Photo editors get some strange requests. James Fridman (previously at Neatorama) explains, while showing off his editing skills in epic fashion. Yeah, she should have worded that a little differently. He "improves" photos for those who request (as time allows) and the results are always gratifying.
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife, five children, family doctor, and three servants during the Russian revolution. The tsar was deposed in March of 1918, and the family was held in St. Petersburg until being moved to Yekaterinburg in April. They were held in secrecy there while different factions of the revolution competed for control of Russia.
The fate of the Romanovs was seemingly undecided until July, when the White Guard – still loyal to the tsar – began to move in on Yekaterinburg and looked certain to capture it.
The Bolsheviks could not afford to have the Romanovs fall into the hands of the Whites, lest they became symbols around which anti-communists could rally or provide foreign governments with an alternative head of state to recognise.
Goloshchekin travelled to Moscow to obtain the order for the assassination and is thought to have secured it from Vladimir Lenin himself, although no paper trail exists to confirm the fact, no doubt deliberate on the part of the Bolshevik leader.
“Revolutions are meaningless without firing squads,” he famously said.
The killings were a messy affair, as the soldiers were inept and somewhat drunk. The Independent has a blow-by-blow description of the night of July 16-17 that you'll find quite gruesome. For a lighter take, the Russian state archives has released some new photographs of the Romanov family, which you can see at Quartz.
A Quiet Place was a horror film about blind monsters that attack if they hear any sound. You can imagine how scary that would be, especially for a family with children. The movie made a big splash this spring. It quietly took in $331 million and a sequel is in the works. Now that it's out on home video, Screen Junkies has examined A Quiet Place thoroughly but quietly to bring us an Honest Trailer.
In only around 10% of mammal species do males spend quality time with their young. The species that developed paternal care have some advantages over species that don't. One of them is the bat-eared fox.
Pops in this species are so dedicated that males spend even more time than females near the dens that house their offspring. These furry fathers play a role in nearly every aspect of child-rearing: grooming cubs’ silky fur, engaging them in play and teaching them to stalk terrestrial insects with their bat-wing-shaped ears (which can grow up to five inches long—nearly 30 percent of their total height).
And this commitment pays off: The amount of time bat-eared fox fathers spend monitoring their young is an even bigger predictor of pup survival than maternal investment or food availability. Dads, at least in this species, matter.
It's not just mammals. Among the 20% of fish species that take care of their hatchlings, most of them are raised mainly by their fathers. Scientists have been studying the reasons for paternal care, the chemical mechanisms that contribute to the behavior, and the outcomes for various species. Read about that research at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Derek Keats)
We saw an impressive teaser a couple of months ago, and now here's the first full trailer for Bohemian Rhapsody, the story of Queen. The film, starring Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury, focuses on the band's music more than anything else.
The film traces the meteoric rise of the band through their iconic songs and revolutionary sound, their near-implosion as Mercury’s lifestyle spirals out of control, and their triumphant reunion on the eve of Live Aid, where Mercury, facing a life-threatening illness, leads the band in one of the greatest performances in the history of rock music.
Bohemian Rhapsody will open nationwide November 2.
Anyone who has spent time in a hospital knows that the food is standardized, bland, overcooked and under-spiced. Kate Washington became deeply interested in the subject when her husband spent several weeks unable to eat and then was charged with gradually getting back to regular meals. He didn't feel good, and hospital meals did not entice him to make an effort to eat. There are reasons behind the way food is in hospitals: the need to deliver scientific nutrition without doing harm, and the industrial scale of feeding all those patients.
In the move from individual at-home care and feeding for sick patients to mass institutions, medical science shifted to a big-picture, data-driven set of prescriptions and practices. Doing so undeniably saved lives, thanks to astonishing medical advances. But in the midst of institutionalizing and standardizing care, the medical establishment may have lost sight of the function of appetites and individual taste.
Food — for many patients one of the few sensory pleasures they can enjoy — can be an important, healing part of that corrective shift. Catering to patients’ tastes and preferences can certainly be more expensive, yet as Brad and I both learned, it can make a huge difference to the very sick, who may have lost almost all sense of themselves. Eating, among the most basic of human acts, can help reawaken that sense.
Washington turned to cookbooks from hundreds of years ago to find food that would appeal to a patient who didn't want to eat, in recipes from a time when the sick were cared for at home. And she researched the switch from home convalescence to the business of feeding modern hospital patients to find out why hospital food is so bad. The good news is that some institutions are trying new methods to make it better. Read about how hospital food got that way at Eater. -via Digg
(Image credit: Allegra Lockstadt)
Taras Kulakov, known as The Crazy Russian Hacker, has three dogs: Luke, Gus, and Hugo. With that many dogs, he decided to purchase a machine to clean them- a dog spa. In this video, he tries it out and gives us a review. Listening to Kulakov is always a treat, but the real draw in this video is watching Luke enjoying his bath. Hugo wasn't quite as enthusiastic. -via Laughing Squid
See more videos from the Crazy Russian Hacker.
Home is calling. #Aquaman – in theaters December 21. Watch the new trailer this Saturday. pic.twitter.com/ZTvO6qTxap
— Aquaman Movie (@aquamanmovie) July 16, 2018
One thing to know about the new Aquaman movie is that a new poster debuted today. So of course people had to have some fun with it.
#Aquaman improved. pic.twitter.com/ZD097qj7yl
— [REKT] Kabuki Q (@Kabuki_Q) July 16, 2018
But there's a lot more to learn. Aquaman, directed by horror master James Wan, will be a DC superhero movie that's an origin story, a battle against evil forces, and a quest movie as well, with a bit of romantic comedy thrown in. Two-thirds of the film takes place underwater, and the story is set after Justice League, but we won't see the other superheroes. That's just the beginning of what you'll learn about Aquaman in an article at Collider, which is full of background but doesn't spoil the plot. Aquaman will hit theaters on December 21st. -via Uproxx
Brett Yang and Eddy Chen are a two-man group called TwoSet Violin. They aren't limited to violin music, as you can see from their performance of Pachelbel's Canon in D played on rubber chickens. I'm not sure that there wasn't some electronic magic going on here, since, while you can tuna fish, you can't tune a chicken. -via Metafilter
Jorge Garza (qetzaart) draws figures in the style of ancient Aztec art. But look closer, and you'll recognize these characters.
Continue reading for more.
This video contains a little NSFW language. Has your relationship with Star Wars undergone a disappointing change? Therapy could help. In this skit from College Humor, a woman who's been a lifelong Star Wars fan no longer feels the magic in the relationship, and is spilling her heart to a counselor. Star Wars is there, too, hoping to salvage the relationship, but he/she/it is overly defensive. Will they achieve a breakthrough? -via Tastefully Offensive
Martha Gellhorn was a war correspondent reporting from the Spanish Civil War in 1939 when she fell in with another correspondent named Ernest Hemingway. The couple moved to Cuba and Gellhorn eventually became Hemingway's third wife. But while Hemingway expected Gellhorn to become a 1940s wife and stay home, Gellhorn continued covering conflicts in far away places. He eventually resorted to undermining her career by snagging the sole press credential from her employer to cover the D-Day invasion. Determined to be where the action is, Gellhorn talked her way onto a hospital ship and locked herself in a bathroom overnight. When she emerged, the invasion was underway.
Amid this otherworldly chaos, no longer caring about personal or professional consequences, Gellhorn learned that her hands—any hands—were needed. The vessel she had stowed away on by chance was the first hospital ship to arrive at the battle. When landing craft pulled alongside, she fetched food and bandages, water and coffee, and helped interpret where she could. When night fell, she went ashore at Omaha Beach with a handful of doctors and medics—not as a journalist but as a stretcher bearer— flinging herself into icy surf that brimmed with corpses, following just behind the minesweepers to recover the wounded.
All night she labored, with blisters on her hands, her mind and heart seared with images of pain and death she would never forget. Later she would learn that everyone of the hundreds of credentialed journalists, including her husband, sat poised behind her in the Channel with binoculars, never making it to shore. Hemingway’s story soon appeared in Collier’s alongside hers, with top billing and more dazzle, but the truth had already been written on the sand. There were 160,000 men on that beach and one woman. Gellhorn.
Hemingway soon met wife #4, and Gellhorn continued covering wars up to her 80s. Read the story of Martha Gellhorn's fascinating life and her relationship with Hemingway at Town and Country magazine. -via Digg
The logical way to divide a spinning planet into time zones would be to draw 24 latitudinal lines on the globe, leaving equal areas for each time zone. But that doesn't work for people who live with real life geography, national borders, and human nature. Countries did not adopt standard time all at once, and politics plays a big part. So we have some extra time zones that set their clocks a half-hour different from their neighbors, and some places that could use more time zones. RealLifeLore explains some of the weirder anomalies in global time. -via Digg
We are used to satellite imagery, drone photography, and of course pictures taken from airplanes. That was all pie-in-the-sky, so to speak, in 1909. Sure, people had used kites to take photographs from high above ground, but kites had their limitations. The pictures the public saw at at the 1909 Dresden International Exhibition of Photography were something else. They came about because a pigeon owner wanted to see where his birds went.
His name was Julius Neubronner, and he had a family history of using pigeons in unconventional ways. His father, also an apothecary, received prescriptions and sent out urgent medications by pigeon. Neubronner also relied on pigeons to replenish his stocks of medications. But when a bird went missing for a month, Neubronner was curious to know where it had been. While other bird-owners might consider this thought a mere flight of fancy, an unanswerable question, Neubronner took a different view: He designed a camera, one that shot automatically, for his pigeons to wear.
The results were so good that in 1907 Neubronner filed for a patent on his pigeon-view photography. Read about Neubronner's pigeon photographers and see some of their images at Atlas Obscura.
What could be more natural than combining professional wrestling with cosplay? They both have costumed characters that feed your fantasies with a live performance. Florida Supercon is going on this weekend at the Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, featuring Fantasy Super Cosplay Wrestling. A surprise entrant this year was caught on amateur video when Geoffrey the Giraffe entered the ring! Geoffrey is apparently looking for a new career since Toys R Us went out of business. Watch as he defeats Starlord and Dovahkin before he is bested by Gangrel's delivery from Amazon Prime. -via Uproxx
