The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel was a book published in France in 1565 with no text. It contains 120 woodcut illustrations with no artist mentioned. The "author" is Richard Breton, who only wrote a preface and did not create the illustrations. The artist is unknown to this day. YouTuber hochelaga refers to these illustrations as "demon doodles." The grotesque drawings remind us of what middle school students draw when they are bored in class. In this video, we learn some of the hypothetical inspirations for the fantasy creatures in the amusing illustrations. We'd never figure out on our own that at least some of these are akin to political cartoons, because we'd have to be medieval scholars to know what was going on at the time. The narrator doesn't know the meaning behind all of them, but the ones he tells us about are fascinating. -via Metafilter

There have been not one but two scientific papers that describe scans of a man's nether regions that show haunting faces in places where they shouldn't be. A case study published in 1996 concerned a 45-year-old Welshman who was referred for an undescended testicle. The description reads, "the left side of the scrotum seemed to be occupied by a screaming ghost-like apparition."

Another case from 2011 revealed a face in a painfully-inflamed scrotum belonging to a 45-year-old Canadian man. The face looks as if it were also experiencing pain. You can see those faces in the provided links. Neither article notes the reaction of the patient, but we can imagine they were disturbed by the images.

Both are, of course, cases of pareidolia, or the tendency to see faces in odd places. This phenomenon is explained in detail at Cracked, which gave them a reason to talk about haunted scrotums.  

As US troops sailed off for Europe during World War II, their families back home were eager to send letters and packages, but delivering that mail was difficult, and by the beginning of 1945, there were six airplane hangars full of mail in England, millions of pieces that were waiting to be sorted, including Christmas packages that were delayed by the Battle of the Bulge. By then, the packages were being eaten by rats. Other nations had similar backups of mail that had been in limbo for up to two years. The US responded by sending in the the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion.

The Six Triple Eight, as they were called, were 800 members of the Women's Army Corps, who had volunteered years earlier and had been performing support work. They became the first Black women ever sent overseas by the US military. The battalion was led by 26-year-old Major Charity Edna Adams, shown being served in the image above. They worked 24 hours a day and sorted, censored, repackaged, and distributed that mail in three months, and were then sent to newly-liberated France to do the same.

The women of the Six Triple Eight came home after the war and were mostly ignored. The six surviving members are now over a hundred years old. But their deeds began to be recognized in the 21st century with a monument at Fort Leavenworth, a Congressional Gold Medal, and a documentary. Read about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion and their adventures in Europe in their own words at Smithsonian. 

(Image credit: United States Army Signal Corps)

How many things can possibly go wrong with a movie? You might be surprised. In the pantheon of "movies that are so bad, they're good," The Room reigns supreme, but that's principally because of Tommy Wiseau's self-casting as the lead. In the case of the 2011 movie Love on a Leash, there are so many aspects of filmmaking that went wrong that the finished product is a full-blown train wreck. Yes, it's a bad film, and you don't want to spend an hour and a half watching it, but you do want to spend 20 minutes learning about what went on to cause this disaster to happen.

Love on a Leash is about a guy who is a dog during the day and a man at night, who falls in love with a woman who takes him home. Does that make sense? Good, because nothing else in the movie does.

The guys from Bloodbath TV break down everything wrong with Love on a Leash from the flawed and somewhat disturbing premise to the confusing editing to the incomprehensible symbolism to the soundtrack (or lack thereof). You have to wonder if the director was completely oblivious to the movie's problems, or just blew them off because it would be too much trouble to fix anything. Love on a Leash might be a wreck, but this critique is interesting and quite funny. -via Metafilter

The first trailer for the DC movie The Flash dropped during the Super Bowl broadcast. The film finished production in 2021, but was was delayed because of lead actor Ezra Miller's year of bad behavior, and is now scheduled for a summer release. The Flash is all about time travel, and explores the commonly-discussed paradox of meeting your past self, which happens to the Flash's alter ego Barry Allen. Also the paradox of changing the past big time and ruining everything, which is the main plot. But the real hook in this trailer is the return of Michael Keaton as Batman. I am not making this up. In fact, there are two Batmans, the other played by Ben Affleck, as well as two Flashes. And, of course, a whole bunch of other superheroes and supervillains. The Flash will arrive in theaters on June 16.

My yard borders on a flowing body of water that's named a creek, but it's bigger than many that are named rivers. The name goes back a couple hundred years, and no one is bothered by it. But sometimes the definition of a geographical feature is important. The 1995 movie The Englishman who Went up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain had to do with a strict definition of what a "mountain" is, which enraged the residents of a Welsh village because they were proud of their mountain. The moral of the story is that strict definitions can make a mountain out of a molehill, so to speak. Throw in the different definitions of "mountain" in different parts of the world, and it becomes clear that no one definition will do. Many agencies have definitions that are pretty broad and have the word "or" several times.

This distinction can be silly, or it can have serious political implications, such as the difference between a lake and a sea. Both are bodies of water surrounded by land, but in the case of the Caspian Sea, the distinction makes a big difference in how the sea's jurisdiction is divided between the five countries that surround it. Read about the difficulties of these definitions and the controversies surrounding them at Today I Found Out.

Super Bowl Sunday is peculiar American holiday that celebrates the confluence of an advertising showcase, a concert, a smörgåsbord of snack foods, and a football game. Since you can select the aspects of the celebration that appeal to you, there's something for everyone. To get you into the proper mood, how about reliving some Super Bowl productions of the past? No, not sports replays, but the many skits dealing with the Super Bowl from Saturday Night Live.

The website If it's hip, it's here collected the 15 best SNL skits dedicated to the Super Bowl and posted them together for your entertainment. They range from a 1982 sketch featuring Eddie Murphy and the late John Madden to a fake ad aired just last week with Pedro Pascal. Since there was no SNL last night, it will not only get you in the right frame of mind for the game, but also give Saturday Night Live fans their weekly fix. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Penna_23)

Making threats is never good, but if you are going to, you may as well be creative about it. People are more likely to listen (or read) and remember when you do. You don't really want to hurt someone, but you want them to know how you feel. And it might even go viral. That's where the subreddit Rare Threats comes in, to archive the wittiness people employ when they are angry and have a minute to think about it.

(Image credit: kylie-420)

You might have heard this one elsewhere. Several commenters attributed it to Klinger in the TV series M*A*S*H, and one recalled it from the children's book The Lightning Queen (published in 2015). But I will always remember it as a Johnny Carson staple, when he did his Carnac the Magnificent bit. See 40 of these imaginative but unserious threats posted online at Bored Panda. But my advice is, don't make threats.

Humans impress each other with attractive profile pictures and witty banter, and perform courtship rituals like dinner dates or chocolates hearts on Valentines Day. The male greater sac-winged bat mixes various body secretions in his mouth, including urine, and paints it over his wing sacs to attract the females of the species. It's pretty gross to us, but these bats probably think our profile pictures are ugly. Mating rituals in nature can be extreme, or at least extremely weird, to any creatures outside that species. In the animal kingdom, your chance of happiness and reproduction may depend on how loud you can screech or how well you arrange seashells, and you can bet they put their hearts and souls into getting it right. Atlas Obscura has a roundup of some of nature's strangest mating rituals, from porcupines to spiders to octopuses, that keep their species going generation after generation.  

(Image credit: Karin Schneeberger alias Felineora)

Minnesotastan posted this image and had people try to guess what these things are, but you can easily click through to Instagram to find out. They are not seashells, seeds, or hand-carved beads. They are phasmid eggs, from various species of insects we know as stick insects or walking sticks. There are hundreds of species, and their eggs are all different. Some of them have a knob on top, which ants see to be seeds. Ants will take the "seed" into their nest, and can feed the knob to their own larvae while leaving the eggs just fine. When the stick insect emerges, it can escape the ants nest safely because it looks like an ant. That's three stages of mimicry: eggs that look like seeds, larva that look like ants, and adults that look like sticks.

The collection in the image is an artwork by Levon Biss, and is for sale. He says some of the eggs are as small as three millimeters long! However, that would make the "totem pole" in the middle rather large for an insect egg. Still, some walking sticks can grow to 25 inches long.

Bethlehem, a couple of hours north of Philadelphia, is a historic town. It was named on Christmas Eve in 1741, and Christmas has been celebrated there in a big way ever since. Nicknamed "Christmas City USA," it was the first American city to display a big, decorated municipal Christmas tree. The downtown historic district still resembles America in the 18th century. But that is the north end of town. The south side has a much more American story.

The Bethlehem Steel plant covers almost five miles, with blast furnaces soaring hundreds of feet into the air. This is where steel was manufactured for a hundred years, steel that was built into railroads, bridges, and skyscrapers across the country, not to mention ships and tanks through two world wars. The work was hot and dangerous and employed thousands of men and women up until 1995 when steel production ceased. The plant fell into ruins, a desolate monument to a way of life for Bethlehem residents. But instead of dismantling the plant, it has been turned into a a museum and art space. Read about the rise and fall of Bethlehem Steel and how it affected the town at Messy Nessy Chic.

(Image credit: The Mebane Greeting Card Co., Wilkes-Barre, PA.)

Laurence Brown of Lost in the Pond (previously at Neatorama) is quite a Valentine's Day cynic. His stated aim in this video is to contrast the way the British celebrate the holiday with the way Americans do it, as is the normal format for Lost in the Pond videos. You might guess going in that Americans go way overboard with it compared to anyone else in the world, and you would be right. Otherwise, there are more similarities than differences.  

What's really remarkable is that Brown is so totally unenthusiastic about Valentine's Day, despite the fact that he himself got married on February 14th. It probably has to do with his tragic history with the holiday. His string of unfortunate holiday memories will resonate with those of us who usually just ignore Valentine's Day.

How do you measure love? All through history, it's been tried one way or another, from spells and amulets to trials to consultation with psychics. But as soon as we learned to harness electricity, machines to measure love, or more often sexual attraction, have sprung up everywhere. At the turn of the 20th century, a plethysmograph that detects chanes in volume was used to measure love. It's still used, but for other medical purposes. Medical instruments that measured temperature, heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure were combined to devise an early love meter, but also led to the lie detector. Other devices measure galvanic skin response or, as in the infamous Cupidometer, the subject's resistance to pain. The most enduring of the love-measuring instruments is the Love Tester, an arcade game that works on a completely different idea. Read about the history of love testers, both the serious and the entertaining, at Atlas Obscura.

Janelle Shane at AI Weirdness trained algorithms to generate Valentine cards last year. Have the programs gotten any better since then? I believe so, although they are still weird enough to generate a laugh or two. This year, she began with the prompt "Roses are red, violets are blue," and let various AI programs complete the poem. Each also generated a description of the accompanying illustration, which may or may not have anything to do with the poem. The example above was generated by GPT-3 Ada (2020 edition). Other examples range from silly to downright threatening. The newest version of ChatGPT, the AI program that is predicted to destroy the college essay and put professional writers out of work, generated eerily perfect but bland Valentine poems and cards. See the poetic work of a half-dozen or so different AI programs at AI Weirdness. If one really strikes your fancy, you can buy them here.

Around 20 years ago, I bought a leather purse with a built-in wallet. It served me well, but 15 years later it was worn out. I went back to the same store and bought another, but found that the slots in the wallet part were no longer big enough to accommodate a credit card or driver's license. That adjustment in material probably saved the manufacturer less than a penny per unit, but it made the purse useless to me. I have a similar story about a simple coffee filter. And my dryer? It contains no computer chips, but because so many others do, there is no longer an appliance repair guy in my town to fix a small problem. I'm sure you have your own stories about the decline of quality in products.

Kim Mas of Vox assures us that the phenomena is real, and explains the forces that go into the relative crappiness of everything we buy these days, from clothing to appliances. The only thing we can do is take care of what we have so we won't have to replace it.