Miss Cellania's Blog Posts

Tattoo Artist Covers Up Racist Tats For Free

Dave Cutlip of Southside Tattoo Parlor in Baltimore has a plan for people who want to start a new life. He will give you a tattoo to cover up an old racist or gang-related tat for free! Cutlip and his wife Beth just want to do some good, but when word got around, everyone wanted to get in on the act.

(YouTube link)

Now Dave and Beth are launching a non-profit organization called Redemption Ink to help folks get beyond the tattoos they now regret. They are recruiting tattoo artists in other areas to provide the same service, and using donated funds to purchase laser removal for those who require more than a cover up. -via reddit  


Red Panda Triplets

Symbio Wildlife Park in New South Wales, Australia, has a set of red panda triplets: Mohan, Raj, and Phinju. They were born on Christmas Eve, and are just old enough now to go exploring outside their den. Lucky for us, the moment was captured on video. You can tell they are excited by the way they are tripping over each other!  

(YouTube link)

Their mother Kesari is right behind them, though, to make sure everything goes alright. -via Tastefully Offensive


MST3K Does Stranger Things

Well, of course MST3K does stranger things, stranger than most other shows, every time we watch it. Oh, but in this promo, the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 watches the Netflix TV series Stranger Things! That show is a definite turn from the quality of the movies Jonah and the bots are used to, but they still have plenty to say about what's directly in front of them.   

(YouTube link)

Any production that has sequences without dialogue is just asking for the MST3K treatment. The new version of MST3K is now available on Netflix, and Stranger Things will return for season two on October 31. -via Geeks Are Sexy  


The New Star Wars Theme Parks will be Fully Immersive

Two new Star Wars-themed parks will open at Walt Disney World in 2019. We don't know how much tickets will cost by then, but if you plan to go, you better get your story straight first. The places you go and the things you do will have consequences. Choose wisely.

During a panel at Star Wars Celebration in Orlando this weekend, it was revealed that the fully immersive theme park areas will allow visitors to develop a reputation. That’s right. If you ride the attraction that pits the First Order vs. the Resistance, the side you pick will have ramifications throughout the park. Fly the Millennium Falcon in another ride and, depending on how well you do, maybe a Bounty Hunter will start hunting you. You may be asked to do tasks for one side or the other in a bar and, whether you choose to do it or not, could affect your park experiences. The whole point is to immerse the viewer in Star Wars in a way they’ve never felt before.

We don't yet know exactly how these steps will be tracked. It certainly sounds like extreme surveillance, albeit with consent. You can learn more about the Star Wars theme parks and see the Star Wars Celebration panel about it at io9.  -via Uproxx


The Soviets Made A Real Doomsday Device In The '80s And The Russians Still Have It Today

During the Cold War, the world went MAD, which means "mutually assured destruction." The concept meant that if your nukes were deployed at my country, ours would automatically be deployed at yours. The technology developed for this fatalistic deterrence system is still around today, as far as we know. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union developed a "doomsday device" they called Система «Периметр», or Perimeter System. It came to be known as Dead Hand. But it was a state secret- the rest of the world didn't even know about Dead Hand until 1993, after the fall of the Soviet Union. What kind of deterrence is that?

If you want a doomsday device to function as a way to frighten would-be attackers into not attacking you, they have to know the device exists. Secrecy renders the whole point moot. That is, unless the purpose of the device is not as clear as it would seem.

Dead Hand, it turns out, may not have been primarily a deterrent against the Americans launching a nuclear attack against the Soviets, but rather was a Soviet-built safeguard to prevent themselves from launching a nuclear attack unnecessarily.

Read how Dead Hand worked (or works) at Foxtrot Alpha. -via Metafilter  


12 Interesting Facts About the Movie Inception

The 2010 Christopher Nolan film Inception has people still discussing its concept seven years later. And like many complicated movies, there are a lot of facts behind it that only come out after the fact. For instance, the special effects that went into it aren't nearly as complicated as we imagined when we saw the finished product. Learn some things you didn't know about Inception in a trivia list at TVOM.


The U.S. Military has a Private Resort at Disney World

The Department of Defense has quite a few Armed Forces Recreation Centers, but there's only one in the continental U.S. The resort called Shades of Green is in the middle of Walt Disney World in Orlando. Disney leases the land to the military, and the Armed Forces owns the buildings.

Like other Armed Forces Recreation resorts worldwide, Shades of Green exists to give American troops and their families a place to enjoy rest and relaxation within the military community. The setting is 27 acres nestled between two PGA championship golf courses. The resort features a lodge-like clubhouse, heated pools and water slides, tennis courts, a poolside sports bar, video arcade, fitness facility, spa (offering makeovers for would-be princesses and pirates), fine and family dining, wedding facilities and indoor parking. The feeling is expansive, family oriented and carefree, and the setting is tropical, with rooms featuring balconies or patios with sweeping views of -- as the name implies – lots of green.

Active military and veterans can take their families to Disney World and stay at Shades of Green for less than comparable rooms at other Disney hotels, with the lowest rates going to the lowest ranks. And vacationers make friends there, because they all have something in common. Read more about Shades of Green, the military resort at Disney World, at Stars and Stripes. -via Gorilla Mask


The Hatfields and the McCoys

The following article is from the book Uncle John's True Crime: A Classic Collection of Crooks, Cops, and Capers.

The Hatfield clan in 1897.

The facts about one of the most famous feuds in U.S. history.

The Contestants: Neighboring clans living on opposite sides of a stream that marked the border between West Virginia and Kentucky. The Hatfields, headed by Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield, lived on the West Virginia side. The McCoys, whose patriarch was Randolph “Ole Ran’l” McCoy, lived on the Kentucky side.

How the Feud Started: There was already animosity between the two clans by 1878. For one thing, during the Civil War, the Hatfields sided with the Confederacy, and the McCoys sided with the Union. But in 1878 Ole Ran’l sued Floyd Hatfield for stealing a hog —a serious offense in a farm-based economy— and McCoy lost. In 1880 relations worsened when McCoy’s daughter Rose Anne became pregnant by Devil Anse’s son Johnse and went across the river to live —unmarried— with the Hatfields.

Continue reading

The Real Zorro?

The following article is from the book Uncle John's True Crime: A Classic Collection of Crooks, Cops, and Capers.

Every cultural legend has to start someplace, even if it’s from just a kernel of truth, expanded and embellished until it bears no resemblance to the original. Here’s the possible origin of Zorro, the “bold renegade” who “carved a Z with his blade.”

BACKGROUND

Pulp fiction writer Johnston McCulley created the swashbuckling character Zorro for a tale called “The Curse of Capistrano” that appeared in All-Story Weekly magazine in 1919. Literary historians believe McCulley based him on a number of characters, most of them fictional... and at least one real human being. It turns out that the story of the real man’s life was just as unusual—and probably every bit as embellished—as Zorro’s.

THE MAN

Not long after gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in California in 1848, a young Mexican man named Joaquin Murrieta came to California with his wife, Rosa Feliz, and her brothers Claudio, Reyes, and Jesus. They hoped to strike it rich in the gold fields, but none of them did; the closest any of them got was when Claudio was arrested for stealing another miner’s gold.

In 1850 Claudio escaped from jail and led his brothers and Murrieta in what became one of the most violent bandit gangs ever to terrorize the California gold country. The group was known to raid isolated ranches, but they preferred to rob lone travelers and Chinese miners (they thought the Chinese were less likely to be armed than whites or Mexicans). The gang murdered most of its victims after robbing them, to ensure that there were no witnesses.

The law began to catch up with the gang in September 1851, when Claudio was killed in a shootout following a robbery in Monterey County. Murrieta happened to be in Los Angeles at the time, and when Claudio died he assumed control of the gang. Not long afterward the bandits made the mistake of killing Joshua Bean, a major general in the militia. Murrieta then compounded the error by abandoning Reyes to his fate—Reyes was arrested for Bean’s murder and hanged.

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The COPS Story

The following article is from the book Uncle John's True Crime: A Classic Collection of Crooks, Cops, and Capers.

(Image credit: COPS via Facebook)

COPS has been a Saturday night TV staple for so long -28 years now- that it’s easy to forget what a groundbreaking show it was when it debuted in 1989.

FIRST-PERSON PERSPECTIVE

In the early 1980s, an aspiring filmmaker named John Langley began work on Cocaine Blues, a documentary about the crack cocaine epidemic sweeping the country. As part of the project, he filmed law-enforcement operations, including drug busts and police raids.

At first Langley obtained the footage as an objective bystander, but that ended when an officer invited him to suit up in tactical gear and follow the police as they moved in. For the first time, Langley understood the stress and danger (and the adrenaline rush) that police experience daily. And the footage he shot during the raid was some of the most compelling he’d ever seen. He thought it might be possible to build an entire show around it.

KEEPING IT REAL

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Beware the Bunny

This Easter bunny looks as if he is just waiting for the right moment to rip your guts out. And it's a bakery cake! They must have been in a real hurry to turn this one out. In a post she calls The Great Easter Fleecing, Jen at Cake Wrecks has a gallery of unfortunate cakes that feature the Easter bunny or a lamb. All hideous.


New Pistol Shrimp Species Named After Pink Floyd

A team of scientists from universities in the UK, the US, and Brazil have described a new species of pistol shrimp in the journal Zootaxa. They named it after their favorite band, because it resembles them in a couple of ways.

Researchers have named a sonically super-powered shrimp after Pink Floyd, because of its bright colour and pistol-quick ability to blast enemies with sound.

The newly-discovered species of pistol shrimp, dubbed Synalpheus pinkfloydi, uses a big, bright-pink claw to shoot shockwaves at its foes, in its habitat off the Pacific coast of Panama.

Pistol shrimp are known for their ability to stun prey with a sonic blast by snapping their claws, which also produces a heat wave. Wouldn't you have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the international group of scientists discussed their rational for naming the species Synalpheus pinkfloydi? Read more about the research at CTV News. -via Dave Barry

(Image credit: Arthur Anker/Universidade Federal de Goiás)


The Real Danger in Being a Redshirt

It's common knowledge that you don't want to wear a red shirt if you are serving under Captain Kirk in Starfleet. Redshirts are usually security officers who accompany an away team down to a new planet, and they often get killed right off the bat. Earlier research shows that indeed, more red shirts were killed during the series than crew members wearing any other kind of uniform. But mathematician James Grime looked at the numbers in a different way. He gave a lecture called "Star Trek: The Math of Khan" at the Museum of Mathematics in New York, in which he used the statistics of the entire Enterprise crew, not just those who appeared on the original series, and not just those who died. He asserts that the idea that you are more likely to be killed if you are a redshirt is not true.

That claim, in fact, is false — more "redshirts" died on-screen than any other crew type (10 gold-shirted, which are command personnel; eight blue-shirted, who are scientists; and 25 red-shirted, Grime said), but that calculation fails to take into account that there are far more redshirts on the ship to start with than any other crew type.

In other words, we're looking at the probability that you are a redshirt if you die (58 percent) — what we want to know is the probability that you die if you're a redshirt, Grime said.

Grime used the "Star Trek" technical manual to find out how many of each crew type there were, which painted a different picture: out of 239 redshirts, 25 died, which is 10 percent. Out of 55 goldshirts, 10 died, which is 18 percent! So you are more likely to die as a goldshirt, Grime said.

It appears we've been led astray by the fact that the TV series only followed the top command of the Enterprise- those who appeared on the bridge. Of course, in the 1960s, the idea that other things went on in a fictional universe that didn't appear on camera was absurd. Grimes also covered Vulcan reproduction, computer paradoxes, and the Drake Equation. Read about Star Trek Math at Space.com. -via the A.V. Club


17 Hilarious Subtitles That Make a Scene So Much Better

If you don't need subtitles to follow sound or translate a language, you rarely watch TV with them on. But those who do sometimes stumble upon out-of-context comedy treasure. Sometimes it's because of a bad translation, sometimes it's due to the titler trying to describe sound effects or something going on audibly off-camera (or even on-camera, which is even funnier), and sometimes they produce a double entendre.

The subreddit r/sadlygokarts takes ongoing submissions of these treasures. Dorkly collected some of the best in a gallery for your viewing pleasure.


Bearded Dragon Sworn in as Police Officer

The Avondale, Arizona, Police Department announced the acquisition of their new drug-sniffing bearded dragon -on April Fools Day in 2016. The drug-sniffing part was a joke, but the bearded dragon is real. His name is Iroh, and he's been the police department's mascot since then.

“Iroh has turned out to be a valuable member of the Avondale Police family,” according to a Facebook post on Feb. 15. “His skill set is so extensive that we have cross trained him in many areas.”

This week, Iroh was promoted from mascot to police officer. Get the whole story of Iroh and the cops who love him at AZ Family.  -via Fark

(Image credit: Avondale AZ Police Department)


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