Drink our coffee. Or else. That’s the message of these curiously sadistic TV commercials produced by Jim Henson between 1957 and 1961.

Henson made 179 ten-second spots for Wilkins Coffee, a regional company with distribution in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. market, according to the Muppets Wiki: “The local stations only had ten seconds for station identification, so the Muppet commercials had to be lightning-fast–essentially, eight seconds for the commercial pitch and a two-second shot of the product.”

Within those eight seconds, a coffee enthusiast named Wilkins (who bears a resemblance to Kermit the frog) manages to shoot, stab, bludgeon or otherwise do grave bodily harm to a coffee holdout named Wontkins. Henson provided the voices of both characters.

Up until that time, TV advertisers typically made a direct sales pitch. “We took a different approach,” said Henson in Christopher Finch’s Of Muppets and Men: The Making of the Muppet Show. “We tried to sell things by making people laugh.”

The campaign for Wilkins Coffee was a hit. “In terms of popularity of commercials in the Washington area,” said Henson in a 1982 interview […]

No cultural tour of Glasgow could be complete without a visit to the Britannia Panopticon, the world’s oldest surviving music hall. “Converted from warehouse to music hall in 1857 and licensed in 1859, the Britannia Music Hall entertained Glasgow’s working classes for nearly 80 years,” says its about page. “By the time it closed in 1938 it had also accommodated cinema, carnival, freak show, wax works, zoo, art gallery and hall of mirrors,” and it had also changed its name to reflect the fact that every conceivable form of entertainment could be seen there. Thanks to an ongoing conservation effort, the building still stands today, and its details have gradually been returned to the look and feel of its glory days.

In 2016, the Britannia Panopticon marked 120 years of showing film in that building. Part of the celebration involved uploading, to its very own Youtube channel, this 40-minute compilation of real footage from 1896, the year its cinematic programming began. (Ambient sound has been added to enhance the sensation of time travel.)

In it you’ll catch glimpses of […]

Mushrooms have quietly become superstars of the global stage.

Sure, not everyone likes them on pizza, but who cares?

In the 21st-century, they are hailed as role models and potential planet savers (not to mention a wildly popular design motif…)

Time-lapse cinematography pioneer Louie Schwartzberg’s critically acclaimed documentary, Fantastic Fungi, has made experts of us all.

Go back a century, and such knowledge was much harder won, requiring time, patience, and proximity to field or forest.

Witness Fungi collected in Shropshire and other neighborhoods, a handbound, hand-illustrated 3-volume collection by one Miss M. F. Lewis, of Ludlow, England.

Miss Lewis, a talented artist with an obvious passion for mycology spent over 40 years painstakingly documenting the specimens she ran across in England’s West Midlands region.

Each drawing or watercolor is identified in Miss Lewis’ hand by its subject’s scientific name. The location in which it was found is dutifully noted, as is the date.

[…]

The danger of enjoying jazz is the possibility of letting ourselves slide into the assumption that we understand it. To do so would make no more sense than believing that, say, an enjoyment of listening to records automatically transmits an understanding of record players. One look at such a machine’s inner workings would disabuse most of us of that notion, just as one look at a map of the universe of jazz would disabuse us of the notion that we understand that music in all the varieties into which it has evolved. But a jazz map that extensive hasn’t been easy to come by until this month, when design studio Dorothy put on sale their Jazz Love Blueprint.

Measuring 80 centimeters by 60 centimeters (roughly two and half by two feet), the Jazz Love Blueprint visually celebrates “over 1,000 musicians, artists, songwriters and producers who have been pivotal to the evolution of this ever changing and constantly creative genre of music,” diagramming […]

“Old paint on a canvas, as it ages, sometimes becomes transparent,” playwright Lillian Hellman observed in Pentimento, the second volume of her memoirs. “When that happens it is possible, in some pictures, to see the original lines: a tree will show through a woman’s dress, a child makes way for a dog, a large boat is no longer on an open sea.”

Seven years ago, something similar started happening with thousands of old books, dating from the 15th to 19th century.

Age, however, didn’t force these volumes to spill their secrets…at least not directly.

That honor goes to macro X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (MA-XRF) and Erik Kwakkel, a book historian who theorized that this technology might reveal medieval manuscript fragments hidden in the bindings of newer texts, much as it had earlier revealed hidden layers of paint on Old Master canvases.

How did this strange “hidden […]