People are constantly floating the idea of making Election Day a national holiday in the US as a way to making voting easier and get more people to the polls. Holidays need meaningful treats, and there are already a few recipes that have political or even electoral overtones that would be good candidates for inclusion. For example, in Australia, it's already traditional to serve up grilled "democracy sausage" on a bun as an. election day fundraiser. This reminds us that if you love sausage and you love the law, you don't want to see either being made.

Or how about bean soup? It has been the Soup of the Day in the United States Senate dining room for more than a century. Or maybe we could resurrect Watergate Salad, which is neither salad nor does it have anything to do with the Watergate scandal. Check out the bone fides of these and other foods that have some tenuous link to political campaigns at Atlas Obscura. However, most of us would like to celebrate the end of this year's election with a good stiff drink.

The old line goes that an infinite number of monkeys typing on typewriters would be able to type the complete works of Shakespeare if given enough time.

Is it true? That's almost too big of a question. Let's try something smaller. Could a single monkey type just one Shakespeare play, such as Hamlet? Australian mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta say no.

The scholars ran calculations and concluded that the heat death of the universe would occur before the monkey could, by randomly striking keys, complete Hamlet. Even a normal mortal chimpanzee has only a 5% chance of writing "bananas" during its natural lifespan.

Fortunately, we have ChatGPT available instead of monkeys, finite or infinite.

-via Pulp Librarian | Photo: Jim Griffin

Thurzó Zoltán is an acclaimed pianist from Romania. He can hit the keys as fast as he wants. In that case, that's 500 times within a 30 second period. If Guinness World Records accepts his evidence, then Zoltán will have clenched a new world record.

UPI reports that he performed his feat in the village of Biharia on October 23 to honor his mother who died precisely one year previously. Watch him accelerate to an almost imperceptible speed and hold it for half a minute. Zoltán hits the 500 mark, thus taking a record away set by a Japanese pianist last December.

-via Dave Barry

During the 18th century, the supply of cadavers for medical students to study was fulfilled by grave robbers, or "resurrectionists." No one wanted their bodies to undergo such a fate, but Henry Trigg of the village of Stevenage, Hertfordshire, England, came up with a plan to protect his earthly remains from plunder. He arranged with his brother that his coffin should be buried not underground, but up in the rafters of his barn. The barn was to be locked, and the key placed in the coffin, so that only Trigg himself could unlock it when he returned from the dead, supposedly in thirty years. As you might have guessed already, the key business could not physically be accomplished, but in 1724 when Trigg died, his coffin was indeed installed in the roof area of the barn.

But while this may have protected Trigg's body from immediate theft, his resting place became a curiosity, then eventually when the barn became an inn, the coffin above the rafters became a tourist draw. Fifty years after his death, Trigg's niece requested a burial, but was denied. Over time, parts of Trigg's remains began to disappear. Read about the restless corpse of Henry Trigg, despite his complicated burial plans, at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: AnemoneProjectors)

There are some places that just always burn. One is the eternal flame installed at the grave of John F. Kennedy. That one's fed by a gas pipe. Then there's Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a cold seam caught on fire in 1962 and is still burning all these years later. The Darvasa Gas Crater in Turkmenistan is a methane vent that has been burning for more than 40 years after it was deliberately ignited.  

Turkey has its own eternal flame in Yanartaş, which used to be called Mount Chimaera, in Olympos Beydagları National Park. There are quite a few totally natural torches burning in holes, and will keep burning long after Centralia or Darvasa exhaust their fuel. These eternal flames in Turkey are fed by methane rising from the deep underground, which is ignited when reaching the oxygen at the surface, with the help of the catalyst called ruthenium in the igneous rocks that make up the mountain. Read about the perpetual flames of Yanartaş and how you can visit them at CNN Travel. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: William Neuheisel)

Moo Deng is a baby pygmy hippopotamus born in July in the Khao Kheo Open Zoo in Chon Buri, Thailand. She and her mother, Joni, and father, Tony, are among the mere 2,000-2,500 pygmy hippopotami in the world.

She's become a viral sensation, especially when she goes on violent rampages and tries to bite the human caretakers despite lacking teeth.

Redditor /u/Eskapi 3D printed this astonishingly lifelike sculpture of Moo Deng taking the form and spirit of a chestburster from the Alien film franchise. It correctly identifies Moo Deng as a relentless force of destruction bent upon the annihilation of humanity.

-via Shirts That Go Hard

The modern pop culture image of a ghost is a partially transparent pale apparition that floats. Ghosts once appeared in many different ways in different cultures, sometimes solid, sometimes only in voices, and sometimes only in the objects they moved around. But they all represented the dead whose bodies are gone the way of all flesh, but whose souls live on among us.

Throughout human history, it appears we just can't seem to let go of the dead. We long to see our loved ones again, but at the same time, the thought of spirits wandering among the living scares the daylights out of us. Ghosts are also a way to explain away the unknown things that frighten us even more just because they are unknown. Over time, belief in ghosts went from comforting because it was evidence that our souls continued after death, to terrifying, because we can't control what mischief those ghostly souls want to practice on the living. -via Laughing Squid

Many folks celebrate Halloween by watching horror films. The problem is that truly dedicated horror fans started watching them on the first of October and have been doing this for years, so you end up watching the same blockbusters and classics every Halloween. The good news is that the world is full of great horror films you haven't seen already. The bad news is that you've never heard of them. But that what the internet is for.

Redditor CanApprehensive8720 consulted the folks at r/movies for a recommendation of a horror film to impress her boyfriend, who has seen "almost every single horror movie in existence." Movie fans were glad to oblige, and told of extremely niche horror films that thrilled them. Many are foreign films, some are arthouse or student movies, and some are just films that are plenty scary but never got properly distributed or promoted. Some are fairly recent while others go back decades. The post got more than a thousand comments, and CanApprehensive8720's boyfriend was impressed indeed and thrilled to start on a list of new horror films to watch. You can check out the responses in the original reddit thread or read the top twenty movies from it with a trailer to accompany each description at Cracked.

Gideon Futerman is a scholar in the fields of solar radiation modification and global catastrophic risk. Last month, he and a colleague worked the northernmost tip of the Isle of Lewis, which is the largest of the Hebrides in Scotland. They were doing geological surveying and had a geological hammer handy. So when they noticed that a Google Street View car was approaching, they staged a violent scene.

You can find it on Google Street View close to the point of the island which is called the Butt of Lewis. Notice that Google helpfully blurs the faces of both the killer and his victim.

There are some factoids and trivia on the internet that have been around so long they are accepted as common knowledge. But that doesn't necessarily mean they are true. If something is repeated over and over, especially if different people repeat it, people will believe it, at least until someone calls their bluff. And if it is something plausible that has no obvious agenda, it's easier to swallow it whole.

In this example, we've all heard that the blood vessels in your body, if laid out end-to-end, would be 100,000 kilometers or 60,000 miles long, which is long enough to wrap around the earth twice and then some. But where did that figure come from in the first place? Who figured this measurement out? And is it true? Kurzgesagt decided it would be best to run this down after someone asked for a source. It was a long path back to 1922 to find where the "fact" came from, and a big job figuring out if it was plausible. The moral of the story is that fact-checking can be a lot harder than you'd think. This video is only 10:35 long; the rest is promotional.   

The question is, "How long does Halloween candy last?" which is a kind of a dumb question. If you are handing out candy to trick-or-treaters in my neighborhood, a five-pound bag of candy will last about 10 minutes. If you are talking about what the kids bring home from trick-or-treating, it depend on how many family members have their hand in the bag, and how much chocolate your neighbors splurged on. In many homes, that's less than an hour.

But let's assume you are an adult who bought candy on sale, or were given leftover trick-or treat candy. You looked at it and said "That will last a year." It might, because it's okay to eat candy past its expiration date, but you really want to consume it or share it before the quality goes downhill. And in candy, the quality will tank long before food spoilage becomes a danger. Some types of candy will last much longer than others, and you can extend that time by keeping it in proper storage, away from heat, light, and humidity. Eater goes over which candies you should make a point of to eat first while they are fresh, and which candies will last longer. After all, you may be inundated with Christmas sweets before the Halloween candy is gone.

(Image credit: Islandsislands)

In 1973, a movie called The Wicker Man hit theaters and was called "The Citizen Kane of horror movies." Too bad this Honest Trailer is not about that movie. Rather, it is about the 2006 remake starring Nicolas Cage that set the standard for bad remakes. The Wicker Man from 2006 has Nic Cage showing his emotional range without any coherent reason. Sure, he's investigating a missing child in a strange community that performs pagan rituals, but he's not getting anywhere by going all psychotic about it. In trying to ramp up the creepy factor, the movie veers into unintentional hilarity. That would be good if this were a comedy, but it's not, and anyone who appreciated the 1973 masterpiece was appalled by the remake. It did not make enough money to cover its budget, and was nominated for five Golden Raspberry Awards. Screen Junkies reminds us of why we didn't see The Wicker Man in 2006 in this Honest Trailer.

Walk in style into the nail salon to get your pedicure. Bravest Studios in New York City and footwear designer @canyaon offer these slides that look like giant human toes. They're optimal for attracting attention of both the wanted and unwanted categories.

If you prefer body parts other than toes for shoe design, consider these brain-like mules by the same company or cross species with these shoes that look like bear claws.

-via Ugly Design