What if the new movie Avengers: Endgame came out forty years ago? Darth Blender took existing footage and the narration style of yesteryear to imagine what it could have been like. And if we were actually watching this in the 1970s, we would have liked it! The latest edition of Marvel's Avengers have plenty of precursors from movies and TV, but they don't quite resemble what we've grown accustomed to from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. -via Digg
Believe it or not, the video series called Autotune the News is ten years old. To celebrate the occasion, Andrew Gregory of the Gregory Brothers went back to Autotune the News #2 and expanded on the segment with Kate Couric that includes the phrase "very thin ice," and made an entire song about it. Ten years later, we are on even thinner ice. -via Metafilter
You might recall seeing a woman bursting out of a cake in old movies, or more likely, old cartoons. It was a trope reserved for truly lavish and hedonistic occasions. If you've ever wondered how that idea got started, it was a party in 1895, ostensibly to celebrate Ellliot Cowdin’s 10th wedding anniversary, but since there were no women invited, it was more of a stag party. The dessert was a huge pie, from which 16-year-old Susie Johnson emerged, to the surprise and delight of the guests.
For the posh set of late-19th century New York City—a coterie as obsessed with public prudery as with private adultery—the “Pie-Girl” dinner was a sensation. “The ‘Girl in the Pie’ at the Three Thousand Five Hundred Dollar Dinner in Artist Breese’s New York Studio,” declared the New York World, above an illustration of Johnson thronged by besuited men, spread like a Venus in pastry. The picture was as scandalous as the dinner’s cost: more than 2,300 times the daily wage of a day laborer.
In the New York World illustration, architect Stanford White stands to Susie Johnson’s left, wielding a large kitchen knife as though about to carve her. According to the article, shortly after the party, Susie Johnson posed “by electric light” at an artist’s studio, a euphemism for sex work, and went missing soon after. “Poor Susie Johnson, dazzled by the lavish compliments and surprised by the liberality of her distinguished patrons,” reported the World. “Perhaps this article will bring Susie Johnson home to her parents and put a stop to the midnight revels in New York’s fashionable studios.”
The guests at the notorious party included Nicola Tesla and Stanford White, who later made the papers for raping Evelyn Nesbit and then being murdered. Read about the girl in the pie at Atlas Obscura.
This day and age have brought much technology to us — faster Internet, smartphones, and other technological innovations. Life had not been much easier, and we take more of life today sitting down. Binge-watching and sitting down all day long are nothing new.
We are aware that anything too much is bad. Sitting down is no exception. It can lead to weak muscles, and an array of dangerous diseases. Have we become too much of a couch potato?
Americans of all ages increasingly take life sitting down, researchers found, but adolescents sit more than other groups. The study found adolescent Americans typically increased their total sitting time from seven hours to just over eight hours a day in the decade to 2016, the largest amount of time spent sedentary and the biggest jump of all the groups studied, experts said.
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Dr Yin Cao of Washington University in St Louis, the author of the study, said: “It’s very concerning when there’s such an increase in sitting time on a national level across all age groups, especially taking into consideration the health risks that come with this.”
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Such sedentary behavior is not only associated with obesity, but also related to increased risks of cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and overall mortality, the authors warned.
Hopefully there is a way to avoid such dangerous consequences.
More details of the study at The Guardian.
(Image Credit: Brook Cagle/ Unsplash)
Known as The Forgotten Battle, the invasion caused widespread outrage in 1942. Pearl Harbor was still a fresh memory, having been attacked on December 7 of the previous year. Early on th morning of 6 June 1942, 500 Japanese soldiers landed on Kiska, one of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. The attack surprised the ten man (and six dog) US Navy Weather Detachment, the only inhabitants of the island at the tiime.
BRAZIL — This “very obedient” parrot will shout, “Mum, the police!” at the sight of policemen. The parrot was captured by the cops on a Monday afternoon after they a busted a local couple who ran a drug den.
“He must have been trained for this,” one officer involved in the operation said of the two-winged wrongdoer. “As soon as the police got close he started shouting.”
A Brazilian journalist who came face to face with the imprisoned parrot on Tuesday described it as a “super obedient” creature – albeit one that had kept its beak firmly shut after being “arrested”.
The said parrot remained silent in the prison, even when lots of cops came by the place. In other words, it did not cooperate. Smart parrot.
More of this story on The Guardian.
(Image Credit: Mike Pitts/ BBC)
Bob Ross- Finger Puppet and Magnet
Let the Bob Ross - Finger Puppet and Magnet help you bring the joy back to your life. Bob is but a small reminder that there are no mistakes, just happy little accidents.
This might sound crazy, but don't be afraid to put Bob to work. He isn't here just to entertain you. When you aren't playing with him place him on your fridge. He's not just a finger puppet, he is a magnet too. Bob loves hanging around the kitchen and showing off the artwork of fellow artists.
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Parents are riled up with the new rule implemented by James Madison High School. The new rule was a parental dress code. The Houston Federation of Teachers President, Zeph Capo, also disagree with this rule, and stated that turning someone away because of her messed up hair is a little ridiculous.
Principal Carlotta Outley Brown wrote in a letter earlier this month to parents that they cannot enter school grounds while wearing pajamas or revealing clothing. The school is also prohibiting parents from wearing leggings, sagging pants, low-rider shorts, short dresses and low-cut tops. Women can't wear a satin cap, hair curlers, shower cap or bonnet on their heads.
The new policy was implemented "to prepare our children and let them know daily, the appropriate attire they are supposed to wear when entering a building, going somewhere, applying for a job, or visiting someone outside of the home setting," Outley Brown said.
What do you think about this parental dress code?
(Image Credit: Screenshot from CNN)
It has been established that our sense of smell and our sense of taste are closely related. But who knew that it would get more than that? This new study shows that our tongues can somewhat smell, too.
Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit research institution in Philadelphia, grew human taste cells in a lab. Those cells contained several important molecules already found in olfactory cells, the cells found in the nasal passages that are responsible for sensing smells. And when they exposed the taste cells to odor molecules, the cells responded like olfactory cells do.
"The presence of olfactory receptors and taste receptors in the same cell will provide us with exciting opportunities to study interactions between odor and taste stimuli on the tongue," Mehmet Hakan Ozdener, the senior author of the study, said in a statement.
Aside from the tongue, olfactory sensors have also been found in other parts of the body, such as the hair.
(Image Credit: Hayes Potter/ Unsplash)
We had wild imaginations when we were still kids. Often we get scared and we tell our spooky experiences to our parents. Then they would check our rooms, assure us that our room is safe, and those experiences are only “our imaginations.” But this isn’t the case for the family of Caitlin Burch in Sunbury, Ohio.
… last summer her seven and 10-year-old daughters came into her bedroom one night and told her that there was something in their room. She said the girls used the words "creature" and "rat" to describe the animal.
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Her husband Brian then checked the room but didn't find anything, and told their girls it was probably nothing.
A few days after her kids complained about a "creature", Burch said her 10-year-old daughter came into their room at two in the morning screaming that it was an opossum. Her husband got out of the bed to check things out, and that's when he discovered their girls were right. The "creature" that had been living in their daughters’ room was actually an opossum
Caitlin tweeted this unusual, but funny event.
Parents, please thoroughly check your kids’ bedrooms before dismissing the case.
(Image Credit: Caitlin Burch/ Twitter)
The Idaho Potato Commission used a six-ton, 28-foot-long manufactured potato to promote their 75th anniversary. The big potato went on tour for six years, and now has been replaced with a new model. Instead of destroying the original, tiny house developer Kristie Wolfe turned it into an Airbnb rental!
The Big Idaho Potato Hotel, which will cost $200 a night plus $42 in taxes and fees, is for couples. With 336 square feet, it includes a queen-size bed, two easy chairs, an elk antler chandelier, a small sink, lights, heating and air conditioning, and a beverage cooler. There’s a separate bathroom that looks like a miniature steel silo with a round corrugated steel tub, a walk-in shower and sink and toilet.
The hollow interior of the Big Idaho Potato was used to store supplies and T-shirts, Spuddy Buddy stuffed animals and other promotional items during the cross-country tours. Wolfe added 8 inches of spray foam insulation to hide the frame, hooked the potato up to well water and a septic tank, and is readying it for electricity. She carved out two nooks next to the head of the bed and space for the sink and beverage cooler near the door at one end. She installed a wood floor.
The potato will be rented out beginning at the end of May. Read the story of the Big Idaho Potato Hotel at the Idaho Statesman. -via Thrillist
You've heard of Stockholm syndrome, when a captive or an abuse victim starts to sympathize with their abuser. It came from the 1973 Norrmalmstorg robbery in Sweden, in which four bank employees felt no ill will toward Jan-Erik Olsson, who had held them as hostages for six days. They even refused to testify against him. But what you might not recall is how very American the bank robbery seemed at the time.
Olsson was born and raised in Sweden. When he arrived at the Kreditbank on August 23, however, he didn’t speak in his native tongue. He barked orders in English, obscuring his identity. According to Daniel Lang’s New Yorker report on the robbery, he also donned “a pair of toy-store spectacles and a thick brown wig; his cheeks were rouged; and his reddish-brown mustache and eyebrows were dyed jet black.”
But the American accent proved to be perhaps the most crucial piece of his cartoonish disguise. He announced his presence to the customers and tellers at the bank with a round of fire, directed at the ceiling, and a shout: “The party has just begun!” This was a line Olsson had lifted from “an American movie about a convict on the loose,” as Lang wrote, though the exact film was never specified. It wasn’t the only bizarre allusion to U.S. pop culture that day. When a plainclothes police sergeant arrived on the scene, Olsson threatened him at gunpoint, teasing him to sing a song. The sergeant chose Elvis Presley’s “Lonesome Cowboy,” assuming the (seemingly) American man before him would enjoy a familiar tune.
Through this assumed identity, Olsson was telegraphing a propensity for violence—one that was largely foreign to Sweden.
Read more about the robbery and its American veneer at Jstor Daily. -via Damn Interesting
The movie Stockholm, a slightly fictionalized account of the Norrmalmstorg robbery starring Ethan Hawke, is in theaters now. The image is from the film.
If you haven't tried eating black beans before, then you are in for a treat. Here's a recipe that would make you, according to the author, forget about meat, or the lack thereof in the dish. It involves braising the beans and combining them with whatever you fancy, whether it be tortillas, rice, or even toast.
(Image credit: Badagnani/Wikimedia Commons)
Munira Abdulla, who was 32 years old at the time of her traffic accident in which she was seriously injured in 1991, woke up after 27 years from her coma.
… [she] suffered a severe brain injury after the car she was travelling in collided with a bus on the way to pick up her son from school.
Omar Webair, who was then just four years old, was sitting in the back of the vehicle with her, but was left unscathed as his mother cradled him in her arms moments before the accident.
Ms Abdulla - who was being driven by her brother-in-law - was left seriously injured, but last year regained consciousness in a German hospital.
Omar shared this story to give hope to the people who have family members or friends who are in a coma. He pleads that they do not consider the person dead yet.
Find out more about the miracle on BBC.
(Image Credit: Science Photo Library / BBC)
The discovery of the dinosaurs may have led to the “Loch Ness monster delusion”. The Loch Ness monster legend in 1933 when George Spicer, a Londoner, claimed to have seen ‘the most extraordinary form of animal’ as he drove along a new road at Loch Ness, cross the street.
Standing four feet tall, and with a long wavy neck slightly thicker than an elephant's trunk the creature lurched off into the undergrowth and vanished, leaving behind only a legend that has endured for nearly 100 years.
Full story at the Telegraph.
(Image Credit: Robert Kenneth Wilson / Daily Mail April 21, 1934)
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