Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio
The Forgotten Storm
Skunk Research Review
Cowabunga! Strange Cow Stories
The Stories of 5 Railway Tunes
15 Things About Ernest Borgnine
The Axeman of New Orleans
Spiders, Fear, and Size
The Aero-Nuts of 1785
How English Was Made
One of the perks of owning a boat is getting to name it with the most ridiculous pun you can think of. In this case, a punny name is quite appropriate, considering the passengers. The top comment was quite clever, too:
They're all good buoys!
Of course they are.
Many Scottish people speak three different languages at home- Gaelic, English and Scots, a Germanic language spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster.
Since English is the newer of the three languages spoken by Scots they often have trouble pronouncing English words, a fact which the Brits love to tease them about incessantly.
YouTuber WeeScottishLass bravely submitted her mouth to the challenge to see if she could prove the sterotype wrong by perfectly pronouncing those English words that supposedly give Scots trouble, starting with the name "Carl". Is Rick Grimes Scottish?
Serene-ity by Truly Madly Geekly
Captain Mal realized there was something wrong with Serenity the minute he got his ship back, and he didn't even have to look her over to realize she was not the same gal he'd been flying through the 'verse for the last twenty years. But that was to be expected, since the Reavers don't steal ships without modding them all to hell, and Mal had taken his sweet time getting her back so they had time to do some pretty deep mods. And yet hearing Serenity talk to him in her own sultry and smoky voice, and having her stare at him with big ol' cartoon eyes and smile at her with that newly installed cheesy grin of hers, well that was too much for Mal to handle! Wash, on the other hand, saw the mods as a dream come true...
Show your unique love for the greatest cancelled sci-fi show of all time with this Serene-ity t-shirt by Truly Madly Geeky, it's sure to make your fellow fans smile wherever you go!
Visit Truly Madly Geekly's Facebook fan page and official website, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more geek-tastic designs:
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| St Smasher | I Am Pool | Viper |
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There a remake of the Tomb Raider movie coming out in 2018, starring Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft. You can see the trailer here, and in it you can tell that Alicia Vikander is a real woman -unlike the image in the movie's poster, which was released this week. What's going on with her neck? Where does it connected to her skull? The over-editing of the picture is a consequence of trying to get her into that pose, the one where a woman who is the star of a movie must show face, boobs, and butt all in the same picture. This time they've gone too far. Bodies just don't work like that. -via The Daily Dot
— Paul Rugg (@pkrugg) September 20, 2017
Paul Rugg, who writes and does voiceovers for cartoons (he worked on Animaniacs and Pinky and The Brain, among other shows) tells us how he relaxes at home with his beloved dog. Truly a man's best friend. -via reddit
Before Players one and two are handed a newborn baby and officially begin their first quest in the strange and wondrous game called Parenthood they have to go through the longest intro sequence ever.
This intro sequence isn't much fun for the mother carrying the child, but it does prepare her for the fact that nearly every quest in Parenthood will be an escort quest- and the wee one has a very small health bar.
And, as this comic by Andy Kluthe and Andrew Bridgman shows, Parenthood is full of stealth, danger and toxic fluids, but if you're lucky you'll survive to play Parenthood 2: The Next Batch.
-Via Dorkly
The Autumnal Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere occurs on Friday, meaning summer is over and fall will begin. Since the internet is global, the date is now often called the September Equinox. The exact equinox point will be at 4:02 PM Eastern Daylight Time, your mileage may vary. We say that the equinox is the day the sun crosses the Earth's equator, but the sun doesn't really do anything. What happens is that the tilt of the earth, relative to its orbital plane, reaches the point at which the Southern Hemisphere receives more sunlight than the Northern Hemisphere. If you live at the equator, the noonday sun sways a bit north and south over the year, but is directly overhead at both equinoxes. Within the Arctic and Antarctic Circles, the sun is up all summer and gone all winter. Most of us live somewhere between those two extremes, and enjoy long summer days and long winter nights. If you want to get deeper in the details of the equinox, astronomer Guy Ottewell explains what is happening in the graphic above.
Our sky scene above, for an hour after sunset on equinox day in mid-U.S.A., happens to be about three hours after the instant of the equinox. You can see that the anti-sun, as we can call the point 180 degrees from the sun, appears to be just on the opposite crossroads of ecliptic and equator. Actually it’s a little way past, the fraction of a degree that the sun moves in three hours. The anti-sun point is already a little way into the northern celestial hemisphere, as the sun is a little way into the southern.
Earth is hurtling away from the point we mark as antapex of Earth’s way, 90° to the right of the anti-sun point. As Earth curves on along its orbit, both of these points will shift to the left: the anti-sun point higher into the northern sky, the sun itself deeper into the southern, our hemisphere of Earth deeper into autumn.
Read more about the equinox at Guy Ottewell's Universal Workshop. -Thanks, Walter!
(Image credit: Guy Ottewell)
The white supremacists who are making America hate again seem to be a mighty confused bunch, because they claim other races are inferior yet they appropriate whatever they want from other cultures without a second thought.
They carry tiki torches to Neo-Nazi rallies, pledge allegiance to an old German regime and an even older Confederate state even if they're not from the South, and yet they claim to be the most tried and true patriots in the United States of 'Murica.
These hate groups also seem to have a fetish for Asian symbols which, as this VICE News video shows, can be traced back to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, the original racist appropriators of Asian symbology.
-Via VICE
Hollywood follows trends, and it shows when several movies with the same premise are released in the same year -sometime in the same weekend. Embarrassing? Maybe, but what really matters is which movie people go to see. Usually in such cases, one film rises to the top, another is regarded as an also-ran, and maybe a third goes quickly to home video. Rarely, two of them become hits, and will be confused with each other forever afterward. The three movies pictured here were all released in 1985, and all are teen comedies concerning intelligent young nerds whose science projects got out of hand. Read about eight sets of three nearly identical movies at TVOM.
When our furry family members are in trouble we come to their aid just as quickly as we would if one of our human kids needed help, proving how much we value our pet's lives.
51-year-old Paul Stott was out for a stroll on a Northumberland beach with his little Chihuahua mix Dave when poor Dave was swallowed up by a pool of quicksand.
Paul wasn't sure how to rescue little Dave but didn't hesitate either- he reached right into the quicksand pool and yanked the poor little guy out.
Paul's quick thinking kept Dave from becoming quicksand food, and now Dave's story will serve as a warning to other dog owners about the dangerous quicksand pools on the beach.
Here's Paul demonstrating how deep the quicksand pool is, and how far in he had to reach to grab poor Dave:
-Via Daily Mail
What's scarier than Pennywise, the clown from It? Ronald McDonald! See, you already recognize Pennywise as a dangerous entity, terrifying from the start. Ronald, on the other hand, is like the devil in blue jeans, attractive and tempting, until you realize how you've already fallen into his clutches. Resist the fries, Georgie! This is the latest comic from Übertool.
We're taught in school that the most important inventions created by Black people are peanut butter, blood banks and the sidewalk mailbox, but the history books continue to overlook a more recent yet equally important contributor- Jerry Lawson.
Jerry was a self-taught engineer who gave us one of the greatest, and most fun, technological leaps forward in human history- the video game console.
While working as head of engineering and marketing at Fairchild Semiconductor in the mid-70s Jerry created the Fairchild Channel F gaming console, the first cartridge-based console, which was released in 1976.
The Channel F had interchangeable cartridges so players could expand their library with new games, before that gaming "consoles" were stuck playing the one game programmed directly into the hardware.
Jerry Lawson's legacy was overshadowed by big names like Atari and Coleco, but Jerry truly deserves to be seen as one of the most important Black inventors of all time for his contribution to our entertainment lovin' lives.
-Via Endgadget
Mudskippers are some really strange animals. They are amphibious fish, which is not a new division of taxonomy; it just means they are fish that can spend time out of the water. Mudskippers can breathe through their skin, and they have some strange mating habits, too. This video from the BBC explains. It gets really good at about a minute in, so make sure you don't have any liquid in your mouth when they start to dance.
They sometimes get into shouting matches with each other, too, as you can see here. -via reddit
PICKS...or it didn't happen! by Raven Amos
People are making all kinds of wild and crazy claims these days, claiming their feelings trump scientific findings and knowledge that was readily accepted until people decided crackpots know better than trained and educated scientists. To those people I say this- put your pick where your mouth is, in other words PROVE IT! Sciences such as geology, archaeology and anthropology have cold, hard physical proof they can show you that perfectly prove their theories and findings are correct, so what do you have to prove they're wrong? Yeah, that's what I thought...
Make sure you're looking sharp while you make your way through this world full of "alternative facts" fans with this PICKS...Or It Didn't Happen! t-shirt by Raven Amos, it's the perfect way to say you prefer scientific proof over crackpot theories!
Visit Raven Amos's Facebook fan page, official website and Twitter, then head on over to her NeatoShop for more smart and geeky designs:
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| Elephant's Rainbow | A Fall Day Out | Dinosaurs Are Gnarly! | Dragon's Pearl |
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Avocado toast might be one of the most annoying food trends from the last five years -and the fact that Millennials are buying it rather than homes doesn't help. As if avocado toast wasn't bad enough as a food (not that it's bad, just its whole trendiness), it's even more obnoxious as a Halloween costume.
But this year, avocado toast is catching on as the trendy new costume as well. Brit & Co has instructions to make your own, while Parents Magazine can tell you how to make this obnoxious hipster version complete with a child's own "cold brew" chocolate milk.
Worst of all, you can even make your in-bread cat into avocado toast with this Etsy costume by Miss Maddy Makes.
It's only a matter of time until you see crummy lycra costumes in a bag at all those generic Halloween stores out there.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
He was the most famous and beloved baseball player in the world. She was the movies' most glamorous sex goddess. But our story begins not with Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, but with Marilyn and a much less famous ballplayer named Gus Zernial.
In 1952, rising starlet Marilyn Monroe went to the Chicago White Sox spring training camp in Pasadena, California, and posed for a few publicity photos with the upcoming Zernial, who, by a bizarre coincidence was being billed as "the new Joe DiMaggio."
Marilyn posed holding a bat in short shorts, a tight sweater and high heels with the much envied (and no doubt delighted) Zernial. No one thought much of the routine publicity shots until Zernial received a phone call from Joe DiMaggio himself. Joe had seen the publicity shots in the newspaper and, much intrigued, asked Gus how he could get in touch wth Marilyn. Gus recommended trying her press agent, which Joe did.
Sarper Duman is a Turkish musician and a cat lover -he feeds the stray cats of Istanbul and has taken eleven of them in to his home. One of his fans sent him this cute video of a blind cat enjoying Duman's music.
"This has been the most touching message i've ever recieved. This beautiful blind cat's name is Namık. They say he acts that way whenever he is shown my videos. It's so impressive for me... Always be happy Namık !"
Aww! We don't know whether Namik is hugging the phone out of affection for the music, or if he just wants to listen to it closer. The effect is the same. Here's a bonus video of Duman with one of his own cats.
— Sarper Duman (@sarperduman) September 20, 2017
-via Boing Boing
New Zealand farmers hate the invasive weed known as ragwort, as it is poison to horses and cattle. The old method of using sheep and goats to clear it no longer worked during an infestation in the 1930s. Luckily, modern technology provided farmers with a new miracle herbicide that eliminated ragwort. The problem was that it was new, and that meant it came with unintended consequences, like exploding pants.
One of the earliest cases of exploding pants, and the one most closely associated with the phenomenon, involved a farmer named Richard Buckley, who made the local news after some of his pants exploded in his house. After wearing them to spray the sodium chlorate, he hung them in front of the fire to dry out. Out of nowhere, his trousers exploded with a bang. According to a news report from the day, he was able to snag his now flaming pants and throw them out onto the grass where small explosions continued to erupt in the garment. Buckley was alarmed, but unharmed.
Around the same time, similar reports of spontaneously combusting pants began to appear, and not all of them were as harmless as Buckley’s. One report claimed that a farmer was riding his horse when the friction caused his pants to begin to smolder right there in the saddle. Another pair of pants were hanging out to dry when they suddenly burst into flames. Then there were the unfortunate souls who happened to be wearing their pants when the chemical reaction got started. Some survived with serious burns, while at least a handful of farmers died from the ignitions. One person, referenced in Watson’s paper, died after lighting a match in his electricity-free home, just trying to check on his baby.
Eventually the phenomena was connected with the herbicide, and steps were taken to prevent it from happening. During Pants Week at Atlas Obscura, we get to read the story of New Zealand's exploding pants.
If you think being a parent to a human child is hard imagine raising a litter of hyperactive puppies who don't ever seem to want to cooperate, let alone give their poor doggy parent time to relax.
This is probably one of the reasons why so many animal parents stop caring for their kids as soon as they can take care of themselves, but dogs typically take care of their pups for at least the first two to three months of their lives.
So what is a German Shepherd mommy to do when her little ones seem to have an unlimited supply of puppy energy? She has to come up with a creative way to tire them out, preferably one which involves the shepherd half of her DNA.
-Via Shareably
Pumpkin is an iconic American food, as much as turkey, corn, and cranberries. Since the early European settlers first saw the squash, we've been trying to grow larger and larger pumpkins. The first world record pumpkin weighed 400 pounds in 1900. In recent years, they've surpassed a ton. But the current world record pumpkin was grown in Brussels, Belgium, last year. It weighed 2,624.6 pounds! How did Americans lose the title?
Yet for two out of the last three years, the world’s largest pumpkins have sprung up in Europe. “They’re doing very well, and I tip my hat to them,” says Ron Wallace, a country club manager in Greene, Rhode Island, who was paraded on the shoulders of jubilant pumpkin growers one glorious day in 2006 after his squash became the world’s first to break 1,500 pounds. Today, pumpkin growers are gaining on 3,000 pounds, but the Belgians, Swiss and British are in the lead.
Well, see, there was this American soldier stationed in Germany, and… an article at Smithsonian magazine looks at how the fascination with record-setting pumpkins spread to Europe.
(Image credit: Yourcsd)
We love libraries! Borrowing a book is one of life's great pleasures, and a great way to get kids to develop a love for reading. John Green writes books, and he once worked for a library association. So who better to bring us a lot of trivia and stories about libraries? That's what you'll get in the latest episode of the Mental Floss List Show.
Once you've made it through high school and gotten yourself accepted to the college of your choice, maybe even with financial aid, then what? You've received plenty of advice about getting to that point, but there are several years to go as a student. One of the main pieces of advice I gave my kids about college is to make sure the professor knows you, and knows that you're interested in their subject and really want to learn it. They will help you, remember you, and rejoice in your success. College professors are happy to tell you what your high school guidance counselor did not about actually attending (and passing) college courses. Here's a sample:
13. They only remember the names of the good students and the bad students. Everyone in between is a blur.
I know the names of two kinds of students: those who are doing very badly in my class, and those who are interested, engaged, and making an effort to do well. Please don't sit there for 16 weeks, with your hand down and mouth closed, and expect me to know who you are on the last day of class.—Rebecca Gibson, Facebook
22. A 13-year-old could be grading the paper you pulled an all-nighter to complete.
My mom's a professor and the one thing her students NEVER know is that I've graded parts of their exams. It's been a tradition in our family to help grade exams and finals since we were around the age of 13, and none of her students know.—bonniereinsch
My father taught geology, and started me grading papers at a much younger age, at least for the multiple choice quizzes. Read more advice in the list 23 Secrets Your Professors Will Never Tell You (except they obviously will tell you) at Buzzfeed.
Some Nervous Nellies and Anxious Andrews let their fingers tap-tap-tap away whenever they're feeling the least bit anxious or nervous- and that tap-tap-tapping drives me up the wall.
I will admit that I've tapped out a RUSH song or three when nervous, and I'm no stranger to using pencils as drum sticks when sitting around in class, but I also know when to stop tapping away.
Because, as this Pain Train Comic shows, incessant tapping can cause the human animal to revert to beast mode, and you won't like those hairless apes when they're angry!
-Via Geeks Are Sexy
How long has it been since you've been impressed by someone playing the spoons? This is Abby the Spoon Lady, accompanying Chris Rodrigues on the song "Angels in Heaven." They recorded this on Play Music on Your Porch Day in August, which sounds like a lovely thing to celebrate.
Anyone can play spoons, but it takes a lot of practice and dedication to play them this well. But Abby the Spoon Lady is more than just a spoon player. According to Wikipedia,
Abby first started street performing and busking as a means to make money traveling across the United States, primarily hopping freight trains. She taught herself to play the spoons and traveled all over the United States by hitchhiking and railroad. She states that landing in Asheville, North Carolina, was completely an accident and that she took the wrong train.[4] Today she hosts storytelling events where she discusses the lifestyle of the American hobo.[5] She spent a good amount of her time traveling recording the stories, interviews and songs of other American travelers.[6]
She is also a free speech advocate and has a radio show at WSFM-LP in Asheville. -via reddit
I'm a Mid Afternoon Narwhal by WinterWolfMedia
Most people are either early birds or night owls, but what about those of us who stay up too late to be up at 6 a.m. yet don't sleep all day? Well, according to this adorable t-shirt by WinterWolfMedia I'm A Mid Afternoon Narwhal, which totally explains it all. Afternoon Narwhals live life in the perfectly warm waters in-between morning and night, and we walk to the beat of our own drum way more than any early bird ever could so the Narwhal seems fitting. And while we don't gain very many members in our swim group we don't lose any, because mid-afternooning just makes you feel good!
Visit WinterWolfMedia's Facebook fan page and official website, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more perfectly geeky designs:
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| I Believe I can Fly | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | The World of Harry Potter (White) | I'm Your Huckleberry |
View more designs by WinterWolfMedia | More Funny T-shirts | New T-Shirts
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Tracing languages back to their roots can be an interesting way to see how the world's languages have developed and evolved over time, but the tracing of language lineage does not make for an exciting read.
So to spice the subject up a bit illustrator Minna Sundberg, author of the webcomic Stand Still, Stay Silent, created this beautiful Tree Of Languages infographic, so we can trace our tongues back to their roots in style.
-Via Open Culture
The 1987 movie Over the Top had Sylvester Stallone playing the sports underdog, as he did in Rocky, but this time the sport was arm wrestling. The movie was nominated for three Razzies and won two. Thirty years later, you might find that the things going on behind the scenes are more interesting than what made it onto the screen.
9. The movie had its own toy line.
For a brief period of time a line of Over the Top products were available in the toy aisles of many stores. They didn’t last all that long though, just like the movie.
8. Stallone literally pinned critic Roger Ebert against a slot machine to talk to him.
Anyone that remembers Siskel and Ebert recalls that these guys were brutal when it came to criticizing movies. They also weren’t that nice when it came to describing the actors either. So Stallone actually confronted Ebert and told him it was okay to criticize the movie, but not him.
The most surprising thing about Over the Top was that it contained more real physical action than you'd expect. Read the trivia list about Over the Top at TVOM.
Rick and Morty is at once brilliant and moronic, totally brand new yet somehow really familiar, and even though the show has moved far away from creator Justin Roiland's original concept that has proven to be a good thing. So what, you may ask, was Justin's original concept?
The Real Animated Adventures of Doc and Mharti, which was meant to troll Universal Pictures and "poke fun at the idea of getting cease and desist letters", original title Back to the Future: The New Official Universal Studios Cartoon Featuring the New Doc Brown and Marty McFly. (NSFW)
As you'd imagine the short is raunchy and very NSFW, but it also serves as a great example of how a concept, however crude, can become something great if you selectively breed that concept into a champion.
-Via VICE
Even the most innocuous internet communities can get pretty dramatic. Sure, there are arguments, but every once in a while, an intriguing story just pops up where you least expect it. The New York Times posted Katharine Hepburn's brownie recipe, and in the comment section, Sydne Newberry typed this:
“This has been my go-to brownie recipe for 30 years. In the ’80s, an acquaintance in Germany to whom I brought some of the brownies, and who considered herself a great cook, asked for the recipe but was never able to get it to work. She kept asking me what she was doing wrong and I was never able to solve her problem. Eventually, she moved to the U.S. and stole my husband!”
Well, that escalated quickly. The comment went viral, and two years later, The Cut looked Newberry up and got the rest of the story. -via Digg
(Image credit: Whitney)
Shredding stuff and watching stuff get shredded can be very satisfying in many ways, and if I owned an industrial shredder I'd be way too tempted to throw my stuff in there just to watch it all get ground to bits.
So it's a good thing the PressTube channel exists to satisfy our shredding needs, plus they often shred materials we never would have thought of and strange stuff we don't have lying around our homes- like gold slime!
-Via Laughing Squid
