Accio beaucoup bucks! If you've got a first edition Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (which was renamed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for the USA market), it could be worth a lot of money - even if the book is well thumbed or even doodled on!

This hardback copy of the first Harry Potter book - one of only 500 in the first print run in 1997 - was just sold at auction for a staggering £15,500 (USD 20,400), more than five times the top estimate of £3,000. That's a lot of galleons in the Gringotts Wizarding Bank! The book was sold to an anonymous online bidder.

The book seller, a businessman who wished to remain anonymous, picked the book up at a charity shop last year for only 50p. Charles Hanson, owner of the Hansons Auctioneers and the auctioneer on the day the book was sold, said this about the doodled book:

“What a battle for the battered and bruised Potter! We’re calling it the Mancunian Potter because it was found in a charity shop in the city.

“In my opinion, it deserves to be in a museum. Those doodles, penned by a child who loved the book and its characters, encapsulate the power of the Potter phenomenon. It really is quite charming. I’m absolutely delighted for the seller – and the buyer who has purchased a piece of book history.”

Images: Hansons

👨‍🍳 That smiling man on that can of pasta was actually a real guy. Ettore Bioardi moved from Italy to New York at the tender age of 16, became head chef of the Plaza Hotel by the age of 17 and made spaghetti sauce so good that his customers bought it packed in milk bottles. He's the real Chef Boyardee!

🐱 This black cat can really sing the blues. He's probably just channeling John Lee Hooker by meowing, "I had a dream last night / God knows a black cat had crossed my trail."

📷 Ever posted a selfie on social media? That photos may just have been hoovered up by a facial recognition company that aims to identify every human on Earth. All 7.9 billions of us.

🦪 I usually get an upset stomach eating clams, but this man got something nicer. He found a pearl while eating dinner at his local seafood restaurant.

🏠 Turn your world upside down ... literally! The upside down house of Casaloca Guavita in Colombia is a tourist attraction.

🐞 I get famished between lunch and dinner, but a species of tick called Argas brumpti can last 8 years without eating anything. Now that's going on a diet!

Featured art: Go Zoom by indie artist Boggs Nicolas.

Current special: Save up to 20% on all Sci-Fi T-shirts, Fantasy shirts and Horror tees.

Over at Pop Culturista, we took at look at Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy of the USS Enterprise and his most memorable catchphrase, "I'm a doctor, not a (whatever)!" That phrase was used over and over, and long outlasted McCoy and the original Star Trek series. However, it's not the only line McCoy relied on in the series. John DiMarco gives us another compilation that highlights McCoy pronouncing someone dead, over and over, throughout the show's three-year run. We usually remember this as "He's dead, Jim." But it varied quite a bit. After all, you can't address Jim when it's Jim himself, Captain James T. Kirk, who is the dead one in at least three of these clips. Lucky for us, Dr. McCoy was often wrong in that conclusion. -via Laughing Squid

Throughout history, there have been tales of dead animals washed up on the seashore that no one can identify. The really big ones make the news and have often been identified by witnesses as monsters of some sort. These are called "globsters," which is a combination of glob and monster. The more decomposed the creature is, the harder it is to identify. Once barnacles and other scavengers start feeding on it, it may start to look very strange indeed. And the sea can leave a decomposing corpse slimy or hairy or quite monstrous. You can see how this sort of thing once made people believe in dragons and sea serpents. These days, scientists can usually identify what this globster once was, but until then, it may as well be a sea monster. The 20-foot hairy globster pictured here was seen on a beach in the Philippines in 2018.

The white, shaggy carcass may have resembled the dragon from A Neverending Story (1984), but its origins were less fantastical. Local officials concluded that the remains belonged to a whale that had died a couple of weeks earlier—possibly after being struck by a ship. The long “hairs” were actually decaying muscle fibers, and the white coloration was a natural consequence of decomposition.

These are stories that are better read about than witnessed, mainly because of the smell. Read the stories of six really bizarre documented globsters at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Huntxel)

When you have a railroad snaking around mountains in areas where few people live, there's always the possibility of rockslides or even single boulders that can wreck a track and derail a train. In 1882, John Anderson came up with a system for the West Highland Line that travels through the Pass of Brander in Scotland, to warn approaching trains of falling rocks. It was so simple that it will remind you of when you were a child and set a rabbit trap you saw in a cartoon. The system is called Anderson's Piano, and it's worked fairly well for 140 years. It's not a perfect system- the parts get rusty and are hard to replace, but it doesn't depend on a power supply. As Tom Scott explains, so far, no one's come up with anything better.

🦦 Do otters see optical illusions? Here's what happened when two Japanese otters named Kotaro and Hana were given an optical illusion rug that looked like a sinkhole.

🏘️ Got $1.8 million? In San Francisco, that'll buy you an unlivable house with "zero bedroom", but in Golden, British Columbia, Canada, that amount of money will buy you an entire "Edelweiss Village" with chalets fit for Swiss mountaineers.

🕹️ Professional freerunner Calen Chan brought Assassins Creed II to life through parkour (with an equally neat behind-the-scenes video clip). The amazing architecture of Khiva, Uzbekistan served as a backdrop in the short film.

👞 Cryptide Sneaker: 3D printed shoes that leave footprints that look like they belong to a mysterious cryptid animal (like a chupacabra, for example).

😂 This man was careful enough to cover his face when he committed a robbery at a Chicago's train station but he didn't count on his own mother recognizing him and dragging him to surrender to the police.

🥤 Why did old-timey soda bottles have round bottoms? There's logic to this weird design. See if you can figure it out without reading the answer.

🤔 This millennial found the creepiest thing at her grandpa's house: a huge, dusty old book with thousands of pages full of names, phone numbers, and addresses of everyone in town. What does it mean?

🎬 Here's how the Bride of Dracula nearly killed off Nosferatu, one of the first Dracula films, by using a horrifying creature that even the vampires dread: lawyers.

🦸 Think you know your comic book superheroes and cartoon characters? This young woman has just set the Guinness World Record for naming 88 Marvel characters and 102 cartoon characters in one minute. See, reading a lot of comic books can really pay off!

Check out more neat posts over at our new sites: Pictojam, Supa Fluffy, Pop Culturista, Homes & Hues, Infinite 1UP, Laughosaurus and Spooky Daily.

Image: Kotsumet/YouTube

Before the interstate highway system, Route 40 was the main road between Washington, DC and New York City. The highway crosses the Mason-Dixon Line, which traditionally separates the North from the South. Diplomats from around the world used this highway to commute between the United Nations in New York and their embassies in Washington. For African diplomats, this meant dealing with segregation laws in Maryland. Restaurants and gas stations along 40 in Maryland regularly denied service to men in limousines charged with representing an entire nation. An incident in 1961 made international headlines when the new ambassador from Chad, Adam Malick Sow, was denied a cup of coffee at a roadside diner.

The wife of the diner's owner refused to serve the diplomat because he was black. "He looked like just an ordinary run of the mill [N-word] to me. I couldn't tell he was an ambassador," Mrs Leroy Merritt later told the national magazine Life. "I said 'There's no table service here'."

The insult sparked an international incident, making the front page of newspapers across Africa and Asia. Soon after, diplomats from Niger, Cameroon and Togo reported similar experiences at Maryland restaurants.

The news coverage set off a campaign of protests. Some businesses agreed to serve diplomats only, but that only raised the stakes of the protests, as one group impersonated diplomats from a fictional country to make their point. Read about the role Route 40 played in the battle against segregation at BBC. -via Digg

(Image source: Boston Public Library Tichnor Brothers collection #75026)

When a friend or family member is struggling with life or a mental health issue, it can be a real drag for you. Who has time to listen to someone painfully open up and confide in you? What you really want to do is just make the problem go away, which is easy when you have useless platitudes at your beck and call. Then you can tell yourself you helped, even if all you are doing is making them shut up about it ...or they stop being your friend. There, that was easy, wasn't it? This skit from Viva La Dirt League may wake someone up to how unhelpful they are being, even though that won't make a difference in someone who just doesn't care.

Then again, if you do care, the first and best thing you can do is listen. Sometime that's all that's needed. If not, be supportive and encourage them to get professional help.  -via Geeks Are Sexy
 

九尾の狐の伝説が残る、殺生石にひとりでやってきました。

縄でぐるっと巻かれた真ん中の大きな岩がそれ…

のはずなのですが、なんと岩は真っ二つに割れて、縄も外れていました。

漫画だったらまさに封印が解かれて九尾の狐に取り憑かれるパターンで、見てはいけないものを見てしまった気がします。 pic.twitter.com/wwkb0lGOM9

— Lillian (@Lily0727K) March 5, 2022

A large volcanic boulder in Tochigi Prefecture, Japan, called Sessho-seki, or the Killing Stone, has an extensive mythology. The rock is supposed to embody Tamamo-no-Mae, who is a nine-tailed fox and beautiful woman who bewitched the emperor in the 12th century, both at once.

The Killing Stone is said to emanate poisonous gasses. Anyone who touches the rock is in danger of death. Still, the rock is registered as a historical site, and draws tourists who are more curious than scared. But in the last few days, the rock has split into two parts. Does this mean that the spirit of Tamamo-no-Mae has been released to do mischief, or maybe even cause calamity on the earth?

A local guide says the rock has developed cracks over time, and rainwater worked its way into the stone, leading to the split. But you can never be too sure. Read the story at The Guardian. -via Metafilter

Virginia Hall grew up in Maryland, learned several languages, and attended college in both America and Europe. She wanted work for the U.S. State Department, and maybe work her way up to diplomat. Instead she got a job in Turkey as a clerk. While there, she has a hunting accident in 1933 that destroyed her left foot. Gangrene forced the amputation of half her leg. That injury precluded her working for the State Department, as they only took able-bodied employees at the time. But Hall still wanted travel and adventure, so she went to France in 1939. She made contact with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), which considered her potential as a spy.

Hall's work in occupied France became so legendary that the Gestapo looked for la dame qui boite, or "the lady with a limp." She escaped by walking through the Pyrenees Mountains to Spain alone, on a wooden prosthetic leg. But then she returned to France in disguise to continue her work! Read about the exploits of Virginia Hall in World War II at Mental Floss.

Oksana Masters was born in Ukraine with birth defects believed to be associated with radiation from Chernobyl. She came to the US through adoption when she was seven, undersized and traumatized. Sports became her therapy, and now she represents the US at the Paralympics in Nordic skiing. Masters participated in the Summer Paralympics, where she medaled in rowing in 2012, and won two gold medals in cycling in 2020. In the Winter Games, she has medaled in 2014, 2018, and 2022 in skiing, and in two Paralympics in biathlon. Masters has a dozen Paralympic medals in four sports. The 2022 Winter Paralympics are going on now through March 13 in Beijing. -via TYWKIWDBI

In the mountains of Chile, farmers grow crops of strawberries that resemble ping pong balls. They are white, they are very sweet, and they are huge, and they're also a part of Chile's history. At one time, Chileans used the strawberry fields for bait to lure enemies into ambush. If it weren't for Chile's frutillas blancas, we wouldn't have the red strawberries we get at the grocery. These big white strawberries were crossed with tiny American strawberries -in France- to give us the strawberries we are familiar with.

But even as the white strawberries bring high prices to those who farm them, more than ten times that of red strawberries, they are becoming more and more rare. It takes good soil, cold weather, and expertise to grow white strawberries. The lumber industry has degraded the soil, climate change has made the winters warmer, and younger farmers are turning to easier crops. Read about the plight of the Chilean white strawberry at Atlas Obscura.

A commercial truck was broken into in Denver Thursday morning, on 23rd Avenue in the Central Park neighborhood. A box was stolen, but it isn't known if the thief had any idea what was in the box. It was a shipment of cadaver heads that had been donated for medical research. The thief also took a dolly from the truck. Residents of the area expressed concern. Isaac Fields said,

“Pretty shocking. I guess I don’t see too many strange things happening around here usually, but you know you never know,” said Fields.

Police are asking the public for tips on the theft. They described the box as a blue and white cardboard box about 20"x15"x18" with “Science Care” written on the sides. Oh yeah, and there are human heads inside. They have no description of the perpetrator. Anyone with information is urged to call Metro Denver Crime Stoppers. -via reddit

(Image credit: Tony Webster)

Yeah, we know, pizza originated in Naples, where it was street food for poor people. It's also true that Margherita of Savoy made it acceptable in other parts of Italy, although it was still not popular. But it was the US more than any other country that made pizza what it is today, and fairly recently in the grand scheme of things. Before 1880, most Italians who immigrated to the US were from northern Italy, and did not eat pizza. Four million southern Italians arrived between 1880 and 1910, but their pizza still wasn't popular.    

The first successful pizza restaurant in the world located outside of Naples was founded in Buenos Aires in 1882, when a Neapolitan immigrant baker named Nicolas Vaccarezza started selling the pies out of his shop in Boca. For reference purposes, a decade earlier, an attempt to open a pizzeria in Rome, Italy, had ended in bankruptcy, meaning, at the turn of the last century, you could get a pizza in Buenos Aries, São Paulo or New York, but not in Rome, Florence or Venice.

Only after World War II did pizza take off, as American entrepreneurs invested in pizza ovens, diverse toppings, delivery, and entertainment for diners. Now pizza is readily available in Italy, mainly because American tourists expect it. Read how all that happened at An Eccentric Culinary History.  -Thanks, H.D.!

Lent is the 40-day period leading up to Easter, meant for abstinence and penitence, observed most formally in the Catholic Church. The current rules for Lent are that Catholics age 14 and up must must abstain from meat on fast days (Ash Wednesday and Good Friday) and all Fridays during Lent. There is an exception for the chronically ill and pregnant or nursing mothers. That's why churches have fish fries on Fridays and how McDonald's came to serve the Filet-O-Fish. Fish is not considered to be meat.

But over the history of the Catholic Church, the question of what is meat and what isn't has been asked again and again. The original idea was to avoid basic livestock meat like beef, pork, and poultry. The rules for eating wild animals came up over time as Catholicism spread to different parts of the world, and local bishops made rulings that had little to do with biology, but a lot to do with the foods local people depended on. The reasoning for each animal varied.

In Canada, beaver is classified as a fish for the purposes of Lent because it is an aquatic animal. In the southern US, Alligator is considered a fish for the same reason. And in Central and South America, capybara is okay to eat during Lent, and has even become a traditional Lenten dish, because the animal spends so much time in lakes and rivers.   

Other animals have received dispensation to be consumed during Lent not by being classified as fish, but because they were deemed essential to nutrition for the local population. In the Detroit area, muskrat is okay to consume during Lent because at the time the question came up, food of any kind was really scarce. Iguana and armadillo flesh also qualifies, and both are Lenten staples in Nicaraugua.

Puffins were once forbidden to eat during Lent, but in the 17th century were allowed because doctors testified that "the biological and nutritional qualities of puffins made them more like fish than birds." From this we can assume that the porgs of the planet Ahch-To are okay to eat on Lenten Fridays, because they were based on puffins. Read how these exemptions came about at the Lafayette Daily Advertiser. -via Fark

(Image credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)