The best part of the traditional Thanksgiving feast is the dressing, unless you call it stuffing. The basic recipe for both is the same: bread, turkey broth, onions and celery, and spices. My recipe calls for cornbread and lots of sage, others use white bread, sometime sausage or oysters, and an article at Lifehacker mentions eggs, although I never found eggs necessary.
In the South, it's called dressing. If you call it stuffing in the South, people will think you are making Stovetop Stuffing, the instant stuff that comes in a box. In the West, it's more likely to be called stuffing. Other areas vary between the two terms. Semantically, it is stuffing if you put it inside the turkey to be cooked, and dressing when it is cooked separately and served on the side. Still, people tend to use the word common in their region instead of by how it is used.
No matter what you call it, you shouldn't cook the stuffing inside the bird, though, regardless of what your ancestors did. The reasons why are spelled out at Lifehacker.
Elastigirl, one of the main characters from Pixar's The Incredibles movie franchise has notably wide hips and a muscular behind. Or, at least, certain especially attentive people noticed this while watching the movie.
Personally, I watch The Incredibles for the plot.
Elastigirl is not alone. Like the mother from Dexter's Laboratory, she has "Hartman Hips." YouTuber fullcomma explains that this is artistically necessary and, in fact, tasteful.
Animators must reasonably convey the differences between sexually mature and immature bodies. Elastigirl, a middle aged mom, is precisely the former. Violet Parr, a teenage girl, is definitely the latter. The two must be differentiated.
Animators could give Elastigirl large breasts, but a very busty character would likely be seen as sexualized in our culture and thus inappropriate for a children's cartoon. Giving her wide hips, on the other hand, expresses that she is a full grown woman without arousing purient interests by viewers. Thus the audience can enjoy the film for the storytelling alone.
-via Twisted Sifter
🍦 They look like chicken nuggets, but they're actually ice cream covered in cereal crumbs by Milk & Cream Bar in New York. The snack comes in cardboard containers you'd usually get with actual chicky nuggies, and even comes with a container of honey dipping sauce. Yum!
🚁 It's 2021, where's my flying car? Well, that may still be ways off, but how about a flying electric multicopter? Swedish startup Jetson unveiled its eVTOL (electric vertical take off and landing vehicle) called Jetson One that looks like a podracer straight out of Star Wars.
😻 When Liam Thompson noticed that his 20-year-old cat named Frodo had trouble walking up and down a set of stairs, he decided to to help by building a cat elevator.
🕹️ Thumby: a teeny tiny game system the size of your thumb.
🏰 A man's home is his castle, but this house in Michigan is actually shaped just like one. And now it's for sale for $2.3 million. Look inside.
🧶 If you ended up buying that castle above, then this would be the perfect bed for your pet cat: crocheted cat castle pet bed.
🌳 Mill Ends Park, the world's smallest park, is moving ... 6 inches to the left.
🖖 Star Trek replicators, how do they work?
🎲 Lastly, a cafe like no other: a retired elementary school teacher in Virginia opens Unplugged Cafe and stocks it with 700 board games to encourage family to play together.
Today's link round up brought to you by our new network of sites: Pictojam, Infinite 1UP, Supa Fluffy, Homes & Hues, Pop Culturista and Laughosaurus. Go check 'em out!
Image: Milk & Cream Cereal Bar
In the 1980s and the decades afterward, a cult flourished that revolved around Ior Bock, a Finn who claimed to be descended from mystical ancient pagans. Bock was once a well-known actor in Finland, and he spent years as a tour guide for a historical site until he was let go for embellishing his historical tales. Honestly, Ior Bock's biography is bonkers, involving incest, adoption, fratricide, showbiz, cult leadership, mental illness, paraplegia, and murder -and some of it is true.
In the 1970s and '80s, Bock spent his summers in Goa, India, which was at the time a refuge for hippies looking for enlightenment. He told the story of his family's saga as the keepers of history. It explained the origins of all the people of the world and how they are related, as well as the pagan paradise that was once the North Pole, but is now in Finland. Bock gathered followers and told them of a temple called Lemminkäinen that was a chamber full of treasures from the early civilizations he spoke of.
So, since 1987, a small but dedicated team of amateur archaeologists have been excavating the Temple of Lemminkäinen on the Bock family estate.
According to Ior Bock, the temple was sealed in 987AD to protect the pagan artefacts from Catholic crusaders who invaded Finland, so the first job was to open it back up.
They've been digging for more than 30 years now. Dutch author Carl Borgen traveled from Canada to Goa as a teenager and heard Bock's saga, but didn't follow him back to Finland. He kept in touch with friends who did, and now had published a book called Temporarily Insane, which is an account of Bock and his followers. Read an overview of Bock, Borgen, and the book at The Scotsman. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Paasikivi)
Just like clockwork, the end of the Halloween season means Christmas shopping is upon us. And every year, the John Lewis Christmas ad campaign sets the standard for holiday advertising that makes you go all verklempt inside. This year's ad offers us a close encounter, a new friend, and an out-of-this-world experience. Science fiction meets Hallmark, as it were. A YouTube commenter said, "Explain the plot of E.T in 2 mins. Oh, but make it set at Christmas.” His classmates are not going to believe this story when school starts again after the holidays. As many years as I have been posting John Lewis Christmas ads, I still don't know what they sell.
To someone who's not into chemistry, the Periodic Table of Elements may seem incomprehensible. Looking at it without understanding is downright boring. For that matter, looking at it can be boring even if you do understand it. So how about a bit of poetry to make the elements relatable? That's what we get with Elemental haiku. Here are some samples.
Neon
There's no shame in it.
Advertising pays the bills.
Stop looking so red.
Arsenic
Called in for questions,
blacklisted, cannot quite shake
your poisonous past.
Radium
Licked by the women
painting luminous watches.
How much time stolen?
See, every element has a story, one that can be told in seventeen syllables. Elements matter, so to speak. Check out all the elements at Elemental haiku. -via Nag on the Lake
A question used for the 2014 US Physics Olympiad team qualifying exam managed to stick around because it was so intriguing. If you hang a flexible but consistent rope underneath a moving helicopter, which of the above shapes would that rope take? I figured that would depend on other factors, but let's assume they are not carrying a piano or a rhino. Derek Muller of Veritasium decided to find out once and for all, so he hired a helicopter and a pilot to do the experiment. Think about how you would answer the question, maybe even write it down, and then watch the video.
It's pretty neat that he also tracked down the origin of the question and interviewed the guy who came up with it. Don't be concerned with the length of the video; the basic question is answered in about four minutes, but then they add some confounding factors that you'll find quite interesting. The last minute is an ad. -via Digg
🎵 Love music and snacks? Combine the two by turning band names into food puns! Like Fleetwood Mac and Cheese, James Brownie, Stevie Wonder Bread, and many more.
🏠 This man's family lived in a 500-year-old house for 30 years before he discovered that there's a secret room behind his bookshelf, and a mysterious old safe. So, what's inside the safe? Let's find out.
💰 This city will give you $5000, gift cards to the farmer's market, home cooked meals and "grandparents on demand" if you move there.
👶 Man recreated their maternity photoshoot with his one-year-old daughter to honor his late wife.
🐱 Woman messed with this cat by turning it into a zen garden. But whatever you do, don't mess with this cat, who'll defend its food from a wild bobcat.
🌎 This is what the Earth and the Sun look like from the South Pole of the Moon.
🐊 Three eyelids, retractable in battle, and night vision: why crocodile eyes are an engineering marvel.
Today's link round up is from our new sites: Pop Culturista, Homes & Hues, Supa Fluffy, and Pictojam. They've got a new frontpage design, so please check 'em out! Thank you!
Facebook has been in the news lately for reinforcing preconceived notions and contributing to information bubbles. That's because the algorithm loading your feed is programmed to give you more of the same kinds of things you've shown interest in before. It's not the only social media platform to do this, and all kinds of websites are glad to recommend that you read "more like this." You can understand why they do that, but without some effort, you'll end up being recommended the same subjects over and over until you may begin to think that's all there is. Clive Thompson calls that "a form of intellectual monocropping." This applies to more than just politics or pandemic information. If you are into crocheting, football, veganism, or Marvel comics, and you keep following recommendations, you can end up missing out on a lot of the other things that the web has to offer.
Of course, you, being a Neatorama reader, have varied interests and already know that the internet is more than just social media. However, you may want to try some new ways to expand both your web surfing and offline interests. Clive Thompson has put a lot of thought into this, and gives us nine methods he uses to get out of a rut and into something fascinating you wouldn't have considered otherwise. -via Kottke
(Image credit: Flickr user Jennifer C.)
You've heard the phrase "dead as a doornail" before, but it never made much sense, because all inanimate objects are just as dead. Besides, doors are now more likely to be held together with staples and glue than with nails. Maybe whoever coined the phrase just liked the alliteration. But there's more to it than that.
This video starts off talking about the phrase, but fairly quickly turns into a chapter in the history of carpentry. It has to do with the particular challenge of joining flat slabs of hand-hewn wood side-to-side to build a door, back when nails were hand-made. The video ends up being way more interesting than you expect. -via reddit
This odd picture has a wonderful story behind it.
A redditor who goes by Wildlife-outside works at a nature center that has hawks and owls and she got used to handling what we would consider dangerous birds. She also became a volunteer bird rescuer, and now get calls when a situation arises. One day, a bald eagle collided with a bucket truck and was injured. Authorities called her for help while she was in the middle of dying her hair! Wildlife-outside responded and chased the injured eagle through a swamp before wrapping him up in a blanket. Yes, he's a wrapped raptor. He had already tried to bite her in the face, which would have made a very different picture. She put the eagle in a box and drove it to a wildlife rehabilitation center, but not before her husband took a one-of-a-kind snapshot. The eagle doesn't look happy at all, and she has a thousand-yard stare that says, "You have to take a picture NOW?"
The fallout: In case you're wondering, the dye job came out just fine. This type of color doesn't contain any bleach, but you still want to wait until it's finished to show it off. Wildlife-outside doesn't know what happened to the eagle, but is certain that the rehab center took good care of it. While it took her months to get up the nerve to share the picture, the post at reddit got 85K upvotes and 24K comments in only eight hours. I would love to say that a good time was had by all, but neither she nor the eagle had fun saving the bird's life. We are just glad she did.
(Image credit: Wildlife-outside)
Update: by request, she did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) post as a follwup.
Her life began in the countryside. A skill with poisons brought her to the heart of the empire. Jennifer Wright (@JenAshleyWright) on the world's (potential) first serial killer.https://t.co/Tn1B66oUIj
— CrimeReads (@CrimeReads) November 2, 2021
Some may consider Locusta of Gaul to be the world's first serial killer, but she was probably just the first one that was well-documented. She didn't kill for thrills, though. She was a professional. Locusta was born in the countryside where she learned the powers of plants for both healing and killing. Upon moving to Rome, she found out how many people wanted to kill each other, so she went into business providing poisons.
Locusta came to be so well-known that she was eventually arrested, but then was saved from punishment in 54 CE by Agrippina, who wanted to kill her husband, Claudius, and needed professional help. Then Agrippina's son, Nero, gave Locusta the title of Imperial Poisoner! Read how she carried out her most famous murders, and eventually paid for them, at CrimeReads. -via Damn Interesting
Mr. Andrew Cotter frames this as a bedtime story for his two dogs, Olive and Mabel. Mabel is having trouble sleeping and is very attentive. Note her adorable head tilt! Olive, not so much. Olive falls asleep during the story, but Mabel really gets into it, and so will you, as Cotter (previously at Neatorama) is a Scottish broadcaster for BBC Sports and has a lovely voice that you must listen to carefully or you'll miss his delightful one-liners ("I'm too handsome to die!"). Get ready to be spooked by the pale wolf in the woods.
The story turns out to be truly terrifying for dogs, particularly the final line, which causes Mabel to freak out a bit. Surely that will help her get to sleep. And give her nightmares. -via Laughing Squid
He’s tall, mysterious, and a great listener. He’s a bit scary, which a lot people find hot. It’s no wonder that this woman fell in love with the 12-foot tall skeleton from Home Depot.
Anthony DiMieri’s short film “My New Boyfriend” tells the story of a young woman played by Chiara Gerek. After living for several years in New York City, she’s dated all sorts of men, but can’t find anyone serious—and anyone she wants to be serious about. Then she met the 12-foot skeleton from Home Depot and her life changed.
-via Laughing Squid
In other news: read an interview with Lance Allen, the product executive at Home Depot who invented the 12-foot tall skeleton.
-via Amanda Brennan
McDonald's is getting into the market for meatless burgers with the new McPlant. It's a hamburger with no ham. Scratch that, it's a hamburger with no beef, either. By this weekend, it should be available at a small number of American McDonald's outlets. It's not the first meatless fast food burger, as Burger King has been selling the Impossible Burger for a couple of years now.
Despite the name, the McPlant is not vegan, although it may be pass as vegetarian. It is normally served with cheese and mayonnaise, and it will be cooked on the same grill as regular burgers, at least in the US. In the UK, the McPlant is grilled on a separate cooking surface, and the cheese and mayo are also made of plants, making it certified vegan burger.
But how does it taste? Mat Smith has tried it and he says, "it tastes like... a McDonald’s burger." Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is entirely up to you. Read the rest of his review at Engadget. -via Fark
