Believe it or not, Cabbage Patch Kids, the dolls that took the world by storm when they became the Christmas gift of 1983, are still a thing. One of their draws is that these dolls have a magical backstory. Each one is "born" at Babyland General Hospital, and the owner "adopts" the doll, with certificates and everything. Furthermore, Babyland General Hospital is a real place, and you can visit it in Cleveland, Georgia. Take a tour, visit the gift shop, and if you have the bucks, you can buy a doll that you can witness being born. If you don't have the bucks, you can watch someone else's doll being born.

The dolls are born from Mother Cabbage with the help of a costumed nurse who engages the crowd to help her through her labor pains. It's not clear whether Mother cabbage is a tree, a mound, or something hidden behind those things, but the ritual is the ultimate in kitsch, meant to engage a five-year-old but still a little beyond their understanding. Joshua Rigsby took his family to Babyland General Hospital and got to witness the birth of a Cabbage Patch Kid. His description of the bizarre ritual at Thrillist will make you want to visit just for the giggles. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Kelly Verdeck)

Every detail of Boba Fett's getup is perfect as he sets out on his adventure. Everyone knows who he is supposed to be, but once he makes it to a galaxy far, far away, he kind of blends in a little too well. There are Wookiees and Cereans and Biths and Jawas everywhere. Where are all his Mandalorian friends?  

This is an ad for Apple's new app called Precision Finding, available for iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro. I don't know anyone who has a 15, or can afford one, but the skit is pretty cool. The music will be stuck in my head for a while. May the fourth be with you. -via Boing Boing

The monument you see above is in the Kensal Green cemetery in London. This is the grave of George Hill, who died in 1864. It has a lot of text carved into it, which was all about his job with the Colonial Civil Service in India. Apparently he was a highly-regarded employee, but rarely do you see much about one's occupation on a tombstone. Was this a case of a man who had no family? They are not mentioned on the monument, but he had plenty of family. George Hill had two wives and had sired 13 children, eight of whom survived to adulthood.

The tale of his first wife was tragic, and after her death, Hill married a woman half his age who had a child, although the circumstances of her first marriage were suspicious. The second marriage was salaciously eventful, and may be the reason all the room on his gravestone was taken up with the boasting of a successful career. Every life has a story, even if that person doesn't want it to be remembered. Read the real story behind the much-admired civil servant George Hill at The London Dead.  -via Strange Company

Today I learned that the US Navy traditionally allows the infant children of crew members to be baptized in the upturned ship's bell. A 2021 Navy press release about such a baptism onboard the USS Kearsarge says that this tradition was borrowed from the Royal Navy which permitted the such rites in foreign ports either in or under the bell.

A webpage created the National Bell Festival, a non-profit organization that supports the restoration of historic bells, says that the practice is also followed by the US Coast Guard, the Royal Australian Navy, and the Royal Canadian Navy.

This video from 2017 shows a baptism performed in the bell of the USS Gerald R. Ford.

Photo: US Naval Institute

Neatoramanauts are a particularly well-read bunch, so it stands to reason that you've read a lot of banned books. That means books that were banned or challenged by someone, somewhere, at some time, for some reason. The reasons for challenging a book vary widely, and whether you agree that the books should be restricted or not, some justifications are rather weird. Heaven forbid that adolescents should be exposed to the concept of menstruation! My parents never objected to any book I could get my hands on, and it turned out that the only ones that disturbed me were history books.  

Any type of book ban can entice readers and make a book a bestseller. But books that may be unavailable to some readers are catnip to movie producers, because the cinematic version will draw readers and non-readers alike. Weird History goes through the stories of 13 challenged books that ended up as movies. The vast majority of those movies were critically acclaimed or blockbusters or both.  

Orangutan seen treating wound with medicinal herb in first for wild animals https://t.co/lb4O2D3Sl3

— The Guardian (@guardian) May 2, 2024

A group of scientists studying orangutans in Indonesia have observed an orangutan treating his own facial wound with a the leaves of an Akar Palo vine (Fibraurea tinctoria), which is known to have "antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, anti-fungal, antioxidant, pain-killing and anticarcinogenic properties," and is used in traditional medicine. The Sumatran orangutan named Rakus was observed with a fresh facial wound below his eye, possibly from an encounter with another orangutan. Later, he was seen chewing the leaves of the vine and dabbing the juice on his wound. He finished up by sticking the chewed leaves on the wound. Five days later, the researchers saw that the wound had closed up.

This is the first time a wild animal has been seen using a known medicinal plant to treat a wound. Read about Rakus and his feat and what it could mean to the history of medicine at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

The Duke of Richmond would be the first to die trying to build the Rideau Canal, but he would be far from the last.

Canadians used the St. Lawrence River for shipping and traveling, but that river is also their border with the USA. After the War of 1812, our neighbors to the north decided they needed a safer, internal waterway that steered clear of the US. The Rideau Canal was an engineering marvel, 200 kilometers long, built by hand in less than six years, but the cost was high. The Duke of Richmond died of rabies, and a thousand of the workers who built the canal were killed by accidents and disease. The canal as a shipping lane was replaced by rail and road, but is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It also left a living legacy in the form of a rather important city.

This video ends at 8:30, followed by promotional material, then at 10:06 there's a bonus story told over the credits that is well worth the time. -via Digg

パッカーン！でも、ドレスドでもない
ちょっと変わった卵の包み方🍳

【無慈悲】生まれたてのひよこオムライス🐣 pic.twitter.com/t2MBs6u1qU

— テイストメイド ジャパン (@Tastemade_japan) April 24, 2024

Twitter* user @Tastemade_japan shows this clever omurice dish that begins with rice balls decorated to resemble chicks, then fried into a gentle nest made of the flesh of their lost siblings. Next, it is devoured whole by feckless gods who laugh at the terror of the birds. The rice birds realize all too late that the only purpose of their existence was to be consumed.

-via The Best

*None of this "X" nonsense. If the name "Twitter" was good enough for our forefathers, it's good enough for ourselves and our posterity.

In the 1940s, Lali Sokolov met Gita Furman when he tattooed her arm at Auschwitz. The two fell in love, and after liberation, they moved to Australia where they spent the rest of their lives together. Furman didn't want to talk about the Holocaust, so Sokolov didn't, either. After Gita's death in 2003, he told his story to Heather Morris, a non-Jew from New Zealand who didn't know much about the Holocaust. Morris spent three years hearing Sokolov's recollections, and then another ten years trying to option the story as a play. Then she made it into a novel instead. The Tattooist of Auschwitz became a worldwide best seller in 2018.

Although classified as fiction, the book was based on Sokolov's story. Historians from the Shoah Foundation and the the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center, among others, found numerous historical inconsistencies and errors in the account of the tattooist. The story was like a game of telephone, passed from the subject 50 years after the fact, to a young writer with little historical background and no corroboration from Furman. Sokolov died years before the book was published. However, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is far from the only story fictionalized from the Holocaust, and as the generation of survivors disappears, there will only be more.  

The Tattooist of Auschwitz premieres today as a six-episode miniseries on Peacock. The TV adaptation addresses the inconsistencies in Sokolov's story by illustrating how he told it to Morris as an elderly man who suppressed those memories for 50 years. Read up on Sokolov's story, the controversial novel, and the TV series The Tattooist of Auschwitz at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: Martin Mlaka/Sky UK)

It's always fun to see how other countries title American movies. They can be literal translations, but often the marketing team wants to convey what the movie is about, and Hollywood titles often don't do that. So a new title is created to work in whatever country the movie is shown in.

The Norwegians learned a shortcut. For almost a hundred years, American comedies were retitled with the word Help! plus whatever the movie was about. They didn't have to do that with the Beatles' movie Help! The titles became a kind of shorthand to let the viewer know this is an American comedy with just one word. YouTuber SindrElf shows us how many Hollywood comedies got the Norwegian title treatment, which will have you giggling like a little kid eventually. You can read more about the titling trick at Mental Floss. Sadly, they don't do this anymore because almost all Norwegians read enough English to keep the American titles.  

Fingerprints have been used to identify people since at least 220 BC -in China. They weren't used for solving crimes, but for signing documents (and they still do that). The Western world was slow to pick up the importance of fingerprints, but by the late 19th century, the idea of keeping track of criminals by their fingerprints led to printing arrestees for their records, and the concept of finding a perpetrator by fingerprint evidence was beginning to take off.

On June 29, 1892, two children in Necochea, Argentina, were murdered. Their mother, Francesca Rojas, was injured and identified the murderer as her neighbor Ramón Velázquez. Velázquez was arrested, grilled, and reportedly even tortured, but refused to confess to the crime. What's more, he had an alibi.

Then investigators found a fingerprint in blood on a doorway at the crime scene. They had the fingerprint removed by cutting the piece of wood from the doorway. Read how the first murder case was solved by fingerprint evidence, and how that case changed forensics around the world at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: National Library of Medicine)

Dudes playing fruit machine on king's day
byu/Bridimum infunny

Pay your euro and pull the lever! This human slot machine was set up during the Koningsdag (King's Day) celebrations last weekend in the Netherlands. The holiday is observed every April 27th for the king's birthday. Slot machines are called fruit machines in parts of Europe.

It takes a while for the slots to start spinning as the guys say their arms are tired, but they still have their sense of humor. The beer certainly helps. You can tell that most of their patter is jokes, even if you don't understand Dutch. The language has been described as the uncanny valley of languages, halfway between English and German, so both English and German speakers feel they should understand it, but don't, and the effect is that these guys are very talented at speaking gibberish. Is it rigged? That's beside the point, as even a losing player gets a piece of candy.  -via reddit

File this under "things I assumed everyone knew but of course they don't," which becomes more of a thing the older you get. Some songs don't really have an ending, they just fade out while the artist repeats the chorus. I did not know that the fade out ending is rarely used these days. Taylor Swift's new album The Tortured Poets Department uses this technique, and some Swifties think it's a new thing. It used to be very common.

The fade out was not because the musicians didn't know how to end a song. They certainly do, as they make most of their money from live performances. In its heyday, the fade out was used for singles only; songs on an album rarely faded out before The Tortured Poets Department. However, the fade out has been performed live, in several instances before the advent of recorded music. Read about these historic performances and the modern use of the fade out at Mental Floss.

The post-apocalyptic Amazon Prime Video television series Fallout is based on the world of the video game series. It's become quite a hit among viewers, even those who've never heard of the video games. Now that the first season has wrapped up, Screen Junkies goes through it to give us their opinion. They give the premise in the video, but it's kind of like The Time Machine without the time travel. A lot of time has passed, which divided mankind in ways they will find hard to bridge. Their opinion? It seems Screen Junkies likes Fallout a lot. You can't point out a lot of tropes and errors when the whole story is so insane that we haven't seen anything like it before. Sure, they poke a little fun, but if this Honest Trailer were a review of a bad TV series, it would be way more scathing. It appears that Fallout is a shoe-in for renewal.

Let's all raise a glass and toast to Star Wars Day coming up this Saturday! Raise a glass of what? Blue milk, of course. The drink that made young Luke Skywalker grow up big and strong (well, at least strong) is now available at grocery stores for a limited time from the Dairy Farmers of America TruMoo. Star Wars milk contains sugar and vanilla flavor, and Nerdist says it's really good, "like a very delicate melted vanilla ice cream." TruMoo even offers Star Wars recipes to make from or serve with the milk. It's just the thing to take the edge off after you've tried Dark Side Hot Sauce.

While Star Wars milk will only be in stores until it runs out (and you may have to search for an outlet), blue milk has been served for quite some time at Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge in Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, where it is a permanent menu item.  -via Boing Boing