The problem: after trudging through the snow, your boots have gotten wet and muddy. You want to take them off, but you don't want to get your hands dirty.
The solution: wedge your partner's boots between yours, then lift up. Just take turns to get both pairs of boots off cleanly and quickly.
-via The Presurfer
Forgot to charge arm last night. Charging at cellphone charge area at airport #amputeeproblems #relatable #amputee pic.twitter.com/jGoJqojC5q
— Angel Giuffria (@aannggeellll) January 10, 2016
Angel Giuffria is an actress who starred in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1. She was born without a left arm and uses a very technologically sophisticated bionic arm in its place.
When its batteries are fully charged, her arm lasts about 8-10 hours. Her charger is apparently compatible with an outlet available at mobile device charging stations--a feature that recently came in handy.
-via David Thompson
It is a thing of beauty. Oh, we've seen the old rock-inside-a-washing-machine-trick before. But YouTube user bootsowen takes the destructive magnificence of that experience to a whole new level by putting the halpess victim on a trampoline before starting the execution.
It looks like it's dancing!
Except for Neatorama, of course, because it has readers that are remarkably intelligent, kind, and good-looking. Otherwise, I'll spend the rest of my day at Cat Cosplay, which dresses up cats in highly realistic costumes of pop culture characters, such as Spock from Star Trek, Harry Potter, and Marty McFly.
(Photo: Brig. Gen. McAuliffe and Lt. Col. Kinnard via the US Department of War)
During the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944, German forces surrounded and cut off the US Army's 101st Airborne Division under the command of Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe. The Americans were vastly outnumbered and outgunned. The Germans appeared to be in a position to annihilate them.
General Heinrich Freiherr von Lüttwitz sent a message under a flag of truce, urging McAuliffe to surrender. McAuliffe's legendary reply was simple: "Nuts!"
And with that, the great orator and general Anthony McAuliffe became a symbol of American grit. Now you can read the full story of this incident as related by Kenneth J. McAuliffe, Jr., General McAuliffe's nephew.
He explains that General McAuliffe was initially confused by the message. He thought that the Germans wanted to surrender to him, not the other way around:
(Photo: Andrei Filin)
Pastafarians are members of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, an organization that mocks people for having religious beliefs. Some of them wear colanders on their heads as a way to make fun of personal religious practices. As we've noted in the past, sometimes they try to get their driver's license photos taken while wearing their colanders, leading to legal battles with governments.
That's backfired for Andrei Filin of Russia. Government officials permitted him to wear a knitted colander on his head while having his photo taken. But there's a catch: if he's caught driving without his devotional headgear, he'll lose his license. 7 News reports:
The deputy chief of Moscow’s State Traffic inspectorate, Vladimir Kuzin, told Russian that Mr Filin’s victory for the satirical Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster comes with a catch.
“The next time he is stopped by the traffic police, if he doesn’t have a pasta strainer on his head, his licence will be taken from him,” Mr Kuzin said.
(Photo: Four Seasons Resort)
The Four Seasons Resort at Landaa Giraavaru in the Maldives has an unbelievably beautiful wedding chapel just off the beach. It's surrounded by crystal clear blue waters which are visible not only out of the windows, but straight through the glass floor. Wedding party members travel there by gondola. You can see more photos of this mesmerizing place at Fubiz.
Last Sunday, the US Air Force dropped two 2,000-pound bombs on a building in ISIS-controlled Mosul, Iraq. This was where that terrorist organization kept a large amount of its money necessary to fund current operations. The strike hit perfectly, obliterating the target.
The Department of Defense recently released video footage of the air strike. What you see fluttering around are countless pieces of cash forming swirling clouds of money.
After the debris settled, surveillance footage found many pieces of money on nearby rooftops. You can read more at CNN (auto-start video).
-via Gizmodo
Timo the cat is an internet celebrity, what with his cat hammock, masterful Christmas tree decorating style, and adorable yawning.
But he hasn't forgotten the people who loved him before he was famous. For 3 years, his best friend has been a koi. Oh, he's polite to all of the koi in the pond. But the grey one always gets special attention.
-via Gifsboom
(Photo: Gautier Poupeau/Library of Congress)
In 1820, a farmer dug up a mysterious Greek statue on the island of Melos. He found a remarkably well-preserved statue of what is probably Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty—or Venus, as the Romans called her. This amazing find became known as the Venus de Milo.
She arrived at just the right time. The Academic art movement venerated the majesty of the human body, as well as gave men a good excuse to look at pictures of naked women. The Venus de Milo came to epitomize a neoclassical vision of female beauty.
In the United States, the idealization of this beauty standard led to contests in which men searched for women who had Venus’s precise measurements. Thousands of women were measured in this effort, particularly college students, such as this young lady at Wellesley College. Atlas Obscura traces the history of this movement. One leader was Dr. Dudley Allen Sargent, the gym director at Harvard University:
These measurement cards did not require just height, weight, bust, waist, and hips. There were 60 required measurements per person, including instep, wrist, forearm, armspan, and “ninth rib.” And all this data was being put toward new and novel applications. In 1893, Sargent used composite figures from female students' measurements to sculpt a statue and exhibit it at that year's Chicago World's Fair. This figure came to be known as the "Harvard Venus." Visitors to the fair were invited to examine it, reflect on how their own bodies compared, and submit themselves to be measured for Sargent's data collection project. [...]
By this time, Sargent had collected the measurements of over 10,000 female students, yet he claimed he had still not encountered the ideal woman. “Among the many thousands who have been measured at the gymnasium, not one has fulfilled every requirement,” he told the Times. The closest was Annette Kellerman, an Australian swimmer and vaudeville star who stood five-foot-four-and-a-half and sported a 35.2-inch bust, 26.2-inch waist, and 37.8-inch hips. Sargent called her the "perfect woman" for publicity purposes, but he was rounding up.
The movement petered out during the 1920s as new beauty standards took hold of American popular culture. It never did find its truly perfect example of the female form, which is reasonable, as my wife would not be born for a few more decades.
This is pretty much daily life down here in paradise. But it's exotic for those of you who are not fortunate enough to live in Texas. So check out what you're missing.
Sherrod Greeson and his friends are students at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. They're also members of the school's championship winning ranch horse team. A few years ago, while they were in class, 2 cows got loose and ran up and down the streets of the city. So Sherrod and his friends got their horses and lassos and captured the cows.
They described the experience to a local reporter, who can't help but laugh and say to them, "I want to be all of your friends."
-via Glenn Reynolds
19 times.
Without Artoo's timely, brave, and skilled intervention on 19 separate occasions, our heroes would have been killed and all hope for a galaxy free from the Sith menace would have been over.
What did he get for it? Well, Amidala thanked him and gave him a cleaning, which is nice.
Artoo may get a better offer from the dark side. At least the Empire pays its soldiers.
(Photo: Southwest Coast National Scenic Area)
Okay, we can dispense with the marketing meeting because I already have the solution to our problem. Women dig shoes, right? Especially shopping for high heeled shoes. So here's what we're going to do: we're going to make the new church look like a shoe!
It's a fool-proof plan that has become a reality in Taiwan. The new church building is 17 meters tall and has 320 enormous blue glass panels that form the body of a shoe. ITV News reports:
Southwest Coast National Scenic Area spokesman Zheng Rongfeng told local media the church would also include 100 "female-oriented" features including chairs for "lovers", biscuits and cake.
What would a church building for guys look like?
Nope, never mind. I don't want to know.
-via The Presurfer
Natasha of the food blog Through the Eyes of My Belly has started publishing her work very recently. It was only last week that she introduced herself to the people of the internet with her bacon and chocolate shot glasses.
I expect to see only wonderful things from Natasha. She's promptly followed up on that culinary marvel with edible shots made of mozzarella cheese and filled with marinara sauce.
To make them, first, she cut a block of mozzarella into large chunks with hollowed-out tops. She rolled these in flour, washed them in egg, then rolled them again in bread crumbs. After freezing them solid for 2 hours, she deep fried the cheese chunks and filled them with marinara sauce. Yummy!
-via Foodiggity
(Photo: Curtin University/Desert Fireball Network)
Prof. Phil Bland of Curtin University is ecstatically happy for a reason. The rock that he holds in his hand is the oldest in the world. It's an extremely rare meteorite that he dates back to 4.5 billion years. That's older than the Earth.
Bland and his colleagues were racing to find the meteorite. It had been spotted in a remote dry lake bed in southern Australia. That lake bed was about to fill with rainwater. So the research team was using every means at its disposal to track down the rumored meteorite. They found the 1.7-kilogram rock just hours before the rain arrived. ABC News reports:
Curtin University team leader Phil Bland hand-dug the meteorite from a 42-centimetre-deep hole in a remote section of the lake bed just hours before the arrival of heavy rains would have washed away any remaining clues.
"It was an amazing team effort, we got there by the skin of our teeth," Professor Bland said.
"It is older than the Earth itself. It's the oldest rock you'll ever hold in your hand.
"It came to us from beyond the orbit of Mars, so in between Mars and Jupiter."
The three-day operation to find the meteorite involved an aerial spotter, a drone, two researchers on a quad bike and local Aboriginal guides Dean Stuart and Dave Strangways looking in the sticky clay.
-via My Modern Met
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