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)

Thomas Palef made a game so simple that it can't possibly be challenging, right? Wrong. Almost Pong has the same goal as Pong, in that you are batting a ball back and forth between two paddles (yeah, like ping pong). The difference is that there's only you, and only one button, which is your spacebar or your mouse. There's not even a start button. The kicker here is that you are playing as the ball.

While the instructions and gameplay are simple, you have to adjust your reflexes from the paddles to the ball, which might take a couple of rounds. Oh, yeah, you do not have control of the paddles. They will move at random, but so far they have given me plenty of warning. That might change if you play for longer than I've managed to. Almost Pong is mindless but simple fun, at least at lower levels. -via Kottke

How cool is this automata? Four of them, actually, representing John, Paul, George, and Ringo, all dressed up for the Abbey Road photoshoot. Line them up, and you've recreated the album cover. This is the work of Argentinian artist Daniel Bennan. We don't know much about him because Bennan tells us very little about himself. But we know he's talented and put in a lot of work to make this. It's not the first Beatles automata he's created. Here's one from 2018 of the Fab Four in their earlier days.



These belong in a museum! See more, including his Jimi Hendrix automata, at Instagram. -via Everlasting Blort

An excerpt from Justin E. H. Smith's new book The Internet is Not What You Think It Is compares the internet with communications over distance in the natural world. When elephants stomp, the vibrations can be felt and recognized by elephants miles away. A spider knows what's going on along the length of its web by touch. Even plants release chemical signals to inform other plants of disease, predators, and changing conditions. It's a thought-provoking article, but one anecdote stands out, and made me want to know more. French anarchist Jules Allix promoted an alternative to the telegraph by harnessing the communicative power of nature. That of snails, to be precise.

Allix claimed that snails are particularly well suited to communicate by a magnetism-like force through the ambient medium. Once two snails have copulated with one another, he maintained, they are forever bound to each other by this force, and any change brought about in one of them immediately brings about a corresponding change in the other: an action at a distance.

That led me to an earlier article by the same author about this "snail telegraph." Allix had written about it in detail, although terms like “galvano-magnetico-mineralo-animalo-adamical sympathy” and "pasilalinic sympathetic compasses" made the explanation quite dense. He demonstrated his idea in Paris in 1850. A bunch of snails were sorted into a box with slots that corresponded with each letter of the alphabet. Each snail had a partner it had "bonded with" in an identical box, with the two devices separated by a curtain. When a snail was manipulated (probably meaning poked) at one location, the corresponding snail would react in the other location in a process Allix called “escargotic commotion.” The demonstration was not as successful nor as scientifically rigorous as expected, but was never tried again. Yet the idea lingered in the public's mind for decades thanks to Allix's enthusiasm.  -via Metafilter

Spot the issue with some of this "footage" of the fighting in #Ukraine shown on an Israeli channel pic.twitter.com/77XE4AZ8dC

— Michael A. Horowitz (@michaelh992) March 3, 2022

We have been warned over and over not to believe everything we see, especially when news is dominated by footage from social media, which is the case in the war in Ukraine. There are plenty of iPhone videos of the devastation in Ukraine making their way to network newscasts. See if you can spot the clue that this video shown on an Israeli TV news broadcast might not be real. Yes, that's a TIE fighter, wrecked on the side of the road. If you look closely, you'll see a couple of stormtroopers standing by. The TV station has owned up to the error. Here's a machine translation.

The dis-information surrounding the war also produces embarrassing moments and near-comic errors: Sink from the movie "Star Wars" entered News 13 news from Ukraine. The video was broadcast in the main edition and in the channel's current affairs programs.

The footage was from a 2014 viral video, made to look like those ubiquitous Russian dash cam videos that show something strange happening along the side of the road. This example appears to be deliberate trolling, but we don't know if it was just for fun, or meant to be a warning about disinformation campaigns. The lesson is, don't pass along something unless you've checked it out thoroughly, and that goes double if you're a news broadcaster. -via Fark

People in Asia have been enjoying the effects of caffeine from tea for thousands of years. For most of that time, they ate it as greens or added it to soup and other dishes. Buddhist monks, seeking simpler fare, brewed tea leaves to drink. The switch from tea as a food to treat as a drink was popularized in the 8th century by an entertainer named Lu Yu.

Lu was an orphan raised in a Buddhist monastery, where he was used to tea as a drink. He ran away as a young teenager and "joined the circus," so to speak, by becoming a comedy performer. His talents impressed a governor who took Lu in and helped him get an education. He became influential and well-connected, but never liked food made with tea. It wasn't the tea he disliked, but all the other ingredients. He fervently believed tea was an elixir and should be enjoyed in its purest form. Read how he influenced China to switch to drinking tea instead of eating it at Atlas Obscura. While tea went global as a drink, there are still foods that use tea leaves as an ingredient, and you'll find a recipe at the same link.  

YouTube member Name Undecided (which is a decidedly good name) offers a wide variety of piano tunes, some of which are played with his fingers on the keys. Others involve Nerf guns or a badminton racket.

Sometimes, although he wants to play with his fingers on the keys, the task just requires too much effort because his piano is all the way on the other side of the room. To make the task easier, he taped strings from the keys to plastic rings, which permits him to play effectively while, as he calls it, he is "socially distancing" from his piano.

-via Laughing Squid

In 1872, the Yellowstone Act created the world's first national park. This act has been celebrated as a great stepping stone to conserving the natural beauty of the US. When considering the act, Congress discussed the impact such a large federal acquisition would have on white settlers in the area. John Taffe of Nebraska brought up the question of how it would impact the Sioux reservation. The other legislators just shrugged the question off. They didn't consider Native Americans to be any impediment to taking the land. Henry Dawes of Massachusetts replied,

“The Indians can no more live [in Yellowstone],” he told Taffe, “than they can upon the precipitous sides of the Yosemite valley.” To Dawes and almost all of his fellow legislators, potential Lakota land claims and the long-standing use of Yellowstone as a thoroughfare by Shoshone, Bannock, Crow, Flathead and Nez Perce peoples did not matter.

That didn't sit right with Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake), the prominent leader of the Lakota and advocate for their allied nations who lived in the Western states. They were already concerned with the building of the Northern Pacific railroad through their land, bringing a rush of gold miners and settlers and endangering the buffalo herds they depended on. The tensions between the US and the Lakota over rights to the land sparked a five-year war which included the Battle of Little Big Horn.

The Native American objections to Yellowstone National Park have been mostly excluded from American history, but 150 years later, the National Park Service plans to include exhibits at the park to explain how the birth of the park shaped Lakota history. Read the story at Smithsonian.

🤣 Before he was the leader of Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky was a popular actor and comedian with fantastic comedic timing. Case in point: this 2016 skit where Zelensky and others dropped trousers and played the piano without using their hands ... and brought the audience to tears with laughter.

👶 Parents with a young child know how difficult it can be to work and keep an eye on the kid at the same time. But this should help: a parent workstation and child play station combo.

🐦 Don't mess with Emily the Curlew! According to Robert Irwin (son of Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin) the grumpy bird has got some real anger management issues.

🦷 If you're having trouble breathing, it could be a tooth growing inside your nose.

❤️ ABC 6 reporter Myles Harris was doing his news report in Columbus, Ohio, when he got interrupted by his own mom, who yelled out "Hi, baby" from her car. Easily one of the best moments of 2022!

👕 Don't miss this sitewide special over at the NeatoShop: save up to 20% on all T-shirts!

We're trying out a new layout for Pictojam, Laughosaurus, Homes & Hues, Pop Culturista, Supa Fluffy, Infinite 1UP and Spooky Daily. Please check 'em out!

Since the pandemic hit two years ago, we've gotten used to seeing first-run movies at home on our TVs, computers, or even our phones. Why even bother going to a theater anymore? A movie has to have something worth the hassle of getting out and being around strangers to see it on a big screen. Considering which movies we ventured out to see in 2021, that appears to be action movies, specifically superhero movies.

Evan Puschak posits that there's another reason to see movies on a big screen: faces. A closeup of a character played by a good actor can be epic. But we are in danger of losing that type of movie, and indeed those talented actors, when we shun going to theaters. -via Nag on the Lake

I've just discovered the subreddit /r/TipOfMyFork. It's like /r/TipOfMyTongue (in real life, or the subreddit), but for food. Is there some sort of food that you can't identify? Can you describe a food, but don't know what it is? Submit it there for the suggestions from the hivemind.

One notable post on it from two years ago is this bizarre rounded, fluffy, steamy object from an unknown restaurant. What is it?

The consensus among commenters seems to be that it's a cow or sheep stomach that's turned inside out. The dish is attributed to Korea, Mongolia, or Inner Mongolia in China. I want to try it!

That photo... Again, compare this cinematically absurd theatrical setup to Zelenskyy's selfie shots in the middle of his people. Putin is dangerously guided by fear, in many ways. pic.twitter.com/Fdodz6Gjgo

— Oliver Reichenstein (@reichenstein) February 27, 2022

Russian president Vladimir Putin has been photographed meeting with various people at either end of a long, long table, leading to plenty of humorous internet memes. Is it covid paranoia or a power play? Probably both, but the end result is ridicule. Tables like these are meant to seat a lot of people, whether for dining or for meetings. When one person is isolated way at the end, it is symbolic of power, wealth, or estrangement.

New Putin table from IKEA, presented by @me_too pic.twitter.com/0wd48j7P7h

— Darth Putin (@DarthPutinKGB) February 15, 2022

The term "cinematically absurd" means a lot. The image of a long table with few people has been used over and over in movies to illustrate a supervillain's power, as explained at Mel magazine. It is such a recognizable symbol that it is used mainly for parody today. Continue reading to see some examples.

Any history of ice cream will be incomplete, because it's so old and hard to define. The Chinese ate a frozen snack made of milk and rice that had been frozen in the snow about 200 BCE. During the Tang Dynasty, the earliest known flavored ice cream was made with flour, water buffalo milk, and camphor (yum!). Centuries later, the Persians were the first to add sugar to frozen treats. But in the summer or in the tropics, frozen desserts were restricted to the rich, as ice had to be transported from far away.

Ice cream really took off when flavorings from the Americas became available: chocolate, vanilla, and molasses. A revolution came when Augustus Jackson, a free Black man who worked as a chef at the White House between 1817 and 1837, developed a method of making ice cream by adding salt to ice in order to freeze the cream. He didn't patent the ice cream maker, but it made homemade ice cream possible. Read about the evolution of ice cream from snow to Rocky Road at Readers Digest.

See also: The history of the ice cream cone, the ice cream truck, and popsicles.

(Image credit: Peachyeung316)

Turn the closed captions on before watching this video. The Dayton Off Road & Outdoor Expo was held this past weekend in Wilmington, Ohio. It has nothing to do with Star Wars or pop culture, but Luke Skywalker was there. Or rather, Fluke Skywalker, who looks a lot like Mark Hammill and makes appearances to benefit children's charities. He will even officiate your wedding! (Hammill calls him a "lukealike.") Anyway, Skywalker met Robert at the expo, and knew just how to communicate. He even signs "May the Force be with you." -via Digg