Every incarnation of the titular character on the BBC’s long-running Doctor Who has had their own fashion sense, from bow ties to leather jackets to the occasional fez. No accessory has been more memorable, however, than the seemingly endless scarf sported by fourth doctor Tom Baker from 1974 to 1981.
Naturally, kids wanted one of their own—and apparently wrote in to the network with enough regularity that the BBC decided to strike up a standard memo in order to have something to send them.
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An image on Deviant Art—via Open Culture—reveals the company’s response to a fan’s plea for knitting instructions for the scarf, likely sent off in the early 1980s. Reflecting the majestic appearance of the warmer (which even has its own fan page), the sheet calls for 26 balls of wool in seven different colors, knitted in a very specific order, and of course, a precise needle gauge. While you can buy replica scarves anywhere, Who fans with some knitting skill might now be tempted to craft their own. Just try not to trip on it.
Does your town feel too congested? Wish you had more alone time? Like having the road, air, land, and post office all to yourself? You could buy a private island for around $100,000, but then you’d have to rely on submarine cables for power. Or, you could head to one of the not-so-bustling metropolises around the globe that feature occupations so slight a family moving in could possibly double the population. Check out 15 areas that fewer than 15 people call home.
Before automation cut farming jobs, the small Nebraskan hamlet of Monowi was home to roughly 300 residents. That was slowly curbed to a couple: the Eilers, who had lived there since they were children. When Elsie Eiler’s husband, Rudy, passed away in 2004, she became the town’s sole occupant. Eiler, 82, runs the bar, the Monowi Tavern, and acts as the village’s sole librarian in a building dedicated to her late husband. Every year, Eiler collects taxes from herself to keep the area’s four street lights on.
An Old West relic tucked in Tonto National Forest, the tiny town of Tortilla Flat whose center of business is the Superstition Saloon and Restaurant, owned and operated by the town’s population of six. A biker contingent runs up neighboring Old Highway 88 and briefly raises the populace to 500 or so every year, and the town also has a post office, should any of them get the urge to send a postcard.
When the Environmental Protection Agency declares your town a biohazard, you’re probably not going to be left with much of a city council. Picher was originally at a hearty 20,000 residents before toxic sludge from heavy metal mining contaminated the area in the early 1980s. While federal grants funding continued the clean-up work, most of Picher’s locals took home buy-outs; those that didn’t were hit by a tornado in 2008 that injured 150 and killed eight. Roughly 10 have stayed behind, including a pharmacist who didn’t think the government offer was that great and doesn’t mind sourcing water from tested wells.
South of Buenos Aires, the 1500 residents of the spa town Villa Epecuén felt protected from rising waters by a manmade flood wall. But in 1985, the wall collapsed and the nearby salt lake virtually submerged the town, drowning it in 33 feet of water. It took nearly 30 years for the water to recede, revealing the town’s decrepit buildings. One former occupant, Pablo Novak, decided to inhabit the ruins, moving into an abandoned house to tend to cattle. As of 2015, Novak was still there, running into the occasional tourist with questions about his experiences in the Argentinian Atlantis.
KiwiRail employee Barrie Drummond was dispatched to Cass in 1987 to oversee a section of rail line connecting nearby Christchurch to Greymouth. While he initially felt he’d be too isolated in the zero-population town, locals from nearby made him feel welcome. The rent was cheap, traffic was non-existent, and a KFC was still within driving distance; in his spare time, he built a mini-golf course and a bowling green. As of 2014, Drummond was still the town’s sole resident and organizer of Cass Bash, a music festival that draws crowds from neighboring areas.
A 10-acre stopover, Buford was purchased in 1992 by Dan Sammons, who used money from his moving business to become the land’s only resident. He built a log cabin and opened a trading post while publicizing Buford as a single-entity population, turning it into a tourist attraction for visitors en route to Yellowstone National Park. In 2013, Nguyen Dinh Pham purchased the town for $900,000 with plans to host a Vietnamese coffee business, PhinDeli, on the land. Pham, realizing the perks of owning your own town, renamed it PhinDeli Town Buford. Sammons moved to Colorado; a property caretaker has taken his place to keep the sign accurate.
7. HIBBERTS GORE, ME (POP: 1)
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An errant map survey has carved out a small slice of Palermo as an unincorporated, 640-acre piece of land. The U.S. Census has recorded just one resident: Karen Keller, who embraced Hibberts Gore after the dissolution of her marriage. A 2001 Boston Globe article on the anomaly brought Keller a bunch of unwanted attention: she unsuccessfully petitioned the Census to count her as part of nearby Lincoln County. As of 2012, Keller was in the process of renovating her house and avoiding a stream full of unfriendly turtles and snakes.
Multiple fires and limited access to a railroad shut down Gross’s chances to be much of an entity. Today, just two residents remain: Mike and Mary Finnegan, who operate the Nebrask (no “A”) Inn within the town’s limits. The couple arrived in 1985 and promptly made their 5-year-old son the unofficial mayor. A law on the books prohibiting serving wine on Sundays was repealed because they said so; the eatery has gotten rave reviews on its Facebook page.
When you’re both the mayor and barkeep in a tiny town, there’s not much stopping you from printing your own currency. That’s what Emil Erickson does, though the cash—which bears his likeness—is only good at the tavern. Funkley’s population also doubles as its city council. Without much else to appeal to residents, it’s always been a sparsely populated spot: just 26 people called it home in 1940.
Although a dozen people refused to take government buyouts to evacuate Centralia in 1992, there’s a good reason everyone else did: the town has been on fire for over 50 years. It’s believed coal mining precipitated a large-scale blaze that’s been fed for decades thanks to the mining shafts. Streets are prone to cracking open, creating sinkholes and releasing an eerie smoke. Officials believe the fires could rage another 250 years; the properties of residents who pass away will be subject to eminent domain.
While the sign says “Pop: 1,” the four residents of Lost Springs say that’s a Census error. The town was once home to 280 in the mining days of the 1920s. As work dissolved, so did the community. Currently, there’s a town hall, a post office, a park, a general store, and a few public bathrooms.
Mark Perkovich retired to Bonanza in 1994 to find solitude. He got it: Bonanza, a former mining town in the Rockies, is completely desolate with the exception of its lone resident. Aside from chatting with the mailman, Perkovich occupies his time by clearing snow and tending to his property. In 2014, Colorado considered dissolving Bonanza due to its lack of a pulse: Perkovich opposed the change, but disliked the fact that his property taxes to the county didn’t actually buy him anything. In 2015, a couple was rumored to have moved in, tripling the population.
13. WEEKI WACHEE, FL (POP: 4)
Beautiful, sun-kissed, and largely absent of any humans, Weeki Wachee has just three citizens but plenty of mermaids. Weeki Wachee Springs State Park is home to a submerged theater carved into the limestone of a spring where tourists can watch ocean sirens swim around. The attraction has been around since 1947, when ex-Navy officer Newton Perry opened for business. In 2001, mayor Robyn Anderson declared herself a “mer-mayor” due to her past as a performer.
Originally stuffed to the brim with a population of 40 in the 1940s, Swett’s lack of economic impact—it has one tavern—has whittled the population down to just two: Lance Benson and his wife. A traveling concessions salesman, Benson bought Swett in 1998 to oversee the bar and catch customers from nearby towns. (He lived in the lone house.) In 2014, he decided he wanted to move on and put the town up for sale. It was recently listed at $199,000: the cheery description from Exit Realty noted that “locals believe the residence to be haunted.”
You won’t find much more than a general store and part of a gas station in Nothing, a desert villa 120 miles from Phoenix. Nothing was incorporated in 1977 as a way of injecting some humanity into a stretch of US 93, but its residents didn’t find it too hospitable: the last of them moved out after a pizza parlor failed to attract passing truckers. The name became prescient, and there are currently no known occupants. In June 2016, Nothing was subject to a Century 21 publicity stunt in which free patches of land could be given out to dads on Father’s Day. Approximate value? Nothing.
Call the six-sided Rubik’s Cube puzzle a “toy” at your own risk: Ernő Rubik, the Hungarian who invented it in 1974, prefers to think of it as a piece of art. If so, the 350 million-plus cubes sold over the past 40 years might make it one of the most recognizable creative works in history. Check out some facts about its origins, the bizarre cartoon adaptation, and why Will Smith probably deserves royalties.
1. IT WAS ORIGINALLY CALLED THE MAGIC CUBE.
In 1974, 30-year-old Ernő Rubik was a professor of architecture in Hungary when he had the idea of constructing a handheld puzzle game based on geometry that could help students understand spatial relations. The first prototypes made of wood blocks and paper clips were encouraging; pairing with a toymaker in Hungary, Rubik saw his original Magic Cube get modest distribution. In 1980, when the Cube was licensed by Ideal Toy Company, developers changed the name to Rubik’s Cube; they felt “Magic Cube” invoked ideas about witchcraft.
2. RUBIK IS NOT A GREAT RUBIK’S CUBER.
Although the puzzle has inspired millions of people to find new and efficient solutions to making sure the sides align, its inventor is not among them. In a 2012 interview with CNN, Rubik admitted it took him more than a month to solve the Cube when he first invented it; it still took him a minute to solve it when he began practicing. That statistic that wouldn’t wow any of the modern-day “Cubers,” who strive for times under 10 seconds.
3. THERE ARE 43 QUINTILLION POSSIBLE COMBINATIONS.
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With six sides representing nine blocks of a single color—orange, yellow, green, red, white, and blue—a Rubik’s is said to hold 43 quintillion potential configurations. That’s 43,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible ways to prompt a lengthy series of profanities.
4. A 13-YEAR-OLD KID WROTE A BESTSELLING STRATEGY GUIDE.
With Rubik’s Cube hysteria gripping the nation in the early 1980s, players were desperate for a strategy that could expedite a solution and make them seem brainy in front of their peers. Their savior: 12-year-old Patrick Bossert, who authored a book, You Can Do the Cube, in 1981 and wound up on the New York Times bestsellers list. Originally meant for his friends, one of Bossert’s pals showed it to his father, who was an editor at Penguin Books; it quickly sold more than 750,000 copies.
Despite the fact that the modest Rubik’s Cube had no narrative, personality, or sentience, ABC still ordered a full season of an animated series about its adventures. Rubik, the Amazing Cube aired 13 episodes on Saturday mornings in 1983. The puzzle was given legs, a face, and magical abilities. To complete the 1980s-ness, Menudo was enlisted to perform the title song.
6. THE YELLOW SIDE WAS A HEALTH RISK.
When Rubik’s Cube made its way to England in 1982, health officials discovered there was more of a risk than just going out of your mind trying to solve it: the plastic discs affixed to the squares were found to contain unsafe levels of lead. The biggest perpetrator: yellow, which, depending on where it was manufactured, had at least 26,250 ppm (parts per million), far more than the 2500 ppm allowed.
For the puzzle’s 15th anniversary in 1995, Diamond Cutters International created a fully-functional Rubik’s Cube made out of 185 carats of diamonds. Worth $1 million at the time, the company also issued 2500 silver editions for $2000 each.
8. IT STARTED AN ART MOVEMENT.
With Cubism already installed in art circles, the arrival of Rubik’s Cube led to a variation: Rubik’s Cubism. The playful name refers to the practice of using solved Cubes to create a mosaic effect in artwork. In 2009, Josh Chalom crafted a homage to Da Vinci’s Last Supper by using over 4000 Cubes; a later piece, after Michaelangelo’s Hand of God, took over 12,000 Cubes, measured 29-by-15 feet, and weighed a ton. To take the sting out of his supply budget, Chalom bought Rubik’s knock-offs from China at $1 each.
9. WILL SMITH MAY HAVE HELPED POPULARIZE IT AGAIN.
While the Rubik’s Cube has always been a perennial seller, some years have been better than others. In 2006, sales experienced an uptick after the puzzle was featured in The Pursuit of Happyness: Will Smith’s character is seen solving it quickly to let a potential business associate know he’s got some brain power. “That Rubik’s scene was in the trailer, and it blew up from there,” Joe Sequino, a spokesman Winning Moves, which shares Cube manufacturing in America with Hasbro, told The New York Times. “It was the perfect confluence of events, with the movie and with a new generation 27 years later getting turned on to the cube.” In 2008, sales hit a high of 15 million globally.
10. SOMEONE SOLVED IT WHILE FALLING FROM A PLANE.
With so many Rubik’s world records, finding a new angle can be difficult—so Dan Knights decided to get a new perspective. In 2003, the Cube enthusiast jumped from a plane at 12,000 feet, giving him roughly 45 seconds of free fall time to solve the Cube before his parachute would have to be opened. (He drilled a hole in the Cube and tied it to a loop on his wrist so it wouldn’t fall.) The jump—which was commissioned by cable network VH1—was successful: Knights solved it in 32 seconds.
11. THE WORLD RECORD IS 4.90 SECONDS. (WITH HANDS.)
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In the time it takes to rear back for a sneeze, 14-year-old Lucas Etter can manipulate the puzzle in a world record time of 4.90 seconds, which he set in November 2015. But you don’t necessarily need to use your hands: Jakub Kipa can solve it in 20.57 seconds using only his feet, a variation that some Cubers find distasteful.
12. SOME PEOPLE CAN SOLVE IT BLINDFOLDED.
If you’re not shamed enough by the sight of a pre-adolescent solving a Cube faster than you thought possible, you should try watching them do it while blindfolded. Seven-year-old Chan Hong Lik solved one in 2016 by first memorizing the placement of the squares and then obscuring his vision so he can’t see the Cube in motion. It took him just over two minutes and 21 seconds to finish.
13. THE WORLD’S LARGEST IS A TALL TASK.
Hobbyist Tony Fisher earned a Guinness World Record for his massive Rubik’s Cube, which measures 5 feet across and 5 feet tall. It’s also solvable: Fisher is seen doing it on video (above).
14. YOU NEED TO KEEP IT OILED.
Serious Cubers know that a Rubik’s Cube that hasn’t been properly maintained is going to hamper their efforts. The official Rubik’s web site advises “Cube Lube,” their proprietary silicone formulation that won’t rot the plastic components. And no, it’s not considered a performance enhancer: greasing your puzzle is allowed in the World Championship, held every two years.
15. YOU’LL NEVER BEAT A ROBOT.
In a battle of two of the most iconic plastic blocks of all time, the Rubik’s Cube came up slightly short. In 2014, engineers David Gilday and Mike Dobson constructed a Cube-solving robot from LEGO brick playsets and a Samsung Galaxy S4 cell phone. The brick-bot took care of its opposition in 3.253 seconds. While impressive, a conventionally-designed robot still holds the record for efficiency: two Kansas City Cubers have a device that can solve it in a recognized 1.2 seconds, with the duo constantly striving to beat their own record. Currently, that stands at .900 seconds.
When the National Biscuit Company introduced the Oreo cookie in March of 1912, there was no mistaking its origins. It was a blatant knock-off of Sunshine Biscuits’s Hydrox, a double-wafer chocolate and cream sandwich snack that capitalized on the popularity of a similar home-baked treat that had been circulating since the mid-1800s.
The Hydrox was introduced in 1908. But Sunshine had relatively little of the advertising or production power of Nabisco, which was formed in 1898 as a conglomerate of baking companies: The fact that it beat Oreo to shelves by four years was irrelevant. Consumers largely passed up Hydrox and opted for Oreos, which were sold in bulk for 30 cents a pound.
The two cookies had more in common than a similar taste: Both used cookies that were ornate, with wreaths adorning the outer side. In 1952, possibly in an attempt to further distance themselves from the competition, Nabisco opted to change the Oreo design to a slightly more complex pattern that has invited comparisons to everything from the Knights Templar to the Freemasons.
Were conspiracy theorists focusing too hard on the humble Oreo? Or has the cookie been trying to tell us something all along?
The Oreo wasn’t the only snack Nabisco introduced in 1912. The company also produced Veronese biscuits and Mother Goose cookies, the latter embossed with characters from popular nursery rhymes. As with Hydrox, it had become common to create cookie molds that could imprint a distinctive shape on top of the crunchy wafers. It’s a practice that likely has origins in Europe, where producers of communion wafers used molds to create edible religious symbols.
Mass-market cookie businesses had more cynical motivations. It was in their best interests to create distinctive patterns that helped consumers distinguish one product from another. Nabisco’s Lorna Doone cookies had a vaguely atomic symbol along with the cookie’s name; Hydrox opted for flower petals in addition to wreaths. Even out of the package, it was easy to tell one sugary snack from the other.
In 1924, Nabisco made a slight alteration to the Oreo, adding turtle doves on either end of the cookie’s name and enlarging the font. It remained unchanged for nearly 30 years, until 1952, when a former Nabisco mail room employee named William Turnier was tasked with building a better cookie.
Turnier had arrived at the company in 1923, running correspondence for executives before he befriended workers on the food engineering side of their headquarters in New York City. At night, he pursued his GED: Turnier had dropped out of school over bullying he had experienced as a result of being afflicted with polio.
“He was about 18 months old when he got it,” Bill Turnier, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina and the late designer’s son, tells mental_floss. “He was a very bright guy and should’ve gone on to college, but people made fun of his limp and he couldn’t take it. Bullying is nothing new.”
Shadowing creative employees, Turnier developed a new skill set—industrial engineer—and was eventually hired on to revamp Nutter Butter as well as their line of Milk-Bone dog treats.
It’s not known what direction, if any, Turnier was given when it was time to give the Oreo a facelift. The only thing he kept was the cookie’s name in the center. In place of the wreaths, Turnier positioned an array of four-petal flowers. Surrounding the word “Oreo” was a colophon, or emblem, that was a circle with two crossed lines at the top. It was the same design Nabisco had been using to adorn its company logo.
“That was his idea,” Turnier says. “That design goes back to monks who used it on the bottom of manuscripts they copied in Medieval times. It was a sign of craft—saying they did the best they could. Nabisco really liked that.”
Satisfied with Turnier’s blueprint, which allowed the company to create dough molds to his specifications, the Oreo underwent its cosmetic change in 1952; Turnier continued to work for Nabisco until retiring in 1973. It was unlikely he had any awareness that his design for the Oreo would become a kind of Rorschach test for snack lovers, with people finding subversive messages in the way he illustrated the cookie.
In theories that have become easier to disseminate with the advent of the internet, some Oreo observers have noted that Turnier’s four-leaf flower looks remarkably like a cross pattée, a symbol that the Knights Templar carried into the Crusades in the 12th century. The two-bar cross could be construed as the Cross of Lorraine, also from the Knights Templar. Alternately, both could be a subtle nod to the Freemasons, a secret society that functions to this day.
How much of this is inferred and how much did Turnier intend? According to his son, the elder Turnier’s choices were aesthetic in nature. “He just liked the look of the flowers. He could never understand when people would locate him demanding some kind of explanation. ‘Why did you use a four-petal flower? There aren’t any!’ Here’s a man in his 80s, and he’d call me up quite distressed.
“And of course, there is a four-petal flower, the fireweed. We had some when I was growing up in our backyard.”
Likewise, there was no meaning to the number of ridges—90—that surround the cookie’s margin. “He said he probably used a compass to make sure they were evenly-spaced,” Turnier says. The smaller triangles near the word “Oreo” were probably inserted to avoid having any empty space on the cookie’s face.
While Turnier believes his father was not inclined to reference religious iconography, he does note that one member of his family held an intriguing position. “My grandfather was a Freemason,” he says. “But my dad was Catholic.” Though he was probably exposed to Freemason imagery during his life, Turnier had no intention of delivering a secret handshake to cookie lovers.
Nabisco has never offered an official explanation for the design. They do not, in fact, fully acknowledge Turnier had anything to do with it, insisting that their records don’t account for who was responsible for the cookie’s alteration in 1952—only that Turnier worked as a design engineer during that period of time.
Turnier, who keeps a copy of his father’s original 1952 blueprint hanging in his Chapel Hill, North Carolina home, believes the Oreo was simply adorned with easy-to-replicate designs that were possible thanks to the cookie’s durable texture. “The dough dictates what you can do with the cookie,” he says. “The dough for Oreo, you could almost make a coin out of it. You can insert a lot of detail. And then people look for meaning.”
The elder Turnier died in 2004. In contrast to the theories and mystery that have surrounded his work, the etching on his tombstone is unmistakable: Set in the upper right corner just above his name is a fully adorned Oreo cookie.
In the 1970s, films like The Exorcist, The Omen, and The Amityville Horror thrilled audiences with stories of occult occurrences: Catholic church-sponsored exorcisms, demon-spawned children, and haunted houses, respectively.
But by the 1980s, social critics were sounding alarms that a groundswell of actual Satanic activity was responsible for subversive, soul-polluting behavior. A 1980 book, Michelle Remembers, purported to tell the story of Satanists who kidnapped and brainwashed a young woman, a spark that led to both the media and law enforcement driving home narratives that blamed ritualistic evil for crime and mass entertainment. Take a look at eight instances where self-appointed pop culture analysts insisted the devil was in the details.
1. SATAN’S VESSELS: THUNDERCATS AND THE SMURFS
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In 1986, author Phil Phillips publishedTurmoil in the Toybox, a book detailing how Masters of the Universe and other popular cartoons of the era were endorsing Pagan practices through coaxial cables. With pastor Gary Greenwald, Phillips also shot a video that elaborated on his theories.
“The question is, is there a well organized plot, an insidious design right now, to program and influence the minds of our children toward the occult and witchcraft?” Greenwald asked. It was rhetorical, as the two explained that the ThunderCats were inspired by “heathen gods,” that E.T. “died and was resurrected again” and could therefore be confused with Christian figures, and that “there are things we need to look at concerning The Smurfs.” Because the characters are blue with black lips, they were “depictive of dead creatures.” Collectively, Saturday morning cartoons would teach children “to get into spells and witchcraft.” The two concluded their video essay by pointing out that Rainbow Brite had a Pentagram on her cheek.
In December 1985, 18-year-old Raymond Belknap and 20-year-old James Vance ended a long night of drinking by committing to a suicide pact. Belknap shot and killed himself; Vance attempted to do the same but wound up surviving—with grievous and permanent disfiguring injury—the shotgun blast. Both men had been fans of the rock band Judas Priest, who had been reputed to have recorded subliminal messages in their music.
Vance’s parents decided to sue the band and CBS Records for $6.2 million in damages, alleging phrases like “do it” and “let’s be dead” were being delivered to Vance’s subconscious. When the case went to a civil trial in 1990, audio engineers played the group’s music backward and forward at varying speeds in an attempt to discern whether or not there were any hidden urgings for listeners to kill themselves. Ultimately, a judge ruled there were no messages in the music.
Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2015, lead singer Rob Halford expressed both relief and disappointment in the tragic circumstances. “Had the judge found in favor about the so-called subliminal messages having the power to physically manifest themselves and make people to do something, the ramifications of that would’ve been extraordinary,” he said. “How do you prove to somebody that there are not subliminal messages on your record when you can’t hear them in the first place?”
3. THE DUNGEON MASTER
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Introduced in 1974, Dungeons and Dragons quickly captured the imaginations of gamers who relished the opportunity to take on different guises in fantasy settings—and almost immediately found themselves embroiled in controversies over the game’s sorcery and occult elements. That hysteria reached new levels with the 1979 disappearance of James Egbert, a 16-year-old computer science student who was believed to have gotten lost in the underground steam tunnels near Michigan State University. The media quickly jumped on the theory that Egbert had become too absorbed in his role-playing and suffered a mental breakdown.
The truth was less sinister, though just as tragic: Egbert had been suffering from the demands of being a child prodigy as well as shame over his homosexuality, prompting him to run away from school. He committed suicide in 1980. A fictionalized account of the case, Mazes and Monsters, was made for television in 1982 and starred Tom Hanks.
All the negative publicity—one mother formed a group labeled “BADD “for “Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons,” while creator Gary Gygax hired a bodyguard after receiving death threats—was free advertising for the game’s publisher, TSR. D&D sold $16 million in rule books in 1982 alone.
4. PAMPERS DIAPERS
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In 1985, Procter & Gamble found itself in the unusual position of having to hold a press conference to deny that they were funding a Satanic church. Since 1982, the company had been the target of anonymous accusations claiming their logo—a man in the moon surrounded by 13 stars—was secretly the mark of the devil. So many calls poured into the distributor of Ivory soap, Pampers diapers, and other household toiletries that they were forced to set up a toll-free number to refute allegations that they were beholden to the Church of Satan. (As for the stars: When the company was formed in 1882, they were intended to represent the original 13 colonies.) The rumors ultimately prompted Procter & Gamble to remove the symbol from its packaging.
5. THE MCMARTIN PRESCHOOL SCANDAL
In one of the most sensationalized criminal trials of the 20th century, employees of the McMartin Preschool near Los Angeles stood accused of improper behavior and molestation of their students. After one 3-year-old’s mother grew convinced her son had been subject to abuse, several more children came forward. Some of the accounts included details of ritualistic animal slaughter, leading investigators to believe the school had become the epicenter of an occult organization.
After a six-year trial—the longest in American history—no one was convicted; a post-mortem of the investigation revealed several children had been subject to coercive interviews with law enforcement.
6. THE MR. ED MESSAGE FROM HELL
It wasn’t solely popular culture of the 1980s that was being examined for traces of occult worship. In 1986, two evangelists from Ohio—Jim Brown and Greg Hudson—claimed that they had excavated a hidden message in the unlikeliest of sources: the theme song from Mr. Ed.
The 1960s sitcom about a talking horse opened with the title song “A Horse is a Horse.” Played backward, the preachers insisted, one could hear sinister undertones like “The Source is Satan” and “Someone heard this song for Satan.” The discovery was mentioned during a seminar for teenagers on the moral evaporation caused by rock music. The teens then burned 300 popular albums in a pyre.
Despite the discovery, Brown said he didn’t think the producers of Mr. Ed were actual Satanists. “We don’t think they did it on purpose,” he said.
7. CHILD SACRIFICE ON HALLOWEEN
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In 1989, parents in North Carolina were reluctant to send their children out for Halloween candy on the heels of rumors that Satanists planned to abduct and murder them in ritual sacrifice. More than 500 calls flooded area police stations in Raleigh after word spread that blonde boys from the ages of 2 to 5 were the devil worshippers’ preferred targets; mothers indicated they were considering dyeing their sons’ hair to avoid a catastrophe. Police never found evidence of the plot.
8. THE GERALDO INCIDENT
Geraldo’s tips for profiling a Satanist. Kiran Kava via YouTube
At the height of Satanic hysteria in 1988, broadcast journalist Geraldo Rivera compiled a two-hour special for NBC that purported to detail the lurid mission of devil worshippers. Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground posited that a secret cabal of Satanists numbering in excess of one million were responsible for messages in heavy metal and inspiring the behavior of cult leaders like Charles Manson.
“The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secretive network,” Rivera intoned. “From small towns to large cities, they have attracted police and FBI attention to their satanic ritual child abuse, child pornography, and grisly Satanic murders. The odds are that this is happening in your town.”
The special aired in primetime to stellar ratings, grabbing the attention of nearly 20 million homes, although advertisers were reluctant to buy commercial spots. While Rivera presented a compelling case for concern, the mass media took care to note that the special didn’t come from NBC’s news programmers: it was a product of the network’s entertainment division.
The children of Gail Freeman’s fourth-grade class in the Bronx had no idea how unusual their curriculum really was. To them, the six-foot-tall, 200-pound robot dubbed Leachim that occupied one corner of their classroom probably belonged to a larger fleet of AC-powered educators. Students would approach Leachim, dial in an access code, and hear their names in halting, slightly distorted speech.
Hello, Susan. How are you? Let us begin our lesson.
Loaded with information about Freeman’s class, encyclopedia entries, a dictionary, and an irreverent sense of humor, Leachim spent three years interacting with students, prompting them to answer multiple choice questions by pressing Yes/No or True/False buttons installed on his chest. His inventor—Gail’s husband, Michael Freeman—had spent $15,000 of his own money developing a resource that could tailor lessons to a variety of ages and learning levels.
Leachim was in use from 1972 to 1975, at which point Freeman began to grow tired of updating his database and setting time aside for repairs. He thought Leachim (an anagram for Michael) had the potential to be mass-produced in order to reach more children.
With his light bulb eyes and relative immobility, Leachim was the prototype. It would be 2-XL who would fulfill Freeman’s ambition to have the world’s first smart toy.
Born in 1947, Freeman’s interest in robotics had always been ahead of his time. At 13, he entered and won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search [PDF] with Rudy, a robot that could be pulled along on wheels and raise a drink tray when a button was pressed on his back. When Freeman became an assistant professor of computer sciences at Baruch University in New York in the 1970s, he developed the more advanced Leachim. Satisfied with the level of interactivity, he wanted to make it portable.
“Little Leachim” was Freeman’s next project, an evolution of Leachim that appeared to have been hit with a shrink ray. At just a foot tall, Little Leachim could sit on a desk and pull from several recordings on an 8-track cassette tape to provide both questions and answers. He might, for example, inquire whether it was true that George Washington was the country’s first president. The user could press a button for either yes or no, which would then prompt the robot to congratulate or admonish the user, depending on his or her answer. Get enough right and Little Leachim would tell a joke; wrong responses earned his ire and a suggestion to study more.
Freeman patented Little Leachim in 1975. By 1978, he had enticed the Mego Corporation—best known for their cloth-costumed superhero dolls—to mass-produce him for a wide audience. Mego developer John McNett renamed him 2-XL (“To Excel”) and, when presented with the issue of the robot being too generic-looking, grafted a chin onto the plastic mold using a discarded part from their Micronauts line.
It took barely a year for 2-XL to charm his way into prime real estate in toy stores. Despite his substantial price tag—many retailers offered him for between $50 and $80—Mego moved more than 200,000 units by the summer of 1979, along with an untold number of 8-tracks covering everything from history to science. Industry observers who insisted an expensive educational toy was a recipe for disaster had been proven wrong.
Freeman himself voiced the robot, which retained Leachim’s sarcasm; more than 2000 pieces of fan mail poured into Mego’s offices each month. In an era where a computer with processing power could sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars, 2-XL stood out.
Despite his educational ambitions, 2-XL was still relegated to toy shelves. And like most popular toys, he didn’t stay there for long. Declining sales prompted Mego to discontinue the product in 1981. Other interactive toys like Teddy Ruxpin appeared, marrying the appearance of sentience with a more appealing exterior.
When 2-XL reappeared in 1992, new distributor Tiger Electronics gave him a facelift. He sported prominent arms and a more defined face. His eyes and mouth flashed in time with his speech, and his lessons (now on a standard audio cassette) were mixed with choose-your-own-adventure-style stories about Batman and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Unlike the earlier model, he also ran on batteries.
Like the original Mego version, Freeman provided his voice—a hyper, stylized delivery (“question” was pronounced “ques-tee-yon”) and jokes (“What do you call two banana peels? A pair of slippers!”) that gave him some charm.
His popularity back on the rise, 2-XL came full circle back to Freeman’s original Leachim concept: a 10-foot-tall version appeared on Pick Your Brain, a syndicated kids’ game show hosted by Double Dare personality Marc Summers. The towering robot would ask questions and offer narration on the proceedings.
Unfortunately, the show lasted just one season; in 1995, Tiger ceased production on the new version. In 2002, Freeman and Fisher-Price developed Kasey the Kinderbot, a more personable, LED-equipped toy aimed at preschoolers.
While the toy is impressive, it’s the original 2-XL who preceded Siri, Amazon’s Echo, and other two-way communicative devices to intrigue children who might otherwise be indifferent to an educational experience. In mimicking artificial intelligence, 2-XL helped encourage plenty of the real thing.
It’s commonly accepted wisdom that the biggest hurdle to staying in shape is just getting out the door. Once you’re actually working out—for some, once you’re even in your workout clothes—the battle has been won.
But maybe not. According to research conducted by the fitness metric analysts at UK-based GYMetrix, how a gym chooses to stock and arrange its equipment can make a radical impact on whether patrons decide to stick around.
One of the bigger mistakes is ordering too much of a good thing. Some gyms rely on distributors sending them pre-stocked inventory that may feature too many or too few of the amenities that customers will use. A gym might have dozens of cardio machines taking up floor space, edging out stretching mats. Worse, those mats might be centrally located, making gym-goers feel like they’re on “display” for other members.
That concern also holds true when determining where equipment is placed. People are more likely to use stationary equipment like treadmills when they are positioned so that they face other members, not windows or blank space. GYMetrix believes this might be because people feel more comfortable when they have a view of the gym’s activity; if they’re looking out a window or at a wall, they don’t know what’s going on behind them.
When arranging space for free weights, GYMetrix says that gym owners don’t often put much thought into the placement of equipment. They suggest light and medium weight areas be made available for beginning weightlifters or those who can’t yet handle some of the larger plates being used by experienced members.
To see if your gym might be guilty of some of these layout errors, you can check out GYMetrix’s video below.
The clown crisis of 2016 has seen regional law enforcement pursue leads relating to malevolent clowns, while harmless clowns have become targets of suspicion.
Now, the hysteria has claimed its first official victim: Ronald McDonald is taking a sabbatical.
According to McDonald’s, the red-haired mascot will be minimizing his personal appearances until the current climate of anti-clown sentiment blows over.
“McDonald’s and franchisees in local markets are mindful of the current climate around clown sightings in communities and as such are being thoughtful with respect to Ronald McDonald’s participation in community events for the time being,” McDonald’s spokeswoman Terri Hickey told CNN. “This does not mean that there will be no appearances by Ronald McDonald, but that we are being thoughtful as to Ronald McDonald’s participation in various community events at this time.”
The move comes on the clown-shoe-sized heels of Ronald getting a makeover in 2014, when his overalls were replaced by cargo pants. Despite his genial nature, Ronald has always faced an uphill battle: In a 2014 Rasmussen poll, 43 percent of Americans indicated they dislike clowns.
As of today, the Tokyo Sky Tree in Japan stands as the world’s tallest tower structure. The 2080-foot-tall construct, which opened in 2012, is said to be able to withstand 8.0 magnitude earthquakes, thanks to a shinbashira, or a central pendulum that acts as a counterbalance to the natural sway of the tower. If Dubai-based Emaar Properties and Dubai Holding have their way, that record won’t stand for long.
According toBusiness Insider, construction is set to begin on the Tower at Dubai Creek Harbour, an adjunct to a nearby residential area. Although no dimensions have been announced yet, Dubai said the structure is expected to surpass the Sky Tree to become the world’s tallest tower.
As defined by Guinness World Records, a tower differs from a skyscraper when it comes to usable floor space: a tower typically has 50 percent or less of its total height allocated for occupation. The largest skyscraper, the 2722-foot-tall Burj Kalifa, is also in Dubai, although UAE officials said the new tower will be even larger.
The Tower at Dubai Creek Harbour is expected to open in 2020.
In a world where David Hasselhoff is prepared to license his name for automotive products, it’s probably no surprise that Hollywood has found a way to monetize the emojis found in text and messaging applications.
As proof, Sony has just released the first promotional image and synopsis from EmojiMovie: Express Yourself, a feature-length animated film due next summer. What kind of narrative can be pulled from these seemingly superficial icons? Quite a bit. According to their press release:
“Emojimovie: Express Yourself unlocks the never-before-seen secret world inside your smartphone. Hidden within the messaging app is Textopolis, a bustling city where all your favorite emojis live, hoping to be selected by the phone’s user. In this world, each emoji has only one facial expression – except for Gene (T.J. Miller), an exuberant emoji who was born without a filter and is bursting with multiple expressions. Determined to become ‘normal’ like the other emojis, Gene enlists the help of his handy best friend Hi-5 (James Corden) and the notorious code breaker emoji Jailbreak (Ilana Glazer). Together, they embark on an epic ‘app-venture’ through the apps on the phone, each its own wild and fun world, to find the Code that will fix Gene. But when a greater danger threatens the phone, the fate of all emojis depends on these three unlikely friends who must save their world before it’s deleted forever.”
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