Blind soccer was developed in Spain in the 1920s. The rules are complicated, but they permit a spirited game with demanding challenges for athletes.
All of the players are blindfolded, except for the goalies and, for each time, a guide who stands behind the opposing team's goal and shouts suggestions to the players. The ball makes a sound when it moves and players have to say "voy", which is Spanish for "go" when moving toward the ball (or where they think the ball is).
It would be interesting to see similar adaptive versions for other sports, such as stock car racing, paintball, and field hockey.
Her name was Louise Weber, but as a dancer in the chic Paris nightclubs, she became known as La Goulue ("The Glutton" in English) because of her habit of drinking up patrons' refreshments as she danced by. She was also called "The Queen of Montmartre." She snuck away from her family's laundry business at age 16 and danced in clubs around the Paris suburbs, building her reputation. La Goulue debuted at the Moulin Rouge in 1891 and reigned as their star for four years. She danced an early version of the can-can called the chahut and charmed audiences with her outrageous behavior. La Goulue became one of artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's favorite subjects.
By 1895, Weber had saved enough money to strike out on her own. She invested in her own traveling show, but she did not dance- she instead became a lion tamer! Read the story of La Goulue at Europeana. -via Everlasting Blort
Tell it to draw "teddy bears mixing sparkling chemical as mad scientists in a steampunk style" - and you'll get that image above. The technology is so good, it's scary.
Digital effects made with computer power opened a whole new world as to what movies can be. But knowing, or just feeling, that the latest action film was whipped up by digital effects companies instead of actors on a set leaves us feeling a bit cynical about the entire entertainment industry. Or does it? TIFF Originals lays out the evidence. In certain movies, digital effects leave us with a bad taste in our mouths, while others sell it so well we don't care. They break down the making of Mad Max: Fury Road as the main example. People loved the practical effects, the real vehicles, the stunt men risking their lives, and the stars who went through hell to make the movie real. However, every scene in the film was enhanced with digital effects. It appears that the difference may be the characters. We know when real people are doing real things, it makes the movie seem more real. -via Kottke
Joseph Mikulec is not a household name these days, but 100 years ago, he was a celebrity that you might meet on the street. He was famous for walking all around the world, collecting autographs. Born in 1878 in Croatia, Mikulec began hiking the world around 1900. He told people he met that a publishing company in Croatia had offered him big money if he would walk 25,000 miles and write about his experiences. We don't know how true that was, but he walked six continents and collected autographs of famous people. The more publicity he received for the stunt, the more access he got to the movie stars, political figures, sports stars, and wealthy movers and shakers whose signatures he sought.
In the 1920s, Mikulec walked across the US, adding autographs and eventually becoming an American citizen. He compiled his autographs, along with travel souvenirs and newspaper clippings, into a huge volume that weighed 60 pounds. Still, relatively little is known about Mikulec, including anything at all after 1929. But the book of autographs has resurfaced, and is now for sale. Read what is known about Joseph Mikulec, the "Globe Trotter," at Smithsonian.
The movies in The Lord of the Rings trilogy total more than 11 hours. It was an awesome story, though, and many of us sat through the whole thing in theaters without an intermission. But does LOTR pass the Bechdel test? To do so, a book or movie must have three things: 1. at least two women 2. who talk to each other 3. about something other than a man. To show that LOTR indeed passes the test, Eight Foot Manchild made a supercut of the scenes in the movie in which women talk to each other. He said he scanned more than 13 hours of footage, which means the extended versions. That's a lot of work! And I guess that the movie technically passes.
A commenter pointed out there was there was another scene in which these same two characters, Morwen and Freda, talked as the mother put her child on a horse. And they talked about the child's brother. Other fans pinpointed a couple of scenes in which a woman says the equivalent of "Hi!' to each other. I suppose that would make it better. Yet the top discussion at reddit was about the lack of dialogue between Legolas and Frodo. -via reddit
WDSU News reports that a man in the Metairie neighborhood of New Orleans developed an inventive menthod to prevent thieves from breaking into his fancy Chevy Silverado: he rigged a flashbang to detonate if someone broke in.
A flashbang is an explosive device that triggers a temporarily blinding flash of light and a loud noise. Such devices stun and disorient people who are nearby.
The anonymous owner told reporters that his truck had been broken into frequently in the past. He was determined to find an effective way to deter thieves.
New Orleans police expressed their concern about the use of explosives to stop robberies.
🎲 When Yolanda Frontany and her husband bought this old house, she didn't realize that she'd find herself owning a piece of history. It turns out that her house was the one where Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson invented Dungeons & Dragons! But after taking critical hits from the elements for 100 years, the old house is in dire need of repairs, and Frontany has started a crowdfunding campaign to save it. Here's The Quest to Preserve the Birthplace of Dungeons & Dragons | Indiegogo campaign.
💣 During the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, Union soldiers were loading a canon when a Confederate shell hit the canon's muzzle and plugged it up! It's the perfect shot.
Allie Siarto found a new venture during the start of the pandemic. The Michigan-based wedding photographer expanded to an unexpected new type of service, called divorce photography.
Initially starting as part of her personal branding photography, Siarto noticed that most of her clients were recently divorced women. “They were reinventing themselves in their lives and careers, and hiring a professional photographer was one small part of that,” she told PetaPixel.
Mad respect. This Chilean resident decided to work hard to buy himself a Nintendo Switch console! The kid, named Benja, recycled around 500kg of cans to get the cash he needed. He collected the recyclables over the course of nine months.
Benja saved his earnings and kept track of how much he earned in a notebook. In addition to the console, he also bought a copy of Breath of the Wild. Good choice for a first video game on the Switch!
I’m surprised that the device that captured the image survived the Sun’s temperature. In a Twitter post, the European Space Agency shared an extraordinary image of the celestial object.
The photograph was taken by the organization’s Solar Orbiter, a spacecraft that observes the Sun at such a close distance from it. This majestic image was rendered from 25 separate shots as the Orbiter passed directly between the Earth and the Sun. Here’s the full-resolution version of the image so you can really appreciate the quality of the photo!
The Nomad Passport Index is an annual ranking released by tax and immigration consultancy Nomad Capitalist. The said list assesses and ranks 199 places in the world that provide the most powerful passports. The index considers different criterias such as taxation, global perception, ability to obtain dual citizenship and personal freedoms.
The 2022 version of the list has European places in the top five, with Luxembourg at number one. Check the full list here!
Personally, a game becomes more memorable for me if the characters and their dynamics with their environment and others are well explored. When it comes to antagonists, some video games tend to just portray them as the “evil and selfish” person that wants to either thwart the protagonist or just kill them.
On the other hand, a lot of great games have fantastic portrayals of villains that make the world and the narrative in them more compelling to play and finish. Sometimes, you even root for the villain instead. Why? Well, you get their motivations. The reason why they become the antagonist of the story actually makes sense!
Take, for example, Hades, the lord of the underworld from Supergiant Games’ 2020 roguelike hit of the same name. While he acts as the villain to Zagreus, his son, who only wants to escape from his home, the reasons behind his action make sense as you continue to play the game. You won’t necessarily root for him as the story unfolds, but you’ll sit and think— “Yeah, I see why you’re like this.”
The Gamer compiles a list of ten villains that just like Hades, “make sense.” Check the full list here.
I recall some serious arguments in the my childhood between kids who insisted wrestling is fake and those who insisted it's real. What did we know- we were kids. According to Simon Whistler, the audience for professional wrestling was pretty much in on it from the beginning. Oh, wrestling was as serious as prizefighting and horse racing back in the day, but in the early part of the 20th century, spectators realized that legitimate wrestling was rather boring. Promoters stepped in to make it more exciting, and it became "staged" (which is a better description than "fake"). Those who produced the matches did anything they could to put butts in the seats. It wasn't long before betting died out of pro wrestling, but there was always money in tickets and later on TV. And there were plenty of other sports one could place a bet on.
This latest video from Today I Found Out goes through the history of wrestling and the steps taken to make it entertainment. You can skip to 1:18 to get to the subject matter. -via Boing Boing
Nature has given us a wide variety of substances that can act as a medicine, a recreational drug, or a murder weapon, depending on the dosage. There are also a lot of substances that will just plain kill. And since we all eat and drink, poisoning has a long history of the being the easiest way to murder someone. Arsenic was once the easiest way to get rid of a husband, just by serving him dinner. In the Old West, whiskey was sometimes served with a dash of strychnine. During Prohibition, industrial alcohol was imbued with poisonous methanol, to deter -or kill- those who wanted to drink it. Nazi war criminals used cyanide for both killing concentration camp inmates and for suicide.
Read about these poisonings and more, and also the most fashionable way to store your poisons, at Messy Nessy Chic. And when someone pours you a drink, watch how they hold their hand over the glass.
