W-ORD Channel 7 News keeps you up to date on the latest news in letters. John Oliver and Cookie Monster are the co-anchors. Telly Monster is the field reporter. Al Roker presents the weather (which is very bromantic) and Nick Offerman offers mustache commentary. It's all the news fit to eat on W-ORD Channel 7. In a mere 5 minutes and 18 seconds, these journalism professionals pack in joke after joke. Mashable, Sesame Street, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver have outdone themselves.
If John Oliver moves on from his HBO show, we now know precisely who should replace him.
Some of us are ready to rock only after extensive training and preparation. But this little girl was born ready. It's especially fitting that she's showing the double sign of the horns because she's the daughter of Hazuki, a singer with the band Grollschwert. This band from Osaka bills itself as a "melodic deathrash metal band." He's at the front and center of the photo below.
Note that the spits rotate to provide even cooking throughout the slabs of meat.
The workshop geniuses at Wolks Gruppe Garibaldi in Brazil weren't ready to give up on the old jalopy yet. This Volkswagen Brasilia might not be roadworthy, but it is kitchen-worthy. We salute you, gentlemen.
Today is the bicentennial of a seminal event in the formation of the American national identity. Two hundred years ago today, Americans at Baltimore halted a foreign invasion of their nation while standing beneath a flag that would become known as the Star-Spangled Banner.
This is my third post on thebicentennial of the War of 1812--a war that some historians refer to as America’s second war of independence. Although Britain did not want to completely conquer and rule its rebellious colonies once again, it hoped to reduce America into a shadow of its former self--one that could be more easily coerced and managed from across the Atlantic.
(The burned White House by George Munger, White House Historical Association)
The British grand strategy was to tie down America’s limited military resources on the Eastern seaboard and New Orleans while driving a decisive blow down the Lake Champlain-Hudson River corridor. In August and September of 1814, the British acted on their plan. First, they burned down the capital city of the United States. Then they moved into Lake Champlain in the direction of New York City.
(Major General Robert Ross and Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane, respectively)
In this post, we depart from the wilderness of northern New York and return to Chesapeake Bay. Major General Robert Ross, the British Army commander, and Admirals Cockburn and Cochrane, had torched Washington, D.C.--an act that both humiliated and enraged Americans. They had hoped that burning the capital would make the American people despair of the struggle and give up the fight.
They were wrong.
(Modern replicas of two War of 1812-era privateers, The Pride of Baltimore and the Lynx, photo by the US Navy)
So Cochrane, as the senior British officer in the theater, had to decide where to strike next. He seriously considered an invasion of Rhode Island. But nearby Baltimore, then one of the largest cities in America, was a more promising target. During the war, it was a major base of operations for American privateers. Approximately 500 captured British merchant vessels had been sailed into its harbor, which is why Cochrane’s subordinate, Admiral Cockburn, described Baltimore as a “nest of pirates.” Destroying Baltimore would do serious harm to the American economy as well as avenge what the British perceived as a grievous wrong perpetrated by the Americans. And after so easily destroying Washington, why not continue their campaign just a bit further north?
From Visual News comes this lovely sculptural series called "DREAMS-ark." There's little information available about the artist, Ruilin Wang, or what he's trying to express. But I think that he's tapping into the myth from many cultures that the entire world lies upon the back of a giant animal moving through the ether. All of the sea and land is just a blanket over a whale, a turtle, or an elephant. In this case, it's whales all the way down.
Twitter user @belcorno is perhaps best known for his work as a latte artist. We've previously featured his colorful work in that medium. But over the summer, he embarked on a new artistic journey by creating this model of the World War II-era warship Yamato--the largest battleship ever built--using bottles, corks, kite strings, and toothpicks.
The Yamato is the central figure in a long-running anime franchise called Space Battleship Yamato. In it, the sunken warship is converted into a spaceship and sent into battle against alien invaders.
But because of the cables that @belcorno places between the bow, the stern, and the mast, I suspect that his work specifically refers to the real-life seagoing vessel.
At one shocking moment, the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch suddenly felt the icy existential horror of the human experience. Then he wrote:
I was walking along the road with two friends The Sun was setting – the Sky turned blood-red. And I felt a wave of Sadness – I paused tired to Death – Above the blue-black Fjord and City Blood and Flaming tongues hovered My friends walked on – I stayed behind – quaking with Angst – I felt the great Scream in Nature So I challenge the Mona Lisa and Whistler’s Mother
Amy Ratcliffe of Adafruit is at Dragon Con in Atlanta, where she's snapping photos of some really creative and skilled cosplayers. You can see more photos that she's taken here and here.
I adore the Fangirl outfit. That's a fantastic pun.
The rankings on Shea Strauss's chart are not entirely fair. Dr. Pepper, the pride of Waco, Texas, is a perfectly satisfactory physician and a far better art historian than Dr. Zoidberg.
If I knew Doc Brown and The Doctor personally, I'd probably avoid them. A life of profitless adventure? I'll pass.
Will Reid is a devoted and loving father to his teenage children. He's trying to raise them to be independent, self-sufficient adults by teaching them essential life skills. Among those skills is how to change a roll of toilet paper.
What do you do if you run out of toilet paper? Some people simply remain there on the toilet and give up on life. But there's another option: you can get another roll of toilet paper.
Not everyone knows this trick, including Reid's children. So he made this instructional video showing step-by-step how to get a new roll of toilet paper. He's considering also making an advanced-level video showing another helpful technique for toilet paper roll management.
That headline requires a bit of unpacking. If you do some math, you'll find that that number gives us an origin of 1758, which is 18 years before the United States came into existence. Also, it's been underwater at the bottom of a lake for those 256 years.
The Land Tortoise is America's oldest intact warship because it's inside the borders of the United States and it remains, despite its two centuries submerged, in one piece.
The Land Tortoise is located at the bottom of Lake George, a lake in New York that is 32 miles long and 3 miles wide. You might think that an enclosed lake is a strange place to build and launch a warship, but it wasn't in 1758.
At that time, the colonies that would become the United States were still loyal to the British Crown. Lake George formed part of the vague frontier between British and French-claimed lands in North America.
During the French and Indian War, which is what the Seven Years' War is called in North America, the British tried to capture the French-held Fort Carillon, a site later known as Fort Ticonderoga. Fort Carillon lay at the southern end of Lake Champlain and near the northern end of Lake George. In preparation for this battle, the British built a flotilla of oar-propelled vessels.
Among them was a ship known as the Land Tortoise. It was 52 feet long and 18 feet wide. The ship had stout, sloped wooden walls that the designers hoped would deflect musket and cannon fire. There were 7 gunports cut into the walls for cannons that would fire 24-pound balls.
Although the Land Tortoise was far from seaworthy, it was quite capable of moving through the lake, providing support for British troops assaulting Fort Carillon.
The British attack force outnumbered the French 5 to 1, but the French prevailed that day and held Fort Carillon. Fearing that their position on Lake George was untenable, the British decided to temporarily retreat from the region. So they sunk their radeaus, including the Land Tortoise. They planned to raise the ships and put them back into action later, when they had a larger army in the area.
The next year, in 1759, the British routed the French in three different theaters of the war, including the Lake Champlain-Lake George valley. They did not need the Land Tortoise for this task, which remained at the bottom of the lake.
The Land Tortoise rested there, forgotten, for two centuries. Then, in the 1960s, underwater archaeologists began exploring Lake George and its roughly 200 shipwrecks. A sonar team confirmed the location of the Land Tortoisein 1990. The ship is in remarkably good condition. The hull is solid and the wood well preserved. It's a unique time capsule showing colonial life and naval warfare.
Underwater archaeologists Russ Bellico and Joe Zarzynski made a 57-minute documentary about the ship called The Lost Radeau: America's Oldest Intact Warship. The trailer for it is embedded above.
Let's admit that mistakes were made. We both made some inadequate choices, said words that were best left unspoken, and pantsed people in public when it would have been optimal not to do so.
Is that enough, Alex? Can't you just let it go?
Apparently not. But if I lived in Japan, I'd have another option. Rocket News 24 reports that in that country, there are companies that will issue apologies to people you've offended so that you don't have to do it yourself. It's outsourcing humility.
A face-to-face apology may cost $240 each or $33 per hour for an extended interaction, depending on which company you use. It costs extra to have your stand-in cry or provide other emotional effects while apologizing. You can read more about this industry here.
