A researcher from the University of Warsaw’sPolish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology and her colleagues described the inner workings behind the collaborative nature of artisans when it comes to producing designs or decorations for temples in Egypt. According to Anastasiia Stupko-Lubczynska, artisans of different ability levels collaborated to produce the needed artworks for a mortuary temple in the Dayr al-Baḥrī complex in Thebes.
Stupko-Lubczynska and her colleagues analyzed two reliefs situated in the temple’s Chapel of Hatshepsut. After close examination, they discovered numerous discrepancies in artistic styles. “Chisel marks seen on the walls show where corrections were made, suggesting that master artisans worked side by side with apprentices learning the trade,” the Smithsonian wrote.
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Some people think that all corgis, or all German shepherds, look alike. People who have dogs know that's not true- every animal has a unique look and unique facial expressions. However, sometimes they share those unique looks with people you may recognize. Joaquim Campa collected quite a few pictures of dogs that you may have never seen before, but you'll recognize them right off.
Those eyes! Those cheekbones! You ought to be a star! There are a lot more of these, and even when Campa ended his thread, plenty of other people came in to post dogs (and cats) who look like celebrities.
In the town of Watford, UK, city managers decided they didn't want large trucks passing through the downtown area, so they installed width restrictors. This is a set of bollards that are only seven feet wide (2.1 meters), and if your vehicle is wider, it cannot pass through. The bollards are 29 inches high, so the side mirrors on most passenger cars can pass above them. But one particular width restrictor, on Woodmere Avenue, is notorious for the number of cars, even rather small cars, that crash into the bollards. Here's a compilation of such incidents.
What causes such mayhem? Is it bad design or clueless drivers? It appears to be both. Many of these drivers look to be approaching too fast or else not paying attention. But the restrictor itself is kind of wonky. The Google Street View image at the top show us that the curb on the left acts as a ramp that leads right to the first bollard. This is exactly the kind of non-symmetrical ramp stunt drivers use to flip cars for movies. You can see it even better in this image. Remember, in the UK, the driver is on the right side of the car.
Woodmere Avenue Crashes is a YouTube channel dedicated to the Woodmere Avenue restrictor mishaps. There's also a public Facebook group about the restrictor. You'd think after all that, the city traffic engineers would want to do something about it. -via Jalopnik
When the Japanese captured Singapore during World War II, quite a few women and children from Britain and its allies were sent to POW camps. Their husbands and fathers were sent to separate camps, and no communication was allowed between them. However, the women came up with a scheme to let their men know they were alive. They volunteered to make quilts for the Red Cross to use in the camp's hospital, where there were plenty of wounded men. They embroidered quilt pieces with designs that sent clandestine messages to their loved ones, and most importantly, they each embroidered their names on the squares. The names were enough to announce that they were still alive, and the designs were something that would mean nothing at all to a casual observer, but would to a husband, whether he saw it himself or even just heard about it from a hospitalized inmate.
For example, one embroiderer whose husband was imprisoned in the camp depicted a V, presumably for victory, and two smiling rabbits. “She had two daughters, so we think that the message was intended to let her husband know that her two daughters were well and with her.”
Other squares contain chirpy, patriotic emblems like Scottish thistles and Welsh dragons, and subtle references to King George VI. But most importantly, “every square has a name or initial: that was the main objective, just to get their name on the quilt”.
Three quilts are known to have survived Changi prison. Two are on permanent display in Australia, and the third, only recently discovered, is going on display as the British Red Cross opens a new museum in London this week. Read more about the quilts at The Guardian. -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: British Red Cross Museum & Archives)
Movie fans have gone around and around for decades about whether to classify the 1988 film Die Hard as a Christmas movie. In the last couple of years, that seems to have settled down, and the general consensus is that yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie. Just not the same way that It's a Wonderful Life or Home Alone is.
Now Den of Geek lays out the case that the 1987 film Lethal Weapon is also a Christmas movie, even more so than Die Hard. Neither film was released anywhere near Christmas, but they are both set during the holiday. The reason Die Hard was set during a Christmas party was because producer Joel Silver insisted on it, as he had for the previous year's Lethal Weapon. His reasoning was sound: any movie with Christmas decorations and Christmas music would be replayed in December, bringing in years of residuals.
Yet there is more than a temporal setting to Lethal Weapon that makes it a Christmas movie. Amid the car chases, gun battles, and general carnage, there is a subplot that takes Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) from a suicidal wreck to a happy man with a friends, somewhat like It's a Wonderful Life. Read what makes Lethal Weapon a Christmas movie at Den of Geek.
We make fun of the Jell-O salad fad of the 20th century because 1. we think of Jell-O as a sweet treat or dessert, and 2. we can't imagine people actually liking something that's so processed and artificial. But cooks who jumped on Jell-O when it was first produced didn't see it that way. It was an affordable way to recreate the earlier, labor intensive aspic dishes that most people had never experienced. And it was natural, up to a point. Aspic, and their vegan alternatives pectin and agar, are natural products even if they were hard to get and weren't used that much before Jell-O came along.
Then after World War II, we got refrigerators and housewives, which led to ridiculously creative Jell-O recipes. Jell-O helped out by developing celery and tomato flavored gelatin. But the madness finally came to an end. You still see Jell-O salads at potlucks occasionally, but they rarely contain eggs, shrimp, or canned veggies anymore. -via Mental Floss
Literary TikToker (I'm going to just assume that's a thing for the kids these days, just like wearing an onion on your belt is for my generation) Lizzy imagines a scenario in which different incarnated fiction genres meet for their regular bookclub. They have decidedly firm opinions about the relative quality of themselves.
Notably absent is Alternate History, who was probably too busy accusing competitors of using Alien Space Bats, and Science Fiction, who is still world building instead of plot writing. Western's kids took the car keys away and can't get to the meetings anymore.
A Soju Bomb is a cocktail which mixes beer with soju, a Korean grain-based liquor with a very high alcohol content. Simply stirring the liquor into the beer is totally inadequate. The real Soju Bomb experiece begins with balancing the shot of soju over the beer glass on a pair of chopsticks. Knock hard on the table on which it sits to jar the shot loose. To fully prepare your brain for this experience, use something heavy, like your skull. Get your head nicely tenderized so that the booze has pain to numb.
If your shot does not fall in, try again and again, as many times as necessary, to mix the drink. The more times that you hit, the more motivation you gain to complete the drink.
Colonel Henry Ludington was an American commander in the Revolutionary War based in Connecticut. There were around 400 men under his command. On April 26, 1777, Colonel Ludington received a message that the British were attacking the town of Danbury. Time to rally the troops! But since it was April, almost all of them were scattered across Connecticut and an area that is now part of New York, planting their crops. How could he possibly notify them in time?
The Colonel turned to his oldest child, Sybil, who was 16 years old. Sybil Ludington agreed to ride off and find as many soldiers as she could, in the manner that Paul Revere did a couple of years earlier. Sybil, however, had no assistants and no time to prepare as Revere did. By the time she returned, some of the Continental troops were already reporting for duty. However, Sybil was a young woman with no military status, and her feat went unrecognized for so long that we don't even know how true it is. Read about Sybil Ludington at Cracked.
Brothers Jim and Will Pattiz run the site More Than Just Parks, dedicated to sharing information on America's National Parks. They've tackled the task of ranking all the parks in a list that may or may not be useful to you on your future travels.
Each of the 63 designated National Parks (National Monuments, Recreation Areas, Forests, etc. were not ranked) were rated in five equally-weighted factors: accessibility, recreation, crowds, amenities, and scenery. It's sad that a park's very attractiveness can lead to a low score due to crowds, but too many tourists can lead to dissatisfaction with the experience. In deciding whether to visit, you'll need to weigh these factors for your own purposes. If a lack of accessibility and amenities don't bother you, you could see the most glorious scenery there is, without crowds, despite a low score on this list.
The top National Park on the list is Olympic National Park in Washington state, with a score of 48 out of 50.
My state's only National Park, Mammoth Cave, ranked abysmally. It got docked for lack of recreational activities, which is true, and for lack of scenery. Seriously, scenery? What can you expect, it's a cave! Bring lights. The park that came in dead last earned that score because it shouldn't even be a National Park. See the full list of rankings, with an explanation for each score and often a video. -via Kottke
You probably know a few things about Josephine Baker. She was an American entertainer who moved to Paris in the 1920s as a teenager and became a sensation for her singing, her cross-eyed comedy, and her dancing, particularly her notorious erotic dance in a skirt made of bananas. During World War II, Baker was a spy for the French Resistance, using her fame to bypass the scrutiny everyday French citizens had to endure. And later on, she adopted a dozen children from all over the world. Those things you know already.
But there was a lot to Baker's life in between those milestones. For instance, she got the name Baker when she married at age 15. That was her second marriage! During the war, Hermann Goering personally tried to murder her, and nearly succeeded before she made a daring escape. Read these stories and quite a bit more about Josephine Baker's astonishing life at Messy Nessy Chic.
Kransekage means wreath cake in English. These cakes are made in Scandinavia out of concentric circles of baked marzipan, and are served for holidays and special occasions. But in Denmark, if the occasion is really special, like a wedding, the cake takes on a unique shape. This is the overflødighedshorn, or cornucopia cake, a Danish tradition since the late 1700s.
The horn of plenty, or cornucopia, symbolizes good fortune, wealth, a bountiful harvest, and generosity. These Danish wedding cakes are displayed overflowing with a bounty of fruits, candies, or smaller pastries. Overflødighedshorn is an expensive confection, painstakingly made by bakers who are artists. Each ring of the horn must be baked in just the right shape to be assembled into a gravity-defying curve, held together by a bit of chocolate. Read how they do it at Atlas Obscura.
And if you ever see a overflødighedshorn, better take a picture, because this work of art will be eaten!
🎬 The Shining was released more than 40 years ago, but we're still finding intricate details that make the horror movie so good. In "The Invisible Horror of the Shining", Kaptainkristian explains how the brilliant music and sound editing helped elevate the movie's status as one of the most influential horror films ever made.
🥧 The Ouroboros pie is a pumpkin pie that eats itself.
🐤 Ornithologists have finally found what they've been looking for since 2000: the "Kill Bill Tanager," which got its name because it looks just like Uma Thurman's yellow jumpsuit in the Quentin Tarantino's hit movie.
🎵 Did you have a good Thanksgiving? Perhaps it would've been better had Weird Al Yankovic came and sang to your family. That's what Penn Holderness imagined, and we couldn't agree more.
🍼 Have you ever seen a baby armadillo? Well, here's your chance.
😂 Here are hundreds of funny T-shirts that'll tickle your funny bone.
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