RainCity Housing is a non-profit organization in Vancouver that provides housing for people with mental illnesses and addiction problems. It wants to reach out to homeless people in Vancouver and invite them to seek help.
To do so, the ad agency Spring Advertising designed this bench ad. The back folds up and locks into place, providing a partial shelter for people who living in the open in a city sometimes called "Raincouver."
Another version of the bench has glow-in-the-dark text that says, "This is a bedroom."
When it was published in 1938, Action Comics #1 cost 10 cents. It was the first appearance of Superman. As a result, surviving copies can sell for more than a million dollars.
Joe Shuster drew the now famous cover image. It shows Superman heroically lifting a wrecked car. Or we assume that he's being a hero. Have you actually read Action Comics #1? I haven't.
It looks like a tarantula, but what you're actually seeing is a contortionist covered in body paint. She's bent over backwards in a bridge position. You can see her move like a spider in this video.
In the classic fable, the tortoise beat the hare by being persistent. But Bertie may be able to win through speed alone.
Bertie is a tortoise who lives at Adventure Valley, a theme park in Durham, UK. Visitors commented that he seemed to move quickly--faster than you might expect from a tortoise. So animal caretakers at Adventure Valley decided to see what Bertie could do if he trained as a runner.
The standard sprinting distance in competitive tortoise racing is 18 feet. A tortoise named Charlie set a world record in 1977 by running that distance in 43.7 seconds. Bertie smashed that record by crossing the finish line in only 19.59 seconds. That's a lightning fast pace of 0.6 miles per hour!
Guinness World Record officials were on site to witness and confirm the event, so Bertie should get an official record soon.
Ariel Goodman has two golden retrievers: a puppy and an old dog. One day, they were napping together when the older dog had a bad dream. This woke up the puppy, who comforted his packmate until the dream subsided.
If you're male and a citizen of the United States or a legal immigrant, you must register with the Selective Service System when you turn 18 years old. For the next 7 years, if there is ever a draft, you may get called up for mandatory service in the armed forces.
When an American boy approaches that age, the US government often mails him notices, reminding him of this legal requirement.
Under the current law, once you reach the age of 25, your eligibility for the draft is over. But that didn't stop the federal government from sending out registration notices to 14,000 men in Pennsylvania. All of these men were born between the years of 1893 and 1897. The AP reports:
Chuck Huey, 73, of Kingston, said he got a notice addressed to his late grandfather Bert Huey, a World War I veteran who was born in 1894 and died in 1995 at age 100.
"I said, 'Geez, what the hell is this about?' It said he was subject to heavy fines and imprisonment if he didn't sign up for the draft board," he said. "We were just totally dumbfounded."
The error was a result of a clerk failing to select for a century when importing records from a state database. The clerk intended to move records for men born between 1993 and 1997.
We've seen an octopus steal a human diver's camera before. It was a great a video that inspired interesting comments on YouTube, such as this conversation:
Now humans are getting more careful when they dive in dangerous neighborhoods. Recently, Joe Kistel survived an attempted mugging while he was off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida. Kistel fought back and held on to his camera.
But the octopus was determined to get something out of his trouble. So he started stripping the camera for parts, which, I suppose, he could later sell at a chop shop. Mary Bates writes for National Geographic:
As Kistel filmed, the octopus reached for the camera, and then he noticed something in one of its arms: a gasket from the camera’s housing.
“I was completely surprised when he started to dismantle the camera,” Kistel said.
Kistel ended up playing tug-of-war with the octopus to retrieve the valuable camera part. “I think he was just curious,” Kistel said. “He saw something different and thought he would take it.”
What was the octopus trying to do? Was it demonstrating intelligence? Bates asked James Wood, a marine biologist, about how to understand the intelligence of an octopus. Woods wrote:
Intelligence is hard to define, even in humans. If an octopus made an IQ test for a human, it might have questions like, “How many different colors can your severed arm produce in a second?” That’s an intelligence-based skill that’s relevant to its survival that we don’t do.
Octopuses certainly learn very quickly in captivity. They pick up tests like mazes much like a rat or mouse does. They also learn who feeds them and when pretty rapidly. I worked with one octopus that would squirt you in the face with a perfectly aimed, direct jet of water if you were at all late in feeding it. You had to feed that one first or you’d get hosed.
You should already have a rehearsed, carefully thought-out answer to this question before you even begin the interview.
If there's something in your work history that may appear to be a weakness, present it as a strength. You weren't a moocher, but a consulting nutritional services analyst.
In the past, Jones has been more sociable with his fellow passengers. In 2012, he hid inspirational cartoons in the seat back trays on the train. Some strangers probably felt pretty awesome as a result.
Travelling by train today? Check the seat tray. Peppy the Inspirational cat might be there to UNLEASH YOUR INNER BEAST http://t.co/hqC6sM5j
Project Noah is a wildlife discussion website. One member named 4840 found this little guy deep in the interior of Ecuador. It's uncertain what it is, but some forum members think that it is a Martiodrilus crassus, which is Latin for "worm which feeds on dogs and small children."
Bike riding is very popular in Norway, especially in the city of Trondheim. But there's a steep hill in that city called the Brubakken that most bicyclists won't try to climb. It's just too steep.
So in 1993, the city built a bicycle escalator. It recently upgraded the escalator into the one you see pictured here. It's a lift that moves at about 3.4 miles per hour up a 427-foot hill with a gradient of about 10-18º.
Push a button on the control panel at the bottom, and a small metal plate moves up the hill. Bicyclists can brace a foot against this plate and ride it up to the top of the hill.
The lift is called the Trampe or CycloCable. The inventor, Jarle Wanvik, hopes to market his design across the world.
How did the writers come up with the name "Indiana"? That was the name of George Lucas's dog. The lovely Willie Scott was also named after a dog--Steven Spielberg's. These are just 2 of 53 fascinating facts about the Indiana Jones movies rounded up by BuzzFeed's Keely Flaherty. Here are some more:
5. Lucas originally didn’t want to cast Harrison Ford since he’d already been in two of Lucas’ films.
6. Tom Selleck was originally offered the role of Indiana, but CBS prevented him from taking the role because of his involvement in Magnum, P.I. Spielberg later wrote Selleck a “wonderful letter” saying Selleck could work for him anytime.
21. The club owned by the villainous Lao Che in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is called Club Obi Wan, a nod to Star Wars.
48. In the scene when Indiana and his father are sitting at a table on the zeppelin, neither Ford nor Connery is wearing pants. Connery thought he’d sweat too much if he wore pants, and Ford decided to join him.
There are good movies. There are even great movies. But every moive--and I do mean every movie--can be improved simply by adding Batman as a character. The blog It's Better with Batman is dedicated to proving that by photoshopping the Dark Knight into famous scenes.
But all of us at Neatorama promote an open exchange of ideas, even heretical ones. So if you wish to argue that a movie could not be improved by adding Batman, please state your case in the comments.
Kevin Whitney is a farmer in Chickasa, Oklahoma. One day last October, he leaned over a grain elevator while inspecting its interior. His cell phone fell out of his shirt pocket and into a silo containing 280,000 bushels of grain.
Whitney assumed that it was lost. But it wasn't. The phone was going on a long journey down the Arkansas and then Mississippi Rivers until it arrived at a depot in Convent, Louisiana. Then it was loaded onto a ship that passed through the Panama Canal until it arrived in northern Japan.
There, another man found the phone and tried to locate its owner. KFOR News reports:
“The man on the other end said, ‘is this Kevin Whitney?’ I said yeah this is Kevin. He said, ‘did you lose a cell phone?’ I said yeah I lost a cell phone last fall.”
A worker at a grain mill in Japan mailed the phone back to Louisiana and from there it was sent to Kevin in Chickasha.
“It’s crazy I can’t believe it. What really shocked me about it all was what a small world it is. There a lot of a lot of meaningful pictures on it so we are real glad to get the phone back,” said Whitney.
