YouTuber KoalaOK subtitled his wordless animated film Pit with "A Short Film About Human Nature." So you'd expect to see humans, right? Or maybe not- there are no humans in sight until halfway through the film. Instead, we get fantastical monsters fighting to the death over a piece of food. Are these weird creatures an analogy for humans? And are they really fantastical monsters? It doesn't matter; you're too caught up in the violence and creative animation. But then it takes a sharp left, and you're wondering if this is really a comedy. Okay, maybe, or maybe it's just a story with some funny parts. But which part is about human nature? Actually, all of it, but you'll need to stay through the credits because there's a whole new scene afterward. I guess you could call it a punch line. If you're interested in the animation process, there's another video about that. -via Memo of the Air  

People are traveling to Philadelphia, Boston, and Washington to celebrate the nation's 250th birthday this year. You might want to add a stop in New York, because the New York Public Library is offering something unique- beer brewed from George Washington's personal recipe. It was found in a journal Washington kept in 1757 while he led a Virginia militia during the Seven Years War. Notes from the 25-year-old Colonel instruct the brewer to use 30 gallons of boiled barley hops, three gallons of molasses, and a quart of yeast. 

This was a "small beer," not very alcoholic, but it was safer to drink than water for a traveling militia. The library partnered with a local brewer named TALEA Beer Co. to produce it. They toned down the molasses flavor somewhat and boosted the alcohol content to 6.5% to make the recipe palatable to modern consumers. They call it Liberty Lager. It will be available this summer at TALEA taprooms and New York restaurants. If you want to try making your own, the recipe is at Smithsonian. 

See also: George Washington's Whiskey: Not the Best. 

(Image credit: New York Public Library)

Grocery stores sell fruit in mesh bags because it's to their advantage for you to buy twelve oranges when you only need two. If the last few oranges go bad before you finish the bag, then you'll go buy more. You might even find a couple have gone bad as soon as you open the bag, because you can't inspect each orange in a five-pound bag before you buy them. They looked so good when you picked them up, and some of that is an optical illusion.  

However, it's all relative. Oranges with some green in them can still be perfectly ripe, but Americans won't buy those, because you can't really be sure. Our best strategy is to try different fruits from different stores and go back to the food vendor that delivers what you like. MinuteFood explains the illusions that grocery stores use to make food more appealing. The video is only six minutes long; the rest is a sponsor message. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Nic C is a musician who samples music from classic television programs. He takes short slices--just a few notes each--of these famous songs and uses them to compose new music that is simulatenously original and familiar.

A game that combines food and geography is quite relevant to my interests. That game is FoodGuessr, which is a little like GeoGuessr, but it uses food instead of a location photograph. You'll be given a photograph of a dish and a description of its ingredients and preparation method. You have five guesses as to which country the food is from. You pick the country from a list, which is the most time-consuming part because they are arranged by continent and then by alphabet, which is tedious. If your first guess is wrong, they will tell you whether you are warm, hot, or very hot. You get 5,000 points for being right on the first guess, and lesser amounts for subsequent guesses. 

There are actually three games. You can compete with other players in the daily game, which has three rounds. Or you can play by yourself in the unlimited 5-round Quick Play mode. There's also a different game, called Plate Off where you are shown two different dishes, and you guess which is most liked globally. I first tried the Quick Play, where I did better than I expected.

No matter how you score, you'll learn about dishes from around the world that you might want to seek out and try. Or some you may want to avoid. -via Metafilter 

(Image credit: Joseagush) 

My Modern Met informs us the UK/Ireland division of the Subway restaurant chain has created a functional sleeping bag that looks like one of its iconic sandwiches.

The art project is called "Sleeping Bag-uette." It's modeled on Italian B.M.T. sandwich, but doesn't taste as good because it's made of fabric.

The company commissioned the project to promote its food with music festival attendees.

You can see a video of the sleeping bag in action on Instagram.

Some serial killers commit murder in the furtherance of other crimes, like bank robbery. Some do it for a sexual thrill. Some are lashing out at a world they believe did them wrong. But it takes a truly terrifying personality to kill over and over for no discernible reason at all. Experts go back and forth about psychopaths- are they a product of an awful childhood or are they born that way, and is that condition even real? 

The 20th century blueprint for psychopathy are the crimes of 19-year-old Charles Starkweather and his 14-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate. Starkweather committed his first murder in November of 1957. Then on January 21, 1958, he killed Fugate's parents and two-year-old sister. Over the next eight days, the two traveled around Nebraska and Wyoming, killing almost everyone they encountered. The sensational murders inspired several movies including Badlands in 1973 and Natural Born Killers in 1994, plus the Bruce Springsteen song "Nebraska." Weird History brings us the story of Starkweather and Fugate and the trail of dead bodies they left behind them. 

The sitting room, of course. Lorelei Teegarden shared images of her grandmother's half bath, where she keeps her collection of miniature chairs. It's a work in progress, since she's been collecting them at least since Teegarden was a child. There are over 100 chairs at the time this picture was taken, and many are smaller chairs sitting on chairs. After posting pictures, other people offered to send her more miniature chairs.  

Honestly, a bathroom is the perfect place to display an eccentric collection, although I suspect this choice was in service of the pun. If you've always wanted to decorate a room in purple, black, or mermaids, the bathroom is the place to go wild. They are usually small rooms not easily visible from the rest of the house, so a different look will not disrupt the style of the home as a whole (much). Imagine you just have to "go," and find yourself among this delightful collection- you can't help but smile. See more pictures of the sitting room at Facebook. -via Messy Nessy Chic 

(Image credit: Lorelei Teegarden) 

You know this song- "We've Only Just Begun" by The Carpenters. It was heard at every wedding you went to for about twenty years, and a lot of graduations, too. You might think it pretty clever for a bank to use it in an ad inviting young couples to establish their accounts. But couldn't they afford to use the hit version? 

But that's backwards. "We've Only Just Begun" was written by Paul Williams and Roger Nichols specifically to advertise The Crocker Bank in Mendocino, California. Local non-actors were recruited to appear in the commercial, which debuted in 1970. Richard Carpenter heard the ad, liked the song, and reached out to the ad agency for the music rights. The Carpenters recorded an expanded version that proved to be a hit and helped them win the Best New Artist Grammy in 1971. It's not the only advertising jingle that was so catchy it became a song, as you will learn in a list of nine such stories at Mental Floss.

The Incredible Mr. Limpet was a 1964 film starring Don Knotts as a man who magically turns into a fish and helps the Allies win World War II. It was a mix of live action and animation, and Mr. Limpet was drawn as a fish who had Knotts' most recognizable features. The movie was not a big hit, and today has a 40% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I loved it, only because I was five years old. So you might be surprised to learn that Hollywood spent years trying to produce a remake starring Jim Carrey.

The problem was that Carrey would be an animated fish for most of the film, and in the late '90s, he was a superstar and just too expensive to star in a movie in which his face wouldn't be shown. They tried to work around that by animating a fish with a photorealistic rendering of Carrey's face using motion capture technology. The results were terrifying, much worse than the drawing shown here. The movie was in development for around 18 years, but the core problem was never really solved, so the project ran out of steam and was abandoned. Read about the remake of The Incredible Mr. Limpet, and see the test footage of the fish with Carrey's face at Cracked. 

Middle Ground Lighthouse lies off of Newport News in Chesapeake Bay. Though built in 1891, it remains in nightly operation. Northern Virginia magazine reports that it's also been renovated and is available for sale as a functional house.

Joe Negri had been a child prodigy as a musician and was a local star in Pittsburgh when Fred Rogers hired him to star as a recurring character on his iconic children's television show. As Handyman Negri, this musician interacted with puppets in The Land of Make-Believe and operated a music shop in Fred Rogers's* fictional neighborhood.

Joe Negri died on Saturday just a few days of his one hundredth birthday.

You can read more about Negri's work on television in The Good Neighboor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers--a biography that I have read and enthusiastically recommend.

*"Rogers" is a singular noun and thus an "s" is necessary to indicate possession, but Fred Rogers did not follow that rule when titling his show, hence the spelling in the post title.

Images: PBS, Fred Rogers Institute

What's the difference between salami and pepperoni? That's easy- salami is for sandwiches, along with cheese and mustard, on rye bread. Pepperoni is for pizzas. Although my dad used to put salami and cheese on a single slice of bread, top it with ketchup, salt, and pepper and put it in the toaster oven. He called it "pizza toast." At that age and era, the only pizza I'd ever had came from a Chef Boyardee kit, so I accepted it. 

Getting down to brass tacks, salami and pepperoni are both spicy sausages, but that's where the resemblance ends. One has a history that goes back to the Roman Empire, while the other is a 20th century American invention! They are made differently, have different ingredients, and have their own best uses, as I explained above. The YouTube channel Simple Things - Surprising Histories explains it all, plus an important tip for ordering a pizza in Italy.  -via Laughing Squid 

Global trade really opened up during the Age of Exploration, but it was an awfully long journey between oceans when you had to sail around the southern tips of Africa or South America and your trading partners were in the Northern Hemisphere. It would be a far shorter trip through the Arctic Ocean, but how? The fabled Northwest Passage was filled with icebergs and unmapped islands and the sea was frozen most of the year anyway. But intrepid explorers spent 300 years looking for that route, with expedition after expedition turning back or becoming stranded. Many died in the search. 

The first to successfully find a way around northern Canada and map the Northwest Passage was Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, better known as the first man to reach the South Pole. He accomplished this by using a much smaller ship and crew than previous expeditions. The tiny Gjøa was a 30-year-old fishing boat that was only 70 feet long. Amundsen selected only six men for his crew. The expedition set off from Norway in 1903. The ship was indeed icebound twice on the journey, once for almost two years, but the intact ship and crew reached Nome, Alaska, in 1906 and eventually continued on to San Francisco. Read how the Gjøa and crew survived and claimed a new trade route at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: Michael Spiller) 

It's a good day when Bill McClintock comes out with a new music mashup. It's a great day when he mashes up two songs that are this familiar to me, like two old friends that I never knew were friends with each other. Here we have Queen's "We Will Rock You" mixed with "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath. This required some messing with the tempo, but if anyone can make it work, it's McClintock (previously at Neatorama). He calls this song "Rockanoid." 

Oh, but that's just the beginning. There are nine, count 'em, nine other rock-themed songs included in this mashup: "Sad But True" by Metallica, "Rock of Ages" from Def Leppard, "We Rock" by Dio, both "Let There Be Rock" and "For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)" by AC/DC, "Rock Hard Ride Free" from Judas Priest, "Rock 'n' Roll Rebel" by Ozzy Osbourne, Pat Benetar's "Heartbreaker," and "Rock You" by Helix. Good luck identifying them all in this fast-moving video. The only real drawback I find is that it should be much longer.