Specialized employment, or working a job for money, has existed for only a few thousand years of human history. Before that, people were pretty much all farmers, and before that, we were hunter-gatherers. We think of that as a hard life, but studies show that procuring enough food to eat didn't take up nearly as much time as you might think. YouTuber Axen illustrates how ancient people really spent their time, and you might end up being jealous. Just remember, today we have ice cream.
But there are a couple of caveats here. This was from a time when there were fewer people and plenty of resources. Living in a warm climate meant you didn't have to spend a lot of time storing up firewood, building warm homes, and making warm clothes. That changed when humans used their free time to wander into new territory for new resources when the world grew more crowded. As that happened, they eventually had to spend more time defending the community from enemies as well. And no matter what time period you target, women still had the added burden of reproduction and child care.
Or, if you're a bit older, think of the Mikiphone as the world's first Walkman. This invention by Miklós and Étienne Vadász manufactured in Switzerland in 1924 was one of the first means of providing portable music. It's powered by a hand-cranked spring turned a few dozen times.
It would not have occurred to me that the landlocked Idaho has access to the sea for oceanic transport, but it does. The Snake River touches the Port of Lewiston on the western border of the state. That river connects to the Columbia River and thence the Pacific Ocean.
The US Department of Transportation refers to this route as Maritime Highway M-84. Note that this route does not provide sea access for the US Navy's submarine base in Idaho.
I should mention that Lewiston is not the most inland port of the United States. That would be Duluth, which can dock oceangoing vessels traveling along the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway.
-via Battle Beagle
In the past few weeks, Americans under 50 have been looking up the siege of the American Embassy in Tehran to understand the tensions between the US and Iran. Meanwhile, other incidents that have nothing to do with the US were happening at the same time, because groups of people have always been horrible to other groups of people.
On April 30, 1980, six gunmen from the Democratic Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Arabistan (DRFLA) stormed the Iranian Embassy in London. They were Iranian Arabs opposed to the new government, supported and armed by Iraq. They took 26 hostages, mostly embassy employees, but also British and international contractors, visitors, journalists, and one policeman. The terrorists demanded the release of Arab prisoners in Iranian jails and safe passage out of Britain. Margaret Thatcher refused to promise safe passage. The siege went on for six days, until the British SAS staged a terrifying but brilliant raid to end the standoff. Read what led to the crisis, what happened behind the scenes day-by-day, and the fallout afterward at Utterly Interesting.
New recruits for the Pontifical Swiss Guard are sworn into service annually on May 6. That day is special to these soldiers--the last Papal army in existence--because on that date in 1527, the Swiss Guard made its heroic last stand to defend Pope Clement VII during the sack of Rome by muntinous Imperial troops.
Yesterday, Pope Leo XIV attended the admission of 28 members to this revered unit. These men pledged to give their lives, if necessary, in his defense.
The official band of the Swiss Guard then performed for the Pope's pleasure, including a favorite from American popular music: "Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond.
When I started watching this video, I thought it was going to be a rehash of the Lutz family story that inspired The Amityville Horror. But this is one I'd never heard before- it's far less supernatural and therefore scarier. Derek and Maria Broaddus bought a house in Westfield, New Jersey, in 2014. They immediately started renovations to get the house ready for them and their three children to move into. They also started getting eerie letters from an anonymous writer. The letters revealed that someone had them under surveillance, and intended to keep watching them. The letters continued and became more threatening, and the Broaddus family delayed moving in.
Their story was published at a blog in 2018, and was eventually made into a TV show, The Watcher, which ran for seven episodes in 2022. Weird History gives us the rundown on what happened and some speculation about why it happened. No perpetrator has ever been identified. But you might want to watch something a little more benign to clear your head after hearing what the Broaddus family went through.
South Africa in 1982 was at the height of the apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela was in prison and the revolutionary organization ANC operated in secret from surrounding countries. South Africa was also preparing to put its first nuclear power plant online. Rodney Wilkinson seemed like the last person you would suspect of being a political saboteur: he was white, a former national fencing champion, a veteran, and a contract employee at the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station. But Wilkinson's unwilling experience in the "secret" war with Angola had turned him against the South African government.
In December of 1982, Wilkinson managed to plant four bombs in the Koeberg plant, which detonated and caused $500 million in damage and set the nuclear plant back 18 months. Wilkinson bicycled away and wasn't identified until 1995, after Mandela was freed and the apartheid government had fallen. Read about the years of ANC planning that led to the Koeberg bombing and what happened to Wilkinson afterward at the Guardian. -via Metafilter
Before World War II, dirigibles appeared to have a promising future and much effort and money were spent developing them. According to a 1995 article in the US Naval Institute's Proceedings, the first attempt to build a metal-skinned airship was conducted in Germany in 1897, but the design concept was not successful into the Detroit Aircraft Corporation build one in 1929.
Robert Guttman of History.net says that the ZMC-2 was covered with very thin sheets of aluminum riveted together using a process that kept the structure airtight. The helium was not contained in multiple bags inside. Rather, the hull was one single envelope to contain the gas.
Three crew members could pilot the vessel at a speed of 50 miles per hour for a range of 680 miles. It operated for 12 years and completed 2,265 safe flight hours. Nonetheless, the US Navy decided that its range was too short for anti-submarine patrol and scrapped the vessel in 1941.
-via Aviation Archive
Did you know Korea sells “one-a-day” banana packs?
— Sovey (@SoveyX) May 4, 2026
Instead of every banana ripening at once, each one is at a different stage.
One is ready today.
The next one is ready tomorrow.
The last one is still spiritually in college, “experimenting.”
Simple. Genius. Solves the entire… pic.twitter.com/f3r5lXhm5J
Leaving aside sorting bananas by radioactivity as a backup power generation source, you can sometimes eat bananas for food. X user @SoveyX says that consumers in South Korea can buy a week-long pack of bananas that become ripe individually by day.
This prompts @smimik11 to quip, "how are we supposed to lie to ourselves about our intentions to make banana bread?"
-via Marginal Revolution
The What If? series by Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama) tackles submitted theoretical questions seriously, no matter how dumb they seem on the surface. In list of fun facts, we often run across how bananas are radioactive. It's true, but how radioactive are they? And if we could extract that radioactivity, how many bananas would it take to power, say, a home?
Bananas, as you know, are safe to eat. The reason their radioactivity is a meme is a story in itself. Here we find out why bananas (and other foods) are technically radioactive. Still, radioactivity is a matter of scale. This video looks at that scale, and determines that the radioactivity from them isn't worth the hassle of harnessing. You could produce more energy by burning the bananas. But the best way to get energy from a banana is to eat it! Just be aware of the danger- and don't slip on the peel.
L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, and followed it with 13 more books about Oz. The first book is the most familiar, although it isn't the only Oz story that was made into a movie or a TV series. We're not really sure how many adaptations there have been; things like the 13-minute 1910 silent movie don't get seen much anymore. Some are based on later Baum books, and some have nothing to do with the books. Mental Floss gives us descriptions and ranked the quality of the eight best known Wizard of Oz adaptations. Some you may have never heard of, like the anime series that covers the first four books. Some you are well familiar with. They range from the 1925 movie that some consider the worst silent film in history, to number one, which you'll be able to guess pretty easily. Along the way, you might find another version you want to seek out and watch.
What happens when a formerly peaceful household is invaded by a cute kitten? Dorothy is a sharp-tongued little old lady who lives with her grandson Adam and a cat named Trigger. I believe they must have named him Trigger because he triggers Dorothy's ire. He gets in her hair, into everything in the kitchen, and on her last nerve. In other words, he's a typical house cat. From the beginning, Dorothy didn't want to have anything to do with him. Or so she claims.
Dorothy has a repertoire of colorful phrases for Trigger, delivered perfectly. Her yelled commands and constant insults bounce off Trigger's back, but her lines are priceless. The best one is "the damage is done." Will no one rid her of this turbulent feline? She has to be poked and prodded to say anything nice about the cat, but the Dodo manages to pull it out of her. Just a little.
WKRP in Cincinnati was a hit sitcom about a radio station that ran from 1978 to 1982. It inspired me to seek a career in radio, which I kept up for 24 years. WKRP was a fictional station, with call letters designed to invoke the word "crap." But WKRP in Cincinnati is fictional no more.
The call letters WKRP were owned by a low power FM station in Raleigh, North Carolina, broadcasting since 2015. Earlier this year, they announced they were auctioning off the call letters as a fundraiser for the nonprofit that runs the station, and invited Cincinnati stations to make a bid. WOXY (the Oasis) in Mason, Ohio, serves the Cincinnati area, and won the bid. Beginning Monday morning at midnight, they played the WKRP TV theme until the morning show began. Now people in Ohio and Kentucky can listen to the real WKRP in Cincinnati on three FM frequencies. You can also listen online. -via Metafilter
Anything new and different naturally scares some people. Not all people, but enough people so that Something Had to Be Done. That was usually a ban. Chill Dude Explains brings us ten goofy stories about things we take for granted today that totally frightened everyone when they were new, and were made illegal in one place or another at one time or another. If you've followed Neatorama for a long time, you will be familiar with many of these stories.
It's not always an overreaction. The first blood transfusions were deadly, because the scientists who tried them didn't know enough about blood yet. Lucky for us, they eventually figured it out. At least one is completely political- the printing press was a great leap forward in information and literacy, but those in authority fear a well-informed populace. Scary new ideas eventually become everyday things, and we all get used to them. Still, you'll have to get past how Chill Dude Explains pronounces "margarine" to get into the video. He's probably only heard it called "spread."
Oklahoma State Court of Appeals judge Kenneth D. Bacon loved to fly in his open-cockpit Starduster II. On a summer day in 1976, he flew to Kansas alone, and was caught in a bank of black clouds that suddenly appeared, although the forecast was for a completely sunny day. Bacon looked for a place to land, and was shocked to see an enormous airport with runways that looked 7,000 feet long! It was labeled as Habit Field, but he couldn't find a radio frequency, and heard no signal from the tower. Nevertheless, he finally landed and found no one there at all. He described it as an extremely eerie experience. At the next airport over, he was told that "no one lands there." Then they found damage to Bacon's plane that shouldn't have been possible. Read his account of that strange day at Strange Company.
Of course, I had to know more. Naval Air Station Hutchinson was created in 1942. What was the navy doing in Kansas? Well, it was wartime. The airfield was built on 2,565 acres and the runways indeed grew to 7,000 feet. After the war, the airfield was shuttered, and went into private hands briefly, but then was repurposed for naval training. It became a Kansas Air National Guard Base in 1957. It was closed in 1967. Then it became a commercial airport called H.A.B.I.T. (Hutchinson Air Base Industrial Tract). In the late '70s, it was used for a commercial skydiving operation called Sunflower Field. By the end of the century, it was an oversized glider airport. You can read an extensive history of the airport at this site, with lots of pictures.
