Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice wasn’t the blockbuster hit that it was expected to be. Maybe the folks from How It Should Have Ended can make it a little better.
Or maybe they just made it more incomprehensible. I don’t know, I have yet to see the film. -via Tastefully Offensive
C.A. Pinkham shares stories from restaurant servers about their worst customers ever. Ray wrote him about a couple who came into the burger joint where he once worked and ordered two double burgers and fries. They didn’t even try to hide what happened next.
"The wife ate her burger normally, but the husband took the patties off of the bun and ate them by themselves. We all thought this was strange, because if he didn't want to eat the bun, he could have just ordered the burger without the bun. But hey, he paid for it, so he could do what he wanted with it. After they finished their burgers, the husband picked up his tray with an empty bun on it and walked up to the counter. He flagged down our manager and said we forgot to put the patties on his burger. He literally took the patties off his bun, ate the patties, then presented us with a meatless bun, saying he never got any meat.
"The manager comped him his meal and made me make him a new burger." -- Ray Davidson [Editor’s Note: I don’t want to believe that there exists a manager that stupid, but lived experience -- and editing these stories all the time -- has taught me otherwise.]
There are plenty of other, longer stories of horrid restaurant patrons in the first edition of a regular column about terrible customers at Thrillist. If you have such a story, you’re invited to send it in. Otherwise, you can learn what drives servers crazy. -via Digg
(Image credit: Miyagawa)
Reyn Guyer came up with a novel idea for a board game, which became Twister. You know, the excuse for people to wrap themselves around each other. It didn’t sell well at first, because retailers didn’t want to put it on their shelves. But that changed after Johnny Carson demonstrated the game on The Tonight Show fifty years ago today.
Talk show hosts and board games could make for an interesting pairing; Art Linkletter had famously endorsed Milton Bradley’s The Game of Life in the 1960s, his picture even appearing on the box and the game’s currency. But airtime on The Tonight Show was a different beast: Johnny Carson was the most popular late-night personality on the air. Before Milton Bradley threw in the towel on Twister, they had already paid a public relations firm to secure a segment on Carson’s show. On May 3, 1966, the host played the risqué game with buxom actress Eva Gabor. “It reversed the engines pretty quickly,” Guyer says. “By Christmas 1966, we were the game of the year.”
Read about the process of bringing Twister to the masses, and its amazing notoriety when they finally got a chance to play, at mental_floss.
Who is the king of fantasy novels- JRR Tolkien or George RR Martin? They come from different eras and have different styles. Can you really compare The Lord of the Rings with A Song of Ice and Fire? They both have plenty to brag about, as you’ll see in this Epic Rap Battle. There are plenty of insults, too. Contain NSFW language.
When it’s all said and done, does it really matter? I’m sure their fandoms have a large overlap.
-via Tastefully Offensive
It doesn’t take an entire minute to put a smile on your face when you’re watching a kitten learn to hunt. The prey in this case is a ping pong ball.
Now share this with someone who needs a lift. -via reddit
Boing Boing reprinted this puzzle from the book My Best Mathematical and Logic Puzzles by Martin Gardner.
Imagine that you have three boxes, one containing two black marbles, one containing two white marbles, and the third, one black marble and one white marble. The boxes were labeled for their contents – BB, BW, WW – but someone switched the labels so that every box is now incorrectly labeled. You are allowed to take one marble at a time out of any box, without looking inside, and by this process of sampling you are to determine the contents of all three boxes. What is the smallest number of drawings needed to do this?
It’s not difficult to figure out if you can visualize the boxes in front of you (or just look at the picture). It wouldn’t be hard to make this a real world puzzle, either. Give us your answer in the comments!
Hawaii became a US territory in 1898. The federal government considered the islands’ demographic makeup as a problem -it was “too Asian.” At the time, the big five sugarcane plantations were importing workers from Japan, China, and the Philippines. But the horrid conditions caused the workers to organize, spelling trouble for their overlords.
When Hawaii officially annexed the islands in 1900, the contract system was abolished and the sugarcane workers rebelled, whipping the underlying racism of the white ruling class into a kind of paranoiac madness. Newpaper editorials warned of a dystopian future under Asian rule. Ministers raved about the threat of Buddhist missionaries. In 1905, President Roosevelt himself issued a strongly worded pronouncement that Hawaiian immigration must proceed under “traditional American lines.”
Importing Siberian labor was part of a desperate, last-ditch effort to turn the demographic tide in Hawaii, orchestrated by the sugarcane planters, the island elite, and a U.S. congress that feared Hawaii would do the unthinkable and send an Asian senator to Congress. But the weirdest immigration scheme ever proposed by a U.S. territory, also turned out to be the most disastrous. The Russians never provided anticipated relief from Asian workers, because they refused to work at all.
The Siberian immigrants weren’t lazy, not at all. But the desires of the plantation owners, the federal government, and the immigrants didn’t mesh. Read about the failed scheme to transplant Siberians into Hawaii at Atlas Obscura.
(Image source: Russian Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawaii at Manoa)
Over the weekend, Mark Glavin published his 200th comic on the website übertool. But he didn’t draw most of it. Instead, 17 webcomic artists from all over contributed one panel each about their encounters with übertool, “Bigfoot’s lesser-known cousin.” You’ll recognize most of guest panels right off, as they come from many artists we’ve featured time and again at Neatorama.
This would have been a wonderful video even without its drone dancers. The Oyamakai ensemble of Shamisen players perform a rocking tune at sundown at the base of beautiful Mt. Fuji. The featured dancers are 20 synchronized drones, each in their little cages outfitted with a total of 16,500 LEDs. They fly in choreographed formations, swinging their lights in synchrony. You’ll want to see this in full-screen mode.
Sky Magic is the work of creative director Tsuyoshi Takashiro for the tech company MicroAd, Inc. Read more about it at Spoon & Tamago.
The Victorian-era homes of San Francisco are a colorful delight, and that’s due to the influence of one man known as Dr. Color. Bob Buckter is an an architectural colorist who specializes in historic homes. It’s a career he invented for himself when his eye for color gained him a reputation. He’s selected colors for around 15,000 exteriors in San Francisco alone, both residential and commercial -and that doesn’t count the buildings that copied his ideas.
Bob Buckter is a native San Franciscan. He started out as a house painter in 1970, but quickly realized that he had an unusual knack for color design, so he began consulting on the side. “That was a difficult uphill task because, why should people pay two, three hundred dollars for somebody to pick colors? But I was able to convince people—some people—to do that." He thought, "I like this. I want to try to be the best at it, if I can. Or at least very good."
Read about Buckter’s career, how he determines what colors to use, and how he uses those colors, at Hoodline. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Ben Zotto/Hoodline)
Neatorama is proud to bring you an excerpt from the new book The True Tails of Baker and Taylor by Jan Louch and Lisa Rogak (previously at Neatorama). It's the true story of two library cats who brought an entire community together beginning in 1983.
It all started with mice in the library.
Assistant librarian Jan Louch and a coworker decided that what the library needed was a cat. Or, even better, two cats. Soon, they found a pair of Scottish Folds who were perfect for the job. Jan named them Baker and Taylor, and they took up residence in the library.
But these cats were much more than mousers. Visitors to the library fell in love with Baker and Taylor and their antics just as Jan had. And then, after Jan let the cats be photographed for a poster, they became feline celebrities. Children from across the country wrote them letters, fans traveled from far and wide to meet them, and they became the most famous library cats in the world.
In The True Tails of Baker and Taylor, Jan Louch looks back and tells the remarkable story of these two marvelous cats and the people―readers, librarians, and cat lovers of all ages―who came together around them.
The patrons who loved Baker and Taylor were a diverse lot. From the young mothers and toddlers who came in for story time to the retired business executives who came in each morning as soon as the doors opened and headed straight for the reading room where they could read the newspaper for an hour or two, a cross-section of the community walked through the door every day, and I loved that about the library.
(Image courtesy of Jan Louch)
In the early afternoon, there was usually a bit of a lull at the library; the patrons who came in the morning and others who returned a few books on their lunch hour were gone. The next rush consisted of the high school kids who would come in to do their homework.
Baker was a people cat – the staff’s nickname for him was “Library Slut.”
The annual rugby match between the British Army and the Royal Navy took place at Twickenham Saturday. You know that kind of competition will draw some tough characters, but these are probably the toughest.
On the left is Army veteran Cayle Royce with Royal Marine veteran Lee Spencer, who were both part of an all-amputee team who rowed a boat 3,000 miles across the Atlantic earlier this year, representing the organization Row2Recovery. The four veterans on the team have three legs between them. They set a speed record for the trip, too.
Oh, the rugby match was a draw, 29-29. -via reddit
(Image credit: Row2Recovery at Facebook)
The Marvel superhero Thor has a hammer called Mjölnir that cannot be picked up by anyone besides Thor, or someone worthy of Thor’s status. That does not include Spider-Man, who is a mortal with spider powers. So what grief could Thor cause a fellow superhero with Mjölnir?
He could make life miserable. You don’t want to get on any superhero’s bad side, but even in good-natured pranking, an enchanted hammer is truly a secret weapon. -via Tastefully Offensive
CharlieWaffle5 searched the term "onomatopoeia" and found this image. It’s a mini-language lesson all on its own. "Onomatopoeia" means a word that sounds like what it’s describing, which is usually a sound, like "buzz" or "shush." A "rebus" is a phrase or sentence rendered in pictures. But what makes this really remarkable is the astonishing number of redditors who did not know that church benches are called pews.
M&M candies are 75 years old! In honor of the occasion, Pogo (Nick Bertke) made a remix of M&M ads spanning decades.
While this remix has Pogo’s hypnotic signature sound, it also has coherent lines from the advertising jingles and dialogue, strung together to make an entirely new song. You might come out of this craving chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hands. -via Viral Viral Videos
