Look at this beautiful Art Nouveau building! This is the the Paris Metro station at the Bastille. Or it was, before it was torn down in 1962. By that time, it was considered old fashioned, and was demolished to make way for something more modern. The Bastille station was considered "garish" even when it was first built, one of 141 train stations designed by Hector Guimard and erected at the turn of the 20th century. A few still remain in the city.
Today, the Guimard stations are considered French national treasures, and there’s even a replica station in the New York MOMA’s Sculpture Garden. But back in the 1960s, a number of the stations were torn down as the city continued to modernize and expand the subway system. Tragically, the Bastille station was no exception.
Ship's cats have always been common, because they are the best way to exterminate rats and other vermin on long voyages. However, cats are just one of many types of pets taken on ocean travels throughout history. Sailors have been accompanied by dogs, pigs, chickens, rabbits, and other animals, and not all of them were for dinner. Patricia Sullivan, founder and curator of the online Museum of Maritime Pets, talked to Atlas Obscura about the little-known tradition of land animals at sea. They served in wartime and peace time, too.
Pets were also trusted companions for maritime explorers. “Many pets were working animals on exploration vessels,” Sullivan says, with dogs used for hunting at ports of call and cats on exterminator duty. More than all of this, seafaring animals played important emotional roles on long, grueling, monotonous, dangerous voyages plagued by uncertainty. “Sailors were out at sea for months or years at time, so pets were important de-stressors” she says. “I think people would have gone mad without something to pet.”
A few years ago, Sari Mäenpää, a curator at the Maritime Museum of Finland, was conducting research when she first really noticed the presence of pets in the museum’s image archives. “I came across loads of photos, especially from the sailing ship era, where cats and dogs were portrayed in ‘official’ crew photos, and suddenly I started seeing images of them everywhere.”
What's going on with these mantises? Are they about to fight? Are they posing for a picture? Are they even alive? Yes, they are alive, and it appears to be a kind of stand-off, where they are bluffing each other, waiting and even daring one of them to make the first move. Bluffing and posturing are perfectly good tactics in the animal kingdom.
Turns out they are in their fighting stance in reaction to the camera, as it eventually becomes clear that's what they are looking at. They sure are pretty, for a bunch of bugs. Adrian Kozakiewicz (previously at Neatorama) of InsecthausTV has plenty more videos that delve into the mysterious world of insect behavior. -via Boing Boing
The 1991 romantic comedy Doc Hollywood starred Michael J. Fox as a doctor on a road trip from Washington, DC, to Beverly Hills to begin a new job. That was his intention, but when things goes wrong, his plans eventually change. It's a familiar plot made special by Fox's talents and a heartwarming script. Let's learn what went into the making of Doc Hollywood.
10. Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease shortly before this film was made.
He started noticing a mild twitch in his left pinky finger. The disease didn’t start getting worse until later but it was diagnosed in 1990.
9. The movie was filmed in Florida.
Micanopy, Florida is a small town just south of Gainesville and was inhabited by less than a thousand people at the time.
It's crazy to think that Fox has been dealing with Parkinson's for 28 years. Read more about Doc Hollywood at TVOM.
Here's a story that might make you feel good, but it will also make you feel old. It started 17 years ago when 12-year-old Kristin from Arkansas joined a Neopets role-playing guild called Evil Jellies. One of her rivals was 10-year-old Michael from Ohio, although she only knew him as "Doctor," and he only knew her as "Zepher_Cat." They eventually became friends and began to communicate by AIM.
"We went from silly rivalry to talking about school and life," Kristin said.
"It took a long time from having talked pretty much daily when we were younger teens when he finally sent me pictures of himself and we would sneak phone calls."
The pieces of each other's human selves started to come together after they exchanged their real names, locations, and photos over AIM. Kristin soon started to develop romantic feelings for Michael.
This Saturday marks the 10th anniversary of the premiere of Breaking Bad. The AMC series followed Walter White, a chemistry teacher who turns to manufacturing methamphetamine after he develops cancer. It was an entirely new idea in TV to present a perfectly sympathetic character who gradually descends into complete villainhood and takes the audience with him. To celebrate the anniversary, Esquire assembled the people behind the show: Vince Gilligan, Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, and others, to tell the story behind the story.
Charlie Collier, President of AMC, SundanceTV, and AMC Studios: I remember the day Breaking Bad hit my desk, because it was like nothing else I’d seen. At the time, we [AMC] had committed to Mad Men as our first scripted original series, but had not yet aired it. Having greenlit that, we were getting every historical pitch—flappers, Motown—and we wanted to steer clear. Having been American Movie Classics, we didn’t now want to become an “original classics” network known for period shows.
Vince Gilligan: Breaking Bad was dead by the time AMC came into the picture. I was emotionally moving onto other things, thinking, Well, we fought the good fight, but this show was just too damn crazy. A show about a guy cooking crystal meth and he’s the hero? What did I expect? When I got a call from my agent saying, "Hey, the folks at AMC want to meet with you about your project," I said, "Which project?" That’s how far gone I was. My response was "AMC? The channel where they play Short Circuit 2 ten times a day?" Little did I know they were undergoing a renaissance at that point.
Breaking Bad was an artistic treasure, but it also had some lucky breaks: AMC's rebranding, the writer's strike, and Netflix and the rise of binge-watching. Read the oral history of Breaking Badat Esquire. -via Metafilter
From one end to the other, the state of Texas dealt with winter weather this week. Kristy Boyd of Longview, Texas, recorded vehicles trying to make it up an icy hill, with some having more success than others. Then a big rig tried it. It had the speed going up, but couldn't quite make it over the top. That's when things went downhill, so to speak.
First, gravity wins, then inertia. The real winner is the smaller car that didn't even try the hill. I bet that driver's life flashed before his eyes. -via Digg
Whoa, fella, there are universal dreams, and then there are your dreams! Have you ever just assumed that others share the same experiences you've had, and then one day you suddenly find out your experience is outside the realm of normalcy? I saw another example of this type of thing recently, which I declined to write about. It's a weird feeling when you come to the realization that something you've always known as normal is seen by others as unique, bizarre, or even terrifying. This is the latest comic from Randall Munroe at xkcd. By now, Munroe should be used to being unique.
A little fishing trip is more complicated than just that, when you have to build your world first. Even when that world is on your desk in your bedroom! The result is just as cute as it can be.
I have some concerns, however, about the hooks that weren't removed from the fish before it was consumed. Swedish stop-motion animator Guldies Konst used 2,500 still pictures (out of 4530 he took) to create this video. That's a lot of time spent in his bedroom. You might want to go back and check out the images in the still frames -especially the fire. It looks completely different than what the moving video shows. -via Tastefully Offensive
Six destinations where getting there is all the fun.
1) ALASKA’S DO-IT-YOURSELF TRAM
In the winter, hikers at Alaska’s Chugach National Forest have to walk across Glacier Creek. But when the water is high in the summer, a hand tram dangling above is a safer alternative. Hikers climb into the cable-suspended box and pull ropes to get across.
From the literature we see on the internet from the Cold War era, you'd think that everyone had a backyard fallout shelter ready to go in case the Soviets attacked. The truth is that, in 1962, only 1.4% of Americans actually did. As a child of that era, I recall assuming that nuclear armageddon could come at any time, and there was nothing we could do about it. What did the general population of adults of the time think about the nuclear threat? Michigan State University surveyed 3,514 adults in the early '60s about their feelings regarding preparedness for a nuclear war. Check out some of the results.
Is it cowardly to build a nuclear fallout shelter?
There’s nothing quite like the collision of midcentury toxic masculinity and the threat of total destruction from nuclear war. But the results of the survey may surprise you. Just 7 percent of Americans thought that building a shelter was cowardly.
Building a shelter is like hiding in a hole—only a coward would do it. (7 percent agreed, 90 percent disagreed)
Parents have a duty to protect their children by building a fallout shelter (52 percent agreed, 37 percent disagreed)
It would take a little while after an attack, but law and order would be restored. (79 percent agreed, 14 percent disagreed)
Read more findings from the study at Paleofuture. There are also plenty of people in the comments sharing their memories of growing up during the Cold War.
Along with many other dubious medical practices of the 19th century, there was a fad for "orificial surgery." This was promoted by married doctors Edward and Elizabeth Muncie, who opened the Muncie Surf Sanatorium on an island off the New York coast. The Muncies could not only diagnose illness by looking at a patient's orifices, they could determine their personality and potential, too. Various surgeries on those orifices would cure what ails you. The philosophy behind orificial surgery was a branch of homeopathy conceived by Dr. Edwin Hartley Pratt
While its conclusions are utterly bonkers, the premises that underlay orificial surgery begin at least somewhere in the region of medical science. To be in good health, Pratt reasoned, one needed normal circulation. Because the sympathetic nervous system helps determine blood flow, it must be important to good health. So far, so good. But then the evidence-based logic begins to break down. Pratt believed that disease occurs when the circulatory system is fatigued, leading to blood “stagnation.” Observing, correctly, that there are a lot of sympathetic nerves around some of the body’s orifices, in particular the sexual organs and rectum, he reasoned that by nipping and tucking these areas to keep them “properly smoothed and dilated,” poor circulation and thus disease could be kept at bay. And so, writes Ira M. Rutkow in Seeking the Cure: A History of Medicine in America, “when this giant man with the thinning hair and Vandyke beard went to work, no mouth, penis, rectum, or vagina was safe from a manipulation or scraping.” This is true—but the mouth was of far less interest to Pratt and his colleagues than their other targets.
Your parents probably warned you against sitting too close to the TV set. I know mine did, and we only watched a couple of hours a day. The adult in you probably knows this is a myth, and research backs that up. But that's modern research, with modern TVs. There was a reason for this warning, a good reason, at one time.
The incident in question never affected me, because I didn't have a color TV until after college. My Dad telling me not to sit too close to the television was most likely his way of telling me to get out of his way. Still, it's always good to step away from any screen every once in a while. Eyestrain might not blind you, or even affect your sight until you're old, but the old you will thank the young you for taking care of all your body parts while you can. -via Geeks Are Sexy
I'm sure that the idea of a centaur made some kind of sense to some person at some time, or else we wouldn't have any notion of the mythical beast. The creature doesn't really hold up under scrutiny. It's even more horrifying to imagine a neonatal reverse centaur, one that has the non-functioning legs of a newborn human and the head and forelimbs of a foal. Now, try to get that image out of your head! This comic is from Josh Davenport at RGBros.
Russian drivers began using dash cams in their vehicles as soon as they were available to the public. They were important for defense against scam artists who demanded payment for being hit. But the cameras across the vast country caught all kinds of "only in Russia" events that made their way around the world via the internet. Now, director Dmitrii Kalashnikov has compiled the wildest of these videos into a feature-length documentary entitled The Road Movie, which opens in New York this Friday. Here's the trailer.
