The Shōgun, administrative leaders who ran Japan under the emperor, have always been great fodder for dramas, but what do you know about their real history? This account goes over the early years of British contact with Japan, to coincide with the fictional account in the 1975 novel Shōgun by James Clavell. English navigator William Adams found himself in Japan in the year 1598. This began a period of communication and trade between Japan and the British and other Western powers. It only lasted a few short years until Japan decided not to have anything to do with Western foreigners anymore. If you've been following the new TV series Shōgun on Hulu, this video from Weird History might help you understand more about what Japan was really like during that time.

The TV game show Jeopardy! Is celebrating it's 60th anniversary, the the USPS is celebrating with a set of first-class stamps honoring the legacy of longtime host Alex Trebek, who died in 2020. The image on the stamp is the familiar blue tile that offers a clue from the game: "This Naturalized U.S. Citizen Is Now Honored With a Forever Stamp." The correct answer, of course, is Trebek. The categories listed above are Entertainment, Game Show Hosts, Famous Alexes, and Forever Stamps. A sheet of 20 stamps altogether looks a lot like the Jeopardy! video game board we follow on TV.  

The first date of issue ceremony will take place on July 22 at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver, City, California, where Jeopardy! is recorded. However, you can pre-order the stamps now through the USPS website. A sheet of twenty Forever Stamps will cost $14.60.

In case you weren't aware, first class postage is now 73 cents. The USPS introduced Forever Stamps in 2007 to allow people to use up the stamps they had already purchased when the price of postage goes up, which happened often. The genius behind the scheme was that people stopped paying attention to the price of postage.

-via Kottke

When a grizzly bear breeds with a polar bear, the result is a hybrid called a grolar bear. They've been spotted and studied in Canada's western Arctic. All nine identified grolar bears are descended from one polar bear mother. As far as we know, the first hybrid was born in 2000 to a polar bear mother born in 1989. She mated with two different grizzly bears and produced four hybrid offspring. Her only hybrid female offspring also mated with two grizzlies and produced five more grolar bears which are 75% grizzly and 25% polar bear.

When the first grolar bear was discovered, scientists thought that more would follow, as climate change brought the territories of the two types of bear closer together. However, no other grolar bears have been seen outside of the nine hybrids in this family. The concern is that the lineage of grolar bear has become more brown and less white with the second generation. The grolar bear mother in the first generation of hybrids was raised by a white polar bear mother, and also raised her second-generation hybrids, who are even browner, to act like polar bears as well. It cannot be easy to sneak up on a seal on an ice cap when your fur is brown. Read more about the lineage of the grolar bear family at CBC, including a family tree chart that makes it more clear. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Samuell)

William Judson Moon was away from home when his wife Molly committed suicide in 1904. By the time he returned to Caddo, Texas, she had already been buried. Moon was so distraught that he enlisted some local women to help him dig Molly back up and dress her in a new dress he had bought her, and then she was reburied. But Moon would, in a short time, insist that she be disinterred again, bathed, and redressed. This happened so many times that Moon eventually could get no one to help, so he built a mausoleum to keep Molly's corpse in, where he had access to it anytime he wanted. Chris Woodyard of The Victorian Book of the Dead brings us Mr. Moon's story from an account in the newspaper Enquirer.

The introduction to the story mentions the macabre case of Carl Tanzler, who you might recall from this post.

In double-checking the story, I found the story of the rest of Mr. Moon's life, which is almost as odd. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Gena Forsyth via Find-a-Grave)

Randall Munroe's What If? project (previously at Neatorama) received a question about draining the oceans. The original question specified a hole 20 meters in diameter for the drain. That seems big, but the draining would be too slow to even notice, especially considering the melting glaciers. Where would the water go? This is a theoretical question, so it may as well go to Mars. But if we made the hole big enough to really drain seawater, the map of the world would start to look rather weird. Since this theoretical drain is located in the Mariana Trench, it couldn't take all the earth's seawater, because there are geological formations that will trap some ocean water in large lakes. Of course, there would be mass extinctions of ocean species. But for humans, Munroe figures the Dutch will take care of controlling the diminishing water. Munroe collaborated with Henry Reich of Minute Physics to paint this picture for us. -via Laughing Squid

The headline at Mental Floss refers to "interpretations" of Shakespeare's works, so I expected them to tell us how The Lion King is based on Hamlet and 10 Things I Hate About You was an interpretation of The Taming of the Shrew, which we all know by now. But this list goes into some deep thinking that people have been doing about the relationships and motivations of Shakespeare's characters that aren't spelled out in the stories, but extrapolated from small clues in the scripts. Yes, some people have more time on their hands than you or I do, but these theories do make sense.  

For example, why does Iago so badly want to ruin Othello's marriage? Was it because he himself desired Othello? That makes more sense than just retribution for a professional slight. Was Ophelia pregnant? And MacBeth's soliloquy -the only long passage from Shakespeare I can still recite- were those words from one character or two? Then there's the Unified Antonio Theory. Read up on ten intriguing theories about Shakespeare's characters and plays at Mental Floss.

Kintsugi is the traditional Japanese craft of mending broken pottery with gold. It inspired the Brazilian advertising firm Leo Burnett Tailor Made to promote the sale of Oreo cookies by proposing that your broken Oreos chould result in a broken heart. But you can rejoin the shattered cookies with a tube of Oreo filling, which has a consistency something like molten gold.

In its promotional video, the agency expresses that it hopes to convey that customers saddened by their broken Oreos can create a new narrative for their traumatized cookies that their wounding can be a source for beauty within healing.

-via Unseen Japan

Mason Smith (@TheDadSocial) is an influencer who loves his daughters dearly and is building some extravagant core memories with them. Recently, he built them a tiny travel trailer that they can tow with their Power Wheels electric car.

It's an extraordinary build, as it has bedding, windows, ventilation, interior lights, reflectors, and a spare wheel. The family took it to a campground where the girls set up their trailer on jacks and then organized their pretend outdoor kitchen for a perfect glamping experience.

Smith notes that although the girls wanted to go camping alone, they actually slept in the family trailer and just used their own camper for naps and play.

-via Born in Space

Yep, some plants are kinda shady. That's the kind of humor you can expect in this video. Ze Frank's True Facts series (previously) is almost always about animals, but now he's veered into the world of plants. See, plants reproduce by making seeds, but keeping your offspring close by when you are rooted in the ground can become way too crowded. Plants have developed a lot of different methods of spreading their seeds far and wide. Being carried off or eaten by animals is a valid method, but throwing them out by explosive force is a lot more fun to watch. It's such a useful way to spread the next generation to new soil that many species have developed this power independently, and in many fascinating forms, from spring-loaded seeds to seeds that are designed to move around on their own and even dig their own holes! Meanwhile, Ze Frank has fun providing the sound effects for the explosions, and giggling at plant names like sphagnum, hairy wild petunia, and squirting cucumber. Some things never change. This video has a one-minute skippable ad at 3:15.

Posts from the artefactporn
community on Reddit

Last year, researchers in Egypt discovered the cemetery for senior officials and priests of the New Kingdom (1550–1069 BC) in Minya. They uncovered the coffins of two distinguished women, one of them identified as Tadi Ist, daughter of the High Priest of Djehouti in Ashmunein. Pictured above is the inside of her coffin lid. This art seems familiar, doesn't it? A woman wearing a pale green strapless dress and a tall blue headdress. Who could it be?

Redditors, of course, saw Marge Simpson right away. The red shoes and necklace are modern touches. The long-running series The Simpsons has become legendary for predicting the future, mainly because creator Matt Groening is very good at detecting trajectories. But this one goes backward in time. Who knew that when Groening designed the character, he took inspiration from the inside of a coffin lid buried thousands of miles away thousands of years ago? It only makes sense if you believe Groening is a time traveler, which some people have posited over the years. -via Cracked

If you want to build a cult around yourself, you have to learn to communicate like a cult leader. We have plenty of examples from history, and they have some common ways of speaking. First, you have to talk a lot, meaning more than anyone else. That might draw attention, but it doesn't make you a cult leader. For that, you have to learn specific techniques of communication. You have to overwhelm your followers with what you want them to believe, cut off uncomfortable questions or disagreements, and separate your followers from unbelievers psychologically. By then you'll be able to manipulate each member individually in accordance with their weaknesses, or train your most loyal officers to do it. In this episode of Otherwords, linguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) explains the regular formula for building a cult with language. Please don't try this at home. Nor should you fall for it.

I would guess that my only scholarly journal article has been read by a total of perhaps 10 people, including myself, the reviewers, and members of my family. It's hard to get people to read scholarly articles, even in the natural sciences in which scholarship, unlike literary criticism, may actually result in something useful to people.

Success may come from a spicy title and Joseph Cesario, David J. Johnson, and Heather L. Eisthen chose wisely. A screenshot of their 2020 article in Current Directions in Psychological Science has gone viral and resulted in people at least locating if not reading the article.

If I understand their article correctly after barely glancing at it, the authors address the concept of the lizard brain--that older brain structures can be found in the interior of the human brain and that more advanced mammalian structures can be found inside. They assert that this popular belief is a myth.

-via @Cookedspaghett

Minnesota is known as the "Land of Lakes", but that sobriquet would better fit Canada. Canada has so many lakes that just naming them takes a lot of work. Manitoba's innovative and morally commendable response was to name 4,200 bodies of water after individual Manitoban soldiers who gave their lives during World War II.

Did geographers just get lazy by the time that they reached these two lakes in British Columbia? No. The British Columbia Geographic Names Office gave this body of water the official name of Another Lake because that's literally what local residents have called it since at least 1946. The Office rejected the name when it was originally submitted in 1968, but eventually accepted the common usage. And Another Lake has a similar origin story.

-via Terrible Maps

If you live on the internet like I do, you are familiar with the "Cake or Fake" meme, also known as "Everything is Cake" or "Is It Cake?" It came with the rise of talented cake decorators who can make a cake that looks very much like something else. What I didn't know was that it has been made into a TV show called Is It Cake? on Netflix. It's a game show and a cooking show combined, and I suspect there may be some comedy involved. Joel Veitch has obviously been watching it, and he takes the opportunity to turn it into a horror story.

If you don't recognize the name Joel Veitch, he's the one who gave the world Viking Kittens about 20 years ago and the Quiznos Spongmonkeys that frightened people away from the sandwich shop. Veitch turned that twisted sense of humor into a real career, and it's rare to see him doing a video just for fun these days, but it's reminder of how weird his brain is. -via the Awesomer

While we are going into official summer with temperatures in the 90s, we might cool off a bit by thinking of Yakutsk, in the Yakutia region of Siberia. It's the coldest city in the world. But on the Summer Solstice, Yakutsk will double its population of 200,000 people as many others around the region join in celebrating Yhyakh, which marks the new year.

When we are celebrating a new year on January first, Yakutia only has a couple of hours of daylight and it's too cold to go anywhere. But in June, the Summer Solstice brings all-day sun and the couple hours of night aren't even all that dark. For hundreds of years, maybe even thousands, people of the Sakha culture mark Yhyakh as the new year, the start of the short summer season when laying in supplies for the winter has to be done in a hurry. People join together to sing, dance, light a fire, and make offerings to the gods. Yhyakh is also a time for young people to "meet, court, and marry." The revelry goes on all night and ends only with a sunrise celebration. Celebrating Yhyakh was forbidden during the Soviet era, but is making a comeback, both in Yakutia and in Sakha enclaves elsewhere. Read about this holiday at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Dziulita05)