• • • to set a mood • • •
• • • some of the things I read while eating breakfast • • •
American author Constance Woodyard based most of her characters on how she imagined her possessions would act if they were transformed into people.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 31, 2019
How Serbian Immigrants Made an Ohio Town the ‘Fried Chicken Capital of the World’
From Vojvodina, with lard.
Serbian ‘pahovana piletina’ leads a second, star-studded life in Barberton, Ohio.
YOU CAN ONLY TRY PAHOVANA PILETINA in two places. One is Vojvodina, Serbia, where the unique style of fried chicken was born. The other is Ohio, where “Barberton-style fried chicken,” as it’s known there, became one small town’s claim to fame. What started as a comforting meal for an immigrant family came to define a community, turning a humble Ohio town into the “Fried Chicken Capital of the World.”
Smiljka and Manojlo Topalsky weren’t the only Eastern Europeans to leave home for a burgeoning Ohio farm-town called Barberton in the early 1900s. Their grandson, Milos Papich, points out that one of the oldest Serbian social clubs in the country is there, an hour south of Akron. The emigrated family owned a successful 300-acre dairy farm for decades.
During the Great Depression, though, the Topalskys lost everything but the farmhouse. Luckily, Smiljka could still cook.
Many Ohio families, like this one pictured outside of Cincinnati, made their living on dairy farms before the Great Depression.
On July 4th, 1933, the Topalskys opened an eatery out of that farmhouse. They called it Belgrade Gardens, and sold soups, chillis, and sandwiches to their struggling neighbors. “But it wasn’t enough to raise a family,” Papich says over the phone. One day, the story goes, Smiljka was in the back cooking a classic Serbian chicken dish for her family that she’d learned from her mother. After it caught the nose of one outspoken bank-teller, says Papich, he demanded they sell it to their regulars—a mishmash of recently immigrated Eastern Europeans who longed for a taste of home.
Once they had a taste, they couldn’t get enough. …
The Louisville Tarpoles are the only team in America to still play the Renaissance-era sport of “quidgeonry”. In the past, attempts to form a league ran into resistance from public health officials.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 31, 2019
EZRA KLEIN – “WHY WE’RE POLARIZED” AND THE DESTRUCTIVE POWER OF NEGATIVE PARTISANSHIP
Ezra Klein, Vox co-founder/editor and host of “The Ezra Klein Show,” discusses his book “Why We’re Polarized” and describes how political polarization affects U.S. democracy.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available to embed.
Experience: I saved a woman who jumped in front of a train
She was out cold and difficult to lift. The train came closer and people started to scream.
Osman Dean: ‘Suddenly, the woman beside me leapt forwards, falling into the space between the tracks.’
It was a summer evening, and I was on my way home from work on the London Underground. It was about 5.30pm when I changed from the Victoria to the Northern line at Stockwell. The platform was packed and very hot. I stood right at the far end, furthest from where the train would come into the station.
I could see the train lights reflecting off the wall opposite the platform before it arrived. Sometimes, if it’s really busy, the trains slow down as they come into the station, but this one was coming at a considerable speed. Suddenly, the woman standing beside me pushed away from the crowd and leapt, head first, into the space between the tracks.
When you travel regularly on the tube, you don’t think about the track or look into that abyss. But I was forced to confront the very real possibility that this woman would be killed. There was no time for analysis – something subconscious kicked in. I didn’t think about my life. I needed to help. As soon as she fell, I dropped my bag and jumped down after her.
I didn’t know whether the live rail had been turned off; I didn’t want to risk touching anything. The train was coming fast towards us. I tried to work out how far away it was and how long I might have to get her up and on to the platform. I wasn’t even looking at her, but she was out cold after hitting the ground, and difficult to lift.
The train came closer and people started to scream. …
Mysterious light streaks across Southern California’s night sky. What was it?
A celestial object lights up the skies on Wednesday night.
Videos posted by Southern Californians on social media Wednesday night showed a celestial object streaking overhead before disintegrating into dazzling pieces. Residents from all over the Southland logged their sightings, and the American Meteor Society fielded witness reports ranging from Santa Barbara to Imperial Beach, and as far inland as Bakersfield and Indio.
Space debris re-entry caught on AllSky6 camera over SoCal last night – more info here: https://t.co/DFLp4Yconc pic.twitter.com/ulZZQJNjyR
— AMSMETEORS (@amsmeteors) January 30, 2020
Cami Buckman, 23, of El Segundo, said she noticed the impromptu light show while driving on the 405 Freeway near Los Angeles International Airport.
“I never see these kinds of things, so at first I thought it was a plane,” said Buckman, an editor for “L.A. Times Today,” a Spectrum News show focusing on L.A. Times news. “But then, it looked like it was breaking apart, which was when it caught my attention more.”
As she watched, the object “slowly became this long line of fragmented lights, and then it disappeared.”
“My first thought was, ‘UFO?’” she said with a laugh. “But then I realized it was just a meteor.” …
The 6 Weirdest Plagiarism Lawsuits Involving Celebrities
As they say, behind every great story is someone claiming that they also wrote that story. Accusations of plagiarism are as old as art itself, and no creative endeavor is immune to people either taking ideas for themselves or swearing that an idea was theirs all along. What is surprising is how these cases can wind up playing out, regardless of who was in the right. For example …
6. Vanilla Ice Says He Resolved A Copyright Suit By Just Buying The Original
1990 was a wild time for entertainment, with groups like Milli Vanilli being buried alive for a lip-syncing controversy and the similarly named Vanilla Ice getting creamed for cribbing the baseline to his song “Ice Ice Baby” from Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.” When the rapper’s song hit the airwaves, its novelty took over a bleak pop culture landscape, but also sounded quite familiar to anyone who’d been alive nine years earlier, possibly because large chunks of it were a note-for-note copy:
Queen and Bowie heard the song and rightly sought to protect their work from Ice’s Gap commercial lyrics. The one-hit wonder quickly realized how stupid it would be to get into a dick-measuring contest by taking the claim to court. And so, in a bit of news you might find depressing, he claims to have simply bought the rights to the original song, rather than go through the parade of lawyers that Queen and Bowie could throw at him. This would mean that 1) he made enough money off the ripoff to buy the thing he ripped off, and 2) he now profits when you listen to either song.
I said “claims to” earlier because after Ice mentioned this publicly, representatives from Queen disputed it, implying that instead some kind of compromise was reached without going into much detail. The most commonly reported version is that Ice ended up owning “Under Pressure,” while Queen and Bowie got writing credits on “Ice Ice Baby,” which is a Satanic bargain at best. Despite the passing of both Bowie and Freddie Mercury, their work remains some of the most seminal rock of all time. Meanwhile, Vanilla Ice performs as Vanilla Zerg for the Gathering of the Juggalos, and he’s apparently happy. …
2011 Gathering Of The Juggalos Infomercial. Erfling look to the stars and see what is coming.
RECENT COMMENT: Vanilla Ice is so hard up for money……
Erm… yeah. He also stars as Rob Van Winkle on DIY Network’s The Vanilla Ice Project.
We Spent All Day Arguing About This Triangle Brain Teaser. Can You Solve It?
Mathematicians reveal the real answer. See if you’re right.
There’s nothing quite like a maddening math problem, mind-bending optical illusion, or twisty logic puzzle to halt all productivity in the Popular Mechanics office. We’re curious people by nature, but we also collectively share a stubborn insistence that we’re right, dammit, and so we tend to throw work by the wayside whenever we come upon a problem with several seemingly possible solutions.
This triangle brain teaser isn’t new—shoutout to Popsugar for unearthing it a couple years ago—but based on some shady Internet magic, the tweet below reappeared in my feed today and kick-started a new debate on our staff-wide Slack channel, a place traditionally reserved for workshopping ideas, but instead mostly used for yelling about other stuff that we occasionally turn into content.
Say? pic.twitter.com/lrhXrWw5EP
— J (@jiteshpillaai) April 9, 2018
Because I’m a masochist, I drew the triangle again and asked everyone on staff to promptly drop what they were doing and attempt to solve the simple question: How many triangles can you find?
I’ll spare you the full conversation—trust me, nobody wants to see that—but the team’s responses ranged all over the place. Some editors saw four triangles. Others saw 12. A few saw 6, 16, 22. Even more saw 18. One wiseguy counted the triangles in the A’s in the question itself, while another seemed to be having an existential crisis: “None of these lines are truly straight, just curves—thus you cannot define any of them as a triangle,” he said. “There are no triangles in this photo. Life has no meaning.” …
TL;DR
This Untitled Goose Game app turns your Windows PC into pure mayhem
Honk honk
“What if the Untitled Goose Game was your entire computer?” asked nobody but Sam Chiet until this week. 18-year-old Chiet has created an app for Windows PCs that spawns a virtual goose to cause mayhem on your desktop. Much like the game, this goose is annoying and will spread virtual mud all over your screen while honking profusely. It also drags memes or cartoons above your apps, but don’t dare try to close them otherwise this wild fowl will grab hold of your mouse pointer and mess with you.
If you remember BonziBuddy from 1999 then this is similar to that odd era of computing, but way more annoying and strangely adorable. If you leave it running for 30 minutes, you’ll probably come back to your PC and find the goose has run truly wild, spawning little notes that look like Microsoft’s Notepad app and plenty of honk cartoons.
You can even customize Desktop Goose to add whatever images, GIFs, and memes you want the goose to drag onto the screen and obstruct your view. If that’s not annoying enough, you can hack the goose to adjust its aggression and add MP3s that will open when you start it up. Had enough? Simply hold the Esc key to evict the goose from your Windows PC.
I left it on for 30 minutes and when I came back my computer looked like this pic.twitter.com/g0ZmOgtOAu
— Lucas Rizzotto
![✈]()
(@_LucasRizzotto) January 29, 2020
(@_LucasRizzotto)
Chiet built this app over a few days, purely for fun. “I’m a big fan of things that are delightfully ridiculous, and that’s hopefully exactly what this is,” explains Chiet. “It’s a little desktop ‘assistant’ whose sole purpose is to get in the way of your work, and people are responding to it.” …
Ed. Back in the 1990s we had sheep that infiltrated the entire network.
POINT OF REFLECTION: Perhaps I should have advised that I have not tried this game on my own computer and will bear no responsibility for anything untoward happening to anyone’s computer.
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
In Manila, a group of young caretakers lives and works in a cemetery that’s quickly being filled with victims of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s so-called “war on drugs.” Since Duterte took office in 2016, 12,000 Filipinos have been murdered extrajudicially—mostly the urban poor. Read more: https://www.theatlantic.com/video/ind…
Iowa is a predominantly white state, so we sent VICE News’s Roberto Ferdman to Des Moines to talk to minorities about the issues they care about and the presidential candidates they’ll support, ahead of the Iowa Caucus in February.
THANKS to HBO and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Desi Lydic explores the legitimacy of Mars One, a company that offered four people a one-way ticket to Mars.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
We sent a truck to D.C. to make sure the senators remained impartial during Trump’s impeachment trial.
As Trump’s lawyers continued to argue that you can’t impeach a president while he’s running for president, pollsters reported 75% of Americans want the Senate to call witnesses before concluding the impeachment trial.
The host of “Full Frontal” on TBS is looking forward to letting loose at this summer’s Democratic and Republican national conventions.
Full Frontal’s Allana Harkin goes back in time to find out why, of all 50 states, white-as-a-Radiohead-concert Iowa historically predicts the Democratic presidential nominee. Maybe it’s because they’re just nice people? Hop in the DeLorean and buckle up! This segment is a wild ride.
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
Conservatives claim they are being discriminated against across social media. Is that true or does their content just suck?
Seth takes a closer look at the president and his lawyers going from arguing that there was no quid pro quo to arguing that the president can do literally whatever he wants.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
Web cartoonist Randall Munroe answers simple what-if questions (“what if you hit a baseball moving at the speed of light?”) using math, physics, logic and deadpan humor. In this charming talk, a reader’s question about Google’s data warehouse leads Munroe down a circuitous path to a hilariously over-detailed answer — in which, shhh, you might actually learn something.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on a few more Destination F classics for ya!
もうすぐ節分なので”鬼まる”に。”Ogre Maru” because Setsubun is soon.
This disastrous horticultural experiment precipitated a Papal bull against the Royal Prussian Scientific & Astrological Trading Corporation.
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 30, 2019
FINALLY . . .
Visiting One of the Last Fragments of Miami’s Eccentric Native Forest
Pine rockland grows on the most stable land in Florida, which is why it’s doomed.
Welcome to the pine rocklands, one of the world’s most endangered habitats.
IT’S JANUARY IN FLORIDA—DIVINE, SUN-SOAKED, not humid enough to be buggy—and Frank Ridgley is driving a golf cart across the sprawling grounds of Zoo Miami. The zoo is home to many endangered species, from the native Florida bonneted bat to the African painted dog, but on this day it’s not an animal Ridgley is going to see. Behind its menagerie, Zoo Miami hosts one of the world’s most endangered habitats: pine rockland forest. The forest once covered 185,000 acres of Miami-Dade County, from North Miami Beach to Long Pine Key in the Everglades. But today, this ancient, snaking ridge is largely indistinguishable from its surrounding habitat: crystalline condos, strip malls, and asphalt voids. Today less than two percent of the pine rockland remains intact in the county, scattered in pockets so small that even most locals haven’t heard of it.
Ridgley, who moved to Miami from Buffalo in 2007, has lived here long enough to be considered a local. He joined Zoo Miami as a wildlife veterinarian and now works as the head of conservation and research. Since 2011, he’s been on a mission to restore Zoo Miami’s pine rockland to its original glory. Ridgley, a magnetically friendly guy, even behind the opaque black sunglasses that now rest atop his head, expertly steers the golf cart through the zoo’s strangely labyrinthine parking lot—the site was once an airfield for blimps in World War II—to a towering chain-link gate. “Just in case the animals get out,” he says. As soon as the gate whirrs closed, he pauses to tune out an alert on his walkie-talkie—something about the dung compost bin? “Welcome to the pine rocklands, or what’s left of it,” he says, gesturing to a spiky, almost alien assemblage of plants on the side of the road.
The pine rocklands in the fog.
Before Miami was a city, it was a forest born from the bottom of the ocean. Stilt-like slash pines stretched toward the sky and jagged bunches of saw palmetto fanned out on an ancient limestone ridge, the fossilized remains of a coral reef over 100,000 years old. This ancient substrate is also so incredibly hard—more rock than soil—that its slow-growing plants have complicated root systems that feather deep into the ground to absorb nutrients. Though the Everglades certainly appear lush and teeming, it’s pine rockland that boasts the highest diversity of plant species of any habitat in the state.
“Before the air base, this whole site was a continuous pine rockland forest,” Ridgley says. “No one realized how unique and special this habitat was until it was all gone.” Even this patch isn’t actually original; it was restored just a few years ago after invasive species had taken over. The plants are still young and short, and fade into swaths of older pine rockland behind it. “This is what Miami originally was like,” Ridgley says, dropping his sunglasses over his eyes. …
Mark Twain served as a Kentucky senator for eight hours during the Great Neglect of 1874, and described the experience as “somewhere between being a rabid dog and the hand that feeds it.”
— Fake Atlas Obscura (@notatlasobscura) January 30, 2019
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Not? Likely, maybe.