When her mother died, French artist Cécile Davidovici watched old VHS home movies of her family back in 1988. To reinforce the permanence of the relationship now separated by death, she embroidered still images from those home movies to "anchor herself in the moment."
Davidovici calls the series, appropriately, 1988. You can see more examples on her website and Instagram.
-via Colossal
62-year old personal trainer and former Marine George Hood first gained a Guinness World Record for planking in 2011. Then his record was surpassed by a Chinese competitor. Now Hood holds the top title again since holding the planking for 8 hours, 15 minutes, and 15 seconds on February 15.
Hood's training regimen was brutal. Forbes reports:
In training for last month’s attempt, Hood reportedly did approximately 674,000 sit ups and 270,000 push ups. That’s totally Hood. To put these numbers in perspective, if you did a hundred sit-ups a day, it would take you over 18 years to do that many sit-ups.
-via Stuff | Image: Guinness World Records
Modern problems require bold solutions. For example, how do you eat spaghetti without spilling it everywhere, including on yourself?
You use a pair of scissors, as this genius does. Just snip off the ends of your forkful before putting the remainder in your mouth. As he says, "Beats crawling around with a fork."
We salute you, sir. Audentes Fortuna iuvat.
-via Dave Barry
We stopped after just one moon and got our magma vents snipped. But Jupiter kept going and going. Soon, she had 79 kids!
That's just too much stress and work. If you have too many moons, eventually you start losing a few.
-via Pleated Jeans | Image: Safely Endangered Comic
Isabella Dalla Ragione is an archaeobotanist. That means that she researches the history of plants, many of which have changed over time with human cultivation. For example, Albrecht Durer's 1525 painting Madonna and Child with Pear actually shows an old form of the apple. Atlas Obscura describes how her research methods led to this conclusion:
“You can find so many texts detailing the symbolic meaning of pears in this painting,” Dalla Ragione says. However, the distinctive shape of the top of the fruit in Durer’s painting made Dalla Ragione realize that it was actually a “mouth of the ox” apple, an ancient variety that Dalla Ragione had found years ago in an abandoned field near Perugia and now grows on her farmstead.
Ragione tries to restore these old varieties through careful cultivation:
Once she finds a long-lost tree, Dalla Ragione plants three samples in her farmstead and puts them up for adoption via Archeologia Arborea’s website. “If you adopt a tree, it means your contribution will be used for its preservation,” she says. “Some adoptive parents come from as far as the U.S. or Australia.”
She personally takes care of her 600 plants year-round. Between September and October, she picks up most of her pears and apples and preserves them inside an abandoned chapel next to her farmstead. Standing against the chapel’s frescoes, these baskets of fruit symbolize Archeologia Arborea’s mission statement: that plants are an essential element of cultural heritage.
Image: Web Gallery of Art
The would-be thief experienced a major failure in the victim selection process when he chose to hold up the wrong Raising Cane's chicken restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky. Officers Chase and Nicole McKeown from the nearby city of Elizabeth town were there on a date.
NPR describes how they responded when the robber walked up to the cashier and pulled out a gun:
"I saw her hands go up like this and I'm like, 'Is he doing what I think he's doing?' " Nicole McKeown said at a news conference Tuesday, describing how she and her husband watched the scene play out. "And he's like, 'Yeah.' "
From there, the couple reacted quickly, drawing their weapons and circling the center tables to converge on the would-be robber.
"There was literally no question. We just looked at each other: 'Is this what's going on? Let's go,' " said Chase McKeown. He said their police instincts took over, adding, "We just did what we felt like we had to do."
The McKeowns chased the suspect down and captured him.
-via Dave Barry
Mayonnaise is usually a viscous liquid--well, unless you forget about it in the back of the refrigerator for a couple of years.
But you don't have to wait that long in order to eat it as a solid. Andrew Liszewski of Gizmodo informs us that in Japan, mayonnaise sometimes comes in slices akin to cheese shingles. You can drape a mayo slice onto a sandwich, noodles, or ice cream.
Photo: ITmedia
Black bears apparently know when it's trash day in particular neighborhoods, so this 400-pounder decided to stroll down from the mountains and see what tasty treats could be found.
In the incredibly unlikely event that this happened in my neighborhood, I'd run inside my home and call the police. And I wouldn't leave until wildlife officials or law enforcement had secured the beast.
But these people see a wild bear roaming about unrestrained and think, "It's selfie time!"
Perhaps Californians are made of sterner stuff.
Anyway, wildlife officials tranquilized and relocated the bear from the Monrovia neighborhood. Then, the next day, a different black bear went for a jaunt through the same neighborhood!
In this photo, Lady Bird Johnson (1912-2007) sports an impressive bouffant. Big hair styles were popular in the United States during the 1950s-70s, so the First Lady's hair is not out of the ordinary.
But when, precisely, did big hairstyles reach their zenith in American fashions? Elle O'Brien, an AI researcher for Botnik Studios, and Jan Diehm, an engineer and journalist, crunched the numbers from 30,000 American high school yearbook photos.
At The Pudding, O'Brien and Diehm present an interactive chart showing the growth and shinkage of hairstyles for both men and women over time, as well as a decade-by-decade summary of the most common hairstyles for both sexes.
-via Marginal Revolution
Korean artist @nanankang offers a delicious take on a classic. Johannes Vermeer's iconic 1665 painting Girl with a Pearl Earring is immediately recognizable in cereal form.
-via Colossal
The six scents are sesame seed bun, ketchup, onion, ground "beef", pickles, and cheese. If you light them all, you have simulated the experience of eating a McDonald's Quarter Pounder hamburger. Fox News reports that this is one of many products on sale from McDonald's to promote its lifestyle.
Our own company, Neatorama, really should do the same thing by selling a line of candles, each of which smells like a particular author. Burn them together for the supreme Neatorama olfactory experience.
-via Aelfred the Great | Photo: McDonald's
The girl who is third from the left is Brayden Lawrence. She loves to shop at Target. In fact, she loves it so much that when it was time for her birthday party, she asked for one at a Target store with a Target theme.
Brayden and her friends got employee uniforms, walkie-talkies, name badges, and a cake decorated with the retail chain's colors. CBS News (warning: auto-start video) talked to Brayden's aunt, Rikki Jackson:
The attendees then went on a scavenger hunt to find items in the store, but had to put everything back after, "since that's what employees do," said Jackson. The family even gave the pint-sized "employees" gift cards to spend on an "item of their choice." [...]
"She had the time of her life," said Jackson. "She hasn't stopped talking about it since! All she kept saying to my sister Jessica yesterday was 'Momma, you did that!'"
While Target doesn't normally host children's parties, Jackson said in a tweet that the store's manager gave the family "special permission" for the bash. The manager's kindness clearly made an impression on Lawrence.
-via Super Punch | Photo: Rikki Jackson
Do you see the pair of tits in the above photo? Pretty nice, right? Well, they're not Japanese great tits (Parus major), which use syntax. They're Eurasian blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus), which scientists find fascinating for other reasons.
After carefully observing these tits for a long time, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology concluded that the females among normally monogamous birds sometimes stray and mate with male birds other than their social mates. ITV reports:
Scientists found that birds which often foraged together in the colder months were more likely to end up as breeding pairs or partners outside of their couple.
They say many socially monogamous bird species engage in sexual behaviour outside their pair bond, often resulting in chicks. [...]
They studied blue tits that typically form monogamous pairs, but frequently mate outside their pair.
First-author of the study, Kristina Beck, said: “As most extra-pair sires are close neighbours, one could think that extra-pair paternity in blue tits might simply be the result of coincidental meetings between neighbours, and not a social preference for specific mating partners.”
About half of all nests contain at least one young with a genetic father other than the social one, and up to 15% of all offspring are sired by extra-pair males.
-via Dave Barry | Photo: David Aiken
The challenge for Dr. Nicholas Senn, a US Army surgeon during the late 19th Century, was how to quickly assess abdominal gunshot wounds before the invention of x-ray machines. Was the path of a bullet a flesh wound, or had it penetrated the intestines, thus requiring a more complicated surgery?
His solution was to pump hydrogen gas up the patient's rectum*, then hold a flame to the wound. If the gas ignited, that indicated that the gunshot wound had indeed damaged the intestines.
To test this method, Senn first pumped gas up his own rectum to see what it would feel like. Then, in separate experiments, he performed the surgery on animals that had suffered gunshot wounds. You can read his book on the subject here.
Dr. Senn's methods were apparently successful and he went onto other medical accomplishments. Kaushik Patowa of Amusing Planet writes:
Although the first human patient, a 27-years-old black man with a 38 caliber pistol shot wound to his stomach, did not survive, the procedure itself was a success and eventually found use in military surgery to detect bowel wounds in soldiers. Dr. Senn’s methods only became obsolete when X-rays became standard diagnostic tool.
Nicholas Senn was a pioneer in surgical medicine. Aside from his work on gastrointestinal perforation, Doctor Senn was involved in experimental research on acute pancreatitis, plastic surgery, head and neck oncology, and the treatment of leukaemia with x-rays. He strongly supported the early operation for appendicitis, which was not the practice of the time. He also stressed the importance of first aid, first introduced to the military by the German surgeon Friedrich von Esmarch in 1870. Senn frequently quoted the German dictum, “The fate of the wounded rests with the one who applies the first dressing”.
*"Rectum? 'Pert near killed him!"
A King Cake is a cake traditionally eaten by communities in the United States that celebrate Mardi Gras. The sugary purple and yellow cake is consumed on the Christian feast day of Epiphany, which is often celebrated on January 6. Inside the cake is a tiny figurine of a baby. The lucky person whose slice of King Cake contains that baby is the honorary king of the day.
Learn from my mistake: the royal position is purely ceremonial and lacks any power whatsoever, so do not make any dictatorial commands upon friends and co-workers.
Anyway, Calandro's grocery store and the Burgersmith restaurant, both culinary institutions of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, have joined forces to offer the Mardis Gras Mambo Burger. This bacon cheeseburger is wrapped around twisted King Cake dough. You can read more about it courtesy of local news reporter and meteorologist Steve Caparotta.
-via Rod Dreher | Photo: Burgersmith
