Alabama A&M student Rodney Smith Jr. didn’t own a lawnmower himself when he started volunteering to mow lawns for elderly people last year. He ended up mowing 100 lawns in 2015 and, with Terrence Stroy, launched an organization called Raising Men Lawn Care Service. The group of volunteers mow lawns for the elderly, disabled, single parents, or anyone in need. They have become quite popular in Huntsville, Alabama.

His service receives recommendations through Facebook of people in the Huntsville area who need their lawn mowed. He and Stroy often post photos on the organization's Facebook page of boys in their program, smiling with the person whose lawn they just mowed.

"A lot of people, they can't afford it," he said. "They're on social security, barely making it, and they're happy we can do this every two weeks for them."

That's another thing. The lawn-mowing isn't just a one-time thing. The lawncare service visits its clients every two weeks to make sure their lawns stay tidy.

Smith said he's seen clients cry tears of joy when they see their lawns. "One lady had bone cancer and couldn't afford to pay someone to cut her grass. So many people have fallen on hard times and it feels good to be able to help them."

About 20 boys, ages 7 to 17 participate in the program. Their parents or friends contact the service through Facebook, and Smith sends them the sign-up forms.  

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The group has received support from law mower companies, hardware stores, and donors. Smith hopes the concept will catch on another communities. -via reddit

Today is National Tap Dance Day! You might think tap is an obsolete form of dance, but the troupe Syncopated Ladies puts a modern twist to their routines.

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Here they dance to Prince’s song “When Doves Cry.” They dance in perfect rhythm with very little repetition in the routine. This had to take some real work to learn.

Want to see more tap? Check out these 12 famous tap dance routines.

When constructing a building that is expected to last a long time, getting it to stand straight up and down is pretty important. But apparently it’s not always crucial to making the building last. The most famous example is the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but it’s not the only one. And even if the building was originally straight, things happen.

Built in 1765, the Crooked House was first a farmhouse. The area was used for mining in the 1800s, and eventually, it caused one end of the structure to gradually sink. There is a four foot difference from side to side on the building now.

Eventually, it became a public house called Siden House. The word “siden” means crooked in the Black Country local dialect. At one time it was also named the Glynne Arms in honor of the area landowner. In the 1940s it was condemned as being unsafe. It was scheduled to be demolished, but the Dudley and Wolverhampton Breweries rebuilt it with girders and buttresses to retain its crooked angles, while making it safe for use. It is currently a pub and restaurant which contributes to optical illusions due to the tilted walls. It is possible to see marbles looking as if they are rolling uphill, and glasses appearing to slide across tables.

There are also buildings that were intentionally designed to be crooked. Read the stories of ten crooked buildings at Housely.

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Famous people have families, too. It can’t be easy top be the lesser-known sibling of a famous person, but it has some benefits, too. And some of those siblings were successful in their own right, but still were eclipsed in the fame department. John Green tells us some fascinating tales about the brothers and sisters of famous folks in the latest episode of the mental_floss List Show.

Some people watch Game of Thrones regularly, some wait to binge-watch, others just don’t care. Then there’s me, who follows the story only by reading all the spoilers on Monday. I know someday I might have time to watch the entire series, but then again, maybe not. In other words, I read all the spoilers so you don't have to. A list of funny images spawned by Sunday’s Game of Thrones episode at Uproxx is definitely full of spoilers, but if you watched it, they are darn clever. The image above is the least spoilery of them. You can check out the lulz from previous episodes, too.

When the captain tells you to get in the boat, you better not waste any time! A playground at Munson Park in Monroe, Michigan, is the setting for an epic high seas adventure.

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When you’re James Hashimoto, the Action Movie Kid (previously at Neatorama), you can go with the flow, because you know that sooner or later, the stories in your adventures will come to life on video. But even if you aren’t, your parents can learn to do this from the tutorials his dad shares. You can see how this particular video was made here. -via Metafilter 

We’ve posted many times about the weird marginal illustrations in medieval manuscripts. You might have noticed over time that rabbits are a commonly-recurring theme. Sure, the monks that drew them probably saw rabbits often, but the ones in the fields never murdered anyone.

There are a great many strange things that can be seen in medieval illuminated manuscripts: weird human-animal hybrids, distorted monsters and odd scenes. These largely come under the category of ‘Drolleries’ or ‘Grotesques’. I’ll be entirely honest and admit that codicology isn’t my thing, so I’m not 100% certain why someone would spend hours lovingly illuminating an otherwise serious manuscript with such bizarre and nightmarish scenes, but for some reason, they would.

Drolleries sometimes also depicted comedic scenes, like a barber with a wooden leg (which, for reasons that escape me, was the height of medieval comedy) or a man sawing a branch out from under himself… which brings us to a particular type of Drollery – the ‘World Turned Upside Down’.

Ah, the essence of comedy, the contrary and unexpected thing. Jon Kaneko-James takes a closer look at a few famous examples of medieval rabbits causing mayhem that you’re sure to enjoy.  -via Metafilter

No greater feeling than that of accomplishment! #DutyHonorCountry (@usarmy photo by: Staff Sgt. Vito T. Bryant)

A photo posted by U.S. Military Academy (@westpoint_usma) on May 23, 2016 at 11:03am PDT

Alix Schœlcher Idrache was one of the more than 950 cadets who graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point on Saturday. Staff Sgt. Vito T. Bryant captured this photo at the moment his emotions spilled over. Idrache responded to the picture with a comment on Instagram:

I want to thank everyone for your kind and thoughtful comments on this picture. SSG Bryant captured a moment that I will never forget. At this moment, I was overwhelmed with emotions. Three things came to mind and led to those tears.

The first is where I started. I am from Haiti and never did I imagine that such honor would be one day bestowed on me.

The second is where I am. Men and women who have preserved the very essence of the human condition stood in that position and took the same oath. Men who preserved the Union is a dark period of this country's history. Men who scaled the face of adversity and liberated Europe from fascism and nazism. Women like CPT Griest, LT Haver, MAJ Jaster who rewrote the narrative and challenged the status quo to prove themselves worthy of being called Rangers.

The third is my future. Shortly after leave, I will report to FT. Rucker to start flight school. Knowing that one day I will be a pilot is humbling beyond words. I could not help but be flooded with emotions knowing that I will be leading these men and women who are willing to give their all to preserve what we value as the American way of life. To me, that is the greatest honor. Once again, thank you.

-via reddit

If that leaves you a bit verklempt, maybe this video of the senior cadets marching to the graduation ceremony will help. Note the choice of music.

Rise & shine with #USMA2016! This morning they will finish their 47-month cadet experience! #WithHonorWeLead

A video posted by U.S. Military Academy (@westpoint_usma) on May 21, 2016 at 3:59am PDT

It’s the senior talent show at the high school. The entire student body has already sat through singers, musicians, and drama students with amazing talent that they’ve seen dozens of times before. Then this guy steps up. He has one talent, and he wrings all the drama he can out of it.

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Well, to be honest, he probably has other talents. Like showmanship, and making a lot of friends. How else would you draw a standing ovation for tossing a water bottle? The other question is, how long did he train to master this maneuver? -via Viral Viral Videos

In the early 20th century, you could see exhibits at Coney Island featuring people with physical anomalies, cultural exhibits that were ”human zoos,” and premature babies in incubators. That may seem weird now, but people flocked to see the babies, because they were miracles. Prematurity often meant a short life back then, and hospitals rarely had the time or facilities to save them. Martin Couney's Infant Incubator exhibit went the extra mile to save their lives. If a parent had nowhere else to turn, it made sense to commit their struggling baby to a sideshow.  

Each incubator was more than 5ft (1.5m) tall, made of steel and glass, and stood on legs. A water boiler on the outside supplied hot water to a pipe running underneath a bed of fine mesh on which the baby slept, while a thermostat regulated the temperature. Another pipe carried fresh air from outside the building into the incubator, first passing through absorbent wool suspended in antiseptic or medicated water, then through dry wool, to filter out impurities. On top, a chimney-like device with a revolving fan blew the exhausted air upwards and out of the incubators.

Caring for premature babies was expensive. In 1903, it cost about $15 a day ($405 or £277 today) to care for each baby in Couney's facility.

But Couney did not charge the parents a penny for their medical care - the public paid. They came in such numbers that Couney easily covered his operating costs, paid his staff a good wage and had enough left over to begin planning more exhibits. In time, these made Couney a wealthy man.

Martin Couney had more than just the incubators going for him. He believed in the power of breast milk and cuddling when medical experts did not, although he was also a showman, and dressed the babies in oversize clothing to make them look even smaller. Read about Couney and his sideshow nursery at BBC Magazine.  -via Metafilter

(Image credit: New York Public Library)

A group of hunters saw a female beaver in a trap in Saskatchewan, and knew her babies must be near. They found a litter of four beaver kits, only a couple of days old, and took them to Salthaven Wildlife Rehabilitation & Education Centre. Medical intervention saved the babies, and they will be raised at the center until they are two years old. See more pictures of the adorable baby beavers at Buzzfeed.

Check out Salthaven’s Facebook page for an amazing variety of animal babies that have been rescued.

Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.

Sound cards like the Creative Sound Blaster were the missing element that computers needed to take on multimedia. Then, they faded from view. Here’s why.

(Image credit: Brtkr)

Before we embraced MP3s as the official noise of the internet (taking the place of screechy modems), it took a while before the synthesized notes of our musical past could be modulated through the inner-workings of a computer. Some of our earliest computers, for example, could only make very basic bleeps and bloops. But in 1989, everything changed when a Singaporean company called Creative Technology hit upon the perfect approach for synthesizing sound. Here is an ode to the Sound Blaster, the PC peripheral that helped turn the modern computer into a multimedia powerhouse—as well as the company that busted through by breaking some major cultural rules in its home country.

The business oversight that created the market for sound cards

The IBM PC was created squarely for the business market, and while such machines were far more powerful than most video game consoles of the day, two places where they fell flat were video and audio.

The reason? At the time of the machine’s initial release—particularly before clones came about—there was no real business case for a computer to support a wide array of graphics and sound. The graphics-heavy GUI as we know it was still years from becoming commonplace, and it wasn’t like you needed robust sound capabilities when writing documents or crunching numbers.

While early IBM PCs had speakers, they effectively existed only to allow for error messages—and as a result were heavily crippled. As developers got their hands on these devices and moved beyond purely business programs, they eventually figured out ways to stretch this incredibly limited palette of sound using a hack called “pulse width modulation.”

This eventually allowed for the PCs to make 6-bit digitized sounds—not enough, say, to play a pop song through your speakers, but plenty to make music for your average King’s Quest game.

IBM, nor many early clone-makers, were really interested in improving the sound element much for the business computers, but they did try to make overtures to the home market. IBM’s PCjr, released in 1984, had better sound capabilities, thanks to its use of the Texas Instruments SN76489 chip. You may not have owned a PCjr, but you’ve probably come across a SN76489, as the chip was used in many video game systems—both of the arcade variety and in home consoles like Sega Master System and Genesis. But the PCjr’s lack of compatibility with PC software, along with its inability to play games very well, killed the machine on the market.

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She went into the ladies’ room and used the handicap stall, which has a door that opens out. While she was in there, someone used the diaper-changing table on the wall and didn’t fold it back up. The table prevented the stall door from opening wide enough for her to exit. A comedy of errors.

This is not so much a tragedy but an illustration of poor design. Poor design, in this case, resulting from retrofitting a small public restroom with 1. a handicap stall, and B. a diaper changing table. She wasn’t all that worried about getting out. It wasn’t too long before someone else came in, and even if it were, she had a phone. Remember, please return the diaper-changing table to its upright position before exiting the facilities.  -via Digg

Candace Payne, who went viral with her unboxing video featuring that Chewbacca mask, was on The Late Late Show with James Cordon last night. They did a skit in which Payne recreated her original reaction while she was supposed to be driving Cordon someplace. He was a bit annoyed at the delay. Then a surprise guest shows up to calm things down.

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But even better was the short interview afterward. Payne shows that she is just as delightfully joyful in front of an audience without as script as she is elsewhere. 

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If you’re going to the Dallas Fan Expo in June, keep an eye out for Payne. She’ll be the one laughing. -via Buzzfeed

Humans have a tendency to turn any activity into a competition. Otherwise, we wouldn’t ever see an eating contest. This one looks like a lot more fun. Combat Juggling is not exactly new, but it still hasn’t gained a foothold in the U.S. The goal is to keep three pins in the air while at the same time trying to cause your opponent to drop his.

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The A.V. Club tells us

The video documents what is said to be the “semi-final” of combat juggling at an event called NJF 2016 Fight Night. For the uninitiated (read: nearly everyone), that’s Nederlands Jongleer Festival, an annual juggling convention held on the Feast Of The Ascension in the Netherlands. So combat juggling, it turns out, is a Dutch diversion.

Oh, I believe Americans would flock to it, if we didn’t have to learn to juggle first.