Artists from across the country moved to San Francisco in the 1960s to be part of the scene, but Mari Tepper was already part of the scene, having been born there. She was designing posters for rock concerts even before graduating from high school. Those concert posters are well-known among collectors, but Tepper had a wide repertoire that included newspaper illustrations, bread sculpture, comics, and social justice artworks.

In the spring of 1967, Tepper designed a black-and-white poster for a concert at California Hall, her figures rendered almost as silhouettes against a black background. That summer, she produced a poster for the Haight’s own Straight Theater, and in October she drew and lettered two posters for shows featuring Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service, one being a benefit for the newly formed Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, the second featuring a hippie’s Holy Grail lineup at Winterland—in addition to Big Brother and Quicksilver, the Grateful Dead played a set.

But Tepper’s most acclaimed poster of 1967 bore no legendary band names, focusing instead on a preoccupation of the times that was even more important than music—sex. Little wonder then that today Tepper is still best known for her “Hallelujah the Pill!!” mandala, which depicts a quintet of brilliantly hued couples demonstrating various sexual positions. Not surprisingly, this psychedelicized update of tantric sex sold tens of thousands of copies in headshops around the country. But as with her work as a high-school student for the Committee, and her later Haight-Ashbury postcards, Tepper saw nary a dime.

Read about Mari Tepper's unique life and career, including the uncomfortable story of designing the “Hallelujah the Pill!!” and of growing up too fast and too alone, at Collectors Weekly.

How much helium does it take to lift a person? About 70,000 liters. In case you wondered how much helium it took to lift the house in the movie Up, or Larry Walters' or Kent Couch's lawn chairs. But you, too, can float around with a helium balloon in a safe manner, thanks to a French company called Aéroplume. Their balloons are set up in an old blimp hangar so there's no chance of flying off into the wild blue yonder. The helium balloons make you relatively weightless, so you get to experience the feeling of  flying without a plane. How cool is that?

The comments under this video explore the difference between Tom getting the heebie-jeebies walking above the Royal Albert Hall with his apparent calm while strapped onto a balloon. The strapping itself may be reassuring, and the explanation of the worst that could happen probably makes a big difference.

J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937, and The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the 1950s. But he spent the years from 1914 to his death in 1973 building and refining his fictional universe called Middle-Earth, including original languages and a history covering many thousands of years. He left behind reams of unpublished stories, along with research and notes on Middle-Earth. The story that became the new Amazon Prime TV series Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is part of that rich unpublished history. It takes place as the First Age moves to the Second Age and concerns an island called Númenor (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place during the Third Age).

Tolkien's writings on Númenor will be published in November in a book titled The Fall of Númenor. The inspiration for it came to Tolkien suddenly in 1936. Smithsonian has a brief overview of the story of Númenor and how it fits into the mythology of Middle-Earth, and then takes a deep dive into the historical forces that inspired Tolkien's story.

It's autumn, the season in which the most prestigious films of the year are released to entertain holiday moviegoers and qualify for the Academy Awards. A very personal family film from Steven Spielberg will be hard to beat.

The new film The Fabelmans premiered yesterday at the Toronto International Film Festival and received a standing ovation. Today we have a trailer. The movie is directed, co-produced, and co-written (with Tony Kushner) by Spielberg. It is about a boy growing up in postwar America who wants to make movies. Yes, it is Spielberg's autobiography, even though the name of the family is Fabelman. He had been thinking about filming the story for twenty years, but only began serious work on it after his father died at age 103 in 2020 (Spielberg's mother died in 2017). Gabriel LaBelle plays the teenage Sammy Fabelman, and Michelle Williams and Paul Dano play his parents, with music by John Williams. Critics who have seen the movie love it. The rest of us will have to wait until November 11, when The Fabelmans hits theaters.

Chemotherapy often leaves young cancer patients with scalps that are too sensitive for scratchy traditional wigs, even if they could afford them. What they need are warm, soft head coverings. But even more, they need something to smile about. That's where the Magic Yarn Project comes in. Volunteer yarncrafters create beautiful and whimsical wigs, caps, and headdresses that make kids into princesses, superheroes, and other Disney characters. The yarn is soft, hypoallergenic, and machine washable, and best of all, the wigs are free to the kids who need them!



So far, 40,000 volunteers have created 30,000 wings for children in 52 countries. See a video of how the project came about here. If you are a knitter or crocheter and want to make one of these wigs, or you know a child or institution who could use them, or you want to donate, or if you just want to read about the work they do, check out the Magic Yarn Project. -via Metafilter

Queen Elizabeth II passed away Thursday at the age of 96. Have you noticed newscasters having trouble saying King Charles (instead of Prince Charles), or even the word king? It's very new and strange to them because Elizabeth was always the monarch of the British Empire. At least it seemed that way.

Elizabeth was born in 1926 and became queen of the United Kingdom in 1952, when she was only 25 years old. Holding one job for 70 years is hard to wrap our heads around, but Laurence Brown (previously at Neatorama) is here to help. He gives us some mind-bending statistics to emphasize how long 70 years really is, and how much the world has changed.

Europe is currently undergoing a drought that has left rivers running dry and reservoirs reduced to mud puddles. It's been said to be the worst drought in Europe in 500 years. So what happened 500 years ago?

The year 1540 began with Italy going almost 200 days without rain. The River Thames went so low that the sea flowed in and reversed its course. The Rhine, Elbe, and Seine also dried to the point where people could wade across. Without water, sewage could not be swept away and diseases broke out. Crops failed and wildfires thrived. Martin Luther thought it was a sign of the End Times. People all over looked for a scapegoat, such as witches and refugees. The upside to the drought was that vintage 1540 wine was strangely good, made from dried-up grapes with a high sugar content. That was a good thing, as what water they had to drink was pretty nasty. Read about the drought of 1540 and what makes the European drought of 2022 different at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

Can you solve a logic puzzle that was featured in the the 2022 Brazilian Mathematical Olympiad of Public Schools? The information you are given is 1. Pinocchio always lies, and 2. Pinocchio says "All my hats are green." What can you deduce from that? Duh, it means Pinocchio has at least one hat that isn't green. Then they reveal that that this is a multiple choice question, and none of the answers are the one you thought! After I calmed down, I thought, well, one answer is pretty close to mine, although incomplete. But wait, maybe he has no hats! That's silly, we can see from the picture that he does. However, the picture isn't really necessary, and probably doesn't accompany every version of the puzzle. So then we get a lesson in a "vacuously true statement." By the time we get through the video, you realize you were correct all along. Using a confusing multiple choice answer format forces you to justify your choice. And then learn something. -via Nag on the Lake

Siena Awards has completed their competition for their Drone Photo Awards competition for 2022. The Photographer of the Year prize went to Armand Sarlangue for the image above. It's an overhead view of a new fissure in the Fagradalsfjall volcano in Iceland. There were prizes awarded in several categories, including urban, wildlife, sport, people, nature, abstract, wedding, and more. Below is "Water Lily Harvesting" by Shibasish Saha, which was the runner-up in the people category.



You can see all the winning images at the awards gallery, or see them in a ranked list on one page at Bored Panda.

 
During one of those huge patriotic displays that North Korea is known to stage, the Korean People's Army State Merited Chorus and Symphony Orchestra (the North Korean military's musical unit) performed a symphonic version of "Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine. If you think that's highly unlikely, you'd be right. This is an edit, but a particularly masterful one from Lars Von Retriever in which you can listen and watch and start to question whether it might be real after all. Well, the video is real and the audio is real, but they didn't come from the same source. The audio is from a performance by Rockin' 1000 (NSFW lyrics). Someone in the comments mentioned that this video might cause an international incident, but YouTube is not accessible in North Korea except to government elites, and they wouldn't want to draw attention to it. -via Laughing Squid

The first official UFO sighting occurred in June of 1947 when pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted nine objects he couldn't identify as he flew over Mt. Rainier. Once his experience was published in papers across the nation, the floodgates opened and everyone saw flying saucers. The kicker was that Arnold never said the objects were shaped like saucers. He described the movement of the objects with the words “flew like they take a saucer and throw it across the water,” meaning they skipped. But the term flying saucer or flying disc caught on and that's what everyone else was seeing.

On July 8 of that year, the army released a statement on a "flying disc" recovered from a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico (that later was identified as a weather balloon). An article about it appeared in the Anchorage Daily Times that same day, which was the paper's first ever mention of a flying disc. The article said, “None have been reported in Alaska, yet.” The very next day, three teenage girls reported a disc-shaped UFO over Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage. Coincidence?

Whatever happened, the very first movie about flying saucers, titled The Flying Saucer, was released in 1950. It was set in Alaska, and had a lot to do with Soviet spies. That's when the sightings of UFOs in Alaska really took off, with a whole slew of them reported in the 1950s. Read about flying saucer fever in Alaska, and see the full movie at the Anchorage Daily News. -via Strange Company

In the children's book Horton Hatches the Egg, Mayzie the lazy bird leaves Horton the elephant with her egg while she takes off to have a good time. This happens a lot in nature, as there are quite a few bird species that have evolved to outsource nest building, egg brooding, and caring for young to other bird species. That leaves the parasitic bird more time to go breed again. The victim, the industrious bird who built the nest, is infused with maternal hormones and/or bad eyesight and will perform its duty -sometimes. Over time, bird species have developed techniques for fighting back against parasitic birds, and the battle is on to see whose offspring get a good survivable childhood. The parents fight, the chicks fight, and there's a lot of lying and disguises and covert operations involved. No one is better equipped to draw us into the struggle than Ze Frank, who narrates the carnage.

A skeleton discovered in the Indonesian part of Borneo shows signs of sophisticated amputation surgery performed 31,000 years ago. That's 20,000 years earlier than we had evidence of before. A person of unknown sex died at around 19 or 20 years of age, and was missing a foot from surgical amputation.

The lower third of the person’s leg was missing, and the tibia and fibula — the bones between the knee and ankle — ended in a clean cut. This level of precision indicates that the limb was not lost in an accident or an animal attack. The bones lacked the type of mark typically left by an infection, suggesting that the wound had been cleaned and protected from contamination. Furthermore, the small size of the left tibia and fibula compared with the right ones and the healing of the bones show that the amputation occurred during childhood and at least six to nine years before death.

So the residents of Borneo at the time were not only skilled in surgery, with its accompanying pain and bleeding, but were able to prevent infection afterward and then support a young person with a missing foot. Add this to the growing body of discoveries that tell us our conventional image of cave people as "primitive" is completely wrong. Read more about this discovery at Nature. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: T. R. Maloney et al./Nature)

If you want a really cool job title like "professional GeoGuessr," you have to put in the time and effort to become very, very good at it. Nine years ago, we introduced you to the game GeoGuessr. Since then, it has grown so much that there's a GeoGuessr World Cup competition. The premise of the game is easy: you are given an image from Google street view, which can be anywhere in the world, and you try to guess where it is. It's a real kick for geography nerds, but you'll never be as good at it as Trevor Rainbolt. He can identify a country from one image in less than a second! How does he do it? Observation and practice. He learned little details that make places different from each other, like infrastructure, signage, and even the appearance of the soil. He's played the game so much that he can recognize those small clues in patterns quickly. Here he explains what he looks for, but even when you understand what he's doing, his speed and confidence is truly impressive. If you want to see more, check out Rainbolt's YouTube channel. -via Laughing Squid

There are a lot of older people in fixed incomes who have listed spare rooms or spare buildings on Airbnb to raise a little extra money. Joining them is 96-year-old Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. The queen has quite a few pieces of property that aren't part of the official royal palaces. Her private Sandringham estate is where the royal family spends their Christmas holiday, but is otherwise only occupied by caretakers. Beginning in February, you can rent out one house on the property for £354 a night, with a three-night minimum. No you won't be staying at the main house pictured above, but in the former home of the queen's head gardener. Her Balmoral estate in Scotland will also be listed on Airbnb, with individual cottages rates ranging between £555 and £1,620 for a week's stay. No rentals will be taken when the queen is in residence, but you can always say you vacationed on royal property -if you can get a booking. See inside the accommodations at The Daily Mail. -via Fark

(Image credit: Christine Matthews)