Okay, let’s get this straight. Calvin and Hobbes was a strip by Bill Watterson that ended in 1995. Bloom County is a comic by Berkeley Breathed that ended in 1989. However, Breathed resurrected Bloom County (featuring Opus the penguin) last year on his Facebook page, which is the only place the new version is published. Early this morning, Breathed announced that Watterson was handing over the Calvin and Hobbes franchise to him. Then this strip appeared. Well, it is April Fools Day, and we don’t yet know whether Watterson was involved in the prank. -via Fark
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Google rolled out an April Fools Day feature for Gmail called “Gmail Mic Drop” that appended a .gif featuring a Minion (from the movie Despicable Me) dropping a microphone to email messages. The problem was the the button that appended the .gif was right next to the normal “send” button, in the space that normally has a “send and archive” button. So people used it as part of their normal routine without realizing what they’d done. As April first dawned in Australia, the problems began. The humorous .gif was accidentally appended to business correspondence, leading to at least one person reporting losing their job. Many other complaints poured into Google and social media. Google has since removed the “Gmail Mic Drop” feature from their email service. -via Digg
Police in La Vista, Nebraska, responded to a call about a cat stuck in a tree. The cat was about 20 feet above ground over a creek. Officer T.J. Markowsky explained on Twitter how one officer used his Taser to lure the cat down. The weapon had a laser sight, which left a small red dot wherever it is aimed. Knowing the lure of a laser light to cats, the officer enticed the cat to follow the red dot down the tree, where he was apprehended. The perpetrator was incarcerated at the local Humane Society shelter. Officer Markowsky noted that charges are pending against the cat for scratching him. Six days later, the cat was bailed out by a new owner who adopted him.
(Image credit: La Vista Police Department)
Cats don’t care if your heart has been broken. They don’t care if you want to wallow in your misery. They care very much that their breakfast is served on time, so you may as well pull yourself together. French illustrator Claude Combacau has a webcomic called Catsass. A recent series gives us ten reasons why a cat is the best thing to get you through a bad breakup. -via HuffPo
The @Indians new vendor Happy Dog's "Slider Dog." Mac n cheese, bacon, and fruit loops #TribeLive pic.twitter.com/lXolPE2Zjq
— Thomas Khristenko (@ChefKyrie) March 31, 2016
Baseball season is coming! Opening Day is Sunday. And Progressive Field in Cleveland is ready for gluttonous Indians fans with a new hot dog vendor, Happy Dog, who will offer a dog with all your favorite indulgences on it. The new Slider Dog is topped with macaroni and cheese, bacon, and Froot Loops. It’s an extension of this weird idea that if you like more than one thing, you should combine them. Yeah, I like all these things, and I like hot dogs, but throwing them all together seems like an infinitely bad idea. But what do I know? I don’t even go to Major League Baseball games. -via Uproxx
How a musical truck hijacked an elite dessert and delivered it to the people.
(Image credit: Jsellinger79)
It’s the sound of summer: a string of jangly notes cutting through the sticky-hot air. The response is Pavlovian. Mouths water. Parents reach for their wallets. Kids lace up their shoes and hit the pavement. For Ben Van Leeuwen, it was no different. Growing up in suburban Riverside, Conn., he’d race toward the siren song. The ice cream truck was coming.
In the sea of sweaty half-pints elbowing to place orders, Van Leeuwen always took his time. He’d inspect the full menu, pondering each offering, from cartoon-colored Popsicles to animal-shaped treats with gum balls for eyes. He’d imagine the flavors—Strawberry Shortcake, Choco Taco, King Cone. Then he’d pick what he always picked: a Reckless Rainbow Pop Up. “We were poor,” he laughs. The push pop was cheap.
Today, Van Leeuwen is an ice cream magnate. With six trucks and three storefronts in New York City, the company he runs with his brother, Pete, and business partner, Laura O’Neill, prides itself on its quality. Handcrafted recipes combine sustainably sourced ingredients from far-flung places: Michel Cluizel chocolate from France, pistachios from Sicily, Tahitian vanilla beans from Papua New Guinea. The flavors have put Van Leeuwen on the vanguard of an ice cream truck resurgence. In a single generation, the ice cream truck has moved upmarket.
The history of frozen street treats begins long before Van Leeuwen encountered his first push pop—it begins before even mechanical refrigeration. The very nature of the industry—taking something frozen and hawking it on sultry sidewalks—has always forced ice cream peddlers to innovate. That the cold treat had to come to America before it could move off kings’ tables and into the hands of common folk makes the story that much sweeter.
We All Scream for Ice Cream
It’s hard to imagine now, but for much of human history, Slurpees and Klondike bars and even the humble Reckless Rainbow would have been considered status symbols. Difficult to obtain and harder to store, ice itself was once a luxury. When the Roman Emperor Nero wanted Italian ice, he ordered it the old-fashioned way—dispatching his servants to fetch snow from mountain tops, wrap it in straw, and bring it back to mix with fruits and honey—a practice still popular with elites in Spain and Italy 1,500 years later. In the fourth century, the Japanese emperor Nintoku was so enamored with the frozen curiosity that he created an annual Day of Ice, during which he presented ice chips to palace guests in an elaborate ceremony. Around the world, monarchs in Turkey, India, and Arabia used flavored ices to punch up the extravagance at banquets, serving frosty bouquets flavored with fruit pulp, syrup, and flowers—often the grand finale at feasts intended to impress. But it wasn’t until the mid-16th century, when scientists in Italy discovered a process for on-demand freezing—placing a container of water in a bucket of snow mixed with saltpeter—that the ice cream renaissance truly began.
Small talk at the office is fine, but we don’t want to hear about the humorous incident that happened during your colonoscopy. Now, I’d probably want to hear more about the tunneling electron microscope, but this guy is only using it as an analogy to prove a point. Fair enough. This is the latest from John Sutton at The Petri Dish.
Mad inventor Colin Furze's latest project is a thermite launcher. Now, thermite is some dangerous stuff. You have to light it, but then you don’t want to be anywhere near when it burns. So he figured it needed a launcher, which makes it about as dangerous as something that nations have summits over. Here’s how he did it.
Now see the launcher in action. This is the fun part. To watch.
I’m glad to hear he had official supervision for this project, otherwise he’s be waiting for someone to fetch his bail. -via Digg
See also: Previous gadgets by Colin Furze.
What would you think if you heard that three businesses belonging to the same man burned down? And what if that man were P.T. Barnum, the famous hoaxter? You’d probably think he might be an arsonist, but although bad luck seemed to follow Barnum’s buildings, he lost too many priceless artifacts in each disaster to be deemed culpable -and insurance fraud wasn’t lucrative enough to make up for his losses.
Barnum lost three buildings in fires, and then one by tornado. Was it a curse? Barnum’s first museum was Barnum’s American Museum in Manhattan, which opened in 1842.
But the good times couldn’t last. In 1865 the first disaster to befall a Barnum museum came in the form of a fire that raged through the place, destroying the entire endeavor. It was a massive conflagration that reduced the building to rubble and spread to the entire block. All of the employees were able to evacuate, and no human lives were lost in the blaze, but many of the animals in the building were not so lucky. Some of them tried to escape by jumping out the windows, but they were shot by police officers. Others, such as the creatures in the aquariums, simply burnt up.
At the time, the New York Times blamed the fire on a “defective furnace,” but it may have been intentional sabotage. Barnum, who at the time of the first fire was serving on the Connecticut legislature, was a proud supporter of abolition, and it may have been these politics that caused the demise of his first museum. “Right after the Civil War, the American Museum was burnt down, and it was alleged to have been burned down by Southern sympathizers,” says Maher.
Disaster followed his other efforts, too, which you can read about at Atlas Obscura.
When an actor is young and attractive, it only makes sense to cast him as the protagonist, the good guy, and that’s where many actors break through to stardom. But playing an evil character is so much more fun! It also gives an experienced actor the opportunity to show off his talent and versatility. Remember when pretty boy Heath Ledger was cast as The Joker? We had a hard time wrapping our heads around that one, but it worked. There have been quite a few actors who tried going to the dark side, with varying degrees of success, which you can read about at TVOM.
@TwilightBeasts @TetZoo Any time I see Thylacoleo in my feed, I feel compelled to share this. DEATH FROM ABOVE! pic.twitter.com/lUsBvHHAw4
— Ted Rechlin (@TedRechlin) March 21, 2015
Surely you've heard about the dreaded Drop Bear of Australia, which resembles a koala but drops down from trees to attack people. The most important thing to remember is that the drop bear only eats gullible tourists. On the other hand, the extinct marsupial named Thylacoleo carnifex was a real meat eater. And it was several times the size of a modern koala, with adults ranging from 220 to 280 pounds! These giant koalas died out during the last Ice Age, so this is one Australian creature you really do not have to worry about.
Humans undoubtedly saw Thylacoleo. The mammal was still very much alive when people arrived on Australia around 50,000 years ago, and there may even be Pleistocene art of the mammal. The mythical drop bear, however, didn’t appear as a tall tale until the 20th century, so there’s no link between what people actually saw and stories used to make tourists shudder at the sound of a creaking branch in the night. It’s convergence, but it’s a wonderful sort of convergence. So much of prehistoric life was so strange that we could have never imagined those species if we hadn’t come across their remains. The drop bear is a rare case when our species, in jest, stumbled upon something real and just as scary as our imaginations can muster.
Read more about the giant carnivorous koala at Laelaps. -via Science Chamber of Horrors
Someone asked Tommy Edison (previously at Neatorama) how much he understands about vision. He’s been blind since birth, so it’s a foreign concept to him, but he’s interacted with sighted people enough to know that we do things that make no sense to him.
Sure, you can explain how stereoscopic vision works to give us depth perception, but never having been able to see it in action, he can’t wrap his head around it. I was a little surprised he didn’t mention colors, but he made a video about colors once, and seems to associate color with different smells. As always, Edison is cheerful, honest, and always ready to make a wisecrack. -via Digg
Pongdrian - for the https://t.co/F5OaYC24PK game/art challenge pic.twitter.com/WexiHMbMfL
— HappyToast ★ (@IamHappyToast) March 17, 2016
HappyToast saw the similarities of a Piet Mondrian artwork and the classic video game Pong, and made a gif to illustrate it. This was submitted to a b3ta image challenge for video game art. You can see all the submissions here.
This was such a neat idea for a game, that K.M. Hansen made a playable version called MondriPong 1.2. It takes a bit of dexterity to play both sides. -via Everlasting Blort
This goat was just doing his goaty thing near Tempi, Greece, and the next thing he knows, he’s hanging from an overhead cable by his horns. “Well, I guess this is my life now.” Who knows how he got up there or how long he was hanging before a work crew came to rescue him.
Giannis Goulas posted a six-minute video of the rescue effort, which involved ropes and ladders and possibly some profanity if you understand Greek. They managed to get the goat down by pulling him back toward the cliff. The goat wandered off without so much as a “thank you.” Or maybe he did thank them, since it’s all Greek to me. -via Arbroath
Look at this adorable BB-8 cosplayer! Kayla has a costume that’s both realistic and maneuverable, depending on whether you are standing or sitting. Then she meets the Xenomorph from Alien, who is really her sister.
These two were spotted at WonderCon 2016 wearing costumes by their parents William and Nikki Miyamoto, the same couple responsible for this. -via Geeks Are Sexy
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