Jodie, Logan, Briana, and Meg share an apartment in Pittsburgh. A rat got into their apartment earlier this week, so they put their heads together to figure out how to evict it. They cornered the rat in the shower, then set up a complicated course to shoo it downstairs and out the door. What are the odds of this working? The four women and Logan's boyfriend Bo were all ready when Logan forced the rat out of the tub, and surprise! Their scheme worked like a charm, and even better, they got video evidence. Read more about the adventure at Buzzfeed.
You could spend a lifetime watching TV sitcoms and not realize that the same weird things keep happening from show to show over time. Maybe that's because we don't watch that many sitcoms at a time, or we don't compare our favorites from the 1970s to our favorites from the '10s. Did you ever notice how new infants in a sitcom family suddenly become old enough to deliver lines (or at least look cute) the next season? In Full House, Uncle Jesse's twins grew quickly, while their cousin Michelle did not.
Modern Family provides more evidence of a vast baby-swapping conspiracy when Cam and Mitchell celebrate their daughter's second birthday ... only to mention that she's three a few months later. Clearly, they're speeding up the rate of her birthdays so as to avoid arousing suspicions when they inevitably switch her (which they did).
On the other hand, the baby swaps in Growing Pains and Family Ties are so laughably obvious that they seem to imply this business isn't even underground. Chrissy Seaver blossoms from basically a newborn child to a 5-year-old girl in the space of one season ...
That's just one weird thing about sitcoms that happens over and over. You might notice one thing when it happens in your favorite show, but you probably never realized that it's a TV thing in show after show, over decades. Read the rest of the list of weirdness in TV sitcoms at Cracked.
Lindsay Richards decided she wanted a cat. Lain Roby agreed after seeing cats on the site Adventure Cats. So the couple adopted Fish, and took him on many outdoor adventures. A few months later, they adopted Chips, who become Fish's little brother and constant companion. Both cats were leashed trained from an early age, and are used to riding in cars, boats, and backpacks.
The two cats love spending time in the woods, hills, and beaches of Vancouver Island and anywhere their humans want to go. Read about Fish and Chips at Adventure Cats, and see more of these photogenic kitties at Instagram.
On The Tonight Show, Robert Irwin presents Jimmy Fallon with a variety of creatures to gush about. Have you ever heard an armadillo scream? You're about to.
Robert Irwin is the 13-year-old son of the late Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin. He is the spitting image of his dad, in his looks, his enthusiasm, and his knowledge of animals. -via reddit
In the 1880s, libraries were growing fast. Each new book acquired needed an entry in the card catalog. While librarians are liable to be educated and use good penmanship, the cards were still hard to read because the nice script had "too much flourishing.” A library summit meeting was held in Late George, New York in September 1885. One of the attendees was Melvil Dewey, who had developed the Dewey Decimal System. The problem of catalog cards was discussed, and a highly legible new style of writing was proposed. It was eventually called "library hand."
Influenced by Edison and honed via experimenting on patient, hand-sore librarians, library hand focused on uniformity rather than beauty. ”The handwriting of the old-fashioned writing master is quite as illegible as that of the most illiterate boor,” read a New York State Library School handbook. “Take great pains to have all writing uniform in size, blackness of lines, slant, spacing and forms of letters,” wrote Dewey in 1887. And if librarians thought they could get away with just any black ink, they could think again real fast. ”Inks called black vary much in color,” scoffed the New York State Library School handwriting guide.
Dewey and his crew of “a dozen catalogers and librarians” spent, in his estimation, “an hour daily for nearly an entire week” hashing out the rules of library hand. They started by examining hundreds of card catalogs, looking for penmanship problems and coming up with ways to solve them. They concluded that the “simpler and fewer the lines the better,” and decided that, while a slant was best avoided, a slight backward slant was acceptable. Then they got to the more nitty-gritty stuff, such as whether to opt for a “square-topped 3” or a “rounded-top 3.” (The rounded-top 3 won out, as it is less likely to be mistaken for a 5 during hasty reading.)
The second-best use for baked goods is the cinematic pie fight. Getting a whipped cream-topped pie to the face is a great visual, certainly more pleasant than other thrown foods, and doesn't leave major injuries. A timeline of pie fights in movies gives us stories of notorious pie fights. The earliest existing example of the pie in the face is from 1909, followed by a full-blown fight in 1913. Even Dr. Strangelove was supposed to end with a pie fight, but that didn't work out.
So as Kubrick later said, ‘It was a disaster of Homeric proportions.’” Because the scene was so expensive to shoot and clean up from, the studio only gave them one chance to film it. But since the actors were clearly smiling throughout filming, the footage was unusable. The scene has since become one of the most famous unseen pieces of celluloid in cinematic history. Apparently, pie fights make up a majority of that list.
While many U.S. presidents enjoyed the services of a yacht, the most famous of those boats is the USS Potomac, the yacht that provided a refuge for Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1936 to 1945. The Coast Guard cutter was built to intercept bootleggers during Prohibition, but then was determined to be a good fit for Roosevelt. And so it was refitted with features to accommodate the president, and the president's wheelchair.
The biggest change was to install a spacious, shaded aft deck, where Roosevelt could work or entertain while enjoying river or ocean breezes. “When the ship was a Coast Guard cutter, this deck did not exist,” Dropkin says, as we walk across its teak surface, “but it was a favorite area of the president.” That’s probably because the seating on the deck was designed with the wheelchair-bound Roosevelt in mind. Dropkin points to an upholstered settee that follows the curve of the ship’s stern. “It’s about 4 feet deep in the middle,” he says, “to support the president’s legs, something for him to stretch out on. You can almost imagine him sitting there, drink in hand.
“Roosevelt was a martini guy,” Dropkin continues. “A good cocktail was very important to him. He had started having cocktail hour when he was governor of New York, and brought the practice with him to the White House. His wife, Eleanor, wasn’t crazy about that, but they were different people."
Other changes to the Electra that were more particular to Roosevelt included the removal of the floor coamings designed to contain water that might be sloshing on deck. For example, the low barrier was removed between the main dining room and the presidential bedroom, so that Roosevelt could get himself between the two spaces in his wheelchair. Even more dramatic was the conversion of one of the ship’s two smokestacks into an elevator, allowing the president to move freely between to ship’s two main decks. “An elevator was built into what had been the rear smokestack,” Dropkin says. “It’s an electric elevator now, but when the president used it, it was literally just a platform roped to a pulley. He would pull himself up, or let himself down, arm over arm. Roosevelt was very strong, and always wanted to do things for himself.”
After Roosevelt's death, the Potomac went on many other adventures, such as the ill-fated trip to the World's Fair, a purchase by Elvis Presley, drug-running, and a sinking. But the Potomac is getting ready for a new life as a landmark. Read the entire story of the USS Potomacat Collectors Weekly.
How It Should Have Ended and Klomp! Animation have teamed up for a new series of animations called Hero Swap. In this video, they've taken the title character from the 1994 movie Forrest Gump and made him the protagonist in the 1999 movie The Matrix.
They've managed to depict the memorable visuals of The Matrix and shoehorn in the most memorable catchphrases from Forrest Gump. That's pretty neat. -via Tastefully Offensive
Stanley Kubrick's Cold war satire Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was a masterpiece of unsettling comedy that stands the test of time. If you don't have the time to re-watch the whole thing, enjoy the best lines of the movie (often rhyming, no less) in the new musical remix by Eclectic Method with Martin Ware.
Martyn Ware, founder of Human League, Heaven 17, legendary producer of Tina Turner and Erasure, Multimedia artist and professor has teamed up with Eclectic Method to remix Dr. Strangelove. With relations between East and West at such an ambiguous point and the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight then it's been since the Cuban Missile Crisis what better time to revisit the Stanley Kubrick Classic. "Gentlemen, You can't fight in here this is war room!"
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill led his nation through World War II, but also had varied interests we know little about. He once wrote an 11-page essay revealing that he believed in extraterrestrial life. Was this an old college assignment? No, it was written in 1939, only a year before he was elevated to prime minister. The long lost article was only recently discovered at the US National Churchill Museum at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.
At the time Churchill penned the essay, astronomers favoured a theory that had planets form when stars ripped material off one another as they swept past. Because such encounters were bound to be rare, he reasoned that our sun might be alone in hosting planets. But Churchill proved a good sceptic. “I am not sufficiently conceited,” he writes,” to think that my sun is the only one with a family of planets.” His intuition was right. Astronomers have now spotted thousands of planets beyond the solar system.
Step by step, Churchill reaches a view and expresses it a final sentence that mixes despair with optimism. He writes: “I, for one, am not so immensely impressed by the success we are making of our civilisation here that I am prepared to think we are the only spot in this immense universe which contains living, thinking creatures, or that we are the highest type of mental and physical development which has ever appeared in the vast compass of space and time.”
Churchill had an education grounded in science, and went on to hire the first British government science advisor and helped to fund British laboratories. The article is thought to have been intended for a newspaper, but was never published. Read more about this discovery at the Guardian. -Thanks, John Farrier!
The annual Underwater Photographer of the Year competition has announced its winners, and the pictures are gorgeous. Gabriel Barathieu of France won the top honor, Underwater Photographer of the Year, with this image of an octopus. Photos were recognized in quite a few categories, such as Wide Angle, Macro, Wrecks, Behaviour, and Portrait. You can see a selection of the winners in a gallery at Digg, and check out all the top images in all the categories at the competition site.
Stuff in Space is a neat interactive visualization of all the objects orbiting the earth. There are tons of satellites, spacecraft parts, and debris out there, just circling the earth until someone does something about it. You can scroll to zoom in and out, and drag to rotate your view of earth and its surroundings. Mouseover to find the name of an object, and you might be able to look it up somewhere. The menu at the top left allows you to sort objects by type.
Notice the distinct red ring 35,800 km above the equator; those are geostationary satellites. You'd think that aliens should be able to find us by all our satellites, rockets, and garbage. -via Metafilter
The revealing true stories of how our nation’s greatest romantics in chief put a ring on it.
1. MASTER OF SUBTLETY
Harry Truman met Bess Wallace in Sunday school. He was 6. She was 5. Later, in fifth grade, Wallace sat right behind the future president (their teacher sat them alphabetically). He had a crush on her but was too nervous to speak, later confessing, “If I succeeded in carrying her books to school or back home for her, I had a big day.” For years he courted her. He sent love letters, even sneaking in this proposal while talking about, of all things, the weather: “I guess we’ll all have to go to drinking whiskey if it doesn’t rain very soon. Water and potatoes will soon be as much of a luxury as pineapples and diamonds. Speaking of diamonds, would you wear a solitaire on your left hand should I get it?” She said no. He kept asking, and finally, before he shipped out for World War I, she said yes. Throughout the war, he kept a photo of his fianceĢe in his breast pocket.
2. WILSON’S WISE PICK
Woodrow Wilson is one of three presidents to marry while he was in office. (The other two are John Tyler and Grover Cleveland.) Just months after his first wife died of kidney disease, he was introduced to Edith Galt, the “perfect playmate” who could beat him in golf. (He was 59, and she was 43; the Secret Service referred to her as “Grandma.”) He officially proposed over dinner, although as one contemporary joke put it, “What did Mrs. Galt do when the president proposed to her? She fell out of bed.” Edith later proved to be more than a playmate—she sat in meetings in the Oval Office, and when Wilson suffered a stroke in 1919, she stepped in and served, in her words, as his “steward.” Functionally, she became president, secretly and successfully running the government’s executive branch for the rest of her husband’s term.
Adam Pearl of Meridian, Idaho, came home to find evidence that his home had been burglarized- footprints in the snow, missing items, etc. His pet squirrel Joey was okay, though. As events unfolded, it turns out that Joey had acted as a guard dog, and repeatedly bit the intruder!
