It looks like Carroll Spinney is playing both ends in this vintage photograph! But you can hardly blame him for not completely changing between scenes when he had to play two roles. Spinney played both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street for years. At age 84, he is only semi-retired now. He started puppeteering when he was only eight years old, and after years of professional work, almost missed the chance to become a Muppeteer.  

Spinney first met Jim Henson in 1962 at a puppeteering festival, where Henson asked if he would like to "talk about the Muppets". As Spinney failed to realize the question was an employment offer, the conversation never came to pass.[6]

In 1969, Spinney performed at a Puppeteers of America festival in Utah. His show was a mixture of live actors and puppets but was ruined by an errant spotlight that washed out the animated backgrounds. Henson was once again in attendance and noticed Spinney's performance. "I liked what you were trying to do," Henson said, and he asked once more if they could "talk about the Muppets". This time, they did have the conversation, and Spinney joined the Muppeteers full-time by late 1969.[7]

-via Wil Wheaton

(Image source: Parker Molloy)

Now that sonograms for pregnant women are common, a new tradition has evolved called the "gender reveal party," in which the family, and often the parents, find out for the first time whether the baby will be a boy or a girl. The person entrusted with this information devises a way to make the surprise happen, often with a cake. The cake inside is tinted either pink or blue, completely covered with frosting or fondant until the ceremonial cutting. Some of these cakes are rather strange. The cakes above took advantage of a joke, while others take gender stereotypes to the max for a slogan.  

See a roundup of some of the strangest gender reveal cakes at Buzzfeed.

Oh, what a brave new world our inventors and engineers have developed for us! If they can't solve world hunger or bring peace among nations, at least they can scare the living daylights out of us. Programmer Abhishek Singh made an augmented reality program that recreates the iconic scene from The Ring in which Samara/Sadako climbs out of the TV. You know the one. It's pretty creepy.

(YouTube link)

She's even able to follow the viewer around as you try to escape. While it's not perfect, this does show the terrifying possibilities for the technology and what it can be used for. -via Gizmodo

The Big Short sounds like an oxymoron, but it's also the name of a 2015 film about the real estate bubble that led to the 2007-08 financial crash. Despite the dry and depressing subject matter, The Big Short was both a critical and box office hit and was nominated for five Academy Awards. Maybe it was the star power of  Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, and quite a few other well-known actors. Maybe it was because it explained complicated financial shenanigans in a way people could understand, and made it funny as well. If you like The Big Short, you'll want to learn some trivia about it.  

8. The characters were based on real people.

While the names of the people involved were obviously changed most of them were based on real people that had something to do with the disaster in 2008.

7. The real Michael Burry has a cameo in the film.

There’s a shot of him standing near the front door talking on the phone. He plays the role of a Scion employee for just a brief moment in the film.

Learn more about The Big Short at TVOM.

Brooke Swanson was always color blind, but of course she didn't know that as a child, because you don't miss what you've never had. Still, it was difficult for her to use crayons if the labels were torn off. When she was diagnosed, she didn't understand. And as she grew up, she encountered new problems.

Aside from the whole crayon wrapper thing, color blindness didn’t start to really impact my daily life until high school. That’s when you start going shopping with friends, makeup becomes important, your mom isn’t dressing you anymore and you need to wear clothes that match. It wasn’t until I started making mistakes with that stuff that I realized this is kind of a big deal.

We moved when I was a junior in high school. Here I am, 16 years old, at a brand new school, and I just want what every other 16-year-old wants: to fit in. I was leaving English class when this boy Thomas came up to me and said, “I think your eyes are bleeding.” I thought it was a prank, or a weird joke, and I just kind of laughed and shrugged it off.

When I got home later the makeup I’d put on that morning was still out on the dresser. My red lip liner and my brown eyeliner were both Clinique brand, and I’d mixed them up. Thomas thought my eyes were bleeding because I’d been wearing bright red lip liner on my eyes all day. I was mortified, and I never wanted to make that mistake again. To this day, I make sure my lip and eyeliner are always different brands.

Swanson writes eloquently about the struggles of colorblindness, but her story takes an amazing turn when her boyfriend bought her a pair of Enchroma glasses. She describes discovering an entirely new world as an adult, down to seeing her son through new eyes. You'll see color differently after reading her story at The Cut. -via Digg

(Image credit: Flickr user Justin Morgan)

The Walking Dead returns this Sunday night, after a three month break in the middle of season eight. If you've ever heard the show's opening theme, you know that it's not the sort of song that lends itself to lyrics. The Warp Zone took that as a challenge.  

(YouTube link)

The lyrics they used, if you can keep up with them, bring to mind the growing theory that our heroes are actually the bad guys of the series. Not that we'd ever root against them, but they do tend to leave a wide path of destruction in their wake. On reflection, that's to be expected. When you have a big special effects department working hard on zombies all the time, you have to reward them with the opportunity to burn things down and blow things up occasionally.  -via Tastefully Offensive

(Image credit: Wellcome Images)

Dear A.J., I’m in a friend’s wedding this fall, and she’s requested that all the bridesmaids wear Spanx. Do I have to? I hate the way they feel. -Sarah in Baltimore

Here's my advice, Sarah: Tell the lovely bride to cut out the crazy talk! If I’m reading it correctly, our Constitution guarantees the inalienable right to love handles. That said, if you do decide to honor and obey her wishes, take comfort in knowing that in the entire agonizing history of women’s fashion, Spanx is pretty benign.

Consider its 16th-century Spanish equivalent: an iron corset that squeezed the woman’s waist to the size of an Eggo waffle. In the centuries that followed, women slipped into something only slightly less excruciating: corsets made of whalebone, wood, and steel. Lacing up these duds required a brawny servant who stood behind the lady, often lodging a foot in her back for leverage!

Let's go home by Theduc

Kenny must be awfully tired of living by now, and every time he dies again the prospect of succumbing to Death's cold embrace must seem a little more appealing. But as long as Kenny has work to do in South Park he'll keep coming back, leaving Death waiting in the wings like a parent waiting to pick up their child from school. It's funny how appealing immortality seems until you're actually immortal, since nobody realizes that immortality means Death will always be watching and waiting for its chance to embrace you. But that's Kenny's favorite part, because his parents weren't too big on hugging...

Show some love for your favorite animated immortal with this Let's Go Home t-shirt by Theduc, it's a killer design that'll make your fellow fans crack up wherever you go!

Visit Theduc's Facebook fan page and official website, then head on over to his NeatoShop for more drop dead funny designs:

View more designs by Theduc | More Funny 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!

The age old question, "How fast can you run?" is answered logically by "It depends on what's chasing me." But sometimes even that motivation isn't enough. What could possibly lead to this scenario? Could it be a nagging idea that you've let your body go to pot by sitting all day? You sit at work, you sit in the car, you go home and sit while watching TV or playing on the internet. No wonder your legs have no loyalty. And no taste, either, according to the monster. This is the latest comic from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Indoor shooting ranges are where people go to blow off some steam by firing off a few dozen rounds of ammo, and they're a great place for the armed professionals to practice their aim and improve their skills.

But guns are loud and obnoxious, making it impossible to relax in a shooting range, and most ranges discourage their patrons from drinking while they shoot which is why they're not a very fun place to hang out.

So if you want to kick back while developing kick ass combat skills I suggest you head to an indoor axe-throwing range like Brooklyn's Kick Axe Throwing instead, where you can hurl axes in-between drinks and drink 'til you hurl once you're done tossing axes!

-Via Mashable

Even though we've all seen the pictures, only 556 people in all of history have looked at our Earth from the vantage point of space orbit and came back to tell us about it. Only 24 have seen it as a pale blue dot from lunar orbit. National Geographic talked with several of those people. Some of them expressed how limited our language is in describing how it felt.

Kathy Sullivan, who in 1984 became the first American woman to perform a space walk, returned with an abiding awe for the intricate systems that come together to make Earth an improbable oasis. “The thing that grew in me over these flights was a real motivation and desire … to not just enjoy these sights and take these pictures,” she says, “but to make it matter.”

After retiring from NASA, Sullivan led the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for three years, using the robotic eyes of orbiting satellites to pursue her passion. She says Earth from above is so captivatingly beautiful, she never grew bored looking at it. “I’m not sure I’d want to be in the same room with someone who could get tired of that.”

A significant number of those who've flown in space later went into professions and projects to study, improve, and protect our Earth. Read their stories at National Geographic magazine. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: NASA)

Scare campaigns typically have something other than public safety and awareness behind them, and the end result of the campaign rarely justifies the means.

When McCarthy decided to go after the commies among us with his ridiculous Red witch hunt he was doing it for his own benefit, not the country's, and the source of his power over the American people was his "list" of Communists that had infiltrated the U.S. government.

(YouTube Link)

This list is what he used to strike fear into the hearts of the American people, it started the Red Scare and served as the source of McCarthy's power- only this Red list didn't exist:

At first, McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 57 secret commies. Then it was 81, and at one point it was 10, which probably meant a bunch of them watched some John Wayne movies and changed their minds. Each time, the numbers would change, and each time, the senator flashed a piece of paper that contained the names of exactly zero Soviet subversives. It was the xenophobic fearmongering equivalent of saying you have a girlfriend in Canada.

(Image Link)

John F. Kennedy similarly used the Red Scare to convince America to vote for him in the 1960 presidential election, claiming Dwight Eisenhower's negligence had allowed Russia to stockpile more missiles than the U.S., the so-called "missile gap":

(YouTube Link)

We know now this claim was utter BS- U-2 spy planes had already determined the Russians couldn't reach the U.S. with their ICBMs or bombers, and America had already amassed a much larger arsenal.

But JFK knew the Republicans couldn't call his bluff without revealing the existence of secret spy plane missions against the Soviets, so Kennedy tossed out a ripe lie and America ate it up.

Read 5 Major Scare Campaigns Based on Less Than Nothing at Cracked (NSFW language)

In the midst of the Cold War, the US build a military base under the ice in Greenland. They dug tunnels under the glacier that covers the island, thinking that the ice would be permanent. The ice wasn't permanent even back then. Glaciers shift, and that made the Camp Century unstable, and ultimately unusable. But that was after it had been in use for ten years.

By the time the base was abandoned in 1967, it had its own library and theater, an infirmary, kitchen and mess hall, a chapel, and two power plants (one nuclear, one run on diesel). When the base closed, key parts of the nuclear power plant were removed, but most of the base’s infrastructure was left behind—the buildings, the railways, the sewage, the diesel fuel, and the low-level radioactive waste. In the 2016 paper, which Colgan worked on as well, the researchers suggested that the radiological waste was less worrisome than the more extensive chemical waste, from diesel fuel and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) used to insulate fluids and paints.

Overall, the researchers estimated that 20,000 liters of chemical waste remain at the Camp Century site, along with 24 million liters of “biological waste associated with untreated sewage.” That’s just at Camp Century; the military closed down bases at three other sites in Greenland, too, and it’s unclear how much waste is left there. Over the next few decades, the researchers found, melt water from the ice sheets could mobilize these pollutants, exposing both the wildlife and humans living in Greenland.

For 50 years, military officials assumed that the abandoned base would remain buried. But now that the Greenland ice sheet is receding under ever-warmer climate conditions, what's left behind could be an environmental disaster in the making. Read more about Camp Century at Atlas Obscura. 

The politically charged lyrics of Rage Against The Machine made them controversial in the 90s, and yet despite all the controversy (or perhaps because of it) their second and third albums debuted at number one on the charts.

But before they forever changed alternative music with hits like Killing In The Name and Bombtrack they were just a bunch of young, hungry musicians with a new sound and a dream.

And, like many rockers before them, their musical journey started at Zed Records in Long Beach, California, where YouTuber CowProd captured their performance on March 29th, 1992 with this amazing two camera video:

almost 21 [26] years ago i shot this footage of rage playing zed records. mostly been sitting on it for this long because i’m that lazy.

(YouTube Link)

-Via Laughing Squid

The Star Trek universe covers several centuries, a lot of outer space, and a bunch of TV shows and movies. In that universe, the icon starship Enterprise gets around. It's been crashed and disabled and shot at and retired, but it always bounces back, often as a new (and improved) ship with the same basic design and the same name. The canon as we know it has eleven versions so far, and a new one has been teased for an appearance in the series Star Trek: Discovery. That Enterprise is not included in a ranking of all eleven Enterprises at io9, but only because we don't know enough about it yet. If you're a Star Trek fan, you'll want to go see if your favorite made #1.