Japanese Instagram user konel_bread creates amazingly realistic baked goods that look like animals and cartoon characters. In the past, we've seen their loaves that look like teddy bears with six pack abs. Now, they show something more sedate but equally charming: bagels prepared to resemble dozing wiener dogs.

A trend on X lately is to share photos of historically significant buildings that have been preserved by being repurposed by modern businesses. Not all of the descriptions are correct. For example, I've verified that a particular Chipotle was not the place where Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense. But this Publix grocery store is indeed an old government printing house.

501 Gervais Street in Columbia, South Carolina is the site of a brick building where the Confederacy printed fiat currency until February of 1865, when General Sherman burned it. It was rebuilt after the war and is now a grocery store.

It's interesting to watch these changes in real time. There's a beautiful historic building in the small town of Marion, Texas. I drive by it a few times a year. It's lately been a coffeshop, but changes every couple of years.

Photo: Ron Cogswell

Every ellipse has two foci. The foci are, Khan Academy tells us, "two points whose sum of distances from any point on the ellipse is always the same."

Let's say that you build a miniature golf course shaped like an ellipse and place the hole at one focus. If you hit the ball from the other focus with a bank shot, the ball will land in the hole. If you hit the ball from any other point with a bank shot, the ball will miss the hole.

That's the premise of this video by YouTuber Constructive Chaos. He build increasingly complex combinations of ellipses to make mathematically predictable miniature golf course.

-via The Awesomer

The latest hypothetical question for the What If? series by Randall Munroe and Henry Reich (previously at Neatorama) asks how long it would take a bowling ball to fall from the ocean surface to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The trench is the deepest part of the world's oceans, and the point called Challenger Deep is around 11,000 kilometers or 36,000 feet deep. A bowling ball would take quite a while to sink that far. 

But wait- the real surprise here is that it might not sink at all. It might float! That depends on how heavy the ball is. Galileo told us that a hammer and a feather will drop at the same rate if you control for air resistance, like doing it on the moon or in a vacuum chamber. Apparently, physics doesn't work like that underwater, so we find out how objects of different weights would fall in the ocean. But let's don't do this, because that would be littering.  

Bharat Kalicharan Yadav (known as Akku) was brought into a courtroom in Maharashtra, India, in August of 2004 for the purpose of setting bail. Before any procedure could begin, dozens of women rushed to Yadav and began attacking him. He was stabbed more than 70 times, and parts of his body were cut off. Chili powder was forced into his face and mouth. And all this was after he had gone to the police for protection. 

Yadav had terrorized the poor neighborhood for 13 years by then. He had killed at least three people and raped more than 40 women and girls as young as ten. Yadav led a gang and paid off police. He had been arrested 13 times prior to the deadly attack, but had walked free each time. The mob attack was the culmination of years of abuse on an entire community. But now what? When the judge regained order, he asked who had attacked Yadav, and every woman in the courtroom raised her hand. After years of investigation, 21 people were charged in Yadav's death. Read the story of Akku Yadav and what happened afterward at Utterly Interesting. 

Language is a funny thing. It changes over time, and the exact meaning of a word can drift to become more broad or more specific, or something else completely. That confusion can spill over into a courtroom, when the exact wording of a law is debated. Does a more modern interpretation of those words change the intention of those who originally passed the law? And how do we determine exact meanings- by the current dictionary, the generally-understood meaning at the time the law was written, or how the wording of the law is understood today? It depends on how you look at it, or even more importantly, who looks at it. Dr. Erica Brozovsky (previously at Neatorama) breaks down the legal battle over words, and bfings us some court cases where a definition made all the difference. All I could think of while watching this is a quote: "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is."

The American colonists who fought against Britain for independence had help from other countries, mostly notably France, but others as well. The British Empire had plenty of enemies, and people all over liked the idea of fighting for freedom. One of those helpers was a small group of Jewish settlers on an island in the Caribbean. 

St. Eustatius is now more often called Statia, and it's a part of the Caribbean Netherlands, along with the islands of Bonaire and Saba. In the 18th century, up to 40% of the thousand or so residents of St. Eustatius were Jewish refugees who had found safe haven in the Netherlands and continued on to settle in the New World. Some of them built a lucrative trade network with both Europe and the American colonies, which included smuggling gunpowder to the Continental Army. The British were so upset that they raided St. Eustatius, looted the Jewish community of its wealth, and confiscated all the adult men they could find to send them into exile without their families. Now a new history exhibit is hoping to bring light to this forgotten chapter of American history. Read about the Jewish smugglers who aided the patriots at Smithsonian.    

(Image credit: Jrryjude) 

Aynsley Grealis is a fabrics artist in Toronto who makes inventive sculptures, often practical, with crochet techniques. Here, for example, is a a handbag shaped like New York City's famous pizza rat that was filmed moving through the subway system with a slice of pizza.

The Shiki Theater Company is the biggest such company in Japan, and they have a longstanding partnership with Disney. Beginning in August they will stage the musical The Little Mermaid at the Maihama Amphitheater in Maihama, near Tokyo. This preview video has sparked a lot of interest, even though the actual production is still months away. Rina Tachibana stars as Ariel. She has a lovely voice (crucial for the plot, I know) and belts out "Part of Your World" that sounds very much like the movie version, except it's in Japanese. But how does she do it while floating through the water? And how do they make swimming underwater look so effortless onstage? For that matter, how are they going to pull this off in an amphitheater? During the song, we also get glimpses of other scenes from The Little Mermaid, such as Ariel trying out her new legs. -via Kuriositas 

The Let’s Have Better Mottoes Association was the brainchild of Cleveland circus musician and advertising man Frederick E. Gymer, although he usually stayed in  the club's background, with the permanent rank of executive secretary. Formed in 1950, the association awarded a monthly prize for the best new motto, for anything, which was the title of club president for the month. The group, founded in 1950, was pretty popular and had quite a few chapters around the country until Gymer died in 1962, after which it petered out. But during its heyday, the club got all the newspaper publicity it wanted, since the mottoes they came up with were so funny, in a 1950s kind of way.

In case of fire, yell "Fire!"

The More You Explain It, The More I Don't Understand.

I'd Like To Compliment You On Your Work. When Will You Start?

You're doing a good job, but you're doing it all wrong.

We Don't Want 'Yes Men' Around Here — Everybody Agree?

And my personal favorite:

Do It Rihgt.

See newspaper clippings from the association and more mottoes at Weird Universe. 

(Image credit: Daytona Beach News-Journal - Feb 4, 1955) 

Av Grannan is an artist in Chicago who upcycles leather goods into inventive accessories. One of the gems of her website appropriately named Sublime Remains is this functional chessboard hat.

When the hatband is unsnapped, the hat flat. You can then play chess on it with the pieces slipped into the sides.

Most Americans aren't aware of how different toilets in Britain are, even those who have traveled to the UK. Oh yeah, there are places you have to pay to use them, but at least they are available. Laurence Brown, with years of experience living on both sides of the pond, is very aware of how our toilets are different. And our sinks and bathtubs, for that matter. The toilets actually use different mechanisms for flushing. He doesn't mention which system uses more water, but that's not really a concern in Britain, which is geographically consistent and it rains all the time. Now that I'm in the know for watching this, it's my opinion that American toilets are superior, with the exception of having to plunge or snake them occasionally, which is honestly not often enough to be a bother (your mileage may vary). American sinks and tubs seem to be better as well.   

It's somewhat amusing to hear how he talks about toilet efficiency without using any rude words. There's a skippable ad from 2:55 to 4:10. 

When you think of musicians who were in the US military, you think of Elvis Presley and Glenn Miller, who were both quite well known before joining up. Miller volunteered during World War II and Presley was drafted in 1958. But there were other big names who served before we knew who they were. 

Their military careers varied. One credits his navy training in logistics for his ability to later organize concert tours. One was a Morse code expert who intercepted Russian transmissions. Another got his start in the business by singing with an army band as his official duty. One gave up an opportunity to teach at West Point in order to pursue a music career. And two of them were victims of the "enlist or go to jail" scheme that judges once used for young offenders. Neither lasted out their full hitch. Find out which successful musician is matched with each of those stories at Mental Floss. 

History is long and history classes are short, so what you learn about the movers and shakers of the past are only the highlights. You know, what they did that affected the world of today. But every person has a backstory that doesn't get covered as well, and some of them can be pretty wacky. Chill Dude Explains gives us the details that you would never learn unless you did extra reading outside of class. 

I knew most of these stories, because I've been here at Neatorama for 20 years. You may have read them, too, but if you didn't and and you find yourself interested in learning more, you can put any of these names into the search bar at the top right and read about them. Yet there are always more details. Who knew that Abraham Lincoln loved to tell dirty jokes, and that Harriet Tubman suffered from narcolepsy? Neither fact changes their great accomplishments, but you might change your opinion on some of the others in this list. 

The modern way to grab a TV audience is to launch a reality game show in which we get to know the contestants and a winner is only crowned at the end of the season. A modern way to gamble is to place bets on Kalshi or Polymarket on what will happen. But those bets affect the odds, and the odds are made public. The 50th season of the reality game show Survivor (titled Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans) ended on May 20th with Aubry Bracco as the winner. But the show was filmed months earlier. Six weeks before the February premier, prediction markets had Bracco's odds of winning at 61%. Just before the winner was announced, her odds stood at 97%. 

Both betting platforms ban insider knowledge, but there are plenty of ways around that. Survivor isn't the only reality show the markets have spoiled, either. Betting on the outcome had produced spoilers for Next Level Chef, The Bachelorette, and The Masked Singer. You may care little about reality TV game shows, but you also have to consider the affect of insider knowledge on betting markets as they pertain to business ventures, politics, and national security as well. Read about what betting markets are doing to TV at Variety.   -via Metafilter