I suspect he didn't think his cunning plan all the way through. He had a goal in mind, and he achieved that goal. Now what? This is like winning a huge lottery payout: you've dreamed of it all your life, but there are consequences to wrestle with after achieving your goal. It's always good to think beyond winning. This is the new comic from Alex Culang and Raynato Castro at Buttersafe.
As we saw in a post yesterday, the things we see in movies and TV shows are very different from real life, usually for dramatic purposes. Sure, if life were always dramatic, we wouldn't need the escape of entertainment. Then there's the stuff we really don't know much about, and since we only see it on TV, we don't know how accurate it is or isn't. Surgeon Annie Onishi of Columbia University tells us how real life surgery and medical emergencies differ from the TV version.
Onishi covers an awful lot of medical subjects you've seen in movies and TV. A few scenes may be too graphic if you're a bit squeamish about medical procedures. It's nice to know that real-life surgery is in the hands of trained and non-dramatic people. -via Laughing Squid
With our advanced dental technology and space-age materials, it's easy for us to think that using real teeth for dentures is gross. But for our dentally-challenged ancestors, it was a choice between that or dentures made of something else that look or work right, or just doing without teeth. They could have told themselves that these human teeth came from dental extractions instead of dead bodies, but we know the truth.
Such ghoulish dentures are usually referred to as “Waterloo teeth,” thanks to the practice of yanking perfectly good teeth from battlefield casualties. No one is quite sure where that name originally came from, and it’s even a bit misleading. But none of that makes the history of humans filling their mouths with the teeth of other humans any less fascinating.
“It’s kind of a misnomer, because the Waterloo battle was in 1815, and human teeth were in use in dentures already,” says Andrew Spielman, associate dean for academic affairs at the NYU School of Dentistry. According to Spielman, human teeth had been used in dentures for at least a century before the Battle of Waterloo, and were routinely culled from battlefields since at least the French Revolution in the late 1700s.
Read about the practice of using human teeth for dentures, where they came from and how they worked, at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Wellcome Collection)
Simon's Cat is stuck way up in a tree and is afraid to come down! So, like any good cat owner, Simon goes up to get him, but finds it's pretty scary up there. The cat, however, likes the company. The cat would stay up there all night, playing with his human!
Simon Tofield says the latest Simon's Cat video is a true story. That's easy to believe, at least to the rest of us cat people.
Let's take a fun little personality test to determine how many children you should have. Honestly, you should have the number of children that you want and have the resources to nurture. The quiz, by Jill Harness, asks questions that have little to do with children but explores your preferences in a variety of areas. What would it say about me?
Um, okay. I have seven children, but they are all grown. I do not wish to have any more, so I guess the quiz is right. Was it because I like Led Zeppelin? Was is because I haven't read Harry Potter? Take the test yourself and see what it says about you!
The roads were covered with ice, and most folks in Swanage, Dorset, UK, knew that it would be useless to try to drive up this fairly steep hill. So they walked instead. Or tried to. It's a case of one step forward and ten steps back. They should have worn their Yaktrax on that day. At least they aren't rolling a rock uphill, like Sisyphus.
Paul Dubbelman, the guy recording the video is obviously warm and dry in his home upstairs, and feels free to laugh at their misery. His description is "The Swanage ice dancing team getting in some practise for the next winter Olympics". Since most of it is silent, here's a recommended soundtrack. -via Boing Boing
People tend to invite other people to their parties, and they hang around with their fellow humans talking about boring stuff like their jobs, their finances and their families. But if people could stop being so human-centric and start inviting cats to their parties they would see how fun a party can be! There ain't no party like a neko party because a neko party goes on all night long, and when you invite celebrity cats like Jibanyan, Meowth and Vash's buddy Kuro-Neko to your party things can get really rowdy really fast- especially if video games are involved!
Add some cat-tastic color to your geeky wardrobe with this Neko Party t-shirt by Adam Works, it's a cool way to show some love for all of your favorite anime cats!
Visit Adam Works's Facebook fan page, official website and Twitter, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more kitty-riffic designs:
| Spla2n | Showdown | Aloha from Alola | I Love Board Games |
View more designs by Adam Works | More Cartoon T-shirts | New T-Shirts
Are you a professional illustrator or T-shirt designer? Let's chat! Sell your designs on the NeatoShop and get featured in front of tons of potential new fans on Neatorama!
Everyone goes through a rebellious phase. You know, that moment when daddy's little girl decides that booze, boys, and the beach are a lot more fun than the old man ever was. And, if you're lucky, you'll be able to look back on those years and laugh. If you're less lucky, you spent those years on a reality show, so for the rest of time, millions of strangers can look back on them and laugh instead. But, hey, it could be worse. You could be responsible for the fall of Western Civilization, just like Justa Grata Honoria, the Roman princess whose wild ways and naked ambition set off a chain reaction that culminated in the destruction of the Roman Empire.
Barely Regal
Naming NPCs is one of the banes of my existence as a DM (or GM if you prefer the more generic and broadly encompassing title), and try as I might to come up with new names I often fall back on old standards.
If the guy or gal is a rogue-like character then the words sneaky, stabby, cutter, shadow or fingers tend to find their way into their name somewhere, and rangers are almost always named Roger, Dan or Dana for some reason.
And, as this Electric Bunny comic shows, when all else fails you should just name them after the first thing you see. My personal favorites- Mr. Coffee and Senor Stinkbottom (my dog's nickname).
There are reasons that fictional characters do things that no one in real life does. Groups of real people never sit at half a round table because there is no camera or audience. But there are so many odd behaviors in movies and on TV that can get under your skin once you notice how often it happens.
You've probably noticed the police on all the Law & Order incarnations talk to witnesses who never stop working. A normal person will stop and pay attention when the cops want a word with them. But a director early on thought that was too boring, so every witness continues to lift boxes or sweep the floor or whatever while they give their eyewitness account. That really bothered me before I read the explanation somewhere a few years ago.
Other folks are bothered by these weird human behaviors, and they contributed a bunch of them to Cracked "pictofacts" post about how fictional characters are just different from normal human beings. See 34 of them at Cracked.
The song of the laughing kookaburra is one of the most distinctive bird songs in nature, and it's one of the standard sound effects used whenever footage of the Australian bush is shown on film.
That signature kookaburra sound is so unique and such a rich, full-bodied sound that it even sounds cool when it's played in slow motion, as demonstrated in this video of Dacelo the kookaburra shot by his human Connor Margetts.
-Via Laughing Squid
There are plenty of adages about how to be happy, like "Stop and smell the roses," and "Learn to find joy in what you have." These can be boiled down to "lower your expectations," which is a sure-fire way to make yourself feel better about not achieving all that you had hoped for. Eventually, you realize you're not going to get a PhD, scale the world's highest mountain, or write a bestseller. And that's okay, because you managed to get out of bed this morning. There are people who can't do that. This is the latest comic from Chris at Lunarbaboon.
The world is full of weirdos, including those who walk around all day talking to themselves out loud, but the weirdiest weirdos of them all are those who chat with their hair all day.
These loony lock lovers are so convinced the protein strands sitting on top of their heads are actually a sentient entity that they treat their hair like their best friend- leaving the position closed for all humans.
But, as you'll see in the animated short Farkels created by Greg Kletsel, Dessarae Bassil and Valerie Lockhart, it's probably best if sentient beings of all shapes, sizes and species minimize contact with those lock-lovin' loons!
"Dagnabbit" is a hilarious word that you probably learned from Yosemite Sam. It's a pseudo-swear word you can use in public when you don't want to be technically blasphemous, like gosh, golly, gee, and other substitutes. But in even broader terms, it's a "taboo deformation," and the term applies to more words than you might think.
“Taboo deformation is one possible way for a word to change its meaning,” says Andrew Byrd, a professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky who specializes in Indo-European languages. Basically, we are scared of the true names of certain beings or concepts, because to use them might mean we summon them, which we don’t want, or anger them, which we definitely don’t want, or simply make other humans mad at us, which is slightly less bad but still not ideal. The true name is powerful, and we normal humans can’t handle that power. So we avoid using the true name, but sometimes we still need to communicate with each other about those beings or concepts. That means we have to figure out a way to talk about something without using the actual word for it.
You can understand the concept when it applies to one's deity, or even multiple deities, but it also applied to more secular names, like "bear" and "wolf." Dan Nosowitz gives us a breakdown of how those words came to us through taboo deformations, as well as other terms such as "dagnabbit."
(Illustration: Aida Amer)
How many languages can a person learn? How do language rules change over time? What are the most confusing English grammar rules? What is the real definition of "irony"? How does a new word get into our dictionaries? What are linguistics? And how does one begin to invent a new language? These are some of the questions tackled in the newest episode of the Mental Floss series Scatterbrained.
