They never left. You can come up to Salem, Massachusetts and get pictures of your supposed aura in several stores.
In the 1940s in Harlem NY, two men named John Sanford and Malcolm Little worked together as dishwashers at a restaurant. Since they both had reddish hair, Sanford was called Chicago Red and Little was called Detroit Red after the cities they came from. Little later joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Malcolm X, while Sanford got into stand-up comedy and became Redd Foxx.
I wonder if they ever contacted each other again or met up.
They did.
Cool, thank you!
This is absolutely true. My dad had them invade his basement library, you’ve never seen such a stinky disgusting mess. And we had them get into our basement too (we didn’t have our library down there however). They like shiny stuff like aluminum foil, and the ones in California build very large hive-like nests in the forest, like three feet tall. They are individually adorable, being slow-moving and dreamy compared to rats, which are a similar size but ten times the brains and cynicism. They have big eyes and furry tails and feet. If you could only overlook their deplorable personal habits.
There’s one that lives under my deck. It’s a cutie and they are native to the area. The regular rats with the worm tails are foul and an invasive species.
Those little bastards completely destroyed the engine in my BIL’s pickup. Every bit of wiring was gone, and the sticks and other crap was packed in so tight that we were using crowbars and other tools to try to pry it out. He ended up junking the truck.
I learned today that there is a plant called the “naked broomrape”. That has to be one of the most unfortunate names in botany. It is also called the “one-flowered cancer root”.
Hm, not a Brassica, so it’s not related to the rape plant (which you probably know better by its rebranded name, “canola”).
And yes, canola is yet another brassica. It’s not quite a cabbage, but it’s about as close as you can get without being one. Those things are taking over the world.
Orobanche uniflora, not a rape (Brassica nappus) nor a broom (Cytisus spp.) but an endangered small parasitic plant which is ‘naked’ because it doesn’t have leaves, like other parasitic plants, which do not photosynthesize. Very interesting species.
A couple of things which turnout to be way older than you thought, courtesy of a visit to the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes. Dating from around 700 BCE: magnifying glasses and cheese graters. I was actually stopped from photographing them (oops); but here are a couple of interesting cites.
An interesting finding from Ialisos, dated between the 7th and 6th centuries BC, consists of a series of three magnifying glasses made of rock crystal and set in decorated bronze frames. The lenses, of different dioptric power, are flat-convex and have a diameter of about 1.5 cm. It is perhaps the oldest known magnifying glasses. They were probably used for jewelery work and for engraving seals.
(Source)
And regarding the grating of cheese, this image of a man grating cheese twenty five centuries ago is from reddit. The source appears to be page 212 of this PDF virtual museum
I have not yet been able to resolve this conundrum: do the magnifying glasses predate the (local) invention of glass?
j
According to wikipedia glass has been made for at least 6000 years in Egypt and Mesopotamia, so, as Greece had contact to those cultures, I would guess no, magnifying glasses don’t predate the local invention of glass. Specially considerint that naturally ocurring glass is often not transparent, except quartz, which is hard to form and polish. But the ancient Romans did try, so perhaps they made some lenses. They made spheres and prisms, that much is known, but how well polished I have no idea. On the other hand ancient Romans already knew how to manufacture glass: some cups have survived, here a Roman cage cup from the 4th century BC:
Interesting side note: the first eyeglasses used lenses ground from white emerald, known as “goshenite”, because they could not get glass that was clear enough.
Circumstantial evidence, M’lud.
j 
Objection granted, I’ll drop it.
Imagine being the one that breaks one such cup! How embarrasing would that be? 
The Layard Lens found in Mesopotamia also dates from the 8th century BCE
Rock crystal would have been the best thing to make lenses from back them – it was colorless and could be free of bubbles and inclusions.
Earlt glass tended to be colored and have bubbles and inclusions in it. A way around this for making magnifying devices was found during the Roman empire – they used blown glass to make spheres or almost spheres. The bubbles and coloring wasn’t important, since the glass itself was very thin. It was the clear water that filled the vessel that did the magnification. And if algae started growing in it, you could empty it out and clean it.
There was a factory for making solid lenses i Alexandria.
Galileo Galilei was the first person to sight Neptune. At the time, though, the planet had just transitioned into retrograde movement and was essentially stationary relative to the background stars. Galileo believed it to be just another star, and so is not credited with its discovery.
We know this by comparing Galileo’s notes and sketches with where we know Neptune to have been at that time.
TIL that rabbits excrete two ‘types’ of poop. The initial poop, called a caecotroph, contains essential nutrients that have not been absorbed by the rabbit’s body, so the rabbit eats this poo, often eating it immediately after being passed from the body. The next poop is more of a ‘normal’ excrement, and is the pellet-type poop commonly seen in rabbit hutches.
You had to tell me this while I was eating Raisinets? (Literally.)