The Notorious History of North Brother Island

There are a lot of islands in the Atlantic Ocean around New York City and many are a part of the city. You know about Ellis Island, and Rikers Island, and Hart Island is known as the city's Potter's Field. There's also North Brother Island, which is notorious for several reasons. Its history is filled with misery, calamity, disease, and crime. Is North Brother Island cursed? Or could it be haunted? At any rate, no one lives there now, and it is considered abandoned. Finding a purpose for the island is difficult considering how close it is to the penal colony of Rikers Island. A wildlife refuge seems to be the best use for a place that no one really wants to occupy, and nature is working to reclaim what humans have done to it. Weird History takes us through some of the more notable eras, events, and personalities of North Brother Island. We'll also learn some facts about South Brother Island and Rikers Island as well.


Play the Morbid Game When They Died

You know the lives of celebrities. You know when their movies came out, when they peaked in the music business, or when they served in office. But do you remember what year they died? That's a tough one, even for history buffs. When I played my first game of When They Died, I could recall learning about each celebrity's death, but I couldn't place the year. I was close but missed the mark for each of them.

For each famous person presented, you move a slider to guess what year they died. They all died between 1950 and today, and there are five people in each game. A perfect guess will get you 1000 points, and getting within 15 years will give you some points. I ended up with 3732 in my first game, and unlocked a few "achievements" at the end. One of them was called Speed Demon, because I gave answers in a hurry so I could decide whether this game was worth sharing. Try it yourself, and let me know if I was right.  -via Nag on the Lake


Mother Hen Hatched a Peafowl and Rose to the Challenge

Do you recall the story of The Ugly Duckling? Or the cartoon character Baby Huey? The story of Peawee reminds me of both. Peawee started out as an abandoned peafowl egg, which the farm family snuck into Susan's nest. Susan is a regular hen, and she's kind of a bird brain, but she has a motherly instinct that just won't quit. Susan fiercely protected the odd-looking youngster she hatched, and did her motherly duty in teaching Peawee how to be a chicken. The chick grew quickly and was soon much bigger than Susan. Peawee learned to be a typical chicken except for her size and the fact that she is very attached to her mother at an age when most chicks have moved out on their own. Susan doesn't mind, though, as she is quite attached to her giant baby, too.

You can see more of Susan and Peawee at Instagram. Adaurie Stemshorn wrote a children's book about Peawee that will eventually be available.


Bring Your Own Bucket Day Brought Out the Creative Gourmands

In order to get people back in the habit of going to movie theaters, the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO, no kidding) has several promotions planned for 2025. The first was Bring Your Own Bucket Day, meaning popcorn bucket. You could fill your own container with popcorn for just $5, as long as the container would fit through the theater door and would not block anyone from seeing the movie. It was a win-win promotion, since you could fill a bathtub with movie popcorn and that $5 would still be almost all profit.

People showed up with an outrageous range of containers. Several people came into Cinemark theaters with stock pots or actual five-gallon buckets. A backpack or a pair of jeans will hold a lot of popcorn, but do you really want to eat out of them? One guy wheeled in a piece of furniture- a nightstand, to hold a movie's worth of popcorn. Read about Bring Your Own Bucket Day and see the clever containers people brought in at Foodbeast.


Why Volkswagen Makes Ketchup

Volkswagen is most well known for manufacturing cars. But part number 00010 ZDK-259-101 is a bottle of ketchup. For a brief time, during last fall, this part was available to American customers.

The Takeout informs us that Volkwsagen has made its own ketchup for the past 30 years. The ketchup is made to go with Volkswagen-brand currywurst, which is identified by part number 199 398 500 A. The company made the currywurst starting in 1973 to serve to factory workers and then the ketchup in 1996 to season the sausage. The combination is popular enough that the firm is willing to occasionally offer it to non-employees.

Photo: Volkswagen


A Mini-Home for Different-Sized Pets

Over the past year or so, you may have encountered a video on social media about a strangely accurate apartment that was sized for dogs, but also became smaller for cats, and then increasingly smaller for other animals. I saw it with no narration and no attribution, but now I know who did this. This mini-home is by YouTuber Xing's World, or more specifically, Xing Zhilei, an engineer in Zhongyuan, China. He loves building things, and he made a miniature home as a playhouse for his young children. Then he took things a step further and built one for the family's various pets. You have to be impressed with the architecture, the furnishings, and the appliances -some that work! But more than anything, I had to wonder how he took us on a tour into smaller and smaller spaces. Not too long ago, Xing posted a behind-the scenes look at how he built this unique world.

You can see more videos of Xing's miniatures at YouTube. -via Boing Boing


Beavers Take 2 Days to Build Dam Government Had Planned for 7 Years

Government bureaucracies are stereotypically wasteful of both time and money. The Dodo reports that a community of beavers in the Czech Republic apparently became frustrated with governmental delays in the construction of a dam the Brdy wetland region and built one themselves.

The government had planned for seven years to build the dam which advocates hope would restore the damaged wetland. But after seven years and the equivalent of $1.2 million spent, there was still no dam. Then officials found that, in just mere days, local beavers had erected dams in the spots tentatively selected by the humans.

-via Oddity Central | Photo: Klaudiusz Muchowski


Japanese Government Promotes Wearable Futon

Spoon & Tamago, a design blog that informs English-speaking audiences about design developments in Japan, introduces us to the ZZZN Sleep Apparel System. Yes, it's a futon that you wear. But it's even more than just the fabric and stuffing.

The coat/bed electronically monitors the user's sleep state and has a built-in hood with noise-cancelling earphones. The design goal is to promote polyphasic sleep, which is a sleeping pattern in which a person occasionally naps throughout the day. The ZZZN Sleep Apparel System is thus optimal for taking an immediate nap anytime, anywhere.

The Japanese government is promoting the device in response to a study which reveals that the Japanese get the least amount of sleep among all nations in the 38-member Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD).


Artifacts from a Jewish Roman Settlement in Tucson, Arizona ...or Maybe Not

In 1924, Charles Minear and his family recovered a lead cross from a layer of caliche that had been exposed by mining. The cross turned out to be two crosses stuck together, and when they were separated, there was a Latin inscription inside! Manier and his friend Thomas Bent returned to the site ready to dig for more artifacts. Together, they found eight crosses, nine swords, 13 spears, one fan, and one tablet, all but the tablet made of lead and containing more Latin inscriptions and some in Hebrew. The men were convinced that this was proof of a Roman settlement in the US long before Columbus. The inscriptions led them to believe this would have been between 775 and 900 AD.

But there were some fishy things about the discovery. The artifacts were recovered in an evenly-spread area, and from different depths in the caliche. No other artifacts were recovered from the site, no pottery, no trash, no evidence of architecture. The dates assigned to the artifacts came from the Latin inscriptions, which were surprisingly helpful, written as if the items they graced were manufactured as souvenirs. And the lead alloy they were made of was suspiciously modern. But the real kicker is the sword with a carving of a brontosaurus on it! The Tucson artifacts are generally regarded as a hoax these days, but no one has ever owned up to it. Read the story of the medieval artifacts found in Tucson, Arizona, at Archaeology Review. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Erin, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)


The Argonaut is the Weirdest Octopus Yet

An argonaut is also known as a paper nautilus. It's a cephalopod, but it's not a nautilus. Nor is it a squid or cuttlefish, but it has a shell. Argonauts are octopuses with shells. And in case you are wondering, the genus Argonauta was named after crew of the mythical Greek ship. Aristotle, Jules Verne, and others have written about these creatures using their shells like a boat to sail across the sea and their tentacles as sails to catch the wind. That's a myth, but the truth about argonauts is even weirder.

The shells they make are not related at all to other cephalopod shells. The argonauts paper-like shells were developed independently after shell-less cephalopods evolved. But are these shells egg cases, helmets, or flotation devices? The argonauts scoop air into them to make themselves buoyant, which lends some credence to Aristotle's assertions, just with different anatomy. So far, the argonauts are strange even among octopuses, but wait until you hear about their bizarre sex lives. The video is less than ten minutes long, the last part is an ad. -via Laughing Squid


Actor Performs Dramatic Interpretations of Famous Song Lyrics

James McNicholas is an accomplished professional actor who is in high demand on television productions. He's getting a lot of social media acclaim for doing emotionally heavy interpretations of song lyrics, often as older or broken men. In the above video, he reflects upon Taylor Swift's "Anti-Hero."

Continue reading

A Surprisingly Accurate Feature of the Star Wars Stories

If any storytelling device works in the Star Wars universe, you know it will come up again. The Death Star from 1977 was rebuilt in 1983 for Return of the Jedi. Then it came back again in 2015 for The Force Awakens. But a concept that appears even more often is the missing planet. Planets don't really go missing, but the maps that guide us to them tend to fail a lot in Star Wars. Obi-Wan found Kamino missing from the archives in Attack of the Clones. No one knew where Luke Skywalker was in The Force Awakens because a piece of the galactic map was missing. Missing mystery maps came up again in The Rise of Skywalker, Ahsoka, and Skeleton Crew.    

But while Star Wars fans sigh and lament that the same plot device gets used too often, astronomers here on earth tell us that it happens all the time. Maps have gaps, and planets go missing frequently. How does that happen? In Star Wars, it's often deliberate, when someone does not want to be found. Find out why it happens in real life from those who try to map the stars, at Inverse.


Some Unwritten Rules For Being American

It's always interesting to find out what the rest of the world thinks of your culture. Laurence Brown has been pointing out the differences between Britain, where he grew up, and his adopted country, the USA, in his Lost in the Pond series. Over the years, as Brown has settled in and become an American citizen, his video subjects have become less British and more centered on America. In this video, he focuses on the things that make Americans stand out. We tend to be friendlier than most folks, believe it or not. We'll wave to strangers, greet strangers, and even hold a conversation with strangers. We smile at strangers, too, or maybe we're just showing off our teeth. Anyway, this gregariousness makes people from other countries wonder whether we are trying to take advantage of them or we're just nuts. There are other ways Americans are different that he'll point out for us. The video also features several sequences of Laurence doing his American accent while dressed as a Canadian. Or maybe he's going for an upper-Midwestern look. Be on the alert for a 70-second ad at 3:12.


Eye-Tracking Software Measures How People Look at Female Buttocks

Ladies' posteriors can be quite interesting to observe. The great Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as evidenced above, made a careful study of them throughout his long artistic career.

But, unlike Renoir, we now live in an age of scientific wonders that permits us to ponder rear ends with greater precision. When men thoughtfully observe a shapely posterior, where are they looking?

This is of casual interest to us laypeople, but of professional interest to plastic surgeons when they are tasked with sculpting perfection from the clay of the human body. A journal article in Aesthetic Plastic Surgery found that men most often look at the gluteal cleft and then the thigh gap. The women who participated in the study also focused on those two areas.

But, the eye tracking technology revealed, the male participants tended to hold their gaze for longer periods of time than the female participants did.

-via Dave Barry | Image: Reclining Nude by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, photo by Pharos

Previously on Neatorama: Study Finds the Ideal Shape for Male Buttocks


State Senator Wants to Make It Legal to Eat Beaver

Eating beaver used to be legal in Minnesota--as well as a popular activity. But, KSMP News reports, that changed last year due to a law addressing the hunting and trapping of beavers. These are regarded as nuisance animals, but the law accidentally made eating beaver meat illegal.

State Senator Steve Green wants to fix this legislative error so that people can get back to the joys of eating beaver. It apparently tastes like beef, but Senator Justin Eichorn prefers to refer to the dish as "nature's chicken nuggets." Their colleagues in the Senate have introduced a bill to re-legalize beaver eating.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Andrew Patrick


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