If Laura Ingalls Wilder were alive today, she would be celebrating her 150th birthday. Late in life, she wrote down her recollections of a childhood spent in the frontier of the United States. She was advised that those tales would do better as a children's book. It did, and grew into a series of books. Fans of the Little House books who aren't serious students of Wilder's work might be surprised to find out how fictionalized those stories were.

From the moment the Ingalls family sets out in their wagon and leaves the Little House in the Big Woods, the Little House books show an unceasing push West. Real life and Manifest Destiny don’t always line up, though, and in fact the Ingalls family tracked back and forth several times before setting down in De Smet, South Dakota.

The Ingalls family’s first stop after Wisconsin was Independence, Kansas (with a possible stop in Missouri), where they built a “little house” on the open prairie. But the land was not theirs to settle: It was owned by the Osage people [PDF] and the Ingalls family, like thousands of other settlers, were squatters waiting for the Osage to be driven out so that the United States could take it over. It’s not entirely clear why the Ingalls family left, but instead of continuing west they went back to Wisconsin.

Next, they went west again, this time settling near Walnut Grove, Minnesota. Then, financial difficulties, illness, and a plague of locusts forced them to move on. They went to visit family elsewhere in Minnesota, but while there, Laura’s 10-month-old brother, Freddie, died after a sudden illness. Then they continued on to Burr Oak, Iowa, where they ran a hotel. The Ingallses then backtracked to Walnut Grove, where Mary lost her vision, then went west again and eventually settled in what is now South Dakota.

Nonetheless, Laura and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who heavily edited and helped develop the first books, decided that the fictional Ingallses should always move West. The result is a sense of wanderlust and movement that gives the series its structure.

Some of the changes were to make the books simpler or more child-friendly, while others made the family look more ethical and self-sufficient -and some were probably due to poor recollection. Of course, the TV series Little House on the Prairie threw accuracy out the window for the sake of drama. Read the rest of the list of Ways the Little House on the Prairie Books Stretched the Truth at mental_floss. 

American ice sculptor Tim Linhart tells us about making musical instruments out of ice, which led to concerts, which led to a concert hall made of ice.  

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The musicians of Ice Music play in the Lapland town of Luleå, Sweden. They are preparing for the Ice Music Festival February 10 and 11. The concerts will be free, if you can get to Luleå in time.

Inertia can be your enemy. An object in motion tends to stay in motion, especially on ice. The owner of this bike had disabled the kill switch, but it is equipped with snow tires to use on frozen Lake Minnetonka. When he failed to mount the moving bike, it took off on its own for a little solo adventure!  

(YouTube link)

See the Benny Hill version if you prefer. Giant Asparagus filmed this, on a stabilized camera while on foot. He's in really good shape to keep up with the bikes! Anyway, the NorthernWheelies video they were trying to get that day is here.  -via reddit

Jürgen Horn and Mike Powell are exploring the world by living in a new place for 91 days at a time. They are now in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (which the residents still call Saigon) just in time for the New Year celebrations!   

One of the main arteries for Tet festivities in Saigon is along the broad avenue of Nguyên Huệ. The road is shut off to traffic, and the center of the boulevard filled with flower sculptures and monuments. We visited on the actual day of the New Year (Jan 28th) and were immediately swept up in the street’s celebratory buzz. In the evening, thousands of people were crammed onto the street, and everyone seemed to be having fun.

It’s interesting to be introduced to a culture during its biggest holiday. Parties, music, traditions and fun? You couldn’t ask for a better first impression.

See a slew of pictures (and a couple of videos) of the celebration, and read about some Tet traditions at Saigon For 91 Days.

The cat named Pooh was brought in to a Bulgarian animal shelter with multiple injuries, including two missing legs. Locals thought he might have been the victim of a train, since he hung out near the tracks. Doctors at Central Veterinary thought he was a good candidate for some groundbreaking prosthetic technology. A machine translation from the Bulgarian page on Pooh explains his treatment.

The chance of Pooh is called ITAP prosthetics or placing implants that replace the missing part of a leg directly into the bone.

This is an innovative form of prosthetic limbs, a new medicine for human and animal described isolated cases in the literature.

The aim of the fitting is placing titanium stalk (stem) in bone paw and its subsequent attachment to the outer (exo) prosthesis.

The method has enormous advantages over standard external prostheses in animals that require daily maintenance by the owner to bear is difficult (in cats, even if at all) and often cause complications. With ITAP proteza, all these drawbacks are avoided.

Continued "implementation" of titanium implant in the body is a huge challenge, it happens during a slow process that lasts between 6 and 8 weeks.

Pooh is the first cat in Eastern Europe (and the second cat in all of Europe) to receive two bionic hind legs. According to the shelter's Facebook page, the cost of his surgery has been covered by donations, and he is up for adoption. Read Pooh's story and see plenty of pictures at KittenToob. Through the sequence of pictures, you can see the progress Pooh has made not only in adjusting to new legs, but in his overall health.

ChiefAcorn is a tech at a veterinary hospital and shared this email. Maggie was up before anyone else in her house Sunday and had a scare. When you're 12, you really don't know whether your fears are unfounded or if it's time to wake everyone up. But she was really concerned about Shadow. We can be glad that Shadow is okay, because it took the clinic a whole day to find and respond to the email.

Yes, her parents probably calmed her fears as soon as they got up. But it's still a touching episode. -via reddit

The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!

Ig Nobel achievements distilled into limerick form
by Martin Eiger, Improbable Research Limerick Laureate

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK. For details of all the Ig Nobel Prizewinning achievements, see each year’s special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine, and also see the list of winners at Improbable Research.

2015 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize

The prize was awarded to Callum Ormonde and Colin Raston, and Tom Yuan, Stephan Kudlacek, Sameeran Kunche, Joshua N. Smith, William A. Brown, Kaitlin Pugliese, Tivoli Olsen, Mariam Iftikhar, and Gregory Weiss, for inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg.

Professor Colin Raston (Image credit: Flinders University)

(The research is documented in the study “Shear-Stress-Mediated Refolding of Proteins from Aggregates and Inclusion Bodies,” Tom Z. Yuan, Callum F. G. Ormonde, Stephan T. Kudlacek, Sameeran Kunche, Joshua N. Smith, William A. Brown, Kaitlin M. Pugliese, Tivoli J. Olsen, Mariam Iftikhar, Colin L. Raston, and Gregory A. Weiss, ChemBioChem, vol. 16, no. 3, February 9, 2015, pp. 393–396.)

No matter how strongly I toiled,
My efforts were constantly foiled.
There’s a recipe now.
Ormonde has shown how
 

2015 Ig Nobel Economics Prize

“@KhaosodEnglish: Policeman Rewarded 10,000 Baht For Declining Bribe http://t.co/Ys2LqeVdEL pic.twitter.com/V8a226VdSV”< *slow clap*

— the grugq (@thegrugq) October 9, 2014

The prize was awarded to the Bangkok [Thailand] Metropolitan Police, for offering to pay policemen extra cash if the policemen refuse to take bribes.

In Bangkok, the crime is eternal.
It’s brutal, ferocious, infernal.
Policemen fight crime
On the streets all the time,
But keep bribery strictly internal.

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the March-April 2016 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.

(Image credit: Flickr user Yelp Inc.)

When the bar closes or the house party is broken up by the cops, college food suddenly seems like the best thing ever. Check out these dorm-room favorites.

“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here,” Grammy award-winning songwriter Dan Wilson frequently sings to the unwashed masses at many a college town bar around the country. (Fun fact: He won that Grammy not with Semisonic, but for writing a Dixie Chicks song.) And often, they don’t go home. Instead, they go to restaurants made for easing the next morning’s hangovers. Or they do go home, but then they order late-night food that gets delivered to dorm rooms so fast, they freak. Today’s Tedium looks at the cottage industry of college-town food in all its dark alchemy.

The Pizza Place Where Gumby Still Lives

The saddest part about the evolution from traditional animation to 3D might be the fact that once impressive hand-crafted techniques for creating eye-popping visuals suddenly seem old hat.

Which means that Gumby is a forgotten icon of youth that rarely comes up anymore. The claymation bellwether hasn’t regularly been on the air since the 1980s, when it had a brief comeback on the back of an iconic Eddie Murphy sketch on SNL.

(Hollywood is full of blockheads, clearly.)

One place where the memory stays alive, however, is on college campuses, where Gumby’s Pizza menus have been sitting on mini-fridges since the ’80s. (In one case, however, Gumby’s declining name recognition actually led the local franchisee to change its name entirely. Sorry, Gumby.)

The Yelp reviews of the pizza and capital-I Important sides say it all: Gumby Pizza is perfect drunk food. Especially the Pokey Stix. Especially.

We've posted before about banana republics, but the story is a long and sordid one, so there are always details you didn't know about. Sam O'Nella Academy (previously at Neatorama) colorfully explains how the banana republics came into being. Contains NSFW language.  

(YouTube link)

This overview, while both entertaining and horrifying, barely scratches the surface of the violence and misery these trade wars brought to Central and South America. The 'nanners must flow! -via reddit

In 1885, the mining community of Rock Springs, Wyoming, exploded in anger over Chinese laborers working in the mines. None of the coal miners were getting rich, but the immigrants were paid less and diluted the power of the white miner's union demands.

The fight in the mines broke out around 7 a.m. on September 2, 1885, when about ten white miners approached the Chinese workers in coal pit № 6, claiming they had no right to work in the high-yield mine. A brawl erupted between the men and three Chinese miners. One Chinese worker took the fatal blow of a pickaxe to the skull. The site’s foreman broke up the fight, and the white men took off, setting in motion a conflagration that would last into that night.

The gang of men did not retire after the fight; instead they armed themselves with guns, knives, clubs, and hatchets. At 10 o’clock, miners gathered in the Knights of Labor hall, where anger echoed and reverberated. After the meeting they filed into shops and saloons, where barmen soon began to sense the growing hostility and aggression, and at the urging of a Union Pacific official, closed their establishments around 2 p.m. On the move, the mob swelled to some 100 to 150 miners and townspeople, some of them women, armed and looking for what they considered retaliation.

Before the riot was over, 28 people were dead, and the rest of the Chinese were expelled from Rock Springs, set to wander down the tracks. Read the story of the Rock Creek Massacre at Timeline. -via Digg

You may tell yourself that you don't follow cultural rules of rank, formality, and etiquette, but that's only because what you know and do are so ingrained that it's unconscious. I don't have a smartphone, which makes a situation like this much simpler. However, I've had discussions with my kids in which they were forced to explain why they follow the steps of modern communication formalities they way they do. Only then did they understand how complicated and ridiculous those unwritten rules can be. Yeah, texting because someone may be in class makes plenty of sense, but in other situations, you can just go ahead and admit that you want to control the timing of responses for maximum effect. This is the latest comic from Zach Weinersmith at SMBC Comics.

The Atlanta Humane Society was looking for a home for Grant, an adorable special needs kitten. Grant has cerebellar hypoplasia, a condition we first posted about in 2007. Grant was passed over by many potential adopters, but when Emma Wheat met him at a PetCo event, she couldn't get him out of her head.

Emma Wheat didn’t rush headlong into the adoption, but after meeting Grant and getting to know him for a minute or two, Emma went home and did her homework on Grant’s condition and what it would mean to take him into her home. Come next morning, Emma was the first person in line at the Human Society, a big smile on her face as she asked to adopt Grant then and there. She’d done her due diligence and found that not only was she able to take Grant into her home, she simply couldn’t wait any longer.

Having learned what she would need to do in order to keep up with his medical needs, Emma then made preparations for Grant to come home with her before ever making her way back to the Human Society. Emma even professed that she couldn’t sleep the night before adopting him, claiming that she was ready and more than willing to take Grant into her home.

Grant is doing well and is having fun in his new home. Eventually, the kitten will have a job of sorts. Wheat is a music therapist for children who have developmental disabilities, and Grant will be a fine example of how disabilities don't preclude happiness. Read his entire story at KittenToob. 

The following article is from the new book Uncle John’s Uncanny Bathroom Reader.

We tend to think of being very sleepy as, well, just being very sleepy. But if you’re in a position of serious responsibility—really bad things can happen. Here are a few examples.

1. SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER

Disaster: On January 28, 1986, the NASA space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after taking off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, killing all seven crew members on board.

Sleep Deprivation: The night before the disaster, NASA officials held a conference call with officials from Morton Thiakol, the company that designed the shuttle’s rocket boosters. One of Thiakol’s engineers recommended canceling the launch, due to the cold weather forecast for the next day, telling NASA officials that cold temperatures could adversely affect equipment in the boosters—which could cause an explosion. NASA declined to cancel the launch. An investigation into the disaster found that it was indeed caused by the cold weather. The investigation also found that sleep deprivation, caused by a culture of overwork at NASA, played a critical role in the decision by the managers to ignore the engineer’s advice: two of the top managers involved in the conference call had been awake for 23 hours straight at the time of the call, and they had slept for only three hours the previous day. “The willingness of NASA employees in general to work excessive hours, while admirable,” the official report into the disaster said, “raises serious questions when it jeopardizes job performance, particularly when critical management decisions are at stake.”

2. AIR FRANCE FLIGHT 447

The following article is from the new book Uncle John’s Uncanny Bathroom Reader.

If you make it to the ripe old age of 100, hardly a day will go by that someone won’t ask you what’s the secret of living to such a ripe old age. There’s only about a 1 in 1,000 chance that a 100-year-old person will become a “supercentenarian” —live to see their 110th birthday. So how did these folks make it that far? Here’s how these old-timers answered the question.

 (Image credit: Johnrabe)

Gertrude Baines, Los Angeles, California (115)
Ate plenty of bacon, fried chicken, and ice cream, but “she never did drink, she never did smoke, and she never did fool around.”

Dolly Saville, Wendover, England (100 years old)
The world’s oldest barmaid began “pulling pints” (pouring beer) at the Red Lion pub in 1940 and was still at it until shortly before her death in 2015. It’s estimated that she pulled more than 2 million pints over those 75 years. “I love my work and I love the people, it keeps me going and stops me from sitting around,” she said.

Fauja Singh, London, England (105)
Singh, also known as the “Turbaned Tornado,” took up marathon running in his 80s and was still competing at the age of 104. “To me, the secret is being happy, doing charity work, staying healthy, and being positive,” he says. “If there’s something you can’t change, then why worry about it? Be grateful for everything you have, stay away from people who are negative, stay smiling, and keep running.”

Pauline Spagnola, Plains Township, Pennsylvania (100)
“Drink a lot of booze!”

Hidekichi Miyazaki, Tokyo, Japan (104)
The world’s oldest competitive sprinter attributes his longevity to the fact that he “exercises daily, eats in moderation, and chews his food properly.”

Dorothy Howe, Saltdean, England (100)
“I put my health down to whiskey and cigarettes,” Howe told England’s  Daily Mail newspaper after hitting the century mark in November 2013. She prefers Bell’s Scotch whiskey and has smoked 15 Superking Black cigarettes every day since picking up the habit at the age of 16. That comes to more than 460,000 cigarettes over 84 years. “I keep telling myself that I’m going to quit smoking when they put the prices up, but that’s just not going to happen now.”

In 1938, Walt Disney produced an audacious film that was several years in the making: a full-length feature film that was all cartoon! Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs set the stage for everything that would come after for Disney, both Walt and the company he founded. Everything about the production was an experiment. Lets have a little Snow White trivia.

There are several “hidden Mickeys” in Snow White (and a website that tracks them). Look at the wall behind the Queen when she rushes into her laboratory.

Snow White is the youngest Disney princess. She’s 14 years old.

During the making of Snow White, Walt Disney paid his staff five dollars for each successful “gag” that could be used in the film. One example is Ward Kimball’s idea that the dwarfs’ noses should pop one by one over the foot boards while peeking at Snow White.

There's lots more movie trivia about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at Flavorwire.