Ballerinas aren’t the only ones who can wear a tutu. Chickens can, too! A new set of viral photos have once again stormed the internet, this time in the form of chickens in tutus. Because of these tutus, the once ordinary-looking chickens now have become fabulous fowls, more fabulous, even, if I may add, than the magnificent peacock.
See the photos over at Sad and Useless.
(Image Credit: Sad and Useless)
In a world where movie trailers set the stage for our entertainment choices and a lot of revenue for a certain Southern California town, Don LaFontaine reigned supreme over the audio content of those promotional shorts. From 1964 until his death in 2008, LaFontaine's voice imparted the importance of what you were invited to see. Movie trailers weren't his only voiceover work, but it's what he was most known for. LaFontaine came about that deep, resonant voice naturally, and suddenly, when the adolescent's voice broke in 1953.
As you might expect, being of an age when a boy’s life primarily consists of playing flappy with Mr. Happy and otherwise spending the remaining 12 seconds of the day when he wasn’t doing that making fun of his friends and being made fun of in turn, LaFontaine stated he was afraid to speak the next day at school after his voice changed and thus, initially refused. When his teacher became frustrated with this now mute student and forced him to speak, LaFontaine uttered a phrase he no doubt would say countless times to execs the world over, “What do you want me to say?” This apparently prompted his already frustrated teacher, who thought he was putting the voice on, to send him to the principal’s office.
He would later recount that this caused him to feel even more self-conscious about his voice. However, it didn’t take long for his friend’s to realize his baritone vocals allowed him to be “everybody’s dad” on the phone- i.e. he could be used to call the school, represent himself as their father, and let the secretary know his kid was sick and would be missing school that day. Some of these instances apparently were his first paid voice acting gigs.
Read about the exceptional life of Don LaFontaine at Today I Found Out.
Here's the way to automate a puppy's playtime and/or exercise. All you need is a leash and the proper size furniture -and a camera, of course. The kicker here is that the puppy eventually catches his prey! That's a good dog. -via Digg
The papers ran colorful accounts of an 1897 fire in a Manhattan apartment building that was started by a cat fight. That in itself was newsworthy, but the description of the ensuing escape by the residents reminds us of a Three Stooges comedy.
According to the Sun, Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. McIlvaney, who lived in the back rooms behind the Gallaghers, tried to make it down the stairs at the same time. Both women were “stout and short of breath,” and they ended up getting wedged together on the first-floor landing.
The two women began fighting and pushing at each other, both refusing–or unable–to budge. Finally, the firemen arrived and, “after some difficulty,” they were able to some kind of wedge tool to separate the women.
I have no idea if any firemen were able to get past the women in order to get to the fire, or if the fire continued to burn until the human “blockage” was removed. Either way, as I like to say, you can’t make this stuff up.
Considering the fun the newspapers had with the incident, we are glad to find that no one was hurt. “The only other damage was to the tempers of Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. McIlvaney.” But what you'll want to know is the story of the cats who started the blaze, which you can read at The Hatching Cat.
If there’s one thing that you might realize while taking selfies, it is that the one in the picture doesn’t look like your normal self; it’s you but with a bigger nose, and awider forehead. But why does this happen when we take selfies? Gizmodo Asks reached out to a number of experts in photography and psychology and asked them the reason behind this rather perplexing phenomenon. One of the experts, Scott Klinger, has this to say:
Selfies are usually taken with wide-angle lenses, which expand space, distorting the image to get everything in. This works great for landscapes, but not so much for faces—you wind up with a bigger nose, or a bigger forehead. This is why selfies are often taken with arms extended as far out as they can possibly get, or with selfie sticks—the closer the camera is to your face, the more pronounced that distorting effect is. Distance minimizes it, but the distorting effect is still there, and it makes our faces look unfamiliar, which can be disturbing.
Then there’s the fact that people, when they’re looking at pictures of themselves, are often highly attuned to their flaws. They look at the things they don’t like, rather than seeing themselves as someone else might.
Check out Klinger’s full answer, as well as another expert’s explanation, over at the site.
(Image Credit: Lars_Nissen/ Pixabay)
Mark badly needed to go to the bathroom. Unfortunately, his mom did not allow him to do so, as she was so excited to take the mandatory birthday pictures first before allowing his son to relieve himself. Mark assumes that this might have been his 4th birthday, as the “well-decorated ‘Happy Day’ cake wasn’t overly descriptive.”
It wasn’t stated if he was eventually allowed to go to the bathroom after this photo was taken. Hopefully, he was.
What do you think?
Image via Awkward Family Photos
What you see here is not dog poo. I repeat, what you see here is not dog poo. It’s chocolate frosting. Here is what happened before this disaster of a cake happened.
When 31-year-old Andrew decided to bake a cake for his wife after a satisfying dinner, he had a box of cake mix to use for the cake. Unfortunately, he didn’t have frosting to put on top of the cake. In response to this, Andrew’s wife, Aubrie, gave him her grandmother’s chocolate frosting recipe, and left everything to him, as Aubrie believed that nothing could go wrong because the recipe was “simple” and “foolproof.”
Cut to the moment Andrew presented the cake, and Aubrie and her husband both ‘burst out laughing’.
It turns out the frosting had been too hard for Andrew to spread nicely over the cake, so he put it in a plastic bag and attempted to pipe it on instead. Rather than ending up with elegant swirls, Andrew created a series of long, clumpy, brown trails…
[...]
She thinks her late grandmother would have loved Andrew’s efforts, explaining she ‘had a good sense of humour and would have found the situation funny.’
Andrew stated that the cake “tasted better than it looked”. However, he also states that from now on, he’ll be leaving the baking to his wife. His wife, on the other hand, has this to say:
He loves to grill and smoke meats – he’s a very good cook, but apparently not the best baker.
Well, it’s still a happy ending, and they sure had a good laugh with the cake.
(Image Credit: Kennedy News and Media/ UNILAD)
When working on anything having to do with a computer, it is best to 1. backup your work first, 2. make edits on a copy, and 3. get cozy with your "undo" button, and allow time to consider using it. There are times when all these steps are skipped, and the worst thing possible happens. Tom Scott explains his most egregious "onosecond." The story is a couple of minutes shorter than the video.
We love to read stories of heroic dogs who save lives, but you have to wonder- would your dog be so brave and helpful? Dogs are known for loyalty, but there is a wide variation in dogs (as in people) when it comes to loyalty, empathy, bravery, and maybe most of all, intelligence. Scientists put a bunch of dogs to the tests to see if they would "rescue" their humans.
For the main challenge, called the “distress test,” dog owners were placed inside a large box, where they pretended to be trapped and in distress. The owners, who were trained beforehand to sound realistic, cried out to their pets, shouting “help!” or “help me!” Dogs were able to rescue their owners by opening a light-weight door on the box, but they had to figure that out for themselves.
A total of 60 dogs participated in the experiment, none of whom received any kind of special rescue training prior to the experiment. Of these, 20, or one-third, rescued their owners, “which doesn’t sound too impressive on its own, but really is impressive when you take a closer look,” said Van Bourg, in reference to the two control tests used for the experiment. The dogs participated in the two control tests and one rescue test in random order.
It turns out that figuring out how to do it is crucial. Dogs who learned how to open the box under other circumstances were very much more likely to rescue their humans. So your dog would most likely want to save you ...if he could figure out how. Read how the experiment showed that at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Flickr user torbakhopper)
Oh, we know what happens to cats when they get near catnip, but it's always fun to watch as they indulge -especially with psychedelic music and a few visual effects thrown in. It's totally harmless, because cats don't have to make it to work on time or impress their in-laws or or keep an eye on those burning candles. BBC Earth presents a montage of cats enjoying some nip from the series Pets: Wild At Heart. -via Digg
You've seen dollhouses, but you haven't seen the graceful art of 1/12 scale rooms like those of Chris Toledo! His subject matter is historic interiors, so detailed that you wouldn't know they were miniatures if he didn't include something else, like his hand, for scale.
Some of Toledo's creations are for sale. See more at his website and at Instagram. -via Nag on the Lake
Kids have great imagination, and that’s something that I believe that all of us can agree upon. What could seem boring to us adults could be something fun, colorful, and exciting for them. This is what Justina witnessed firsthand on her kids — their ability to create visual images in their minds, as well as their ability to breathe life into their toys.
So, I tried to capture those images with my camera and found the new perspective (quite literally, actually) of the situation and looked at the world in a way my kids do daily. It started as a fun game for me and my kids to create these little stories, by searching perfect locations. And so, the patch of land became a desert, young grass turned to the jungle, anthill for us looked like a battlefield. All the toys came to life.
Check out the beautiful photos of her “Secret Adventures of Toys” project over at Bored Panda.
(Image Credit: Justina/ Bored Panda)
The River Thames in London is a treasure trove of historical artifacts, and there are plenty of people whose hobby involves looking for those artifacts between the high and low tide marks. This activity is called mudlarking. It began as a way for the poorest of the poor to find something worth selling, but now attracts those with an interest in history as told by the objects people left behind. Lara Maiklem has been mudlarking all her life, as she details in her book Mudlark: In Search of London’s Past Along the River Thames. Maiklem explains why the Thames is such a rich depository for items lost or discarded over thousands of years.
"There are lots of reasons for all the stuff in the river. Obviously, it’s been used as a rubbish dump. It was a useful place to chuck your household waste. It was essentially a busy highway, so people accidentally dropped things and lost things as they traveled on it. Of course, people also lived right up against it. London was centered on the Thames so houses were all along it, and there was all this stuff coming out of the houses and off the bridges. It was the biggest port in the world in the 18th century, so there was all the shipbuilding and industry going on.
"And then of course, there’s the rubbish that was used to build up the foreshore and create barge beds. The riverbed in its natural state is a V shape, so they had to build up the sides next to the river wall to make them flatter so the flat-bottom barges could rest there at low tide. They did that by pouring rubbish and building spoil and kiln waste, anything they could find—industrial waste, domestic waste. When they dug into the ground further up, they’d bring the spoil down and use it to build up the foreshore, and cap it off with a layer of chalk, which was soft and didn’t damage the bottom of the barges.
"One of the reasons we’re finding so much in the river now is because there’s so much erosion. While it was a “working river,” these barge beds were patched up and the revetments, or the wooden walls that held them in, were repaired when they broke. But now, they’re being left to fall apart, and these barge beds are eroding as the river is getting busier with river traffic.
"Every tide, something new will turn up, and the contents date right back to Roman times in central London. When they dug cellars or basements in the 18th and 19th centuries—this is when they created the barge beds—they’d dig down into medieval Roman layers, and then bring that spoil down to the river to build up the barge beds. So that’s possibly why we’re finding Roman objects next to Victorian objects next to Georgian objects. Such a mess of history in there.
"The beauty of the Thames is that it’s muddy and anaerobic, so if something falls into the mud, it’s preserved as perfectly as the day it fell in. It’s not too acidic, it’s not too alkaline, and no oxygen gets to it, which means there’s no degradation at all. It’s like suspended animation until you find it—it’s not like finding things in fields or archaeological digs. What we’re pulling out of the mud is pristine: Sometimes you’ll pull a pin out, and it’ll still be shiny, or you’ll find coins that have absolutely no damage on them at all, like they fell out of someone’s pocket yesterday. It’s incredible. Centuries-old leather and wood and even fabrics have been found, which is quite incredible. The key is, though, getting to it before it washes away or it starts to erode. The wave action starts to damage these objects."
Maiklem has found fossils, 16th-century gold, raspberry prunts, human bones, ancient coins, and even a glass eye. Read about mudlarking the Thames at Collectors Weekly.
(Image credit: Lara Maiklem)
It is said that some animals, like dogs, try to make themselves sick by eating grass. You might have heard or read about this before, and you might have panicked when you saw your dog eat grass. Hopefully, this isn’t really the case. According to Dr. Stephanie Austin, a veterinarian, dogs eating grass is a normal behavior.
“Grass or plant eating is a widely recognized normal behavior amongst domestic dogs,”...
According to Dr. Austin, grazing shouldn’t cause any alarm for dog parents.
“Rarely does this cause problems and rarely is it indicative of any problems,” Dr. Austin said. “Often the dog is just having fun.”
Dr. Austin, however, states that there is a time where you should be worried, and that time is when your dog ingests a plant that is potentially toxic to it.
Head over at The Dodo to know which plants you should look for.
(Image Credit: felix_w/ Pixabay)
You shave with a safety razor? That's cute. Qurbon Ali Qurbonov, a barber in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, has a more testosterone-infused way of shaving a man's head. He uses a very sharp axe fit for combat. It's useful for general manscaping.
-via Toxel
