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2022/03/09

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Ettore Boiardi: The REAL Chef Boyardee

Posted: 08 Mar 2022 08:17 PM PST

👨‍🍳 That smiling man on that can of pasta was actually a real guy. Ettore Bioardi moved from Italy to New York at the tender age of 16, became head chef of the Plaza Hotel by the age of 17 and made spaghetti sauce so good that his customers bought them packed in milk bottles. He's the real Chef Boyardee!

🐱 This black cat can really sing the blues. He's probably just channeling John Lee Hooker by meowing, "I had a dream last night / God knows a black cat had crossed my trail."

📷 Ever posted a selfie on social media? That photos may just have been hoovered up by a facial recognition company that aims to identify every human on Earth. All 7.9 billions of us.

🦪 I usually get an upset stomach eating clams, but this man got something nicer. He found a pearl while eating dinner at his local seafood restaurant.

🏠 Turn your world upside down ... literally! The upside down house of Casaloca Guavita in Colombia is a tourist attraction.

🐞 I get famished between lunch and dinner, but a species of tick called Argas brumpti can last 8 years without eating anything. Now that's going on a diet!

Featured art: Go Zoom by indie artist Boggs Nicolas.

Current special: Save up to 20% on all Sci-Fi T-shirts, Fantasy shirts and Horror tees.

He's Dead, Jim

Posted: 08 Mar 2022 09:00 AM PST



Over at Pop Culturista, we took at look at Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy of the USS Enterprise and his most memorable catchphrase, "I'm a doctor, not a (whatever)!" That phrase was used over and over, and long outlasted McCoy and the original Star Trek series. However, it's not the only line McCoy relied on in the series. John DiMarco gives us another compilation that highlights McCoy pronouncing someone dead, over and over, throughout the show's three-year run. We usually remember this as "He's dead, Jim." But it varied quite a bit. After all, you can't address Jim when it's Jim himself, Captain James T. Kirk, who is the dead one in at least three of these clips. Lucky for us, Dr. McCoy was often wrong in that conclusion. -via Laughing Squid

Look What Washed Ashore- a Globster!

Posted: 08 Mar 2022 06:00 AM PST

Throughout history, there have been tales of dead animals washed up on the seashore that no one can identify. The really big ones make the news and have often been identified by witnesses as monsters of some sort. These are called "globsters," which is a combination of glob and monster. The more decomposed the creature is, the harder it is to identify. Once barnacles and other scavengers start feeding on it, it may start to look very strange indeed. And the sea can leave a decomposing corpse slimy or hairy or quite monstrous. You can see how this sort of thing once made people believe in dragons and sea serpents. These days, scientists can usually identify what this globster once was, but until then, it may as well be a sea monster. The 20-foot hairy globster pictured here was seen on a beach in the Philippines in 2018.

The white, shaggy carcass may have resembled the dragon from A Neverending Story (1984), but its origins were less fantastical. Local officials concluded that the remains belonged to a whale that had died a couple of weeks earlier—possibly after being struck by a ship. The long “hairs” were actually decaying muscle fibers, and the white coloration was a natural consequence of decomposition.

These are stories that are better read about than witnessed, mainly because of the smell. Read the stories of six really bizarre documented globsters at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Huntxel)

A Train Protection System So Simple, No One Can Improve On It

Posted: 08 Mar 2022 02:15 AM PST



When you have a railroad snaking around mountains in areas where few people live, there's always the possibility of rockslides or even single boulders that can wreck a track and derail a train. In 1882, John Anderson came up with a system for the West Highland Line that travels through the Pass of Brander in Scotland, to warn approaching trains of falling rocks. It was so simple that it will remind you of when you were a child and set a rabbit trap you saw in a cartoon. The system is called Anderson's Piano, and it's worked fairly well for 140 years. It's not a perfect system- the parts get rusty and are hard to replace, but it doesn't depend on a power supply. As Tom Scott explains, so far, no one's come up with anything better.

Otters and Optical Illusions

Posted: 07 Mar 2022 10:14 PM PST

🦦 Do otters see optical illusions? Here's what happened when two Japanese otters named Kotaro and Hana were given an optical illusion rug that looked like a sinkhole.

🏘️ Got $1.8 million? In San Francisco, that'll buy you an unlivable house with "zero bedroom", but in Golden, British Columbia, Canada, that amount of money will buy you an entire "Edelweiss Village" with chalets fit for Swiss mountaineers.

🕹️ Professional freerunner Calen Chan brought Assassins Creed II to life through parkour (with an equally neat behind-the-scenes video clip). The amazing architecture of Khiva, Uzbekistan served as a backdrop in the short film.

👞 Cryptide Sneaker: 3D printed shoes that leave footprints that look like they belong to a mysterious cryptid animal (like a chupacabra, for example).

😂 This man was careful enough to cover his face when he committed a robbery at a Chicago's train station but he didn't count on his own mother recognizing him and dragging him to surrender to the police.

🥤 Why did old-timey soda bottles have round bottoms? There's logic to this weird design. See if you can figure it out without reading the answer.

🤔 This millennial found the creepiest thing at her grandpa's house: a huge, dusty old book with thousands of pages full of names, phone numbers, and addresses of everyone in town. What does it mean?

🎬 Here's how the Bride of Dracula nearly killed off Nosferatu, one of the first Dracula films, by using a horrifying creature that even the vampires dread: lawyers.

🦸 Think you know your comic book superheroes and cartoon characters? This young woman has just set the Guinness World Record for naming 88 Marvel characters and 102 cartoon characters in one minute. See, reading a lot of comic books can really pay off!

Check out more neat posts over at our new sites: Pictojam, Supa Fluffy, Pop Culturista, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus and Spooky Daily.

Image: Kotsumet/YouTube

Traveling Highway 40 as an African Diplomat in the 1960s

Posted: 07 Mar 2022 01:16 PM PST

Before the interstate highway system, Route 40 was the main road between Washington, DC and New York City. The highway crosses the Mason-Dixon Line, which traditionally separates the North from the South. Diplomats from around the world used this highway to commute between the United Nations in New York and their embassies in Washington. For African diplomats, this meant dealing with segregation laws in Maryland. Restaurants and gas stations along 40 in Maryland regularly denied service to men in limousines charged with representing an entire nation. An incident in 1961 made international headlines when the new ambassador from Chad, Adam Malick Sow, was denied a cup of coffee at a roadside diner.

The wife of the diner's owner refused to serve the diplomat because he was black. "He looked like just an ordinary run of the mill [N-word] to me. I couldn't tell he was an ambassador," Mrs Leroy Merritt later told the national magazine Life. "I said 'There's no table service here'."

The insult sparked an international incident, making the front page of newspapers across Africa and Asia. Soon after, diplomats from Niger, Cameroon and Togo reported similar experiences at Maryland restaurants.

The news coverage set off a campaign of protests. Some businesses agreed to serve diplomats only, but that only raised the stakes of the protests, as one group impersonated diplomats from a fictional country to make their point. Read about the role Route 40 played in the battle against segregation at BBC. -via Digg

(Image source: Boston Public Library Tichnor Brothers collection #75026)
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