Snoop Dogg and his family competed against Sugar Ray Leonard and his family on a recent episode of celebrity Family Feud. Snoop was the second contestant in the fast money round.
“You’re about to be on YouTube.” Indeed. Steve Harvey strung this out for maximum comedy, even though we all knew how it would turn out in the end. They included the question about what happens in April expecting him the say “4/20”, but he knew better. -via Viral Viral Videos
Many famous literary stars of the past knew each other and had close, often lifetime relationships you’d never suspect from just reading their works. You have to wonder if that was because creative and intelligent people tended to flock together, or if literary inspiration rubbed off on people who already knew each other. Perhaps both. Lady Jane Wilde was a poet in Ireland, and enjoyed gathering intellectuals in her home, which included Bram Stoker. She was also the mother of Oscar Wilde.
This love triangle started in Dublin in 1875, when both young men fell head-over-heels for a woman named Florence Balcombe. Bram spent that holiday season with the Wilde clan, whose numbers included Oscar. Though the two men weren't super-close, they'd known one another for quite some time. Around that time, Oscar met Flo and they started dating; he described her as "just seventeen with the most perfectly beautiful face I ever saw and not a sixpence of money."
If you don’t already know, you can find out how that relationship turned out at History Buff.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Clint Eastwood is one of the last of the true legends of the world. Respected and admired by movie lovers and fans the world over, Clint is truly one of cinema's immortals. Both as an actor and as a director, Clint has given us dozens of great movies.
The classic spaghetti westerns, Dirty Harry and it's sequels, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino, heck, the guy even did a great "chick flick": The Bridges of Madison County- with Meryl Streep yet (!!!) He turned 86 this year, so let's take a look at a few things you may not know about Mr. Clint Eastwood.
1. He is allergic to horses.
Yes, irony of ironies, isn't it? Clint Eastwood- movies' greatest cowboy since John Wayne- is actually allergic to horses.
2. He's allergic to dogs and cats too.
He does love snakes though. He once had a collection of 13 snakes.
The price of asphalt and concrete has risen much faster than city budgets, so some towns are taking a retro approach to fixing damaged roads. Instead of constantly filling in potholes or repaving, they are grinding up the pavement and making gravel roads. Montpelier, Vermont, started doing it in 2009.
Repaving roads is expensive, so Montpelier instead used its diminishing public works budget to take a step back in time and un-pave the road. Workers hauled out a machine called a “reclaimer” and pulverized the damaged asphalt and smoothed out the road’s exterior. They filled the space between Vermont’s cruddy soil and hardier dirt and gravel up top with a “geotextile”, a hardy fabric that helps with erosion, stability and drainage.
Many other towns have turned to gravel roads to dave money in the years since. While gravel roads aren’t the greatest for vehicles, it beats banging your car over potholes every day. Read more about this trend at Wired. -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user NCDOTcommunications)
Arthur Radebaugh drew a newspaper comic called Closer Than We Think in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. While his art was firmly planted in that era, the ideas were supposed to be of the future. Some of his fantastical predictions have come true, like home computers, self-driving cars, factory farms, flatscreen TV, robotic warehouses, remote jobs, electric cars, and the electronic home library. Other are just silly, like space hospitals, color-changing cars, and the vehicle you see here. The walking machine is for evacuating cities by walking over the clogged roadways in the event of an emergency. And it would scare alien invaders away. See 42 of Radebaugh’s visions at Gizmodo. -via Metafilter
Before there was radio or TV, we used to sit around and laugh at the cat. Then we got movies, TV, and then the internet, and now we sit around and watch other people’s cats do funny cat stuff.
Cats love boxes, and kittens are playful, so a kitten in a box its a double delight! Enjoy this compilation from CrazyFunnyStuff. -via Tastefully Offensive
Let this be a warning to you -martinis will get you drunk very quickly. This olive had certainly had more than enough! It’s just one picture of a collection called 18 Inanimate Objects That Look Completely Wasted at Pleated-Jeans. It's pareidolia that makes you laugh.
The Jefferson County (Colorado) Sheriff’s Department got a call about a bear in a car. The young bear had somehow opened the door, entered the car, and locked himself in. Deputies Tillman and McLaughlin tried to free him, while wondering if his mama were watching.
After some deliberation, they decided the safest and quickest action would be to pop open the hatch to release the bear. The challenge was that none of the doors easily opened due to the bear’s destruction of the inside of the car, including ripping off the door panels.
The hatch door wouldn’t open with the key fob button so Deputy McLaughlin had to manually open it while Deputy Tillman stood nearby with his shotgun just in case.
They eventually got the rear hatch of the car open, and the bear took off. The body-cam video misses quite a bit, but as far as we know, there were no videographers standing around to make an epic production out of the caper. -via Tastefully Offensive
A “nerdcation” is exactly what it sounds like: a vacation for nerds. They are less about relaxation and more about learning something or even becoming part of something fascinating. Your getaway can involve history, adventure, literature, or something completely different that you'll always remember. Of course, you don’t have to be a nerd to participate! John Green tells us about some weird and wonderful vacation ideas in this week’s episode of the mental_floss List Show.
LEGO sets are getting bigger and bigger. Get ready for the Disney Castle set, designed to resemble Cinderella’s Castle at Walt Disney World in Florida. It has 4,080 pieces, including pieces that represent Cinderella’s glass slipper, the Magic Mirror, the rose under glass from Beauty and the Beast, frogs, archery equipment, and even the buckets from “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” It comes with five minifigs: Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, and Tinkerbell. The set will be available September first for $350, and you can see a gallery of closeup pictures at Geekologie.
Empire is a Fox TV show about Luscious Lyon, a hip-hop artist who founded a recording company, and is now the CEO of a diverse corporation. His home has become a focal point of the series, with its opulent but tacky decor and furnishings. The real home where the series is filmed is a mansion outside of Chicago, and it’s got a great story itself.
2. The property has been on the market since 2013, the asking price then was $15.9 million. In 2015 owner Sam Cecola lowered the price to a more affordable $13 million. Cecola is also the owner of the very popular Admiral Theater strip club in Albany Park, Illinois. At one time he also owned the notorious Club Paradise strip club in Las Vegas.
4. Cecola and his wife purchased the property in 2003 for $1.1 million. The house was completed to their exact specifications five years later in 2008. The long building process is said to be directly related to the huge amount of custom woodwork and ornamentation the couple demanded throughout the house. There are 5 luxurious bedrooms, nine bathrooms, and 2 half-baths.
Whether you’re in the market or not, you’ll want to check out the story, details, and pictures of the mansion at Housely.
The medieval history we study is mostly that of the elite people of the time, because they were literate enough to leave records, or powerful enough to hire someone to leave records. We don’t know nearly enough about the commoners, and the vast majority of people were commoners. But a few years ago, a project was begun in England to seek out and record graffiti left on buildings that have survived for several hundred years, particularly churches.
To date, the Norfolk survey has recorded more than 26,000 previously unknown medieval inscriptions. More recent surveys begun in other English counties are revealing similar levels of medieval graffiti. A survey of Norwich Cathedral recently found that the building contained more than 5,000 individual inscriptions. Some of them dated as far back as the 12th century. It has also become clear that the graffiti inscriptions are unlike just about any other kind of source in medieval studies. They are informal. Many of the inscriptions are images rather than text. This means that they could have been made by just about anyone in the Middle Ages, not just princes and priests. In fact, the evidence on the walls suggests that they were made by everyone: from the lord of the manor and parish priest, all the way down to the lowliest of commoners. These newly discovered inscriptions are giving back individual voices to generations of long-dead medieval churchgoers. The inscriptions number in the hundreds of thousands, and they are opening an entire new world of research.
Some of the marks are the “signatures” of the craftsmen who built those churches. Others are “witch marks” that people left as prayers for protection from evil forces. Some are text marking left by the semi-literate. And many markings are pictures of what medieval peasants dealt with in their daily lives, which you can read about at Aeon. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: NSMGS)
The entire internet is asking why we need a remake of the perfect movie, meaning Ghostbusters. Screen Junkies remembers when we asked that question back in 1989, as the sequel to the original 1984 film was launched. Yes, it was a sequel, but the whole idea was to recreate the magic, so it ended up being a rehash.
In this Honest Trailer for Ghostbusters 2, we get a shot-by-shot rundown of how the sequel was a copy of the original. It still made over $200 million. The new remake hits theaters tomorrow, and it at least has different actors. -Thanks, Paul Panday!
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— HANGİ UMUT ? (@oumutdeyil) May 7, 2016
Cockatiels can whistle and sing pretty well if you train them early in life. This cockatiel learned the theme to the TV series The Addams Family, including the finger snapping part! For that, he raps his beak. A friend almost joins in, but with one searing look, he goes back to a solo performance. -via Tastefully Offensive
In 2001, Tom Morgan drove a Fiat 126 from the Czech Republic to Mongolia for the fun of it. It was so much fun that he got some friends to try it in 2004, and the Mongol Rally was born. This year’s rally starts in southern England on July 17th, when 900 participants will take off on a 10,000 mile quest to drive to Mongolia and back. There is no prize money. Most will not finish the race. You have to be somewhat crazy to want to try it. Here are the rules:
Rule 1) If the car looks like it would survive a trek across seven different time zones and multiple deserts, it’s probably not allowed. Specifically, cars must have an engine smaller than 1.2 liters (for reference: most modern Mini Coopers have an engine size between 1.4 and 1.6 liters).
Rule 2) Beyond occasionally posting in a Facebook group, the Adventurists offer no help. They tell where you the Rally starts and where it ends. Teams are on their own to plan a route, obtain visas, and decide what to bring.
Rule 3) Each team has to raise a £1,000 for charity. Half goes to a charity of the team’s choice and the other half supports the Rally’s official charity, The Cool Earth Foundation.
The organizers of the race, a group called The Adventurists, actively discourage any type of planning or preparation. But this year, they are embedding videographers with some of the teams, so we will get to peek into their adventures. Read more about the Mongol Rally at The Awl. -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user Holidayextras)
