Good Reads and Info

The Great Place the Ball Swindle. It was a complicated but seemingly perfect scam, until threats and fear got out of hand.

Drugs marked as “not for human consumption” span a legal gray area between legal and illegal. Some are making a killing selling them to people who, not surprisingly, consume them. (via Metafilter)

7 Tragic SNL Deaths. Each was devastating as we felt like we lost a close friend, one who was too young to die.

Aiden is a 5-year-old leukemia patient who has been selling his drawings to pay for medical treatment. (via Metafilter)

It's hard to believe today, but less than 100 years ago, there was a great debate about whether women should be able to vote. The anti-suffragettes declared that voting women would abandon their families, turn ugly and mean, and society would collapse.

In the Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, the explanation for how the elephant got its trunk involved a crocodile that pulled on a baby elephant's nose until it stretched out. That same scene was photographed recently in South Africa. (via Fark)

A blogger reminisced about the wonderful tree that was the center of the Disney film The Swiss Family Robinson. One of his readers responded by not only tracking down the location of the tree in Tobago, but taking pictures of it as well! (via Metafilter)

The “Black Death” Bacterium Began Its Rampage in China. What impresses me is how they can figure that out 700 years later.

Rapture is a time-lapse video of the night sky. You have to get far, far away from town to see stars like this -and then you wouldn’t have the music.