(via Bad Menu)
Monday, September 30, 2019
A Bad Day in Space
It's a bad place to be stranded or attacked, and it happens more often than you think. Contains NSFW language. (via Nag on the Lake)
In 5 Minutes
Click to the right to advance the comic. It's wonderful to be able to set your own schedule, but when it doesn't work, you have no one to blame but yourself. You know what you need to do, and when the stars align and you get ahead, it's a wonderful feeling! But it's also rare. Like they say, work expands to fill the time allotted for it. If it weren't for the last minute, I'd never get anything done! This comic is from Sarah Vettori.
Miss Cellania's Links
The 'Infortunate' Dictionary Scam. (via Damn Interesting)
Have an Enfeebled Fall!
Mister Global 2019.
New Star Wars Toys Revealed Before Force Friday. Pick your favorites, or perhaps your price range, and you won't be taken by surprise when they're all sold out in November.
Fanny Burney’s Gruesome Mastectomy. (via Strange Company)
This Terrible Mammoth Drawing Was a Giant Help to 19th-Century Naturalists.
The Balloon Boy Hoax—Solved! (via Digg)
Rescued Abandoned Kitten Will Be Returned to the Wild. You can keep up with Arwen, who is battling anemia, in daily updates at Facebook.
A blast from the past (2008): 6 Assorted Animal Adventures.
Tweet of the Day
This might the best thing I've ever seen pic.twitter.com/IYDacvkOxs— Giles Paley-Phillips (@eliistender10) September 11, 2019
(via Nag on the Lake)
Sunday, September 29, 2019
City Of Crime
The 1987 movie Dragnet is over 30 years old, which was a parody of a TV show that is now more than 50 years old. And stars Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd performed a rap song during the filming for the movie's credits. It's not great, but it is proof that Tom Hanks was once a young comedy actor, and must be a complete befuddlement to anyone who is not familiar with the movie's purpose. Decades later, Hanks still remembers the lyrics. (via Metafilter)
Simple Parking Strategies: A Primer
Paul Krapivsky and Sidney Redner crunched the numbers and published a paper on the optimum strategy for choosing a parking space in a parking lot. Since the paper is paywalled, the Santa Fe Institute give us an overview in a short video. However, the study makes a lot of assumptions, the first of which is that walking is something you want to minimize. Honestly, I don't care about parking far out, since I'll probably walk twice as far inside the store anyway. And it's it worth walking further to get a space in the shade. (via Metafilter)
SNL Returns Just in Time for Impeachment Drama
You can imagine the writers at Saturday Night Live have been tossing ideas around all summer, then in the final week before the season premiere, everything is tossed up in the air with new political revelations from Washington. They pulled out all the stops, er, makeup and wardrobe, that is, for the show's opening last night. Also check out the skit that reveals the casting for the 2020 election challengers.
When Irish People Cant Speak Irish
You can study a language in school for years, but if you don't practice it in the real world, how fluent are you, really? In this scene from Foil Arms and Hog, a detective needs someone who knows Gaelic, fast. The skit is only two minutes long, despite the video length. (via Laughing Squid)
Tweet of the Day
How it feels to browse websites in 2019... pic.twitter.com/LeBN2K26RA— Sterling (Spencer) (@HugdiSpencer) September 10, 2019
(via Everlasting Blort)
Saturday, September 28, 2019
Metropolis Remix
Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis is hailed as a breakthrough in cinema, but you might not have ever watched it because it's a silent film, in black and white. Now we have a fan edit that is both colorized and dubbed with sound- in English. (via Digg)
The Global Restaurant Chain Run by North Korea
North Korea is the most isolated and shunned nation in the world, but it manages to do a little international trade through its Pyongyang Restaurants. You won't find one near you, most likely, because they haven't quite made it to America or New Zealand yet. Half as Interesting tells us why.
Tweet of the Day
So much is terrible in the world, but you can Google "dinosaur with banana head" and it takes you directly to the correct dinosaur, and I think that's beautiful.— Julia Gulia 🌈 (@JRobb773) September 6, 2019
I tried this; works exactly as it says on the tin. (via some ecards)
Friday, September 27, 2019
Sweet Dream Seven Nation Army
This is not your everyday music mashup, but the vocals of Eurythmmics' "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This" sung over the music of "Seven Nation Army" by the White Stripes. You're listening to a performance by Pomplamoose featuring Sarah Dugas. (via Boing Boing)
Brahms' Lullaby for Meow
Habaru chose his human's noise-making machine s a place for a nap. So it only made sense that he'd play Brahm's Lullaby. The cat gets to choose which octave it's played in. (via Neatorama)
True Facts: The Ogre Faced Spider
ZeFrank tells us all about a spider named Margaret, who is an ogre-faced spider. You might guess from the name that the imagery in this True Facts video might be hard to take for people suffering from arachnophobia. Also, there's a bit of rude language. That said, the ogre-faced spider has a unique type of web and a unique method of hunting prey. (via Geeks Are Sexy)
Miss Cellania's Links
15 Things About Life In The U.S. That Are Super Not-Normal.
Where the Labradoodle Came From. The original breeder feels like he unleashed Frankenstein's monster.
The Undertaker Village of Paris: Then & Now.
Best of the worst: the history of bad TV in 10 shows.
Li'l Don Trump and how the cookie crumbles. The latest from Tom the Dancing Bug.
This Vancouver Urinal has Zero Privacy and 100 Years of History. (via Metafilter)
Revisiting Disney's America: The Theme Park That Never Was. (via Digg)
A Gallery of Knockoff Halloween Costumes. (via Boing Boing) https://boingboing.net/2019/09/25/gallery-of-knock-off-halloween.html
A blast from the past (2012): 10 Robots with Very Specific Tasks.
Tweet of the Day
uptown funk - mark ronson ft bruno mars pic.twitter.com/K36B3VhTkp— soviet soldiers dancing (@communistbops) September 21, 2019
This entire Twitter account is worth checking out. (via Everlasting Blort)
Thursday, September 26, 2019
Here Comes The Sun
The album Abbey Road was released 50 years ago today. In honor of the occasion, the Beatles have released a new official video for the song "Here Comes the Sun." It's a combination of still photos of the Fab Four from 1969, arty video clips, and beautiful animated sequences. There is a little video of the Beatles from 50 years ago, also. (via Boing Boing)
The Bottle Dance
From the movie Fiddler on the Roof. You might think it's movie magic, but dancers do this on stage all the time.
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Babies Hate Grass
Dunno why I’m laughing 😂 this the cutest thing I’ve seen on the internet. pic.twitter.com/jixWBbEb53— MISTAHMASALATI ™️ (@MisterMasalati) September 19, 2019
By the time they are three, they'll be running through the grass barefoot with joy, but infants apparently do not want to come in contact with the earth's surface. Enjoy this compilation of clips showing babies doing whatever they have to, to avoid touching the grass (or water, or sand). (via Buzzfeed)
Thoughts
Click to the right to advance the comic. This is my life, but I can also vouch for children in their ability to bring you down to earth. This comic is from Sarah Vettori. (via Bored Panda)
Miss Cellania's Links
The Moderate Middle Is A Myth.
The Whitechapel Fatberg Has Its Own Hidden Memorial. (via Nag on the Lake)
The most complex word in English only has three letters.
Money Can Kind of Buy Happiness After All. (via Digg)
Cats Really Do Bond With Their Humans, Study Finds.
The Girl in the Box: the Mysterious Crime that Shocked Germany. All these years later, has the crime been solved or not? (via Damn Interesting) https://www.damninteresting.com/curated-links/
How To Recognize Famous Painters By Their Art. The rules are simple.
A blast from the past (2008): Seven Strange and Wonderful Dishes.
Tweet of the Day
“The President actually said to Nancy Pelosi, ‘Hey, can we do something about this whistleblower complaint, can we work something out.’ And she said ‘Yes, you can tell your people to obey the law.’ So she quickly swatted that down." - @HeidiNBC https://t.co/vtWnAww1ch— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 24, 2019
The Weight
The latest song project from Playing for Change is the song "The Weight," originally recorded by The Band. For the song's 50th anniversary, musicians from five different continents collaborated, led by Robbie Robertson and Ringo Starr, to recreate the sound. (via Laughing Squid)
Plaisir Sucré
That donut forced me to eat it! A likely story, indeed, but that's what happens in this very short French animation by MegaComputeur. Stay past the credits for the best scene. (via Laughing Squid)
That's Impossible
Okay, this ended up being quite believable, and just plain awful. Don't fall for this one when it happens to you. Brought to you by Chris Hallbeck of Maximumble.
Miss Cellania's Links
A Secret 1950s Strategy to Keep Out Black Students. Long-hidden documents reveal the University of Texas’s blueprint for slowing integration during the civil-rights era.
The Coffee Brand That is a Total Lie. Chock full o’Nuts contains no nuts at all, but the coffee does have is an interesting story behind it.
The Vietnam Myth That Gave Us All Those Rambo Movies. (via Digg)
Here Are The 70 Best Signs From The 2019 Climate Strike.
Cinderella with a Glass Arm. (via The Daily Dot)
ER Was Prestige TV Before the Term Even Existed.
Joachim Gans, the First Practicing Jew to Set Foot in North America, Finally Gets His Due.
Mitch McConnell: The Man Who Sold America.
A blast from the past (2012): 14 Classic Distractions for the Internet Newcomer.
Ghostly Deepstaria Jellyfish
The crew of the RV Nautilus used the Hercules ROV to spy on a Deepstaria jellyfish. In reaction to the Hercules drawing near, the jelly went into defensive mode and put on a show for the watching scientists. This jelly doesn't have normal tentacles, but rather a ghostly blanket of flesh.
Deepstaria is as mysterious as it is rare, a shapeshifter whose body exists somewhere on a spectrum between enormous trash bag and ghostly lampshade. Last week, these researchers used a remotely operated vehicle to capture a video of the freaky jelly.The jelly also has a living isopod inside, but scientists aren't sure if it's a parasite or a symbiote, since we really don't know all that much about Deepstaria. (via Boing Boing)
The jellyfish in the video is roughly the size of a trash can. This deep-sea jelly lacks tentacles, and appears in the shape of a thin, membrane-like bell. Up close, you can see a geometric mesh pattern made up of canals that provide structural support and deliver nutrients to the body. In 2015, Wired referred to it as a “floating blanket.”
Tweet of the Day
One fish.— No Plastic Waste (@No_PlasticWaste) September 19, 2019
One plastic bag.
One diver.
Entire ecosystems.
Millions of tonnes of waste (per year).
One planet.
Plastic waste is choking us all. #NoPlasticWaste
(Video by Nat Senmuang - Phuket, Thailand) pic.twitter.com/dqed2WOkhD
Monday, September 23, 2019
Mr. T's Advice For President T
Mr. T always knew what was right. And he wasn't shy about telling you.
Skepticism
If our job as parents is to raise children who can operate well in the real world without us, then a sense of skepticism is a gift they will need sooner or later. This comic is from Zack Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Tops
Spinning toys are almost universal, although they take slightly different forms in different cultures. The 1969 short film Tops takes us on a mesmerizing tour of spinning tops from all over. It was produced by designers Charles and Ray Eames, who are more famous for their office chair. The soundtrack is by composer Elmer Bernstein. (via Kottke)
Miss Cellania's Links
How to Balance an Egg on Its End. It's traditional to do this on the equinox, but any day will do fine.
Here Are The Winners At The 2019 Emmys.
The First to Sail Around the World.
Absinthe: The Rise and Death of the Green Fairy. (via Strange Company)
Trump's farmer bailout is already more than twice as expensive as Obama's automaker bailout.
How the Storming of Area 51 turned out.
Constructing the Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World. (via Nag on the Lake)
In the 12th century, the people of Fijian province in China developed an architectural wonder to protect their communities from bandits and warfare. A tulou is a fortified apartment home for several hundred people with a central courtyard and outer walls up to six feet thick!
A blast from the past (2008): 8 Chimpanzee Stars.
Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours
Okay, we have a classic Motown song, a chorus line of 1970s fashions, an awesome bass player, and Stevie Wonder dancing. "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours" was the first single Stevie Wonder produced on his own, when he was only 20 years old. You'll be glad you spent three minutes enjoying this.
Tweet of the Day
Finally, a beauty contest I can get behind. (Kinmundy Express 1931, via @_newspapers) pic.twitter.com/gqlPPMI6ZR— Undine (@HorribleSanity) September 20, 2019
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Earth-Like Exoplanet
The latest "water on an exoplanet" announced is not the breakthrough it's made out to be. Not only does this planet differ from earth in many ways that could eliminate it from the actual definition of "habitable," it's also 111 light years away. That means it would take only 111 years to get to it, if we could fly at the speed of light. Which we can't. This comic is from Randall Munroe at xkcd.
10 Forgotten Fads from the 1970s
From CB radios to leisure suits, these are the things from the '70s that should be forgotten. The local TV ads haven't yet left.
Tweet of the Day
Jellyfish shot pic.twitter.com/Ifk4BjyTts— Universal Curiosity (@UniverCurious) September 20, 2019
The recipe sounds nasty, but the visual effect is nice. (via Boing Boing)
Saturday, September 21, 2019
Who? Are You Paranoid?
"Who AreYou?" from The Who mashed up with "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath. Yes, it's another masterful Bill McClintock edit.
A Memorable Birthday Cake
Chad Riden's grandma turned 101 years old. When her children ordered the birthday cake, they said she would be one hundred and one. So the decorator wrote a hundred, then a one. Here she is, trying to look upset, but you know she's suppressing a giggle.
A discussion on the wording of numbers tells us that you shouldn't use the word "and" because the numerals would be 100.1 or maybe 100.01 which some say is taught in school, but I'd never heard of that before. In this case, you can be sure that the decorator just wasn't thinking. If it were a proper cake phrase, the numeral would be 101st. You might imagine what would have happened if they'd have asked for "Happy one hundred and first birthday."
-via reddit
A discussion on the wording of numbers tells us that you shouldn't use the word "and" because the numerals would be 100.1 or maybe 100.01 which some say is taught in school, but I'd never heard of that before. In this case, you can be sure that the decorator just wasn't thinking. If it were a proper cake phrase, the numeral would be 101st. You might imagine what would have happened if they'd have asked for "Happy one hundred and first birthday."
-via reddit
Kiss Me Maybe
In this song parody, YouTuber Liechee uses Carly Rae Jepson's song "Call Me Maybe" to tell the story of The Little Mermaid. It's not only a clever and funny idea (if a little dated), but the song and video turned out right nice. (via Geeks Are Sexy)
Do You Know What Today Is?
Every year, Demi Adejuyigbe reminds us of the importance of September 21st in music and more. See his previous productions on this date here.
The Ocean
How many ways does Mother Nature have to warn us that something is very wrong? More importantly, are we going to listen and change our ways? This comic is from Lunarbaboon.
Tweet of the Day
Over 4 million on #ClimateStrike today. In 163 countries. And counting...— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) September 21, 2019
If you belong to the small number of people who feel threatened by us, then we we have some very bad news for you:
This is just the beginning. Change is coming - like it or not. #FridaysForFuture pic.twitter.com/MHGRNx1tnH
