Matthew Inman of the famous webcomic The Oatmeal has a great idea: make it a common custom for cat owners to give their indoor cats orange colors--and no other color. That way, if you ever see a cat outdoors wearing prison orange, then you know that it's a lost cat.
Inman is trying to address a problem: although 26% of lost dogs are returned home, fewer than 5% of lost cats are. That's because cats are good at hiding and most people, if they see a loose cat, just assume that it's an outdoor cat with a human family.
Talking parrots are prized status symbols in Nigeria. But supplying them and distributing them to different markets profitably is a challenge. Sometimes, parrots speak unusual languages, which requires retraining and therefore extra expenses for parrot dealers. Drew Hinshaw writes for the Wall Street Journal*:
It is a decision the pet shops of Nigeria confront every time a talking bird lands in their possession. Last year, a babbling grey parrot arrived at Salisu Sani’s bird stand in this northern city.
There was only one problem. She spoke one of the country’s lesser-known tongues.
“I told her: ‘This is a rubbish language. Try my own,’ ” recalled the lifelong parrot distributor, who spent weeks teaching the animal greetings in Hausa, a more widely spoken vernacular.
Nigeria is one of the world’s easier places to buy a parrot—the garrulous birds are a status symbol for some civil servants. In traffic jams, young salesmen approach car windows holding up cages with birds inside. African greys sell for about $60.
But they sell closer to $100 if you can get them to speak.
The question is what Nigerians want their pets to say. The country’s 182 million people speak 520 different languages, according to Ethnologue, an atlas of the world’s linguistic boundaries, published by the International Linguistics Center in Dallas. Church services drag for hours as deacons translate their pastor’s sermons into three, sometimes four languages. Customer service lines begin with a plethora of options: one for English, two for Hausa, three for Yoruba, four for Igbo.
Now can I get a pizza topped with tiny pizza slices that are themselves topped with even tinier pizza slices? Let's see how far we can take this idea.
Vinnie's Pizzeria, a restaurant in Brooklyn famous for its funny signs, is an innovator in pizza design. If you want a plain pizza, but you want to maximize its plainness, you can order your plain pizza with another plain pizza sliced up and layered on top.
This adorable video from 2009 shows a very proud father and his son. The dad has good reason to be proud! David, the young man in the video, was leaving home to defend his doctoral dissertation in math at Stanford University.
Tradition mandated that David ride to the defense on a unicycle while juggling. He juggled 4 balls, as math and natural sciences scholars usually do (social sciences: 3 balls, humanities: 2).
He was successful! The father now calls him "Dr. Dave."
Many non-Jews risked their lives to help Jews escape from the Holocaust. In 1953, Israel created the Righteous among the Nations program to honor these heroes. Since then 25,685 people from 49 nations around the world have received Israel's highest honor.
For the first time, an American serviceman has been awarded the title of Righteous among the Nations. Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds of the United Stated Army earned it after he was captured by German forces in late 1944. He was a prisoner of war for 100 days. During that time, prison camp guards tried to separate Jewish soldiers from the American prisoners so that they could be executed.
MSgt. Edmonds stopped them. The Times of Israeldescribes how Edmonds, the senior NCO present, saved the lives of Jews among the prisoners of war:
Turning to the rest of the POWs, he said: “We are not doing that, we are all falling out,” recalled Chris Edmonds, who is currently in Israel participating in a seminar for Christian leaders at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies.
With all the camp’s inmates defiantly standing in front of their barracks, the German commander turned to Edmonds and said: “They cannot all be Jews.” To which Edmonds replied: “We are all Jews here.”
Then the Nazi officer pressed his pistol to Edmonds head and offered him one last chance. Edmonds merely gave him his name, rank and serial number as required by the Geneva Conventions.
“And then my dad said: ‘If you are going to shoot, you are going to have to shoot all of us because we know who you are and you’ll be tried for war crimes when we win this war,'” recalled Chris Edmonds, who estimates his father’s actions saved the lives of more than 200 Jewish-American soldiers.
Witnesses to the exchange said the German officer then withdrew.
Edmonds was later liberated. He returned home to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he died in 1985. He never told his family about the incident. Edmonds's son, Chris Edmonds, learned of it only a few years ago.
What can you do with armpit hair? A better question is what can't you do with a full growth of armpit hair! The fashion world is finally taking up a long-neglected part of the body. You can, of course, dye your armpit hair. Or you can get armpit hair extensions.
But once you've taken those steps, what other fashion worlds are left to conquer?
Be bold. Glitter up those locks. Cosmopolitan reports that glitter pits are all the rage now. You can see many examples of #glitterpits on Instagram. Here are some of the best:
Dr. Robert Hamilton Pacific Ocean Pediatrics in Santa Monica, California has been working at his craft for 26 years. He knows all about caring for children, including how to get upset babies calm. When they get painful injections at his office, he uses a particular technique that soothes them almost instantly.
You can skip to the 1:01 mark in this video to see Dr. Hamilton use what he calls "the Hold." Pick up an infant according to it and, as Dr. Hamilton says, "shake their booty."
As a professional climatologist, Brian Brettschneider thinks a lot about the weather. What does it mean to have "good weather"? One element, Brettschneider thinks, is a pleasant temperature of 70ºF.
If you'd like to spend an entire year at that temperature without making use of heating or air conditioning, then he's got the perfect road trip for you. On every day of this 9,125-mile journey, the average high is 70ºF. It takes you through 30 states of the contiguous United States.
Pop Up City tells us that the Hühnerhof der Motte, an urban farm in Hamburg, Germany, has been operating for 30 years. To make its farm-to-table shipping process even faster, it added an egg vending machine. Eggs from the free-range chickens that live there are put inside for customers who want to enjoy the taste of extremely fresh eggs, even in the middle of a major city. Just slide in €2 for 6 eggs.
My 7-year old calls a landline phone as a "Grammy phone" because that's what her grandmother owns. That phones could not always show cartoons and operate games makes her jaw drop open.
These millennials aren't that young, but they didn't grow up with rotary phones, cassette tape players, record players, and mechanical alarm clocks. Their grandparents, though, did. In this video from Elite Daily, the older folks teach their grandkids how to operate these sophisticated gadgets.
It's called a "doofnado." Urban Dictionary says that doof is an Australian slang term for an outdoor rave in the countryside. When the electronic music is blasting at a doof, even the weather can't help but feel the energy and respond.
A dust whirlwind appeared at the Earthcore festival in Pyalong, Victoria. Olivier Bonenfant captured this incredible footage of it forming in the middle of the party. Concertgoers got their kicks by running in and out of it. It looks like fun! The festival organizers were very thoughtful for arranging it.
We have to act quickly! This person fell into the river and has drowned. But there's still time to save him. First, pull down his pants. Then insert this tube into his bottom. Next, light a cigar. Now pump the bellows!
According to Eighteenth Century British medicine, that it was possible to revive a person who had stopped breathing by blowing tobacco smoke up his rectum. Emergency enema kits like these were the defibrillators of the day: essential lifesaving tools designed by medical professionals. Ella Morton of Atlas Obscura writes:
Cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, was still centuries away from common usage. Instead of pumping the chest or giving mouth-to-mouth to a drowning victim—a practice that prominent British doctor William Hunter called "vulgar" in 1776—rescuers employed a variety of other dubious methods when attempting to revive those with waterlogged lungs. Rubbing the skin, inflating the lungs via a tube inserted into the trachea, and bloodletting were among the approaches. The most creative technique, however, was rectal tobacco insufflation—piping smoke into the unconscious person’s intestines via a bellows inserted in the anus.
Occasionally the process worked. The medical journal The Lancet repeats a story from 1746:
A man's wife was pulled from the water apparently dead. Amid much conflicting advice, a passing sailor proffered his pipe and instructed the husband to insert the stem into his wife's rectum, cover the bowl with a piece of perforated paper, and ‘blow hard.’ Miraculously, the woman revived.
On the other side of the aquarium glass is a fresh dog tail. In fact, it's so fresh that it's still attached to the dog!
The penguin makes several passes, but is unable to reach the dog with his beak. The dog, long domesticated, has forgotten that he is the prey of penguins in the wild. He is dangerously unaware of his surroundings.
George Barris was rightfully known as the king of custom cars. When television and movie programs needed a uniquely styled vehicle, they knew to call Barris. Over his career spanning several decades, Barris became famous for building the 1966 Batmobile, the Munsters’ car, and KITT from Knight Rider.
Barris died on November 5 at the age of 89. His funeral on Saturday at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles was a truly grand spectacle. You can see photos of it at the Los Angeles Times. His coffin was no exception to the parade of astonishing customs. It’s modeled to resemble Barris’s most famous car: the Batmobile from the 1960s television show Batman.
