A thousand years ago, there was a city in Illinois that was bigger than London at the time. Cahokia had around 15,000 people, making it the biggest city in what later became the United States. It may have had large suburbs, too, because there were once plenty of manmade mounds across the Mississippi River that were bulldozed to build St. Louis. All that's left of Cahokia now are the mounds, which are now protected and studied, and open to the public, too.

Cahokia grew so large because it was a great location with fertile fields and a big river. But it didn't last. What led to the abandonment of Cahokia? It wasn't disease brought in by Europeans, as the city was declining 200 years before Columbus landed. It may have been crop failures due to drought, maybe it was war, or maybe its residents saw better opportunities elsewhere. It didn't die out suddenly, though. PBS introduces us to what we know about the ancient city of Cahokia.  -via Damn Interesting

As we gather together with family for the annual Thanksgiving feast, some of us are filled with trepidation over tensions between family members and the possibility of spoiling the occasion. After all, there are reasons we live so far away from each other and don't get together more often. Some families took that tension to extreme.

For example, a man named Dipendra went to a family party and killed his mother, father, brother, sister, plus his uncles and aunts and a cousin. He killed nine people that evening, and therefore became the king of Nepal because his was the royal family. However, Dipendra spent his entire reign in a coma because he also tried to kill himself. His surviving uncle then became the last king of Nepal because having a monarchy wasn't going so well.

Cracked tells us of five incidents when a family feast was the setting for murder. Three were mass killings, and the other two were single murders committed men who had caused plenty of other deaths. We hope your Thanksgiving with the family will be much more peaceful.

(Image credit: Nabin K. Sapkota)

The relative dearth of Thanksgiving movies meant that Laurence Brown grew up in Britain only knowing about Thanksgiving from the film Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. The actual celebration plays a very small part in that movie, since it's from the point of view of a man just trying to get home on time. So is it any wonder that Brown was completely mistaken on what it's all about?

It's about the food. More specifically, it's about the bountiful American harvest, so the traditional dishes contain foods not all that common in Britain. With the exception of an irritating stock photo of cranberry sauce served atop mashed potatoes (which is just plain wrong), the food greatly impresses newcomers to the US. I should know, because many years there's someone at my table eating their first American Thanksgiving dinner. If someone ever tells you the US doesn't have a native cuisine, invite them to enjoy turkey, cornbread stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and their choice of pecan or pumpkin pie.  

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The general public had no real grasp of the concept of species going extinct until 1796, and even then, their reaction was not what anyone today would expect. During the Victorian era, news that a bird species was in danger of going extinct made everyone want their own specimen. After all, rarity implies value, and no ornithologist or collector wanted to miss out on a chance to display a stuffed great auk, passenger pigeon, or ivory-billed woodpecker. Rare and exotic birds were also shot to provide feathers for ladies' hats. These actions drove species already suffering from lack of habitat into dangerously low numbers.  

Cornell ornithology professor Arthur Allen was horrified at such behavior. He preferred to study living birds and help them to thrive. In 1924 he spent months in Florida looking for the rare ivory-billed woodpecker. Allen finally located a mating pair, but while he waited for the birds to nest, poachers took them. It was eleven more years before he found another ivory-billed woodpecker and took the photo you see above. Allen spent the rest of his life working to change the scientific study of endangered species from the philosophy of "collect them while you can" to protecting such birds. Read the story of how Allen changed science forever at Smithsonian.   

(Image credit: Arthur A. Allen, watercolored by Jerry A. Payne)

If you are completely sick of Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" already this year (thanks to overexposure in previous years), give this video a listen anyway, because the tune is barely recognizable. It's there, but it's buried under the distinctive styles of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Bela Bartók. No Bach, no Liszt, and no Chopin, but don't shoot the piano player- he's only human. Pianist Josep Castanyer Alonso illustrates what these musical geniuses would do if they made modern-day covers of hit songs. The video is annotated so you can learn the terms for what is happening, even when he has to make up those terms on the spot. Still, you know if these composers were around today and had recording contracts, the record company would insist that they add some jingle bells just in case the listener couldn't recognize that the song is supposed to be Christmas song.  -via Metafilter

In 1971, an airline passenger going by Dan Cooper showed a stewardess that he had a bomb and demanded $200,000, four parachutes, and a private flight. His demands were met, and during the second flight with only Cooper and the flight crew, he jumped out of the plane somewhere between Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. He was never seen again. For 50 years, it was the only unsolved skyjacking in America.

Strangely, only five months later, Richard Floyd McCoy II pulled off an almost-identical skyjacking in Utah, in which he absconded with $500,000. McCoy was arrested soon after and convicted of the crime. He escaped from prison and was shot by FBI agents. McCoy has always been a suspect in the D. B. Cooper case, but was thought to have been too young to be the same person. Until now. Pilot and YouTuber Dan Gryder has been researching the case for decades, and in 2022 found a parachute on McCoy's property that could be the uniquely-modified parachute Cooper used when he bailed out of the plane.

Gryder was alerted to the existence of the parachute by McCoy's children, Richard II and Chanté. They were small children when the skyjackings occurred, and always suspected their father was the mysterious D. B. Cooper, but kept quiet until the death of their mother in 2020. The parachute is now in the custody of the FBI, which officially closed the investigation in 2016. It may soon be officially reopened. Read about the family's claims and the new evidence in a two part series at Cowboy State Daily, part one and part two. -Thanks, WTM!

(Images credit: FBI/public domain)

We've seen digital artists take vintage photographs and give them the stereoscopic treatment, in which a 3D effect is achieved by making the elements move slightly, more so for the objects in the foreground. This is not that at all. What happens in these postcard images is the kind of thing you'd expect from a Terry Gilliam animation, in that you don't know what is going to happen at all. It's pure nonsense, but there are no giant feet crushing landscapes. However, what they did to that lighthouse seems pretty destructive.

The vintage postcards are from the Isle of Wight, a popular vacation destination in the English Channel. The video was made by Justin Mason, also known as Drivelsieve, and is actually a followup to an earlier compilation video he did using the same subject. It's just as silly.

Mason began his series of animated Isle of Wight postcards ten years ago. You can see the entire series in this playlist. -via Nag on the Lake

The article, promising a recipe for Long Island cheese pumpkin pie, starts off telling us it was never a commercial hit. I immediately thought the name was to blame. Who wants to eat a pumpkin pie with cheese in it? But maybe it's cream cheese, which might be good. Then I find out that the pie is made from a "cheese pumpkin," which isn't grown nearly as much as other varieties. Of course not, who wants a pumpkin that tastes like cheese? But that's not how the pumpkin got that name -it was named that because its shape and color makes it resemble a wheel of cheese.

The article is not so much about pumpkin pie, but for those dreaming of next year's garden. The reason the cheese pumpkin didn't become commercially successful is because its shape kept it from rolling through a mechanized harvesting process as easily as round pumpkins. They taste wonderful, and can be grown in a variety of environments, including the Mojave desert. While a cheese pumpkin is the same species as the pumpkin puree you get in a can, this heirloom variety is infinitely adaptable, especially when you save the seeds and grow subsequent generations. Cheese pumpkins are becoming popular with backyard gardeners who cook their own pumpkins. Read about cheese pumpkins, and find a recipe for Long Island cheese pumpkin pie, at Atlas Obscura. There is no cheese in it, just as there is no tea in Long Island tea.  

(Image credit: Badagnani)

Rango was an animated Western comedy that came out in 2011. The title character was a chameleon who accidentally wound up in the desert and took on the persona of a tough guy to get by. While the movie did well, it didn't become a classic, cult or otherwise, so Rango seems a strange choice for a mashup. But mashup artist eli_handle_b․wav saw the possibilities. He set Rango into the virtual Old West of the video game Red Dead Redemption 2, where the chameleon seems right at home. That's a bit of a turn from playing a fish out of water, so to speak, in his original movie. These outlaws don't seem to have a problem with a 6-foot lizard in their midst. Rango manages to fall right into the Van der Linde gang, although he may regret that. The setup is beyond absurd, and the editing is smooth and impressive. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Robin Duska is a volunteer at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, working on cataloging the museum's bird specimens. She discovered a snow bunting labeled as being found on May 29, 1872, by Emil Bessels. Duska did the research and found that Bessels was a physician who served as the science officer on the Polaris expedition, an 1871 quest to be the first to reach the North Pole. The expedition was led by Charles Francis Hall, who did not survive the unsuccessful trip. When the crew of the Polaris returned home in 1873 (without the ship, which had been crushed by ice), there were questions about Hall's death.

Was Hall murdered? Dr. Bessels had declared the cause of death a stroke, and an investigation agreed. Hall had been buried in the permafrost of Greenland. Then an autopsy in 1969 showed that Hall had ingested arsenic. Did Hall have any enemies aboard ship? Yes, many, as the crew was full of drunks, deserters, and men who didn't want to go to the North Pole. But Hall's biggest enemy was Bessels. Not only did they disagree about the expedition, they were both wooing the same woman back in Washington, a prominent young sculptor named Vinnie Ream. What does any of this have to do with a bird buried in the archives of a museum? Read about the latest clue in a possible murder mystery at The London Times.   -via Strange Company

The comedy troupe Foil Arms and Hog portrays two suitcases moving along a baggage conveyor belt at an airport. This time it's just Foil and Hog, because suitcases don't have Arms. One is highly upset about an insult they received. The other is caught in that no-win situation when your partner is pissed off about something, but can no longer respond to the one who wronged them, so they lash out at the closest person. Anything you say will be misunderstood and can well feed the flames, but you can't just say nothing, because that's wrong, too. You could (and should) call this "emotional baggage." Listen closely, because they've included quite a few luggage and airline puns.  

And after I went to all the trouble to keep the main joke here a secret, it's spoiled in the on-screen video title. This performance is from the current Foil Arms and Hog tour. They'll be in the US for four shows in March.  -via Laughing Squid

Lydia Faber and her husband live on a houseboat in Amsterdam. When they adopted a kitten named Nimis, they put him in a feline life jacket, because in some places, the city's canal walls are too steep for a kitten to climb. Some people joked that Nimis' bright yellow life jacket looked like a police jacket, so when Faber found embroidered patches at a surplus store that said "police," she added them to Nimis' uniform. The neighbors thought it was hilarious, tourists took pictures, and even the local cops took a shine to the "police cat." They don't mind the impersonation, because any official law enforcement officer in Netherlands would be labeled politie.



Nimis is three years old now, and can swim and climb as well as any cat who lives on a boat. But he still wears his jacket, because he is a celebrity not only in Amsterdam, but around the world. You can see videos of Nimis, along with his brother Tommy and his humans, at Facebook and Instagram. -Thanks, WTM!

If you've ever had a small fly annoy you in the shower, you've met Clogmia albipunctata. It's a species of drain fly bigger than a fruit fly and smaller than a house fly. You might have wondered where that fly came from, and that would be your drain.

Redditor daisy_bare took the cover off a basement drain and found a writhing mass of drain fly larvae. Before the mass was identified, suggestions included welding the cover back on and burning the house down. While the fly stage of Clogmia albipunctata is generally harmless and several people described the insect as "cute," you really don't want flies in your home. The adult flies are rather waterproof and don't live long, but their main purpose is to lay eggs in your drains, where the larvae can live off the gunk that lines your pipes. The ways to get rid of eggs or larvae in the drains are to 1. pour boiling water down the drain, 2. pour baking soda and vinegar into the drain (that can be dramatic), 3. use a drain cleaning product, or 4. scrub your drains or, if all else fails, call a professional to clean them.

Outside of your home, drain flies are quite useful in treating sewage. I am tickled with the taxonomic name, and had to go check the genus Clogmia to see if there is a species named Clogmia pipe. Alas, there is no such bug.  

(Image credit: Jerzystrzelecki)

Have you ever wondered how in the world audio artists like Bill McClintock and DJ Cummerbund make those marvelous song mashups out of very different songs from different genres? The secret is the chord progression. If two songs have the same chord progression, the melody can be transferred from one to another. Oh, they might be played in slightly different keys or have a different tempo, but those can be manipulated by computer, and if they are close enough to start with no one will notice. Besides, most songs are in the simpler keys anyway.

Pianist David Bennett illustrates how this is done by swapping the music and lyrics of disparate songs that have the same chord progression. Even if you don't know anything about music theory and don't care about chord progressions, you'll enjoy a video in which Michael Jackson sings over a U2 melody, and Celine Dion croons over a Phil Collins tune. The previous video he mentions is here.  There's a 30-second ad at 5:35.

Americans in the early-to-mid 20th century developed a taste for salad that was actually dessert. It wasn't their fault that the manufacturers of Cool Whip, marshmallows, Jell-O, and pudding mix came up with recipes that they labeled as "salad," giving us an excuse to indulge in highly-processed fat and sugar, and who doesn't love that? People today continue to enjoy these bizarre recipes at family gatherings like Thanksgiving and Christmas, because Grandma, or Great-Grandma, always made her signature sweet salad. And since it's "salad," people eat them with the main entree, even if it's just crushed candy bars glued together with whipped topping.

Neatorama readers know about Watergate salad, but have you ever eaten pretzel salad, ambrosia salad, Snickers salad, or frog-eye salad*? They are all regional favorites that you might want to try for some truly decadent occasion, unless your family has its own sweet salad tradition, although you might want to make the kids eat their dinner first. Read about all of them at Atlas Obscura.

*Note: frog-eye salad has nothing in common with frog pizza.

(Image credit: Marshall Astor)