In an action movie, this simple exchange would be handled by experienced professionals who have no human faults and are confident in their mission. Real life doesn't work like that. We know that any story from Birdbox Studio is going to go completely sideways from what we would normally expect, even though the chosen scenarios are situations that can easily happen in real life. You can see that from the animations we've posted before. In their latest production called The Exchange, we see a suspicious meeting from a distance through binoculars, so we can't know what was said. But we can imagine based on what we see. Still, that inner dialogue changes when the unexpected happens, and that happens over and over in this one. Sure, you will feel sorry for the participants, but you have to keep telling yourself it's just a fictional story. We hope. -via Nag on the Lake

When times are tight and business is bad, people have to get creative just to get by. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, people developed ways to repair, reuse, and stretch what they had to avoid buying new things that they couldn't afford. This affected businesses, which had to look in new directions to stay afloat. Have you ever wondered how cars started offering radios as a standard feature? It wasn't because the public asked for them; it was because people stopped buying radios for their homes. Paul and Joseph Galvin had a radio parts business that suffered from the economic downturn, so Paul decided to concentrate on putting radios in cars. That meant they had to design a radio small and lightweight enough to install in a motor vehicle. A promotional tour was so successful they renamed their business after the car radio, becoming Motorola.

Read that story and those of four other inventions that were born of the deprivations of the Great Depression at History Facts.

(Image credit: Erkaha)

The Spanish band Broken Peach is really into Halloween and music. Two years ago they did a slasher version of "Don't You Want Me," and last year they performed Blondie's "One Way or Another" as skeleton cheerleaders. You can find a playlist of their Halloween songs going back to 2015 when you hit "more" at the YouTube page.

For this year's Halloween special, they are once again in their spooky skeleton getups as they do a rockin' mashup of Blondie's "Call Me" and Kiss's "I Was Made For Lovin' You" that is so seamless that you realize they are basically the same song. Also mixed in is a bit of the song "Joker and the Thief" by Wolfmother. You might watch this video and think there's some stop-motion shenanigans going on, but pay attention to the fog machine effects on the floor. It shows they are just that well-rehearsed in their jerky skeleton dance.

Google Trends has launched their annual Frightgeist site, ranking the top Halloween costumes as determined by web searches. The list of the top 25 costumes overall is dominated by this year's movies, with characters from Inside Out 2 and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice accounting for nine of the costumes. The number one costume is the character shown above -do you know his name? There are several pop culture costumes you might not be familiar with, but an article at Mental Floss might help.

You can also filter the list to show the top costumes for kids, dogs, couples, and costumes done with makeup. There are also lists for the top-searched party themes, holiday decor, and the top Halloween foods. Keep in mind that people will often search for multiple costumes before they decide on one to wear on October 31st, so the list might not accurately reflect what you will see at a Halloween party. But don't be surprised if you open the door and find a whole family of emotions in different colors looking for treats.     

 

The 10th anniversary Quebec Comiccon was held in both French and English in Quebec City over the weekend, and plenty of cosplayers put on their best to bring the worlds of comic books, movies, TV, video games, and literary worlds together. Our friends from Geeks Are Sexy were there to document the best costumes, like Goku and Vegeta from Dragon Ball shown above. The only thing bigger than Goku's muscles is his hair! Among the ambassadors from a galaxy far, far away was a large contingent from Mandalore trying to look more menacing than they really are.

And then there's this set of intriguing costumes that I didn't recognize at all. They are from the Nintendo game Pikmin. Check out a whole gallery of awesome cosplayers having fun at Quebec Comiccon at Geeks Are Sexy. Click on each photo to bring it up in full size. It's obvious from the video that a good time was had by all.

Just because something has been a mystery for hundreds of years doesn't necessarily mean that it's supernatural or extraterrestrial. It usually means that we just don't have the know-how to figure it out ...yet. The science of data detection, measurement, and analysis has grown by leaps and bounds in the last couple of decades. With new and powerful microscopes, telescopes, chemical analysis, geolocation, and DNA sequencing, we are busting mysteries left and right. For example, in 1997, scientists detected a low-frequency noise in the ocean they call the Bloop. It sounds like an animal, but is louder than any on earth can produce. Is there a sea monster in the depths we've never found? No, in 2012, it was determined that the sound is meteorological, not biological. It's the normal sound of glaciers breaking.

It's just one of five mysteries that you've read about on the 'net that seemed really intriguing at the time, but the logical explanation that has been discovered isn't as exciting and doesn't draw as many clicks. Four of these mysteries have been solved only since 2012, and the fifth has been determined to be no mystery at all. If you missed the news, you can catch up in a list at Cracked. 

(Image credit: Eros Films)

The Omeleto short film The Move is supposedly about a couple taking the grand step in their relationship of moving in together. Kate and Todd are excited about finding a roomy apartment they can afford. But the place is a little strange, or let's say, very strange. Maybe that's why it's affordable. What they find provokes shock, fear, and possibilities. You have to wonder what happened to the previous tenants. The viewer is intrigued by an anomaly in the fabric of space and time, and we expect to get a resolution or an explanation, or even an adventure. But that's not what this is about at all. Todd's and Kate's reactions to the weirdness brings their differences to the surface, and we eventually get to the crux of the matter. The Move was written and directed by Erick Kissak and stars Dustin Milligan from Schitt's Creek and Amanda Crew from Silicon Valley. Contains NSFW language.  -via Kottke

If you are in Willow Springs near Chicago and see a woman in white by the side of the road, she may get in the car with you, but then ask to be let out at a cemetery. Then she vanishes. That's Resurrection Mary. But the same story is told in many other locations around the US, with different names. Sometimes the requested stop is a cemetery, or the site of a plane crash, or the hitchhiker just vanishes while still riding. Berkeley students Richard K. Beardsley and Rosalie Hankey found 80 such tales from all over, that mostly originated in the 1930s, a time that many folks were hitchhiking the highways of America looking for work. This appears to be a relatively modern legend, arising spontaneously in different places.  

But it may go back much further. Automobiles and even America itself are recent in the grand scheme of things, but roads and lone travelers go back thousands of years. The setting is classic for a scary tale: traveling at night is already scary, and a stranger on the road can be someone in need or someone very dangerous. And with the vanishing hitchhiker, it's easy to localize the story. Read about the evolution of the vanishing hitchhiker story at Atlas Obscura. Then if you don't have such a legend in your local area, you can start one.  

The Leonard Cohen song "Hallelujah" has been around since 1984, but reached global notoriety when it was featured in the 2001 film Shrek. It's been used in quite a few films since then. The tune is beautiful, and the lyrics are somewhat of an an enigma, mixing biblical and sexual themes. Besides, there are many versions of those lyrics, as Cohen took five years to write them.

But Dustin Ballard, also known as There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama), took away all the ambiguity of Cohen's song by just substituting the lyrics of "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-a-Lot. Poetry is poetry, after all, and in this mashup, there's no question of what the song is about. As you might imagine, commenters are now asking for the lyrics of "Hallelujah" be mixed to the music of "Baby Got Back."  

There I Ruined It isn't just Dustin Ballard anymore. The vocals on this song are by Matt Bull, and the entire group does live shows in Texas.

Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay are credited as the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, in 1953. But were they the first, or just the first to reach the summit and live to tell about it? There is still speculation about the doomed expedition of climbers George Mallory and Andrew "Sandy" Irvine, who were last seen on the Northeast Ridge just below the summit. Then clouds descended, but the two men did not. George Mallory's body was discovered in 1999, without the camera the two had taken to record themselves at the summit.

A team from National Geographic filming a documentary last month made an important discovery. They found Sandy Irvine's left foot, unearthed by the melting Central Rongbuk Glacier. The booted foot has a sock labeled A.C. Irvine. Irvine's great-niece has provided a sample for a DNA test, but the sock label is pretty convincing. Investigators now know where to search for the rest of Irvine's body and possibly the camera. Read an account of the find at BBC. Be warned that the article has a photograph of the boot. -via Metafilter

(In the image above, Irvine is second from the left and Mallory is holding the magazine.)

Light display maniac Tom BetGeorge has revealed his 2024 Halloween light show! We've been posting BetGeorge's holiday decorations for years now, as he went from a humble music teacher to running his own light show production business called Magical Light Shows. In that time, he moved to a larger property where he could avoid neighborhood tension, and even experimented with drone shows one year. BetGeorge's 2024 light show is about a half-hour long, and the sequence set to AC/DC's "Thunderstruck" above is only the beginning. Continue reading to see more.

Suzanne Dryden Kuser knew some secrets, and she took them to her grave. It says right on her gravestone "I still cannot tell you." But that's engraved under a string of intriguing numbers and letters.

Kuser came from a prominent family of politicians; both her father and her brother have Wikipedia entries, as well as many of her other ancestors. "Sukie" herself had quite a career, beginning at the National Security Agency as a cryptologic linguist, then working at the State Department for 58 years. Kuser ended up as the head of the U.S. State Department's Intelligence Reporting Division before retiring. But even then, she was a consultant and reviewed classified documents.

However, the code on her tombstone, while a memorial to her work, was designed to be decodable by anyone interested. Several commenters at reddit figured it out easily. Each word begins with a letter that is linked to the alphabet backwards, meaning a Z would be an A, a Y would be a B, etc. The rest of the letters are numbers, also keyed to the alphabet but in a somewhat more difficult manner. You don't even need the number key because the numbers that are doubled correspond with the doubled letters in the answer, but ThymeIsTight posted a key to make it all clear.

But you don't want to go to all that trouble, so I will tell you what the code actually says. Show Answer

President John F. Kennedy's funeral was held on November 25, 1963, three days after he was assassinated in Dallas. At the conclusion of Kennedy's burial, the military Honor Guard all laid their hats around the burial dome topped with the Eternal Flame, creating an image that no one from that time will forget. To accommodate the crowds of visitors, the gravesite was moved a few years later to a 3.2-acre site with stones paving the grave and a 5-foot circular stone holding the flame.

The hats stayed with the grave for a long time, but no one knows what happened to them. They inspired Jackie Kennedy to commission a permanent memorial sculpture, a project that was managed by her friend Rachel Lambert Mellon, who had designed the White House Rose Garden. The sculpture was designed by Tiffany jeweler Jean Schlumberger to be created by sculptor Louis Féron, and was supposed to be kept secret until its installation. It resembled a wreath of different kinds of wood, rendered in metal, with the military hats. But the memorial sculpture was never installed at the gravesite, and for many years, no one was really sure it was ever produced. That is, until the entire twisted story of the memorial was uncovered, and the sculpture was finally found just this year. We still don't know exactly what went wrong with the plan, but you can read what we now know about Kennedy's memorial sculpture at Smithsonian.  -via Strange Company

(Image source: US Army)

You might call Alma Cooper an overachiever, but it's just life for her. Cooper graduated from West Point in the spring of 2023, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S Army. Her father delivered her oath of office 24 years after he took the same oath. Cooper is now working on her master's degree in data science at Stanford University. Any parent would be proud of such accomplishments in a 22-year-old daughter. But that's just the beginning for Alma Cooper.

If you wake up by a phone alarm, your natural instinct is to make it stop by any means necessary, and if you are too sleepy to function, that may even include destroying the phone. Joseph Herscher of Joseph's Machines (previously at Neatorama) made a chain reaction contraption that tries to do just that. But while the machine works, all it does is move the phone through the course of the device, without harming it at all.

The reason for that is that this is an ad. Herscher got the attention of Casetify, a company that makes protective phone cases. He was glad to construct a Rube Goldberg machine to abuse the phone mercilessly to show how well the case protects it even if it meant his machine didn't quite do the job it was seemingly designed for. Clever. What makes it funny is that the chain reaction machine made more noise than the alarm! And at the end, after all that nonsense, he got up out of bed against his wishes by the actions of the machine anyway. -via Boing Boing