Poolbowl must be some kind of combination of billiards and bowling. All I know for sure is that Jason Belmonte and Florian "Venom" Kohler have a lot of time on their hands, and have used it to perfect some glorious tricks. So what if they have terabytes of outtakes, this compilation video is cool! -via Metafilter
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In 1976, Rita Moreno had already won an Oscar, a Grammy, and a Tony. She won her first Emmy for a performance that year on The Muppet Show in which she sang "Fever" with Animal accompanying on the drums. She remembers the recording session in detail.
And when I watch myself—’cause I’m usually so critical—but when I watch myself, I just laugh at me. What I love about it is that my character’s trying so hard to be sexy and sultry. And this horrible creature in back of me is acting up. [Laughter] See? I can’t stop laughing. It tickles me to death.
Read Moreno's recollection of the sequence at The New Yorker. -via Metafilter
I Love Lucy was a groundbreaking TV show in many ways. It ran from 1951 to 1957, and is the oldest show in syndication because it was recorded on 35mm film and then broadcast, so good copies of 180 episodes are available all these years later. Let's learn some more about I Love Lucy.
1. CBS DIDN’T THINK AMERICANS WOULD BUY THAT LUCY WAS MARRIED TO A “FOREIGN” MAN.
When CBS approached Lucille Ball with the offer of turning her popular radio show My Favorite Husband into a television show, she was agreeable with one condition: that her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, would be cast in the role of her spouse (played on the radio by Richard Denning). The network balked—there was no way that American viewers would accept average housewife Liz Cooper (her character’s name on the radio series) being married to a “foreign” man with an indecipherable accent. Never mind the fact that Lucy and Desi had been married more than a decade; such a “mixed” marriage was unbelievable.
2. LUCY AND DESI HAD TO TAKE THEIR SHOW ON THE ROAD TO CONVINCE THE NETWORK BRASS.
Arnaz had a successful career touring the country with his rhumba band, which was one of the reasons Lucille wanted him to get cast as her TV husband—to keep him off the road and close to home. In an effort to show the network (and potential sponsors) that they could work together as a comedy team, they crafted a sort of vaudevillian skit that was inserted into the middle of performances by the Desi Arnaz Orchestra during a tour in the summer of 1950. The audiences roared over Lucille’s antics and her interaction with Desi as she interrupted his band’s concert confusedly, cello in hand, thinking she had an audition scheduled. The “Professor” skit not only convinced the network powers that be that the couple could, in fact, be convincing as husband and wife—it also was such a hit that it was incorporated into episode six of I Love Lucy’s first season.
We also get some trivia about our favorite episodes, like the grape-stomping, the chocolate-dipping, and Vitameatavegamin, in a trivia list about I Love Lucy at Mental Floss.
Lucy the Elephant was built in 1882 in what is now Margate, New Jersey. James V. Lafferty had a six-story elephant constructed as a public relations stunt to draw attention, and it sure did. Lafferty probably had no idea his elephant would outlive him and everyone who was there at the beginning.
The idea was to catch folks’ interest with it, and then lure them inside to show off his South Atlantic City properties from the look-out. Once she was completed in 1882, everyone from presidents, to celebs and the Average Joe came to gawk at the “Elephant Bazaar”. The building was composed of about a million pieces of wood, and 12,000 square feet of tin for the exterior.
She towered over present day Margate, New Jersey, at a height of 65ft. The elephant’s eyes contained telescopes and acted as an observatory for visitors. Its manager claimed to see, from the elephant’s back, Yellowstone Park, Rio de Janeiro, and Paris.
Lucy, as a building, has been used for a quite a few different purposes over the years. She was looking her age when a restoration project was launched to save the elephant in 1969. She got a face lift and a new, permanent home. See pictures spanning almost a century of Lucy's life, including her ride down the street at Messy Nessy Chic.
Pusic, Russia's most spoiled cat (previously at Neatorama), is fascinated with the new treadmill. He learns how to use it in only six days! It's an accomplishment, alright, but since he's conquered the learning process, he can go on to other things. The hooman can practice every day until he gets it right.
They say there are no stupid questions, only questions that are weird enough to provide entertainment. On the forum Physics Stack Exchange, Billy-bodega posed the question, "Supposing that the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries, what would happen from the perspective of a person on the surface?" That brings up an entertaining picture, but Anders Sandburg of Oxford University kept thinking about it, and ended up writing a paper on the subject, released just a few days ago. There's a lot of factors to consider when building an imaginary planet.
This process of imagining blueberry earth begins with fat, thick-skinned highbush blueberries (the kind you find in grocery stores, not in the blueberry barrens of Maine). Given the estimated density of blueberries, the mass of an Earth made of berries would be a fraction of its current mass, with weaker gravity. Blueberries, Sandberg points out, are not particularly strong, able to resist the weight of a sugar cube but not a milk carton. Within a few yards of the surface of whole blueberries, the force of gravity would pulp the blueberries into mash, releasing the air that had separated each berry from its neighbors and shrinking the planet to a smaller radius. If no other forces were involved, the blueberry planet would collapse under its own weight in an estimated 42 minutes.
But there are other factors at play. The air released by the pulping of berries would create a thick, dense atmosphere, which Sandberg compares to Titan’s. Little light would filter through to the surface, so the dramatic events that followed would happen in almost total darkness.
The pressure of the weight of the fruit would soon cause other reactions. You can read Sandburg's science paper for all the details or a summary of the project at Atlas Obscura.
Now, these are some freaky-looking pies! Doesn't matter. If they've got berries in them, I'll eat it. I believe these pies were made by Ashley Newman of Folsom, Louisiana. Her Etsy store is here. Newman posted a tutorial a few years ago on how to make these pies. -via reddit
"How much is that in dog years?" We are used to assuming that for every calendar year, a dog will age the way a human will in seven years. That makes some sort of sense according to a dog's expected life span, but it doesn't tell the whole story. For example, the dog in this picture has one candle on her birthday cake, but she's old enough to have puppies. Veterinary professor Jesse Grady explains the life stages of dogs and cats.
Dogs and cats age differently not just from people but also from each other, based partly on breed characteristics and size. Bigger animals tend to have shorter life spans than smaller ones do. While cats vary little in size, the size and life expectancy of dogs can vary greatly – think a Chihuahua versus a Great Dane.
Human life expectancy has changed over the years. And vets are now able to provide far superior medical care to pets than we could even a decade ago. So now we use a better methodology to define just how old rule of thumb that counted every calendar year as seven “animal years.”
You'll find life stage charts for cats and dogs at The Conversation. According to the cat chart, I have two mature cats and one cat entering his prime. -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: Flickr user Omer Balamir)
The Soviet Union operated pretty much in isolation from the rest of the world from 1922 to 1991. They had their own nuclear weapons buildup and their own space program, plus manufacturing and technological advances like every other nation, but we didn't get to see them. When they were revealed later, the photographs of Soviet machinery, vehicles, and architecture seemed to come from some bizarro world where nothing is familiar to us. Take, for example, the snowmobile pictured above from the 1950s. It was the Sever-2 Aerosan, developed for the military, seemingly by plopping a sedan body on top of skis and powering it with an airplane engine. You can see a gallery of things made in the USSR, ranging from goofy car designs to scary military installations to Tetris, at Messy Nessy Chic.
The world watched and waited on edge of our seats while professionals from around the world came together to bring a young soccer team out of a flooded cave in Thailand. It's hard for us lay people to understand the difficulty of the task. Chris Peterman is a professional cave diver, safety diver, and instructor. He helps to paint a full picture of their work by stressing the five cardinal rules of cave diving:
- Be well-trained and do not dive beyond your certification level
- Never use more than one third of your breathing gas to enter the cave—reserve one third for exiting and one third for emergencies
- Maintain a physical guideline back to the cave entrance at all times
- Never dive below the appropriate depth for your breathing gas mixture
- Carry at least three lights per person—one main and two back-ups
Peterman explains each rule and relates how they would work in the Thailand rescue operation. He also tells stories from cave divers' experiences that illustrate what happens when you don't follow each rule. Read his fascinating insights at Ars Technica.
(Image credit: Chris Peterman)
It's hot this summer in North Carolina, especially if you are a dog bred for cold climates. Mako the Husky has found a way around that, because he's found his place -inside the ice maker! He would have never been found if he'd pulled his tail in properly. Now the ice machine belongs to him.
Boing Boing has another video where they caught Mako in the act of climbing into the ice machine.
The picture here has been all over the internet for years as an example of pareidolia, or things that look like other things. These small windows are set into roofs in Romania to allow ventilation into attics where food is stored, yet they are small enough to keep light from getting in. This particular house is in the city of Sibiu. Yes, they look like eyes, as if the house itself is watching you. In Romanian, you might say “Vă vedem,” which means "We see you."
Starting in the winter months of 2017, hundreds of thousands of people in Romania came out to protest, after a newly elected government moved to decriminalize corruption and put laws into place that could help politicians escape investigation. According to Transparency International, Romania is one of the most corrupt countries in the European Union and those February protests were some of the largest in Romanian history. That slogan, Vă vedem, appeared on their streets under suspicious, slanted eyes.
Almost a year later, in December 2017, protests continued, and in Sibiu, where the Romanian president, Klaus Iohannis, had served four terms as mayor, a group of protesters adopted the “Sibiu eyes” as their logo.
Since then, people from all over the world have been using the stylized symbol of those windows to show their support for Romanians fighting corruption. Read the story and see those symbols at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Flickr user lucianf)
Science fiction speculates on the march of science and technology. The best science fiction raises questions about how those things affect humans and the way we live. PBS Digital Studios looks at the development of science fiction from Frankenstein to Black Panther with a delightfully animated video. -via the AV Club
The National Aquarium of New Zealand erected a sign last year to shame their Naughty Penguin of the Month, complete with the reason for the award. In contrast, they also named a Good Penguin of the Month. It was a cute way to remind visitors that penguins are not all alike; in fact they all have their own distinct personalities. The Aquarium has kept up the idea, and posted a new Naughty Penguin and a new Good Penguin each month. Regular visitors got to know the best -and worst- penguins. Now @jonnywaistcoat has curated and posted evidence of each Penguin of the Month over the past year with commentary so that internet users all over the world can get to know the individual penguins, too!
It's good to know that Timmy, the original naughty penguin, actually made the good list once, but then fell back into his old ways. But we learn that Timmy is also a victim of bullying. Mo made the naughty list so many times, they turned to shortcuts to describe his behavior, as you can see in the picture above. And the new guy, Burny, is turning out the be a real sweetheart. See all the Penguins of the Month at Thread Reader. -via Metafilter
Seth Meyers tells the tale of DeDe Phillips, who was attacked by a rabid bobcat. As he proved when his second son was born, Meyers really knows how to tell a story. Since the June 7 attack, Phillips has undergone rabies vaccination, and is okay. Well, she's not only okay, she's a badass.
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