Author Kurt Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod in the 1960s, and so was following the news of the Cape Cod Cannibal with interest, and even writing about the crimes. Four young women had gone missing in 1968 and '69, and while searching for two of them, police found a third. Ultimately four mutilated bodies of young women were uncovered the same area. Police arrested Tony Costa, which drew Vonnegut further into the sensational crime. His 19-year-old daughter Edith knew Costa. Costa had even invited her to come see his marijuana patch, a line he used with many young women.   

Luckily, Edith never took Costa up on his offer, but it wasn’t because she thought he could be dangerous—Edith believed Costa was strange but harmless. Most of the area residents did, too. Despite his run-ins with the law and heavy drug use, Costa was well-liked by many in the community, especially children. He was a fun and friendly babysitter to the local kids whose parents were either too busy or too apathetic to care for their kids during the hot and hectic days of summer.

Which is why so many area residents were shocked to find out Costa was a cold-blooded killer, including Edith. “‘If Tony is a murderer, then anybody could be a murderer,’” Vonnegut reports Edith told him during a phone conversation.

Read up on Tony Costa, Kurt Vonnegut, and the Cape Cod Cannibal crimes at Mental Floss.

Sweet, tropical, and refreshing, the piña colada is a gift to the world from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Which made it worth a weeklong vacation business trip to the island to track down its origins. There are several stories: the drink is the result of a competition at the Caribe Hilton‘s Beachcomber Bar in 1954, that a different bartender there came up with it, and that another bar, Barrachina, is the original home of the piña colada. The name, at least, is even older than those claims.

Before the piña colada became the piña colada, the phrase, which translates to “strained pineapple,” was used in Cuba to indicate a nonalcoholic drink of strained, sweetened pineapple juice, optionally with coconut water. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails even notes that there were piña colada stands in the U.S. in the 1930s. “At least one American journalist suggested the obvious, that the standard pineapple-coconut drink might easily be turned into a ‘grand rum cocktail’ (this was in 1944) … but not until the late 1960s did the alcoholic version become the default one, and then it came as a Puerto Rican import,” Curtis writes.

In 1978, Puerto Rico named the piña colada as its official drink, and a year after that, “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” made its glorious debut. Was I the only one who thought that was a Jimmy Buffett song? It’s by Rupert Holmes. Anyway, in more recent years, the Puerto Rican government has formally recognized Marrero as the inventor and the Caribe Hilton as the laboratory of its creation.

This article on piña coladas is more than a history of the drink, though. It's also a love letter to the piña colada and a primer on how to make a better one. -via Digg

He's a killer queen! You have to hand it to jared531, but be sure you hand it to his right hand. You might be a Queen fan, or you might be a fan of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, or both, and combining Freddie Mercury and Freddy Krueger is simply puntastic. Jared531 wore this costume to the NY Village Halloween parade last year and was such a hit that he posted the instructions for pulling off the costume.

Sure, it's early, but the best Halloween costumes take planning. -via reddit

This video from Ohio shows a classic method of toad hunting. Just draw a circle with chalk around the animal and it will be convinced that it's trapped inside.

What other species do you think might be susceptible to this trickery?

Etsy seller Anisa Liang carves tiny, fragile pearls into unique pieces of jewelry. She's especially fond of skulls (who isn't?) and much of her work focuses on that body part. They're beautiful pieces that make we regret not knowing this was an option before I purchased an engagement ring because this is exactly the right way to pop the question.

Disney's latest effort in the Disneyland ride genre is Jungle Cruise, still in some theaters and, of course, on Disney+. The film has made millions of dollars, but performed below expectations. It has yet to break even. This Honest Trailer explains why- the source material is thin, the plot is formulaic, and everything about Jungle Cruise is borrowed from other films that did it better. However, its two hours is filled with puns and dad jokes, which cements its connection with the theme park ride, so it works as a kids movie.

I know what you're thinking: it's one more job that robots are taking away from humans. But consider that this robot's job requires access to humans. So when the robopocalypse happens, it will be necessary to keep at least a few of us around to provide employment for the EMMA. This robot, developed by the Singaporean startup company AiTreat, can customize a massage to reflect the needs of each client. CNN reports:

Using sensors and 3D vision to measure muscle stiffness, EMMA (which stands for "Expert Manipulative Massage Automation") identifies pressure points and delivers massages to patients to help offer pain relief and relaxation.

AiTreat CEO Albert Zhang describes a future dominated by these robots:

With soft-touch treatment modules warmed to a temperature of 38 to 40 degrees Celsius (100 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit), patients lying on the table might not even notice the difference between EMMA and a real-life masseuse -- but Zhang doesn't want robots to replace masseuses. Instead, he says that they can help by taking away the back-breaking work massage therapists do every day, and enable them to "focus on the 10% highly skilled part," which can increase their productivity and income while reducing the cost for patients.

-via Dornob | Photo: AiTreat

This cabinet of mysterious origin, now housed in the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam, is a miniature apothecary's workshop and collection of natural curiosities. It's a masterpiece of woodworking, as it contains perfectly fitted spaces and an almost countless number of drawers, many of them with secret openings. Scholars don't know who made it, but they do know that it was made for a wealthy physician who wanted a place to display scientific samples.

-via Messy Nessy Chic | Photo: Rijks Museum

Neatorama readers know plenty about Thomas Edison, but what do you know about Thomas Edison, Jr.? His life turned out completely different from his father's. As you might guess, the inventor, being a very busy man, did not have much time for his son, either in nurturing a relationship or in guiding him to follow his father's footsteps. And since the older Edison was a very famous man, Junior had the added burden of high expectations without the necessary training or talent.  

To mask his sensitivity and deep insecurities, Thomas Jr. took a cue from his father and turned to bravado and self-aggrandizing, and also alcohol. In New York, he soaked up the attention of journalists and reporters and made them believe that he'd be the next best American inventor, even claiming to have fashioned a light bulb better than that of his dad. The man who simply did not have his father's brains (in science) soon got involved with shady enterprises selling all kinds of snake oil products because having a guy carrying the Edison name be the head of your company sure sounded like a good idea at the time. The Thomas A. Edison, Jr. Chemical Co. sold "Wizard Ink" tablets that not only capitalized on Thomas Senior's "Wizard" moniker but were also nothing more than a mediocre writing tool with questionable testing methods behind it.

But mediocre inventions were nothing new, not even back then, and few people beside Wizard Edison batted an eye over Junior's "just add some water" ink. It wasn't until the release of the Magno-Electric Vitalizer invention in 1904 that things really started turning bad for the young Edison. Jumping on the "Woah, electromagnetism!" bandwagon, his company claimed to have invented a machine that could cure everything from paralysis, kidney disease, deafness, and menstrual cramps. Heck, they even claimed that the device could literally make a person smarter.

Read about Thomas Edison, Jr. and how his business ventures turned out at Cracked.

The animated TV series Futurama only aired until 2013, but so many things that happened in it could be set in 2021. It only makes sense, because the show was set in the future and made jokes about how the world changed since the early 2000s. Yet many of those jokes were so precient that you might even believe it really was from the future. However, Futurama writers were just following bubbling trends to their ultimate, if ridiculous, conclusions. -via Digg

All we know about dinosaurs is what we can see in their fossils. And we haven't yet found a fossil showing dinosaurs having sex in the last moments of their lives. But they must have mated, since they reproduced. Still, it's difficult to imagine, what with those armored plates and horns and thagomizers and... well, it might have been like that old joke, "How do porcupines have sex? Very carefully!" Anyway, while scientists don't know much about dinosaur sex, they have figured out a few parts of it.

Thanks largely to the discovery of once-controversial feathered fossils from China in the 1990s, we now know that birds are the only living relative of dinosaurs -- specifically, therapods, part of the same family as T. rex and Velociraptor.

"You go back 20 or 30 years, and you still have scientists saying birds aren't dinosaurs, but now we have so much more evidence that they are. So you can look at the behavior of birds and work out how some of these dinosaurs behaved," Lomax said.

Case in point is a type of scratching that male ground-nesting birds do to signal they are strong and good nest builders. It's part of behavior called lekking, when males, typically in groups, competitively dance and perform other courtship rituals to attract the attention of females.

Dinosaurs engaged in similar mating behavior, according to fossilized "scrapes" left behind in 100 million-year-old rocks in the prehistoric Dakota Sandstone of western Colorado. One site revealed more than 60 distinct scrapes in a single area of up to 164 feet (50 meters) long and 49 feet (15 meters) wide.

There's more, and it gets more explicit, at CNN. -via Fark

People have been using farts to tell jokes, insult others, play one-upmanship, and entertain crowds for as long as there have been people. Neatorama has built a reputation for fart coverage, so a list of the world's most memorable farts is catnip to us! These farts are presented in chronological order, which gives us a kind of history of flatulence, but there are more modern stories because the internet operates without the kind of filter our mothers tried to instill in us. But fart humor goes way back. One butt bomb started a war!

In Egypt in 570 BCE, a fart changed everything. King Apries had angered his people and was worried about a mutiny, sending one of his best generals, Amasis, to calm things down. However, the mutineers decided Amasis would be king instead, and he was into it. When Apries sent a messenger to bring Amasis back, Amasis farted and instructed the messenger to take that back to the king. This led to a battle, a defeat, and a new farting bottom on the throne.

The list of 20 memorable farts at Mental Floss actually has more than 20 fart stories, with links in case you don't believe them.

The Takeout takes Halloween candy very seriously, so they've compiled a seven-week deep dive into the top Halloween treats. Each week, a different facet of the top ten candies will be ranked and explained, and the data will lead to the ultimate ranking before Halloween, so that you can purchase the very best candies for trick-or-treaters. Or yourself. America's top ten most popular Halloween candies are:

Skittles
Reese’s Cups
Starburst
M&Ms
Hershey’s Miniatures (Hershey, Mr. Goodbar, Krackel)
Twix
Snickers
Sour Patch Kids
Tootsie Pops
Jolly Ranchers   

In week one, they ranked the candies by their wrappers, which, you must admit, are part of the experience. In week two, they ranked them by the nostalgia factor. Check back on Friday for the third ranking. Of course, we all know who will win in the overall competition: Reece's Cups. There can be no doubt.

Now this is a surprise! Pottery, glass, and nails were discovered by archaeologists at the site of an inn and tavern in Florence, Alabama. The team from the University of Alabama’s Office of Archaeological Research excavated the site, now called Pope’s Tavern Museum, and unearthed artifacts dated to the 1830s, and some are even estimated to predate Alabama’s admission as an official state in 1819: 

During the Civil War, Union and Confederate forces occupied Florence at different times. Both sides used Pope’s Tavern as a hospital and command center, notes Florence-Lauderdale Tourism on its website.

Today, the museum houses a number of Civil War artifacts, including a rare Kennedy long rifle and a Confederate colonel’s uniform. Staff are currently preparing for an exhibition exploring slavery and cotton in the Florence area. Among the topics set to be covered is the role enslaved workers played in constructing some of the area’s significant buildings, including Wesleyan Hall at what’s now the University of North Alabama.

Excavations at the site began with measurement of the yard in May. Then, technicians scanned the ground for anomalies and used the data to determine where to dig test pits. In addition to the pottery and other small items, archaeologists found the remains of a brick structure that may have been a hearth, privy or outbuilding, reports the Associated Press (AP). Murphy says they’re conducting a microscopic analysis of the building materials.

Image credit: Jimmy Wayne via Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

That’s nice. In order to keep troop counts a secret from enemies, ancient Chinese generals employed a mathematical technique that is very much alive in today’s modern mathematics. The ‘math trick’ involved the generals dividing their troops into different sections and rows until they had enough information to determine the total number of their soldiers without explicitly counting. In modern terms, this trick is now known as the Chinese remainder theorem:

The theorem allows you to find an unknown number if you know its remainders when it’s divided by certain numbers that are “pairwise coprime,” meaning they do not have any prime factors in common. Sun Tzu never proved this formally, but later the Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhata developed a process for solving any given instance of the theorem.

“The Chinese remainder theorem gives you an actual recipe for making a number,”said Daniel Litt of the University of Georgia.

To learn more about the theorem, check Quanta Magazine’s full piece here! 

Image credit: wikimedia commons