James from Casually Explained (previously at Neatorama) gives young people a honest and detailed rundown on what it's like to move out of their parents' home. You'll only want to share this with your kids if they've already moved out, because it's pretty discouraging. When Baby Boomers moved out on their own, it was for the purpose of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, which kids these days don't do so much of. Also, we could find a place to live where the rent was only a week's income or less, if you weren't picky. Now the rental units are owned by Baby Boomers, and they demand exorbitant security deposits because they fear young tenants will act like they did at that age. -via Tastefully Offensive
Fans love it when a TV series throws in a line or an action that is only understood by faithful viewers, those who have been watching since season one. They are callbacks, running gags, internal references, brick jokes, slow burns, in-jokes, or Chekhov's gags. You could look all those up at TV Tropes, but then you can kiss your evening goodbye. In the above case, a subject comes up 43 years later, and the internal reference is just dialogue for most viewers, but pure gold for those who remember the earlier episode. Below, the gun going off for no reason is just a random fact, and the reason it was mentioned at all only becomes evident years later.
Maybe these things are in-jokes for the writers, or maybe they are put in just to see if anyone notices. Even if just a few fans do, you can bet they'll share the cleverness on social media tomorrow. See 13 such references in a pictofacts article at Cracked.
During both of the Battles of Bull Run in 1861 and '62, the Union Army suffered defeat and lost a lot of men. The battlefield near Manassas, Virginia, is now a memorial protected by the National Park Service. They do not normally allow the ground to be dug up, but a utility project in 2015 unearthed some curious human bones. Physical anthropologist Doug Owsley and forensic anthropologist Kari Bruwelheide investigated.
One bone in particular, an incomplete distal left femur found in more than ten separate pieces, leapt out at them. Cleanly sawn, the find piqued the pair’s curiosity. “Knowing this is a Civil War battlefield,” Bruwelheide says, “the first thing we think about is an amputation.”
Owsley and Bruwelheide soon had much more to go on—additional scouting in the area of the first find turned up a human-excavated pit, dug a single foot deep, containing seven additional limbs and two virtually complete skeletons (one was missing its skull, likely due to farming activity during the years before the site became a National Park). Owsley and Bruwelheide set about doing what they do best: piecing together the story behind the bones.
“First, we had to determine whether this was First or Second Manassas,” Owsley says. “There were two battles fought on this property.” To help them assess the evidence, Owsley and Bruwelheide corresponded with park superintendent Brandon Bies. The location of the pit suggested the second battle, but it was two subtle aspects of the bones within that led Bies and his fellow park historians to reach an ironclad conclusion.
The team found subtle clues to determine which battle the bones were from, who did the amputations, and why the full skeletons were buried in the medical pit. Read the fascinating research that yielded the answers at Smithsonian. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Kate D. Sherwood)
Think you're going to outsmart a hungry raccoon with your silly "technology"? Watch this trash panda foil a critter-proof bird feeder! You get the idea that it's not the first time he's seen this kind of setup. While the folks inside admit defeat, they are impressed with both the raccoon's intelligence and his dexterity. -via Tastefully Offensive
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom opened nationwide yesterday, and it inspired Keith Phipps to look at the 100-year history of dinosaur movies, including the original Jurassic Park from 1993.
Jurassic Park succeeds in part by breaking with the two approaches that have dominated dinosaur movies from the start: portraying them as bloodthirsty monsters or as cuddly anthropomorphized creatures. And the history of dinosaur movies is a long one, one almost as old as movies themselves. In fact, the medium developed alongside our understanding of what dinosaurs were — even if dinosaur movies didn’t always reflect this growing understanding.
He starts with the live-action Primitive Man and the animation Gertie the Dinosaur, both from 1914. Then there are the monsters-fighting-monsters films from the mid-20th century, many of them with dinos by Ray Harryhausen. Then the kids' films of the 1980s made dinosaurs cuddly again. Jurassic Park had both, but gave us some real, if implausible, science about dinosaurs and the ethical questions surrounding it. The best part of the article at Vulture is the many videos of trailers, clips, and complete films that illustrate the evolution of dinosaurs in film. -via Digg
She was prim and proper, educated, and wielded en enchanted umbrella. Was Mary Poppins trained in the magic arts at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? It makes so much sense! The various clues for this fan theory are explained in a video from Uproxx. Don't let the fact that Mary Poppins was a Disney movie and the Harry Potter films were from Warner Bros. make you doubt it. Remember, they were all together in the library to begin with.
There are quite a few literary classics in which the characters must deal with the death of a beloved dog. It's heart wrenching, but sometimes it's there to make a point, and sometimes it is the entire reason for the story. But we don't need "reasons" for a dog to die, or "reasons" to come up with a way that the dog doesn't die. Riane Konc did just that, reworking well-known canine death scenes to make them less sad, and sometimes completely hilarious. Take The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck:
A big swift car squealed its tires and jerked his wheel, the car nearly tipping up on two tires as the vehicle narrowly missed the family pet.
“Dammit, but I won’t be a symbol for the suffocatin’ and murd’rous weight of capitalism and the myth of the American Dream on the day laborer and migrant worker by killin’ your pup with my sportscar!” the driver screamed out his window, giving the whole Joad family the finger.
And he wouldn’t. Everythin’ else — ev’ry death an’ loss an’ unjustice an’ tragedy an’ animal for the next 400 pages or so would basically drive that point home — but at least the whole time, through everything, the Joads had their beloved dog. He wasn’t very good symbolism, but he was a very good boy.
Read about the survival of good dogs from Old Yeller, Marley & Me, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Odyssey, and even Cujo at Electric Literature. -via Metafilter
Hope for Paws got a notification of a kitten on the freeway in Los Angeles, on a fast lane with no shoulder. Eldad Hagar and Loreta Frankonyte were out transporting a dog with puppies, and did a detour to make a scary rescue. The kitten was scared, hungry, flea-ridden, and had infected eyes. There's no telling how long he was out there on the road by himself. But Napoleon was fed, bathed, treated, and named, and now has a bright future. -via Laughing Squid
In 1997, downloading a short video clip took forever, Flash animation was still in development, we had never heard of Midi-chlorians, and people with time on their hands created little pictures with ASCII characters. New Zealand Star Wars fan Simon Jansen was one of those casual artists who tried a little ASCII fan art from the first Star Wars movie, now called A New Hope, that turned into an 18-year project.
For reasons that are a mystery even to himself, Simon Jansen began creating individual frames of A New Hope after a chain of joke emails. Though not particularly keen on animation or ASCII art, Jansen was just enough of a Star Wars obsessive to keep up with the project.
Obsessive is pretty much the only way to describe Jansen’s project. With more than 16,000 frames at 15 frames per second, the animation only lasts about 18 minutes. It’s not a perfect, shot-for-shot recreation. Those 18-plus minutes manage to cover almost 40 percent of the original. And Jansen had much less than that completed two years after he started the project, when he went viral before it was even a term.
As the years went by, Jansen added to his ASCII remake of Star Wars, while technology advanced to the point where amateur animators could turn out Star Wars fan films in a matter of hours. No doubt that's one of the reasons why Jansen quit adding frames in 2015, but what he accomplished is legendary. Read about Jansen's epic project at Tedium. And if you've got 18 minutes, you can watch ASCIImation Star Wars here.
Imagine a GPS (or SatNav, if you're British) in 1971. There was such an idea, but since the satellite technology wasn't there yet, it came on pre-recorded cassette tapes that gave you directions as you played it. Watch how it works in this clip from the erstwhile TV show Tomorrow's World. Of course it could never work as advertised. If you ever made a wrong turn, the whole system would suddenly turn useless. Or if you were caught in a traffic jam, didn't drive the speed the cassette expected, or the machine ate the tape- which was a fairly common occurrence with cassettes. You would need to buy a new cassette for every new route, and once you drove there, you wouldn't need that tape again. I'm sure there were more reasons not to buy into this system. It would have been easier (and cheaper) to learn to read signs and maps, develop a sense of direction, and ask someone as a last resort. -via Nag on the Lake
Once, Jon Arbuckle of the comic strip Garfield was voted "The Most Depressed Comic Book Character." He serves as a comic foil for his cynical cat Garfield. That's not quite the case in this version of Jon by cartoonist Gail Galligan. In two comics, she turns Arbuckle into the main character who's not so much depressed, but introverted in a way we can all understand. Part one is about a dinner party in which he meets his significant other Liz's college friends, three of them veterinarians like her. In part two, he goes to a comic convention for the first time in years.
Both adventures are frightening prospects for the shy cartoonist, but he powers through. Garfield and Odie are peripheral characters seen only occasionally watching the action. The comics are not jokes, but sweet and relatable stories that make Jon a three-dimensional person instead of a cat's punching bag. -via Metafilter
Extreme nerdery incoming! EC Henry used a virtual wind tunnel to test the aerodynamics of the ships seen in the Star Wars movies. It becomes clear that they were designed to look cool, and not to work in a real atmosphere. But when you compare them to each other, the Rebels with their ugly ships were more realistic and might have even worked. -via io9
The most popular cherry in America is the dark red Bing cherry, but few know where its name came from. The variety was first developed at Seth Lewelling's orchard in Oregon. The Lewelling family had hauled 700 fruit trees out west in the mid 1800s to take advantage of the region's fertile land and mild weather. Ah Bing was a 6-foot-tall Chinese immigrant who worked for Lewelling for 30 years, earning money to send back to his wife and children in China.
As the foreman of Lewelling’s orchard crew, Ah Bing supervised more than 30 men. He worked closely with Lewelling on grafting, propagating, and caring for trees. The Bing cherry, Ledding recalled, surfaced one day when Lewelling and Ah Bing walked through the rows of cherry trees, where each man maintained separate rows. In Ah Bing’s row, there was a marvelous new type of cherry. Someone suggested that Lewelling name the cherry after himself. But Lewelling protested. He had already named a cherry for himself. “No, I’ll name this for Bing,” Ledding recalled him saying. “It’s a big cherry and Bing’s big, and anyway it’s in his row, so that shall be its name.”
But other stories portray Ah Bing as even more central to the development of the cherry. In 1922, the agricultural journal The Oregon Grower related that Lewelling had assigned a collection of “Black Republican” cherry seedlings to Ah Bing to care for in 1875. Ah Bing’s cultivation resulted in the Bing cherry, which, the author commented, would “pass his name down in horticultural history.”
The name stuck, but the connection to Ah Bing is little known. He was a victim of the Chinese Exclusion Act and suffered through riots as anti-Chinese sentiment worsened. Read about Ah Bing and his cherries at Atlas Obscura.
For ten years now, we've followed the story of Mark Hogancamp, who created the intricate miniature World War II world called Marwencol. His art went viral, and led to a book and then a documentary about how Hogancamp used Marwencol as therapy after he suffered horrific injuries from a beating. Now his story is a feature film called Welcome to Marwen, starring Steve Carell as Hogancamp. The movie has an advantage over a documentary in that the dolls and action figures of Marwencol, or Marwen, come to life to support Hogancamp. Welcome to Marwen is scheduled to open on November 21. -via Tastefully Offensive
The Gorilla Foundation has announced the passing of Koko. Koko the lowland gorilla was born at the San Francisco Zoo and was only one year old when she began to train in sign language with Dr. Francine “Penny” Patterson. Koko's amazing ability to communicate led to the establishment of the Gorilla Foundation. She had a vocabulary of around 1,000 words in sign language and understood around 2,000 spoken words. Koko loved to watch movies and was an avid fan of the TV show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. She was the first non-human to successfully participate in an internet chat. Koko was famous for her loving relationship with cats, and her intense bonding with her first kitten.
Koko’s capacity for language and empathy has opened the minds and hearts of millions. She has been featured in multiple documentaries and appeared on the cover of National Geographic twice. The first cover, in October of 1978, featured a photograph Koko had taken of herself in a mirror. The second issue, in January of 1985, included the story of Koko and her kitten, All Ball. Following the article, the book Koko’s Kitten was published and continues to be used in elementary schools worldwide. Her impact has been profound and what she has taught us about the emotional capacity of gorillas and their cognitive abilities will continue to shape the world.
Koko was 46.
(Image credit: Flickr user sid)
