Have you ever wanted to emulate the look of saggy jeans while also keeping them securely in place? Then maybe the new Natasha Zinko High Waist Double Jeans are for you! They have wide legs, no hem, contrasting side stripes, and two zippers. And they are dry-clean only.
Aren't they adorable? No, they are weird and not at all flattering. But then again, it doesn't matter what you think of the look. They cost $695 and they're sold out, the double whammy of conspicuous consumption, so these jeans are guaranteed to be popular among the trendy set. -via Boing Boing
Our friends at The Annals of Improbable Research have bestowed the annual Ig Nobel Prizes upon deserving scientists who caught our imagination with their fascinating but weird research. The 2017 Ig Nobel Award ceremony has just concluded at Harvard University's Sanders Theater. The winners include a study on whether twins can tell themselves apart, why old men have big ears, and if cats can be both a liquid and a solid. Continue reading for the complete list of winners.
My school took field trips to many factories when I was young. The only two I can recall now are the cheese factory and American Greetings, both because of the smell. The cheese factory turned us all off cheese for a few weeks. American Greetings made scented candles, cinnamon at the time, and the fumes burned our eyes and made our noses run. The workers were used to it. Neither of those experiences compare to a visit to a factory that makes surströmming, or fermented herring.
Some people are confused, others just want to be difficult. This comic from Megacynics could have ended after the second panel, but they had to get some digs into each other. In case you don't get "it," It is a movie. First base refers to the classic Abbot and Costello bit about baseball players with odd names, best known as "Who's on first?"
Maru the Japanese Scottish fold is ten years old, but he still loves his boxes, no matter what they are made of. His roommate Hana is all grown up, and still taking lessons from Maru. In this video, Maru confronts a see-through box, or what we'd call an aquarium.
We know that technological breakthroughs only come after a series of failures. The main thing is that you learn from your failures and move on. Elon Musk's company SpaceX has had its share of spectacular failures, every one of which was highly publicized and enshrined on YouTube. That's the way of the world today.
Since there's no reason to shy away from their failures, even if they could, SpaceX has released a compilation of their duds, crashes, and explosions on the way to achieving private space flight. Just imagine how many millions of dollars went into these clips. Look closely, and you'll see that their successes are included, too. -via Gizmodo
Jessica Lewis planned to bug out of her apartment and head to her parents' home in Atlanta before Hurricane Irma hit. She asked permission to bring her dog Luna to Dr. Kennedy's class on Thursday, so she could leave straight from there. Buttering up the professor didn't work.
So Luna went to a political science class, and yes, she was a good girl. A dog in the class had to be good for students axious about the hurricane.
“She was pretty well-behaved in class, She went straight to whoever was talking for the most part, like if someone was answering or asking a question. Just walked around and got pets from everyone and made friends. The really funny part was that every time the professor stopped and asked if anyone had questions or comments, she whined loudly like she was responding. It was hilarious.”
The latest comic from Grant Snider at Incidental Comics reminds us to look for the common things that have a hint of the extraordinary. Beauty is found where you look for it, when you look without preconceived notions of what you will find.
The 1979 film The Warriors took place in New York City during a time when New York had a reputation as a crime-infested wasteland filled with garbage and graffiti. It never was as bad as portrayed in the media, and the city is different now, but the movie lives on. To younger viewers, it seems to be set in a post-apocalyptic future, while old-timers know the movie, and the book it's based on, are relics of their era. If you are a fan of the movie, you might want to learn some trivia about the making of The Warriors.
5. It had a comic book series that filled in plot points.
As of now the comic is online and should be easy to find, but it occurs after the events of the movie. The gang attempts to free Ajax and the individual members continue to develop after returning to Coney.
4. Robert DeNiro was supposed to have a part.
It’s not really certain why he was never cast in the role of Cowboy but the rumors are that he simply passed on it or that the director didn’t want him there. In truth it would have given the film the star power it needed.
If you have a high school senior in your home, get ready for lots of walking around campuses, trying to discern what makes this school different from the one you saw last week. Your child knows there's no way they're ever going to attend this school because it's close enough for their parents to drive to. However, it's close enough to drive to, and they get an excused day off from from school for taking the tour. This would be better titled as a "generic" college tour rather than an "honest" tour, but the difference is negligible.
The tour is led by a student on a work study program, and they do their best because they don't want to go back to washing dishes in the cafeteria. Your kid runs into a student they barely knew from high school, and you don't see them again for hours. Meanwhile, you're lucky to see one dorm room, since no one volunteers for theirs to be seen. Soon, you realize that it doesn't matter a bit what the school looks like, only whether they will give your kid financial aid. After two or three of these tours, you just send your kid (and all their friends) off to go see a campus on their own. They just wanted a day away from school anyway. -via College Humor
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Ernest Borgnine was one of those rarities, an actor who not only starred in a classic TV series McHale's Navy but was also a huge (and Oscar-winning) movie star. Ernest passed on at the ripe old age of 95 (he looked about 65) on July 8th, 2012.
As an actor, Ernest gave legendary and brilliant performances in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), From Here to Eternity (1953), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969), along with dozens of others.
Although he specialized in playing bad guys in his early films, he gained true movie immortality by playing a shy, withdrawn butcher in Marty (1955), a true classic and one of the most intimate films to ever win an Academy Award. Ernest himself earned his one and only Academy Award for Best Actor as the title character in Marty.
He also had a very successful career on television, starring in McHale's Navy (1962-1966), as well as Airwolf, besides making many great guest appearances in such series as Get Smart, The Simpsons and Magnum P.I.
Ernest was beloved far and wide in show business, a well-known "good guy", a genuinely nice, decent man. Okay, let's take a look at a few facts you may not have known about the great Mr. Ernest Borgnine...
1. Ernest was perfectly cast as the star of McHale's Navy, as he had served 10 years in the U.S. Navy. He served on the destroyer USS Lamberton. He earned several decorations for his distinguished service, including the Navy Good Conduct Medal, the World War II victory medal and the American Defense Service Medal.
2. One of Ernest's early jobs was sweeping up the clipped hair from the floor in a barber shop.
3. Ernest claimed the P.T. boat used in McHale's Navy was owned by Howard Hughes.
Norm Krumpe had the digital personal assistant Alexa pick a number between one and a million. He only needed two guesses to get it right. Artificial intelligence has a way to go before it takes over the world. Someone remarked that it was like playing hide and seek with a giggling toddler. -via reddit
In 1952, Mike Murphy ran for student council secretary. The 12-year-old handed out campaign cards, which at the time had to be printed at a print shop, and it wasn't cheap. I recall asking about business cards for my dad in the 1970s, and the printer said the first one would be $50! I almost fainted, but then he said every one after that was only a penny. Anyway, no sixth-grader had ever campaigned with printed materials before, so Murphy made an full and honest disclosure of his finances. Which made the local paper. However, you might notice that he never explained where he got the money for the cards. We don't know if he later went into politics as an adult. -via Weird Universe
We know that working too many hours on too little sleep can be dangerous. Teaching hospitals have the latest technology and the most up-to-date facilities, but they are also staffed by residents in training who may be working long swing shifts and haven't had a good night's sleep in days. Third shift factory workers have more accidents than their daytime counterparts, even when their shifts never change. There's something in our bodies that craves a regular amount of sleep during nighttime hours, even when modern life encourages us to fight against the clock to squeeze more into a 24-hour day. Scientists, called chronobiologists, at the University of California at San Diego's Center for Circadian Biology are studying how time affects our bodies and our health.
All across the UCSD campus, members of the Center for Circadian Biology—which does not have its own building— are researching these timekeeping functions. Among their findings: Genes that run our circadian rhythms are linked to metabolism and its control networks. Mess with one and you mess with the other. For example, eat too late in the evening, when your metabolic defenses have powered down, and your chances of growing obese balloon. In turn, that fat can also invade your liver and thus increase your likelihood of inflammation and cancer.
Our mental health is also at risk. Researchers have found that 70 percent of people with disorders that keep them from sleeping at the usual time—possibly due to a genetic abnormality—suffer from conditions like severe depression or anxiety. In fact, nearly two-thirds of bipolar sufferers report abnormal sleep cycles.
Already, doctors treating cancer have used chronobiology’s findings to better plan their treatments. For example, undergoing chemotherapy later in the day increases patients’ chances of avoiding nausea because stomach linings better repair themselves at that time.
Alexander Hamilton had a nice house called the Grange built for his family in the countryside of Manhattan Island in 1802. He was only there two years before he was killed by Aaron Burr. But the house remained, and the city grew up around it. Eventually the Grange was hemmed in by trees, apartment buildings, and a church next door that built a stone porch partially across the front yard of the Grange. The National Park Service took possession of the house in 1962, but how do you move a historical home when it's blocked in on all sides? It took more than 40 years to put a plan into place. Mike Brovont of Wolfe House & Building Movers described the process.
The church’s stone porch was problem one. “And we couldn’t go in from the back because of trees,” Brovont says. Wolfe’s plan was to come at the problem vertically, raising the house off its foundation 38 feet in the air to clear the obstruction of the porch. “This way, we could keep it intact.”
Over a period of three weeks in May and June 2008, Wolfe employees performed a structural levitation act. The Grange—which weighs roughly 300 tons—was raised in stages.
