Best Of MetaFilter

Question by hikabu

In Ask Metafilter: can anyone make sense of these glyphs/symbols?

valentine4 by Emmaline (cc by-nc-nd)

RobotVoodooPower solves the weird delayed Valentine’s day text messages mystery.

Okay, not really, but we want to believe

Still from Sesame Street animated short 'Cracks'

Check out the mystery of Sesame Street's creepy lost short, and read along as Mefites tell tales of other kids' programming that scared the stuffing out of us.

Bizarre cult? Weird geo-caching thing? Red-herring by local eccentric? Unexplained Russian girl scout artifact? Prop for a play? Art installation? Alternate reality game? Film prop? What was this bizarre billboard on the Cornish coast.

Ghost Characters; Ghost Child; Ghost Letters; Ghost Ship; Ghost Planes; Ghost Jokes; Ghost Protocol; Ghost in the Dunes; Ghost in the Machine.

mitred noro blanket by Alex "Skud" Bayley (cc by)

I need a new delightfully tedious hobby!

Can you help with this mystery photo of 1860s woman?

Live video translation by a random person, and telecom in the Faroe Islands

Stars by sudoaptgetupdate (cc by-nd)

Thank you, shiny MeFites, for all the great comments every day! Here are a few recent sparklers:

bonehead describes some of the challenges of search and rescue response to a large cruise ship going down in Arctic waters

citygirl on what it's like to work on a cargo ship

not that girl lays down some deep knowledge of the US men's Olympic gymnastics team

NotMyselfRightNow worked with Alvin Toffler: "He was probably the largest individual purchaser of filing cabinets in California"

What were new the hot bands in Vancouver in the 1980s? philip-random can help, because "I was doing radio there at the time. Still am."

flug bringing the amazing detective work in an AskMe about an old mystery play, David and Abigail

P1040844 by mlinksva

Too-Ticky has the answer to une_heure_pleine's mystery object Ask Me post, wherein we learn that "treen" is the "generic name for small handmade functional household objects made of wood"

'They made me wear my bathrobe' [screen capture from video via hlntv.com]

Now is the time when I am typing. I am typing on my computer doing internet things. Isn't this interesting? Cool internet things. I solved a puzzle and now people are taking pictures of me pretending to solve a puzzle. – harperpitt

JannaK reports that the HLN network has produced a short video episode featuring the Ask Metafilter post requesting help with her late grandmother's coded messages, and "the true hero of this story: Metafilter's own harperpitt, her code-breaking skills, and the power of the hive mind in tackling web mysteries."

(Post title text grabbed from littlesq!)

Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium by paukrus (cc by)

Some great recent posts on the natural world:

A 17th-Century Woman Artist’s Butterfly Journey: gorgeous images and bio info on early entomologist-artist Maria Sibylla Merian

The inner life of the fig: documentary on the sycamore fig tree, focusing on the intricate mutualism between a fig tree and its fig wasp

A tree grows in Israel: an extinct Judean Date Palm is grown from an ancient jar of seeds unearthed by archaeologists

My hovercraft is full of Petromyzon marinus: science, lore, and more on the fearsome sea lamprey

Satan Put the Kettle On: the mystery of Devil's Kettle Falls' vanishing waterfall

vinyl by suzy_yes (cc by-nc-nd)

Thanks to the work of everyone in this thread, I was able to make a positive identification of the song, order the vinyl, and have it professionally converted to digital.

The OP has updated an old thread about a 30-year-old mystery tune in Ask Me with a YouTube video of the song. Yay, team!

Looking for more musical mysteries to solve?

What's the Baby Elephant song I heard at Burning Man?

I'm trying to identify a sample from the first few minutes of this album

Loving you is . . . easy to forget? What was that song from 2008 - 2009?

Finding a song based on a music video: "a woman riding a horse and she had dramatically long hair that floated through the sky"

My toddler has a set of animal magnets that include a snail, a cow, a beaver/woodchuck thing, a sheep, another sheep, a goat, and... a purple blobby thing. What the hell kind of animal is this?

Mario Bros. Question Mark by so happy! (cc by-nc-nd)

Asked, "What is this ram-bly, rom-bly thing?"

And answered, "That's a "Cricut Jukebox Cartridge Station ... (I wrote the firmware for it...)"

Thanks, straw!

[Cricut at Wikipedia]

Raymond James Stuart illustration 'Chaw Beef'

Weirdly, I accidentally discovered a lot more about one of the central mysteries today: What the heck sort of prank is knotting a shirt?

In FanFare, maxsparber delves into a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, inside a Mystery Show podcast and unknots the origins of what turns out to be the "Chaw Beef" prank.

Fwd: ROLLER GREETING by Wonderlane (cc by)

Back in October of 2014, sarcasticah asked a simple question about an old 80s or 90s sitcom.

During the intro/ opening credits, there's a bit where one character is painting a wall or a door, and another character opens the door, and the first character rolls the paint roller over the other person's face. I can see this in my mind, but I cannot for the life of me figure out the show it came from.

Shockingly, Ask Mefi did not save the day, and apparently fans of the question have been on the edge of their seats ever since, so we are highlighting this cold case again, just in case there's a last minute lead before the thread closes in a couple of months.

So, "paint roller on the face opening credits": Mass Hallucination or True Thing? Do you know the answer?

(Also, we hired a pug to illustrate the suspense and anxiety surrounding the non-resolution of this issue, in case it helps.)