Go, video, go! You can do it! Keep loading ahead of the playback. Failure means that I won't get to watch this My Little Pony episode without being interrupted. Push it!
There's drama in everyday life, as illustrated by Essenti of the webcomic CUTBU. And, yes, yelling at your computer helps.
-via Pleated Jeans
(Crime Scene Bandages now on sale at the NeatoShop)
Last month, a man walked into a Sports Page sporting goods store in Marshalltown, Iowa. He asked for a job application, filled it out and turned it in. Then, according to police, he felt entitled to a five-fingered pay raise: he shoplifted $153 of clothes and left the store.
Managers reviewed security camera footage and recognized the suspect. So they called him in for a job interview. The police were waiting and arrested him for the theft.
The moral of the story: don't go to job interviews.
-via Weird Universe
(Photo: Shizuo Kambayashi/Associated Press)
This shark clearly made Santa's nice list! On Wednesday, a member of the staff of the Sunshine International Aquarium in Tokyo dressed as Santa Claus and embraced a zebra shark.
-via Lustik
This is a painting of HMS St. Lawrence. With 112 guns, it was the largest warship ever seen on the Great Lakes and the largest Royal Navy vessel to ever sail entirely on fresh water.
After Napoleon abdicated, the British government offered the famous Duke of Wellington the command of its forces in North America. For several reasons, Wellington declined. Among them, Wellington stated that what Britain needed in the war against the United States was not a huge army, but naval control over the lakes between the United States in Canada. These waters alone were the highways that could carry British armies into the United States.
(Map from Mahan's Sea Power and Its Relations to the War of 1812)
Early in the War of 1812, Britain gained control over Lake Huron. The Americans eventually gained superiority on Lake Erie and Lake Champlain. But Lake Ontario was different and this huge warship is one reason why.
Niagara Falls blocked Lake Ontario from Lake Erie and rapids at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River limited the size of vessels that could travel from the sea onto Lake Ontario. Thus it was necessary to build large vessels on-site.
(Photo: Yamakawa Firefly)
Are you going to eat this meal or is it going to eat you? Don't take any chances and dig in right away. Stab it in the brain with a chopstick.
You can find English-language instructions on how to make your own here. You'll need green drink powder to get the facial coloration just right. The eyes are two halves of a quail egg. A diced quail egg white also provides teeth. The nostrils are sliced seaweed and the infected tongue is a slice of ham.
-via Foodiggity
It's a hard time of year for people with claustrophobia, as Dan Piraro of Bizarro Comics illustrates. There are Clauses everywhere and rooms tend to get smaller and air in shorter supply wherever they go.
(Photo: 20th Century Fox)
Here's a fascinating story from the filming of the 1968 science fiction film Planet of the Apes. In that movie, there are 3 ape species: chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. When the actors for the ape characters put on their makeup and costumes, they segregated themselves by species:
During the filming of Planet of the Apes in 1967, Charlton Heston noted “an instinctive segregation on the set. Not only would the apes eat together, but the chimpanzees ate with the chimpanzees, the gorillas ate with the gorillas, the orangutans ate with the orangutans, and the humans would eat off by themselves. It was quite spooky.”
James Franciscus noticed the same thing filming Beneath the Planet of the Apes in 1969. “During lunch I looked up and realized, ‘My God, here is the universe,’ because at one table were all the orangutans eating, at another table were the apes, and at another table were the humans. The orangutan characters would not eat or mix with the ape characters, and the humans wouldn’t sit down and eat with any one of them.
Read the rest at Futility Closet.
-via American Digest
Smaug from The Hobbit has a fiery breath, but maybe he can put it to good use by lighting this cocktail from The Drunken Moogle. To make your own, you'll need Goldschläger, which is a type of cinnamon-flavored schnapps, Fireball Cinnamon Whisky, a splash of grain alcohol and a bit of flame.
There are now cameras everywhere. So you can't just roll out of bed, put on sweat pants and drive to the McDonald's anymore. There are people there who will judge you. So you have to impress them by putting on a fedora that matches your sweatpants.
We wanted flying cars. We wanted robot girlfriends. This isn't the future that any of us, including Kris Straub of Chainsawsuit, wanted.
(Images: Michelin)
The Michelin Man—the mascot for the Michelin tire company—is a happy, jovial fellow. He’s always been that way, but you may find early photos and illustrations of him scary.
His name is Bibendum. That’s a reference to a line by the Latin poet Horace, who said, “nunc est bibendum.” That means “now is the time to drink.” Michelin did not adopt this phrase in order to promote drunk driving, but to express that Michelin tires eat up obstacles on the road.
He doesn’t anymore, but Bidendum used to drink heavily, smoke cigars and wear pince-nez glasses. He was drawn gray when tires were usually gray in color, then black when tires were commonly black. You can see more early images of him here.
-via Ace of Spades HQ
Redditor sneakylawyer went urban exploring in Ronse, Belgium. He went inside an abandoned building and found several walls covered with beautiful, precisely-executed images from the Batman universe. The unknown artist appeared to be heavily influenced by The Animated Series, Batman Beyond and The Dark Knight trilogy. You can see more photos here.
-via Nerd Approved
Several days ago, we featured Michael Kenny's illustrations of several incarnations of the Doctor as if they had been drawn by Tim Burton. The tumblr blogger Made by ABVH animated 3 of them: the Tenth Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor and the War Doctor. They only further my argument that Tim Burton and the BBC should make this happen.
-via Super Punch
In case you haven't heard already: the sign language interpreter at the funeral for Nelson Mendela was a fake. He signed pure gibberish. If Thamsanqa Jantjie knows any sign language, he failed to demonstrate it at the funeral.
But perhaps, as this animated .gif (that's pronounced jeeeef) demonstrates, he was actually trying to make balloon animals.
Quantum Leap, episode 273: Sam leaps into the body of a sign language interpreter at Mandela's memorial. "Oh boy."
— Matt Westcott (@gasmanic) December 12, 2013That, or we were just watching an episode of the science fiction show Quantum Leap.
My @SeinfeldToday plot: George tells high school crush he's a sign-language translator; accidentally has to translate Mandela funeral.
— jon gabriel (@exjon) December 12, 2013Or Mr. Jantjie was trying to impress a lady and failing spectacularly.
What we do know is that the signs made no sense at all. Jimmy Kimmel brought a real interperter onto his show, who then translated Mr. Jantjie's gestures.
Should a person in this situation, as Jimmy Kimmel advises, just do the macarena dance? Maybe Mr. Jantjie was trying to start his own dance craze, as this video illustrates.
(via Robb Allen and American Digest)
When the Klingon leader General Martok (who was recently elected to public office in New York) wishes you a merry Christmas, you should at least try to respond in his own language. There's a limit to the Yuletide cheer that the universal translator can express.
Here is Mashable's handy guide to saying "merry Christmas" in 40 languages, including Farsi, Lithuanian and Korean.