This lovely custom-made box contains a curious collection of personal items nestled in green and purple velvet. It dates to the 19th century and was sold at an estate sale for $39,999. Embedded in the lid is a dagger with a mother-of-pearl handle. In the pull out section below, you'll find a .22 revolver with mother-of-pearl grips. Could these be the personal tools of a classy assassin? The leather box in the middle contains a card holdout device, a clip used to cheat at card games. Maybe this box belonged to a professional gambler. Then the rest of the items are quite ordinary, yet very feminine. One perfume bottle, one empty glass vial with a silver top, two ornately decorated trinket boxes, a match box, and a pink and purple garter. Definitely a woman's possession. No one knows who originally owned this box, but this type of item is called a "prostitute set." Yeah, you were already thinking that. Read more about the set and see close up images of the objects within at Estate Sale Edit. -via Nag on the Lake 

Dogs know that something human-shaped is probably a human. They also recognize something shaped like a dog. And they know when something is not quite right. Well, Halloween is the time when a lot of things are not quite right, so man's best friends have quite a variety of reactions to seasonal decor. We Rate Dogs gets a lot of video submissions, and in this compilation they show us pooches that fear a nefarious intruder when Halloween decorations go up, or they might want pets from an animatronic character. Or they try to chase a black cat cutout. Or ask scarecrows to throw a stick for them. Some dogs are just completely confused- if not friend, why friend shaped? One of these puppies recognizes a bone when he sees one, and he wants it even if it belongs to an artificial skeleton. Lucky for dog lovers, they did not include any jump scares in this compilation.

We all know that you kill a vampire by driving a stake through its heart, but to vanquish a zombie, you need to aim for its brain. What makes the difference? Both are examples of revenants, or the dead rising again, and neither are good to have around the living. How about an ancient mummy? They are also revenants, but there's no advantage in destroying one organ any more than the rest of its organs. Meanwhile, a ghost has no physical body, so there's no use in trying to kill one. 

Looking back at any of the folklore that gave us these monsters, they once were susceptible to other methods of dispatch, depending on the source. Usually one of these sources gave us a bestselling book or a hit movie that cemented its greatest vulnerability in canon. The Art of Manliness not only gives us the proper method of killing each monster, we also get the reason that method is considered universal now.  -Thanks, WTM!    

Gary went to his job at the warehouse, taking some cookies from the house. Michelle called to berate him because those were not his cookies and he shouldn't have done that. Too late; he had already shared them with his boss Dave. I don't want to give too much away, but things go from bad to worse, and it's all told in a frenzied Gospel-style song. YouTube comedian Sarah Elizabeth Hyde illustrates the story for us, or at least parts one and two. Contains NSFW language. 

The original song is by TikTokker Michelle.Jamz who makes songs about her Gen X life. The tale of that time when Gary took the wrong cookies was a real hit and people wanted to hear more, so she added more verses to the song of the cookie chaos to tell parts three and four about picking them up. Then part five involved calling Dave's wife. Part six was labeled as the finale, but then she added part seven to end the story, although it's not pretty.  

There are several videos with extra verses using the comments on the story. The TikTok comments is where I found this photo of Gary and Dave. These guys returned to illustrate other parts of the story.   

What was the real world like 100 years ago? You can read about the Roaring '20s in history books, but those only contain the biggest events driven by famous people. Robert-John Evans of Kuriositas spent a long time finding images from 1926 and digging up the stories behind them, stories that might otherwise be lost to time. The world wasn't in black and white, but the photographs are- and they are public domain! The image above shows dance teacher Vivian Marinelli giving a lesson in the very popular Charleston to the Washington Palace Club players, a Washington, DC, basketball team. You can see by the sign behind them that the Palace Club offered quite a variety of entertainment besides basketball games.

These are the "wave pirates" of WJAZ in Chicago. The radio station made news in 1926 by broadcasting on the frequency of their choice instead of the frequency the government assigned them. Yes, this is where the term "pirate radio" came from. An account of their court case accompanies the photo. See about 45 such images (I may have lost count) from 1926 and their stories arranged month by month at Kuriositas. 

Occult author Michelle Belanger is all about about the darkness within and without, so it is fitting that she made a little free library with a horror theme. The coffin-shaped box is painted black for the season is for, specifically, only books in the horror genre. This sharing library is open for business this Halloween in the Cleveland, Ohio area.

You can tell this TED-Ed lesson is a horror story because it features toothy green monsters and is narrated by a skeleton. But as an adult, you should already know that nothing good can come of going a long time without brushing your teeth. Your mother told you that if you didn't brush every day, your teeth would fall out. That really hit home when you turned six and your teeth fell out. But that second batch of teeth have to last a lifetime. Scientists can explain exactly what happens in your mouth to cause unbrushed teeth to fail, and it's not pretty. Furthermore, rotten teeth and infected gums can affect the rest our bodies as well. 

This video made me wonder about comatose patients, so I looked it up. Yes, they get their teeth cleaned by nurses using specialized tools, products, and methods even though they don't eat anything, because you gotta keep those green monsters at bay.

In the 1930s, gifted scientist Robert E. Cornish became obsessed with reversing the process of dying. He focused on restarting the natural rhythmic processes of the body, such as breathing and heartbeat. For this he developed several strategies, some of which were later incorporated into CPR. But Cornish's main tool was the teeterboard, to rhythmically change the effects of gravity on a deceased body to restart its physiology. He began by trying to resurrect a couple of men who had been dead for hours, with no luck.

Cornish then turned to experiments on dogs, since he could control how long they'd been dead. After all, he killed them. Each of the dogs was optimistically named Lazarus. He achieved limited success with Lazarus II, but ran into the problem of brain damage from lack of oxygen for several minutes. Cornish had better outcomes in Lazarus IV and V, yet still not what you would call good outcomes. Neither were they humane. Read about Cornish, the 20th century Victor Frankenstein, at Popular Science. The article includes a one-hour movie based on Cornish. -via Strange Company 

Black Annis is an English witch who supposedly ate children, which is always a good story to keep your kids from wandering in the woods at night. A written account from 300 years ago said she lived in a cave, was raised by wolves, had sharp claws, and wore a skirt made from human skin. We know the specific area the legend came from, but where is the cave? Could the story of Black Annis come from that of a 15th-century nun named Agnes who lived alone outside her convent? A woman hermit was very unusual, but Agnes seems to have been respected and even revered. However, a couple of hundred years separated those stories, and intervening events may have changed the details greatly to fit new religious narratives. There are alternate theories on the origins of the legend, and Dr. Emily Zarka (previously at Neatorama) goes through them to judge their accuracy.  

Annie Rauwerda has made a name for herself by digging for the funnies so you don't have to. She founded Depths of Wikipedia. Along the way, she's collected some wonderful old newspaper headlines. They feature celebrity names, but not the people you connect with those names today. These are other people who had the same names long ago.

 

You'll find a couple dozen such headlines in this Bluesky post. People liked them so much she posted another couple dozen. I was surprised that Taylor Swift died after a long illness, that David Bowie was arrested for car theft, and Dick Nixon won a diving competition. Here's one that's just dripping with irony. Poor Bill!

The modern day celebrities themselves would probably get a kick our of these. It makes you want to dive into newspaper archives and search for your own name, doesn't it? Scroll down in these posts, and you'll see more contributions from commenters as well. -via kottke 

Do you have a friend that you just hate to watch movies with because they are really bad at it? They have such a hard time focusing that you have to stop and explain it to them constantly. Maybe that's because they are on their phone, thinking that they can multitask. Spoiler: you can't multitask two activities that require brain power, much less three. Even if your friend didn't have his phone out, they may have lost the ability to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes at a time. Ryan George has a product for you, and somehow it involves adding a third device to the scenario. But Corn-i doesn't have much patience, either.  

My main experience with this type of annoyance was when my daughters went from animated kids' films to adult movies (shut up, not that kind of adult movies). My patience came from my obligation to teach them how to follow a plot and figure things out, because they were too young to know better. It was hard because those questions would come in theaters, too, when you can't pause the story. They are well-behaved viewers now.

A Court of Thorns and Roses is the first novel of a romantasy novel series of the same name. There are now six books in this series by Sarah J. Maas with a seventh due in January. They are, to put it mildly, popular at my library.

Megan of Forest & Fiction loves books and dressmaking and so made this Halloween costume from pages of the novels. Making book dresses is something Megan does and does very well. She wore it to a party at Beguiled Books, a bookstore in Seattle that specializes in romance.

Design Boom tells us that the Chinese division of McDonald's is offering a computer mouse shaped like a carton of French fries and a paired mouse pad as a promotional item. The company claims that these computer peripherals are made from recycled parts from Happy Meal toys.

Take it to the office. It's not just a toy, but a fully functional Bluetooth-compatible mouse that will remind you to take your lunch break as your fingers lovingly caress the textured plastic.

I still cant believe this is a Houston car dealership ad. https://t.co/t4MsDxDSvK

Is this video real? Yes, it is real. Bayway Kia in Houston is being lowkey about it, but it is listed on their official Instagram page.

What is the blonde anime girl saying? I have watched enough anime to pick up only a few words. Sugoi! It's very kawaii. It makes me want to do a roadtrip just to meet her. Because she's real, right? I mean, in terms of a waifu, one could do worse.

John and Dan Bell--the Bell Brothers--are emerging filmmakers who digitally splice together movies, television, and music to form amusing and terrifying takes on famous stories. For example, imagine Mrs. Doubtfire if Joker was in it or Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds with Big Bird.

Their latest mashup seamlessly blends The Night of the Living Dead and It's a Wonderful Life. In it, George Bailey must contend with his future being torn apart both metaphorically and literally as the dead rise to slaughter the hapless inhabitants of Bedford Falls, New York.