As the U.S. National Park Service turns 100 years old, we are learning more and more about the parks, like the questions over crime jurisdiction in Yellowstone and how it became the first National Park. Now let’s learn something about the park rangers who work in our national parks.  

9. THE FIELD IS HIGHLY COMPETITIVE.

Even those who put in the hard work to become a ranger might not get a job or get placed where they want to be. According to Gifford, “There is so much competition for every single position within the agency. One of my coworkers applied to 90 different jobs before getting on with us.”

As far as compensation goes, it varies quite a bit based on the location and scope of the park, the position itself, and the employee's education history. Most NPS jobs—like other government jobs—have their pay based on the General Schedule pay scale [PDF]. But while most on the GS pay scale are full-time workers, many parks employees are seasonal, meaning they have to find work in other areas during the off-season. For a few specific examples of jobs (and their pay brackets) check out the USAJOBS site; some positions are hourly while others are salaried.

10. A PARK RANGER DOESN’T NECESSARILY WORK FOR THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE.

Of course, not every park with a ranger falls under the umbrella of the NPS. There’s also the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the National Wildlife Refuge System, and other state agencies that employ the term “park ranger.” It might seem like a small distinction, but the agencies have different approaches and missions, which means their rangers can have different roles and responsibilities. For example, while national parks emphasize preservation and work under the Department of Interior, the US Forest Service is under the Department of Agriculture and is focused on both preservation and uses—such as lumber, cattle grazing, and mining.

Read more about the life of a park ranger at mental_floss.

In 1870, a group of prominent citizens of the Montana Territory set out on an expedition to map the area known as the Yellowstone country. The Washburn Expedition hoped to confirm or disavow the tall tales of geysers, boiling lakes, and other wonders. Among their number was one Truman Everts, who was very nearsighted and totally unsuited for a wilderness experdition.    

A desk-jockey all his life, Everts had run the Montana Territory’s Internal Revenue department in Helena for the past five years. The Grant administration wanted its own man collecting taxes in Montana, though, and by the summer of 1870, the taxman had been unemployed for seven months. Enamored with the idea of exploring the unknown with Montana’s fellow leading citizens, the middle-aged widower enthusiastically joined the Washburn Expedition. The jaunt into the unknown was to be “sort of a between-jobs vacation for him,” Whittlesey says. Little did Everts know his holiday would become a comic wilderness odyssey—think The Revenant meets National Lampoon’s Vacation—of grit, luck, and utter incompetence that would, against all odds, help lead to the creation of the nation’s first national park.

The first thing Everts did was fall behind the group and become lost. Then his horse ran away with his supplies. The rest of the expedition looked for him for a week, then decided he must have frozen to death. With neither tools nor supplies, Everts continued the best he could. When a prospector found him 37 days later, Everts weighed only 50 pounds. The story of his terrifying time alone in the wilderness, strangely, aided the push to make Yellowstone the United States’ first national park in 1872. Read about Everts’ ordeal at Outside.  

(Image credit: Erin Wilson)

Raymond Mazzarella of Pittston Township, Pennsylvania, was upset that his neighbor’s tree was dripping sap on Mazzarella’s car. Saturday afternoon, he took a chainsaw and cut through the tree’s 36-inch trunk. The tree fell on Mazzarella’s apartment building, rendering it uninhabitable and leaving five people homeless.

Police said Mazzarella was being checked out at a hospital. Upon his release Monday afternoon, a neighbor saw Mazzarella trespassing near the apartment house and called police. When the neighbor confronted him, Mazzarella punched him. The neighbor pulled out a stun gun to protect himself. Mazzarella then started hitting him with a baseball bat.

Mazzarella is charged with assault and harassment and is locked up in the Luzerne County jail on $10,000 bail.

The Red Cross is providing the other apartment residents with temporary housing. -via Arbroath

An animation of Dragonite and Charizard dancing has Twitter users trying to one-up each other with the music they add.

@flashboy @elenacresci ye of little faith tom pic.twitter.com/ZvUBp3F1E3

— Ollie Cole (@ProducerOllie) August 25, 2016

Ashley Feinberg has a roundup of the Pokémon dancers set to various songs (post title contains NSFW language). But it doesn’t contain “All Star” by Smash Mouth. -via Metafilter

BTW: Enlarging this video caused Sandyra's screen to freeze. Besides, it looks better small size.

Once you’ve learned to scuba dive and invested in the necessary equipment, you’ll certainly want to explore the undersea world. The rest of us can just dream of seeing some of the most beautiful undersea sights around the globe. Check out some destinations for scuba divers and what they have to offer. Somewhere in the middle of the list is Bikini Atoll.

Many know Bikini Atoll as the site of nuclear weapons testing in the mid 1900s, but now it’s a popular spot for those who want to explore wrecks while deep water scuba diving. The area is a veritable graveyard of different ships that you can swim around, including naval ships from World War II. The waters are clear enough to search what’s below, and even today those who dive there commonly find well preserved historical artifacts and other items.

Read the rest at Money, Inc.

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A Brazilian musician sings with his parrot, who knows the songs and even harmonizes in places! I’d like to know how long they’ve been making music together for the bird to be such a good performer. -via Digg

So you got a tattoo, and it isn’t right. The artist wasn’t as good as you thought they were, you changed your mind about the design, or it started to fade over time. You could get expensive and painful laser treatments, or you could find a much better tattoo artist and do a cover-up design. Buzzfeed asked readers to submit pictures of their regrettable tattoos and the cover-ups. Some are just plain awesome. The tattoo shown here has an intermediate image that shows where the old one is under the cover-up, but many other original tats are impossible to find in the “after” pictures. See 24 “before and after” pictures of tattoo cover-ups.

Madeleine L'Engle's time-hopping heroine transported sci-fi into a new dimension.

(Image credit: Byron Eggenschwiler)

Madeleine L'Engle sat in front of her typewriter in the Tower, her private workspace in her family’s isolated, 200-year-old Connecticut farmhouse. It was her 40th birthday—November 29, 1958—and she was at a crossroads. Though she had published five novels since her mid-twenties, she was far from a household name, and lately she was having trouble selling her work. She considered her thirties a “total failure” professionally. “Every rejection slip—and you could paper walls with my rejection slips—was like the rejection of me, myself, and certainly of my amour-propre,” she wrote. While her career floundered, her husband had temporarily given up his acting career and started running the local general store.

Now, her latest manuscript, The Lost Innocent, was out with a publisher. Two editors were enthusiastic, another “hated it,” and a fourth was still to be heard from. At midday, her husband called. He had gotten the mail. The book had been rejected.

The blow felt like “an obvious sign from heaven,” she wrote, “an unmistakable command: Stop this foolishness and learn to make cherry pie.” L’Engle covered her typewriter, vowed to abandon it forever, and walked around the room, sobbing.

Then, suddenly, she stopped crying. In her despair, she realized she was already considering turning this moment into another book—one about failure. She would write. She had to write. Even if she never had another work published. “It was not up to me to say I would stop, because I could not,” she wrote. And the novel that lay around the corner was about something far greater than failure.

Forget trojans, lions, or bulldogs. Nothing’s more intimidating than a mascot capable of giving you food poisoning.

1. FIGHTING PICKLE

When the University of North carolina School of the Arts needed a name for its 1972 intramural team, they honored pickles. The school still lacks an athletic program. Or as Chancellor JohnMauceri said in 2012, "The fighting pickles are peerless and remain undefeated."

2. FIGHTING OKRA

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Delta State University’s official team name is the “Statesmen,” but when students realized that a politician didn’t stir fear in opponents, they chose vegetable meanus, “a large, prickly, bipedal vegetable with an inherently bad temperament.”

3. KERNEL COBB

In the spring of 1965, dentist John Riley slipped LSD into after dinner tea for John Lennon, George Harrison, and their wives Cynthia and Patti. John Lennon later recalled the experience in a radio interview, which became the narration for this animation.

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Rolling Stone has some thoughts from the others who were present, and the story of what happened afterward. John and George introduced LSD to Ringo that summer, but Paul resisted until the next year. That fact created some problems in the group as they worked on their next album, Revolver. -via Uproxx

The subject of crossing the equator came up in a discussion of the Rio Olympics, and we all slightly recalled that you had to go through some kind of ritual, but no one could recall what they heard it was. We figured it varied by the organization you were with. Ben Marks went through that experience recently on a French research vessel and lived to tell about it. Then he did more research on such rituals, which are really a form of hazing. Marks talked to Dr. Simon Bronner of Penn State University, author of Crossing the Line: Violence, Play, and Drama in Naval Equator Traditions.

“Well, I can give you a manifest reason and a latent reason for the practice,” Bronner begins, referring to the obvious and subconscious justifications for the tradition. “The manifest reason is around the idea that the equator itself is some kind of a liminal twilight zone, if you will, because its latitude is 0, 0, 0. There is a certain religio-magical connotation to the equator, so the ceremony is a way to indicate that one is traveling not only through space but also time, through some kind of a liminal reversal zone.”

For the record, Pascal never mentioned anything about liminal reversal zones when he was binding my wrists, smashing raw eggs on my head and face, or offering me a sip of water after I’d been standing in the sun for an hour, only to find out that it was seawater. After I realized what I was about to swallow, I spat the stuff in his face, which elicited from Pascal a loud, staccato laugh, and earned me another wink.

“Latently,” Bronner continues, “there is a lot of tension when you’re on a ship because you’re in this master-servant role. On a ship, the idea of discipline and obedience is much more emphasized than in other branches of the armed forces because a ship is a danger zone—discipline and obedience can save lives. So, I think the ceremony is partly a release from all that. Often the officers who are crossing the equator for the first time are treated the harshest. But there is a sense among the participants that there is license to do many of the ceremony’s activities within the framework of play that you couldn’t do anywhere else. The activities serve as an equalizer and ice breaker, especially in institutions, organizations, or groups whose members are strangers to one another.”

Collectors Weekly has a history of equator crossing rituals, and a blow-by-blow description of Marks’ two-hour ordeal -with pictures.

Comedian and prankster Stuart Edge (previously at Neatorama) bought a couple of big bears from Costco and used one as a bear costume. That’s a great opportunity to go out and offer free bear hugs!

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But that’s not all. Edge also shows off some moves at a skate park, which can’t be easy wearing a plush bear. At least when he falls, he has plenty of padding! -via Tastefully Offensive 

It might seem a little premature to be ranking the films of the century, but there’s nothing wrong with ranking the films of the past 16 years. A list at BBC Culture used the input of 177 movie critics from 36 countries. Yes, they included movies from 2000, although some will argue whether that year is in the 21st century. At the top of the list:

10. No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
9. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
8. Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000)
7. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
5. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)
4. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
3. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
2. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

Check out the entire list of 100 movies and how the list was compiled at BBC Culture. If you’re like me, you might want to save the list for future use when you have time on a weekend, or for when you retire.  

 

Depending on your age, you might recall Betty White from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Golden Girls, or Hot in Cleveland. However, the 94-year-old actress had a long list of television credits before any of those shows. She was cast in an experimental TV show in 1939! Yes, there was television back then, although very few people had receivers before the postwar boom. Over the years, Betty White has been involved in talk shows, game shows, and dramas that made her a fan favorite and brought her seven Emmy Awards. Let’s learn more about Betty White.  

1. She has a Guinness World Record

In 2014, when the record keeping show was being auditioned, Betty White received a title for the Longest TV Career for a Female Entertainer. The record showed seventy four years+ in show biz. The year before, the title for the Longest TV Career for a Male Entertainer had been given to Bruce Forsyth, who’d been a long time British Television host. Since the two both started their careers in ’39, they would be competing for the same title, were it not for the gender disparity.

12. She is not a big fan of reality TV

Betty White has made it clear that she does not like reality TV. Although she has not clarified why, most people assume it’s her history in creating and writing conflicts with how random people with virtually no talent gain fame by simply recording their lives and frequently acting like morons. Surprisingly, Betty White hosts a kind of reality television show known as Betty White’s Off Their Rockers in which old people play pranks on young guys.

There’s a lot more about Betty White to learn at Money Inc.

(Image credit: Alan Light)

In the past few years, filmmakers have set up shop in Detroit to film horror flicks. Where else can you find huge empty buildings, run-down homes you can buy for a pittance, and overgrown fields? Justine Smith looks at how several movies used and treated the city in scary movies: Lost River, Don’t Breathe, It Follows, and Only Lovers Left Alive. The influx of business has to be good for the city, but its image may suffer from being portrayed as a continually terrifying place. -via The A.V. Club