There are nine basic things that a cat needs to live a happy life. Each one of them is illustrated by a Simon's Cat vignette of him being his usual self. Personally, I would have lumped "hunting" and "entertainment" together. Strangely, sex is not one of the nine, but if a cat is fixed before puberty, he or she will never know what he/she is missing.
Gertrud Gunther was born into a normal Prussian middle class family in 1881, but she made good when she married Baron Heinrich von Puttkamer and ascended to a life of high society and wealth. She took to it well, from entertaining royalty to doting on her much older husband. But she had a secret identity. The baroness wrote lesbian-themed poetry and novels, which she published under the name Marie-Madeleine. It is possible that the baron never knew about her writings in all the years they were married before he died in 1914.
In the following 14 years, the baroness published another 28 books, including novels. Just as lesbian love dominated her works at first, morphine started appearing in her writing beginning in 1910. It became the dominant theme after the baron’s death and for the rest of her literary career. “Her work was particularly appreciated during the decadent, dissolute years of the Weimar Republic when alternative sexual behavior and drug use were tolerated — and often celebrated,” says Gertz.
If anything, her writing became even more ecstatic and rapturous after her husband’s death. “She traveled around Europe with a male companion and fellow morphine enthusiast, living in villas in Germany and France,” says Gertz, “completely unknown as the notorious Marie-Madeleine.”
The baroness had maintained her secret identity for more than three decades, but Hitler’s Nazis eventually ferreted her out. The Third Reich wasn’t too keen on Jewish lesbian poets addicted to morphine, and despite her nobility, they wanted to erase her from history. When the Nazis starting burning books, Marie-Madeleine’s were among the first to go into the flames. Her books sold more than 1 million copies during her career, but it’s extremely hard to come by a copy of one today.
Read about the life and legacy of Baroness Gertrud von Puttkamer at Ozy.
Sima the raccoon just wants to fit in. He is the only raccoon in the family, and he has to deal with humans, cats, and dogs. The cats seem the closest to what he'd want in a companion, but they aren't too happy with his un-catlike overtures. They won't let Sima forget that he's the oddball of the household. The language you hear is Russian, so this might be in Ukraine, where raccoons are becoming more common. -via Boing Boing
If you wish to renounce your citizenship, most countries will allow this only if you hold citizenship in another country. The United States is not one of those countries. In America, it's mainly a matter of paying for the paperwork, which is quite expensive. But then what happens?
You see, should they do this without being a citizen of another nation, they will become what is known as stateless. While difficulties vary for stateless people depending on the country they currently reside in, in general, many otherwise commonplace things can potentially become very problematic for these people- things like getting a job, getting access to education for their kids or themselves, getting citizenship for their potential future children, ability to get married, get a driver’s license, rent or buy a house, travel across borders, or even just getting a bank account. A bigger problem for some is the loss of certain legal protections they’d otherwise be granted.
On this note, in the United States, the over four million stateless people residing in America can potentially be arrested without having committed any crime and jailed for many months, generally while the the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tries to find a country to deport them to, if possible.
You can see a big can of worms being opened. There are around 12 million stateless people around the world, although most are stateless through no fault of their own. Depending on the country, you can be stateless because your nation collapsed, or you were born in a refugee camp, or even because your parents weren't married. Read about stateless people, by choice or by circumstance, at Today I Found Out.
If you've seen your cat give you "that face," you probably felt bad about it, because the same sneering expression on a human indicates disgust, horror, or at least a hateful thought of some kind. But that's not what's happening from the cat's point of view. Hank Green of SciShow is here to explain. -via Geeks Are Sexy
More than 100 Pink Cadillacs lined up outside of Greater Grace Temple in Detroit #ArethaHomegoing #ArethaFranklinFuneral #ArethaQueenForever pic.twitter.com/a4aK1KasoX
— #LaquanMcDonald (@ifuaskmee) August 31, 2018
You may have spent all day Friday watching Aretha Franklin's star-studded funeral service on TV, but even so, you didn't get to see the procession outside. More than 100 pink Cadillacs were there to escort the hearse from the funeral home to Greater Grace Temple in Detroit on Friday morning.
The cars are a reference to her song, "Freeway of Love," in which she sings: "We goin' ridin' on the freeway of love in my pink Cadillac."
The turnout is all thanks to Mary Kay national sales director Crisette Ellis asked that any employee who owns a pink Cadillac show up for Franklin's funeral service, according to the Detroit Free Press. (Sales representatives for the cosmetics company famously drive pink cars.)
Per the paper, many of the Cadillacs that turned up to the service were driven by Mary Kay employees, though other pink Cadillac owners also turned up to pay homage to the Queen of Soul.
You can see many more pictures of the Cadillacs and some video, too, at Mashable.
Pianist John Pumper wants to play "My Immortal," a song by Evanescence. It sounds really nice. But his head -and his fingers- are haunted by "Africa." He just can't help himself!
So he switched gears and tried "Cheap Thrills" by Sia. Nice song, but Toto managed to creep in, anyway.
What to do? Pumper then tried getting into a song that's already an earworm: Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird." To no avail. He'll never escape "Africa." -via Tastefully Offensive
You know them, but how weird is it to see brand logos out of context? The digital agency Hello Velocity made a new font, Brand New Roman, using 76 different corporate logos to spoof late-stage capitalism. Lukas Bentel explains the effect of the font.
"At this point, brands are inescapably ubiquitous and attention-hungry," says Bentel. "What's interesting about Brand New Roman is that when you smash so many of these brands together, they start to lose their powerful brand connotations in interesting ways. The sheer density overrides all the extra brand identity connotations each symbol usually carries."
The font becomes more readable when rendered in a single color, but the brand identity of the individual letters starts to get a little fuzzy and harder to identify. So which is more important to your finished product, the brands represented, or what you are saying in your text? Try Brand New Roman yourself- you can type anything into this generator to see what it looks like. The applications are endless, and can be quite funny. Check out some examples at Muse.
In 1983, Amos Barkai, a graduate student at the University of Cape Town, was investigating the effects of bird guano runoff at the beach when he noticed something that took his research in a new direction. The waters around Malgas Island were teeming with lobsters, so much that you had to move lobsters to see anything else. Meanwhile, around Marcus island, just 4 kilometers away, there were no lobsters at all. To determine why, Barkai arranged to move a thousand lobsters from Malgas to Marcus to see if they would survive and thrive.
On the day of the experiment, Barkai was alone in the water, as he was working with a topside crew that didn’t dive (something that would make university dive safety officers extremely uncomfortable nowadays. Of course, this was the ’80s, and things were different). First, the boat stopped at Malgas, and Barkai collected the lobsters for the transfer. A short 4 kilometer boat ride later, and both he and the lobsters entered the waters by Marcus. And that meant he was the only one to witness what happened next.
“Visibility was great that day, and virtually the entire sea bottom started to move,” he said.
That movement was countless whelks. They started to climb onto the newcomers, sticking to their legs. “I didn’t know then, but they’d started to suck them alive, basically. It was like a horror movie,” Barkai said. “It actually was a bit frightening to watch.” The lobsters simply didn’t know how to respond. They were outnumbered and overwhelmed.
“To my horror, in about 30, 40 minutes, all the lobsters were killed.”
The whelks had literally sucked all the meat out of the lobster shells. Barkai felt bad for the lobsters, and figured he must have conducted the experiment wrong. Then he immediately set about figuring out why the lobster prey had become the lobster predator in a nearby environment. Read what they found that made the two areas different, and what it means for sea management, at Discover magazine. -via Metafilter
Todd Cobb took on a project to write about ghosts, hauntings, and other urban legends of Portland, Oregon. He solicited stories from anyone who had one about the city. What he got was a range of interesting stories, not-so-interesting stories, and a few crackpots who wasted his time.
Serial disappointments have a way of dulling one’s ambitions. Cobb couldn’t help it if some of the supernatural anecdotes were a bit boring, or if Portland simply didn’t have enough well-documented ghost stories to fill a book. At least one time, he invented a story entirely. It always seemed odd to him to write about “true” ghost stories, but he did get nervous that he was stretching the truth a little too far. But the publisher accepted what he’d written and the book came out in 2007. He became known, at least for awhile, as Portland’s “ghost guy.”
As the ghost guy, he heard more ghost stories, and then a strange thing started happening. He would hear the stories he wrote—parts he knows he made up—repeated back to him, by people he didn’t know and who didn’t realize that they’d read them in a book. He had written in the introduction, “When we move beyond the realm of science, we’re in the realm of faith. We believe because we believe.” But he was surprised that people believed so thoroughly and eagerly in ghosts that he’d just invented.
“The first requirement for there being a ghost in a house is someone believing there’s a ghost in the house,” says Christopher Bader, a professor of sociology at Chapman University in Orange, California, who has spent years studying paranormal beliefs in America. A good story can be enough. So now, two haunted bars featured in Cobb’s book—only one of which had a ghost story prior its publication—are equally haunted.
Sarah Laskow went to both bars and talked to employees about the ghostly manifestations, which were strikingly similar. And she talked to experts about how people believe in ghosts because they want to believe in ghosts, which you can read about at Atlas Obscura.
The performers you know from movies, TV, and Broadway represent only about one percent of the performing artists making a living today. The rest work in nightclubs, dinner theater, amusement parks, local birthday parties, and cruise ships. Cruise ships hire a wide range of performers to entertain thousands of passengers, and Princess Cruises guest entertainment manager Phil Kaler knows them all.
The $38 billion cruise industry has boomed with Boomers, growing from 17.8 million passengers in 2010 to 25.8 million passengers in 2017. The Regal Princess is one of more than four hundred fifty active cruise ships, and each is a floating entertainment district. It typically employs a six-piece party band; a seven-piece house band; a jazz quintet; a DJ; a piano-bar lounge singer; and seventeen singer-dancers who rotate through stage shows, including two created exclusively for Princess by Wicked’s Stephen Schwartz. (Other lines feature partnerships with outfits like Cirque du Soleil, Second City, and Blue Note Records.) Last year, Kaler and his team booked four hundred sixty-eight different headliners, from “a cappella” to “xylophonist.”
“How can you please all 4,100 passengers?” Kaler asks, as he unfurls massive spreadsheets that map out his bookings across all eighteen ships. “You can’t. You give them variety.”
Seven years ago, Kahler launched the Entertainer of the Year competition for cruise performers, to reward the best artists for their hard work. The contest gets its own week-long cruise. The top prize is only $5,000, which is a couple weeks pay for cruise performers, but the recognition that comes with the title is worth it, and is especially useful for booking further jobs. Esquire magazine followed the Entertainer of the Year cruise and competition, and tells us the stories of the performers who make their living entertaining passengers. -via Digg
(Image credit: Logan Hill)
There are many species of parasitic wasps, many of which we've posted. But even parasites can become the victim of parasites, in this case a plant that feeds on wasps that feed on plants. The oak leaf gall wasp invades oak trees and induces them to develop galls, or abnormal growths, that the wasps use to draw nutrition from and lay their eggs in. A research team led by Scott Egan of Rice University noticed a vine among collected galls that seem to have attached suction cups to the galls.
So, Dr. Egan went back to the Florida sand live oak forest where his collaborator, Glen Hood, first found the gall. Dr. Egan walked through the trees and kept his eyes open. Soon, he realized that in one patch, the oaks and their galls were threaded with a plant called the parasitic love vine. There the researchers found numerous instances of the vine entering the galls.
The connection did not seem harmless. When the researchers dissected 51 love-vine-infested galls from one wasp species, they found that 45 percent contained a mummified adult wasp, compared with only 2 percent of uninfested galls.
That suggests that the love vine interferes with the wasp’s nutrition such that it develops fully but is not able to leave. And the host tissue within dissected galls was twisted toward the vine's entry points, hinting that it was co-opting the gall's nutrients.
Revenge of the plant kingdom, indeed. Read more about the parasitic vine at the New York Times. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Egan, Zhang, Comerford, and Hood)
Animator Joshua Slice is also a musician. That means Lucas the Spider can play tiny little musical instruments -five of them! And he does it cutely, as always. -via Geeks Are Sexy
At first glance, running a lemonade stand appears to be a wholesome activity. We imagine children getting their first taste of entrepreneurship, while passers-by get a refreshing drink on a hot day. But it wasn't always that way. Lemonade sold on the street was always iffy. If you were lucky, it contained alcohol, and if you were unlucky, it could be vinegar and swill. And even when kids took over, sometimes it could be dangerous.
One hot afternoon in July of 1941, a young woman—name and age unreported—opened up a lemonade stand in Western Springs, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The “little girl,” as newspaper accounts later described her, plied her friends and passing strangers with refreshing glasses of lemonade in a makeshift stand just outside of her home. She sometimes sampled her own supply.
Within weeks, the county’s health department was knocking on her door. They asked questions about the chain of lemonade custody and her sanitary practices. It turned out that the budding entrepreneur had failed to rinse the glasses she gave to her customers after they had been used. As a result, she had contracted polio, and so had four of her young friends. According to the Associated Press, the outbreak of the disease was no less than the “hottest trail of the deadly disease virus in the history of epidemiology.”
Read the history of lemonade stands at Mental Floss.
We knew cheetahs were born to run, but who knew that liked to play fetch? The Oregon Zoo throws balls for their cheetahs to chase for exercise and enrichment, and in order to fling them fast and far enough, they built a huge slingshot they call the Cheetahpult. Imagine getting to shoot that contraption and play ball with large cats ...and getting paid for it. -via Laughing Squid
