Knowing how humans will make a competition out of anything, you might not be too surprised to learn that snowball fights have become an organized sport. You will not be too shocked to learn that it originated in Japan. The sport of Yukigassen pits teams of seven players against each other. The rules were established by the Japan Yukigassen Federation, which oversees competitions in many countries where snow is available. Every year, the world champion is decided by a tournament at the foot of Mount Usu in Japan, where around 100 teams compete for the title. Great Big Story explains the history of Yukigassen, how the sport is played, and even gives us tips on how to make and throw the perfect snowball. Useful information right now, if you live in the Southern Hemisphere.
How long before the Yukigassen becomes an exhibition sports in the Olympic Winter Games? It may be some time, since the games won't be hosted in Asia for at least the next ten years.
Before you can know where the manicule came from, you have to know what a manicule is. The image above may give you a clue. It's the pointing hand that's so familiar in iconography and typography. Whether it's the more ornate Victorian typography or the newer emojis, we all recognize the little hand that's pointing to something important. Believe it or not, these are much older than typography or even type itself.
The first manicules were hand-drawn, in the margins of books. They were used as a kind of highlighter to point the reader to something important in the text. Examples date back to at least the year 1086. The pointing finger was always favored over an arrow because everyone knows what a pointing finger means. When type was invented, the manicule proved to be just too useful to leave out of a set of moveable type, and the use of it moved away from the reader with a pencil to the publisher with a printing press. Later on, the manicule was taken over by advertisers, sign makers, and eventually the internet. Read the entire history of the little pointy hand that you never knew the name of at Messy Nessy Chic. -via Strange Company
It's hard to designate who was America's first policewoman because it depends on how you define "police woman." Around the turn of the 20th century, suffragists and women's temperance groups advocated for female police officers to handle social crimes and defend powerless victims, but the women hired for these positions often had no authority to arrest on their own, nor did they carry weapons.
Alice Stebbins Wells was the first woman appointed to the Los Angeles Police Department in 1910. Her duties began as supervisor of public places that had questionable morals, such as theaters, arcades, and dance halls, but as time went on, she was called on to question women and children who were victims, witnesses, or perpetrators of crimes and to investigate domestic violence, which male officers didn't want to get involved in. Wells' position in the LAPD went from not being taken seriously to crucial in the protection of women and children. Wells advocated, and got, more policewomen added to the LAPD's roster. Read about her career and what it meant at Smithsonian.
We've all seen those videos where someone does amazingly precise things, from full court basketball shots to Rube Goldberg machines, and wondered how many times they had to do that to get it to work perfectly. Michael D. Shields does amazing tricks on his YouTube channel That'll Work. He doesn't tell us how many tries it takes, but he lets us in on how long it takes to get a ping pong ball to bounce exactly where he wants it. Better still, we don't have to sit through all the failures that come before the success.
What Shields does for a living doesn't change the world, but it's real work that tales real time and effort. You have to be at the top of your game to lake a living at it, so who are we to look down on it? You can see more of Shields' trick shot videos at Laughing Squid.
If you tell people they cannot do something, particularly if it involves free expression, they will move heaven and earth to find a way around the regulations. Take, for example, the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, historically caught between Denmark and Germany. The kingdom or country ruling over each duchy changed over hundreds of years through complicated trades and treaties. In 1864, these regions were ceded to joint rule by Prussia and Austria, which is complicated enough, and the residents were forbidden to fly the Danish flag.
Danish farmers in the region then embarked on a project to breed pigs that resembled the Danish flag, which is red with a white cross. They got the vertical white stripe on a red-haired pig with a new breed called the Husum Red Pied (Husumer Rotbunte). Others loyal to Denmark would recognized what the pigs meant while the farmers maintained plausible deniability. Now 150 years later, that region is split between Germany and Denmark, and the Husum Red Pied breed is almost extinct. Read of the rise and fall of the political pig at Amusing Planet.
(Image credit: Axel Krampe)
Analog Society is a British vocal group that performs covers and original songs, but has become known for their clever musical mashups, when they combine two songs that may be from different decades but sound good together. The video above has them mashing up "Somebody That I used to Know" from Gotye and "Dreams" by Fleetwood Mac. Continue reading for more.
'It was chaos': The week when cannons shot 250,000 bouncy balls down San Francisco hills https://t.co/yXyxWkgiEL
— SFGATE (@SFGate) March 10, 2025
Twenty years ago, a film crew dropped a quarter-million bouncy balls down the hilly streets of San Francisco to advertise Sony Bravia color TVs. Today, that stunt would be done with special effects, but everything was real in the finished ad that won numerous awards and is still being watched on YouTube all these years later. The Sony Bravia Bouncy Balls ad is legendary, but it certainly wasn't easy to film.
Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig had to get permission from the city, notify everyone in the area, and promise to repair any damage. Then he had to round up 250,000 bouncy balls, which temporarily wiped out the US supply. Then the crew had to invent cannons to launch those balls, which destroyed quite a few of them. And people were hired to retrieve those balls after they bounced down the hills- day after day for a week. At one point, extra people were hired to sort the balls by color! When the filming was through, the bill just for broken windows was $74,000. Bouncy balls were found miles from the set, and continued to be found for years. Read the story behind the filming of this legendary television ad that never even aired in the US at SFGate. -via Damn Interesting
On the marvelously curious subreddit /r/DiWHY, redditor /u/carrieminaj asks why this door is shaped this way. One potential answer lies beneath the fold.
Remember when you were a kid, you saw a lot of fireflies, or lightning bugs as they are sometimes called. Now if you go out on a summer's evening, you have to deliberately look to see any fireflies at all. Sure, scientists have noticed this, but in order to do anything about it, they need hard data, and that's really hard to get when you're talking about many different species of a bug that's really hard to see when they're not flashing their shiny hineys. But new photography techniques are getting better at sorting out the little sparkly butts so we can count them. Still, this endeavor needs lots of photographers, and you can help.
Ze Frank doesn't make a lot of jokes about fireflies in this video, because his main concern is getting everyone on board for their conservation. Every species has its niche in the ecosystem, and it's up to us to protect them. You can get involved through the Xerces Society by joining a project or by making a donation.
On March 4, a 4-year old boy in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin called 911 with an urgent problem: his mom was being bad and he needed the police to take her to jail. Specifically, the villainous mother had eaten his ice cream.
People magazine reports that when officers arrived on the scene, the boy had changed his mind. He was okay with them not taking his mother to jail so as long as he got ice cream. The negotiations were productive for all parties involved. The next day, Officers Gardinier and Ostergaard brought the child ice cream.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: Mount Pleasant Police Department
Major League Baseball has unveiled a new line of hats for their teams from New Era. These are called "overlap" hats because of the way they were designed. Every year, they hope to create collector's items with new hat designs, and this year will probably be a banner year. But it won't be because they are great. The general idea was to take the team's logo and lay it overtop the team name or the city. But most of those logos are initials, and you should never overlap letters with other letters, because it changes the word. When the human eye sees these hats, they will read them as the Tetas Rangers, Houston Ashos, Seattle Masers, Los Angeles Anaels, Bobon Red Sox, Mmmi Marlins, and the Washington Nawals. SB Nation has a few things to say about these hats. The Texas Rangers hats have already been pulled from stores.
But was it truly a careless mistake or a marketing ploy? The whole league seems to have taken a page out of last year's Oakland A's hat design disaster that became collector's items. Some of the new hats look fine because the overlaid team logo is a pictures instead of a letter. You can buy them here. -via Metafilter
If you loved Parasite and are looking forward to (or have already seen) Mickey 17, you know how good a movie written and directed by Bong Joon-ho can be. That's why Screen Junkies went back to make an Honest Trailer for Bong's first English language feature film, 2013's Snowpiercer. Like all of Bong's biggest films, Snowpiercer explores the themes of class and privilege while telling a story that will allow you to think you are ignoring those themes- until the story demands that you pay attention.
Snowpiercer is dystopian science fiction, so its success depends on the viewer finding the premise believable, no matter how ridiculous. And this one is quite ridiculous, as this Honest Trailer makes clear. Yet the movie is enjoyable and thought-provoking, causing you to buy into it, so you might be surprised to confront how weird the elements really are. Yeah, that's if you've seen the movie. If you haven't, rest assured that all this weirdness comes together to tell a thrilling story and make a point as well.
Much equipment should be purchased prior to the arrival of a baby in a home. A stroller is essential for parents on the go. And if you really want to set your baby apart from slower children, consider this luxurious, high-performance stroller by Italian supercar manufacturer Lamborghini.
Fast Company tells us about the Reef AL Arancio on sale from babycare product designer Silver Cross. Only 500 of these superstrollers will be made for only the most discriminating infants. It features a polycarbonate carry cot, precisely engineered suspension wheels, a handlebar finished by hand, and a brake pedal modeled after those on Lamboghini's own cars.
This is how you tell the world that your child is going places.
Mexican illustrator José Guadalupe Posada became well-known for his satirical and political drawings featuring calaveras, or skulls, around the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, Posada is one of the reasons that decorated skulls became associated with Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. But Posada had interests beyond those calaveras.
Posada illustrated newspapers and magazines that would be referred to as tabloids today- literature aimed at entertaining the general public, and the more sensational a story, the better. When a photograph wasn't available, or wasn't as exciting as an illustration, Posada would draw a picture and create an engraving. Among those were many stories of unusual births, often referred to as monsters or freaks in those days. These included children with extra limbs, conjoined twins, and stories that are hard to swallow. The illustration above accompanied a story of a woman who gave birth to three children and four animals. See more of Posada's illustrations of what were called "freaks of nature" at the Public Domain Review. -via Nag on the Lake
When we explain pollen as "plant sperm," that's just a simple shortcut to saying it's part of the sexual reproduction process of plants; specifically, it's the part that moves. So you might be surprised to learn that pollen is not like sperm at all in the way it works. And that could be a relief to those who have to deal with the side effects of getting pollen in your nasal cavities, at least psychologically. No, pollen is way weirder than that, and so is the female side of plant reproduction. It's true we rarely talk about a plant's embryo sac, the female side of the reproductive process, and that's because it doesn't cause hay fever or cover our cars with dust the way pollen does. While it's easy to say that plants and animals are just way different, MinuteEarth goes into detail to explain how plants really reproduce and why. Keep in mind that there are exceptions, because there always are.
