An ermine is a stoat wearing his white winter coat. I had no idea they were so cute, but this little guy is utterly charming as he peeks out of his cubbyhole in a hollow tree stump. Look at those bright black eyes! There is no information about where this was recorded, or whether this critter is used to humans or not. It's just a delightful moment, captured on video. -via Tastefully Offensive
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Meow Parlour, New York City’s first permanent cat café, is newly open on the Lower East Side. The café is booking customers online, which for the most part will eliminate one issue common to all popular NYC establishments: long lines. Customers can book from 30 minutes to a maximum of five hours at the café.
A sister shop called Meow Parlour Patisserie is around the corner to sell treats and coffee to customers wanting to bring a bite to eat during their stay. Inside Meow Parlour, customers enjoy free wifi and the company of adoptable shelter cats from KittyKind, a local no-kill shelter. The café was established by Christine Ha, the founder of the Macaron Parlour, and her employee, Emilie LeGrande.
Learn more or book time at Meow Parlour via their website and see more images at their Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Via Laughing Squid | Images: Meow Parlour
Diego the cat casually strides into the surf and goes for a swim. He's calm and collected. His humans, though, are going crazy with delight over the sight of their swimming kitten. "He's swimming! He's swimming! He's swimming in the water!"
-via 22 Words
The name Margaret Hamilton may make you think of the actress who portrayed the Wicked Witch of the West, but this Margaret Hamilton is the software engineer who kept the Apollo 11 mission on track to the moon. The photo above was taken in 1969 and shows Hamilton with the mission software. In a recent interview, Hamilton tells us about her role at NASA, a little about women in programming, and how she coined the term “software engineer.”
Software during the early days of this project was treated like a stepchild and not taken as seriously as other engineering disciplines, such as hardware engineering; and it was regarded as an art and as magic, not a science. I had always believed that both art and science were involved in its creation, but at that time most thought otherwise. Knowing this, I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it (and those building it) would be given its due respect and thus I began to use the term “software engineering” to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering; yet, treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process. When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.
Since 1986, Hamilton has headed her own software company. Read the rest of the interview at Medium.
(Image credit: NASA)
Redditor pwnyride13 posted about a gay couple he's friends with who returned home to find that a slur had been scratched into their door. This wasn't a time to be furious, it was a time to be fabulous, as their response (below) shows. -Via 22 Words
Having a little trouble getting into the Christmas spirit? Well, just dive in. After all, if even these adorable little penguins in South Korea are celebrating in style, what's your excuse? Chances are your ugliest of all Christmas sweaters still leaves you looking more appropriately covered up than those little waddling penguin booties. If only all little penguins could be so festive.
The 1964 television special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a treasure of storytelling and stop-motion animation. Watching it every Christmas was a cherished tradition in my home, both when I was a kid and now that I have kids.
But the world has changed since 1964. Both America and the North Pole are different places. At the beginning of the original program, Santa says that no red-nosed reindeer can serve on his sleigh team. You could say things like that 50 years ago. But in 2014, as this Fatawesome video points out, you've got to be careful. Someone could be recording your words. The end of your career could be just a YouTube upload away.
Content warning: foul language.
-via 22 Words
Remember when you were growing up, on Christmas Eve you could hear radio reports of how U.S. military radar picked up a mysterious object flying away from the North Pole? Those reports, called NORAD Tracks Santa, began in 1955, when a Sears store in Colorado Springs invited kids to call Santa Claus, and a typo in the phone number led children to a high-security line at the Continental Air Defense Command. Colonel Harry Shoup was the man who answered the hotline. StoryCorps recently talked to Shoup’s three children about how that first phone call.
His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.
"And Dad realized that it wasn't a joke," her sister says. "So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho'd and asked if he had been a good boy and, 'May I talk to your mother?' And the mother got on and said, 'You haven't seen the paper yet? There's a phone number to call Santa. It's in the Sears ad.' Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus."
The phone calls were only the beginning. Read (or listen) to the story of what Shoup did on Christmas Eve that same year that started the tradition and led him to be called “Santa Colonel” for the rest of his life, at NPR. -Thanks, Daniel Kim!
(Images credit: NORAD)
(According to Devin/Devin Bosco Le)
If you're a high school or college student, then you may be studying for your final exams right now. Don't sweat them! Once you have the exam in your hands, you'll be ready to regurgitate the information as easily as you did 5 minutes previously. And if that doesn't work, then click on the refresh button in your brain.
-via Tastefully Offensive
Martha Bellingham was going to work in London when she encountered this dog playing in a fountain. The dog bounds back and forth through the streams, taking full bliss in the simple act of running through the water.
May we all be as happy as this dog.
This is a really simple game. You know that is a loaded statement. Just because a game is simple doesn’t mean it can’t be maddeningly difficult to win, or finish. I’m not sure this game even has a finishing, or winning, point. All you do is click the tile that is a different color. But the further you go, the less contrast there is in the tiles. Eventually you will be seeing waves of color and changing tiles, although that’s in your head. How far will you go? I made it to level 23 once, although I stumbled at 18 the first time around. -via Metafilter
This annoying cat wants in, and he won’t take no for an answer! The dialogue is in French, so check the subtitles. In this version, it’s not even his house! The original video was already funny, but with dialogue added, it’s completely ridiculous. It was dubbed by Faireset, the same guy who gave us Dansons la Capucine and Cats and Mirrors. -via Tastefully Offensive
This cartoon was painful to read because it's accurate.
So when I got home from work, I played with my daughters for a few extra minutes.
This time in their lives and mine will never come again.
The video Star S'Mores is supposed to teach children the concept of self control. But we all need to learn that, so it's appropriate that the story parodies a movie older than some of the kids' parents.
In five pun-packed minutes, Flan Solo (Cookie Monster) tries to learn to control his urge to eat his partner, Chewie the Cookie, a chocolate chip cookie. Only One Cannoli, Master Groda, Darth Baker, Princess Parfaia, and Luke Piewalker help Flan Solo learn to control his impulses by using The Four.
-via Gizmodo
If the princes from Disney princess movies were real guys …you probably wouldn’t like them very much. Sure, they look good, and that’s all that matters when you’re six and want to grow up to be a princess. But real life is a different story altogether. This Buzzfeed video lays it all on the line. Disney princes, even the ones who aren’t royalty, can be egotistical, kinky, abusive, or poverty-stricken, but the most common trait they have, which helps to move the plot along in many cases, is that they’re far from intelligent.
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