(Image: Columbia Pictures/Marvel Entertainment, via ComicBook)
Two actors have donned the red mask in recent years: Tobey Maguire in 2002 and Andrew Garfield in 2012. To honor their work, scientists recently named two real webslingers after them.
The Filistata maguirei and Pritha garfieli are newly-discovered species that live in Iran. Marusik et al. note in the journal Anthropoda Selecta that "They are venomous but do not pose a risk to humans." Of course not! They're our protectors.
I remember that after one of my pet rabbits died, the other rabbit, in a shocking display of strength, ripped the door off her cage and went out looking for him. She scoured our apartment, searching for her lost mate. She was, in her own way, mourning him.
Or am I just projecting? Joe Hanson, a biologist and the host of the PBS program It's Okay to Be Smart, reviews the evidence. For a long time, scientists assumed that only humans could mourn because only humans could intellectually grasp death.
But now it's clear that crows, chimpanzees, and elephants mourn in some capacity. Zoologists noticed that when one elephant under observation died, her family stopped and lingered near her for a while. For several days, five other groups stopped by and visited her body--even when doing so placed them in danger from predators.
They're called boaterhomes. I use the plural form because, surprisingly, this isn't a one-on-a-kind vehicle. There are many of them. Like the saucer separation procedure in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a boaterhome drives to the shore, then detaches a fully functional cruising boat.
This particular model, the AutoBlog tells us, is a 1987 Watercraft Sports King that rides a 1986 Ford E-class van. All it needs is helicopter wings to offer a full menu of transportation options.
Don’t send that résumé off yet! First, run it through Kittify. This online application by Daniel Landry turns your words into a series of cat-themed puns and references. Here, for example, is the Gettysburg Address. You could also use the application to tweak a seductive love letter, an especially menacing death threat, or a simple shopping list.
Please leave comments—but first, run them through Kittify.
What he doesn’t mention is that babies don’t stay that way forever, as cats do. Eventually, babies become teenagers. That’s when the fun begins, right?
On June 8, 1972, Nick Ut of the Associated Press photographed the napalm bombing of a Vietnamese village. 9-year old Kim Phuc, hit by the caustic gel, stripped her clothes off and fled in terror. Her expression of pain and horror became an iconic image of the Vietnam War.
Phuc grew up and traveled to Cuba. While her plane stopped for refueling in Canada, she defected. She later became a Canadian citizen and served as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Peace.
Now 52, Phuc has never fully recovered from the horrendous damage that napalm did to her body more than four decades ago. She recently traveled to Miami to visit a high-end dermatology clinic that can heal many of the scars that cover her body. The AP reports:
Late last month, Phuc, 52, began a series of laser treatments that her doctor, Jill Waibel of the Miami Dermatology and Laser Institute, says will smooth and soften the pale, thick scar tissue that ripples from her left hand up her arm, up her neck to her hairline and down almost all of her back.
Even more important to Phuc, Waibel says the treatments also will relieve the deep aches and pains that plague her to this day.
For this story, the AP assigned a photographer that Phuc already knew: Nick Ut, the man who first photographed her in 1972 and rescued her:
Ut remembers the girl screaming in Vietnamese, "Too hot! Too hot!" He put her in the AP van where she crouched on the floor, her burnt skin raw and peeling off her body as she sobbed, "I think I'm dying, too hot, too hot, I'm dying."
He took her to a hospital. Only then did he return to the Saigon bureau to file his photographs, including the one of Phuc on fire that would win the Pulitzer Prize.
During World War II, millions of Americans who had never travelled beyond their own states were, in short order, trained and sent far away to foreign lands filled with people very different from themselves. So the Army published a series of guidebooks that taught the Americans how they should conduct themselves in ways that would leave the natives with the right impression. These books included the nations of France, Britain, Australia, Germany, Iran, and Iraq.
They included helpful pointers on etiquette. For example, don't slap an Iraqi on the back. You may think of it as a friendly gesture, but the average Iraqi won't. You can read more about these guides at Atlas Obscura.
There she is, Miss Navajo. In 2012, Leandra Thomas, who is pictured above, won that coveted title. There's no swimsuit competition at this beauty pageant conducted by the Navajo Nation. Contestants wear traditional garb and have to demonstrate a facility with the language and essential skills. For example, Miss Navajo knows how to butcher a sheep properly. Laurel Morales wrote in 2012 for NPR:
One petite woman struggles to lift an enormous, slippery stomach out of her sheep. Judges circle and scrutinize.
Immediately after the women finish, they must answer impromptu questions in Navajo, like, "What are you supposed to do with the sheep's head?"
One contestant answers, "Wrap it in aluminum foil and put it on the fire."
The crowd boos in response because they don't like her answer — and because she switches to English. The event is intended to show whether these women can multitask, stay calm under pressure and most importantly, first-time contestant Wallitta Begay says, prove their understanding of Navajo customs.
This year, redditor aubra_cadabra and her friends chose Robin Williams. From left to right, you can find Williams's roles in Mrs. Doubtfire, Mork & Mindy, Jumanji, Popeye, Hook, Aladdin, and The Birdcage. This assembly won them Best Group Costume in a costume contest for the fourth year in a row.
In previous years, the group went as Johnny Depp, Jim Carrey, and Will Ferrell:
Egyptian artist Moataz Nasr calls his installation Vacanze Romane, which translates into English as Roman Holidays. He displayed it in the Italian city of Pisa. One Piaggio Vespa joins another in an endless ride through an eternal city.
Inspired by a Photoshopped image of Donald Trump wearing a man bun circulating the internet, the graphic design website Design Crowd invited people to Photoshop other politicians wearing man buns. Here's Vladimir Putin, the apparently perpetual president of Russia, by forum member lionx. You can find many others here, including Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon, Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Kim Jong-un.
That belly is just what you need to impress everyone at the Halloween party. Just wrap the cardboard cutout around you and you'll attract a lot of eyes. And don't let anyone tell you that you're out of shape. Avocados are very healthy.
Last year, artist Alain Thomas conducted Illumi'Nantes (translation), an animated light show projected onto the face of the Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in Nantes, France. Visitors were treated to a kaleidoscope-like impression of colors and shapes. It is a presentation of the Nativity story that sweeps across the old Gothic cathedral. You can see large photos of it here.
Harrod's is an upscale department store in London. It lets all sorts of people inside, including riff raff like you and me. If you contact the staff online, they'd like to know how to address you. They wouldn't want to refer to a Wing Commander as a Princess or a Sheikh as Her Royal Highness. That's why the online contact form requires that you provide your title.
-via Marilyn Terrell, who says, "I prefer Viscountess." How about you?
(Morning of the Battle of Agincourt, a painting by Sir John Gilbert)
And for 600 years to follow, gentlemen in England then abed thought themselves accursed they were not there that day. On October 25, 1415--the Feast of St. Crispin--a small army led by King Henry V smashed a much larger but antiquated French army at Agincourt in northern France.
British novelist Bernard Cornwell explains at length in the Daily Telegraph how mud and the power of the Welsh longbow became the undoing of the heavily-armored French knights:
Some eight thousand French men-at-arms were advancing on foot. No one knows how long it took them to cover the two hundred or more paces which separated them from Henry’s men-at-arms, but it was not a quick approach. They were wading through mud made treacherous by deeply ploughed furrows and churned to quagmire by horses’ hooves. And they were being struck by arrows so that they were forced to close their helmets’ visors.
They can see very little through the tiny eye-slits, their breathing is stifled, and still the arrows come. The conventional verdict suggests that the French were cut down by those arrow-storms, but the chief effect of the arrows was to delay and, by forcing them to close their visors, half-blind the attackers.
When the French knights finally closed in on the archers, they found that their unarmored opponents were still at advantage, even in close quarters combat:
The bowmen wore little armour, and in the glutinous mud they were far more mobile than their plate-armoured opponents, and any man capable of hauling a war-bow’s string was hugely strong and a battle-axe in his hands would be a ghastly weapon. And so the archers joined the hand to hand fight and the tired French were killed in their hundreds.
Agincourt has loomed large in British popular memory for the centuries that followed. It was well remembered by William Shakespeare, who made it the center of his play The Life of Henry the Fifth. His character of King Henry delivered the famous "Band of Brothers" speech, abbreviated in the 1989 Kenneth Branagh adaptation.
-via VA Viper, who points out that today is also the 71st anniversary of the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in world history, as well as the 161st anniversary of the charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava.
