The United States traces its official birthday to the issuing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. That was 250 years ago. This weekend, we will celebrate the founding ideals that the US stands for: liberty, democracy, and equality, as the Founding Fathers broke with the British monarchy. But while those ideals are still worth celebrating, they weren't always adhered to. Our elementary history classes used to teach about the more undemocratic episodes of our nation's story as justified. Then they were taught as "just the ways things were back then," and now they are often skipped completely because there's a lot of history to cover and the unsavory parts are just too difficult- and it's sometimes seen as frankly unpatriotic. PBS fills in some of the pieces you didn't learn about in school. 

Niche Museums is a website that catalogs unusually specific musems around the world. It directs us to the Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection in Durham, North Carolina. IF you're into tubas, this your pilgrimage site!

Vincent Simonetti, one of the two founders, began building his collection of over three hundred tubas in 1965 when he encountered an unusual specimen. He and his wife, Ethel, operated a tuba business until 2011, when he sold it and offered his personal collection to interested viewers.

Would you like to see it? You can visit by appointment only on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 3 and 6 PM. A tour is free, but Mr. Simonetti does suggest a donation.

-via David Thompson

As European settlers traveled to the New World, the Irish were ahead of the curve when it came to escaping the British Empire. Ireland was also a British colony, and its citizens were treated terribly. They were converted to Christianity, then a few hundred years later, non-Anglican religions were outlawed. Irish land was confiscated, their trees were cut down, and their priests executed. In the wake of this treatment, many Scots-Irish, particularly Presbyterians, fled to America to breathe freely. 

By the time of the American Revolution, people of Irish heritage made up about 10% of the white colonial population. But they comprised between 25 and 50% of the Continental Army! They were serious about freedom from Britain. They filled roles from cooks to spies to officers to Founding Fathers. John Barry immigrated to Philadelphia as a teenager, and rose to be the first commissioned officer in the US Navy. Lydia Barrington Darragh served as a spy for the patriots. John Dunlap printed hundreds of copies of the Declaration of Independence within a day of its adoption. Nine of Washington's generals and eight signers of the Declaration were Irish. Read about these and other ethnic Irish patriots who served valiantly in the American Revolution, at Smithsonian. 

(Collage credit: Sonja Anderson) 

The history of Long John Silver's turns out to be way more local to me than I realized. Growing up in Kentucky, I knew Jerry's restaurant was a treat because they had hot fudge cake and strawberry pie. My parents knew that after eating a meal, I couldn't do a whole dessert, so we split one among the family. I had no idea that Jerry's was related to Long John Silver's, but here we are. 

Long John Silver's was the second fast food restaurant in my childhood town, going up right as the interstate highway was built (KFC was the other, of course). In high school I discovered that they would sell you a basket of crunchies (the batter that floated away from the food) for a quarter, which was important when you had limited lunch money. It was a way to skip the real food and just get the greasy batter they were known for, cheap.

My current town still has a standalone Long John Silver's without the rebranding. I don't eat there because these days I cannot deal with a meal that's all deep-fried, even if it does include hushpuppies. Weird History has the tale of a fast food chain that's time has come and gone.

The reason that Star Wars was made was because George Lucas couldn't get the rights to Flash Gordon. The 1980 movie Flash Gordon was made because Dino De Laurentiis, who held the rights to the story, saw what Star Wars did and decided the time was right to make a Flash Gordon film. He didn't know what he was in for. 

The production went through four directors before the project even began. Kurt Russell turned down the role of Flash, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was rejected because of his accent. Sam Jones got the role due to his looks, but he eventually walked off the set and the role was completed with a voice actor and a stand-in. The production design was entrusted to Danilo Donati, who was a genius but spoke no English. His sets were confusing and became so banged up that they were held together with duct tape. And De Laurentiis had never heard of Queen, but luckily entrusted them to do whatever they wanted to with the music. 

Flash Gordon barely made back its production budget in the US, but did well enough abroad. Its neon-arty look and music clashed with the over-serious acting, but the movie has become a cult favorite in the decades that followed. Read how Flash Gordon was made at Utterly Interesting. 

If a school suddenly imposes a ridiculous rule that no one understands, you can assume that someone caused a problem, and they can't figure out a better way to deal with it. When I was in high school, they cut our lunch break from a half hour to 20 minutes. Then the next year it was cut to 15 minutes. That was serious for a school that didn't have a cafeteria. Both cuts came after someone was busted for drugs, and all of us suffered. 

I'm sure that's happened throughout the history of public schools, but in the age of the internet, such incidents can make the local news and then go viral globally. You probably didn't hear about each of these instances, but Chill Dude Explains did the research. Here are ten times that one prankster, or one group of pranksters, left their legacy for the classes that followed them by sparking odd school rules. Sometimes these new rules spread to schools statewide or even nationwide. 

Dries Depoorter is a Belgian artist, public speaker, and "concept provider." I would be skeptical about the last position as a real job, but my introduction to him is this clever candle that burns down at the rate of its cost. The candle costs €30 (that's $34 or 16 quatloos) and has 30 lines on it. As you use it, the money that you've spent on it burns away.

-via Flowing Data

Imagine what it would have been like if George Lucas had to produce Episode IV of Star Wars with only pocket change?

Secondhand Movie Company has recreated iconic scenes from Star Wars (and Jurassic Park) with props made of cardboard, duct tape, and spraypaint. Here's the introduction of Luke Skywalker and a drunk Uncle Owen buying droids on Tatooine.

It's not a shot-for-short remake of Star Wars. The scriptwriters have fun with the scenes by adding animosity and implied sexual tension between our two favorite droids. They also turn the iconic blue milk into paint and give Aunt Beru a beard.

-via Nag on the Lake

We learn about the American Revolution from the accounts of those who lived through it, but they only wrote about the most important events. What their everyday lives were like got short shrift because it was normal to them. Everyone had aches and pains, itchy skin, and deteriorating food, so there was no use in making a big deal about it.

With few doctors and no germ theory, about a third of colonial children died before their second birthday. However, they knew to stay away from people with diseases like smallpox or diphtheria. Low level malnutrition was rampant. A toothache usually meant pulling the tooth. There were treatments like bloodletting, but most colonists just dulled the senses with alcohol. And they still managed to defeat the British. Some people, like Benjamin Franklin, would refer to the constantly suffering health concerns of colonists in their letters. Get a glimpse of what colonial life was like from a medical historian at the Conversation. 

American musicians have always been drawn to traveling the open roads, or at least singing about some wonderful place they've been before. Or maybe some notorious place full of memories they can't get out of their minds. City names pop up in songs of every genre throughout the history of recorded music. It's a surefire way to get airplay in at least one town!  

This geographic compilation by Dustin Ballard of There I Ruined It (previously at Neatorama) takes us on a musical trip through the cities of the United States, as sung by artists you know and love, from Dolly Parton to Eminem to Frank Sinatra. Of course, this could have been much longer, but we're getting near a holiday weekend, so he didn't want to put too much work into it. The signature slide whistle is there, and the end is not the end, because a special guest comes in to wrap things up in a coda.

Americans traditionally celebrate the Fourth of July with cookouts and fireworks, and sometimes a parade. Some towns tried something strange and different at one time or another, and the event was so popular it became a holiday tradition. In Hannibal, Missouri, they're celebrating Tom Sawyer Days in honor of Mark Twain. On the fourth you can see the National Fence Painting Contest, in which participants race to paint a section of a wooden fence faster than anyone else, just as Tom Sawyer tricked his friends into doing the chore for him. In Gatlinburg, Tennessee, you can catch the first Fourth of July parade of the year because it starts at midnight. In Bristol, Vermont, the holiday isn't complete until the Great Bristol Outhouse Race is run. And in Key West, Florida, they have the annual Key Lime Pie-eating Contest, a race to eat a whole pie the fastest without using your hands. 

Read about these oddball Independence Day traditions and more, ten of them in all, at Smithsonian. 

In 1975, a criminal court in Georgia convicted Terry Brown and sentenced him to seven years in prison at hard labor. There was apparently a personality conflict between the presiding judge and members of the appellate court because the judge "demanded that if Judge Randall Evans, Jr. ever again was so presumptious as to reverse one of his decisions, that the opinion be written in poetry."

The appellate court did precisely that. Judge Dunbar Harrison composed the reversal of Brown's conviction in proper rhyme. You can read the full poem/decision at Justia and an article about it and other instances of judical humor in the University of California Law Journal.

-via Jarvis Best

When John Adams wrote about American celebrating Independence day with bonfires and illuminations, he never dreamt it would be like this. CodyBPyrotechnics shows us the latest innovations in Roman candles. The ones available for consumer use are bigger than ever before. There's also a model of launcher that resemble a Gatling gun. Why would you need a rotating gun for fireworks? I guess because it just seems cool. The real innovation is that you can aim your massive fireworks somewhere other than straight up, which doesn't seem all that safe to me. He compares several of these guns in this video. 
 
The fireworks are pretty, but watching a video is as risky as I want to get with this. Not to mention I don't want to pay for such a single-use gun- although someone in the comments mentioned you can reload them. These should not be used near people, or forests, or homes, or after holiday drinking. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Anytime someone posts a list of the greatest songs or artists, it's an invitation for everyone to critique their taste, no matter what kind of criteria they use. Now we have a list of the best music, meaning the best 500 musical artists, the best 500 songs, and the best 500 albums, called The Greatest Music. 

This ranking was compiled by using other lists, with a weighed criteria that's explained here. Yes, you can argue that it's too 20th century, because songs that stand the test of time do well, and too English language, because, well it is. But, while you can kvetch about the rankings all day, you won't find any bad artists or songs here. Click on any of the titles to get a "resume" of the song's source lists. You can also sort the lists by decade. 

In the arguments at Metafilter, there's a list of the top songs in alphabetical order by artist to make it easy for you to check your favorites. 

Sora News 24 tells us about the opening of a new hotel outside of Osaka. The Hoshinoya Nara Prison is a beautiful historic penitentiary that now serves more voluntary guests and provides conditions that previous residents would envy.