Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Rey and Simba



Animal Defenders International (ADI) works to free wild animals from unnatural living conditions. They support wildlife shelters and opened their own preserve in South Africa. When Peru banned circuses from using wild animals, compliance was slow. ADI tracked down one circus high in the Andes and took two lions, brothers named Rey and Simba. It was a monumental task, involving a fight with the circus, a 19-hour drive to Lima, and then two years of paperwork, and an intercontinental flight taking 33 lions to South Africa. But after all that work, it was a joy to see Rey and Simba getting to walk on grass and explore their roomy new stomping grounds in the place they belong. These lions are bonded to each other for life. They know what they've been through together.



Traffic



5 Amazing Movie Endings That You've Never Seen



Many feature films have several possible endings before one is selected for the final edit. The chosen ending is often a result of test audiences’ preference, a better idea that occurred to writers along the way, or the decision to open the door for possible sequels.

Screen Rant lets us in on the endings that weren’t used in five movies. Therefore, this video contains spoilers for First Blood, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, I Am Legend, Terminator 2, and 28 Days Later. I think if you were ever planning to see those movies, you would have by now. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

Miss Cellania's Links

Happy 23rd blogiversary to Everlasting Blort! In celebration, Madame Jujujive is bringing back some very old but entertaining links.

October Haunted Happenings in Salem, Massachusetts.

New York Times writer draws ire for blaming Biden’s economy for $78 airport meal. More discussion here.

A Curious 1909 Custody Case for the Paris Police.

Welsh Sheep-Shearing Cake Is a Forgotten Pastoral Pleasure. try it yourself with this old recipe.

Kazuaki Horitomo's Monmon Cats. Tattooed cats tattooing other cats. (via Nag on the Lake)

This Implantable Device From MIT Pumps Insulin Without Needles. (via Neatorama)

Gravity is not uniform. It varies geographically. (via Atlas Obscura)

A Blast from the Past (2015): The Legend of Pope Joan.

His Birthday

Today is mine, too. (via Daily Picks and Flicks)

Steadfast Stanley



Stanley is a Pembroke Welsh Corgi who is left behind when the zombie apocalypse comes. All he wants is to find his boy and bring him his other shoe. Will his tiny little legs be able to outrun the zombie hordes? The only thing for certain is that you will love the little dog. John Lim made this student film at CalArts. (via Metafilter)

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Opinion



This is about feral cats. (via Bad Newspaper)

Troll Girl



An odd-looking baby is abandoned at the church steps and is taken in by a nun. The "Troll Girl" grows up as an outcast, trying to hide her true nature. She just wants to blend in and be left alone, but she is bullied relentlessly. Along the way, she finds inner talents that come in handy when she has to save the only person who ever loved her unconditionally. Troll Girl was written and directed by Kay Carmichael of Giantslayer Studios.   

Harsh



Cats vs Zombies



Who will take charge after the zombie apocalypse? Who has the power to save us from the zombie hoard? Why, it’s the internet’s favorite thing: cats! From Mr.TVCow comes the cutest little guerrilla fighters ever, with a mad plan to save the world from the dangerous zombies! (via Metafilter)

Welcome



Mama Is At Home Alone



When Mama finally gets some time all alone by herself, she has no clue what to do. All her time has been in service to everyone else in the family for so long that choosing how to spend that time is a real stumper. Moms don't plan ahead for time to themselves because that sets up a dream that may take years to fulfill. They just get used to subsuming their own desires in order to keep the househole running smoothly. Kim Holderness illustrates that conundrum to the tune of "Papa was a Rolling Stone."



Cat Lover




Mississippi Queen



Leslie West, Felix Pappalardi, and Corky Laing, otherwise known as Mountain, perform at Randall's Island in New York in 1970. This clip is from the film The Day The Music Died.

Tweet of the Day

The New York subway system comes with the occasional floor show. (via Everlasting Blort)

Monday, September 25, 2023

Wedding Vandalism



From 1890. (via Undine)

Piece of Cake



Two brides, porcelain wedding cake toppers Val and Mara, are unsatisfied with the grooms they are paired with. One of the guys turns abusive, and his bride is injured but not destroyed. The other couple comes to the rescue and the whole cake shop turns into a war scene. After the violence dies down, Val and Mara really only want to be with each other. It's a touching tale, but the real story is revealed in still shots shown during the credits. I had to laugh when the shopkeeper arrived the next morning. As Marvel has taught us, never leave before the credits roll. The award-winning short film Piece of Cake was written and directed by Sophie Feher and produced by Emma Goeas at the Savannah College of Art and Design.


College

(via reddit)

Not Quite Roadkill



Jennifer found a fox on the side of the road, which had apparently been hit by a car. It wasn’t dead, but was badly injured, unconscious, and barely breathing. The fox, eventually named Tammy, was taken to the Woodlands Wildlife Sanctuary, a totally volunteer-supported wildlife rehab center in Ontario. Tammy pulled through, although it was tough, and it was a long time before she could get around on her own. When she did, she met Todd, another fox that had been hit by a car. According to the conversation at Facebook, Tammy and Todd will be released together when Tammy is determined to be completely healed. (via Viral Viral Videos)

Premiere Listing 1966



(Thanks, WTM!)

Freestyle Slackline Competition



This sport appears to be a combination of trampoline and tightrope walking. The final competitors are Estonia and America. They give it their all as fast as they can to impress the crowd and the judges at the Globetrotter World Slackline Masters meet in Munich. Who should win? Why do they do this? These guys even fall off with style! (via Digg)

Miss Cellania's Links

When a Fashion Week Image Goes Viral. It's not pretty. (via Nag on the Lake

Bob Ross’s First Made-For-TV Painting Has Surfaced—and It’ll Cost You $10 Million.

I won $37 million in the lottery. The money wrecked my relationship with my mom and I got scammed by my best friend.

Homemade Sriracha. This version hits the right notes, but with a brighter, fresher flavor.

84 years after a Kimberly woman went missing, her family convinced police to open an investigation into her disappearance. (via Strange Company)   

Struck with Style: Lightning Rod Fashion of the 18th Century.

Summoning the Water Lord. Turn the sound on.

Jellyfish show how you don’t need a brain to learn, say researchers. (via Damn Interesting

New Documentary Werewolves Unearthed Debuts October First.

Squishe



(via Fark)

Sexual Harassment Found Footage



From the Found Footage Festival, we get a supercut of sexual harassment employee training videos from the ‘90s. The re-enactments are cheesy and get laughs, but the things they illustrate were just another day at the office back in the day. (via Everlasting Blort)

Tweet of the Day

(Thanks, WTM!)

Sunday, September 24, 2023

With Chips

(via Bad Menu)

I Want This Shirt



The Rare Liondog in the Wild



This amazing footage shows a lion dog that very much resembles Fritz the golden retriever. Watch him stalk his prey, the elusive soap bubble. Here he encounters a herd of them, to his utter delight! (via Tastefully Offensive)

Camera



(Thanks, WTM!)

Following a Mountain Biker by Drone



Warning: this video may induce vertigo. We've seen heart-stopping POV videos of mountain bikers wearing helmet cams. The next iteration of this type of videography is from the view of a fpv (first person view) drone. In this sequence, we follow Kade Edwards down the Red Bull Hardline downhill mountain bike race track in Wales, an extreme track if you ever saw one. Can Edwards stay upright on this terrifying run? Can the drone keep up with him? Can it navigate through thick groves of trees? Can we keep our stomachs from leaping while watching? Edwards makes the run look easy, but we all know that it isn't, and the drone pilot did a fantastic job. Any of us would have crashed and burned in either role. (via TYWKIWDBI)

Faris




Cat Shuts Up Yapping Dog



Devon Meadows set up a camera to see what goes on when he’s not home, particularly how much his new puppy Chazz barks. That’s how he came to witness an epic shutdown by his cat, Grayscale. Cats know when to be intimidating, and the puppy was certainly put in his place. (via Neatorama)

Tweet of the Day

That "99% will fail" part is pure clickbait. The correct answer could be 0, 2, 4, or 6, depending on how you parse the question. How do you fail this one? By guessing on odd number? This is really a language problem, not a math problem.

Saturday, September 23, 2023

Question of the Day

100 Movie Dance Scenes Set to “Uptown Funk”



Everyone’s dancing to “Upttown Funk,” from Charlie Chaplin to Nicola Cage to cartoon characters! There are 100 movies represented here; how many of them have you seen? (via Tastefully Offensive)

How Popey was the Pope?

(via reddit)

The Aztec Death Whistle



No, you won't die if you hear the sound of an Aztec death whistle, but you'll hear it a lot in this video, and you might want to be ready with the volume control. It can cause a jump scare in the people in the next room, or make children cry. The Aztec death whistle is a small instrument that looks like a duck call, but the sound it produces is like a terrified person screaming beyond control. If you didn't know what caused it, hearing this in the night would make the hairs on your back rise up. James Orgill of The Action Lab actually made some Aztec death whistles with a 3D printer. He tells us both the history and science of these whistles, and blows those darn whistles quite a few times. That's an interesting and sneaky way to lead up to an ad for the 3D printer. (via Digg)


Autumn



A Teaser Trailer for Squid Game: The Challenge



The last we heard about the upcoming TV game show Squid Game: The Challenge was in January. Now the upcoming Netflix series has a teaser trailer and a premiere date. The teaser is less than a minute long, but we can see that they've gone to great lengths to recreate the visuals from the original fiction series Squid Game from 2021. This time, it's all about the games, with no life-and-death risks or moral decisions to make along the way. In Squid Game: The Challenge, 456 people will compete for a grand prize of $4.56 million.

The original series was a dystopian horror about the lengths desperate people will go to win riches at the expense of their fellow man (or woman). The entire idea of making it into a game show with lower risks only shows how well we manage to miss the point. Still, the games themselves made viewers consider their own strategy to win. In the original, there were 455 losers and one winner. The reality game show has not revealed whether the fates of their contestants will be the same, besides that detail of death. You can watch Squid Game: The Challenge on Netflix beginning November 22. (via the A.V. Club)


Plotting



This book is by Matthew Inman at the Oatmeal. (via Fark)

Avery Lands a Fish



Avery is out fishing with her dad with her pink Barbie fishing pole. Not only does she catch a fish, it’s a 5-pound, 20 inch bass! And she did it all by herself. Father and daughter will remember this catch for the rest of their lives. (via reddit)

Tweet of the Day

(via Everlasting Blort)

Friday, September 22, 2023

Slow News Day



From 1879. (via Undine)

True Facts About Reef Corals



In the latest edition of Ze Frank's True Facts series, we learn about reef coral. Yeah, it's an animal, although what we see of them are their shells, which make a reef. You might wonder how he could ever make a bawdy, silly, joke-filled video about coral, but he manages to do so. One animal of coral is called a polyp.  What we would call building a reef, he describes as a polyp "farting crystals." You get the idea. Yeah, it's a ridiculous way of telling a story, but that makes it much easier to learn how coral works. Or at least more likely to be remembered. See, already I am impressed that coral reproduces both sexually and by cloning themselves. And they have several ways of eating. The images in this video are beautiful on some ways, and gross in others. There's a one-minute skippable ad at the five-minute mark.

What a Crock

(via reddit)

Five New Cheetahs



Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, was the site of a blessed event on September 12. An eight-year-old cheetah named Echo gave birth to a litter of five cubs! The cubs appear to be doing quite well, and are being left alone with Echo. When they are a bit older, staff will take inventory to see how many males and females there are, and take a blood test to determine who the father is. It will be either Asante or Flash, both part of the Cheetah Breeding Center Coalition program, which the zoo is a part of.

You can peak in on the cheetahs any time with the Cheetah Cam, although Echo has been moving them around, so you may have to come back later to see them. Read more about this cheetah family at Zooborns.

Run to Live Longer



How fast can you run? That depends on what's chasing you. Motivation is everything. This comic is from Bonus Context. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

Jupiter



Stainless Steel Hollow Sections



If you enjoy the dry humor of engineering nerds, wait until you see three of them together! A Finnish industrial company called Stalatube wanted to show off their stainless steel hollow sections. That's a pretty esoteric product, and their engineer Pekka is not all that charismatic (and likely fictional), so how will they draw attention? They team up with Finnish madman Lauri Vuohensilta of the Hydraulic Press Channel and and Mythbusters' Jamie Hyneman, now a professor at  LUT University in Lappeenranta, Finland.

They put different grades of steel through Lauri's hydraulic press test, with the results you might expect. Then they go on to test the steel with heat. But that's not enough, so they take their samples to a testing facility where the steel is further tortured. Hyneman is duly impressed with the product, but that's still not good enough for Pekka. There's more to come; the second episode of this ad series will drop on October 6. Yes, it's an ad, but if you are going to watch a ten-minute ad for anything today, you'd want it to be this one. (via Metafilter)

Miss Cellania's Links

The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it. That word is noctalgia. (via Metafilter)  

‘Extraordinary’ structure has no real parallel in the archaeological record, scientists say. At 476,000 years old, it predates Homo sapiens. (via reddit)

Hollingsworth Hound presents The CEO's Guide to Government Services. The latest from Tom the Dancing Bug.

Han – The Little Merman. A controversial statue in Elsinore, Denmark, is the gender-swapped version of The Little Mermaid.

When a Five-year-old Asks About Nazis

How to Use Analogous Colors to Make Your Home Look Expertly Designed.

Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump’s vision. Lots more links at Metafilter.

The Nedelin Catastrophe: The Worst Space-Related Disaster Ever. It was, of course, covered up from public knowledge.

New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People.

Grandkids




The Dog Train



Eugene Bostick has a soft heart for dogs. He’s taken in countless unwanted dogs and gave them a forever home. And to give them a little extra fun, he takes them on a train ride! He built the train out of plastic barrels and pulls it with his tractor. The dogs love it.  (via Neatorama)

Tweet of the Day

(via Everlasting Blort)

Thursday, September 21, 2023

How's the Food?

(via Bad Menu)

What Bears Do in the Woods



They dance, of course! When bears emerge from the hibernation in the spring, they've shed most of the weight they put on last summer, but they still have their winter coat. As the temperatures rise, they feel their fur starting to get loose. It's an itch that must be scratched, and the best place to do it is against a tree with rough bark. The dancing in this video starts at about 1:45, and it's a downright sensuous experience. As they scratch their backs, the fur comes off, and so does that bear's scent. It's our job to add the music.

This clip, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, is from the BBC TV series Planet Earth II. The entire video is a feast for the eyes, as long as you aren't a marmot. (via Born in Space)  


Police Crackdown

(via reddit)

Willie Wonky and His Kitten Charlie



Mandy and Phillip took in a special needs foster cat and named him Willie Wonky. Well, cats don't care what you name them as long as you care for them. They had to make some adjustments in their household for Willie, but he turned out to be so delightful and loving that they adopted him permanently. A "wobbly cat" is one with a neurological condition called cerebellar hypoplasia, which affects motor control but is not painful and doesn't affect a cat's lifespan if they are cared for. Mandy and Phillip learned so much while caring for Willy that they took in another wobbly cat, a kitten named Charlie. Willie bonded with Charlie, and now Charlie has been adopted into the family, too! You can keep up with Willie, Charlie, and the rest of the family at Facebook and Instagram.

Do You Remember?


It was posted in June, but I saved it for a specific date. If you don't get it, watch this video. This comic is from Deliberately Buried.

Bike Path

Why Does The Gambia Exist?



In the summer of 2020, a young man from Gambia stayed with me because of the pandemic. He couldn't remain at school after graduation, he couldn't fly home, and slowdowns in government work meant he couldn't get a work permit in time to accept job offers. I was gone a lot taking care of my mother, but I learned quite a bit about the Gambia. The word means "river."

I asked him how Senegal felt about the Gambians taking both banks of the river. He said that wasn't us, that was the French and the British. This video tells that story. The Gambians and Senegalese get along fine, and share things like utilities and sports teams. However, some of the things I learned about West African politics made me feel very lucky to live in the US.

Cosmo



(via Fark)

Activewear



“Activewear” is the marketing term for sports or exercise clothing. Everyone wears activewear, but few are actually active. There are two basic kinds of activewear: the body-hugging yoga pants and sports bras that show off one’s physique, figure, or lack thereof, and the loose sweats good for warmth and comfort. Young people want to show off their bodies and look like they work out, and we older folks just want chafe-free covering. The video is aimed at girls, but we all know guys do it, too. This music video was created by the Van Vuuren Bros for the TV show Skit Box. (via Tastefully Offensive


Tweet of the Day

These little girls are terrified at first, but they rally and defeat the dragon! That's some bravery. (Thanks, WTM!)

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Paving Stone

(via Bad Menu)

I'm Your Captain (Closer to Home)

Grand Funk Railroad, recorded at Shea stadium in July of 1971. You can read a description of that record-breaking concert here.


Traffic Rules



(via reddit)

Barbie's Honest Trailer



If you haven't seen Barbie yet (and there are a few of us), here's your chance to get an extended look and critique of the movie. Oh, and you won't want to miss the Quentin Tarantino part. Screen Junkies pronounces it a showcase of ad placement, not just for Barbie but also for Chevrolet and other consumer products. Plus, it's deeply feminist, implausible, and juvenile. But who cares about all that? It's really funny, which covers all other sins. But they find plenty of other good things to say about Barbie, so it's no wonder that the movie has made $1.4 billion already, the most of any 2023 movie so far.

Dogs and Cats



The Legality of Baby Names in Australia



In the US, you can give your baby pretty much any name you choose, but the very worst examples might draw the attention of Child Protective Services. In Australia, the regulations prohibit certain types of names, and each is judged individually. The one that gave me pause was a restriction against naming your child a title. In Kentucky, that would exclude a lot of Generals, Majors, Dukes, and Earls. But one rules was a restriction against a name "contrary to the public interest for some other reason." That's as ambiguous as you can get, and gives bureaucrats a lot of power over naming your child.

Kirsten Drysdale of the Australia Broadcasting Corporation decided to test the limits of the law by naming her child something pretty bad, but not specifically prohibited. Oh yeah, she really did. Let's see how that goes. This video does a good job of covering up the worst language, but it still has NSFW audio. (via reddit)

Miss Cellania's Links

The Extremely Enchanting, Totally Perplexing, Possibly Never-Ending Quest for the Golden Owl.

The Wild History of the Tale That Created the Modern Vampire (And No, It's Not Dracula).

How to pronounce "D'yer Mak'er."

Older Adults Share The Best Things About Being In Your 60s.

Doodle a few minutes with the refreshing web toy Water. (via Everlasting Blort)

John Fetterman is leaning into the latest ridiculous conspiracy theory about him by selling t-shirts. This would look good on my 5' 3" frame. (via Fark)

Should you be friends with your kids? They can always make new friends, but they need a parent.

Brain-altering parasite turns ants into zombies at dawn and dusk. They glued tags to hundreds of ant butts to study them. (via Real Clear Science)

Electric Vehicle Gender Gap Suggests Men Want Novelty, Women Want Value. Just like every other part of life.


Handsome Boy



Visualizing Chopin



Enjoy an animated visualization of Chopin’s Etude, opus 25 no. 1, in A-flat major. Stephen Malinowski and his Music Animation Machine make it look as pretty as it sounds. (via The Kid Should see This)

Tweet of the Day

This is pretty neat technology, if you care at all about golf courses. (via Super Punch

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Halloween Supplies



Superfools



Aretha Franklin sings "Chain of Fools" to the music of Black Sabbath's "Supernaut." We also hear a variety of Ozzy Osbourne songs mixed in, too, in the latest mashup by Bill McClintock.  

Filters



(via reddit)

Outsmarted



Big dog, small cat... but the cat has something going for it. He's smarter than the dog! (Thanks, WTM!)



Longtermist



When you put it that way, I can understand why so many people just don't care about the world our great-grandchildren will inhabit. Not that understanding makes it any better. This comic is from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Educational Sign



How Daniel Radcliffe Pulled Off A Hollywood Magic Trick



Daniel Radcliffe was eleven years old when he first auditioned to play the role of Harry Potter. He grew up making the eight Harry Potter films, and was inextricably linked to the character. But not for life. Radcliffe wanted to be an actor since he was five years old, and was determined not to be typecast, which would shorten his professional career. He latched onto all kinds of roles during and after Harry Potter, and became most noted for the weirdest ones- roles that were totally opposite what you would expect from the child wizard in a child's literary series. Let's see how Daniel Radcliffe deliberately set out to stretch his abilities and our expectations after establishing a name for himself in an iconic role.  


Loanwords and Calques



We know that a few words are the same in all languages, or at least many languages, because they travel from one language to another. It's only natural, as we travel the globe and find things and concepts that are new to us. There are a lot of "loanwords" that just become a part of the second language. That's what we get for communicating. Even more common are words taken from another language and then get changed a bit to fit better into the second language. You might even call them mangled, as some examples end up being rather funny to people who speak both the old and new languages. Then there are "calques," which I wasn't at all familiar with, but it has to do with translation. Tom Scott explains these leaps of language that eventually enrich all of our languages. Along the way, we also find out where Admiral Ackbar's name came from.


Miss Cellania's Links

Optography: Preserving a Dead Person’s Last Sight.

What the Internet Will Tell You About the Canadian Marble Fox.

The Earth Opens Up Under Three Cadillac SUVs.

29 Video Game Features With Bonkers Backstories. It was easier to make a bug into a feature than it was to fix it.  

Why Can’t Vampires Eat Garlic?

While carrying garlic is presumably adequate to repel vampires, ingesting garlic is even better because it makes one's blood distasteful to vampires. The Medical Journal of Australia offers tips on the proper dosage for such purposes.

Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani perform an animated mugshot duet. (via Nag on the Lake)

Carrots were originally purple, not orange. Here’s what happened. (via Damn Interesting

Toronto restaurant issues liability waiver after customer asks for ketchup on shawarma. (via Metafilter)

Cosplay Cat



(via Fark)

Best Reason to Use a Dashcam



Imagine tootling along in your car when this happens. This was on Red Hill Avenue in Irvine, California. The local paper had the story a bit later. It was a Piper Cherokee with some kind of equipment failure that prompted an emergency landing on the street. No one was injured, and the plane was not damaged during the landing. 

Like redditor AHPpilot said, “One man's emergency landing is another man's hilarious dash cam video.” (via reddit)

Tweet of the Day

Interior decorating at its finest. Read more at Homes and Hues.

Monday, September 18, 2023

Bargain



Duck Soup



The 1933 movie Duck Soup is about the closest we've come to a perfect comedy. It stars the four Marx Brothers plus Margaret Dumont. It was Zeppo's final film with his brothers. The synopsis:

Groucho portrays the newly installed president of the mythical country of Freedonia. Zeppo is his secretary, while Chico and Harpo are spies for the neighboring country of Sylvania. Relations between Groucho and the Sylvanian ambassador deteriorate during the film, and they go to war at the conclusion.
Even if you've never seen the whole movie, you already know some of the highlights, like the hat exchange, the sidecar gag, and the famous mirror scene. Oh yeah, and a lot of jokes you've heard over the years. (via Metafilter)

Candy Corn



(via reddit)

Where a Cat Sleeps



I have four cats, and I know where they will be when I go to bed. One will sleep near my arms, so can pet him, or even fall asleep on my arm. The biggest cat will always be at the foot of the bed. One cat never sleeps in my bed because it's too crowded, but she will be on the table nearby. And the kitten wants to be in my face.

Cats spend more than half their lives asleep, so where they choose to do so is important to them. If you cat wants to sleep with you, that's a sign that they like you. Of course, it helps that you generate warmth on a cold night. Where they sleep when you are not in bed will tell you about their status, comfort, sense of security, and relationships with other cats. Feline Fanatics goes over the many factors that a cat balances before deciding where the perfect place to sleep will be.  

John Deere



(Thanks, WTM!)

A History of the Stone Age



When we think about the Stone Age, we think of cave men, or The Flintstones. You might be surprised at the many important steps that mankind took toward civilization during the Stone Age, which lasted a couple of million years. What we think of as "primitive" during that period was the best life ever gets for early man, and those folks made great efforts toward making their own lives better with new ideas and technical innovations. We call it the Stone Age because that's what they left behind. Who knows what else they used? Bones, sure, and maybe wood, leather, plants, and a host of other things that just didn't survive long enough for us to find them. Meanwhile, humans developed fire-making, cooking, art, clothing, agriculture, and long-distance travel. That's a lot of innovation for "cave men." We only call them "prehistoric" because they didn't write their accomplishments down, but we can figure out their history from what little they did leave behind.   


Miss Cellania's Links

The Gruesome 18th-century Pirate Medical Devices found on Blackbeard’s Ship. (via Damn Interesting

Four Sisters Get Caught. A delightful emergency they really didn't want Mom to see.

The Nurses of MASH — Meet the Real Women Behind The Characters From the Iconic Korean War TV Series. (via Strange Company)

What if Middle-earth was in Pakistan? Iranian Tolkien scholar finds intriguing parallels between subcontinental geography and famous map of Middle-earth. (via Atlas Obscura

We Blind Taste Tested Fast Food Spicy Chicken Sandwiches — Here Is The Hottest & Most Delicious. 

Inside The Cottage Industry Of ‘Experts’ Paid To Defend Anti-Trans Laws. (via Fark)

California and Florida grew quickly on the promise of perfect climates in the 1900s – today, they lead the country in climate change risks. (via Smithsonian)

15 Facts About A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884.

Spend A Few Months In Rotterdam Working At “The World’s First Coffee Hotel.” (via Nag on the Lake)

Shared Hobby



Look at That Body



Above Average is making a series of videos called Criminal Crimes, which pokes fun at police dramas. It stars the sketch group Chess Club Comedy. This episode takes place in the morgue, as our detectives examine a murder victim. The coroner needs to get out more, maybe see a movie or two. I know she’d enjoy Thor. (via The A.V. Club)

Tweet of the Day

Choose your philosophers carefully.

Sunday, September 17, 2023

neighbors



Late Night Quantum Physics



In February of 2007, Jim Carrey appeared on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and they discussed physics. The one-upmanship may sound like gibberish to you and me, unless you are a physicist. You might try to parse out what they are saying, but the conversation really goes off the rails when Max Weinberg joins in and makes a fool of himself. The real punch line, not available to viewers at the time, is that the paper they are discussing is real. Reading it doesn't make it any clearer, though. I did notice that Carrey titles it "phase shifting," when it is really "phase switching." It's a crucial difference, of course. (via reddit)

Terry



(via reddit)

Yes We Do



(Thanks, WTM!)