People joke that one day the story of 2020 will be made into a movie, and it will be a horror film. Maybe not. YouTuber Probably Tomfoolery tells the story of what happened in 2020 from the perspective of what we learned, a saga we will tell our children one day. In rhyme, no less! -via TYWKIWDBI
A "school lunch classic" may sound like a contradiction in terms, but here it (mostly) refers to favorite recipes at colleges, which are known to have food that is vastly superior to grade school lunches. Some recipes have become famous, at least regionally, because students love them. And each of these standout recipes has a story behind it, like Jersey Dirt at the University of Richmond. As a prank, Tina Lesher entered it in a recipe contest at the school, claiming it was her daughter's favorite dessert. It was a winner.
One day, Melissa Lesher walked into the dining hall and saw Jersey Dirt (which she had never tried) on display, along with signs stating that it was her favorite. “I was mortified. I lost it. I turned the cards over so no one would see my name associated with it. I was livid,” she told the alumni magazine years later. But the dessert lives on at UR. Writes alumnus Catherine Amos Cribbs, “That glorious mix of cheesecakey pudding and crushed Oreos could calm an overstressed brain or soothe a broken heart.” For our overstressed brains and broken hearts, you can use this recipe from the university itself.
Find out how other school recipes became standouts, like Wellesley Peppermint Stick Pie and Cornell Barbecue Chicken, at Atlas Obscura. You might be pleased to find that two of these treats are from the lower grades, and one is actually served for lunch.
For years, Anna Jarvis fought for the recognition of Mother's Day as a holiday. She even endured the mockery of some senators,
Senator Henry Moore Teller (D-CO) scorned the resolution as "puerile," "absolutely absurd," and "trifling." He announced, "Every day with me is a mother's day." Senator Jacob Gallinger (R-NH) judged the very idea of Mother's Day to be an insult, as though his memory of his late mother "could only be kept green by some outward demonstration on Sunday, May 10.
However, despite the success, Anna later on loathed how people celebrated the holiday. She eventually tried to stop the promotion of the holiday and had a special hatred for florists who used Mother's Day to promote their businesses.
What do you think about Anna's reaction on how the world celebrated the holiday she founded?
Read more at Mental Floss.
(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The 332nd Fighter Group of the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force in World War II are better known now as the Tuskegee Airmen. As bombers flew over Nazi Germany, they wanted the best escorts to protect them, and that meant the Tuskegee Airmen. The group flew 1,500 combat mission and 200 escort mission during the war, with more than 15,000 individual sorties, garnering 850 awards. Their motivation was to win the war, but it was also to prove their worth because so much was riding on their success for the folks back home.
In the late 1930s, the German army was spreading through Europe. Although the U.S. hadn’t yet declared war, thousands of Americans were signing up to fight overseas as pilots. But at the time, racist stereotypes were widespread in the U.S. military. The Armed Forces were segregated, with black servicemen often restricted to working menial labor jobs. Nowhere was this inequality more apparent than in the Army Air Corps, which didn’t just segregate black servicemen from their white counterparts, but outright excluded them.
To justify, military leaders pointed to a racist Army War College report released after the First World War. The report claimed black people were an inferior “sub-species” of human who lacked the intelligence and courage to serve in combat, especially in challenging roles like pilots.
For decades, civil rights leaders had been fighting against such prejudice, lobbying for equal treatment in the military. The pressure mounted when the U.S. started preparing for war. In 1938, anticipating the need for more pilots, the Army Air Corps began establishing flight schools at colleges all across the country, excluding black schools. However, advocates’ efforts were about to pay off. In 1940, while campaigning for his third presidential term, Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised to start the first training program for black military pilots.
The 332nd Fighter Group was an experiment with long-lasting consequences. Read how the Tuskegee Airmen approached the tough training and rough treatment at Popular Mechanics. -via Damn Interesting
(Image credit: USAAF)
What is your floor made of? Lava? That's what most say, but in Holly Gramazio's childhood, the floor was quicksand. Others say water, sharks, poison, electricity, piranhas, swamp, or just a void of nothingness. People didn't say wood or linoleum because they know we are talking about the game. It could be a game with rules, a group activity, or a solitary obsession.
The unifying characteristic is: acting as though the floor is forbidden. Inverting the standard behavioural rules of the gym or yard or living room, where the floor is for walking on and the furniture is very much not.
That doesn’t always mean avoiding the floor. Sometimes succumbing to the danger is the pleasure: a tiny quick step onto the carpet and a squeal at the sting of the lava; reaching down with a courageous hand to tease the sharks. I remember sitting on the beige carpet of my bedroom and imagining the quicksand as it crept up slowly over my legs, and then up my body, around my waist and higher and higher while I grabbed on hard to the leg of my bed so I could haul myself out at the last minute.
As long as there’s some rules or pretence about what happens when you touch the floor, the game is something I’m interested in.
Gramazio took a survey to see how universal the game is, and how it is viewed by people around the world. Read her insights from the responses about that game we all know. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Flickr user Kheng Cheng TOH)
Super Mario 64 might be over two decades old now, but that doesn’t mean that it’s no longer fun to play. Last year, fans sought to resurrect the game by starting a recompilation project. Together, they reverse engineered the game’s source code. Finally, the finished product, which is a fully functioning PC port of the game, was released online a few days ago.
Unlike PC emulators which imitate the conditions of the original N64 hardware, the DirectX 12-powered port allows players to run Mario 64 at far higher resolutions without compromise, such as native 4K or in ultra-widescreen mode.
But wait, there’s more!
It’s even possible to add modern visual effects to Super Mario 64 via third-party app Reshade, including primitive ray tracing.
While activating ray tracing may not change the gameplay experience that much, it makes the game visually more appealing.
More details about this over at Video Games Chronicle.
Via PC Mag
(Video Credit: Unreal/ YouTube)
After years of following a strict regimen of regular workouts and eating balanced meals, these bear breads have finally achieved their body goals. Despite having this amazing body, however, they have but one weakness: teeth.
(Image Credit: konel_bread/ Instagram)
Cookies are defined by Cookiebot as “the memory of the Internet.” These are what companies use to remember you. Using these, companies can make a “profile” of you, which they use to personalize your browsing experience.
Cookies themselves may not pose that much of a threat to us users, as they are just a bunch of plain text that contain no executable code within themselves. However, the danger lies in those who handle these cookies.
There have been cases of data breaches connected to cookies, which is where the anxiety stems from. In February 2015, a Yahoo data breach compromised data from over 32 million users. Hackers stole Yahoo's code relating to cookies, which allowed the bad actors to piece together the cookies for all of those affected, without needing a password.
These so-called "forged cookies" included email addresses, full names, dates of birth, phone numbers, hashed passwords and security questions. In other words, all that was needed to commit identity theft.
So how do you keep yourself safe from the potential dangers of cookies? You do so by removing them from your computer. And how do you remove them? Popular Mechanics will teach you how over at their site. But if you don’t want to read their definitive guide, then I suggest that you do this frequently: clear your history and check “remove cookies.”
(Image Credit: kalhh/ Pixabay)
There are many ways to protect the brain from aging, such as exercising regularly and having a balanced diet. But if you want to further protect your brain from aging, learning another language might interest you, as this research from Singapore University of Technology and Design suggests that bilingualism has a protective effect against cognitive decline in aging.
Researchers… examined and found that active bilingualism – the regular balanced use of two languages and language switching – will offer protection against the brain’s aging process. The paper was published in the Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.
More details about this study over at Neuroscience News.
(Image Credit: geralt/ Pixabay)
On April 29, 2010, Felix Arvid Urf Kjellberg joined YouTube. Back then, he did not know that he was about to be the most subscribed individual user on the said platform.
Ever since the day he joined, he constantly uploaded videos on YouTube. Now, with over 104 million subscribers, Felix, also known as PewDiePie, clearly has earned his special place at the platform.
Celebrating his decade in YouTube, Felix decides to take a peek at how much his channel progressed over the years, reflecting how much has changed since the beginning.
Obvious Plant (Jeff Wysaski) has made a documentary! The Exciting of Trains goes off the rails, so to speak, early on and then gets weirder as it goes. After all, trying to make random old clips of train travel into a coherent story just invites nonsense. -via Metafilter
Holy cow- surely this isn't how this guy's head is shaped! No, it's just a well-done optical illusion tattoo. Click the right arrow on the image; Ryan's tattoo looks just as good in color. And it's not even finished! This tat is the work of Matt Pehrson of the Zion Tattoo Company. You can see more of his intricate geometric tattoos at Instagram. -via Laughing Squid
Residents of one street in Chester, UK, made this video to support each other while social distancing. You have to wonder if this is sort of an artist's colony, since the residents have such a fashion sense and no hesitance about performing. They did a wonderful job! -via Nag on the Lake
Yehuda Devir (left) and his wife Maya (center) are the happy parents of Ariel (right) a growing baby. Yehuda and Maya are both artists and, appropriately, illustrate their adventures together in an ongoing comic series titled One of These Days. In it, the parents address the joys, anxieties, and tribulations of raising a baby.
You can follow their labors on Instagram or view a roundup of their babycare-related cartoons at My Modern Met.
