Most of us are aware, by adulthood, that silica gel is used as a desiccant, or a substance to keep the area around it dry. That's why you see them packed in with all kinds of new purchases, like shoes, pills, snack foods, and electronics. You don't want your stuff arriving moldy or rusted after it's been in a warehouse for a while. I live in a humid area, and sometimes save these packets, thinking they may be useful someday. Then I forget where I stash them, so they never reach a useful number. These little packets of silica gel beads always say "DO NOT EAT" as if they are poison.
But what is silica gel, anyway? You may be surprised to learn that it has properties that make it useful in other applications besides absorbing humidity. A miracle material, indeed. And what's worst that could happen if someone did eat it? After all, the warning looks a bit like a challenge to people who don't like to be ordered around.
In 1988, the Oscar Mayer company offered this promotional item. It can still be found occasionally on auction sites. This pan flute is not the only wiener whistle that the company offered, but appears to be the only one capable of multiple tones. The back side of the label provides instructions for playing the enchanted tones of the company jingle.
This pan flute is certainly superior to the alternatives, as it offers a loop at one end so that the instrument can be hung around the neck with a lanyard or at the waist with a retracting belt reel. Always keep your wiener whistle handy for emergencies.
-via Geppetto San Martín
William Daniels's acting career is almost as old as television itself, since it began in 1943 with a variety show performance on the nascent NBC network. He continued acting on television, films, and on stage.
For my generation, Daniels is the voice of KITT from Knight Rider. For Millennials, he's Mr. Feeny on Boy Meets World. He's still active, recently playing the ghost of King Henry VI in a production of Richard III and appearing on Dancing with the Stars.
But I posit that Daniels's greatest accomplishment is his marriage. Daniels and his wife, actress Bonnie Bartlett, hold the record for the longest ever Hollywood marriage at 74 years.
Ed Harrington is one of our favorite artists. He's designed many of the t-shirts that we sell at the NeatoShop and we've showcased some of his simultaneously monstrous and subversively amusing artworks.
Recently, he designed the XenoFrog sculpture which is on display at the Bottleneck Gallery in Brooklyn. It shows our favorite amphibian Muppet in his most terrifying form: the Xenomorph from the Alien franchise. It's not easy being green, but it's even harder when humans are hunting you and your young.
Harrington is selling a limited run of these sculptures, including a glow-in-the-dark variant.
-via Gizmodo
Minnesota's own MinnesotaStan introduces us to "funeral bread" -- a comfort food from Minnesota and North Dakota. The Star Tribune says that it consists of cinnamon bread coated with a layer of Cheez Whiz and topped with sliced green olives. Some variants use rye or pumpernickel, but these are corruptions of the tradition which is centered around the small town of Roseau close to the Canadian border.
The dish is commonly served at communal gatherings after church or at funerals, hence the name.
The above photo is by from a now-deleted reddit account. I'm at a loss as to why the redditor was forced to purge their account and flee into hiding.
Kate Wagner has been suffering from Long Covid and has barely posted anything new at McMansion Hell in the past year, but she's recovering and found a house that just had to be featured. This home in Illinois has a 10,000 square foot interior and is for sale for $2.5 million. This was obviously custom built to someone's dream vision of luxury living, and conforms to no known rules of architecture. The front entrance seems to be set at a 45-degree angle to the house, but another picture of the rear shows that other parts of the house jut out at odd angles, too. And just what are those columns supposed to be supporting? It's as if the designer demanded all the features they ever admired be included in one building.
But the interior is just as insane. The rooms come in odd sizes and shapes that have no relation to what the space is for. There are ledges and angles and odd windows everywhere, all illuminated by cheap modern light fixtures. The furniture and art is just as weird, but those can be changed. Take a tour of this modern disaster at McMansion Hell.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Imagine you're Edward Teller and you've spent years of your life probing the mysteries of the atom and finally invented a nuclear bomb. That happened with the Manhattan Project, and resulted in two nuclear bombs that finally ended World War II. What then? The US and the Soviet Union developed more powerful bombs and large nuclear arsenals until the concept of mutually-assured destruction took hold. These bombs were so deadly that neither side could use them as weapons, since that would be suicide.
So what good are these very expensive bomb-splitting weapons if they can't be used in war? Maybe they could be used for infrastructure projects, like digging canals, opening up harbors, oil extraction, or maybe geothermal heat production. What could possibly go wrong? If you've ever wondered what all those underground nuclear tests in the 1960s were for, Kurzgesagt is glad to explain them to us. There's a promotional break from 4:49 to 5:56. The video ends at 11:56.
Part of the success of Costco is that visiting one is not just a shopping trip, but an experience. The food court is famous for its simple but very cheap fare, such as the $1.50 hot dog. Costco insists on being authentic to itself and not raising the price, despite inflation. Customers line up to participate in the slogan "I Got the Dog in Me," a reference to those hot dogs.
Now Costco is offering branded whiskey at a few warehouses in the DC area. Although the hot dog costs $1.50, the bottle of whiskey will set you back $85.99.
-via Aelfred the Great
Idea: Neatorama should offer branded whiskeys. I can suggest some innovative and unexpected flavors.
Hollywood, we now have a great premise for a new heist film! Fox Business reports that a truck containing 413,793 KitKat bars left a factory in Italy and vanished before it could arrive in Poland. Nestlé, the owner of the candy cars, is assuming that they were stolen. That's 12 tonnes* of chocolately goodness in the hands of the wrong people.
In a press release, Nestlé says that normal supply should not be impacted, so there is no immediate danger or cause for panic.
-via Stacey Vanek Smith | Photo: Carl Spencer
*I see reports of both 12 tonnes (12,000 kilograms) and 12 tons (24,000 pounds), but I think tonnes is what Nestlé means.
UPDATE 3/30/2026: We now have a suspect.
— Domino's Pizza UK (@Dominos_UK) March 30, 2026
Paul Lukas of Inconspicuous Consumption notices things that other people don't, and in this case he went to great lengths to get to the bottom of the story. The results are not at all earth-shattering, but you have to admire his dedication and research. The picture above shows the entrance to Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois. It was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1908, and features a typeface that Wright designed himself. If you study it closely, you might notice that the first "H" is upside down! The horizontal line is supposed to be above the midpoint. The other two "H"s are oriented correctly. How did that happen?
Lukas dug into the history of the building and found that the letters have been removed and replaced several times, and were even stolen once. The only thing to do was search historical photos to find out when and how it happened. But those photos over the past century showed that there were sometimes more than one "H" installed upside-down, and an "S" was also an occasional victim! Lukas was able to reconstruct a timeline of the lettering over the 120 years of the temple, and it's a wild story.
There's a part two, but it's paywalled and not crucial to the story. That said, after looking at so many pictures of type, I am personally bothered by the inconsistent kerning, especially in the word "SERVICE." -via kottke
(Image credit: w_lemay)
It may seem a little premature to get nostalgic about the internet of 20 years ago, but it's normal. In the 1970s, we all watched a TV show (Happy Days) that harnessed nostalgia about the 1950s only 20 years earlier. That said, the history of the internet can be a little jarring. Back in the 2000s (no one really calls them the aughts), graphics were rough, users were naive, and goofiness was everywhere. It was a lot of fun!
Then came algorithms, social media, SEO, and endless advertising. The sites that were the most fun were bought up by corporations. Paywalls went up. Personal data became a commodity. Influencers made money by making you feel inadequate. Spam and viruses gave way to bots. And then there's artificial intelligence. But let's not think about those things- Weird History is glad to take us back to the days of flourishing creativity and goofiness in the 2000s. This video has a promotional break from 5:18 to 6:29.
In his 1972 breakout hit "Ain't No Sunshine," Bill Withers says, "I know" 26 times in a row. This is because he ran out of lyrics while he was recording the song and realized it only during the session. Then unknown and of limited financial means, Withers kept and worked with that recording. Now it's hard to imagine the song without it.
David Hartley is a music teacher who produces videos about the history of modern popular music. His latest work informs us of 15 songs with mistakes in their recordings. Did you know that Axl Rose's line "Where do we go now?" in "Sweet Child O'Mine" is a question that he was literally asking his colleagues in Guns N' Roses?
-via The Awesomer
Through most of history, people developed regional accents from talking to the people around them. Then movies and TV helped to flatten those accents as people were exposed to the way Hollywood talks. Then we got the internet, which shattered the shared media landscape, and allowed like-minded people around the world to find each other. So now instead of accent being a matter of geography, it is a more likely a matter of media choice.
In this world, there arose a way of speaking that is termed the "lifestyle influencer accent," which is designed to create intimacy and engagement for SEO purposes. A subset of this accent is the "lip filler accent," which is when people speak as if they have had their lips filled even if they haven't. The procedure changes the way someone moves their mouth and affects their speech. In that online world, word pronunciation spreads virally, and people who are too young, or too broke, to get lip fillers, end up sounding like the people who've had it done. Read how the lip filler accent came about and what it means for English linguistics. -via Nag on the Lake
We've posted about some really strange airports before, but that's mainly because they are scary. The geography of the world doesn't adapt to the needs of air travelers, yet people want to flly to remote places. Ercan International Airport in Cyprus, on the other hand, is weird merely because it's caught in a political no man's land. The history of Cyprus is like a lot of other country's histories: ruled by the Greeks, the Romans, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, then left to their own devices, which can open up ancient rivalries and prejudices. In Cyprus, independence led to a split between the ethnic Greeks and the ethnic Turks, and the formation of Northern Cyprus, which is not recognized as a country by the UN. That designation puts the Ercan International Airport in a weird spot, as Half as Interesting explains. The video is only six minutes; the rest is promotional.
In the winter of 1393, the young French king Charles VI (previously at Neatorama), who was known to be mentally ill, became convinced that he was made of glass and ordered iron rods sewn into his clothing in order to protect him from breaking. His was the first documented case of what became known as the "glass delusion." Over the next several centuries, there would be plenty of others. The glass delusion varied, as some thought their bodies were glass pitchers or lamps, some felt they were encased in glass, and some believed they had glass inside of them. They were all terrified of being shattered.
Then the glass delusion died out in the 19th century. Some believe it came about because glass was the most technologically magic material available during those years, and this delusion was later replaced by the scarier materials of the modern world. Read up on the rise and fall of the glass delusion at the Public Domain Review. -via Messy Nessy Chic
