The anticipated Fashion-Fungus crossover of 2024 has arrived, whilst the celebs were serving high fashion, we are serving high diversity; we’re giving you Ascos, Basidios, Myxos and more.
Brace yourself for myco-magnificence! #MetGala2024

First up Zendaya as Microglossum viride pic.twitter.com/q8UYLAcXja

— Kew Mycology (@KewMycology) May 7, 2024

The Met Gala last week was an extraordinary fashion exhibition in which all of your favorite celebrities came dressed in their most extraordinary custom outfits, all of which were apparently inspired by each model's favorite fungus.

The Kew Royal Botanic Gardens in London maintains a Twitter account devoted to informing the public about mycology, which is the study of fungi. In a recent thread, it provided a detailed exploration of the mycological origins of the fashions at the gala.

-via Marilyn Terrell

Etienne Constable, a resident of Seaside, California, owns a boat. He parks it in his driveway. This resulting view was apparently unacceptable to the city government, which required him to screen the unsightly boat with a fence.

KSBW-8 News reports that Constable creatively obeyed the edict. He erected the fence and then commissioned artist Hanif Wondir to paint a realistic image of the boat on the fence now blocking the view of the boat. Constable says that the city has yet to respond to his malicious compliance with its rule.

Here's a time-lapse video of Wondir composing the mural.

-via Mary Katherine Ham

Hi I’m Megan and this is Reverse William Tell pic.twitter.com/xZN1ln8x78

— meg “Yooper” bitchell (@MeganBitchell) May 7, 2024

The Swiss folk hero William Tell allegedly was forced by Austrian overlords to shoot an apple off the top of his own son's head. That's quite dangerous for the target, so New York City-based actress and comedian Megan Bitchell proposes an inversion of the game: impaling an apple on an arrow mounted on top of her head.

Cicadas are active again. Like humans, they emerge from their underground burrows once every seventeen years to grow, shed their exoskeletons, and mate. You can see the similarities we share with this species in this video produced by the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County, Illinois. The employees re-enacted the life-cycle of the humble cicada.

The video production quality is remarkably good for a government institution and the mating scene tastefully expressed. I especially appreciate the entomological pick-up line that the male cicada uses on the female and plan to use it myself later today. After all, it clearly works.

-via Nag on the Lake

The term "wampus cat" can mean anything and everything, but the name was associated with real sightings, animal deaths, and hysteria in the early 20th century. In Quitman, Mississippi, a wampus cat was blamed for the deaths of 102 dogs, whose flesh was stripped from their skeletons. A wampus cat was captured in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, in 1914, and was described as having black fur with white spots, claws on its front feet and hooves in the back, and a nine-foot tail. It escaped after three days. A full-on war with a suspected wampus cat was declared in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1918 after the mysterious deaths of dogs, chickens, and a mule. The cat was seen, described as jumping 12 feet into the air, but was never caught.

These attacks may have come from cougars, which were already rare in the South by 1900. We don't believe it was a six-legged cat as shown in the photo above. But the fear was real during these episodes and left a legend behind. Read about the notorious wampus cat at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: U458625)

Thursday night was commencement for the Thomas Jefferson University School of Nursing in Philadelphia. As is custom, each student's name was announced as they received their diploma, and the on-screen captions soon followed. This quickly became a game for the viewers to try and guess what the name really was from the announcer's pronunciation. The carnage included a mangling of common names like Stephanie, Molly, and Elizabeth. The real kicker was the name Thomas, considering the name of the university.

The announcer was using cards with the phonetic spelling of the names, which should have included the normal spelling as well but apparently did not. After the first three rows of students, she apologized and her cards were replaced with a list of names, and the rest of the graduates had their names pronounced correctly. The university has issued an apology, but the viral moment will live on forever. -via reddit   

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is all about history. Many families take a trip there as their children begin to study the American Civil War, so they can experience the actual battlefield and visit the many museums dedicated to the Battle of Gettysburg and the larger history of the war. One that may be especially interesting for children is Civil War Tails at the Homestead Diorama Museum. This museum features expansive dioramas that illustrate the military engagements of the war, with a twist. All the tiny soldiers are cats! Look closely, and you'll see ears and tails on all the figures.

Civil War Tails is a project by twin sisters Rebecca and Ruth Brown who are fascinated with Civil War history and have been making clay cat soldiers to scale since they were children. Rebecca bought the Homestead Museum in 2013 as a place to display their battle cat dioramas. They are very serious about conveying the importance of the war, but think making the combatants into cats is a way to make the subject more engaging. Besides, making a cat is easier than crafting a human figure. They have recently unveiled their 10,000th cat figure! See more pictures of Civil War Tails at Facebook.  -Thanks, William!

(Image credit: Civil War Tails at the Homestead)

This is what can happen when you live on the internet. Not just that an internet outage will destroy your whole day, but how this guy got into the shape he's in. He's apparently been researching internet conspiracy theories, down the rabbit hole into a world of paranoia and altered perception. Okay, an internet outage requires a call to the service provider, miraculously resulting in a service call, which is suspicious enough in this day and age. But you get the feeling that this may be the first actual live person he's talked to in weeks. You can also believe that it's probably been that long since he took a shower or walked outside. This guy has his problems, and the further we go into the scene, the worse those problem prove to be. Don't let this happen to you!

Steakhouse, directed by Ft. Langley, is described as a "sci-fi comedy," although I would classify it as a short horror film. -via Nag on the Lake

The US Constitution is the framework for how the American government works. It's been that way for more than 200 years, so it's hard to imagine how the system could be any other way. But when that framework was hammered out at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, there was no blueprint for a nation to govern itself. A number of ideas were proposed by our Founding Fathers that didn't make it into the Constitution or any of its Amendments. Some representatives were wary of the idea of a president, because one man leading the country sounded too much like a king. Alternative ideas included having three presidents at once, or a council of 12 with equal powers. They also toyed with the idea of having no states at all, or else treating the states like lesser entities, for which the federal government would appoint governors. And the very first proposed Amendment would have set a constant number of constituents for each congressional representative. If it had been adopted, we would now have a House of Representatives with 6600 members! Read about the ideas that were floated for our Constitution that never made it into the final version at Mental Floss.  

(Image credit: Junius Brutus Stearns)

Randall Munroe of xkcd spends an awful lot of time and brain power answering theoretical questions in his What If? series (previously at Neatorama). For example, one question is "If every country's airspace extended up forever, which country would own the largest percentage of the galaxy at any given time?" The answer is Australia, not because it's the largest country (it is 6th), but because it's the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, which tends to point more to the center of the Milky Way.

Dumb questions can lead to a lot of learning. In the video above, the question is "If all the lightning strikes happening in the world on any given day all happened in the same place at once, what would happen to that place?" My first thought was that everyone would avoid that place, and that is certainly one of the consequences. But to understand the implications, we must first learn a few things about lightning, which is well worth the time it takes for Munroe to get to the actual question in this video. Spoiler alert: if it happened, it would look awesome. From a distance.

An extremely rare chunk of Tyrian purple dye has been found in England, in the archaeological dig on the grounds of the Carlisle Cricket Club. The dye was found in the drainage area of the remnants of a Roman bathhouse dating back to the third century CE, during the reign of Roman emperor Septimius Severus. It is a rare find because Tyrian purple, also called imperial purple, was such an expensive dye that it was restricted to royalty, and someone lost it in the bathhouse drain. You can imagine the uproar that must have caused. It is also rare to find Tyrian purple in a solid form, as it was used mostly for paint and for dying fabric. Also, the specimen is still quite colorful after 1800 years!  

Tyrian purple was so expensive in its day because it was made from the glands of murex snails, the most productive being the species Hexaplex trunculus. It took about a quarter million snails to produce one ounce of dye. These sea snails live in shallow water and die when exposed to air. Yet the dye gland can only be extracted from a living snail (which causes its death), or the dye will deteriorate immediately, so each snail must be kept alive until the glands can be harvested, one by one. The process for doing all this is explained in this post. The smell of the dye was remarkably bad, as you would imagine the smell of rotting sea creatures to be, and would not yield to washing the fabric. Emperors who wore Tyrian purple had to be heavily perfumed to disguise it.

The name Tyrian purple came from the Phoenician city of Tyre, which, along with the city of Sidon, was a center of the dying industry. In fact, the word Phoenicia came from the Greek word Phoinkes, which means "the purple people." Both cities were wealthy from Tyrian purple, and both cities were known to smell awful. There is no mention of whether the chunk recovered in England still smells. You'll find even more links about Tyrian purple at Metafilter.     

(Image credit: Wardell Armstrong)

Sweden has the odd PhD tradition of Lutherishly nailing your thesis to a wall a few weeks before your defense, so here is my PhD student Vidya Somashekarappa nailing her thesis into the designated thesis nailing wall (officially required btw). pic.twitter.com/2s8DiwCy1l

— Asad Sayeed @asayeed@zirk.us (@asayeed) April 3, 2024

Sweden is historically a Lutheran nation, so the tradition of nailing statements to buildings is strong. At Umeå University, when doctoral students complete their theses, they nail a copy to the wall of the library in a ceremony called spikning or "thesis spiking." The library's website says that this procedure "is no longer mandatory," implying that, at some point, it was a formal requirement. Still, many students choose to participate in this ritual.

Yesterday I drove through Atlanta as the construction season is starting to ramp up, so I am very impressed with this pavement replacement project in Switzerland. They simply erect a bridge over a section of the road so that cars can drive right across while work is going on underneath! The crew carves up the old pavement, repairs and prepares the sub-pavement, lays new asphalt, steamrolls it smooth, and cleans up the mess, before moving the bridge to a new repair section. Here's a machine translation of the YouTube description:

The mobile ASTRA Bridge construction site bridge has been in use again on the A1 in the direction of Zurich since the beginning of April 2024. The decking work under the ASTRA Bridge is progressing according to plan. While work is going on under the bridge, traffic above is moving in two lanes at 60 km/h.

You have to wonder how long it takes to move the bridge, because they probably do have to divert traffic for that part- or do they? Here's another video from the Swiss Federal Roads Office showing how the ASTRA Bridge is erected.



So yes, they close lanes to put the bridge up, but even so, it is a minimal closure compared to the weeks that lanes are closed in the US while miles of highway are repaved at a time.  -via Boing Boing

We tend to take it for granted that blue jeans were invented by Levi Strauss, who made work pants for the miners of the California Gold Rush. It's true that Strauss designed tough work pants with rivets, but the blue denim they were made of had already been worn by working class people in Italy for at least a couple of hundred years! We know this because of ten paintings by an unidentified Renaissance painter known only as the “Master of the Blue Jeans.” This painter depicted a family of working class people clad in denim, with a white weft and blue warp, the same as the jeans we wear today. The warp threads were dyed with indigo, which brought the price of blue fabric down considerably after it began to be imported from India.

The Master of the Blue Jeans is the subject of a new exhibition at Galerie Cenesso in Paris opening May 16. Read up on the history of blue denim and see two of the paintings from the mysterious Master of the Blue Jeans at Smithsonian.

(Image source: Galerie Canesso)

Ontario horse groomer Autumn Purdy plays music while she works in the stable. One quarterhorse mare really likes the music, and will bob her head and dance -but only to heavy metal tunes. She loves music by Rammstein, Motörhead, Of Virtue, Rob Zombie, Pantera, and Korn, but her absolute favorite music is by Slipknot. Purdy did a little music experiment, and the horse just turned her back when hearing country music! She bobbed a little to Tom Jones, but then soon lost interest. We don't know the horse's real name, but she's become famous as Rock Horse. Some of the bands have actually sent Purdy new songs for the horse to check out and give her opinion. You can see more of her head-banging joy at TikTok. -via Laughing Squid