Miss Cellania's Links

The Ten Longest Wars in History.

Democracies end when they are too democratic. And right now, America is a breeding ground for tyranny.

Meet Dr. Color: How Bob Buckter Repainted San Francisco. (via Metafilter)

The Toughest Pirates in Existence.

Is There A Better Way To Pay For America's Schools? Honestly, any way is better than property taxes staying in the district.

Inside the Bizarre, Racist Scheme to Import Siberian Workers to Hawaii in 1909.

Who Was the Funniest U.S. President?

The Scrambled Boxtops Puzzle. It's not as hard as it first seems.

Fiction

(via Fark)

Sky Magic at Mt.Fuji

This would have been a wonderful video even without the dancing drones. The Oyamakai ensemble of Shamisen players perform a rocking tune at sundown at the base of Mt. Fuji. The featured dancers are 20 synchronized drones, each in their little cages outfitted with a total of 16,600 LEDs. They fly in choreographed formations, swinging their lights in synchrony. You’ll want to see this in full-screen mode.

Sky Magic is the work of creative director Tsuyoshi Takashiro for the tech company MicroAd, Inc. Read all about it at Spoon & Tamago.

Pet of the Week

(via Bad Newspaper)

Onomatopoeia Rebus

CharlieWaffle5 searched the term “onomatopoeia” and found this image. It’s a mini language lesson all on its own. “Onomatopoeia” is a word that sounds like what it’s describing, which is usually a sound. A rebus is a phrase or sentence rendered in pictures. But what makes this really remarkable is the astonishing number of redditors who did not know that church benches are called pews.

Sleeping Piglets

The little pigs may be asleep, but their ears are fined-tuned to detect sounds. When they react as a group, it’s hard to keep a straight face. (via reddit)

13 May Festivals and Events Around the World

As nice weather returns, the world has a great selection of festivals and events in the month of May. There are plenty of May, music, film, flower, and barbecue festivals, and then there are a few that are totally offbeat and worth checking out. See 13 of them a list I prepared for mental_floss. 

Some of these entries were rendered nonsensical in the editing process. St. Sara is not named Mary; she was the servant of the Three Marys, two of which are involved in the Pélerinage des Gitans. The name of the festival translates to Pilgrimage of the Gypsies. “Gitans” is French for Roma, or gypsies. There are no flower or barbecue festivals in the list; the original intro made clear that these are something else.

Nice Out?

From Married to the Sea.

Bite Size Candies

M&M candies are 75 years old! In honor of the occasion, Pogo (Nick Bertke) made a remix of M&M ads spanning decades. While this remix has Pogo’s signature sound, it also has coherent lines from the advertising jingles and dialogue, strung together to make an entirely new song. You might come out of this craving chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hands. (via Viral Viral Videos) 

Miss Cellania's Links

Cracking the Voynich. Will we ever be able to decode the ancient manuscript?

Monica, Marcia, Tonya, and Anita famous in the 1990s for widely varying reasons, to the point that we didn’t even need to use their last names. What they had in common was the media circuses that grew up around them. (via Metafilter)


The Petrified Man’s Guide to Home Renovation.

A Learning Machine Made of Drawers and Beads.

What women superheroes have to deal with, by Kate Beaton.

Talia Jane was the canary in the coal mine of wages in San Francisco. Here’s what’s happened since. (via Metafilter)

14 Epic Facts About Gangs of New York.

Why Are Highly Educated Americans Getting More Liberal? Because, duh.

The Catnip Garden

(via Fark)

Strange and Beautiful Deep Sea Jellyfish

What does this creature remind you of? A space alien? A virus? A cartoon? It’s real, a real jellyfish recorded by an ROV from the ship Okeanos Explorer on a NOAA expedition to the Mariana Trench. This video was taken 2.3 miles below the ocean’s surface.
Scientific American has more:

Scientists believe this animal belongs to the genus Crossota, a group of jellies that does not have a sessile polyp stage; all phases of their lives are ocean drifters. They also believe this animal is an ambush predator – note the posture it had assumed in the first half of the video: its bell motionless with its tentacles outstretched like the struts of a spider’s web, waiting for something to bumble into them. The red canals, they suggest, appear to connect the bright yellow objects, which may be gonads.

(via Viral Viral Videos)

Breathtaking Bravado

(via Bad Newspaper)

Ghostbusters in 2 Minutes in LEGO

Two years ago, Monsieur Caron of BrickFun made a LEGO Ghostbusters video that was quite amusing. Now he’s back with a new and improved version that tells the movie’s entire story in just two minutes! You can catch some of the behind-the-scenes images at Instagram. (Thanks, Yan!) 

Gas Prices Are Falling

(via reddit)

Puppy Joins Litter of Kittens

A Chihuahua puppy named Bobby was only two days old when his mother was hit by a car. The Michigan Humane Society took him in, but he was so young, what to do? They had a cat in residence that had a litter of young kittens, and they just gave Bobby to her. Gwen the mother cat took to him just fine,m like he was just another kitten. 

Six weeks later, Bobby has settled into his new family just fine. The cats and puppy are all living with a foster family until they are old enough to leave Gwen and find forever homes. (via Buzzfeed)

Tetris

I never said that. I told my kids to use those skills every time they loaded a dishwater. (via Pleated-Jeans)

Desert Critters

A desert fox only wants to devote his time looking for something to eat, like most wild creatures do, but this annoying young fennec fox kit named Nibbles wants to be buddies or something. What’s a fox to do?

The story is simple and classic, the desert animation is lovely, and the foxes are cute. Enjoy CalArts student Li Wen Toh’s latest film. (via Digg)

Seriously?

(via Fark)

Campus Snapchat Love Story

Mystery Girl saw a guy she was attracted to at the Memorial Library. She called him Vikings Fan because of what he was wearing. A couple of SnapChat messages, and they both wanted to meet, but schedules and stuff got in the way. As the day went by, the entire University of Wisconsin-Madison campus was rooting for them.

Would the two ever find each other? It was a Romeo and Juliet story for the modern age. Better than a soap opera, because it was playing out not only on SnapChat, but also in real life. (via reddit)