Have you ever tried to make up a bed with a cat intent on helping? If so, then you won't be surprised by how Simon's Cat does it.
This video is remarkable in several ways. First, there is no blood involved. Two, Simon is actually happy with his cat for a moment or two. And surprisingly, we get to hear Simon speak, even if it's only one word.
Alfred Carlton Gilbert was an extraordinary man. He set a world record for chin-ups, won an Olympic gold medal in the pole vault, earned a medical degree, and invented the Erector Set. The toy company he built around it was so respected that Gilbert was elected the first president of the Toy Manufacturers of America trade group. And that's when he ran into his biggest challenge.
It was 1918, the U.S. was embroiled in World War I, and the Council had made an open issue about their deliberation over whether to halt all production of toys indefinitely, turning factories into ammunition centers and even discouraging giving or receiving gifts that holiday season. Instead of toys, they argued, citizens should be spending money on war bonds. Playthings had become inconsequential.
Frantic toymakers persuaded Gilbert, founder of the A.C. Gilbert Company and creator of the popular Erector construction sets, to speak on their behalf. Toys in hand, he faced his own personal firing squad of military generals, policy advisors, and the Secretary of War.
Gilbert managed to convince the committee not to cancel toys for Christmas, which worked out well as the war ended that November. Read what he said to convince them at mental_floss.
(Image credit: Flickr user Travel Salem)
Abby Jo Hamele is a student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She got her wisdom teeth removed last week. Hamele emailed her philosophy teacher about an assignment that she was afraid she'd miss. Because she remembered the deadline wrong. Heres the text of that email.
Kevin-
I believe that i relmebmer you said we, as us students, would be able to send you our papers for classss for you to look at over before we turn them in to cColin if we got them to you by the 22nd of Novermber.
I unfortmately got my wisdom teeth sliced outr and have not not been reacting very well to the surgeryy nor the medicatioon i were given/ so I do not thimk that I will be able to habe my paper finisherd by Tuesday at all.
Is tehere any way I would be able to send you my paper at any later date??? I wnt to do very good on this paper you know becayse i like to do well in my classes.
please sir I workled very hard and thouught that I would be abel to finish it on timme but my doctor said I will most likelly not be normal again until at least Thanksginvg turkey. If you say no then that is okay but i would be sad and i would reallyyyy lik e it if you said yes. Thank you Kevin, my dude.
Abby Jo Hamele (pronounced hah-mil-lee) (if you were wondering)
P.S. I will answer youpr questions in class forever so theere are not any more awkard silence. and i will buy you expo markers that work (even thougjh our tuition should pay for markers that work)
love you bye
Hamele later Tweeted the email and blamed it on her pain medication. I don't think so. She was obviously still under a cloud of anesthesia, which can take quite a few hours to wear off. Kevin Patton, the philosophy TA, reacted exactly as the rest of us did, by laughing hysterically. And he answered the email. See more of Hamele in her drug-induced state at Buzzfeed.
Cats are even smarter than we realized. Of all the things they could take from a purse, a drawer, or a backpack, they go for the currency. And sometimes coins.
They know they better make a quick getaway with their filthy lucre, too! -via Tastefully Offensive
It's spooky how much Facebook knows about you. And Google. And Twitter. And all those places that throw up ads for something you looked at for a brief moment. I sent my aunt an email and mentioned using a 20-foot pole with a feather duster attachment. When I hit "send," gmail said "Are you sure you're ready to send? You typed 'I attached' but there are no files attached." Wooo. You can see here how Facebook's facial recognition system could suddenly change everything in the DC universe. This comic is from Max is Drawing. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Has no one done this already? Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble should take this idea and run with it. I mean really, look how happy Whiskers is, and how the other guy is just floored with the genius idea of a subscription supply of cat boxes. The only thing cats love more than a box is a newer box. A "selection" of boxes every month should give a cat enough to sit in, explore, and chew on. And the facts that they are themed only gives us an incentive to take plenty of LOLcat pictures. Shut up and take my money!
Since so many people have a complicated relationship with their boss, it only makes sense to use a boss in a TV sitcom. They can be a caricature of how one sees their boss in real life, as a dictator, a buffoon, an inspiration, and/or a target of cathartic revenge. The best TV bosses are either extreme caricatures or complicated personalities.
For a lot of us who have exhausting and strenuous relationships with a real life boss, watching a memorable TV boss is therapeutic. It might even help us get along better with our own boss because we can always tell ourselves that no matter how bad our particular lot is, at least we don’t have to work with the incompetent fool on our favorite television show. If this sounds like you, then you’ll love this list.
Check out ten memorable bosses from sitcoms at TVOM. Is your favorite on there?
The Atlantic has published a fascinating set of interviews with 100 American workers who talk about their jobs. They include business owners, artists, politicians, military, service workers you see every day, and occupations you've never heard of. They include a woman who works 65 hours a week at two jobs to make ends meet, a teacher and rap artist who combined the two to become a children's songwriter, a tattoo artist who started work when tattooing was still illegal in her state, and a guy who climbs up on wind turbines. The interviewees are listed in this index. -via Digg
The following article is from Uncle John’s Factastic Bathroom Reader.
Something everyone thinks about as they get close to retiring is “What am I going to do with all that free time?” Some people move to the country, others travel the world. Still others make a difference right where they are.
HIGH ROLLERS
One of the perks that come with working in a swanky, well-run high-rise office building in cities like Seattle, Washington, is that you almost never run out of toilet paper. The janitors see to it. Each night they replace the old toilet paper rolls with new ones, whether the old rolls are used up or not. And what happens to the rolls that get replaced? In the old days, the janitors just threw them out, something that drove Allison Delong, the manager of several buildings in Seattle in the 1990s, crazy. She hated to see all that toilet paper going to waste, but what was she going to do with all those partially used rolls?
The problem continued until Allison’s father, Leon Delong, retired in 1999 and found himself with more free time than he knew what to do with. When Allison told him about all the toilet paper rolls that were being thrown away, he offered to collect them and donate them to area food banks. She instructed the janitors in her buildings to set the rolls aside, and every other week Leon would load them into his pickup truck and deliver them to the food banks. They packaged the rolls in groups of three or four and put them out for people who didn’t have enough money to buy toilet paper. “Putting out Leon’s toilet paper is like putting out T-bone steaks,” food bank manager Anthony Brown told the Seattle Times. “If we don’t hold some of it back, it’s gone in an hour.”
ON A ROLL
Seattle’s “Toilet Paper Guy,” as Leon came to be known, added one building after another to his paper route (so to speak) until he was collecting rolls from about a quarter of all the high-rent office buildings in Seattle. He collected some 2,000–3,000 rolls every other week— enough to fill the bed of his pickup truck three times. He kept at it for 15 years, until a bout with pneumonia over the holidays in 2014 forced him to hand over the route to other volunteers. By then he’d saved what he estimates as around one million rolls of toilet paper from the trash and made them available to people in need. “I’m amazed how much this mattered to people,” he told the Seattle Times in 2014. “To me, it was just a nice thing to do. Now it’s my claim to fame. You know, I’m sort of proud of it.”
[Ed. note: Leon Delong died in March of 2015.]
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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Factastic Bathroom Reader. The 28th volume of the series is chock-full of fascinating stories and facts, and comes in both the Kindle version and paper with a classy cloth cover.
Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
Police in Gardner, Kansas, got a report of a possible mountain lion sighting in Celebration Park. To determine whether it was true, they set up two wildlife camera traps in the park. Three days later, they were surprised at how many times the cameras were tripped. There were pictures of a skunk, a coyote, a raccoon, two gorillas, a ninja in a ghilly suit, a homicidal senior citizen, Man Bear Pig, and Santa Claus. Chief of Police James Pruetting saw the humor in the situation.
“They did a pretty good job of centering themselves and putting themselves in the camera’s view, because you can’t—it’s like a box and I wouldn’t have known where to stand,” Pruetting said. “We still don’t know who it is. The attention has been 100 percent positive but no one has come forward. I mean, how many people have two gorilla costumes?”
You can see all the pictures at the Gardner Police Department's Facebook post.
(Image credit: Gardner Police Department)
The National Park Service has built a five-mile-long fence around Mauna Loa on the Big Island in Hawaii. The purpose of the fence is to keep cats out, making it the longest cat-proof fence in the country. Isn't that nice, they're trying to save the poor kitties from death by volcano. Except, while it might keep cats away from flowing lava, that's not the purpose of the fence. It's to protect nesting birds from the cats.
Mauna Loa’s lava-covered slopes make for some seriously forbidding landscape, but that hasn’t deterred cats, which have adapted to the Hawaiian islands just fine since arriving on explorers’ ships. So fine, in fact, that the little invasive predators are now a mortal threat to the endangered Hawaiian petrel, a seabird that breeds on Mauna Loa. Several thousand of the birds live in Hawaii, but only about 75 breeding pairs are on the Big Island.
The fence, which took three years to erect, is six feet tall and has a special curved design at the top that is supposed to be cat-proof. I find it hard to believe that cats couldn't scale it if they had to, but I can well believe that it might be more difficult than a cat would consider worth the effort. -Thanks, John Farrier!
(Image credit: Scott Hall/National Fish and Wildlife Foundation)
Some people never give up. John Green tells us about some folks who are over the age of 80 and put us all to shame with the things they do, in athletics, in travel, in working, and in the arts. It just goes to show, you're never too old to be the best at something. Enjoy the latest episode of the mental_floss List Show.
Fiction's famous characters* could have benefitted from our golden era of easy fixes. Learn from what they didn't know.
1. An orphan forced to toil endlessly in a savage workhouse, you're constantly hungry and exhausted. After a game of chance with fellow orphans, you ask for more gruel from the wicked beadle Mr. Bumble, who denies your request.
#Lifehack: Build a “yes” ladder. People are more inclined to agree to favors if they’ve already answered in the affirmative to a series of lower-stakes inquiries. Start by asking Mr. Bumble simple questions like, “Are orphans good at picking oakum?” before moving to the riskier request for more food.
2. You and your Greaser friend Johnny hide out in an abandoned church in the country after Johnny stabs and kills a Soc during a fight. The church catches on fire with a group of children inside, and you and Johnny try to rescue them.
A teacher in South Korea has turned a lifetime love of Pinocchio into a museum. The Pinocchio Familia Museum in northeastern Seoul houses her dolls, artwork and ephemera related to the Italian tale of a wooden puppet that became a real boy. Renowned Korean architect Moon Hoon (previously at Neatorama) designed the three whimsically-shaped buildings of the museum. They are named Wave and Whale, Whale Tale, and Nose Fountain.
The Nose Fountain is the final building making up the Pinocchio Familia Museum. It is seemingly simple, but it is a great finishing touch to the whale-inspired structure. It is also perhaps the most relevant building to the main character behind the Museum. It features an elongated pipe affixed to its nose, and this small detail represents Pinocchio’s elongated nose. What’s more, the pipe is continuously spouting out water to add an element of the sea.
When a nose spouts water, the sea is not exactly what I think of. Take a tour of the architecture of the Pinocchio Familia Museum at Housely.
Ben Carter is 14 and has severe autism. He takes his medicine in liquid, served in the only cup he will drink from -a blue Tommee Tippee sippy cup with two handles. That particular model is the only cup he will use, and his parents have gone through several of them over the years. Still, Ben has been to the hospital twice for dehydration because of his issues with drinking liquids. Since the manufacturer discontinued that model cup 12 years ago, it's been difficult to find replacements. So Ben's father Marc appealed through social media. His Tweet vent viral, and people responded.
However, not only did the family receive several dozen old cups of the same model but the interest prompted the manufacturers to search factories across the world. Eventually they tracked down an original production mold in China which had not been disposed of as should normally have happened. After confirming it still works and is in a food-safe condition, they have told the family they will produce a lifetime supply of cups for Ben.
BIG NEWS: We’re going to manufacture a batch of little blue cups for Ben! #CupForBen https://t.co/NrnFjFc4bn
— tommee tippee UK (@tommeetippee_UK) November 24, 2016
Marc Carter (@GrumpyCarer) was overwhelmed by the response and plans to make a documentary about the cups. Read the entire story, with a news video, at Geeks Are Sexy.
