pretty much restricted to one small area of Antarctica. When you first hear that, you might think that it has something to do with earth's rotation, or maybe a magnetic field that grabs these falling objects and steers them towards this area around the South Pole. That place is weird in many ways. But you'd be wrong. The operative phrase in the first sentence is "that we have found." It is Antarctica's unique environment that makes finding meteorites easier than anywhere else on earth, even though that continent has relatively few people looking for them. The vast majority of rocks falling from the sky will never be found, but those that are collected in Antarctica tell us an awful lot about outer space, according to this video from MinuteEarth.

...Lychon—a member of my own family!—slaughtered me, still in my youth. He threw me from the heights like a discus. I was twenty years old, so full of beauty, when the Moirai spun my fate and sent me as a delight to Hades."

RIP my dude💔

(Louvre Ma 2867, trans. Chaniotis) pic.twitter.com/xFDMYE7Eaq

— Roko Rumora (@rumorahasit) March 8, 2023

A tombstone looted from ancient Greek city of Alexandria Troas, near Istanbul, is now in the Louvre. It is inscribed with the image of a rather short young man. The epitaph has only recently been translated into English, and we get the macabre story from the inscription. Poor Aphrodisios! He was only 20 years old, yet lost his wife and his life to the greed of Lychon, thrown like a Frisbee to his death. The discussion at Metafilter centers around who arranged (and paid) for this gravestone to be carved. If it was commissioned by Lychon, who was after all a relative, he wouldn't have included the part about the dirty adultress. It could have been Aphrodisios' parents, which would explain the description of Aphrodisios as "so full of beauty." All we have left is a mysterious glimpse into an ancient dysfunctional family.

American black bears once roamed the entire continent before it was settled by European immigrants. Due to conservation over the last hundred years, the bears have rebounded to about half the area they once inhabited. But weird things are happening to black bears lately. Their hibernation period is growing shorter, and some bears don't hibernate at all! This is especially true among "urban bears," those who hang around close to towns. The number of urban bears began to spike around 1990 in the Lake Tahoe area. A 2003 study tracked them, and found that bears that lived near towns went into hibernation a month later than more isolated wilderness bears, and awoke earlier in the spring. Five of the 38 bears did not hibernate at all.

There are two reasons for this. Urban bears have a year-round food supply in human garbage, so they don't get the nutritional cues to go sleep for a couple of months. Climate change is the other reason, as winters stay warmer longer and spring arrives earlier. One expert calculated that by mid-century, the average bear hibernation could be two to six weeks shorter than today. Read about how human activity has changed a bear's natural cycle at LitHub.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Cephas)