Redditor Massagrauq passes along this helpful recipe for your most recent whale catch. It serves a complete meal for three whole villages. Personally, I prefer my whale heavy on the curry and light on the seal.

I'm uncertain about the origin of this recipe, but I suspect that it's in the book Arctic Home Cooking: Build Strong Families = Ikayuglugich-Payaniatiksranatigun-Anayuqaagich. That's a cookbook published by a social services agency in northwestern Alaska in 1998 or 1999.

Glitter is a pain in real life, as anyone who's done craft projects with children will tell you. But in the hands of an artist, those sparkles will make you smile. Pakistani artist Sara Shakeel uses glitter, sequins, rhinestones, and crystals both digitally and in real life to give shine and sparkle to some surprising things. Continue reading to see more.

South of San Francisco, right on Linda Mar Beach, there's a Taco Bell. It's so close that surfers need a place to stow their boards while they go inside to each, so the restaurant has a surfboard rack on the front wall.

I almost titled this "Why that tune is stuck in your head." Sea shanties have become a thing on TikTok, particularly the song "Soon May the Wellerman Come." Sea shanties are fun to sing, particularly with friends- or even strangers. The video sharing platform TikTok makes it easy for people to join in and add their voice to existing videos. When singer Nathan Evans posted his performance of the Wellerman, many others were inspired to contribute their voices. And the meme took off. The song is so infectious, you can't help but sing along.

2021 is the year of the sea shanty pic.twitter.com/ohOAGvkbtC

— Tim - Poster of Hugo Pics (@Beertheist) January 11, 2021

You can hear more of TikTok's sea shanties (ShantyTok) here. -via Metafilter

A well-preserved fossil of the dinosaur Psittacosaurus found in China has paleontologists waxing poetic about its well-preserved cloaca.  

The dinosaur's derrière is so well preserved, researchers could see the remnants of two small bulges by its "back door," which might have housed musky scent glands that the reptile possibly used during courtship — an anatomical quirk also seen in living crocodilians, said scientists who studied the specimen.

Although this dinosaur's caboose shares some characteristics with the backsides of some living creatures, it's also a one-of-a-kind opening, the researchers found. "The anatomy is unique," study lead researcher Jakob Vinther, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, told Live Science. It doesn't quite look like the opening on birds, which are the closest living relatives of dinosaurs. It does look a bit like the back opening on a crocodile, he said, but it's different in some ways. "It's its own cloaca, shaped in its perfect, unique way," Vinther said.

The rest of the article at LiveScience is not quite so awestruck at the discovery, but has more information on the Psittacosaurus fossil. They used so many different terms for butthole that another dino comes to mind -the thesaurus.  -via reddit

(Image credit: Vinther et al.)

Scientists estimate that the earth is around 4.5 billions years old. In Western Australia, you can see stromatolites, rock formations built by organisms beginning about 3.5 billion years ago. And those organisms are still with us. 

With a citizen scientist’s understanding, stromatolites are stony structures built by colonies of microscopic photosynthesising organisms called cyanobacteria. As sediment layered in shallow water, bacteria grew over it, binding the sedimentary particles and building layer upon millimetre layer until the layers became mounds. Their empire-building brought with it their most important role in Earth’s history. They breathed. Using the sun to harness energy, they produced and built up the oxygen content of the Earth’s atmosphere to about 20%, giving the kiss of life to all that was to evolve.

The stromatolites were eventually eclipsed by thrombolites, which were more adaptable. The structures built by these ancient organisms are now under threat from human populations and climate change. Read about them both at BBC Travel. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Ruth Ellison)

The 1984 film The Karate Kid was a big hit, spawning three sequels, a remake, and a Broadway show. In 2018, the original stars Ralph Macchio and William Zabka were reunited for a YouTube Red series following the lives of their characters more than three decades later. It appeared to be a ridiculous premise: two guys who peaked in high school go back to competing with each other, but Cobra Kai has proved so compelling that it's been acquired by Netflix for its third season, and has been renewed for a fourth season. It's so popular that Screen Junkies just had to take aim and do an Honest Trailer.

Have you ever considered how people made coffee before coffee makers, or even percolators, were available? When I was rather young, an older co-worker told me about his railroad days, when the crew would make a large batch of coffee in an industrial boiler by throwing coffee grounds, water, and eggs into it. This was a common workaround for percolating and filtering, as seen even today in the Lutheran church that sells Swedish egg coffee at the Minnesota State Fair.

Even in the mayhem of the State Fair, those three words on Salem Lutheran’s marquee are enough to stop the uninitiated cold. Yes, egg coffee. Jim Zieba, who’s been brewing the stuff at Salem since the 1970s, explains:

“The egg is mashed into the grounds, and the grounds are boiled in, kind of like campfire coffee,” says Zieba. “The coffee being slightly acid and egg being alkaline, they cancel each other out, and you get a very mild clear cup of coffee. A lot of people, they just love it for some reason.”

Yes, eggshells are included. Get the instructions for making egg coffee, which is not necessarily Swedish, at the Takeout.

When you think of the union suit, or one-piece long underwear, you probably think of cowboys in a Western film, or maybe Santa Claus. However, the popularity of the garment was the result of a push by feminists in the 1800s. The union suit was an answer to the restrictive dress of the time. A properly-dressed woman would numerous undergarments, long skirts, corsets, and in some periods also carried around hoops and bustles to make her skirt stand out fashionably. The union suit simplified that dress in several ways.

According to Patricia Cunningham, author of Reforming Women's Fashion, 1850-1920: Politics, Health, and Art, one of the first union suits was patented in 1868, and called the “emancipation union under flannel.” The garment combined a knit flannel shirt and pants into one piece. The long pants extended to the ankle, nixing the need for long stockings and garters, and later versions would have rows of buttons at the waist to help suspend several layers of skirts, discouraging the use of heavy petticoats that often weighed upwards of 15 pounds. Most importantly, it “emancipated” women from the pinching confines of the corset.

While it sounded like a much more comfortable option than metal crinolines and tight corsets, not many “ordinary” women rushed to buy the undergarment. Instead, it was mostly found in feminists’ wardrobes. During the first wave of the dress reform movement, which was led by prominent suffragists and women’s rights leaders like Amelia Bloomer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck in the northeast, the union suit was part of a packaged deal that would free women from frivolous fashions and make them more equal to men. Some of these activists not only championed comfortable underwear, but they also wanted to change clothing norms as a whole, which included removing bulky bustles, shortening skirts to the ankles and wearing them over pantaloons, often referred to as “bloomers.”

Union suits took some time to become universal, but eventually both men and women saw them as more comfortable, convenient, and affordable than previous underwear. Read how the union suit came about and became ubiquitous at Smithsonian.

A new world record was set as Chang Yu-Te of China managed to blow 783 soap bubbles inside another soap bubble! As always, judges from Guinness World Records had to be there when it happened, but I suppose they relied on video evidence to actually count all those bubbles. That's a job I wouldn't want to tackle. He must be using some industrial-strength soap solution! There's no mention of the previous record at the website, so this might be the first world record in this particular category. -via Nag on the Lake

Vulture has produced another list that might make you angry, or might be an opportunity to explore a movie genre you want to know more about. Westerns are particularly American movies, even when they are produced elsewhere. They range from action films to history lessons, from comedies to social commentaries, from art films to mindless romps. There are so many of them that the compilers set some limits.  

This list of the 50 greatest Westerns reflects that wide legacy from the very first entry, a film directed by a Hungarian and starring a Tasmanian. It’s been assembled, however, working from a fairly traditional definition of the Western: films set along the America frontier of the 19th and the first years of the 20th century. That means no modern Westerns, no stealth Westerns starring aged X-Men, and no space Westerns with blasters instead of pistols. (We did, however, make an exception for a certain comedy that concludes with its stars attending its own premiere.)

That, of course, still leaves a lot of great Westerns. More, of course, than could possibly fit on a top-50 list interested in capturing the full scope of the genre. As such, not every John Ford film made the list. Anthony Mann and James Stewart made eight Westerns together. Any of them could have been included, but not all of them have been. This list is designed to double as a guide to the genre’s many different forms in the hopes it will send readers to corners they might not know and reconsider some classics they might not have seen before.

The list at Vulture features synopses of each movie and a justification for its inclusion, and some trailers, although not as many as we'd like to see. -via Digg

The corpse flower isn't called that because it's dead, but rather because its smell resembles that of rotten flesh, which draws flies for pollination. But the seven existing species of corpse flowers are endangered due to human encroachment. Preventing them from going extinct is a real job, as the plants are tropical and their seeds tend to die when dried or frozen. Numbers are extremely low, and they go years between blooming, which puts their genetic diversity at stake, so a consortium of botanical gardens are working together in a project called TREES to save corpse flowers.   

To help breed on this unpredictable schedule, the Chicago Botanic Garden is creating a store of corpse flower pollen, which can be sent across the country when another specimen that isn’t closely related blooms. These targeted cross-pollination efforts could lead to more genetically robust offspring. While TREES has yet to lead to a crossing of corpse flowers, the Chicago Botanic Garden has used the methodology to strategically cross another plant called Brighamia insignis, also known as a cabbage-on-a-stick plant, which is critically endangered.

Only time will tell if this scheme can save the corpse flower. Read more about the effort at Atlas Obscura.

If you ever get into the comments at reddit, you know how they can start to resemble a free-for-all sometimes. To have some fun with the drama, South African software engineer Micah Price built an application that sniffs out controversial exchanges and sets them into the world of the video game Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. The exchanges caught so far appear to be drama for drama's sake, for the amusement of the entire forum.

Even better, everybody can join in the fun — all you need to do to trigger the bot is add "!objectionbot" or "!objection-bot" to a Reddit comment on certain supported subreddits (you can view the full list of those here). The bot then scans the thread, finds the top commenters, and turns their discussion into a YouTube video that's then automatically linked to in the thread (the "objection!" graphic happens when a comment has a negative score, or if the bot's neural network detects the tone of the comment to be negative).

Price said the whole thing took him about three days to put together. "I wasn't sure if it would be popular so didn't want to spent much longer on it," he said. "I used Python and a bunch of computer vision and machine learning libraries. It's uber buggy at the moment, though."

If you don't want to trigger the bot yourself, just keep your eye out on reddit for u/objection-bot to respond with "Here's the video!" See them linked here. Read more about the sudden rise of objection-bot at Mashable.  -via Gizmodo

A person getting struck by lightning is a rare event. Surviving a lightning strike is even rarer. And the injuries caused by a lightning strike vary so much that doctors rarely know what to do. The effects can be immediate or delayed, present in different organs, and work against each other. Then there's psychological damage, as survivors deal with fear of the outdoors and a sense that no one understands what they are going through. Shana Williams Turner was struck by lightning in 2015. No one knew how to react, so her sister searched the internet for guidance. The results said to go to the hospital.

When lightning hits a person, it sends 300 million volts of electricity across the body in three milliseconds. The current flows externally, disrupting or short-circuiting the body’s electrical systems, such as the one that controls the heart. Cardiac arrest is the most common cause of death from a lightning strike. Brain damage from blunt-force trauma caused by the shock wave is also common. The jolt can severely burn skin, and in some cases it etches an intricate web of scars on the body that resembles the form of a lightning bolt itself, known as Lichtenberg figures, which fade within days for reasons unknown. Most people survive because the lightning hits the ground nearby or passes through a taller object such as a tree, or, in Shana’s case, the transformer.

Greg pulled up to the emergency room entrance and Shana stumbled out. She felt a rising panic, as if everything was caving in on her. A security guard, sensing that something was wrong, took her under his arm and dragged her into the emergency room. When doctors learned that Shana had just been struck by lightning, she was rushed onto a gurney and hooked up to an electrocardiogram. Nurses dashed around her in a blur, taking more vitals. Later, a doctor said that her blood pressure was abnormally high, but that there were no burns or obvious signs of injury. For that reason, no additional tests were ordered. Shana stayed overnight for surveillance, leaving the next day feeling as though she knew next to nothing about what had happened to her.  

The worst effects of the lightning strike took time to emerge, and were often discounted by doctors and insurance adjusters. Shana suffered psychologically, but was that from her injuries or from the fact that no one believed in them? She finally found validation in a nationwide support group for lightning strike survivors. Read her story at Narratively. -via Damn Interesting

How many times have you seen a big, beautiful supermoon in movies? In this compilation by Ariel Avissar, you can see them together, and it just proves how wonderful that big old moon is, anyway. The music is perfect, too. -via Laughing Squid