In this holiday cartoon from Simon Tofield, the cat and the kitten double-team Simon when he's merely trying to enjoy his Thanksgiving meal. They've adapted the methods of a gang of common street thieves: distract the target and swipe the goods.
You might think it sad that he's eating alone with just his cats, but this one is not based on a real Thanksgiving meal- Tofield is British, after all. That doesn't mean he can't make a treat for his American fans. But an aromatic savory bird is attractive to cats all over the world. I hope he cooked enough for all of them!
Crew members Danielle and Graeme of the Queensland Ambulance Service in Australia reported a detour they took on the way to deliver a patient to hospice care. From the Facebook post:
A crew were transporting a patient to the palliative care unit of the local Hospital and the patient expressed that she just wished she could be at the beach again.Above and beyond,the crew took a small diversion to the awesome beach at Hervey Bay to give the patient this opportunity – tears were shed and the patient felt very happy. Sometimes it is not the drugs/training/skills – sometimes all you need is empathy to make a difference!
It's not the first time the ambulance service has granted a last wish. The top-rated comment underneath from Darren Booker is also worth sharing.
Years ago a fellow crew member and I had a situation where the patient was taking her last ride home. She asked to see the beach one last time. After going tthe beach and opening the rear door, we asked her if would like an ice cream, to which she replied yes with a giggle of delight. A short time later the hardly licked ice cream fell to the floor. The patient had passed away. As she lay there still smiling at the last view that she ever saw, we had a minutes silence for her. Although the memory is an old one, it is still vivid. Great work by this crew, well done guys and girls.
The Thanksgiving episode of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 featured Jim Henson and his Muppets through the whole show. This clip has Cavett's monologue, some ads from 1971, a musical number, and an interview with Henson at nine minutes in.
The name of the video is The Poop in My Pants, but don't let that preventing you from watching, it's SFW. The Rick and Morty character Mr. Poopybutthole is going over the events in his life and all the things he has to be thankful for.
You don't have to be a Rick and Morty fan, or even watch the show at all, to find this video from Adult Swim charming. However, if you do watch it, you'll see a lot of references to season three of the show. -via Uproxx
The Disaster Artist is a movie opening December 1, based on a book about the experience of making a very bad movie. Tom Wiseau's opus The Room premiered in 2003 and proved to be so poorly made that a film buff (Michael Rousselet) made all his friends go see it. Word spread, and eventually it became a phenomena in the vein of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A writer (Tom Bissell) was fascinated and convinced Harper's Magazine to let him write an article on The Room. Meanwhile, Greg Sestero, who played Mark (Oh, hi Mark) in the film, was considering writing a book, and teamed up with Bissell. Also meanwhile, Simon & Schuster, whose vice-president was a fan of The Room, was trying to get a book deal with Tommy Wiseau. That didn't work out, but Sestero's book, The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside ‘The Room,’ the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, did.
Three weeks after his book came out, Sestero remembered, Bernstein called to tell him that Franco and Seth Rogen were interested in turning The Disaster Artist into a movie. “My mind was blown,” Sestero said. After all, even before the memoir was written, he’d told Bissell that he wanted it to become a film in the vein of Ed Wood.
Sestero and Wiseau soon joined Franco on a conference call. Sestero recalled Wiseau asking Franco, “What is your vision?” Wiseau also emphatically suggested that he should be played by Johnny Depp. When an amused Franco softly shot him down by explaining that Depp was one of the biggest actors in the world, Wiseau responded with this: “So what? You will try even harder.”
There are few feature films specifically about Thanksgiving, the best of which is the 1987 film Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It stars Steve Martin as a businessman trying to get home for the holiday and John Candy as the goof trying to help him. Meanwhile, everything about their trip goes wrong. It was sort of based on a true story.
1. JOHN HUGHES ONCE HAD A HELLISH TRIP TRYING TO GET FROM NEW YORK CITY TO CHICAGO.
Before he became a screenwriter, Hughes used to work as a copywriter for the Leo Burnett advertising agency in Chicago. One day he had an 11 a.m. presentation scheduled in New York City on a Wednesday, and planned to return home on a 5 p.m. flight. Winter winds forced all flights to Chicago to be canceled that night, so he stayed in a hotel. A snowstorm in Chicago the next day continued the delays. The plane he eventually got on ended up being diverted to Denver. Then Phoenix. Hughes didn’t make it back until Monday. Experiencing such a hellish trip might explain how Hughes managed to write the first 60 pages of Planes, Trains and Automobiles in just six hours.
6. IT WAS ALL MEANT TO BE SHOT IN CHICAGO, BUT THERE WASN’T ENOUGH SNOW.
Some exterior scenes were filmed in Buffalo, New York. Martin said that the cast and crew pretty much lived the plot of the movie. “As we would shoot, we were hopping planes, trains, and automobiles, trying to find snow.”
Cats and a String “Domestic Cats (Felis catus) Do Not Show Causal Understanding in a String-Pulling Task,” Emma Whitt, Marie Douglas, Britta Osthaus, and Ian Hocking, Animal Cognition, vol. 12, no. 5, September 2009, pp. 739-743. The authors, at the University of Nottingham, UK, report:
This study explored how domestic cats perform in a horizontal string-pulling task to determine whether they understand this case of physical causality. Fifteen cats were tested on their ability to retrieve an unreachable food treat in three different set-ups: (a) a single baited string, (b) two parallel strings where only one was baited and (c) two crossed strings where only one was baited. All cats succeeded at pulling a single string to obtain a treat, but none consistently chose the correct string when two strings were parallel. When tested with two crossed strings one cat chose the wrong string consistently and all others performed at chance level. There was no evidence that cats understand the function of the strings or their physical causality.
Classify Dogs’ Facial Expressions from Photographs “Classifying Dogs’ (Canis familiaris) Facial Expressions from Photographs,” Tina Bloom and Harris Friedman, Behavioural Processes, vol. 96, 2013, pp. 1-10. The authors, at the State Correctional Institute, Marienville, Pennsylvania and Walden University, Florida, report:
Have you ever seen a paper balloon? The Japanese toy called kamifusen has been around for over 100 years. Japanese mathematician Tadashi Tokieda blows one up, but that's not the only way you can make your kamifusen round. The other way is surprising.
Part of the kamifusen’s genius is the paper from which it is made. The paper is not only lightweight and relatively impermeable to air, but it also has a degree of plasticity that allows it to deform easily and retain its resulting shape. Because of those properties, the kamifusen inflates to a volume commensurate with its air content and maintains that volume until additional air is added. As a result, a squashed kamifusen can accumulate air and eventually inflate to its full size from repeated bouncing, even though the net pumping from a single bounce may be small. A balloon made of plastic, rubber, or any other material that does not share the key properties of kamifusen paper would not inflate as the Japanese balloon does.
Well, actually… you're going to think about this comic the next time that friend of yours has to get all pedantic and dissect the fine points of your everyday language. "Fire-breathing dragon" is what we've called that fictional beast for as long as anyone knows. Correcting such a common term is annoying in the best of times, but when there's a life-and-death situation going on, he shouldn't act so pleased with himself. That's as good a time for karma as any other. This comic is from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.
Food items you buy at the grocery store have dates on them, but that does not mean that the food expires on that date. What the date really does mean can vary depending on the food, the state, and exactly how it's worded. Stores use sell-by dates so they can make sure they're rotating their stock properly -to sell the oldest stuff first so nothing is wasted. Speaking of waste, you may be wasting food if you are convinced it goes bad by the date on the package.
Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything has the lowdown on how expiration dates work in the real world. And spoiled milk, which is a little icky. -via Tastefully Offensive
Arlo Guthrie got arrested in 1965, and he wrote a little song about it. One of the reasons that the song has lasted so long is that it happened on Thanksgiving, so that "Alice's Restaurant" has become classic for a holiday that has a dearth of songs. Guthrie wrote "Alice's Restaurant" soon after the events happened, and added more context until the song eventually took up a half-hour of his live show.
But the song’s first true breakthrough, one that commemorates a second golden anniversary, was “Alice’s” February 1967 radio debut on New York City’s WBAI-FM. Said Arlo: “I’d been a big fan of WBAI. I’d been to their studios a few times and one night they asked me to perform live. I had no idea they were taping it, although it wouldn’t have stopped me from performing. I loved those guys.”
By May, the non-profit WBAI was receiving so many requests to play ‘Alice,’ it became a fund-raising gimmick. “WBAI…would play it after they’d been pledged enough money,” recalled Guthrie, then quipped: “Eventually they were playing it so often, they took pledges to stop playing it, and…raised even more money.”
For Thanksgiving, Buzzfeed traditionally asks the staff at its UK office to try labeling a map of the United States with the state names, with often funny results. But apparently they are is getting too good at it, so this year, they solicited non-American readers to try it. The best (or funniest) have been posted today. Now, keep in mind that these were submitted by people who thought they knew something about the US, and they do, but the sheer number of states can become overwhelming for anyone who doesn't live here. SulliDowry, from China, did the map above, and although he knew there was a state that produced potatoes, he doesn't really know which one. Strnknd from Switzerland did this one.
Several labeled Kentucky as KFC, which is better than previous maps that did not label it at all. And everyone knows Florida -either from Disney World or the news. Check out the rest of the maps here.
The Awl is doing a series of posts on spices called The Anthology of Underrated Herbs. Yes, I'm sure they know spices and herbs are different things. Fran Hoepfner's contribution is paprika, specifically the custom of putting it on cottage cheese, which her parents do. Her entire interview with them about it is in the post.
Me: The Awl is doing a series of pieces on spices, and the best I could come up with, because we’re not an aggressively spice-heavy family, is that you both do a thing where you eat cottage cheese with paprika on it. I wanna know why the heck that is.
Mom: I think the cottage cheese with paprika is me. It’s my twist on it. Your dad would always season deviled eggs with a pinch of paprika.
Me: Right…
Mom: Originally, I thought it was Dad who put it on cottage cheese
Me: Okay…
Mom: I’m saying, somehow Dad got the paprika on the table for me to see it because, as you said, we don’t use a lot of spices. There was no paprika in the house when I was growing up, so Dad definitely brought that into the marriage.
By the end, all I could think of was how sad that people can actually grow up in America without spices. Hoepfner's mom didn't even have salt and pepper on the table when she was child. The only reason they have paprika now was because their son brought some back from a trip to Hungary. How important were spices in your family? I use paprika on quite a few dishes, but I like my cottage cheese with salt, pepper, oregano, and parsley, and maybe a little grated parmesan. Read the rest of the amusing interview at The Awl.
(Image credit: The National Dairy and Food Bureau of Chicago via Cardboard America)
The award-winning 1997 animated film Anastasia (not the be confused with the 1956 version) was based very loosely on the fall of Russia's last royal family and the subsequent claim by Anna Anderson that she was the lost Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, one of Tsar's four daughters. The movie wasn't trying to be historically accurate, what with the supernatural elements and all, but for many young adults, Anastasia is what they know about the historical events. You know better, but maybe you don't know the details that went into making Anastasia.
It is well-known that Meg Ryan voices the main character in this film. However, she took some persuading to accept the job. She had just finished filming ‘Sleeping in Seattle’ and was dubious about getting involved with Anastasia due to the dark nature of some aspects of the storyline. The producers persuaded her by taking a clip of her acting in ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ and transforming it into an animation.
The animators had the character, Rasputin, fall through an iced river. This was a nod to how the real Rasputin was wrapped in cloth before being thrown into a river when he died in 1916.
Selecting a title for your book is fraught with danger. It should be short and intriguing, but often ends up telling you little about the actual subject matter. For that, you need a subtitle. Snide Octopus is an Instagram account that takes book titles right out of the library and subtitles them to make you laugh.
