Somewhere along the lines, a long time ago, ruling families got the idea that their blood was better than everyone else's, so they wanted keep reproduction in the family, so to speak. This was also a convenient way to keep inherited wealth from being divided. But inbreeding will catch up with you sooner or later, as more and more harmful genes have the chance to get doubled up. The case we are most familiar with is that of Charles II of Spain, whose family tree was not only a wreath, but even more resembled an Euler diagram.
But he was far from the only victim of royal inbreeding. It's happened from ancient Egypt up into the modern age. The Crooked Explainer takes us through several dynasties in which inbreeding made a lasting mark on history. It would have been far healthier to accept the children of these kings' extramarital relationships with commoners, before their bloodline crashed into a wall. The exception is Queen Victoria's family. In that case, the harm wasn't a confluence of inbreeding leading down to one last tragic ruler, but in her scheme of marrying off her children and spreading a genetic disease to other ruling families of Europe.
Karahan Tepe is an archaeological site near Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, and has been dated back to between 10,000 and 9500 BCE. That would make it the oldest known village on earth. Of course, "known" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, since earlier villages built with wood or other organic material could have vanished completely. Karahan Tepe was built of stone.
The common understanding of the birth of civilization is that nomadic people settled down in permanent communities in order to grow grain crops. But new findings from Karahan Tepe reveal what the residents ate, and it was mostly gazelle meat and wild legumes, not grains. Such a diet, while monotonous, would provide the protein required for building the stone walls, monuments, and carvings found on the site. This 12,000-year old community may have delved into agriculture of some sort, but it mainly relied on hunting and gathering while its people built something truly lasting. Read about Karahan Tepe and what we've learned from it at the Debrief. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Campels)
Jonas Lauwiner isn't just some nut like Emperor Norton of the United States. To borrow a phrase attributed to Napoleon, King Jonas found the crown of Switzerland lying in a gutter.
The Swiss Confederation is a republic in structure. It had no king until 2019 when King Jonas staged a coronation in Bern. The Times reports that he's been building a power base by exploiting a legal loophole that allows residents to acquire unclaimed land by registering a claim with the local government.
Over time, King Jonas has acquired numerous small plots of land--including sections of road--that are equal to 0.045 square miles, which is roughly a quarter of the size of Vatican City.
-via @myth_pilot | Photo: His Majesty, King Jonas of Switzerland
Forensic linguistics deals with the study of language used in legal cases. Not lawyer talk, but things like figuring out who wrote something when they aren't identified. I've been delving into that type of puzzle just today, in reading about Trota of Salerno and which medical texts she did and didn't write, and Luke, who wrote two books of the Bible. So I was surprised to see a video about the science of these investigations.
FBI forensic linguists learned an awful lot about the Unibomber by the manifesto he released. It didn't contain any identifying information, but it was so long that his writing style was a treasure trove of clues. Most communications from unknown perpetrators are much shorter, but there are techniques that police can use to trace them back to a suspect. Half as Interesting shows us some of those techniques that have cracked cases before just from some anonymous writing. This video has one minute of advertising at the end.
One of the earlier breakthroughs in fertility treatment was the development of the drug Pergonal in the 1940s, which contained hormones that stimulate ovulation. Most women produce their own follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH) all their lives, but during pregnancy and after menopause, the hormones are no longer utilized and are excreted in urine. The amount of FSH and LH in the urine is an indicator of pregnancy, and led to the development of at-home pregnancy tests.
The Italian pharmaceutical company Istituto Farmacologico Serono that developed Pergonal had trouble getting enough of these hormones to test the drug, much less run clinical trials for fertility treatment. But the Vatican owned the majority of the company, so the pope okayed a plan to collect urine from post-menopausal nuns at retirement convents. When 30,000 liters were collected, they had just enough hormones for Pergonal to go to clinical trials. The drug was used for several decades until synthetic hormones were developed. Ironically, the use of Pergonal was crucial in developing IVF treatments, which the Vatican opposes. Read about the nuns' urine and the hormones it contained at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Toni Frissell)
Master mixer Bill McClintock (previously at Neatorama) is back with his latest project, which he calls "Psycho-Push-it" by Salt-Knot. It basically uses the instrumental track of Slipknot's 2008 song "Psychosocial" with the vocals from Salt-N-Pepa's 1987 hip hop hit "Push It." To be honest, this mashup actually includes music and lyrics from both songs, to mix things up a bit.
It works well, because this is what McClintock does. He finds the most disparate songs you can think of and makes them sound good together. Also consider that both songs, as different as they are and 20 years apart, can be found on the same playlists for an awful lot of people, and can even be heard on the same radio stations. Just because you like metal doesn't mean you can't like hip hop. You'll like this version.
Horsewoman Kate Janicki of Woodland, California is proud of her sister, Hannah, getting a job at a local Dutch Bros coffee shop. She decided to visit Hannah at work. So she saddled up Penny, one of her horses, and then put the horse in a trailer and hauled her to the cafe.
Once they arrived at the Dutch Bros, Ms. Janicki mounted Penny and took her to the drive through window. Hannah and her coworkers were delighted at the surprise.
Penny was pretty chill about the experience (including the highway noise), but found the white paint marks on the road a bit unsettling.
Since its launch by inventior Ruth Handler in 1959, the Barbie doll (and her fictional universe) was a pop culture behemoth that spawned inumerable accessories and merchandise.
In 1961, Mattel released a 45 RPM record in which Barbie, performed by Charlotte Austin, and Ken, performed by Bill Cunningham, sang six songs with a swing style common to the late 50s and early 60s. It came with a booklet that I gather had the lyrics. They describe an idealized vision of romance suitable for young audiences.
The album is available on YouTube. You can also purchase a copy from eBay.
When Shigeru Miyamoto designed a new game for Nintendo in 1981, he was hoping to use Popeye and his friends as characters, but couldn't get permission. So he concocted a cast of new characters, one of which was a plumber with a mustache who wore red overalls. He was dubbed Jumpman, because that's what he did in the game. Bluto became an ape called Donkey Kong. The game did well, and Miyamoto used the characters in other games. The eight-bit Jumpman was easily recognized with his red clothes and mustache, and became a fan favorite. In 1982, he was named after the landlord of Nintendo's American office, Mario Segale. With the name Mario, he grew a backstory as an Italian American living in Brooklyn. He got a brother named Luigi when a game required two protagonists.
In 45 years, Mario has gone from an improvised eight-bit character to the face of Nintendo, with three movies, three theme parks, three TV series, and appearances in many games. His appeal is that he is Everyman, a regular Joe with a regular job who takes on brave quests but doesn't use violence unless he absolutely has to. Read how Mario began, and how he changed and grew with the video game industry to his global fame today at Rolling Stone. -via Everlasting Blort
I've never felt good calling myself a language nerd, since I only speak one language. But I can't call myself an English nerd because I'm not English. And I've been making a serious effort to not be a pedant because language changes over time and you can't stop it. For example, it grinds my gears when people say "less" when they mean "fewer," but I don't correct people, and I vow right now that I'm going to let that go forever. I'm fine with ending a sentence with a preposition, because the lengths you must go to in order to avoid it are never worth the effort. If someone corrects you on that, tell them to "shut up."
There are other grammar rules that are just not worth policing because popular usage is changing. I could not get my kids to say "different from" instead of "different than," and I would correct "on accident" in favor of "by accident." But why, then, is that different from saying "on purpose"? Yeah, some grammar rules should just go away- especially ones about the confusing use of English prepositions. If you can make yourself understood by the person you are addressing, that should be enough.
Plenty of modern-day meteorologists cite The Wizard of Oz as the childhood inspiration for their careers, as they were transfixed by the cyclone that blew away Dorothy's house in the 1939 movie. They learned sooner or later that it wasn't a cyclone, but a tornado. A tropical cyclone is called a hurricane or a tropical storm (depending on the severity) in the US, or a typhoon or cyclone elsewhere. But Frank Baum called it a cyclone in his 1900 book, despite the fact that it happened in Kansas, where hurricanes do not occur. Shortly after the book was published, the chief of the US Weather Bureau wrote to the publishers about the term, and was assured it would be corrected in the next edition. But it never was.
When the movie was produced, the storm was still called a cyclone because that's the way many people knew the story. Never mind that they changed the ending. The movie did have Bert Lahr yell "It's a twister!" at one point, but Dorothy called it a cyclone. John Fricke wrote extensively about the cyclone/tornado confusion, with the various depictions of what is obviously a tornado in the different versions of the story for the Oz Museum. -via TYWKIWDBI
うちのぐるぐるレイアウトもスリップリング経由でレールに給電してます！#鉄道模型 #Nゲージ #Bトレ #ジオラマ https://t.co/Tnngs9844O pic.twitter.com/Btdp3odQYI
— B作 (@Btoretsukuru) April 28, 2026
Japanese X user @Btoresukuru makes N-gauge model trains. The N scale is 1:160, so making a scene so realistic that it looks like a video recording of a real train requires incredibly precise attention to detail. He has a store from which he sells specialized tools and parts for this kind of model railroad construction.
Btoresukuru explains that he used slip rings to permit continuous rotation of both the train and the base. The visual effect is stunning.
A Brazilian funeral company is now selling Mario-themed coffins
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) April 28, 2026
You can choose from Mario, Luigi, Toad, Princess Peach, or even Yoshi pic.twitter.com/bEeNrXcKQ6
Eventually, you run out of 1-Ups. You jump into a warp pipe that doesn't end.
When that happens, be prepared with an appropriate coffin. The Portuguese text is throwing me off, but I gather that artist Bruno Tanato has teamed up with coffin manufacturer Industria de Urnas Bignotto to produce coffins that resemble the colors and iconography of Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Toad, and Princess Peach. They're also working on designs inspired by Barbie and The Fairly Odd Parents.
Most slang words are coined to represent an age group or some kind of community for which outsiders don't know the slang word. As soon as those words go mainstream, they are out of fashion. It happens so fast that you can date a movie by the slang words it contains, or at least identify the period it's set in. But one slang word just refuses to go away- the word "cool," used for anything good in pretty much any way.
While the word itself goes back hundreds of years, it was first published as a slang word in 1884. That means it was being used as vocal slang for a long time before that. And it's still used today by all age groups. Besides that, it doesn't go out and in and out of fashion, but rather spreads further and becomes more common all the time. "Cool" can be mean many things besides temperature, but it's always a positive word. Linguist Dr. Erica Brozovsky goes through the history of "cool" and the many ways it's been used.
The Soviet Union was not known for being a powerhouse of popular culture export products (Tetris being the only exception). But the dictatorship nonetheless tried to make popular entertainment for domestic and foreign markets.
Mary Poppins, Goodbye is an example. This is two-part musical miniseries in Russian that premiered in 1984. The story is not too unfamiliar to those of us who grew up in the Disney adaptation of the novel. Natalya Adrenychenko stared in the titular role.
You can watch part 1 and part 2 on YouTube. Scrolling through these videos, it's possible to get the gist of the story even without the ability to speak Russian.
-via @kiyasu
