Do you find that, every once in a while, you just stop paying attention? Some people call this daydreaming, others call it zoning out, and some call it boredom, or just a little break from all that stimulation. You've been told that this is bad, and you've trained yourself to never do it while driving. But you shouldn't feel guilty about zoning out, because science has found that your brain is actually performing necessary tasks while you aren't thinking about anything in particular. It appears to be a major clean out time. 

The latest research finds that zoning out behavior in your brain resembles what happens during deep sleep, and it happens more when you don't get enough sleep. There are physiological processes that occur during those times that result in a kind of biological hygiene. And since zoning out can be beneficial, maybe we should reserve some time to give in to those urges and let our brains rest. AsapSCIENCE explains further. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

The producers of the television show The Addams Family knew the audience would be familiar with the work of Charles Addams, who drew the family in cartoons for The New Yorker. Still, they wanted to go in their own direction and tell a story from the point of view of the family's butler, Lurch. John Astin would play the role. That's, of course, not how things turned out. Astin was perfect in the role of Gomez Addams, but casting calls went out for all the other roles. Plenty of people wanted to be in The Addams Family, and from the perspective of 60+ years later, they found the perfect actors. 

But you have to wonder about the other actors in the running. Vintage Everyday tells us about the 1964 casting process for the TV series, and gives us a gallery of those who tried out for the various parts. They threw their hearts into getting those roles, but all seem quite wrong to us now, especially the also-rans who didn't get the role of Lurch. -via Memo of the Air 

(Image credit: ABC Television) 

Henry Brown took the "photo a day" idea and made it speak. Every day during 2025, he talked to the camera, and then compiled it into a coherent essay about the passage of time in 365 video clips. The clips are not all in sequential order, but you can follow the times of the year mostly by the length of his hair and the background weather. In some places, there is more than one word for the day. Whatever you think of the finished product, you have to admire his dedication to the project. 

In one spot, Brown challenges you to recall what you were doing exactly five years ago. That would be difficult if it were any day but today- we all remember January 6, 2021, and we were all watching TV. If the effect of the video obscure what he actually said, you'll find a transcript at Laughing Squid. 

Imagine you discovered an ancient wall, 120 meters (394 feet) long, two meters (6.6 feet) tall, and averaging 20 meters (66 feet) wide? That's an enormous construction. On top of that, you found it nine meters (30 feet) underwater! That would be the only way it could have escaped detection all those years. How many years? Somewhere between 7300 and 7800 years. That makes it older than Stonehenge. 

The wall was found with LIDAR technology off the coast of France. Closer exploration found that the wall was built with 60 huge granite stones set into the bedrock in pairs, filled in with smaller stones between them. This all raises questions about how and why it was built. The sea level was lower then, so the wall now called TAF1 could have been a seawall, or possibly a fish catching device, depending on what conditions were like at the time. There is speculation that it could be a remnant of the legendary sunken city of Ys. The stories of Ys are fantastical, involving star-crossed lovers, supernatural floodgates, and even a mermaid. But that doesn't mean it wasn't based on some ancient event. Read about the Mesolithic underwater wall at Big Think.  -via Real Clear Science 

(Image credit: Yves Fouquet, et. al./International Journal of Nautical Archaeology)

In 1904, J.M. Barrie produced a hit play about Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. Disney made it into a children's animated adventure in 1953. But the real story behind the story is anything but charming. In this video, it is told in three chapters. First, there is the tragedy of Barrie's own childhood, which left him with a serious case of arrested development. Then, it explores his relationship with the five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Davies, who inspired Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Barrie became their guardian after their parents' deaths, and they all suffered from Barrie's immature handling of the family and from the fame that Peter Pan brought them. Two of them ultimately committed suicide. Lastly, we get a deeper look into the darker side of the protagonist in the original Peter Pan stories before they were Disneyfied, and how they reflect Barrie's own psychological problems. 

The original Star Trek ran from 1966-69, but only grew more popular in syndicated reruns during the 1970s. Paramount noticed, and drew up plans for a new series, called Star Trek: Phase II under the supervision of Gene Roddenberry. Sets were built and writers were enlisted. Most of the original Star Trek cast were rehired, with the exception of Leonard Nimoy, and actors were hired to portray new crew members. But one thing led to another, and ultimately Star Trek: Phase II was scrapped in favor of a feature film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released in 1979. The script for the Phase II pilot was reworked into that of the motion picture. But there were plans for 19 TV episodes, many of them with scripts ready to go. Whatever happened to those stories?

A couple of those scripts were reused in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation, which launched in 1987. Some of the ideas and elements found their way into later Star Trek movies and series. And some make you wish you could have seen them on TV. Woman's World has the synopses and notes from all 19 episodes of Star Trek: Phase II for your intergalactic fantasies of what could have been. -via Damn Interesting 

Watergate is the short-hand name for the political controversy that brought down the Nixon Administration. This Watergate is a card game from 1973 in which two to six players accuse each other of malfeasance and try to deceive each other. Bribery is not only permissible but encouraged. Everyone loses, but some players lose more than others.

The key to success in this game, as in so many other dimensions of life, is to lie persuasively.

In this video, Board Game Archaeology unpacks and plays this game.

Photo: eBay user Treasures Gallery

Elisa Rogers found these unique stained glass sculptures at an estate sale. The late artist, she learned from the daughter, made "ridiculous beautiful things" that sold well enough to pay for trips to Italy. Rogers was so inspired by them that she began making stained glass herself.

-via The Husky

Fox 13 News in Salt Lake City reports that the police department of Heber City has lately been using artificial intelligences to accelerate the report-writing process. These applications are called Draft One and Code Four. They transcribe the audio recordings from police body cameras.

Recently, during one investigation, an officer's recording picked up audio from the Disney film The Princess and the Frog. The AIs interpreted this information to indicate that the officer had transformed into a frog.

Fortunately, the transformation was temporary. The officer got better.

The AI tools save time. Sgt. Keel says that it shaves off about 6-8 hours a week of work. But attorney Steve Lehto says that defense attorneys could exploit these errors during trials.

Photo by Sarah Deer used under Creative Commons 2.0 license.

Cormac McCarthy is known for prose as terse as Coolidge's and punctuation as minimal as a bikini. William Faulkner, on the other hand, took his time to express his thoughts with great verbosity. In this video, comedian Jerry Wayne Longmire plays both writers arguing about the proper density of language in narrative prose.

"The dictionary ought to charge you rent." I'm with McCarthy on this one.

This video is one of Longmire's many parodies of Faulkner, my favorite of which is his Faulknerian reading of his home electric bill. Longmire has also offered 90s rap by Faulkner, a Fourth of July celebration, discount whiskey, responding to a HOA notice, complaining about Comcast customer service, and a complaint about a clogged toilet in a hotel room.

The song "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac was recorded in 1975 but wasn't released as a single until 1997 (a live version). Still, it became a classic for its wistful, melancholy melody and poetic lyrics. Stevie Nicks wrote the song as she contemplated her future with or without Lindsey Buckingham. Sure, she was looking at the Rocky Mountains, but a landslide was simply a metaphor. Nicks ultimately ended their romantic relationship but continued to work with Buckingham, which proved to be the right choice. 

But what if the song were about a real landslide, an avalanche, a natural disaster? Dustin Ballard, also known as There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) collaborated with guest songwriters Griefcat to make it so. Now the subject matter is completely at odds with the laid-back tune, but they match the title at least. And now we have a There I Ruined It song you can share with your mother.  

Back in the days when I saw every movie our local theater showed (two a week), I didn't bother studying movie posters or bothering to watch trailers (that was social time), so I was properly shocked at the twists in the movies Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes. But that was 50 years ago. It happens more and more often these days that a film studio -or rather, the marketing team- will go ahead and share way too many details that the filmmakers would rather reveal in the movie itself. Merchandise, released before opening day to capitalize on the hype, often adds to the spoilers.

Cracked has 15 examples of movie marketing spilling secrets within the movie plot. If you're lucky, you didn't know enough about the movie going in to put two and two together before you watched it. Still, the Planet of the Apes poster didn't look like it was from 1968. These do, and they have no spoilers. The more modern-looking poster was produced after the secret was out, which was just bad luck for subsequent generations who could have used a good twist.  

Cannibalism, the eating of human flesh, is a universal taboo, and may I say, distasteful for everyone involved. However, there is a huge difference in degree, depending on the case. It's sad and gruesome, but understandable, to eat the bodies of people who are already dead if the alternative is your own starvation. To kill a person in order to eat them is murder. To kill someone and eat them when you're not even hungry is murder with another level of depravity added. 

Tales of cannibalism aren't as rare as you might think. Weird History brings us seven cases of cannibalism from history, specifically from the Victorian Era, arranged so that each tale is more horrifying than the one before. It is far from comprehensive, though. The case of American mountain man Alferd G. Packer is not included, even though it occurred in 1873. You can read that story in the Neatorama archives. 

Let me explain the post title. Cystic fibrosis is not communicable, but we would not know much about it without the work of one doctor. I found the story via an unattributed (probably AI) bit of copypasta that's making the rounds on Facebook. The story was worth checking out, so that's how I learned of Dr. Dorothy Andersen.

Today, we recognize cystic fibrosis as a genetic condition that affects the lungs. In the Middle Ages, it was a digestive illness identified by salty skin in children, confirmed after death as a problem with the pancreas, and attributed to witchcraft. In the early 20th century, young children who died of CF were often diagnosed with celiac disease, because they starved to death despite eating ravenously. Dorothy Hansine Andersen became a doctor in 1926, but couldn't get into the boy's club of surgeons, so she became a pathologist. She found some strange results in a 3-year-old girl whose cause of death was listed as celiac disease, and sought out other cases of celiac disease in children. She found 49 cases in which the same constellation of abnormalities was found (cysts in the pancreas, thick mucus in the lungs, etc.). She named it and developed diagnostic tests, first by sampling the intestines and later by measuring sweat salt. Andersen went on to deem CF a recessive genetic disease. 

Andersen also developed treatments for CF, which sorted out the digestive issues and led to the modern focus on the disease as a lung problem. Her discoveries led to CF patients living decades longer, but she rarely got the proper credit for her work. Read Dr. Andersen's story at Wikipedia.  -Thanks, Patrice! 

(Image source: the National Library of Medicine) 

It's been quite some time since we've posted a video from Lily Hevesh, known as Hevesh5 (previously at Neatorama). In that time, she's just gotten better at doing amazing things with dominos and has turned her talent into a career. Now she makes dominos play music!

The domino fall itself is beautiful, and involves thousands of dominos and several sets of bells. But how do you design the timing of the bells? Trial and error would involve setting up thousands of dominos over and over and over. That is a challenge Hevesh thought about for years before making the attempt. How it's done is explained in an extensive behind-the-scenes video that involves math. And a bit more trial and error than you or I could handle. But the longer videos lets us in on some secrets, like how to make dominoes turn sharply and how painted dominos act differently. -via The Kid Should See This