Black Annis is an English witch who supposedly ate children, which is always a good story to keep your kids from wandering in the woods at night. A written account from 300 years ago said she lived in a cave, was raised by wolves, had sharp claws, and wore a skirt made from human skin. We know the specific area the legend came from, but where is the cave? Could the story of Black Annis come from that of a 15th-century nun named Agnes who lived alone outside her convent? A woman hermit was very unusual, but Agnes seems to have been respected and even revered. However, a couple of hundred years separated those stories, and intervening events may have changed the details greatly to fit new religious narratives. There are alternate theories on the origins of the legend, and Dr. Emily Zarka (previously at Neatorama) goes through them to judge their accuracy.  

Annie Rauwerda has made a name for herself by digging for the funnies so you don't have to. She founded Depths of Wikipedia. Along the way, she's collected some wonderful old newspaper headlines. They feature celebrity names, but not the people you connect with those names today. These are other people who had the same names long ago.

 

You'll find a couple dozen such headlines in this Bluesky post. People liked them so much she posted another couple dozen. I was surprised that Taylor Swift died after a long illness, that David Bowie was arrested for car theft, and Dick Nixon won a diving competition. Here's one that's just dripping with irony. Poor Bill!

The modern day celebrities themselves would probably get a kick our of these. It makes you want to dive into newspaper archives and search for your own name, doesn't it? Scroll down in these posts, and you'll see more contributions from commenters as well. -via kottke 

Do you have a friend that you just hate to watch movies with because they are really bad at it? They have such a hard time focusing that you have to stop and explain it to them constantly. Maybe that's because they are on their phone, thinking that they can multitask. Spoiler: you can't multitask two activities that require brain power, much less three. Even if your friend didn't have his phone out, they may have lost the ability to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes at a time. Ryan George has a product for you, and somehow it involves adding a third device to the scenario. But Corn-i doesn't have much patience, either.  

My main experience with this type of annoyance was when my daughters went from animated kids' films to adult movies (shut up, not that kind of adult movies). My patience came from my obligation to teach them how to follow a plot and figure things out, because they were too young to know better. It was hard because those questions would come in theaters, too, when you can't pause the story. They are well-behaved viewers now.

A Court of Thorns and Roses is the first novel of a romantasy novel series of the same name. There are now six books in this series by Sarah J. Maas with a seventh due in January. They are, to put it mildly, popular at my library.

Megan of Forest & Fiction loves books and dressmaking and so made this Halloween costume from pages of the novels. Making book dresses is something Megan does and does very well. She wore it to a party at Beguiled Books, a bookstore in Seattle that specializes in romance.

Design Boom tells us that the Chinese division of McDonald's is offering a computer mouse shaped like a carton of French fries and a paired mouse pad as a promotional item. The company claims that these computer peripherals are made from recycled parts from Happy Meal toys.

Take it to the office. It's not just a toy, but a fully functional Bluetooth-compatible mouse that will remind you to take your lunch break as your fingers lovingly caress the textured plastic.

I still cant believe this is a Houston car dealership ad. https://t.co/t4MsDxDSvK

Is this video real? Yes, it is real. Bayway Kia in Houston is being lowkey about it, but it is listed on their official Instagram page.

What is the blonde anime girl saying? I have watched enough anime to pick up only a few words. Sugoi! It's very kawaii. It makes me want to do a roadtrip just to meet her. Because she's real, right? I mean, in terms of a waifu, one could do worse.

John and Dan Bell--the Bell Brothers--are emerging filmmakers who digitally splice together movies, television, and music to form amusing and terrifying takes on famous stories. For example, imagine Mrs. Doubtfire if Joker was in it or Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds with Big Bird.

Their latest mashup seamlessly blends The Night of the Living Dead and It's a Wonderful Life. In it, George Bailey must contend with his future being torn apart both metaphorically and literally as the dead rise to slaughter the hapless inhabitants of Bedford Falls, New York.

Look at that- that's a Flocken Elektrowagen! It was the first four-wheeled automobile powered by electricity, and it came by its name honestly, because it was developed by German machinist Andreas Flocken. Flocken was not an automotive engineer; he built agricultural motors around the time that electrical power was on the rise. If electricity could power his farm equipment, why not try it in an automobile? 

Flocken wasn't the first to build an electric vehicle, but in the 19th century, experiments with mobile electric motors were constrained by batteries that couldn't be recharged, and a weight limit that gave us contraptions with three wheels that looked more like fancy bicycles. Rechargeable batteries were developed in the 1850s. In 1888, Flocken dedicated part of his company to an electric vehicle, and before the year was out, they introduced the Flocken Elektrowagen. It looked like a car, with a substantial chassis and four wheels. It even had electric lights, which were not at all common at the time. Better yet, it was cooler than steam-powered cars and much quieter than gasoline engines. Read about the Flocken Elektrowagen at Amusing Planet. 

(Image credit: Franz Haag) 

Plants that produce fruit want to be eaten, because that's how they disperse their seeds. Long, long ago, the ancient ancestor of pumpkins evolved to be eaten by megafauna like mastodons. They were too bitter and toxic for creatures like humans. Besides, they had a really hard rind. Only those large animals could open the fruit, tolerate the taste, and properly spread the undigested seeds around with some handy manure for fertilizer.

Then around 12,000 years ago, humans wiped out the mastodons, giant sloths, mammoths, giant bears, and other animals that ate those proto-pumpkins. Those bitter pumpkins weren't appealing to other mammals, so how did they survive to today? They are an evolutionary anachronism, a species that should no longer exist. You might not be surprised to learn that it was because of humans, who do weird things. PBS Eons explains how we got pumpkins even though they should have died out thousands of years ago. That story is only 12 minutes long; the rest is promotional. -via Laughing Squid 

Perhaps you enjoy the classic sketch "Who's on First?" made famous through performances by Louis Costello and Bud Abbott (though Shakespeare's version is funnier.) Perhaps you find it funny.

You are wrong.

Tyler Cowen is an economist who teaches at George Mason University outside of Washington, D.C. He explains, with clear reasoning, why it is not funny. First, it is inherently classist, as it depicts the straight man (Abbott) as representative of the establishment and the buffoon (Costello) as lower-class and ignorant. The names of the players are, furthermore, absurdly unbelievable, as is the Costello's interest in them.

Correct your opinions accordingly.

-via Jarvis Best

You may have heard about the blue blood of a horseshoe crab and its amazing ability to fight infections, but that's just the beginning of how varied blood is in the animal kingdom. Humans, and almost all vertebrates, have red blood because its cells contains hemoglobin, an iron-rich chemical that bonds to oxygen. It's efficient for distributing oxygen to all parts of the body, but other creatures use very different chemicals. 

Some marine animals, such as horseshoe crabs, have blue blood that contains hemocyanin, which is not as efficient as hemoglobin, but deals with cold environments better. Others use hemerythrin to carry blood, and their blood appears purple. Sea creatures have been found with green, orange, or yellow blood, which can be due to chemicals produced by their bodies, or a side effect of the food they eat. Antarctic blackfin icefish have white blood, even though they are vertebrates. We don't know exactly why, but it works for them. Read about different kinds of blood in the animal kingdom and the variety of colors they produce at Knowable magazine. -via Damn Interesting 

(Image credit: Knowable magazine) 

We've done underground nuclear tests, and we've done underwater nuclear tests. We found out that they work, and they did some nasty environmental damage. But what if we were to take those tests to an even deeper, more remote location, like, say, the Mariana Trench? And let's make it a really big bomb, like the Tsar Bomba! That's the question answered in the latest episode of the What If? series (previously at Neatorama) from Randall Monroe and Henry Reich. 

They take these questions seriously, so we find out what would happen. However, the world's largest nuclear bomb turns out to be no match for the deepest part of the ocean. That's not very fun, so our guys came up with a new scenario in which the bomb is equivalent to the Chicxulub impactor (which is fun to Google). That gives us results more in line with what we expect from the What If? series.  

Here's something fun for both movie fans and data nerds. In the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, you try to connect any Hollywood actor to Kevin Bacon by listing the movies that two actors were in together until you reach Kevin Bacon.A data analysis at The Pudding contends that you can actually connect more than 99% of Hollywood actors to Bacon in four movies. You'd have to know a lot about movies to do it. 

But there are actors that would fit this role of "the center of Hollywood" even better. No single actor can reach all of Hollywood in three movies, but quite a few would make it in four.They crunched the numbers to measure what they call "remoteness" to gauge who is the Hollywood actor you can connect the easiest with all other actors. It probably won't surprise you too much when you find out who that is. But they also have a chart where you can slide back in time and find actors from years back to 1980 that appear to be the center of Hollywood. And they explore the data to predict which Gen Z actors may take that crown in the future. -via Nag on the Lake 

It's a lively election season here in Texas. Every vote counts, including those of all registered voters currently off-planet.

Since many astronauts live in the Houston area, the Texas Election Code prudently allows for those who are voters to make their choices on election day. This isn't a form of early voting. Rather, the Secretary of State is responsible for ensuring that, somehow, voters in space can vote on election day.

It's unclear to me how this takes place, but a 2018 article from Houston Public Media indicates that a secure electronic voting method is available and has been used.

-via Alex Wolford | Photo: Shujianyang

Kurzgesagt doesn't usually tell personal stories, but this one is different, and it's full of science anyway. Philipp Dettmer, the founder and head writer of Kurzgesagt, went through chemotherapy treatment for cancer in 2018. Years later, he is ready to tell the story, narrated by Steve Taylor and illustrated in the neon minimalist Kurzgesagt style. The drug is called Cisplatin. Like most chemotherapy drugs, it is very toxic and does quite bit of damage to a human body. Cancer therapies were developed by calibrating how much was required to kill cancer without killing the patient. That's why chemotherapy is so debilitating, and only worth it at the end when you are deemed cancer-free.  

Dettmer explains how Cisplatin was developed and how it works in the body. His body, in this case. It's particularly effective against testicular cancer because of the unique role those organs' cells are designed for. There's a lot of violence at the molecular level, with success at the end. And the cancer battle is directly related to why we have Kurzgesagt in the first place. The story is only 12:24; the rest is promotional.