Southeastern Texas is alligator country. They are numerous snippy. Gator Country is the name of a wildlife rescue organization that specializes in protecting these modern-day dinosaurs and showing them to adventurous tourists.

KHOU 11 News reports that an employee named Kat recently graduated from McNeese State University across the border in Louisiana. She arranged for a photoshoot with Laura Obelsbee Photography which showed the happy graduate snuggling with her favorite animals.

-via Jonathan Kentrick

I believe Halupedia got its name from the word hallucination. You can jump from any link in the existing articles to another, or do a search, and if it didn't exist before, the algorithm will write something for you to read. The main page has a few suggestions, like The Great Pigeon Census of 1887, The Ministry of Terribly Wrong Maps, or The Society for the Prevention of Unnecessary Tuesdays. They are all nonsense, but they are surprisingly well-written nonsense. 
  
I clicked on the words Inter Municipal Hydrology Commission in an article titled Greater Bellevue, and I had to wait a few seconds while this encyclopedia wrote an article for me. The Commission, located in several fantasy towns including Vernal Drip, has a complete history that is grammatically correct and makes plenty of sense on the surface, but may remind you of Grand Fenwick or a Monty Python sketch. Really, the Commission was de-commissioned after their 700-page report on fog. This can be a lot of fun if you just want to revel in verbiage. You can leave comments, but you can't use your own name. If you get caught in a loop of links, reddit has some suggestions for more AI generated Halupedia articles. -via Nag on the Lake 
  

  

Dutch YouTuber Strange Inventions found a real deal- 65 little bottles for just €6.50. What to do with them? How about designing a digital clock, using bottles of colored water for pixels? It sounded like a good idea at the time, but this project ended up taking 210 hours of work and €580 ($680) in parts. The finished product is pretty, and impressive because it actually works, but as a timepiece it's pretty hard to see the numbers unless you squint. The real entertainment value is in the part of these projects that you usually skip- the build. 

He had no previous project to draw from, and had to figure out each component on his own. That meant failure after failure, and buying more parts at each step. And since he was working with water, there were constant leaks that had to be fixed. Each successful step only revealed problems in the next step. But once he had invested some time and money, he couldn't stop until he got it right.   

This is YouTube, and around here, we appreciate stupidity and esthetics. 

By the end of the video, you feel so sorry for the guy that you have to applaud. Kind of like the way you applaud your child at their awful first band concert because you don't want to destroy their enthusiasm after they've worked so hard. -via Born in Space 
    
    

There were many ways to get around the laws against alcohol during Prohibition, but for the poor, those workarounds could come at a high price. Jamaica Ginger was a patent medicine that had been around for a hundred years already when Prohibition began. Like many medicines, it contained a high percentage of alcohol, and you were only supposed to take it a spoon at a time for whatever ailed you. But when there was no other alcohol, you could get a two-ounce bottle of Jamaica Ginger for fifty cents and have the equivalent of around three shots. The popular medicine came to be called Jake for short. Government authorities took notice, and so required Jamaica Ginger manufacturers to add enough ginger to make Jake unpalatable.  

Some manufacturers looked for a way around the regulation, which included testing. They found that tri-orthocresyl phosphate (TOCP) could make Jamaica ginger pass the test without ruining the taste of the medicine. The only problem was that TOCP is a powerful neurotoxin that caused paralysis. Beginning in 1931, doctors were confronted with cases of muscle failure and paralysis among poor men that couldn't be explained. Even when the cause was found, assistance was egregiously absent, and men who displayed symptoms of "Jake Leg" were ridiculed. Read the story of adulterated Jamaica Ginger and what it did at Deranged LA Crimes. -via Strange Company 

(Image credit: Deltabeignet) 

BagelFest is an annual competition of bagel baking. The Wall Street Journal reports that 2,000 competitors converged at Citi Field in New York City to see which bakery produced the best example of this iconic bread of New Yorker cuisine.

A Texan bakery won, of course.

Starship Bagel is a small chain of bagel-centered restaurants in the Dallas area. The bagel pictured above is dubbed the Millennium Falcon. It has tomato, avocado, alfalfa sprouts, pickled red onions, red pepper and your choice of schmear.

The WSJ article examines in depth how a bagel can be defined and how that definition has changed over time. There is a great deal of innovation in bagel development in recent years, of which the Millennium Falcon is only one example.

-via Instapundit | Photo: Starship Bagel

I don't know about younger viewers, but those of us who watched all the Star Wars movies in order of their release have always been baffled by the implications of retconning. It was bad enough that the secrets kept in the first movie, then revealed in the second and third, made it clear that Lucas was making it up as he went along.

Every time a new prequel came out, the effort to bring familiar characters back only screwed with the timeline and ruined the logic of the first movie that captured our imaginations. "New" characters turned out to have been there all along. More implausible connections between them were revealed. Sure, Lucas explained that the droids had their memories wiped between the prequels and the original trilogy, but that doesn't work for a Wookiee. Or for Obi-Wan Kenobi, who knew everything all along, but refused to reveal anything actually useful. Matthew McCleskey gives us the spoiler version that might have been. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

On a long drive this week, I heard three different reports on NPR about a Neanderthal tooth that has been discovered with a deliberately-drilled hole in it. The tooth also shows evidence that it was used for chewing after the hole was drilled! A bioarchaeologist described the tooth and the stone drill used to make the hole, which tells us that Neanderthals not only had the skills, but the cooperation and trust to perform such surgery. A modern dentist said that the problem was probably terrible pain from infection and swelling. He said it would have taken at least an hour to painfully drill into the tooth, but the patient must have understood the relief to come afterward. The tooth, from a cave in Siberia, was dated to 59,000 years ago. We don't know what, if any, pain relief was available to Neanderthals.

The drilled hole extends into the tooth pulp, which would have destroyed the nerve and is somewhat analogous to a root canal. In most early human dentistry, the normal cure would have been to pull the tooth. Read about the tooth and what it tells us at NPR. 

(Image credit: Zubova et al./PLOS One) 

 

Ulla-Stina Wikander is a Swedish fabric artist who images a world filled with vibrant colors and delightful textures brought about by embroidery.

Motor vehicles are prohibited in Denali National Park in Alaska, except for buses that shuttle visitors through a limited area. Rangers patrol on foot, on horseback, in helicopters, or with dogsleds. For more than 100 years, Denali has raised sled dog puppies in their own breeding program in conjunction with reputable Alaskan breeders. On March 30, sled dog Spark gave birth to six puppies in the park. Some of these will be swapped with other litters from breeders, and four that show the best qualities of a sled dog will grow up to be official Denali canine rangers. This year's puppies are named after national parks: Sequoia, Mammoth, Rainier, Teton, Mesa, and Acadia. They are now six weeks old, and you can peek in on them anytime with the Denali Puppy Cam! Keep in mind that Denali is four hours behind the Eastern Time Zone. If the puppies are asleep, scroll down to read about Denali's puppy program.  -via Metafilter 

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson collaborated on the Declaration of Independence in 1776. They both served as US president, then retired, and notably died on the same day, the 50th anniversary of the country's founding, on July 4th, 1826. Those are things you already know about the two men. You might also know that the two friends had a falling out over politics after the Revolutionary War, and went years without speaking. 

However, in the 15 years before their deaths, the two Founding Fathers reconnected by correspondence. They reminisced about how the Declaration came about, and their memories didn't always agree. But they were both aware of the lack of documentation as it was happening, and that their later correspondence would become part of the nation's historical record. Those letters reveal fundamental differences in the way that Adams and Jefferson understood the nature of the general public and how they would guard the liberties they fought for.  

When I taught my kids how to drive, I made then watch The Dukes of Hazzard so that they would know how to locate suitable topography for car jumps.

Why? Well, this is why.

Fox 11 News reports that sheriff's deputies in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin chased a suspect who was out on bond for car theft. During his automotive flight, he departed the bounds of the earth as he hit an embankment and passed over another car perpendicular to his path of travel.

You can see the full bodycam video here.

The car, lacking the structural integrity of the fictional 1969 Dodge Charger of fame, did not do well upon its descent from the heavens. The suspect proceeded on foot until tased and subdued.

-via ABC News

One redditor jokes that it's the "I wasn't asking" version of the toilet plunger.

Redditor /u/brewstah saw this plunger at a hardware store in Osterville, Massachussets. Why was it made this way? There's speculation that it's to prevent a customer from walking off with it, although I think that a used plunger is an item unlikely to be stolen.

My guess is that the employees had to assemble a plunger on short notice and grabbed an available handle. In this case, it was a broom handle.

-via David Thompson

Kate, an artist in Odesa, Ukraine, creates marvels of stained glass which she sells on her Etsy store called Sea Stained Glass. She has not yet said if she will sell her latest creation: a functional cap made of stained glass.

As you can see from this video, it's quite functional. Although a bit heavy, it's comfortable--in large part because Kate shaped it for her head specifically. She mentions that the visor is good alternative to sunglasses (which she doesn't like) because it shades her eyes without resting on her face.

We tend to think of navies as a military force that deploys on the high seas. The US not only uses its navy for ocean battles, but traditionally for troop transport to faraway wars before air travel. But how would a country house and train a navy without seaports? There are seven landlocked countries in the world that maintain navies as a separate branch of their military forces. The "how" behind those forces comes down to the fact that oceans aren't the only bodies of water in the world. But the "why" is way more interesting, and each country has their own story. Some are responding to real threats, and some are legacies of a complicated history. In the case of Laos, we don't know much about it at all, but I'm sure they have their reasons in their own cultural context. This video from Half as Interesting is a minute shorter than it looks, since an ad is at the end. 

Zillow Gone Wild introduces us to this lovely old firehouse that is now on the market for a large family that wants a lot of open space. It has four bedrooms and four bathrooms spread over 3,105 square feet.