fact
Why Are Car Air Fresheners Shaped Like Trees?
Today’s Big Question: Why are car air fresheners shaped like trees?
Should You Apply Ice or Heat to Your Aches and Pains?
With the joys of fall, also come a few drawbacks: arthritis flare-ups and headaches—as well as the likelihood of injuring yourself during a routine workout—all become more common as a result of colder weather. Here’s how to know when to apply ice or heat to your body after an injury.
The Ideal Charge Amount for Prolonging Your Laptop’s Battery Life
There may be a way to prolong the life span of your power source and avoid the pain of an ailing laptop battery.
Here’s Why We Crave Sugar So Much
We know sugar is bad for us—so why, then, do we keep consuming it?
How A Misinterpreted Anagram Predicted The Moons of Mars
This is how a misinterpreted anagram from Galileo predicted the moons of Mars.
14 Absolute Facts About The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Though it flopped at the box office when it premiered in 1975, four decades later, Rock Horror Picture Show has established itself as the quintessential cult classic. In anticipation of Fox’s movie musical remake The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again airing tonight, we’re revisiting the absolute pleasure with 14 facts.
Fall is the perfect time for a small-town festival: the summer heat has cooled and harvests are abundant, creating ideal conditions to get outside, mingle with your neighbors, and snack on local treats. Although many small-town festivals center around food, our favorites approached their culinary selections in a unique, unexpected way. And there were a few non-food-related standouts that we couldn’t resist including as well. Herewith are 12 offbeat, small-town fall festivals worth checking out.
According to legend, Napoleon and his traveling army once stopped for the night near the town of Bessières in the South of France. A local innkeeper fed Napoleon an omelet that was so good, the French leader ordered the village to round up all its eggs to serve the same dish, on an extremely large scale, to his men the following morning. From this story has grown the French tradition of cooking a massive omelet to feed the poor at Easter—a tradition the Louisiana town of Abbeville has taken for its own omelet celebration, in a move to reconnect the town with its French heritage. For this annual festival, started in 1984, 5000 eggs are paraded through the town to a 12-foot skillet, where chefs whip them up into a Giant Cajun Omelette. The festival also features an egg toss, an egg-cracking contest, and a charity walk, among other family-friendly activities.
As its name attests, this Edgerton, Wisconsin, festival celebrates the wizards brought to life by J.K. Rowling and the magical world in which they live. The festival goes to great lengths to recreate Potter World, offering its own Diagon Alley, Tri Wizard Maze, fully animated patronuses, and mugs of butterbeer. Visiting muggles can ride a broomstick, go on a horcrux hunt, try on a sorting hat, or any number of other activities clearly laid out on the fest’s own Marauder’s Map.
COURTESY THE CIRCLEVILLE PUMPKIN SHOW
Held annually since 1903, this four-day homage to the pumpkin has grown into the country’s sixth-largest festival, attracting more than 400,000 attendees every year. Highlights include the Giant Pumpkin Contest (last year’s winner weighed 1666 pounds) and the equally gigantic pumpkin pie (six feet in diameter), baked every year by local pie-makers from Lindsey’s Bakery. Other attractions include a pumpkin pie-eating contest, seven parades (including one for pets), and pageants to crown Little Miss Pumpkin and Miss Pumpkin Queen. And as promised by the festival’s slogan—”The Greatest Free Show on Earth”—you can enjoy all the festivities sans entry fee.
What started, 30 years ago, as a way for the townspeople of Ennis, Montana, to clear out their freezers, has turned into an annual competition to create the most interesting dishes out of last season’s wild game. Held each year right before the start of rifle season, the cook-off sees home chefs competing in the categories of Best Chili, Best Non-Chili, Most Unusual, and Judge’s Choice. Past entries have included moose chili, elk fajitas, and—in the category of Most Unusual—deer fudge and bear pizza.
Just like Circleville, Wisconsin’s Union Grove hosts a pumpkin festival at this time every year. Its fest, however, has a much different draw: a pumpkin chucking contest. Teams compete in the categories of Trebuchet, Slingshot, and Catapult, in which they attempt to chuck an 8- to 10-pound pumpkin using one of these contraptions that they built themselves. While they’re waiting to find out who won—trophies are given out for Machine Design, Team Presentation, Distance and Accuracy, and Good Sportsmanship—they can sample fare from the festival’s Best of the Midwest BBQ Cook-off, which awards prizes in the categories of best chicken, ribs, pork, and brisket.
Also held in honor of one of its state’s largest crops, this fest has been hosted by the town of Crowley, Louisiana, since 1937 (not including a four-year hiatus during World War II) and now ranks as one of the state’s largest agricultural festivals. The three-day festivities include the Rice Creole and Cookery Contest, a 5K Rice Festival run/walk, and the crowning of the Rice Festival Queen, as well as live music and arts and crafts.
Seeing as a quarter of the nation’s peanuts are grown within a 100-mile radius of this Alabama town, it’s no wonder Dothan, which calls itself the Peanut Capital of the World, hosts this peanut festival every year. The inaugural festival, held in 1938, was a three-day event that featured a pageant, parade, and Dr. George Washington Carver as guest speaker. In the years since, the fest has grown into a 10-day extravaganza that includes live music, livestock shows, amusement rides, a parade, and a cheerleading contest. The pageant remains part of the festivities, as young women from peanut-producing counties in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia compete for the title of Miss National Peanut Festival.
Nicknamed the Mushroom Capital of Texas, Madisonville has been hosting this mushroom-centric festival for the past 15 years. Highlights of this year’s fest include a gala dinner—whose menu, of course, features mushrooms in each of its four courses—and cooking demos of mushroom-centric recipes. The festival also offers tastings of Texas wines and craft beers in its biergarten, as well as an annual competitive grape stomp.
Bacon lovers, this one’s just the thing for you. This Springfield, Missouri, fest, now in its fourth year, devotes an entire day to celebrating the increasingly gourmet meat, with the region’s artisan bacon makers and chefs offering attendees tastes of bacon-infused treats. The festival also features a bacon-eating contest, crowning whoever can pack away the most meat in two minutes. Since the fest is billed as “a salute to bacon, bourbon and beer,” it’s no surprise that craft beer and spirits will be on hand to sample as well—or that festivalgoers must be at least 21 years old to attend.
Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, this Niceville, Florida, festival—called Boggy Bayou after the town’s original name—honors the mullet fish that gave the town’s first inhabitants their main source of sustenance and trade. The weekend-long fest offers attendees plenty of opportunities to sample its namesake food as well as other regional culinary treats like crawfish, shrimp, and, for the truly adventurous, alligator on a stick. The festival is also known for the country music stars who grace its stage; this year’s big names include Confederate Railroad and Chase Bryant.
The longest-running duck calling competition, this Stuttgart, Arkansas, contest—the highlight of the city’s Wings Over the Prairie Festival—is now in its 81st year. (Flossy facts: The first-ever champion, Thomas E. Walsh of Greenville, Mississippi, won with calls he produced not with a duck call but in his own throat; only one woman has ever been champion—Stuttgart’s own Pat Peacock, who won in 1955 and 1956.) The contest attracts callers from all over the country and is so competitive that contestants must have won preliminary contests sanctioned by the Stuttgart Chamber of Commerce to even enter. The rest of the Wings Over the Prairie festival includes a children’s duck-calling contest, a duck gumbo cook-off, and the Queen Mallard Pageant.
North Carolina’s Iredell County has a long history with hot air balloons, having manufactured them since the early 1970s. This annual festival, held in the town of Statesville, has been celebrating that relationship for more than 40 years, making it the second-longest running ballooning event in the country. Twice a day, attendees are treated to the sight of more than 50 hot air balloons rising into the sky; as darkness falls on Saturday night, they can also enjoy the Balloon Glow, as the balloons, lit up from within, shine like lanterns in the sky. As if the festival isn’t lovely enough, a percentage of its proceeds are donated to local nonprofits.
October 19, 2016 – 10:00am
More than 60 years ago, a rising star filmmaker put together a small cast, built a giant set, and turned a screenplay almost no one wanted into a landmark feature film. To this day, Rashomon is considered one of the greatest entries in the stellar filmography of Akira Kurosawa. It brought Japan to the world cinema stage, made Kurosawa an icon, and continues to endure both as a work of art and as an example of just how fragile our relationship to the truth can be. To celebrate this iconic film, here are 11 facts about how it got made.
Akira Kurosawa had the idea and the budget for what would become Rashomon as early as 1948, but for at least two years he couldn’t get a studio to commit to the film. The Toyoko Company, who originally planned to fund the film, backed out in 1948 after determining the film to be too much of a risk. Toho, the studio where Kurosawa made many of his films, said no. Then the Daiei studio signed a one-year contract with Kurosawa and agreed to fund the film after Kurosawa expanded the script to add a more definitive beginning and ending. Even as Daiei backed the film, though, the head of the studio—Masaichi Nagata—wasn’t impressed, walking out of his first screening. Of course, when the film became a darling of international cinema, he was more than happy to take credit.
The script that would become Rashomon began as a slightly short screenplay by Kurosawa’s friend, Shinobu Hashimoto, adapted from the short story “In A Grove” by the Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. The story, like the film, features varying accounts of an incident told by different people.
Kurosawa liked the idea, but felt the script needed expansion, so he used Akutagawa’s story Rashomon, in which characters huddle in the rain under the Rashomon gate, as inspiration. The two merged, and the film was born.
While thinking about how Rashomon should look, Kurosawa remembered the days before films had sound, when visuals were the star, and hunted down French avant-garde films of the silent era for research. He saw the film as a “play of light and shadow,” and as a result many of its most famous sequences are built upon the camera, not the dialogue.
“I like silent pictures and I always have,” Kurosawa said. “They are often so much more beautiful than sound pictures are. Perhaps they had to be.”
In researching Rashomon, Kurosawa paid particular attention to how the titular “Rashomon Gate” should look, and did research on other similar gates of the period. In the end, he determined that the gate should be much larger than originally intended. It was so big, in fact, that if they’d built it intact, it would have collapsed on itself.
“It was so immense that a complete roof would have buckled the support pillars,” Kurosawa said. “Using the artistic device of dilapidation as an excuse, we constructed only half a roof and were able to get away with our measurements.”
Rashomon’s now-famous nonlinear storytelling style might seem commonplace to modern viewers, but it wasn’t in 1950. As a result, three of Kurosawa’s assistant directors came to him during production to ask him to explain the script. He explained that the film was about “the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology,” and two of the assistants left to read the script again. A third kept asking for further clarification, to the point that Kurosawa eventually asked for his resignation.
Rashomon’s small cast became a tight, energetic group during production, enduring grueling shooting days and then going out drinking together at night. According to Kurosawa, they eventually created a meal together, which they called “Mountain Bandit Broil.”
“It consisted of beef strips sautéed in oil and then dipped in a sauce made of curry powder in melted butter,” according to Kurosawa. “But while they held their chopsticks in one hand, in the other they’d hold a raw onion. From time to time they’d put a strip of meat on the onion and take a bite out of it. Thoroughly barbaric.”
For the iconic forest scenes, Kurosawa chose the pristine Nara forest, and the cast and crew happily headed out into the trees to shoot there. There was just one problem: leeches. They would drop out of the trees, crawl up cast members’ legs, and generally plague the entire production. So, the cast and crew came up with a simple solution: salt.
“Before we left for the location in the morning we would cover our necks, arms and socks with salt,” Kurosawa said. “Leeches are like slugs—they avoid salt.”
Anyone who’s ever seen Rashomon remembers the iconic shots of characters crouched under the Rashomon Gate, sheltering themselves from torrential rain. While shooting, though, the production had trouble getting the rain (created by fire hoses) to show up on camera when silhouetted against the sky. So, to make it more visible, black ink was added to the water to create contrast.
To further emphasize his “light and shadow” metaphors, Kurosawa wanted his camera to sometimes point directly at the sun, creating a lens flare effect. At the time, this technique was so frowned upon that some believed it would literally burn the film, rendering it useless. Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa was willing to take the risk, though, and the result is iconic.
After making Rashomon, Kurosawa went on to direct an adaptation of one of his most beloved novels, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. The film was greeted with very poor reviews, and he was crestfallen. Then, at the peak of his despair, he got a call informing him that Rashomon had won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, a festival he didn’t even know the film was screening at. It would then go on to win an honorary Academy Award for Outstanding Foreign Language Film. To this day, Rashomon is credited with bringing Japanese cinema onto the global stage.
Since its rise as a global pop culture phenomenon, Rashomon’s narrative has inspired a particular phrase used everywhere from TV shows to courtrooms: “The Rashomon Effect.” This describes a situation in which different people have different accounts of the same incident, perhaps in part because they lie to make themselves look favorable.
Additional Sources:
The Films of Akira Kurosawa, by Donald Richie
October 19, 2016 – 10:00am
Mike Lehmann, Mike Switzerland via Wikimedia Commons // CC-BY-SA-3.0
As more people use antibiotics to fight infections, certain strains of bacteria are becoming harder to beat. A future tool in the fight against drug-resistant superbugs may come from an unusual source: Tasmanian devil milk. As Gizmodo reports, milk from the marsupials contains certain chemical compounds that can wipe out most dangerous bacterial infections.
For their research, recently published in Scientific Reports, scientists from the University of Sydney analyzed Tasmanian devil milk in their search for new superbug-fighting compounds. Milk from marsupials like Tasmanian devils differs from that of other mammals in that it has to provide nourishment to an underdeveloped infant. Joeys enter the pouch after a little more than a month of gestation, and their mother’s milk offers them extra immune support once they leave the safety of the womb.
The research team was able to pin down the compounds responsible for this special property. Tasmanian devil’s milk contains six antimicrobial peptides called cathelicidins. For comparison, humans have just one. After synthesizing the compounds in the lab, researchers found them to be effective against potentially deadly bacteria such as vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecalis and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or golden staph.
Antibiotic-resistant superbugs are one of the biggest health threats we’re currently facing. Tasmanian devils aren’t the only marsupials that might prove useful in the battle against them: Wallabies and opossums boast exceptionally high numbers of antimicrobial compounds as well. Study researcher Emma Peel told the BBC that studies into koala milk are also underway.
[h/t Gizmodo]
Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.
October 19, 2016 – 9:00am
The 2016 presidential election has certainly given us a lot to talk about, including actual words used by the candidates themselves. As we run up to the big day on November 8, here’s a look back at some of the buzzwords the campaign and candidates have given us—and a look into their surprising histories.
In many ways, this election has sought to destabilize the political establishment, fittingly enough for the etymology of the word. Coming into Middle English from the French, the word ultimately derives from the Latin stabilire, “to make stable,” from which the word stable is also derived. In the 1700s and 1800s, establishment began referring to post-Reformation English churches that were “set up” with the approval of the state. The notion of the establishment as “the powers that be” doesn’t emerge until the 1920s.
Many candidates and voters have expressed their frustration with the establishment because they feel the political and economic system is rigged against them. The word rigged has nothing to do with any ship of state, so to speak. In the 17th century, a rig was a colloquial term for a “scheme,” “prank,” or “swindle,” like the thimblerig, an early shell game. Some etymologists think this rig comes from the phrase to play rex, “to act like a lord or master.” Such is the power, apparently, that trickery can endow. By the 1820 and ’30s, rigged auctions were huckstering shabby wares and rigged stocks were illegally manipulating their values, both of which anticipate today’s use of rigged.
Throughout his campaign, Bernie Sanders described geopolitical situations in the Middle East as quagmires. But back in the 1560s, a quagmire was far from the desert terrain we associate with that region: It was wet, boggy land. The word probably literally means “marsh marsh,” joining quag, a variant of quab (of obscure origin) and mire (from Old Norse). Sanders didn’t employ a new metaphor, though, with his quagmire: The word has referred to “sticky situations” since the 1570s.
Many pundits and critics have described Donald Trump’s style as bombastic. Bombast has characterized “inflated” language since the 1580s, describing speech that is “puffed up” like the cotton, once called bombast, that was used to pad or stuff clothing. The word traces back to the Latin (bombax) and Greek (bombyx) for a yet softer substance: silk.
Speaking of fibers, stamina—that “vigor” and “endurance” much discussed this year as a presidential qualification—comes from the Latin word stamen, meaning “thread.” In Roman textiles, the stamen was a specific kind of thread that served as a foundation for a weave. The Romans also used stamen for the “thread of life” spun by the Fates, whose mythical weaving determined how long humans lived.
Both senses of the Latin stamen, a foundational thread and one’s inborn longevity, came to influence the modern sense of stamina, which gradually emerges between 1500 and 1800 for the “essential qualities” that gives an organism its “energy” and “perseverance.” Note that qualities is plural, as is stamina in Latin. The stamen of a plant is also named for the “thread-like” shape of the organ.
Temperament has been another key attribute central to this presidential election. In the 1400s, when the word first appears, temperament was the “mixture of qualities” in an organism, which proportion was believed to determine its nature or disposition. Hence the four temperaments, where one’s personality depends on which of the humors (black bile, yellow bile, blood, or phlegm) prevails most in them. Temperament broadened in meaning to one’s general “character” or “constitution” by the 1800s, and today can connote an angry or cool-headed demeanor. And as a word, temperament comes from the Latin temperare, “to divide/combine in proportion” or “regulate.” This verb also gives English temper, “to moderate,” and temper, as in a short one.
People with an even temperament tend to keep their heads. Polls, whose ups and downs we ride all the way to Election Day, are all about counting those heads—and quite literally so. As far back as the 1300s, a poll was the “top of the head” (which explains tadpole, “toad-head”). The total number in a group of people can be determined by counting by poll, or headcount. Polls referred to the total number of votes by the 1730s, and to statistical surveys by the 1900s.
Heads aren’t the only body part of the 2016 road to the White House. Backs are, too. Many conservative newspapers made headlines by endorsing a Democrat—here, Hillary Clinton, of course—for the first time in their history. In the 1300s, to endorse was “to write on the back of” something, especially a financial document like a check. Endorsing a check serves as an act of verification. This notion of verification extended to “confirmation” or “approval” in the mid-1800s, hence political endorsements. At root is the Latin indorsare, joining in (on) and dorsum (back). Dorsum also yields do-si-do (via French dos-à- dos), which involves dancing “back to back.”
No do-si-do has found the political spotlight this campaign (yet). But another dance, the shimmy, has, thanks to Hillary Clinton’s much-memed shoulder shaking in the first presidential debate. The shimmy started out as a popular (and often banned) jazz dance in the 1910s. Some etymologists think the shimmy shake comes from shimmy, an 1830s dialectical variant of chemise, historically a kind of smock or undergarment. The connection between the article of clothing and the dance move is uncertain.
The shimmy isn’t the only fancy maneuver of the election. After the candidates clinch their nominations, they pivot away from winning over their party base towards the general electorate. Back in the 14th century, a pivot was a “hinge pin,” the central rod around which some mechanism, like a pair of shears or scissors, rotates. And it’s this idea of a central point that leads to a word like pivotal in the early 1800s. Basketball players were pivoting by the late 1890s, whose quick turning on a pivot leads to the political pivot used by politicians today. The English pivot is from the French pivot, a word whose deeper origins are unclear.
And why are candidates said to clinch nominations? Because they settle the contest decisively, like a clinched nail. To clinch a nail is to hammer it through a board and bend back the point, which ensures it’s fastened. The verb appears by the 1570s, probably a variant form of clench. The sense of victory-securing clinching emerges in the 1700s. The root of clinch and clench is the same that gives English cling.
Hillary Clinton’s email controversy has been clinging to her campaign since the news broke early last year. The word email, which dates to the late 1970s, merges together electronic mail, which goes back two decades earlier. Clinton found herself on the hot seat for emailing over a private server, but, historically, mail used to be quite the private object. In Middle English, mail was a wallet or traveling bag. In the mid-1600s, English speakers were referring to a mail of letters—post being transported in bags, naturally. The term didn’t name the letters or packages themselves until the mid-1800s in American English.
In past tweets, Donald Trump has treated climate change as a hoax. The word hoax, a kind of elaborate or mischievous deception, turns up in the late 18th century and probably developed out of hocus, an older term for a “trick” a juggler would perform. In the early 1600s, a juggler, originally a jester or conjuror, could have gone by the nickname of Hocus Pocus.
By the 1630s, jugglers were using hocus pocus as a magic formula in their tricks. Many like to claim, thanks to a snarky suggestion by Anglican clergyman John Tillotson, that hocus pocus is a corruption of hoc est corpus meum, “This is my body,” a Latin phrase used to consecrate the Eucharist-cum-Body-of-Jesus-Christ during mass. It’s more likely that hocus pocus is just some sham Latin, made up by an old performer to impress—or perplex—an audience. And no doubt, if the words alone are any measure, the 2016 presidential election has been quite the show.
October 19, 2016 – 8:00am
