The song "Smooth" from Santana and Rob Thomas was a massive hit in 1999. The song spent 12 weeks at #1, won three Grammys, and became Carlos Santana's biggest hit ever. "Smooth" had a lot of factors going for it: a great dance beat, the combination of a classic rock star and a successful current vocalist, and that soaring guitar. It worked well on pop, rock, Latin, and adult contemporary radio playlists. It was the perfect first single for Santana's comeback album Supernatural, as it was designed to be. But the road to that success was not exactly 'smooth.' Ticking off the requirements for a hit single, producers rejected songwriter Itaal Shur's lyrics and enlisted Rob Thomas to write new ones for Shur's tune. Thomas sang his lyrics on the demo before he was considered for the actual recording.   

Santana: When I listened to the lyrics and heard, “It’s a hot one,” those lyrics are outside of time and gravity. I thought we had entered a place of immortality. But with all respect to Rob, I said, “I’m having a little challenge believing you that what you’re singing is true.”

Matt Serletic (producer): At some point, Carlos wasn’t sure about Rob. He was on the fence. My first conversation with Carlos was about that, like, “Rob’s really a believable singer. He can bring it.” Carlos wanted to be assured, as any artist is with whatever doubts they have. He’s a spiritual guy, and I guess he got a good vibe from the conversation. He said, “I trust you. Let’s do this.”

Davis: Carlos says, “We have to have him. He has to do it. He’s perfect.” I said, “Well, easier said than done. The guy records for another record company.”

The twists and turns required to get "Smooth" recorded were worth all the trouble as the song became a radio staple over the next several years. Read the story of "Smooth" at Rolling Stone.  -via Metafilter

Also: There is an alternative oral history, which may be less accurate but more entertaining.

How does Godzilla stand up so he can shoot his atomic fire straight up? One artist thought up 10 crazy suggestions, and others joined in the fun.

While divorce has been difficult to achieve throughout most of history, there was a peculiar period from the 14th through the 17th centuries where a woman could get a divorce on the grounds of failure to have sex, most likely due to impotence. Men could take advantage of the loophole in the laws, too, but few wanted to go that route. Thousands of such divorce trials took place, and the records survive for our edification. Although the stories can be salacious, what's most notable about the article is the bizarre lengths the author goes to in order to use every possible metaphor for sexual terms.  

Moving swiftly on, in other cases, a (male) doctor might be hired to stimulate the man’s noodle to see if it could be cooked al-dente. Understandably, even men capable of normally rising to the occasion struggled to do so under these circumstances.

For example, in one famous account of the Marquis de Gesvres, it is noted, in his case he was able to achieve a partial erection while being examined, but the examiners felt the, to quote, “tension, hardness, and duration” were inadequate for the required cloning via boning.

Lucky for the men, many of the males who were a part of the trial were sympathetic to this plight, and so failing to release the Kraken wasn’t usually immediately seen as a definitive sign that the man wasn’t capable of having his corn dog battered under more normal circumstances.

Further, some men even stated their inability to perform during the trial was because the wife had hired a sorcerer to bewitch his giggle stick, such as the case of one Jacques de Sales. In 1603, de Sales was subjected to such a trial and, when he couldn’t salute the jurors, stated his wife herself had cast a spell on his penis to keep it from saying hi.

Read more of the details of the impotence trials at Today I Found Out.

Theodor Seuss Geisel, the author of the Dr. Seuss books, spent years illustrating advertising copy and constructing political cartoons. He turned to children's books as a more pleasant project to alleviate burnout. Geisel wrote the first dozen between 1937 and 1956 to respectable sales, but Dr. Seuss was hardly a household name. Then he got caught in the battle over how to teach children to read. The sight reading vs. phonics battle was heating up as children of the Baby Boom were starting school, using the same Dick and Jane primers that had been in use for decades.    

It didn’t help that Dick and Jane belonged to what many have dubbed the dullest family on earth. The books were plotless, littered with mind-numbing, repetitious quasi-sentences. (“Look, Jane. Look, look. See Dick. See, see. Oh, see. See Dick.”) The illustrations were stodgy and bland. Flesch deemed the series “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless.” The author John Hersey, in an article on the literacy debate, for Life magazine, was not much kinder, calling the books “namby-pamby” and “insipid,” and the pictures “terribly literal.” Hersey wondered why primers couldn’t at least feature the talents of gifted children’s-book illustrators, and he listed Dr. Seuss among their ranks.

The head of Houghton Mifflin’s education division took note. He challenged Geisel to write a primer that emerging or reluctant readers would actually enjoy, pleading, “Write me a story that first graders can’t put down!” But for a wordsmith as playful and unconventional as Dr. Seuss—someone fond of phrases such as “howling mad hullaballoo,” who invented animals like the Yuzz-a-ma-Tuzz—there was a big catch: to qualify as a first-grade primer, the text would have to be tightly restricted to a list of three hundred and fifty simple, pre-approved vocabulary words, supplied by the publisher, with a preferred limit of just two hundred and twenty-five words. Could Dr. Seuss deliver a page-turner that contained itself to no more than two hundred and twenty-five real, English, mostly monosyllabic words?

Geisel took on the challenge. Read how that transformed children's literature at the New Yorker. -via Damn Interesting

Deztin Pryor is having an in-depth conversation with his infant son. This is exactly how babies develop speaking skills, although I wish we could decipher what's on this one's mind right now. He's apparently put plenty of thought into it. -via the A.V. Club

The Beijing Civil-Military Integration Expo 2019 on Tuesday has witnessed perhaps one of the most thrilling military inventions ever made — an armored military vehicle. Disappointed? You won’t be. This vehicle can unleash 12 suicide drones that can be used for reconnaissance and for wreaking havoc.

The 5.7 meter-long, 2.4 meter-wide 4x4 off-road vehicle was developed by Beijing Zhongzi Yanjing Auto Co Ltd. It has a max speed of 125kmph and can adapt to the various demands of highly mobile troops. The vehicle can operate in difficult terrains including jungles and mountains, Global Times reported Tuesday.

The wheeled vehicle uses what the company calls "missile-vehicle integrated technology." It carries 12 pneumatic launch tubes that fire drones into the air, which then spread their wings and become operationally controllable.

These launch tubes are usually hidden within the vehicle and are only revealed upon use. This provides an element of surprise as enemies will have difficulty distinguishing drone launching vehicles from standard ones, an employee of the company said.

To be honest, I wouldn’t call this amazing. I would call this scary. What are your thoughts on this one?

(Image Credit: Liu Xuanzun/GT)

To mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo Da Vinci's death on May 2, 1519, the British restaurant chain Bella Italia commissioned food artist Carl Warner to recreate the above portrait of Leonardo with Italian foods, heavy on the pasta. It's a pretty good likeness!



In case you don't recognize the olive eyes, here's an explanation of the materials used.  

You can see the full ad at vimeo.  -via Laughing Squid

I'm an unapologetic comics fan and even today I read an assortment of newspaper comics that are available online. But what I really like are the old comics created by masters such as V.T. Hamlin (Alley Oop), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), and E.C. Segar (Popeye).

All of these men have been dead for decades but their work lives on through other artists. One of these 'other' artists was Bobby London, an underground comics artist (Dirty Duck) who became mainstream when King Features Syndicate, owner of Popeye, hired London to continue Popeye since its longtime artist and writer, Bud Sagendorf, had retired. London was hired because he could emulate the artistic style of E.C. Segar so closely that it was difficult to tell the two apart.

Well, you can take the man out of underground comics but you can't take the underground comics out of the man. In 1992, London, who, had been both writing and drawing the strip for six years, introduced a Home Shopping Club storyline for Olive Oyl. Thus began the controversial and final three weeks of the Popeye strip under London's direction. Mike Lynch documents the events leading to London's downfall and provides the fatal continuities.

Of course, this was 1992. Had this continuity appeared today, Bobby London would probably be the Toast of the Town, things being like they are with any and all matters pertaining to Social Justice. You decide.

But rather than be grateful that the raspberries were fortified with extra protein, the shopper at a Sainsbury's grocery store in East Mayne, UK turned the carton into an employee. The New York Post reports:

It is unclear how the dark-scaled gecko managed to find its way to the Essex supermarket, but the company says it has processes in place to “prevent these sorts of scaly surprises.”

“I was approached by a fellow customer who had picked them up and she was worried about it being disposed of, I passed it on to a supervisor and left it with him. I can only hope he or she wasn’t hurt,” Johnson said.

-via Proper Opinion

Photo: SWNS

How does water behave in a zero gravity environment? If there was one word to describe such behavior, it would be weird. Very weird.

Normally, when we shake a container full of water here on Earth, bubbles would form and these bubbles would make its way to the top. But if we shake that water-filled container in space, it would be a bizarre experience. The water would appear to be a gel-like substance. What would be the reason for this strange behavior?

The reason water takes on this unfamiliar form has to do with gravity, or rather, the lack thereof. On Earth, air is lighter than water, and its added buoyancy compared to water makes it float upward and quickly burst through water droplets. In space, however, air bubbles linger in the liquid rather than floating to the top, because gravity isn't pulling the liquid down. 

(Image Credit: CSA)

An Oak Ridge environmental microbiologist named Christopher Schadt approaches a cottonwood tree, and “sticks a hollow tube in the middle and then takes a lighter and flicks it.” The next thing that happened was mind-blowing. There was flame shooting out of the tube? How could this be possible?

This was achievable because of the methane trapped inside the cottonwood tree. The trapped methane phenomenon happens in certain cottonwood trees. The question is: How did the methane gas get to be inside the tree? Do these trees make the methane gas?

"The wood in this particular species naturally has this condition called wetwood, where it's saturated within the trunk of the tree," says the lighter-flicking scientist, Oak Ridge environmental microbiologist Christopher Schadt.

This wetwood makes for a welcoming home for all sorts of microorganisms.

"You can't actually see a lot of the organisms because we can't grow a lot of these organisms," says Melissa Cregger, a staff scientist at Oak Ridge. "So we're able to identify them using their gene sequences."

Some of those organisms turned out to be species of archaea that are known methane producers. So it's not the trees themselves that are making the methane, it's the microbes living in the trees.

(Image Credit: Dan Yip/ ORNL)

Schrödinger’s cat has been the symbol of quantum superposition and unpredictability. But you might ask yourself, “What really is this cat?” It is not a cat; it is a thought experiment — and one that remains a puzzle for physicists.

Schrödinger’s cat is a well-known paradox used to illustrate the concept of superposition — the ability for two opposite states to exist simultaneously — and unpredictability in quantum physics. The idea is that a cat is placed in a sealed box with a radioactive source and a poison that will be triggered if an atom of the radioactive substance decays. The superposition theory of quantum physics suggests that until someone opens the box, the cat is both alive and dead, a superposition of states. Opening the box to observe the cat causes it to abruptly change its quantum state randomly, forcing it to be either dead or alive.

To put it simply, once you put the cat inside the box, there is no way of saving the poor creature. However, researchers from Yale University may have found a way to rescue the cat, and that is by predicting its “quantum jumps”.

More details of this at YaleNews. 

(Image Credit: Kat Stockton)

In 1970, David Young bought a box of 1930s news/crime photographs at a thrift store in Philadelphia. When he moved to Seattle, they went into a kitchen cabinet and didn't see the light of day for years.

Earlier this year, he pulled it out for a look. The prints had, over the years, curled up into a tight roll, and he had to slide them apart from one end. That’s when he noticed that most of them bore a photographer’s stamp on the back: PHOTO BY A. FELLIG. Five decades ago, he had not been able to Google that name, but in 2019 he quickly discovered that Arthur Fellig was the given name of Weegee, the legendary crime-and-mayhem photographer of mid-century New York.

Soon thereafter, Young got in touch with Christopher Bonanos, Weegee's biographer. He couldn't send scans of the photographs because they were curled up so tightly. But he was able to send a some snapshots to Bonanos, who was able to recognize Weegee's handwriting on the back of them.

According to Bonanos:

Eventually, based on some further Googling, Young rigged up a homemade humidifying chamber that allowed him to flatten the photographs — gently — and get them on a scanner. When they hit my in-box, I about fell out of my chair. There are 73 prints, and 49 of them bear Weegee’s stamp; the unmarked ones too are surely his. Not one of these pictures is duplicated in the biggest collection of Weegee’s work, which is his own estate, held at the International Center of Photography.

To Bonanos' knowledge, none of these photos have been published for 82 years. Read Bonanos article and view some of the cache of pictures and their stories at Vulture. Warning: some of the pictures are disturbing as couple of them depict murder victims and victims of automobile crashes.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Lionfish are dangerous sea creatures. They are venomous fish whose stings can cause extreme pain to us humans and, in worse cases, paralysis. They also are harmful predators that prey on native fish and crustaceans in the Atlantic Ocean. In other words, they are a threat to the ecosystem in the Atlantic.

In order to solve this aquatic problem, the Robots in Service of the Environment (RSE) launched a robot called Guardian LF1 — a submersible robot that preys on these lionfishes. It “hunts, stuns, and captures” these predators.

The Guardian LF1 features eight thrusters, an onboard computer, a camera, and a power source, along with a set of low-voltage “stunning panels” and a chamber for storing captured fish. It is controlled from the surface using a tether but includes an autopilot and a computer vision system capable of distinguishing lionfish from other species.

The robot costs around $1,000 but could net its operator $1,500 to $2,000 worth of lionfish on a good day, its creators claim (assuming the fish can be sold for food). The latest version of the robot can dive to 1,000 feet, below the reach of sport divers.

(Image Credit: Technology Review)

The first time that Tom Rice of San Diego, California parachuted into Normandy, France, people were shooting at him. But that was on June 6, 1944. He was a US Army Ranger on that fateful day.

On both occasions, he was jumping out of a Douglas C-47 Skytrain. This time, Rice and the C-47 were participating in commemorations of the 75th anniversary of the allied invasion of Normandy. AP reports:

Rice said afterward, "it went perfect, perfect jump." He continued, "I feel great. I'd go up and do it all again."

He jumped in a tandem into roughly the same area he landed in on D-Day, outside of Carentan, a Normandy town among the main objectives for the Allied paratroopers on D-Day.