People who saw Violet and Daisy Hilton in a sideshow or performing on the vaudeville stage saw two smiling and well-groomed young ladies performing musical numbers. Their draw was that they were conjoined twins connected at the pelvis. What audiences did not see was the kind of lives the Hilton Sisters led.

Born in 1908 in Brighton, England, the twins' mother sold them to her employer, bar owner Mary Hilton, who saw the opportunity to make money off the sisters. She exhibited them in her bar, then at fairs and circuses. When the paying customers were gone, the girls were kept under wraps and treated as objects. When Hilton died, the "ownership" of Violet and Daisy was transferred to her daughter Edith and son-in-law Myer Myers. The couple toured with the twins, making thousands of dollars a week, while Violet and Daisy didn't see a penny, nor were they educated beyond what was necessary for their performances. When they finally broke free of the Myers, they were 23 years old and totally naive about directing their own lives and finances. That left them vulnerable to further exploitation, and as adults, they became fodder for tabloid gossip about their sex lives. Read the lucrative but tragic tale of Violet and Daisy Hilton, 1908-1969. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Progress Studio New York)

See also: Chained for Life, a feature film starring the Hilton Sisters.

In case you are avoiding the crowds at the Black Friday sales, sit back and learn something about how this Christmas shopping madness got started. Everyone knows the name Macy's because of the Thanksgiving Day parade, and from the movie Miracle on 34th Street. In fact, Macy's invented the concept of the "Christmas shopping season" by staging the annual parade. But that is far from the only retail innovation Macy's brought us.

These innovations included fixed pricing, pay as you buy, pricing in non-round numbers, Christmas window displays, and having Santa Claus right there in the store. Innovative and relentless promotion caused Macy's flagship store to grow to two million feet! That was 100 years ago; it's back down to a million now. Macy's bought up stores outside of New York that benefited from the name, peaking at around 850 stores in 2018. Since then, Macy's has cut back due to the decline of malls, but the brand is still synonymous with the heyday of department store shopping. -via Laughing Squid

It's a rather common practice for kindergarten teachers to ask students how to make Thanksgiving dishes. Chris Duffy has a friend who teaches a kindergarten class, and asks her students to collaborate on recipes. Then she prints up the recipes in book form every year. The above is the 2024 class recipe for stuffing/dressing. I'm not sure how much 200 meters of honey is, but I suppose it compliments the toppings.

Duffy also posted the recipes for turkey (which includes a decorative tent made of turkey bones), cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie at Threads. Other teachers and parents contributed recipes they saved from similar assignments over the years. -via Kottke

Happy Thanksgiving, everyturkey. Stay safe out there. Cartoonist Tyson Cole reminds us that the humans are on the hunt this day. It's like a Purge. So stay inside, lock your doors, and keep your mind clear of the horror films that you watched.

Norfolk Island is a community of about two thousand people in the south Pacific Ocean that are governed by Australia. They have a unique heritage with much of the population descended from the mutineers of HMS Bounty. The island is a mixture of Tahitian, English, Australian, and mutineer cultures.

There's even an American element. During the Nineteenth Century, American whalers frequently visited Norfolk. When an islander became the American consul, he decided to put on an American Thanksgiving Day celebration.

The practice stuck, although Gastro Obscura explains, the Norfolk approach has a local flavor. Churches are decorated with corn. There are pumpkin pies, but there are also coconut pies. Tahitian fish salads and many banana dishes appear at the feasting table. Norfolk is almost self-sufficient agriculturally and the Thanksgiving Day menu proves it.

It had never occurred to me that one could use a Bundt pan to prepare yeast breads. But it makes sense. Bluesky user Neven Mrgan is a genius! A ring sandwich continues indefinitely with no end until you bite into it. And you don't have to think too much about which part to bite into first because they are identical.

Question: could one prepare a sandwich in the shape of a Möbius strip? If so, how?

-via Super Punch

Anyone who has followed the development of artificial sweeteners knows the story is often the same. We go from "this is the greatest thing ever" to "this causes cancer" to "it only causes cancer in rats if they eat tons of it" to "this is not good for you for plenty of other reasons." This story isn't about artificial sweeteners, but it does evoke the confusion over food safety studies, regulations, and recommendations that swing from one extreme to another.

On November 9, 1959, the US government announced that some Pacific Northwest cranberries "may have been contaminated by a weed killer that could lead to cancer in rats." This was something the public wasn't used to hearing, as it was based on a new food safety law that has since been modified. Today, we would justify eating those cranberries by 1. reading the science studies, 2. checking where they were grown, 3. washing them, and/or 4. reminding ourselves that we only eat cranberries once a year. But in 1959, people were genuinely afraid. Cranberry producers across the country were upset because Thanksgiving sales would make or break their year. Politicians tried to assuage panic. But many Thanksgiving tables in 1959 just didn't have cranberry sauce. Read about the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959 at History.com.  -Thanks, WTM!  

Chef Alton Brown shows us the ways we should not prepare a Thanksgiving turkey, but which may appeal to a certain portion of internet users. He calls this "Hazardous Turkey Cookery for Adrenaline Junkies." In part one, above, he addresses the dangers of deep-fryinging a turkey and how to make that adventure somewhat safer. Then he attempts to cook a turkey by electrocution, which involves attaching electrical wires directly to the bird instead of putting it into an electric oven. The results are rather implausible. But in part two, he harnesses an actual cooking method from Norway.

Yes, he really cooked a turkey with molten glass. It seems a valid cooking method until you get into the details. How do you get the turkey out of the glass? When the glass is hot, you could burn yourself or leave drops behind. If you wait until it cools, you'll have glass shards in your food. You'll be pleased to know that no one actually ate the turkey cooked in glass for those exact reasons. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Update: It has come to my attention that there is a third installment in this series. Continue reading to see it. 

It's become somewhat of a national pastime to surf Zillow listings to look at houses for sale. Some do it to dream, or to see how the other half lives, while others do it to keep up with local property values or to peek into their neighbor's homes. We occasionally post notable or (more likely) ridiculous real estate listings. Now there's a Zillow pricing game in which you can put that surfing experience to work. I think it's called Fliphaus.

You will be presented with two simplified listings. All you get is the location, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and an exterior picture. You decide from that information which home is listed at a higher price. The game only runs until you get one wrong, but it's easy to restart. Meanwhile, you will be insulted for your error or score. And if you haven't been keeping up with the enormous variation in housing markets across the US, you will be shocked at the price differences. Or who knows? You might even find your dream house for sale. -via reddit

A thousand years ago, there was a city in Illinois that was bigger than London at the time. Cahokia had around 15,000 people, making it the biggest city in what later became the United States. It may have had large suburbs, too, because there were once plenty of manmade mounds across the Mississippi River that were bulldozed to build St. Louis. All that's left of Cahokia now are the mounds, which are now protected and studied, and open to the public, too.

Cahokia grew so large because it was a great location with fertile fields and a big river. But it didn't last. What led to the abandonment of Cahokia? It wasn't disease brought in by Europeans, as the city was declining 200 years before Columbus landed. It may have been crop failures due to drought, maybe it was war, or maybe its residents saw better opportunities elsewhere. It didn't die out suddenly, though. PBS introduces us to what we know about the ancient city of Cahokia.  -via Damn Interesting

As we gather together with family for the annual Thanksgiving feast, some of us are filled with trepidation over tensions between family members and the possibility of spoiling the occasion. After all, there are reasons we live so far away from each other and don't get together more often. Some families took that tension to extreme.

For example, a man named Dipendra went to a family party and killed his mother, father, brother, sister, plus his uncles and aunts and a cousin. He killed nine people that evening, and therefore became the king of Nepal because his was the royal family. However, Dipendra spent his entire reign in a coma because he also tried to kill himself. His surviving uncle then became the last king of Nepal because having a monarchy wasn't going so well.

Cracked tells us of five incidents when a family feast was the setting for murder. Three were mass killings, and the other two were single murders committed men who had caused plenty of other deaths. We hope your Thanksgiving with the family will be much more peaceful.

(Image credit: Nabin K. Sapkota)

The relative dearth of Thanksgiving movies meant that Laurence Brown grew up in Britain only knowing about Thanksgiving from the film Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. The actual celebration plays a very small part in that movie, since it's from the point of view of a man just trying to get home on time. So is it any wonder that Brown was completely mistaken on what it's all about?

It's about the food. More specifically, it's about the bountiful American harvest, so the traditional dishes contain foods not all that common in Britain. With the exception of an irritating stock photo of cranberry sauce served atop mashed potatoes (which is just plain wrong), the food greatly impresses newcomers to the US. I should know, because many years there's someone at my table eating their first American Thanksgiving dinner. If someone ever tells you the US doesn't have a native cuisine, invite them to enjoy turkey, cornbread stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, and their choice of pecan or pumpkin pie.  

This video has a one-minute ad at 6:03.

The general public had no real grasp of the concept of species going extinct until 1796, and even then, their reaction was not what anyone today would expect. During the Victorian era, news that a bird species was in danger of going extinct made everyone want their own specimen. After all, rarity implies value, and no ornithologist or collector wanted to miss out on a chance to display a stuffed great auk, passenger pigeon, or ivory-billed woodpecker. Rare and exotic birds were also shot to provide feathers for ladies' hats. These actions drove species already suffering from lack of habitat into dangerously low numbers.  

Cornell ornithology professor Arthur Allen was horrified at such behavior. He preferred to study living birds and help them to thrive. In 1924 he spent months in Florida looking for the rare ivory-billed woodpecker. Allen finally located a mating pair, but while he waited for the birds to nest, poachers took them. It was eleven more years before he found another ivory-billed woodpecker and took the photo you see above. Allen spent the rest of his life working to change the scientific study of endangered species from the philosophy of "collect them while you can" to protecting such birds. Read the story of how Allen changed science forever at Smithsonian.   

(Image credit: Arthur A. Allen, watercolored by Jerry A. Payne)

If you are completely sick of Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" already this year (thanks to overexposure in previous years), give this video a listen anyway, because the tune is barely recognizable. It's there, but it's buried under the distinctive styles of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Bela Bartók. No Bach, no Liszt, and no Chopin, but don't shoot the piano player- he's only human. Pianist Josep Castanyer Alonso illustrates what these musical geniuses would do if they made modern-day covers of hit songs. The video is annotated so you can learn the terms for what is happening, even when he has to make up those terms on the spot. Still, you know if these composers were around today and had recording contracts, the record company would insist that they add some jingle bells just in case the listener couldn't recognize that the song is supposed to be Christmas song.  -via Metafilter

In 1971, an airline passenger going by Dan Cooper showed a stewardess that he had a bomb and demanded $200,000, four parachutes, and a private flight. His demands were met, and during the second flight with only Cooper and the flight crew, he jumped out of the plane somewhere between Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. He was never seen again. For 50 years, it was the only unsolved skyjacking in America.

Strangely, only five months later, Richard Floyd McCoy II pulled off an almost-identical skyjacking in Utah, in which he absconded with $500,000. McCoy was arrested soon after and convicted of the crime. He escaped from prison and was shot by FBI agents. McCoy has always been a suspect in the D. B. Cooper case, but was thought to have been too young to be the same person. Until now. Pilot and YouTuber Dan Gryder has been researching the case for decades, and in 2022 found a parachute on McCoy's property that could be the uniquely-modified parachute Cooper used when he bailed out of the plane.

Gryder was alerted to the existence of the parachute by McCoy's children, Richard II and Chanté. They were small children when the skyjackings occurred, and always suspected their father was the mysterious D. B. Cooper, but kept quiet until the death of their mother in 2020. The parachute is now in the custody of the FBI, which officially closed the investigation in 2016. It may soon be officially reopened. Read about the family's claims and the new evidence in a two part series at Cowboy State Daily, part one and part two. -Thanks, WTM!

(Images credit: FBI/public domain)