It’s an amazing coincidence! Animal shelter volunteer Hannah Rountree reunited with her childhood cat Spunky three years after the cat disappeared. The fifteen-year-old was on her second day at the Saving Grace Pet Adoption center when she spotted a cat that resembled Spunky. It turns out that the feline was actually her childhood friend, who was returned to the shelter by his new family because he didn’t want to catch mice.
The two are now reunited and Spunk returned to his old home, equipped with a microchip on his person in case he gets lost again!
🗺️ This is an amazing story: Thirty-three years ago, a four year old boy was kidnapped from his village and sold to a child trafficking ring. The man was finally able to find his long-lost mother by drawing a map of the village he remembered growing up in and sharing it on social media.
🐱 Jessica and Nikii Gerson-Neeves were excited to get a Vitamix blender as Christmas gift. The problem? Their cats are holding it hostage and an Internet saga is born.
If you watch the nightly news, it seems that Americans live in a highly divided society on the verge of splitting into two polar political opposites. From vaccine policies to mask mandates to views on the event of January 6th, Americans are split along old and familiar political fault lines.
So it’s refreshing to me to find these 2021 poll results from the Pew Research Center and Gallup that show that Americans are actually quite unified in many areas: the majority of people across the country, from both blue states and red states, and across various socio-economic strata - actually agree with each other.
Two thirds of adult Americans agree that extreme weather events are happening more often.
According to Pew Research, about 50% of adult Americans living in the western states, 73% living in southwest and central states, and 59% living in the middle Atlantic states see extreme weather events happening more often than in the past. Overall, 67% of Americans across the country see higher frequencies of extreme weather events and 28% see these events as about as often as in the past. Only 4% think that there are more extreme weather events in the past than in the present.
94% of Americans approve of interracial marriage
In 1958, Gallup started asking the question of whether Americans approve or disapprove of marriage between Black people and White people. Back then, only 4% of people approved. In 1997, the approval rate passed the 50% mark and in 2021, the approval rate of interracial marriage reached an all-time high of 94%.
Remarkably, Republicans (who have consistently been least supportive of same-sex marriage in the past) finally reached majority supporting same-sex marriage for the first time (55%) in 2021.
66% of Americans support transgender people serving in the military
The American views on transgender issues remain more divided, but those that favor allowing openly transgender people serving in the military is a solid 66% according to Gallup. In contrast, a majority of Americans (62%) think that transgender athletes should only be allowed to play sports in teams based on their birth gender, rather than their gender identities.
An interesting note is that the American view on transgender issues is very likely to change in the future, as the younger generations become a larger part of the population. This is because today, only 19% of adults aged 65 and older know a transgender person whereas half of adults younger than 30 personally know of one in their lives.
68% of Americans support legal marijuana
I suppose it’s not surprising that Americans now solidly favor the legalization of marijuana - this view is shared by the majority of US adults across all genders, age, income, and education.
In 1969, when Gallup first asked whether Americans think that marijuana should be legal, only 12% agreed. That number crossed into the majority in 2013, and now reaches an all time high of 68%.
80% of Americans think that the country is no longer a good model of democracy
Perhaps all of the political divisiveness has taken a toll: according to Pew Research, 80% of Americans believe that the U.S. is no longer a good model of democracy. Of these 80%, 72% said that the country used to be a good example, but has not been one in recent years, and another 8% said that the country has never been a good example of democracy.
Family is the top source of meaning in life for Americans
Let’s end this with this global study by Pew Research, where they asked adults across 17 countries with advanced economies the open-ended question of what gives them the most meaning in their lives.
While that is not all too surprising (family is chosen by 14 out of the 17 countries polled), it does show that in some countries, family isn’t all what it’s cracked up to be: In Spain, people valued health as the top factor, with family a distant fourth. In Taiwan, society is number one. South Koreans, it seems, are the odd fellow: they value material well-being as the top source of meaning in their lives!
Redditor TheTonz lives in Minnesota where the high temperature was -2F (-19C) on Friday. He wet a set of his kid's pajamas and set them outside to see how they would freeze. The result was a yard sculpture that was easier than building a snowman. On Saturday, the temperature had risen to 26 degrees (still below freezing) and the pajamas had melted "Matrix-style."
Hard enough for a child to stand on it. An adult trying that may have left them with broken pajamas. There may be more updates coming, you'll find them at The Tonz' reddit archive.
Sir David Attenborough is 95 years old, and has spent a lifetime teaching us about the wonders of nature. Yet he's not retired, and is still risking life and limb to bring us more Mother Nature. He is filming a new BBC Earth series called The Green Planet, which is about plants. You'd think that the subject matter would be a little safer for a man his age than chasing after animals, but no. Attenborough has been injured by a cactus. It's far from the first time he's been injured on the job.
Why would you want to touch a cactus? To prove how dangerous they are.
Point proved, I guess. And also because Attenborough is as hard as nails. He was once in a boat that got caught in an Indonesian whirlpool. He trapped a caiman in Guyana. He’s been crawled over by a bunch of wild mountain gorillas. He has met cannibals, and was knocked unconscious while filming dolphins in the Bahamas. There’s tough, and then there’s Attenborough.
You might be a little anxious about your first skiing trip because you might ski into a tree and break a leg. But you would never in your wildest dreams anticipate this nightmare.
On Friday, a skier at Beech Mountain ski resort in North Carolina ran over a hydrant and broke it. The hydrant was right under the ski lift. What's the worst that could happen? The ski lift stopped and restarted as the spray affected skiers going in either direction, drenching them in water in single-digit temperature conditions. Some opted to jump off, at a height of about 25 feet. You can see a much longer video of the incident here.
We don't know yet how the particular person in the Twitter video fared, but several people were injured by jumping off the ski lift to avoid the spray. Two were sent to a hospital by ambulance and are said to have non-life threatening injuries. Others sought medical help on their own. -via Fark
🧨 When Tuomas Katainen of Finland found out that Tesla wanted $22,000 to replace the batteries in his Tesla Model S, he balked and decided to blow it up with 30 kg of dynamite instead ... with an effigy of Elon Musk inside the car!
🎬 Before they were famous stars, these actors and celebrities were on Miami Vice. See if you recognize them.
There are 26 letters in the current English alphabet. Some of them could be done away with if we wanted to- there's no real reason to keep a "c" when we have both "k" and "s", and the "q" could be dropped if we were to use "kw" for the sound. But that would be weird. However, plenty of letters have been dropped from the English alphabet. Old English and Middle English had letters we don't use anymore, and each has a story behind it. For example, the letter "yogh" (shown above) looks like a three and was used for several sounds.
Yogh represented quite a few sounds in Middle English. According to English scholar Dennis Freeborn’s From Old English to Standard English, in just the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, it could stand for the “y” sound in yet, the “ch” sound in German Bach or Scottish loch, and many more.
You can see how this would be confusing, but yogh only started to die out when it was replaced by "gh", which has just as many varied and confusing pronunciations. And like many letters, its final death knell was the printing press, as typesetters didn't really want to keep up with so many letters. Read about yogh and nine other letters that are no longer used in English at Mental Floss.
What a delightful combination: cats and trains! Katze vs. Gartenbahn is a series of five YouTube videos featuring a giant cat attacking passenger trains. No, that's not it. It's about a model train in a garden that occasionally disturbs the cat who naps there. In video number three, shown above, the cat is occupying a trestle, and has no place to go when the train comes through, except up on top. Continue reading to see more.
Neatorama readers are familiar with Centralia, the town on a Pennsylvania coal seam that's been burning for 60 years. That's nothing compared to Burning Mountain in New South Wales, Australia, where an underground fire has been burning for at least 6,000 years! Like Centralia, it is also a burning coal seam, and it's moving along the seam at a fairly steady rate, which gives away its age.
The fire is estimated to be about 30 meters deep, and moving south at about a meter per year. The smoldering fire leaves the ground above it warm and kills off vegetation as it moves. The difference it leaves in the forest above is the clue to how long it's been burning, although it may be more ancient than we know. As the coal burns, it causes shifts and cracks in the earth above it, which let in just enough oxygen to feed the fire.
The area is a nature reserve, and is far enough away from settlements to pose no threat to people. How long will Burning Mountain continue to burn? No one knows. Read about this astonishing natural phenomenon at ScienceAlert. -via Strange Company
Saratoga Springs, New York, is famous as the birthplace of the potato chip. The story goes that in 1853, railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt dined at at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs and sent back his fried potatoes because they weren't thin enough. Chef George Crum maliciously compiled with Vanderbilt's demand, and fried up super-thin potato slices until they were extra crispy. But Vanderbilt loved them, and the potato chip was born. Crum opened his own restaurant, and became famous for his chips.
Since then, earlier recipes for the same dish were found, but Crum's chips caused people to make the pilgrimage to Sarasota Springs to try them. That was just the beginning of the story, as other people made the snack accessible to all, from the Ohio man who got them into grocery stores, to the California woman who bagged them for freshness, to the movie star who dared us to try to eat just one. Read the history of the potato chip -or chips, since you can't eat just one- at Smithsonian.
In the olden days, librarians would make printed guides to doing research for various topics. These were called pathfinders or research guides. Then the internet happened, and librarians adopted the practice for online environments. Then the Springshare developed LibGuides, which is basically an online content management system for libraries.
This isn't an advertisement for LibGuides. I just love their product. A professor can email me a class research assignment and I can throw a research guide for it online in as little as 15 minutes.
Now Rice University's Fondren Library has kicked up the game. Librairan Jeanette Sewell, who identifies as "the Official Golden Girls Librarian" offers her patrons (and us) a LibGuide on The Golden Girls. This is timely, given the recent departure of Betty White from among us.
I'm especially impressed with Sewell's scholarly bibliography on The Golden Girls, which would be especially helpful for both pop culture researchers and casual fans.
This is a restored Lamborghini 5C TL tractor that was built in the 1960s. Owning this would make you the envy of all the guys down at the co-op! If you're not a gearhead, you might be surprised to know that Lambourgini built tractors before the company ever built cars.
Ferruccio Lamborghini grew up on the family vineyard and was always fascinated by farm machinery. After World War II he designed tractors that would get Italy back in its feet again. He became so wealthy that he could afford nice sports cars, which eventually included Ferraris. But as an engineer, he wasn't happy with his Ferrari, and let the company founder, Enzo Ferrari, know about it.
He took his grievances to Enzo Ferrari and the two famously head-strong men had a wild argument over it – the result being that Ferruccio started his own car company to show Enzo how it should be done.
The two companies remain each other’s greatest rivals to this day.
While Lamborghini's name became forever associated with luxury sports cars, he continued to build tractors into the 1970s. Read about Lambourgini and his tractors at Silodrome. -via Fark
Get the details of this particular model at the auction listing. Bidding will close on January 10.
Yeah, we know there was a Terminator 3, but even if we consider it canon, there's room for further adventures anywhere in that messed-up timeline, as we've seen from the many other forgettable Terminator sequels, and you can improve upon them as you will.
After the events of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Sarah Connor and her son John took on new identities. But now there are several terminators (model T-800) sent back to find them. Fabrice Mathieu (previously at Neatorama) edited together more than a dozen movies to create this clever dialogue-free action sequence. -Thanks Fabrice!
📺 Mike Judge tweeted a teaser about an upcoming Beavis and Butt-Head movie on the streaming service Paramount+. The thing is, they're now middle-aged men with balding heads, bad teeth and pot bellies. But some things don't change: surely they'll still be wearing old heavy metal T-shirts like all the middle-aged men I know.
😻 When Milo the dog gave birth prematurely to a litter of puppies that didn't survive, she was so heartbroken ... until she got to adopt some rescue kittens.
🎵 From country to rock to rap, here's the funniest butt song remix we can all get behind. No and if or but(ts) about it. Punny enough for ya? Ba-dum-bum.
