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

The image above is titled The Swarm of Life. It depicts tadpoles swimming through a forest of lily pads in Cedar Lake on Vancouver Island. It won Shane Gross the title of Wildlife Photographer of the Year and the winner in the category Wetlands. The Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition is held annually by the Natural History Museum in London, and the top entries will be on exhibit at the museum from October 11 through next June. The Young Grand Title Winner is Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas of Germany for the image below of a two-millimeter springtail insect with a slime mold. It's titled Life Under Dead Wood. 

There are winners named from each of the 18 different categories, too. I was particularly taken with the winner in the Portrait category.



Titled On Watch, it shows a mother lynx with her two grown offspring behind her. Photographer John E. Marriott tracked this family of Canada lynx for a week in the Yukon and captured this image from a distance. Explore the gallery for the winners in the various categories plus highly commended photos, and the top five in the People's Choice award voting. On both pages you can click on an image to bring up information about it. Read more about the competition at NPR. -via Damn Interesting

Cheese is made of milk, which is white, but many of our cheeses are shades of yellow passing into orange. Cow's milk contains beta carotene from the grass they eat, which is orange. The real question should be why milk is white in the first place. Sheep's milk doesn't have nearly as much beta carotene as the milk from cows, which is why cheese made from sheep's milk is almost always white. That same beta carotene is the reason butter from cow's milk is yellow. We really should qualify the assertion by saying cheese made from high quality milk from grass-fed cows is yellow-orange, but cheesemakers have found a way around the question of color (and quality) by making cheese any color they want. People expect a yellowish or orangish cheese, so that's what they will get, one way or another. This video contains a 70-second skippable promotion at 1:05. -via Laughing Squid

The Amazing Maize Maze was the name of the first documented corn maze, which is such an awesome name that it's no wonder it became a thing. You might be surprised that it was so recent, too, in 1993. While mazes have always had entertainment value, they were traditionally made from trees or hedges or stone walls by wealthy people with a long-term plan. But corn, that most American of crops, lends itself well to a temporary seasonal amusement. It's tall enough, grows fast, and is laid out in a grid that makes planning a relatively simple matter. Plus, the layout can be changed every year. Modern technologies like computer-assisted design and GPS enable farmers to cut corn in designs that can double as advertising seen from above.  

If you play your cards right, a corn maze can bring in more money than the corn crop itself. But to be successful at it year after year, the maze has to be challenging enough to get people to buy tickets, but not so challenging that they give up and never return. Besides, getting lost is half the fun! Read about the business of corn mazes, and what to do if you're ever lost in one, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Mike's Maze)

What makes holidays special are the traditions that surround them. We celebrate the same way every year, with maybe just a little variation until those variations become tradition themselves. For children, it's exciting to recall what happens every year and enjoy it all over again, and for adults, these traditions evoke wonderful memories. Since 1966, part of the tradition of Halloween is watching It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown as Linus once again waits confidently for the Great Pumpkin to arrive at the local pumpkin patch. His annual disappointment doesn't shake his faith that it will happen next year. Meanwhile, Charlie Brown gets rocks in his trick-or-treat bag and Snoopy battles the Red Baron and ends up giving Lucy dog germs in the bobbing for apples game.    

Swedish producer Chetreo remixed portions of the Peanuts TV special using autotune to make a song about Halloween. It's guaranteed to take you back to the autumns of your childhood and the excitement of the one time a year you got to see the show ahead of Halloween. Knowing what will happen doesn't make it any less special. -via Geeks Are Sexy

We live in an age of wonders. Unlike the the primitive before times, we now have access to TikTok, broccoli haircuts, and Brazilian butt lifts. Best of all, crocs, which are allegedly futuristic but also stupid, are now available to our fur babies.

Fast Company reports that BarkBox, a company that will monthly send you a box of things that you don't need, is teaming up with the official Crocs brand to produce footwear for dogs. They're fairly sophisticated shoes because they're made to fit different sizes and shapes of dog feet. They're compatible with Jibbitz charms, so be sure to also order your dog's favorites starting on October 23, when these crocs go on sale.

Photo: Crocs

The staff at Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium were quite excited to see a baby king penguin hatch, the first one in two years at the Australian facility. Pesto weighed less than a pound at the time. Normally, king penguins grow to be between 31 and 37 pounds as adults. But Pesto, at nine months of age now, weighs 51.8 pounds! Pesto is being raised by penguin couple Tango and Hudson, both weighing around 24 pounds, and he towers over both of them now. But they aren't his biological parents. Pesto's sire Blake is a large penguin at 39 pounds, and Pesto even eclipses him.

It's possible Pesto might lose weight as he matures into an adult, but he'll still be on the large side for a king penguin. His size may be due to his appetite- he eats around 25 fish a day! Meanwhile, this big chick has become a media darling, drawing crowds into the aquarium to see the penguin that rivals Baby Huey. Read more about Pesto and the other king penguins at Smithsonian.  

(Image credit: HoseIsFaucet)

This Honest Trailer contains NSFW language. Deadpool & Wolverine has made $1.3 billion and became the first R-rated film to pull in more than a billion dollars. It's now the second-biggest movie of 2024, only surpassed by Inside Out 2 so far. So you know that Screen Junkies were salivating to make an Honest Trailer. Sure, people loved the movie, but that doesn't mean it's perfect, and they were determined to find its flaws. They highlight the fan service, the ridiculous cameos, the product placement, and the incomprehensible plot. None of that is accidental; Deadpool & Wolverine leaned heavily into its own criticism to parody these things, and hey, it paid off well, financially or in laughs. The audience knows what it's supposed to take seriously and what it's not, and to be honest, there's no upside in taking Deadpool & Wolverine too seriously. We're just here for the action and the jokes. You can look for Deadpool & Wolverine on Blu-ray and DVD on October 22.  

When people saw this viral video on TikTok, they at first thought this animal was a llama, a dog, or a bobcat. Other, more amusing guesses include Chewbacca, a horse, or a toddler in a Halloween costume. This is Zeus, a Maine coon cat from Moldova that stands a meter tall (39 inches) on his back feet! Measured horizontally on four legs, he's 1.2 meters (47 inches) from his nose to the tip of his tail. You can get a better sense of this cat's size when his feline housemate is in the picture, because she's a normal sized cat. Zeus towered over her even when he was just a kitten. The number of videos of Zeus will tell you that this isn't a matter of forced perspective like other internet Maine coon cats, -he's just a big boy. You can keep up with Zeus's life at TikTok and at Instagram. -via Boing Boing

What if your favorite Looney Tunes cartoons happened in the Star Wars universe? Or more specifically, what if Wile E. Coyote and the roadrunner were droids on a ship of the Empire? AFK presents this short as a part of their series For the Empire (previously at Neatorama) They refer to it as a "cartoon," even though it's quite realistically animated by artificial intelligence, namely Unreal Engine. But the music, the sound effects, the action, the camera angles, and the familiar elements from the roadrunner cartoons are all there. An Astromech resembling a mechanical Darth Vader is bedeviled by a quick-moving Mouse Droid. What can he do but order a miniature death star from ACME? Keep your eye out for the printed signs everywhere that make up for the lack of dialogue. One that is rendered in binary actually says "Help!" As entertaining as this cartoon is, it's only 4:30; the rest is an ad. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The most common pop culture depiction of a ghost is a floating apparition that appears to be covered in a white sheet. That is a lasting image from Britain over the past few centuries, when poor people were often buried in a bedsheet, wrapped up as they were laying on their deathbed, instead of being buried in a coffin. It only made sense that they'd be wearing that sheet when they reappeared to haunt us. But it was also cemented in the popular image because of those who put bedsheets over their heads to impersonate ghosts and cause their own mischief, ranging from pranks to serious crimes, such a rape and murder. These "bedsheet ghosts" frightened the more superstitious, and even those who weren't superstitious knew the fellows in the bedsheets were up to no good.

In 1804, a spate of ghost sightings in Hammersmith, on the west end of London, had everyone on edge. Was it a real supernatural ghost, or an impersonator in a bedsheet meaning to cause harm? The only real difference was how much fear each identity would cause in the potential victims. When Francis Smith took his gun out in the night to look for the Hammersmith ghost, he was on edge, but did not expect to shoot a man who was merely trying to protect his wife from the same ghost. The strange part of the case was that there was neither a ghost nor a criminal wearing a bedsheet involved in that night's crime, but merely the fear of those things. Read about the case of the Hammersmith ghost and the consequences of Smith's trial, at Mental Floss.  

(Image credit: Phiz)