One of the main rules in naming a shop or a company is that the name should be easy to remember, and one way to do just that is by settling with puns. That is a tried-and-tested method. The result are shop names that would give you a chuckle.
Check out some of these punny shop names over at Bored Panda.
(Image Credit: Bored Panda)
Found in the village of Rushton in Northhamptonshire, England, is the Rushton Triangular Lodge. This building was constructed between 1593 and 1597, and was designed by Sir Thomas Tresham, as a way of expressing his faith.
The number three, symbolizing the Holy Trinity, is apparent everywhere, from the triangular shape to the use of the trefoil window designs, to the number of floors, the various dimensions and symbolic letters, dates, and numbers which are all multiples of three.
Thomas Tresham, grand prior of the order of St. John in England, was the eldest son of John Tresham of Rushton. The family owned large estates in Rushton and Lyveden which he inherited from his grandfather at the age of fifteen, establishing him as a member of the Catholic elite. He served as sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1573 and was knighted at the Queen's Royal Progress at Kenilworth in 1575. Tresham’s connection with Jesuits and his recusancy made [him] a threat to Protestants and he was frequently imprisoned and fined for his religious affiliation. It was during his prolonged captivity that Sir Thomas formulated the idea of making a covert declaration of his faith.
On his release in 1593, Tresham began designing the triangular lodge as something of a shrine dedicated to his long suffering.
Learn more about the building over at Amusing Planet.
(Image Credit: Daderot/ Wikimedia Commons)
When you hear the word “science genius”, the first names that could come into your mind are the most popular names, like Newton, Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein. Buried beneath these popular science geniuses, however, are the names of other geniuses that have been forgotten by most of us. Tom Siegfried lists ten names of unsung geniuses over at Nautilus. Why don’t you check them out? For now, here’s Brahmagupta, one of the unsung geniuses on the list.
A prominent astronomer, Brahmagupta wrote an extensive treatise covering such topics as the motions of the planets, eclipses, and the phases of the moon. But his genius emerged most prominently in mathematics. He introduced the idea of zero as a number like any other and discussed how to calculate with it. He was also the first to explain negative numbers, a concept thought by the Greeks to be “absurd.” Brahmagupta pointed out that multiplying two negative numbers (he called them “debts”) produced a positive number (in his terminology, a “fortune”).
(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)
Carla Rhodes knew something was up when she saw the patch of dust forming in her backyard. Curious to see what was going on, the wildlife photographer decided to set up a trail camera, and, lo and behold, her camera captured a wild female turkey which stopped by her backyard every afternoon to treat itself with a nice dust bath.
Soon after, Rhodes set up a camouflaged hunting blind in her driveway. Armed with her camera and hoping to snap a photograph of the wild turkey in action, Rhodes sat for hours in silence. “One day, I was in there for four hours, and I wouldn't leave because I would think, when I leave, she's going to show up,” says Rhodes.
“My husband would come outside while I was in the blind,” says Rhodes, “and I would call him from my cell phone and be like, “Get back inside—she might show up, you might scare her!”
Finally, the turkey arrived at the patch of dust, and began her ritual of wriggling and frantically flapping in the dirt, tossing clouds of dust into the air around her. Rhodes was thrilled—she’d finally captured the turkey dust bathing, but she moved too quickly and spooked the bird. The next time the turkey showed up, Rhodes was more cautious and snapped more shots.
For a few weeks, with an enthusiastic spirit, Rhodes observed and documented the female turkey.
Read about her experience, and see some of the photos she took, over at Smithsonian Magazine.
(Image Credit: Carla Rhodes/ Smithsonian Magazine)
If you ever want to go dinosaur hunting, the last place you would want to go to is Ireland. Due to its weird geology, the rock layers are only made up of material that dates either before or after dinosaurs existed. This means that finding dinosaur fossils or remains in this place is extremely rare. But it doesn’t mean that you can't find one.
Just recently, a research team led by Dr. Mike Simms have confirmed two bone fragments, which were discovered by a schoolteacher named Roger Byrne, to belong to two different dinosaurs. These are the only dinosaur remains to be found in Ireland.
… the two bone fragments were found to belong to two different individuals.
"This is a hugely significant discovery," says Simms. "The great rarity of such fossils here is because most of Ireland's rocks are the wrong age for dinosaurs, either too old or too young, making it nearly impossible to confirm dinosaurs existed on these shores. The two dinosaur fossils that Roger Byrne found were perhaps swept out to sea, alive or dead, sinking to the Jurassic seabed where they were buried and fossilized."
More details about this story over at New Atlas.
(Image Credit: University of Portsmouth/ New Atlas)
Made-for-TV Christmas movies have filled the schedule at the Hallmark Channel and Lifetime for a couple months now, but it's time for the premieres of the 2020 crop. Get ready for 82 new ways to wallow in Christmas and eat up the hours spent at home. Yes, they are formulaic, but 2020 is the year to indulge in safe guilty pleasures.
You know that thing people say about Taco Bell? That the whole menu is just five ingredients (tortillas, cheese, meat, beans, sauce) remixed and rearranged in infinite combinations? Made-for-TV Christmas is the Taco Bell of entertainment genres. Take the same haggard tropes — the struggling inns, the small towns, the career women who must be cured of their unladylike ambitions by falling in love with boring men — and just switch the names and actors around, and it’s a tradition that works year after year.
The list of synopses (and trailers) at Vulture is divided into themes, since several movies share the same setup, plots, or attempts to stand out. There are three movies centered on blogging (as if that's interesting), nine with a land developer as the villain (because how else will you save the school/wilderness/historic landmark?), six with "scavenger hunt" as a plot device, and four (count 'em, FOUR) movies with LGBTQ themes. And a partridge in a pear tree somewhere, I'm sure. Happy wallowing!
(Image credit: zannaland)
Gerald the turkey is not practicing social distancing.
— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) May 22, 2020
He's been aggressively approaching visitors, disrupting their picnics and frightening children at a public park in the Grand Lake neighborhood of Oakland. https://t.co/smaGqjpD0G pic.twitter.com/14X1xkIeJ0
Who knows what goes on in the mind of a turkey that makes them turn violent? In the previous post When Turkeys Attack, we linked to a list of six notorious turkey incidents, but the story of Gerald the turkey terror of Oakland was not included. Gerald menaced visitors to a city park for the better part of a year!
In the Before Times, Gerald was a beloved figure in the neighborhood. On weekday mornings, he would start his day by strutting across the Morcom Rose Garden to go and wait on the sidewalk with commuters in the sunlight. But late last year, per the news outlet Oaklandside, locals like Molly Flanagan, who were familiar and friendly with Gerald, noticed that the bird they knew was no longer acting like himself. “Flanagan said she first noticed the change when she was in the rose garden with a friend and Gerald wouldn’t leave them alone,” Oaklandside reported. “The bird ‘fixated’ on her friend, sending what Flanagan described as ‘a lot of energy’ their way.”
Another local, Alexis Morgan, recounted to Oaklandside a tale of Gerald relentlessly pursuing an older woman around the rose garden “until she was forced to climb a tree to escape.” Morgan acted to save the older woman, but Gerald had something for her, too, “landing a ‘kangaroo kick’ on her, leaving the imprint of a turkey foot on her thigh.”
Gerald continued his crimes, first because experts thought it was a phase, and then because local ordinances prevented officials from doing anything to him. He also gained a fan club, which meant Oakland residents who wanted to do something about him were at war with those who wanted to protect the bird. Find out what ultimately happened to Gerald at Mel magazine.
Retro gamers, rejoice! Arcade games are now more accessible (well, some retro games, to be specific) for you! Capcom has revealed that it will release a mini-arcade machine packed with its classic titles. The mini-arcade, called Retro Station, is a tabletop unit with an 8-inch screen. The following are the titles available to play in the console:
Mega Man The Power Battle
Mega Man 2 The Power Fighters
Mega Man X
Mega Man Soccer
Mega Man & Bass (Japanese Console Version)
Street Fighter II
Street Fighter II’ Champion Edition
Super Street Fighter II
Super Street Fighter II Turbo
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo
Will you be getting one?
Image via Nintendo Life
A new country is now joining the US, Russia, and China when it comes to space exploration. The United Arab Emirates has announced an unmanned moon mission for 2024. The new lunar mission will use the UAE’s most ambitious spacecraft yet:
The new lunar mission involves a small rover, to be built entirely at Dubai's Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center (MBRSC). Inaugurated in 2006, the center has already designed and built Earth-orbit satellites under an all-Emirati team, but the rover is its most ambitious technological undertaking to date.
"We have experience with orbiters, but this will be the first mission in which we are landing on another celestial body," says Adnan Al Rais, who leads the Mars 2117 program at the MBRSC.
"We are working on the development of the science and technologies that will enable us one day to send humans to Mars," explains Al Rais. "In order to do that, we looked into the gaps that we currently have in our knowledge; space robotics and robotic technologies are among those gaps, which we are addressing by developing a lunar rover."
Image via CNN
I try to be an ethical buyer, especially when it comes to fashion. The fashion industry isn’t a saintly place, with the issues in fast fashion, such as overworking and underpaying employees just to be able to release a lot of cheap products for the mass market. Ethical shopping isn’t easy, with so many terms, certifications, accreditation systems, and marketing stunts, how do we support the right companies? The Conversation provides some details that can guide us to be more aware of where and what we buy! Check the full piece here.
Image via The Conversation
Although not native to the new World, sugarcane had a big hand in its history, from the slave trade to the rise in diabetes. It is grown mostly in Brazil and the Caribbean, but also in parts of America's Deep South, where sugar is a deeply-rooted part of the culture, despite the misery of the crop's development.
Sugarcane and its derivatives would become foundational for Southern culture. It’s in the pecan pie and the gâteau de sirop and the corn pone. Poured on biscuits. Some fools — what the hell are they thinking — even put sugar in their grits. Women are expected to be sweet. So is the tea. William Faulkner praised drinking whiskey “cold as molasses” in Light in August and dissolved a teaspoon of sugar in rainwater from a cistern for his own toddy. Otherwise, he wrote, it “lies in a little intact swirl like sand at the bottom of the glass.” A Southern-born conspiracy theorist named Robert Henry Winborne Welch, Jr. invented Sugar Daddies and Sugar Babies. (He also founded the John Birch Society.) Fullback Bobby Grier first broke the collegiate football color barrier during the Southeastern Conference’s Sugar Bowl on Jan. 2, 1956, when he took to the field for the University of Pittsburgh Panthers against Georgia Tech’s Yellow Jackets. Ella Fitzgerald sang “Sugar Blues” in 1939; Bob Wills of The Texas Playboys wrote “Sugar Moon” in 1947. Over three long days in 1969, the same year my great-aunt demanded filial kisses from me, The Rolling Stones holed up at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, in Sheffield, Alabama, where they recorded “Brown Sugar.” Those stark lyrics by Mick Jagger played on tight rotation last month as I snaked beside the Mississippi on River Road, heading west from New Orleans as the annual sugarcane harvest got underway.
In lovely prose, Shane Mitchell tells us about sugarcane: its history, how it's harvested and processed, the state of the industry, and its legacy at The Bitter Southerner. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Sheila1988)
Partners rarely address each other by their first names. Usually, when one of them does that, it means he/she is angry with the other. When this woman decided to call her husband by his first name and asked him to give her a drink, his reaction was that of fear.
“What did you call me?” the surprised husband asked.
“David?” the wife answered.
“Am I in trouble? Was it today?” he asked again, then immediately looked at the calendar.
What are your thoughts about this one?
(Image Credit: PoloBoiBoi/ YouTube)
Meet Georgia Tann. She was a social worker who arranged adoptions in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. She was very successful in placing Memphis orphans with wealthy couples in California and elsewhere, where she could charge 100 times the previous going rate for her services. Tann grew rather rich and made friends among the powerful movers and shakers of Memphis, and so was a respected member of the city's elite. Meanwhile,
From 1924 all the way until 1950, terror stalked the streets of Memphis. Children vanished from porches and playgrounds. Babies were taken right from their cribs. Kids went to the hospital for a routine checkup and all that came back was a death certificate. The city had the highest infant mortality rate in the country, for no reason anyone seemed able to explain. In a horror movie, this would end with a band of plucky kids defeating a guy with a crow mask and a chainsaw for a hand. In reality, the mayhem was all the work of an eminently respectable society lady named Georgia Tann, who ran the Tennessee Children's Home Society.
Tann made a profit from most of the children in her care, but those who were judged less adoptable were neglected, mistreated, and abused. Many of them died. Read the story of Georgia Tann and her long reign of terror at Cracked.
(Image credit: The Commercial Appeal)
A man with a rooster head piggybacks his son whose head is that of a chick’s. A woman with a parakeet’s head does yoga. These are just some of the creations of Alessandro Gallo, which are included in Intersect Chicago 2020, an art fair which will run through December 5.
Based in Helena, Montana, the Italian artist likens the animalistic features to a mask or caricature. “I combine it with the silent language of our body and the cultural codes of what we wear in order to portray not only a specific individual, but also the larger groups and subcultures they belong to and, ultimately, the common habitat we all share,” he says.
Check out the anthropomorphic sculptures over at Colossal.
(Image Credit: Alessandro Gallo/ Colossal)
Do you know Mr. Snuffleupagus? If you grew up watching Sesame Street, you'd know the answer right away -- He's Big Bird's "mysterious friend" who shows up at the wrong time!
Here's now he was introduced to the show:
Lacking a watering pot, Big Bird was delighted to see the massive, lumbering creature use his trunk to tend to his garden. The two became fast friends.
Despite the unbelief of the whole cast, Big Bird kept on talking about him. Eventually, people got curious Big Bird's friend is imaginary or not.
Martin P. Robinson (via Still Gaming: Lee & Zee Show Podcast, 2009): He was never imaginary. I say that a lot. And I say it with great strength of conviction. He was my character, he was never imaginary; he just had bad timing. He was shy, he had bad timing, and the joke was, he’s big, you can’t miss him, but adults being the way they are—preoccupied, going to work, you know—they miss those little details. And Snuffleupagus just happened to be one of those little details that they kept missing year after year after year. So he was a good, real friend to Bird; it’s just that no one else ever took the time to actually meet him.
This was like a joke that went on for a time, up until the issue of child abuse at home and in daycare center rose up and the actors desired to play off a new dynamic:
If Big Bird—ostensibly the show’s stand-in for the 6-year-old viewing audience—was being brushed aside when trying to convince people Snuffleupagus was real, there was the chance children might not be convinced adults would believe them if they came forward with more troubling claims.
Stiles: We started getting some letters from people who worked with children who had experienced some kind of abuse, and what we were told was that they often don’t think they’ll be believed because the stories are so fantastic in their minds.
That pushed the crew to look to experts in childhood development, asking, "What’s the best way to address what we want to address?"
That’s the model Sesame was founded on, with writers, producers, educators, and researchers all working together.
Read more how the story went on at Mental Floss.
Image Credit: Sesame Workshop
Image Credit: Sesame Workshop
