At this point we've seen about all we can take of people responding to the ice bucket challenge in support of the ALS Association. Perhaps Dave Grohl and the other Foo Fighters anticipated this, and projected the terror inward, resulting in this horror film parody. Dave, go to your closet and ask to be forgiven! Via Viral Viral Videos.
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How to keep a squirrel from eating the seed that’s meant for the birds? Vaseline! If you do this, make sure you have a camera ready, like Robert Krampf did.
For anyone who is concerned about the squirrel, he still raids our other two feeders and the vegetable garden. The tiny amount of Vaseline used is non-toxic, the kind used for lip balm. He quickly learned that this feeder was not worth the trouble, so we have not put more on the pole, and the birds are delighted to actually get some of the bird seed.
-via Tastefully Offensive
Emma is leading her horse, Cinnamon. Emma was two years old when this video was recorded, but she’s already on her way to being a real horsewoman. Cinnamon is a very gentle and cooperative horse, who went on to live and work at the Nighthawk Ranch, a getaway for children with cancer, in Guffey, Colorado. Video by Emma’s father, Justin Dunn. You can see more videos of Emma taking care of horses at Daily Picks and Flicks.
In 2007, we had a post about Edith Macefield and her refusal to sell her home, even though a high-rise was going up all around her little house in Seattle. Edith died in 2008.
In 2009, we posted a picture of Macefield’s house festooned with balloons as a promotion for the then-new Pixar movie Up. Many speculate that the movie was inspired by Macefield.
You might not know the rest of the story. Who got the house when Macefield died? She willed it to Barry Martin, the construction chief of the project that went up around her house! The two had become good friends during the building controversy. He is making sure that Macefield's legacy lives on. Read the whole story, with pictures, at Buzzfeed.
(Image credit: Ben Tesch)
Animation has come a long way since the days of classic Disney animated features like 101 Dalmatians and The Sword In The Stone, and now that we use digital art and animation programs to make the whole process easier than ever before these classic films would have a very different look if they were made today.
Tyson Murphy is a lead character artist for Blizzard, and he decided to do a digital painting lighting study by painting over stills from old Disney films.
Tyson's versions look very painterly, and the characters definitely look more realistic, but for my money it's impossible to improve on the perfection of the original backgrounds. Tyson says he's planning to do more of these studies soon, may I suggest a scene from the Black Cauldron?
-Via Bored Panda
Kristin Kerr took her two children, 4-year old Kaelyn and 3-month old Jackson, on an elevator in a building in Reading, Massachusetts. The elevator broke down between floors. Firefighters lowered a ladder into the elevator to evacuate the Kerr family.
During this stressful time, Kaelyn began to panic. One of the firefighters responded by playing on his smartphone the song "Let It Go" (embedded below) from the movie Frozen. The firefighters, John Keough and Scott Myette, sang along. Soon Kaelyn calmed down and joined them. NBC News describes the scene:
“John said, ‘Do you like the movie “Frozen?”’ Myette recalled. “So she just nodded yes and when she did, I guess my father instinct kind of kicked in and I just started singing the song, and John did, too.”
To improve the impromptu performance, Myette also played the original song, which he had downloaded on his phone for his daughter.
“I’m slightly embarrassed to admit this, but yeah, I pretty much knew all of (the words),” he said. “It’s not a bad song, it just gets stuck in your head a little bit.”
Kerr said her daughter loves both the song and the movie, which she estimates she’s watched 15 to 20 times. She was both amused and impressed by the firefighters serenading her daughter.
My 3-year old is singing "Let It Go" at this very moment, so I can see how this method would be effective.
-via Amy Duncan | Photo: Kerr Family
How humiligratin'! This is not what you had pictured when you tried to leap that small fence, is it?
The deer didn’t quite make it over the picket fence Sunday morning. The Kelley family of Attleboro, Massachusetts, woke up to find the poor deer hanging upside-down from the point where its rear legs were caught between the pickets.
Luckily, the pickets in this one-year-old fence slide out, so Brian Kelley was able to free the deer by removing one picket -very carefully. The deer seemed to be okay, and Kelley did not get kicked in the face as expected. -via Arbroath
Australian photographer Bobby-Jo Clow went on a photo safari in the Serengeti National Park and had an up close and personal visit from a cheetah. He may be an apex predator, but he’s as curious as a house cat when confronted by something new and different, like a vehicle in his territory.
The young male then started to relax and made himself quite at home. He rested his front paws through the car roof, they were actually dangling in front of my face. At one point he put his whole head into the car and smelt my head. The cheetah stayed there for another five minutes before his mother started to call to him. He then jumped off our car and headed back to his family.
The experience inspired Clow to start running her own photo safaris. See the sequence of eight pictures at Africa Geographic. -via Laughing Squid
(Image credit: Bobby-Jo Clow Photography)
The following is an article from Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader.
What was it that caused Adolf Hitler’s physical and mental health to collapse in the closing days of World War II? He was losing the war, of course- surely that had a great deal to do with it. But for more than 60 years, historians have wondered if there was more to it than that.
THE LEADER
On April 21, 1945, an SS physician named Ernst-Günther Schenck was summoned to Adolph Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and ordered to stock it with food. By that time, Germany’s war was hopelessly lost -most of the country was already in Allied hands. Soviet troops had almost completely circled Berlin and were battling their way into the center of the city. Rather than flee, Hitler decided to make his final stand in his führerbunker in the heart of the Nazi capital. He would remain there until the end, which for him was just nine days away.
Like all Germans, Dr. Schenck had been fed a steady diet of photographs, films, and propaganda posters of Hitler since the dictator had come to power in 1933. But the man he saw in the bunker looked nothing like those images. The 56-year-old Hitler “was a living corpse, a dead soul,” Schenck remembered in a 1985 interview. “His spine was hunched, his shoulder blades protruded from his bent back, and he collapsed his shoulders like a turtle… I was looking into the eyes of death.”
OLD MAN
Even more shocking than the way Hitler looked was the way he moved about the bunker. He walked with the slow, halting shuffle of a man thirty years older, dragging his left leg behind him as he went. He couldn’t go more than a few steps without grabbing onto something for support.
Hitler’s head, arms, and entire left side trembled and jerked uncontrollably. No longer able to write his own name, he signed important documents with a rubber stamp. He had always insisted on shaving himself -the murderer of millions could not stand the thought of another man holding a razor to his throat- but his trembling hands made that impossible, too. He could not lift food to his mouth without spilling it down the front of his uniform and could not take a seat without help -after he shuffled up to a table, an aide pushed a chair behind him, and he plopped down into it.
Hitler’s mental state had deteriorated as well. His thinking was muddled, his memory was failing, and his emotions whipsawed back and forth between long bouts of irrational euphoria (especially irrational considering how close Germany was to defeat) and fits of screaming, uncontrollable rage that lasted for hours.
DIAGNOSES
Schenck remained in Berlin until the end. On April 29, Hitler married his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, and the following day the pair committed suicide in the führerbunker. Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 7.
Der Führerbunker. (Image credit: German Federal Archives)
After the war, Schenck spent a decade in Soviet prison camps. He never forgot what he saw in the führerbunker, and after his release he spent years poring over Hitler’s medical records in an attempt to discover just what had caused the dictator’s health to decline so rapidly in the final years and months of his life.
He was not alone in this effort- in the more than 60 years since the end of the war, many historians, physicians, and World War II buffs have done the same thing. What caused Hitler’s collapse -was it Parkinson’s disease? Tertiary syphilis? Giant cell arteritis? Countless theories have been advanced to explain Hitler’s physical and mental decline, and after all this time the experts are no closer to agreeing than they were on the day he died.
THE CURE THAT ILLS
One of the more bizarre theories was advanced by some of Hitler’s own doctors in July 1944. The diagnosis came about by chance, after a visiting ear, nose, and throat specialist named Dr. Erwin Geising happened to notice six tiny black pills -“Doctor Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills”- sitting on the Führer’s breakfast tray next to his porridge, dry bread, and orange juice. After spotting the pills, Geising did something that Hitler’s own personal physician, an eccentric quack named Dr. Theodore Morell, had apparently never bothered to do: He examined the tin the pills came in and actually read the label to see what was in them. Geising was stunned by what he read. Could it be? Was the Führer bring poisoned by the pills he took to control his meteorism -powerful attacks of uncontrollable farting?
Michael J. "Mickey" Petronchak of Aliquippa, Pennsylvania died in February at the age of 54. He was deeply loved by his family and his friends at Federal Express, where he worked. He touched the lives of many people at that company. When he passed away, they arrived at his funeral in about 100 delivery vans. Redditor VirtusOne was among them. He describes Mickey as a friend to everyone:
He was a ramp agent at Fedex Express. He was basically a manager, and he was on top of his game all the time. God, he had to be working there forever! He never called off, took a vacation, or worked less than 8 hours a day. Mickey loved everyone, and did so many generous things for people. He had no selflessness what so ever. He was so special to me because he was the first person I met at Fedex. He trained me and made me always be happy to be at work. He is a role model to me, and a lot of other people. He is one of those people that never take credit for what tasks he achieved. No one disliked him and he was the hardest worker I knew. Mickey used to give me 5 bucks for the vending machine. Why, I don't know. He just did it all the time.
You can see more photos of the procession here.
-via 22 Words
A Russian father and his baby daughter are having a seriously heated discussion. The little girl most likely only understands a few of the words, and she can’t reproduce them coherently, because she’s a baby. She can, however, reproduce the cadence, emphasis, and body language to an amazing degree, which is adorable. If I understood what she was arguing about, she’d have me convinced. According to the comments at reddit, he is chastising her for throwing her pancakes on the floor. That means that her side of the argument is a vigorous defense. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
YouTube Link - via Esquire
We've covered Hawaiian-born musician Kawehi a while ago on Neatorama, so we're glad that she's back! This time, Kawehi takes her looping-technique to cover Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box." That's pretty good!
If you like that, check out the rest of her music videos, then head over to her Facebook page:
Oreo is a black and white labrador. She's friendly, but also kind of dense. She explored a rocky cliff on Portuguese Beach in Sonoma Coast State Park, California. Oreo made it about 40 feet down a 90 foot cliff and got stuck. She couldn't climb back up. And she couldn't climb down, either, because the waves were battering the cliff hard. If Oreo had tried to get down, she would have probably drowned.
Thankfully, some humans from the local police department were able to help. The helicopter crew from the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department flew in. Deputy Henri Boustany dangled from the end of a 100-foot line. Paul Bradley, the helicopter pilot, lowered him to Oreo's position. Boustany was able to pick up the dog without any problems.
-via Ace of Spades HQ
The Oxford comma has sparked many an internet argument. Everyone seems to have an opinion, and everyone is convinced their way is the only correct way. What really matters is that you communicate clearly. That means reading back over what you’ve written, and since fewer and fewer writers actually do that (and I am as guilty of that as anyone), communication problems can creep in. Personally, I like the Oxford comma and use it always, but I honestly don’t care whether everyone does, as long as their meaning is clear. The full TED-Ed lesson can be found here. -via Laughing Squid
Photo: First Coast News
Ah, the developmental milestones of a child's life. Smiling that first smile. Uttering the first word. Taking the first step. Now, add this one: getting that first traffic ticket.
Two-year-old Za'Dariyah Mishaw was cruising along the parking lot of her Florida condo complex, fulfilling her need for speed, when she saw that dreaded flashing blue lights coming up behind her.
According to First Coast News, patrol officer Christian Velasco, who gave the lil' speed demon a ticket, said that "she was going pretty fast. It took me a while to catch up to her, but we did, and she was cited."
Za'Dariyah's uncle Keyth Mishaw said, "Everyone always had bad things to say about the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, well, I want to say BIG PROPS to these officers for making a memorable moment for my family." It was Za'Dariyah's first time in her new car, and now she kept telling her mom that she wanted to pay her $4 ticket.The photo of the coppers giving the young kid her first taste of the law has gone viral on Facebook, racking nearly 40,000 shares.
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