In the 1950s, the CIA launched Project MKUltra, in which they experimented with LSD as a possible truth serum, mind control drug, or biological weapon. The head of the project was biochemist Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who has been compared to "Q" from the James Bond movies as well as a mad scientist. The project began with volunteers, but then moved to unwitting subjects, with nefarious results that you can read about in a previous Neatorama post.
Later in the program, Gottlieb wanted to see how the combination of LSD and sex would affect possible subjects, specifically if they would be more easily interrogated and would release private information. To do this, MKUltra set up apartments and hired sex workers to lure subjects in. They were given LSD without their knowledge. After sex, the women would question the men while CIA agents watched through two-way mirrors and listened through planted microphones. Houses were set up for this in New York City and in San Francisco for Operation Midnight Climax. Hundreds of people were subjects of this experiment, and may not have ever realized anything was amiss afterward. Read about Operation Midnight Climax at Messy Nessy Chic. No nudes, but some images might be considered NSFW.
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
— Amanda (@Pandamoanimum) March 30, 2023
Mushrooms come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. Pedro Pascal, the star of The Mandalorian and The Last of Us, has the stylish wardrobe of a man who gets his picture taken a lot. So who wore it better- one of nature's brilliant fungi, or the fun guy?
— Amanda (@Pandamoanimum) March 30, 2023
A Twitter thread from Amanda @Pandamoanimum has a dozen of these comparisons. You can enjoy the pretty colors, or just enjoy looking at Pedro Pascal. -via Everlasting Blort
The Royal Navy vessel HMS Bounty set sail from Tahiti to Jamaica in 1789 on the last leg of an arduous mission to import breadfruit to feed enslaved people in the Caribbean. The ship was commanded by Lieutenant William Bligh, a name that has become a metaphor for cruel authoritarianism. Three weeks out, Bligh's second in command, Fletcher Christian, led a mutiny and put Bligh to sea along with 18 loyalists in a small boat. The crew took the Bounty back to Tahiti and then to uninhabited Pitcairn Island to hide out. Bligh and his men rowed all the way to Timor, and eventually made it back to England.
That's what you would know about the mutiny from the movies, made in 1916, 1933, 1935, 1962, and 1984. But what ultimately happened to the people involved? The Bounty's crew fell into several groups: Those who sailed off with Bligh, those who followed Christian to Pitcairn, those who wanted to sail with Bligh but there was no room on the boat, and a group from various factions who decided to remain in Tahiti. Some from each group died or disappeared, and some on Tahiti were arrested for mutiny -and some of them died in a shipwreck. Bligh had a complicated career after the Bounty incident, including another mutiny, this one landlocked, so it was more of a coup. Christian and his men, plus a group of kidnapped Tahitians, disappeared for 35 years. But their descendants were eventually found, having created a strange culture of their own that continues today. Read the multiple complicated outcomes of the Bounty mutiny at Today I Found Out.
International borders can be weird. If you are in Detroit and go south, you end up in Canada (see the comments under this post). Rivers are like that. Near the mouth of the Rio Grande River, the water flow meanders widely, and in 1906 a private irrigation company simplified one of those meanders by cutting a channel across it to shorten the river, essentially changing the US/Mexico border and leaving the American residents of the village of Rio Rico in flux. When that was discovered, the government was like, no big deal, and made the irrigation company pay Rio Rico's residents some money. They were still US citizens, but over the years the oxbow lake left by the re-channeled river dried up and eventually no one knew where the boundaries were. The village made the most of their status during Prohibition, but the anomaly was rediscoverd in the 1960s, which led to further chaos. It's quite a story. -via Damn Interesting
The Habsburgs (sometimes spelled Hapsburg) were a dynasty of Europeans from the same family who ruled over Austria, Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, and eventually countries across the continent for two centuries in the Middle Ages. You can recognize them in portraits by their pronounced jaws, called the Habsburg jaw. You are probably familiar with the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, King Charles II, from a previous Neatorama post. He is shown at the left in the image above, with his father and great-uncle Philip IV on the right. Charles had the most tangled family tree you've ever seen, outside the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. He also had a very pronounced Habsburg jaw, and so many other physical problems he never produced a royal heir. Common sense would tell you that the inbreeding caused the Habsburg jaw to become more pronounced over generations, but now we have science.
A study in the Annals of Human Biology focuses on 15 members of the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs from different generations who had realistic portraits painted. First they gleaned information from the family tree and assigned each of the subjects an inbreeding coefficient. Charles' inbreeding coefficient was so high that he never had a chance. Then separately, they asked mouth and jaw surgeons to examine the portraits and rate facial features that would indicate mandibular prognathism (protruding jaw) and maxillary deficiency (sunken midface). Then they compared the data from the two studies to determine that the Habsburg jaw was, indeed, likely to be the product of inbreeding. Get the details on this study at Smithsonian.
Passover is a Jewish religious observance to commemorate the Hebrews' exodus from Egypt. The name comes from the night the angel of death passed over their homes when killing the Egyptian's firstborn children. The traditional Seder is a meal in which every dish and every procedure has a story behind it, to teach and reinforce that history for the next generations.
However, this was a problem in the Soviet Union. Jews in Russia had suffered under many regimes, and the Bolsheviks were the least oppressive, considering their communist idea of equality. The communists wanted to welcome Jews into the fold, but they also wanted to stamp out religion. Their solution was to make Jews into an ethnic group instead of a religious group, by changing their religious traditions to suit the new ideology. That was the impetus behind the "Red Seder," in which the traditions were bent to reflect communist themes of throwing off the shackles of the capitalist bourgeois. Red Seders were promoted in the 1920s and '30s, after which they were deemed successful and then discarded under Stalin, who had his own feelings about Jews as an ethnic group. Read about the Bolshevik Red Seders at Atlas Obscura.
(Image source: Hagadah far gloybers un apikorsim, 1923)
Francis Zuber was skiing through the trees at Mt. Baker in Washington state when he ran over an inverted snowboard. The board belonged to Ian Steger, who was still attached to it, but buried upside down in a tree well. Tree wells can have up to 20 feet of soft snow, and if you fall into one head first, you can disappear from sight forever. Steger was snowboarding with two friends, but they were ahead of him going downhill, and they might never have found him. When they called him, he couldn't reach his radio.
Zuber didn't know how long Steger had been buried, and frantically went to work finding his head so he could get air. This video contains NSFW language. Steger tells his side of the story and says he assumed he was going to die. He doesn't mention injuries, so we can assume he's okay now. -via Metafilter
The Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice opened nationwide on March 30, 1988. It seems like just yesterday. It flipped the script on the standard haunted house story by making the ghosts (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) good people who become entangled with a humorous but malevolent ghost-for-hire, Beetlejuice, played by Michael Keaton. The producers didn't much like the title Beetlejuice, and they suggested House Ghost to make the plot more clear. Burton offered a counter suggestion: Scared Sheetless. He was astonished that they took him seriously and even considered it. But it remained Beetlejuice, and upon release, quickly made back five times its budget. Meanwhile, young Winona Ryder hoped the film would raise her status at high school, but it only made the bullying worse. You'll find all kinds of trivia tidbits like that in a list at Cracked celebrating the movie's anniversary.
Back in 1667, medicine and philosophy were dangerously entwined. What physicians of the time didn't know about the human body was important- some organizations did not yet accept the theory of blood circulation. But French physician Jean Denis did, and after increasingly successful experimental blood transfusions between animals, he began giving the blood of lambs and goats to human patients. He figured that the blood of animals was cleaner and purer because they didn't drink alcohol and were free from sin.
Denis' first patient improved greatly, which may have been because he had already undergone many sessions of bloodletting and desperately needed the volume. His second transfusion patient was already healthy, but displayed renewed vigor. The third patient died. These transfusions sent the medical establishment into a frenzy. Things came to a head when he was sued over the death of his fifth patient in Paris, which ultimately turned out to be a murder. But that was the end of animal-to-human blood transfusions.
Denis was opposed to human-to-human blood transfusions because he assumed that the donor would not survive, which tells us something about how donor animals fared during his "successful" experiments. Read about Jean Denis' xenotransfusions and how they were received at The Public Domain review. -via Nag on the Lake
Mark Hamill has been working with United24, the official fundraising arm of the Ukrainian government, for months now. He's helped to fund their drone program in the defense against Russia, and serves as their ambassador to spread the word of how the rest of the world can help Ukraine. Another collaboration is between United24 and the mobile alert app Air Alert, to send warnings of attacks to citizens' smart phones. The app can be set to local areas and to any of several languages. Hamill is the English voice of the app in his Luke Skywalker persona. His voice will alert local users to missile attacks, shelling, street fighting, radiation, or chemical threat. Hamill's "all clear" announcements are infused with Jedi quotes. However, at no point does he say "I have a bad feeling about this." -via Laughing Squid
Once upon a time, recurring characters on Saturday Night Live would prove to be so popular that they would star in a feature film. It's astonishing that characters could go from two-minute television skits that were often pretty repetitive to a two hour movie, but sometimes it worked. That's how we got The Blues Brothers in 1980 and Wayne's World in 1992. The trend also gave us some pretty horrible movies, too, like It’s Pat in 1994, which was pulled from theaters after only a week.
Then there was Hans and Franz. Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon portrayed two bodybuilders with Austrian accents who host a TV show called Pumping Up with Hans & Franz. It was an obvious parody of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Schwarzenegger got a real kick out of it. He even appeared on the show with Hans and Franz a couple of times. And the three actors set about to make a feature film of the skit. It was a musical, believe it or not. But it was never to be. Read what happened to the proposed Hans and Franz movie at Cracked.
The monk and acclaimed cynic Benito Jerónimo Feijoo told the story of creature who was part man, part fish discovered the Spain's Bay of Cadiz. In 1679, as the story goes, fishermen saw a mysterious creature and managed to lure it out of the water with bread. The "fishman" was shaped like a man, but had gills and some scales. He had red hair and white skin and didn't speak a word. They took him to the local priest who interrogated him, but it was several days before he spoke just one word: “Liérganes.” When word got to the town of Liérganes, María del Casar told them it might be her son Francisco de la Vega Casar, a redhead who vanished five years earlier when he was swimming in the estuary at Bilbao. The fishman was taken to María for a glorious reunion, and lived with her for the next nine years. But he was never the same as when María last saw him in 1674.
If any of this tale is true, what could explain it? There are a couple of medical conditions that could fit the fishman's appearance, explained in the story at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Rafael Tello)
David Friedman of Ironic Sans ran down a mystery peeking out of pictures of Joe Biden in the Oval Office, the president's office in the White House's West Wing. What's the deal with a picture frame that has no picture in it? It's a clever bit of unexpected camouflage. Friedman finds the answer, but then goes down the rabbit hole about presidents and the modern technology they enjoyed in the Oval Office. We won't find out anything really secret, but we learn some really neat tidbits about presidential history in this video. While researching this video, Friedman took a tour of the White House, and it's not the way it used to be. If you'd like to see it yourself, there's a visitor's guide to the West Wing online.
The island of Bali in Indonesia boasts enticing tropical beaches, volcanic mountains, and beautiful terraced rice fields. These terraces provided enough rice for the island for thousands of years, thanks to an invisible system of subaks, which are a sort of farmer's co-op melded with the worship of the water goddess Dewi Danu. It was an ingenius system that few outside of the farmers themselves knew about. But in the 1970s, the rest of the world discovered Bali, and both the population and the tourism industry exploded.
To boost rice production, the government instituted a program called Bimbingan Massal, or “Massive Guidance,” funded by the Asian Development Bank. Rice farmers were provided with the latest agricultural technology: irrigation aids, high-yield varieties of rice seed, and plenty of fertilizers and pesticides. They were encouraged to produce three crops of rice per year instead of the traditional two. You can probably guess what happened. Production rose by a very small percentage, but farmers confronted problems they never had before: plagues of insects, poor yields, and a lack of adequate water. Meanwhile, Bali's beaches suffered from fertilizer runoff.
Strangely, the situation was unmasked and alleviated by another bit of modern technology in the form of computer modeling. Read the story of how Bali's ancient and modern rice production systems worked against each other and why at Damn Interesting. You can also listen to the story as a podcast.
Antarctica is a continent that has no countries. Many countries have settlements there, but the residents of the science stations are rarely permanent. Still, many countries have planted a flag on Antarctica without taking ownership, and they all fly flags to show where they are from. So the people of Antarctica love flags, and have pretty much always wanted to have a flag for Antarctica itself. You can't really blame them. Believe it or not, the first flag specifically designed for Antarctica came about because of a geography video game. If you are going to designate names to all the places on earth with a flag, you've got to have one for the continent with no countries. CGP Grey tells us how Antarctica got a flag in 1929 (which was appropriate, but totally boring), 1997, and in 2018. The 2018 flag, called the "True South" flag, is expected to be permanent. You can even purchase one! -via Laughing Squid