Mama always said that learning a second language would come in handy, but that old joke is about mice learning to bark. Here, Paula Mendes uses the promise of a treat to teach her dog how to meow like a cat. And when the incentive is right, a dog can do anything! -via Tastefully Offensive
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Don’t be put off by the title of this video! If you don’t want to lose weight, or you don’t need tips on losing weight, you should be told that it’s way more than that. It’s a story. Contains NSFW language.
The story is from Aaron Bleyaert, based on a blog post he wrote a year ago. He’s one of Conan O’Brien’s staff writers, which is why you might spot Conan in a small role. The lead character Chris is played by Beck Bennett from Saturday Night Live all the way through, despite his weight loss over the course of the story. -via reddit
Shoe vendor Irregular Choice has teamed up with Disney to offer a posh limited edition line of shoes with an Alice in Wonderland theme. Above you’ll see the pair called All Mad Here, and below is one of the pair called Flowers Can’t Talk.
There will also be styles that feature the Cheshire Cat, in both flats and high heels -with tails. A pair of these shoes will run you between $184 and $381. The collection will be launched on February 26 at selected stores and online at the company’s website. Read how they came about and see more pictures of the shoes at The Daily Dot.
(Image credit: Irregular Choice)
In the rainforests of Chile and Argentina lives a vine that camouflages itself by mimicking the tree it climbs on. But Boquila trifoliolata doesn’t just evolve to look like its host. It doesn’t pick trees that it resembles. It actually changes its leaf shape when it grows up a tree! A single vine will have a certain shape leaf while it grows across the ground, and then a different shape growing from the parts of the vine that climb a tree. And a single Boquila vine can have several different leaf shapes as it grows from tree to tree. Why does it do that?
The probable answer is that it keeps it from being eaten.
The forest is full of leaf-eaters. Imagine a hungry caterpillar wandering up to a tree:
It loves eating leaves. It might find vine leaves extra tasty. But if our vine is hiding among the many, many leaves of the tree, each vine leaf has a smaller chance of being chewed on.
Or maybe the vine is assuming the shape of leaves that are toxic to the caterpillar. This is called Batesian mimicry, when a harmless species tries to look like a very bad meal.
Whatever the reason, mimicry seems to work. Gianoli and his co-author, Fernando Carrasco-Urra, reported that when the vine is mimicking its neighbors higher up, it gets chewed on less.
The real question is how the “stealth vine” achieves its mimicry. How does a plant without eyes know what the surrounding leaves look like? Scientists have no concrete answers, but they have some ideas of what might be going on. Read about those theories at Phenomena. -via Digg
(Image credit: Robert Krulwich)
The town of Wangaratta in Victoria, Australia, is being invaded by “hairy panic.” While that might make you think of a monster, it is actually a type of grass (Panicum effusum) that dries up in drought conditions and blows in the wind like tumbleweeds.
The weeds are waist deep in places, and blown against buildings, they can reach roof level.
A council spokesman told Guardian Australia there was not much that could be done “from an enforcement side of things, through local laws,” to control the tumbleweed’s spread, though it was investigating potential controls for next year. “The council has a very limited capacity to intervene, but we are attempting to work with residents and nearby farmers.”
On Friday morning street sweepers would “attempt to clean up the mess”, he said. “We don’t know how effective it’s going to be until we try.”
Though there was often hairy panic in Wangaratta, he said, it had been particularly bad this summer. “It’s widespread. It can happen in any town, at any time, and it does happen in Wangaratta. It just spreads from farm to farm.”
-via Metafilter
Can you believe that Jack Nicholson has been in movies since 1958? IMDb lists him in 64 films, some more memorable than others, and a few TV shows from early in his career. If you enjoy Nicholson’s work, you’ll want to take a look at clips from ten of his most iconic roles, spanning decades, from Easy Rider in 1969 to About Schmitt in 2002. It’s a bit strange to see him at so many different ages, but you’ll enjoy the trip down memory lane.
The top picture is of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, in 1917. You can see that what is now the National Mall was indeed a swamp at the time. The memorial’s construction was part of a grander plan, and the reflecting pool that now lies between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument was completed by 1923. A series of photographs at the Atlantic shows more of the construction, the dedication ceremony, and recent pictures as well. You’ll enjoy the photos of kids sledding down the memorial’s steps in 1935 and 2016, and the one of a worker cleaning Lincoln’s ear. Also, did you know the Lincoln Memorial has a basement? It’s set to be developed as a museum space when the monument undergoes a renovation. -via reddit
(Image credit: Library of Congress/ButtercupColfax)
(Image credit: Edward St. George/Reunite Dias)
A family of six fled ISIS-controlled Mosul, Iraq, by land and sea, taking a boat to Lesvos, Greece, in November. They carried their cat, named Kunkush, the entire way. There, the cat disappeared into the crowd of refugees. The family reported the missing cat, but had to move on to an unknown destination before finding him. Three days after they left, the cat was spotted in a nearby village. A volunteer group caught him, settled him with a foster mother through a shelter in Berlin, and launched a social media campaign to find his family with a Facebook page and a fundraising page for veterinary expenses. They named the cat Dias.
Meanwhile, Suva Al Alaf and her five children were living in Steinkjer, Norway. They thought their beloved Kunkush was lost forever. Suva’s brother heard about the search for Dias’ family, and knew that it was Suva’s 3-year-old cat. They welcomed Kunkush to Norway yesterday, after his three month adventure.
-via reddit
New Orleans rapper Dee-1 went to college, graduated, got a job, and made minimum payments on his student loans. That mountain of debt is like a heavy stone around your neck. So when he finally got a recording contract, he used his advance to pay off his loans. What a great feeling! To celebrate, he wrote a little song about it called “Sallie Mae Back,” as in “I finished paying Sallie Mae back.” -via Time Newsfeed
Jesper is a cat in Hedmark, Norway. Watch him on a ski outing with his humans! Jesper doesn’t exactly ski himself, but he’s pretty good at pulling a cross-country skier with his leash, at riding on a skier’s shoulder, or snuggling up in a backpack.
Jesper is quite the celebrity in Norway. See more of him at Facebook or Instagram. -via the Presurfer
The following article is from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids.
Mice have had a remarkable career as pests. In fact, they are so successful that, throughout history, people have put an awful lot of effort into keeping them out of their homes, food stores, and businesses. That’s tough, though— mice can flatten out their bodies and slide through cracks as thin as ⅜ of an inch, meaning that if a pencil can roll under a door, so can a mouse.
Cats and some dogs make good mousetraps, but to some people, having cats and dogs is almost as bad as infestation by mice. So it’s not surprising that thousands of mouse-catching contraptions have been invented over the years. What is surprising, though, is that, for hundreds of years, most didn’t work very well. They were too complicated, too bulky, and too easy for the rodents to escape from.
HOOKER TRAP
That all changed in 1894 when a brand-new mousetrap came out of Abington, Illinois, patented by a man named William Chauncey Hooker. The design was simple, effective, cheap to manufacture, and— as its name “Out O’ Sight” implied (complete with the face of a mouse peeking out from the middle O)— easy to hide. Although revolutionary at the time, the wood-and-wire, spring-snap trap quickly became the leading design, and today it’s the most recognizable one. Hooker and his mousetraps were a huge success. But they might have done even better if it weren’t for an Englishman who not only stole Hooker’s design, but the credit for it as well.
That’s exactly it! So many road trips, so many questions, and they’re all the same. My answer was always “Yes,” which annoyed my kids, but they deserved it. I made them learn to read an atlas and watch the signs and mile markers. Today, they’d just pull up their GPS app. A few years of the same question over and over, and parents are quite primed to put up with the somewhat different hell of teaching kids how to drive themselves. This comic is from Kristian Nygård at Optipess. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Maybe you’ve seen the chess players at Washington Square Park in New York. They play each other for grins and crush out-of-towners quickly. Here, a chess hustler named Wilson is challenged to a game by a stranger, or at least a guy he doesn’t recognize. It’s chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley. Wilson doesn’t know what he’s in for, but he puts up a good fight anyway.
Ashley barely looks at the board as they zip through a speed chess game, but he still knows exactly where every piece is supposed to be at any minute, which causes some controversy before the game is over. It’s a satisfying match, even if you can’t follow it. This video is a segment from the HLN TV show The Tim Ferriss Experiment. -via Uproxx
German naturalist Georg Everhard Rumpf joined the Dutch East India Company in 1653 and shipped off to Batavia in the Spice Islands (now Jakarta, Indonesia). He settled in Ambon, and there he spent the rest of his life studying and cataloging tropical plants, despite a life full of calamity. Rumphius went blind. Then his wife and two of his daughters were killed in an earthquake. A fire destroyed his files. He went bankrupt. His reconstructed manuscripts were stolen. Rumphius reconstructed them again, and the Dutch East India Company prevented them from being published. But he soldiered on.
In setting about his great work, Rumphius’ first task was one of naming. For each plant and shell in his collection, he would list its name in Latin, Malay, Ambonese, and, when possible, Javanese, Hindi, Portuguese and Chinese as well. He also had to invent names in his adopted language, Dutch. He took on this burden with all the exuberance of a new Adam. A tour through Rumphius’ work is a masterclass in the poetry of the concrete noun. His shells bear names like Little Dream Horn, the Prince’s Funeral, Peasant Music and the Double Venus Harp.
His plant names are even more adventurous. In the pages of his Herbal, one meets, among others, the Writer’s Fern, the Nude Tree, the Adultery Plant, the Blue Clitoris Flower, the Memory Plant, the Astonishment Plant, the Wondrous Quis-Qualis Shrub, the Bilious Rope, Stinking Bindweed, Redolent Conyza, Saturn’s Beard, Hair of Nymphs, the Wild Drumstick Tree, Eyes of the Sea Crabs, the Mountain Fish-Slayer Tree, the Blinding Shrub, the Berries-Bearing Tuba Shrub, the Notched Appendage, and the Tart Rottangh.
There’s a lot more to Rumphius’ life and work to read about at Atlas Obscura.
黒木さんちの芝桜見てきた(*^^*)
— まろちゃ (@Rkr21Sfmfr) April 11, 2014
めっちゃキレイやった(*´ω｀*) pic.twitter.com/CJLOGf4poG
Toshiyuki Kuroki and his wife of 60 years Yasuko ran a dairy farm in Miyazaki Prefecture in Japan. But personal misfortune changed their lives and their farm became a tourist attraction full of beautiful flowers.
After 30 years of marriage, however, and at the age of 52, Mrs Kuroki suddenly encountered a problem with her eyes, which turned out to be a complication from diabetes, causing her sight to fail just one week later. Feeling her life was over, Mrs Kuroki was devastated at the prospect of not being able to go on the trip she and her husband had always dreamed about and didn’t want to face a life of immobility. As a result, she shut herself away from the world and began living a life of seclusion in her home. It pained her husband to see her normally cheerful expression become one of sadness, and he thought that if they could at least have a visitor or two each day, it would encourage his wife to come out of her shell.
Mr. Kuroki chopped down trees, prepared the ground, and selected the pink shibazakura, known as creeping phlox in the U.S., to plant all over the farm. Now, decades later, thousands of people come to visit the Kurokis’ home and brighten the couple’s lives during blooming season. Read the story and see lots of pictures at RocketNews24. -via Buzzfeed
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