Have you ever wondered why Lois Lane couldn't figure out that Clark Kent was Superman? These two ladies in Las Vegas went to Harrah's to see Tape Face perform. Remember Tape Face from America's Got Talent? He was on his way to work, and the women asked him to snap a picture of them as they posed in front of a cardboard cutout of... Tape Face. He was glad to oblige. They did not recognize him without tape on his face; they just saw a guy with tattoos who spoke with a New Zealand accent. Let's hope that he revealed his identity afterward. Redditor createch, who posted this picture, didn't say whether he did or not.
You see this baby squid looking back at you, and it hasn't even hatched yet! Redditor rockyroo529 says his nephew found a seashell with squid eggs inside. There were about 16 eggs with developing squid, and evidence that some eggs had already hatched.
They took few pictures and then put the shell back into the water so the little ones can go about their squid business.
Kittens are cute, baby goats are cute, and this video has both! Hector is a newborn Nigerian dwarf goat at Sunflower Farm Creamery (previously at Neatorama). He was a single birth, and the first of the season, so there are no other kids for him to play with yet. But there is a litter of barn kittens! Hector wants to make friends, and even learned to climb up on a bale of wood shavings to join them. He'll have plenty of company soon -the farm has a live webcam set up to catch more goat births. -via Tastefully Offensive
While the members of the second Continental Congress didn't celebrate American independence with picnics or backyard grilling the way we do today, they did their share of celebrating. Smithsonian takes a look at the food that was available to the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia at the time, but the more interesting subject was what -and how much- they drank. They drank a lot of alcohol. George Washington was known for spending prodigiously on drinks for everyone, while Thomas Jefferson worked to produce better wine. Benjamin Franklin was the most famous drinker of the bunch, because he wrote about his appreciation of alcohol. Steven Grasse and Reverend Michael Alan, who produced a book on colonial drinking, tell us more.
Benjamin Franklin was especially unabashed about his love of “the cups.” Though Grasse writes that he was careful to advise temperance, he regularly enjoyed wine and what some might argue were early iterations of craft cocktails. His favorite, according to Alan, was milk punch, a three-ingredient brandy-based sip whose two non-alcoholic components–milk and lemon juice–washed and refined its third. Another Franklin foodie badge is his “Drinkers’ Dictionary,” a compendium of Colonial slang describing the state of drunkenness. Initially printed in 1737 in the Pennsylvania Gazette, its publication made Franklin one of America’s first food and drink writers.
There are statues of various American presidents all over, with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln leading the pack. But you've probably never seen the sexy young shirtless Lincoln depicted in the statue shown here, which stands at the US Courthouse in Los Angeles.
Artist James Hansen entered this design into a Public Works contest in 1940 and won $7200. He used the money to buy a car which he then wrecked the next week, presumably because he was distracted thinking about Abe’s abs.
Another copy of the statue exists, in the D.C. Office of Public Records.
Presidential statues can go wrong because of artistic trends that don't stand up over time, or unexpected problems in production, or the artist's lack of talent, or deliberate disrespect. See 13 unexpectedly weird statues of presidents in a list at Plodding Through Presidents. -via Strange Company
Remember New Coke? The reformulation of Coca-Cola in 1985 was a huge disaster for the company, although the controversy itself was advertising. But innovation in soft drinks goes on, and only seven years later, the company's North American president, Doug Ivester, introduced a new product with a large dose of pomp and circumstance. However, this promotion was not all that it appeared.
The product was Tab Clear, a new version of the sugar- and calorie-free diet drink first introduced in 1963. While it retained its bubbles, the liquid was transparent, an obvious nod to rival Pepsi’s introduction of Crystal Pepsi earlier that year.
Publicly, Ivester boasted that Tab Clear would be yet another success in Coca-Cola’s long history of refreshment dominance. But behind the scenes, Ivester and chief marketing officer Sergio Zyman were convinced Tab Clear would be a failure—and that is exactly what they hoped would happen. Flying in the face of convention, the launch of Tab Clear was deliberately designed to self-destruct.
The idea behind Tab Clear was a genius marketing move on many levels, but still reads like a super villain scheme. Read the story of the motivation behind Tab Clear at Mental Floss.
In case you want to shut the world out and wallow in the universe of warm fuzzies, here's a photo-heavy story for you. British filmmaker Paris Zarcilla found a strange cat under his bed that had just given birth to kittens. He's fallen deeply in love with them.
To my cat sons and daughters, I'll be the hero you deserve, but not the one it needs right now (because of mama cat). So I'll hunt for you, because I can afford it. I'll be your silent guardian, your watchful protector. Love, #CatDadpic.twitter.com/JkaUpGzXCP
Well, "fallen in love" doesn't do it justice. Zarcilla has discovered a new plane of existence and uses words like "nirvana" and "fatherhood" and "the hidden depths of my own capacity to love." He is obviously suffering the effects of either oxytocin or toxoplasmosis. I'll vote for oxytocin. There's nothing like a tiny new family member (or five) to make one's outlook change. Read the entire thread here, and bookmark Zarcilla's Twitter feed for updates. -via Metafilter
Deadpool 2 is ruling the box office this weekend. It is the 11th movie in the X-Men series. That's not quite as many as in the 19-movie Avengers series, but there could have been many more. Filmmakers have been trying to get X-Men projects to the screen for almost three decades now, but many of those ideas fell by the wayside for a variety of reasons.
This isn't intended to be a comprehensive or exhaustive listing of every unproduced X-Men screenplay. Instead, I've focused on a series of drafts that had the best chance of getting made. Not included are re-writes of existing X-Men films (like Joss Whedon's discarded overhaul of the first X-Men movie and other early drafts that essentially just became the first film) and only slightly different drafts of movies that got made with some changes (David Benioff and Skip Woods' Deadpool-less X-Men Origins: Wolverine for example).
Fans of the comic books will be dismayed at what might have been, but some of those projects could be resurrected still. Read about six X-Men films that never made it to the screen (and one that finally did) at Den of Geek.
We've seen an awful lot of cheap bootleg movie merchandise, often badly done in far-off countries to get around copyright laws, with different names that suffer in translation. If there aren't enough humorous knockoffs, how about some made just for us to laugh at? Jeff Wysaski at Obvious Plant made up a bunch of "fake fakes," based on the Avengers and the marvel Cinematic Universe. They are just weird enough to be believable. After all the trouble he went to in order to manufacture these for the photos, Wysaski offered the props for purchase. He could have charged a lot more money, because they sold out in no time. See the entire collection here. -via Boing Boing
We followed the adventures of the Rosetta spacecraft as it approached and sent the Philae Lander onto the surface of comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The European Space Agency (ESA) is just now releasing substantial data gathered during the expedition. And it's awesome. Twitter user landru79 combined that data into a gif, which Phil Plait converted to a video.
The landscape itself is the comet. Comets are lumps of ice — things like frozen water, carbon dioxide, and ammonia — and rock, mostly in the form of gravel and dust. Some orbit the Sun on long ellipses, and when they get close in the ice turns into a gas, releasing ice flakes and the gravelly bits. This surrounds the solid nucleus with a gaseous/dusty coma, and that can then blow away from the comet due to the solar wind and pressure of sunlight to form the tail.
67P is a double-lobed comet, looking more like a rubber ducky than anything else. It's very roughly 4 or 5 km across, and takes about 6.4 years to circle the Sun once. Rosetta was about 13 kilometers from the comet as it took these images, slowly moving around it so that our vantage point in the video changes slightly. Comets are very dark, and it was three times farther from the Sun than Earth is when these images were taken, so the lighting is fainter. Also, these were on the "dark side" of the comet, so the illumination you see is from reflected sunlight by the coma. The video represents about a half hour of real time.
When we first heard of hand transplants, it raised the question of how organ transplants could be justified when they aren't necessary to save a patient's life. We've come a long way since then, with limb and face transplants to improve the quality of life. When the first penis transplants were done, doctors knew that such experimental surgery would be an important achievement in caring for those wounded in war. And in March, the first American veteran received a penis transplant during a 14-hour operation at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The surgery was successful, and the penis is expected to achieve normal function within a few months. Researchers a the hospital developed a new technique to facilitate such reconstruction.
One of the challenges from this type of injury is that transplants typically require patients to take strong anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives. Those drugs pose a risk, which must be balanced against the benefit of surgery that is designed to improve quality of life but is not essential to health.
To address that, doctors at Hopkins have developed a method to minimize the drugs required for these patients. That involves infusing some blood cells from the donor, to prime the recipient's immune system to recognize the foreign tissue as "self." Doctors at Hopkins say they can then treat the patient with a single anti-rejection drug rather than the usual cocktail of three.
Unlike previous penis transplants, this surgery included the scrotum and some tissue from the lower abdomen, in order to reconstruct a large wound. The patient was injured by an improvised explosive device. He also lost his legs below the knee as a result of the IED attack.
Airlines are always looking for ways to make a few cents more, but the most lucrative way to do that is to squeeze more passengers into each plane. We're at the point now where average-size people are uncomfortable in economy class, even for short flights. How much smaller can airplane seats get? Okay, since you asked... let me introduce you to the Skyrider 2.0. It braces passengers and gives them something to lean against while they stand through the flight. I am not kidding.
Engineered by Italian aerospace interior design company Aviointeriors and introduced at Hamburg’s Airplane Interiors Expo in earl April, the seat positions a willing passenger almost completely upright on a polyester saddle and back support. It seems well thought out, it’s reportedly very functional, and it even looks good. But I’ll still never sit on one.
Being a librarian is a great job for someone who loves books, but a career in the library requires more than that. Librarians must be dedicated to curating and protecting the library's collection, and at the same time, be an advocate for the public's access to those materials. And it's more than books, as public libraries lend out many other types of materials. They also work to promote public participation and literacy. Then there are all the smaller things you don't know about a librarian's work. Here's a sample.
5. THEY LOVE HELPING TO SETTLE A BET.
There’s a mundane occurrence to delight every librarian. “Especially if there are language barriers, I love when someone musters the courage to ask me a question and we can go back and forth to make sure I connect them to the right resources,” Krakowski says. For Paolini, it’s when “someone comes in nervous, expecting us to be mean, then they tell me, ‘You guys are so nice … and I didn’t know you had e-books!”
But Paolini's favorite thing of all is getting a call at the phone reference desk from a sports bar where two buddies are arguing over player stats: “I’m like, ‘This is great that you’re calling the library to settle a bet!'”
9. THEY WISH YOU WOULDN'T USE BACON AS A BOOKMARK ...
Librarians find all kinds of objects wedged between the pages of books—$100 bills, Broadway tickets, condoms, paychecks, love letters, drugs, hatchets, knives, and even a vial labeled “smallpox sample.” Messiest of all, though, might be the food left in books, like crumbled Cheetos, slices of pickles, and whole strips of bacon (both cooked and raw).
The library can be a place of intrigue and mystery - that's what librarian Georgia Grainger found out one day, when a little old lady approached her with a question.
"Why does page 7 in all the books I take out have the 7 underlined in pen? It seems odd," she said.
Odd indeed! And when Grainger checked other books, she discovered that many, though not all, also bear the secret code.
