Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Over 16 years of performing, stuntman Evel Knievel was injured numerous times and had the scars to prove it. Various accounts chronicle a range from 37 broken bones over his career to 431 breaks in one season! Steve Mandich has a look back at the different reports on Knievel's various injuries. Link -via Reddit
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Wilford left a comment under the Show Off Your Smarts contest for today that said:
The very first Christmas movie was "The Night Before Christmas" released in 1906. It was a silent adaptation of the poem of the same name by Clement C. Moore .
Of course, I immediately looked that up. It’s an Edison film! IMDb Link. -Thanks, Wilford!
Get out your thinking cap and get ready to win free stuff because this week Neatorama and mental_floss are teaming up to challenge you to SHOW OFF YOUR SMARTS!
Each day we'll throw out a topic and all you have to do is come up with the smartest, funniest, most interesting fact related to it. Simply enter your fact in the comment below and if yours get chosen, you'll win a brand new prize from the mental_floss store (along with endless bragging rights!). One fact per comment, but you can enter as many facts as you'd like.
Today's topic: Holiday movie and music-related facts. Dazzle us with your knowledge of obscure trivia about holiday entertainment!
Here are two examples to get your mojo working:
When “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was first shown on TV in 1965, Coca-Cola sponsored the broadcast. A few animated sequences with the Coke logo were edited out of future airings of the special.
The 1984 charity all-star single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by Band Aid continued to sell after the holiday ended. The record peaked at #13 on the Billboard chart the week of January 19, 1985.
Today's prize: The awesome There's no right way to eat a rhesus T-shirt.
And even if you don't have a winning fact, mental_floss is giving Neatorama readers a special discount in the mental_floss store. This week only, visit mentalfloss.com/store and get 15% off anything in the store by entering "neatorama" into the coupon code.
Good luck, guys!
And congrats to yesterday's winner, Mandie on her Debbie Downer fact. After working our way through a heap of terrific entries, her submission: "A 'downer' is a farm animal that is too sick or injured to stand and walk" left us positively, well, negative. We'll be sending her a mental_floss tee, and using that comment to spur awkward pauses in plenty of conversations this holiday season.Joel Veitch {wiki} of Rathergood is a big supporter of Tommy's Charity, a UK-based foundation funding research into miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature births. Last year he created the ultra-silly animation Tommy's 12 Days of Christmas to help raise awareness and funds for the organization. Link -Thanks, Bill!
I don’t know what this is, or how to adequately describe it. It's pretty and interactive. It’s from Adobe Japan, and I don’t read Japanese. If you do, maybe you can find out something about it. Go take a look. Link -via Grow-A-Brain
The owner of a Christmas tree farm in east Tennessee found that someone had sawed off the tops of 28 large Christmas trees that were ready for market. The thief took about six feet of each tree, leading authorities to believe they will be sold as whole Christmas trees. The damaged Frasier firs would have been sold for $100 to $150 dollars each to organizations and businesses with high ceilings. http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=cp_fj4drqn8h37&show_article=1&catnum=9 -via Fark
Scott Johnson of ExtraLife created a poster identifying 56 Geeks. You may recognize some of your friends here! Link to an image of the full poster. Link to order. -via the Presurfer
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Matt Hempey wrote and produced this song about the inflated value of Web 2.0. It’s a Silicon Valley music video by The Richter Scales. -via Reddit
American cuisine might not be the healthiest on earth, but we love it anyway! mental_floss brings you the places (and stories) behind your favorites, such as hamburgers, onion rings, corn dogs, and root beer floats in the article The 10 Greatest Birthplaces on the Great American Food Trail. Link
Scientists have announced the discovery of a dinosaur “mummy”, a dried hadrosaur with much of its skin, tissue, and bones intact. The find was made in 1999 in North Dakota. The presence of tendons and ligaments give researchers new insight to how dinosaurs moved. Although the hadrosaur was 35 feet long and weighed 35 tons, they estimate he could run up to 28 miles per hour, faster than a T. rex! Link to story. Link to video report.
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This cute kitten is just playing, but he looks like he wants to be Maneki Neko! If that makes no sense to you, see the earlier post Seven Strange Lucky Charms. -via Arbroath
Writer and photographer Shreve Stockton took in a baby coyote when his parents were shot for killing sheep in Wyoming. She is documenting Charlie’s life with her and Eli the cat on the blog The Daily Coyote.
If Charlie demonstrates the need or desire to be out in the wild, there are places around here I could safely set him loose. There’s no question he would survive in the wild just fine - his instincts are very intact (more on this later), and though he is gentle and attached to me and to MC, he is afraid of other people.
From the beginning, I have made the commitment to let Charlie decide his destiny; to do right by him without attaching my own desires to the outcome or interfering with human logic. You can join me in seeing what unfolds.
MC refers to a coyote expert who is helping with Charlie. Scroll down the blog and check the archives for adorable baby pictures. Link -Thanks, Bill!
Immersive Media makes 360-degree panoramic videos. Push play, then mouseover to move your viewpoint left or right while the scene moves. You can also pan while the video is paused. This video is 42nd Street in New York City. Other video demos are available at the site. http://demos.immersivemedia.com/ -via Metafilter
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