A bear in Colorado Springs, Colorado, decided to pull a reverse Goldilocks and invaded a house, possibly looking for porridge. The bear entered through a broken window on the ground floor, and made his way upstairs. He apparently wanted to go back outside, but didn't realize that a second story window would have a different exterior. Neighbors caught a recording of the bear looking confused and hanging out of the upper window. The bear considered dropping to the ground, but then thought better of it and climbed back in. But he tried that window again with the same results. It turns out the bear had accidentally shut himself in a bedroom. A police officer opened the door so the bear could leave,  through the same downstairs window he entered. We suspect the police officer stayed as flat as he could behind that door.

Ryan MacFarlane was away that day and came home to missing pork chops and snacks and some minor damage, much less than he had expected. The bear had been implicated in several other house invasions in the area. -via Boing Boing

Ever since we saw The Jetsons in the 1960s, we've been waiting for flying cars. We aren't quite there yet, but we may see flying taxis at the Summer Olympic Games in Paris next year. And they will be powered by non-polluting electricity! The city is working on partnering with the German firm Volocopter to run their electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOLs) to get people to the sports venues. These electric helicopters don't yet have the power necessary for long-range trips, but a city taxi service using them can cut trip times into fractions. That is, if they can nail down proposed routes and design a system for keeping the skies safe around other traffic. After all, there will be conventional helicopters in use, as well as innumerable drones.

Volocopter isn't the only company pioneering eVTOLs. American company Archer Aviation Inc. is poised to begin taxi runs in 2025, ramping up for full service at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Still, these taxi runs will be expensive, at least at first. Read about eVTOLs and where you might see them at NBC Sports. -via Fark

(image credit: Spielvogel)

Apparently in my absence my husband has hung cat-level wall art. So sophisticated 🧐 pic.twitter.com/xwVwWl89Xk

— Yvette Cendes (@whereisyvette) February 23, 2023

An entry in a list at Bored Panda tickled me, so I went to save the Tweet. In the comments below it, I found there was more to the story. Yvette Cendes had also posted the picture to reddit, where she explained what the art piece is.

The response inspired reddit's resident artist Shitty_Watercolour to contribute a rendering of the poor house cat expressing her desire to live like the cat in the photograph.

At which point the discussion turned to whether it is better to be a house cat in Boston or a stray in sunny Havana getting your picture taken. And that's as far down the rabbit hole I want to go today. However, I did check to see if Cendes printed out the watercolor and hanged it at cat level- no word on that. The Tweet is from Bored Panda's list called 50 Hilarious Boyfriends And Husbands Who Never Fail To Make Their Partners Laugh.

The Orient Express was a luxury train route taking passengers from Paris to Istanbul on a posh three-night journey. Between 1883 and 1977, wealthy travelers enjoyed fine dining, sleeper cars, and personal service from a staff of well-trained porters. The route became world famous, and indeed many of us only know about it through fictional stories that took place on the trains. But the demand collapsed when air travel took over. The route and the name were leased by another company, but full trips to Istanbul only occurred once a year.

However, a new company is joining them with the aim to bring back the luxury and nostalgia of the original Orient Express, with a proposed opening date of 2025. Getting the trains back together proved to be an enormous challenge.  At its peak, the service used more than 2,000 train cars, including sleeper cars, dining cars, lounges, and cars for supplies and baggage. It means a lot to get those original cars back, but they had been scattered to the four winds, and many are assumed to be unrepairable. The company hired train historian Arthur Mettetal, who is doing his Phd on the Orient Express (about, not literally on) to locate the original cars. Mettetal went to great lengths, including tracking down faintly recognizable blue cars with cream roofs in the background of internet photos. He once ventured into Belarus and faced an armed standoff to negotiate for original Orient Express cars. Read about his quest, and the efforts to collect and refurbish the luxurious train cars of the Orient Express at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: Honza Groh (Jagro))

She's convinced that sending her dog Molly to the moon is the right thing to do. But she's wrong. We never get to learn why she came to believe this, or how she managed to get him onto a rocket ship in the first place, but no logical explanations are really necessary to the story. You just have to suspend your disbelief and go with the shorthand way the story is told. That saves a lot of time.

Moon Dog is a short and charming little film by Australian filmmaker Nat Kelly. The premise is sort of dumb, and in the middle you'll think the story is awful, but stay with it because the payoff is worth it. No animals were harmed in the making of this video, especially Molly.  

Nat Kelly made a name for himself when he was just a teenager and produced a full-length feature film on a zero budget. When it was shown at the local theater in Darwin, the house was packed.  -via Metafilter

Wilbur and Orville Wright are acclaimed for building the first ever motorized heavier-than-air flying machine. Its first successful flight was on December 17, 1903. While that may seem a huge accomplishment to those of us who know what came after, it was so low-key at the time that they couldn't even get it into newspapers. Even the brothers' hometown newspaper, the Dayton Journal, thought the flight was too short to count. It was pretty short- the distance they flew was shorter than the length of a modern airliner.

So the Wrights kept trying, staging a demonstration for the press in 1904 that didn't go well. It wasn't until they did figure eights in the air in France that the press decided the Wright Brothers were the real deal- in 1908! Why did it take so long for anyone to notice this stunning breakthrough? Because no one believed powered flight was possible. Read about the slow media response to the Wright Brothers flight at Big Think. -via Real Clear Science   

The birthday party invitation above has gone viral. Carys Roberts of Kingston, Ontario, is throwing a party for her twin girls as they turn five years old. Anyone who knows a five-year-old girl can understand that they wanted their party to have a theme of "unicorns but with rainbows and maybe bats but there should be princesses and also Minnie and we need dancing lights" But what's really appealing is that Roberts is trying to lower expectations for the party guests, especially the parents, with phrases like "brought to you by Pinterest fails and the dollar store." It's an appropriate tactic in an age that finds children's birthday parties designed more for social media than for the children.

There's no reason to rent equipment and hire entertainment for young children, although we've seen parties with perfectly matched theme decorations, food, and games for one- and two-year-olds. What children really want is a fun time with their friends and family. Another part of the invitation that caught people's attention is Roberts' polite admission that she could use some help supervising the kids -"adult juice" provided. If you can't read the text in the image above, a larger version and an interview with Roberts can be found here. -via Metafilter

Gav and Dan, the Slow Mo Guys, have played with dangerous things before, but they are serious when they warn us about playing with large neodymium magnets. "They will crush you." But that's exactly what they are doing in their latest video. These magnets are so attractive that you can't work with them before removing all the metal on your body, or you'll be sorry. Getting two of them together is another level- they will rush together so quickly and forcefully that they break! It happens in a blink of an eye, but these are the Slow Mo Guys. They recorded the magnets colliding at 187,000 frames per second, so we can see how it happens. The collision throws parts of the magnets off, but they are quickly sucked back together. That all occurs in the first four minutes; then they try some other experiments and show us how very weird these magnets act when they're trying to handle them.   -via Born in Space

From 1809 to 1927, this strange disease killed thousands of settlers and farmers in the Midwest—including Abraham Lincoln’s mother. https://t.co/GODTnGUwJg

— Smithsonian Magazine (@SmithsonianMag) June 20, 2023

When pioneers began settling in the United States midwest, they encountered a deadly illness that was eventually dubbed "milk sickness." It could kill a person within days. Calves died from it, and milk cows suffered as well, so the connection with drinking milk lent the illness its name. But no one knew what caused it, until Doctor Anna put her efforts into finding the cause.

Anna Pierce Bixby saw a need in her new Illinois community, and went to Philadelphia to be trained in nursing, midwifery, and dentistry, and returned to Rock Creek, Illinois, as the only medical practitioner for miles around. Besides delivering babies and pulling teeth, she searched and found the cause of milk sickness, with the aid of a Native American woman whose identity has been lost. But while cases of milk sickness waned in southern Illinois due to Bixby's efforts, it continued elsewhere because faraway doctors and officials didn't put much stock in what a frontier midwife had to say. Time and experience proved Bixby correct, yet even today she is more known for a local legend of buried treasure than for her public health work. Read how Doctor Anna fought milk sickness at Smithsonian. -via Damn Interesting

Simone Giertz, the "queen of shitty robots" (previously at Neatorama), went to a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan to meet Mohammad Waheed Hussein Asaf, who makes toys for the children of the camp. The aim was to collaborate in making a working helicopter for the children. Their time together is a contrast of old and young, Eastern and Western, man and woman, from different parts of the world who don't have a language in common.  

"He thinks I'm incompetent, and I think he's a stubborn old man."

There had to be a translator there, but the editing of this video is so exquisite that you don't even realize it. Can they come together to build a helicopter from the materials available? That seems to be almost beside the point, as the real story here is the partnership of two makers.

The video is a project of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, to celebrate World Refugee Day on June 20. The UNHCR's mini-documentary series called We Are Here has four episodes available on YouTube.  -via Metafilter

If you were to go by pop culture versions of Viking feasts, a meal would be laden with whole animals roasted over a spit, accompanied by plenty of alcoholic beverages. While that may be appropriate for a celebratory dinner after a successful pillaging, it's not what most people of the Viking era ate. Daniel Serra is the world's foremost expert on Viking cuisine, and has published a cookbook of Viking recipes. He also gives demonstrations of historic cooking in recreated Viking villages in Scandinavia. But how do you recreate meals from a culture that didn't write anything down?

Serra studies a combination of sources, such as archaeological digs, mentions of food in orally-preserved Viking sagas, and extrapolating back from later written recipes. He cross-references his findings with the science of what the area was like in the Viking age, what resources were available, and what the culture was like. Then he tests his recipes and cooking methods to see if they work.

Serra describes the everyday "comfort foods" that Viking communities would produce, and even shares a recipe for Traveller's Fish Porridge at BBC's World's Table. -via Digg

You might think that someone messed up the instructions for assembling their IKEA cat, but this is Gulliver, and he's just weird. That's how he got featured on the subreddit WhatsWrongWithYourCat.

Then there's sangu811's cat, who can sleep in what would be a most uncomfortable position for humans. Honestly, there's usually nothing wrong with these cats, it's just that cats are open to new experiences, exceedingly flexible, and they don't care what you think. If you enjoy cats caught on camera being all weird, check out 50 of them in a ranked list at Bored Panda. 

Red velvet cake wasn't on the table for the first Juneteenth celebration in 1865, because it wasn't all that widespread, or all that red yet. But other red foods were there, like watermelon for dessert, and became symbolic of the holiday. So it's no mystery why red velvet cake is served at modern Juneteenth celebrations, and at Christmas, too. Besides, it's delicious!

The first velvet cake was a deluxe chocolate cake, and the faint red tinge was a byproduct of how the cocoa reacted with the leavening agents. The cake was a hit, and people liked the red tint as much as they liked the flavor. Yes, you had to use the right kind of cocoa to produce the red color, but if you wanted to make sure, you could add food coloring. A recipe for red velvet cake was even used to promote the sale of food coloring in the 1940s. The shockingly bright red color with the additive proved very popular, and now you don't even need chocolate to have a festive red cake. But don't forget the cream cheese frosting!

Read how red velvet cake came about, and try a recipe for the classic Velvet Cocoa Cake that produces the natural reddish brown color, posted at Atlas Obscura. I made a set of red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting Friday for an office gathering, and I will be eating my sole portion today in honor of Juneteenth.    

(Image credit: I made this.)

Throwing a cable across a ravine is easier than building a bridge. Actually, throwing a cable across is the first step to building a bridge, but sometimes the project stops there, because people can cross with just a cable if they are brave enough. Slovenia has several manual cable cars strung across some of its more inaccessible ravines, but Tom Scott found only one that is regularly maintained. When you see it, you'll have your doubts. But Tom watched other people use it, and was game to demonstrate it for us. There's no way on earth you'd get me in that thing, even if I were being chased by some bad guys out of an Indiana Jones movie, and I grew up in the land of rickety swinging footbridges. Would you ride a rusty 70-year-old zipline? If heights make you queasy, be warned that they do show images of what Tom is crossing over.

From the early days of photography, here's a story of a torture that became a badge of honor. Born in 1799, Captain Jonathan W. Walker was an avid abolitionist. He worked with the Underground Railroad, and helped those who escaped slavery settle in Mexico. But in 1844, he was on a boat taking seven escapees to the West Indies when they got into trouble and were rescued by a ship with a pro-slavery crew. Walker was arrested, and a US Marshall branded his right hand with "SS," which stood for "slave stealer." He was jailed in Florida for eleven months.

The incident didn't slow Walker down at all, and he continued his abolitionist work lecturing and arranging for escapes after his bail was paid by an abolitionist group. Not long after, he commissioned a photograph to be made of his branded right hand. The image, however, is reversed and appears to be his left hand- notice that the Ss are backward. Read Walker's story that left us a lasting image of the fight over slavery at Vintage Everyday.  -via Nag on the Lake