Why did bags of french fries start appearing on her porch?

From Toronto Life: "It was the middle of the night, a Wednesday in early April, when the first bag of A&W french fries was deposited on my neighbour’s porch. Nobody saw who put it there, but when my neighbour opened her door to get her mail the following morning, there it was — a fast food bag crumpled up at the foot of her white wooden bench. She hadn’t ordered any A&W french fries in the middle of the night, and she wasn’t the one who had eaten them either. The first bag was a mild curiosity. But the next morning my neighbour found another one on her porch, this time with a few fries still inside. Friday morning. Another mostly eaten bag of A&W french fries had appeared on her porch. The third night in a row. written in black Sharpie on both bags: Rodolphe. My neighbour, who recently turned 50, lives alone. By the time the fourth A&W bag materialized on her porch, she had gone from being curious about what she’d viewed as random littering to frustrated to shaken by the invasion of her privacy."

South Park's creators and the greatest TV contract clause ever written

From Trung Phan: "The legendary South Park guys have officially joined the Tres Comma Club, with Matt Stone and Trey Parker each worth $1.2B per Forbes. They hit this financial milestone after signing a development deal with Paramount (which recently merged with Skydance Media in an $8.4B deal) and a $1.5B exclusive streaming agreement with Paramount+ (which has mostly been a vehicle for Taylor Sheridan projects but did just add UFC rights for $7.7B over 7 years). While their bottomless supply of creativity is the foundation of their success, Stone and Parker also made a fortune because of fortuitous dealmaking. Some was luck. Some was ballsy. All of it was betting on themselves. Oh, they also may have signed the most valuable (and improbable) TV contract clause ever, which ultimately entitled them to 50% of South Park’s digital revenue."

Experiments show that memories can survive both amputation and metamorphosis

From Nautilus: "The study of memory has always been one of the stranger outposts of science. In the 1950s, an unknown psychology professor at the University of Michigan named James McConnell made headlines — and eventually became something of a celebrity — with a series of experiments on freshwater flatworms called planaria. These worms fascinated McConnell not only because they had a true synaptic type of nervous system but also because they had enormous powers of regeneration. You could cut the worm into as many as 50 pieces with each section regenerating into an intact, fully-functioning organism. McConnell trained the worms by pairing an electric shock with flashing lights. Eventually, the worms recoiled to the light alone. Then something interesting happened when he cut the worms in half. The head of one half of the worm grew a tail and retained the memory of its training. Surprisingly, however, the tail, which grew a head and a brain, also retained the memory."

Hi everyone! Mathew Ingram here. I am able to continue writing this newsletter in part because of your financial help and support, which you can do either through my Patreon or by upgrading your subscription to a monthly contribution. I enjoy gathering all of these links and sharing them with you, but it does take time, and your support makes it possible for me to do that. I also write a weekly newsletter of technology analysis called The Torment Nexus.

Solving the mystery behind a sudden outbreak of paralysis in Mozambique

From Damn Interesting: "On 21 August 1981, Australian physician Julie Cliff received the following message on her telex, a print-on-paper precursor to modern text messaging: “Polio outbreak. Memba District. 38 cases. Reflexes increased.” The apparently routine message was sent from the Provincial Health Directorate in Nampula, a city in northern Mozambique. Cliff worked in the epidemiology department of the Mozambican Ministry of Health in Maputo, at the southern end of the country. Effective vaccines against poliomyelitis⁠—a food and water-borne infectious disease that can damage nerves and cause paralysis⁠—had been developed in the 1950s and 1960s, eliminating polio from many industrialized countries. However, the disease remained rife throughout sub-Saharan Africa. So the message was unremarkable⁠—except for one thing. In the acute phase of polio, tendon reflexes are not increased. They are absent. "

Tracking down the 24-year-old whose computer virus caused $25 billion worth of damage

From the BBC: "Filipino Onel de Guzman, now 44, says he unleashed the Love Bug computer worm to steal passwords so he could access the internet without paying. He claims he never intended it to spread globally. The Love Bug pandemic began on 4 May, 2000. Victims received an email attachment entitled LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU. It contained malicious code that would overwrite files, steal passwords, and automatically send copies of itself to all contacts in the victim's Microsoft Outlook address book. Within 24 hours, it was causing major problems across the globe, reportedly infecting 45 million machines. It also overwhelmed organisations' email systems, and some IT managers disconnected parts of their infrastructure to prevent infection. This led to estimates of damage and disruption running into billions of pounds. In the UK, Parliament shut down its email network for several hours and even the Pentagon was affected."

What happens when a bull escapes a bullfighting ring and makes it into the stands

Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as "serendipity engines," such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg's Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis's Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton's The Browser, Clive Thompson's Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy's Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova's The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me at mathew @ mathewingram dot com