You might look at these maps and think, "come on now, there couldn't be that much variety in which toys each nation likes best." And you'd be right. The clue is in the title here. Last year, ToyZone made maps of each nation's most popular toy, and the results were about what you'd expect- game consoles ruled the world, with a few places preferring Barbies or LEGO. That might be accurate, but it makes for a boring map. In their map this year, they gathered the data on the toys with the most Google searches in each country, and then compared each answer with the popularity of toys in surrounding nations. So while these toys are popular, the "uniquely" part comes in when a toy is searched more in one nation than the others. That's why Lincoln logs are the toy mapped for the US. It's not that Lincoln Logs are all that popular; it's that no one else in the world plays with them. The rest of the world buys LEGO, Duplo, or Nanoblock building toys.

Personally, I think these maps would be more useful if they were broken down into age groups, but that's difficult when your research consists of analyzing Google searches. There are world maps of toys broken down into categories, such as dolls, building blocks, board games, and video game consoles. See the maps for each continent, category, and the world at Toy Zone. -via Metafilter

A drug transport went bad in 1985 and led to a plane ditching $15 million dollars worth of cocaine, which landed over the woods of Georgia. A bear found some of the cocaine and ate 75 pounds of it. The story became a legend in Kentucky, where the drug smuggler was from (he died parachuting from that flight). The bear is even on display in Lexington! Ever since the story came out in the papers, people have been talking about the movie that should be made from the story. For a long time, it fell into that category of "not believable enough." But times have changed. Now, Cocaine Bear has become a reality.

Watch the first trailer above, which contains several F-bombs. The movie appears to be a bloody gore-fest that is also a comedy. It has been highly fictionalized, since no one actually encountered the bear before it died, but can you blame them for bringing us an extra-large bear in a cocaine rage? Cocaine Bear will be in theaters February 24th. -via reddit

Kitchen appliances that do one thing only have to be very useful to stick around for hundreds of years. The waffle iron is an exception. Sure, we can do without waffles, but who doesn't love the taste of hot fried batter with extra crust and little spots that hold syrup? Waffle irons were a part of medieval kitchens long before the use of electricity. People found it well worth the effort to heat up a heavy iron device over the fire for a plate of waffles. The oldest known waffle recipe was recorded in 1393, although we have found waffle irons that are even older. Today we are just as likely to pop waffles into a toaster as to mix up the batter ourselves. Or even order them at a restaurant. Atlas Obscura takes us behind the scenes to explain three different aspects of waffles: the history of the waffle iron, how Eggo waffles came about, and the origins of San José’s delicious green waffles.

(Image credit: Georg Flegel)

It would be nice to have some oversized Christmas decorations for your yard that aren't the same as everyone else's, but that means spending a lot of money. Unless you make them yourself! Jen and John Yates of Epbot created a variety of decorations that turned their neighbors' home into a giant gingerbread house! The gingerbread man you see here is cut from a panel of pink foam insulation, and his eyes and buttons are tree ornaments cut in half. They also explain how they made peppermint stick columns, a giant mint lollipop, starlight mints, and these huge wrapped candies, which ended up in a tree.

The wrapped candies are the easiest to make, requiring only a trip to Dollar Tree and a few minutes to assemble, plus you can take them apart and reuse them next year. The rest of the projects involve some painting, but nothing that requires specialized power tools or a workshop. See a video of the finished house here. The process of making all these decorations is explained and illustrated at Epbot.

If you're wondering why the post is titled "part 2," it's because part 1 is about decorating the same house last year.

Ah, the joy of dancing as you rapidly try on a series of toupees. Yeah, and you thought at first this guy was wearing tribbles on his jacket. It's astonishing how good each of these toupees look, even when slapped on in a hurry. Sure, it's advertising, but it's also fun to watch! Stay with it; there's a surprise later in the video. This is asiantoupeedude, also known as asianwigman on TikTok. He has an extensive gallery of videos showing how he helps people have hair where was was no hair there, including himself. He is not bald, but shaves his head to make these demonstrations easier. That hairless spot sure makes it easier to change styles every few seconds! The fact you can dance in them is another selling point. He says he is working on launching an online store. In case you're wondering, the song is 家财万贯 (DJ版). That's "Rich Wealth" in English.  -via reddit

In 2018, a science experiment went viral because it involved six doctors swallowing LEGO heads just to see how long they would take to pass through their digestive systems. Now the doctors involved have reunited in an article to explain their methods and motivations. Emergency physician Dr. Andrew Tagg was always interested in the many things children swallowed. The most common are coins, followed by plastic toys. There was already research in how long it took to poop out a coin, but none on plastic toys. Meanwhile, frantic parents were searching through toilets to find what had been swallowed. But there was a second motivation, shared by many research doctors- the thrill of an article that might be published in the famous December issue of the British Medical Journal, where odd and often funny studies are highlighted. That desire helped Tagg recruit other pediatric doctors. Then they had to set the parameters, agreeing on coordinating their bowel movements and their methods of searching through them. And they had to choose their toys.   

I don’t think anyone specifically went out to buy Lego heads to find which was the tastiest looking one to have. It was much more of a case of which head had the best-looking face to swallow. You want one that looks kind of shocked and scared as it goes down.

Four years on, the doctors give us the lowdown on what they went through to test the passage of the LEGO heads. You won't regret reading it. -via Metafilter

If you want to guess the Word of the Year before reading this post, the image above might be a good clue. The editors of the Merriam-Webster dictionary have selected their Word of the Year for 2022, and it's "gaslighting."
 
The use of the word has become ubiquitous in the past couple of years, although at the same time, the meaning has become more broad. The original definition is the act of getting you to doubt your own judgement or sanity in order to manipulate you. It is a reference to the 1944 film Gaslight, in which musician Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer) manipulates his new wife Paula (Ingrid Bergman) into questioning her own sanity when she finds evidence of a crime. One of the symptoms of her assumed mental illness was the dimming of the gas-powered household lights.

In 2022, gaslighting is often meant as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone, especially for a personal advantage.” Unlike previous words of the year, the meteoric rise of the term is not tied to a specific event, but has gained everyday usage in the wake of political division and charges of bias in the news media. I love how Wikipedia warns us not to confuse "gaslighting" with "fart lighting."

Merriam-Webster also lists eight other terms that have become notable in 2002, from "queen consort" to "oligarch." -via Fark

The Bay of Fundy in Canada is famous as the place with the highest tides on earth. The way water moves around against various earth features is crazy. Rivers actually change direction twice four times a day! This powerful water movement would seem to be ripe for generating electricity. So why don't they do that? Tom Scott went there and almost froze to explain it to us. We also get to see his bathroom. The title of this video indicates that "there's just one problem," yet the real answer is that there are many problems. But people are still working on the idea, and one of these days, we will overcome them.

People used to get rid of inconvenient family members quite easily by putting arsenic in food until a reliable chemical test for the poison was developed in 1836. Still, it took some time for word to get around, and by then Charles Lafarge was dead. His young wife, Marie Lefarge, was arrested on suspicion of murder. It was a sensational trial, with plenty of evidence.

1. People knew Marie was unhappy with her marriage, since she found out the groom was not as wealthy as he had told her.

2. Charles became sick on several occasions after eating Marie's cooking.

3. A nurse had seen her put a powder into Charles' eggnog. She even took samples, which were positive for arsenic.

4. The rat poison Marie left out for the rats proved to be inert flour and water.

5. Charles' exhumed body tested positive for arsenic, although that happened after several inconclusive teats.

Yet many people thought Marie was railroaded due to the new chemical tests that had yet to stand the test of time. Read what happened in the case of Marie Lafarge at Amusing Planet. 

The giant fiberglass statues of midcentury American advertising are becoming more and more rare, so it's a treat any time you see one these days. American Giants is a company that finds and restores these iconic statues, but it's not easy. Watch how they take an abandoned, weather-beaten Paul Bunyan statue in two pieces and do a complete refurbishment. They put him back together, patched up the cracks, and filled the holes. They gave him new feet, stronger bones, and a face that could light up a room! The result is stronger and shinier than the original statue, but still very much recognizable as an original Paul Bunyan. While the process is impressive, the before-and-after pictures at the end are amazing. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: nememess)

What is this jumble of letters trying to say? If your first impression was "fart water," you are not alone. That can't be it, but what are those letters at the top all about? Eventually, you figure out that if you start at the second tallest word and read down, it also says free water, which is an attempt at cleverness that ended up just kind of dumb. As signs go, there's a common problem with trying to write a message across divided panels that the eye normally reads within those panels, like the infamous "don't dead open inside" scene in The Walking Dead. Here it not only goes to extremes, but has one unfortunate individual unit that's just sad.

(Image via reddit)  

Some confusing signs offer a challenge to figure out where they went wrong. One sign was made over two panels meant to be read horizontally across both panels. Then a third was tacked on with a different sentence to be read on its own, which confuses the whole message. But then there's this, which is not only nonsense, but you can't even figure out how it went so wrong.  

(Image credit: FreeWillyPete)

Take a look through 50 such signs at Bored Panda and see if you can 1. decipher what they are saying, and 2. figure out how they got that way.

This award-winning animated short walks the line between adorable and terrifying. How do you do that? Simply make it about a cat. Black cats can be sweet as sugar, but they have the reputation of demons from the depths of hell. This is totally undeserved, as Lucy was just acting as cats do. Lucy is a cute black kitten that happens to resemble a void with gold eyes, but like anyone, she can only take so much. This film is from Kate Vaillant of the Ringling College of Art and Design Class of 2022.

This is a dangerous post! Not for any particular reason, but this post has claimed a lot of victims. A four-foot tall bollard in a Walmart parking lot in Auburn, Maine, attracts automobiles into its clutches far more often than probability would predict. They've tried painting it different colors, they've tried changing the traffic flow, but people keep ramming into the bollard. It's already a local legend; and it's beginning to have global notoriety like the infamous 11' 8" bridge in Durham, North Carolina

There's a slideshow at reddit showing 20 of the accidents involving this bollard and the great damage. Why does it keep happening? The Sun-Journal talked to driving instructor Andy Levesque, who said, “People make turns prematurely and cut corners.” That doesn't explain how cars manage to impale themselves on top of the bollard. Who drives fast enough to do that in a parking lot? -via Boing Boing

Warning: this video contains minor explosions, engineer talk, and a certain amount of pain. Maybe a little NSFW language, mostly covered by bleeps.  

Mehdi Sadaghdar of ElectroBOOM (previously at Neatorama) made an electrical device he calls the Photo-BOOM Electro-Pranker 3000. The purpose is to startle passers-by with sound, flashing lights, and explosions. He gets deep into the details of the electrical principles involved in this "ingenius" contraption. But that's not what we are here to see. If you've seen any previous ElectroBOOM videos, you can probably guess that he ends up pranking himself more than anyone else. The last minute of this video is an ad. -via reddit

A clay tablet from ancient Sumer tells quite a story. It is rare that records that old have any name attached to them, and when they do, it's usually royalty. Common people doing common work came and went, leaving no trace of who they were. But Kushim kept track of the barley trade in the city of Uruk, and he put his name on the receipts for shipments, signing them "administrator Kushim." That in itself makes the tablet, dated between 3,400 and 3,000 BC, an important artifact. But once translated, it shows that Kushim wasn't much of an accountant. The barley tallied on the front of the tablet should equal 3,910 bowls (a unit a bit bigger than a gallon). But the total Kushim etched on the back is 3,895 bowls.

Kushim was 15 bowls short. This could be a math error, indicating that he might have been in the wrong job. Or it could mean he was skimming some of the barley for himself. Either way, it's not the only math discrepancy in the ancient tablet, which you can read about at Historic Mysteries. One has to wonder if Kushim would have done anything different if he knew his work would be examined 5,000 years later. -via Strange Company