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
Russian pilot Sergey Ananov attempted to set a world record last summer by flying around the world solo in his 800-pound R-22 helicopter. He almost did it, too, but just 3,000 miles from home, his craft failed and dropped him into the sea between Greenland and Nunavut. With the sinking helicopter went his communication devices and most of his survival equipment. All he had was a life raft and his soaking-wet survival suit.
Sergey Ananov is trapped on a slab of ice in the Arctic Circle. He has no locator beacon, no phone, and barely any water. The fog will hide him from any rescuers. Night will come. Hypothermia will come. And whatever large, powerful creatures that scratch out their existence in this primordial world—maybe they will come too.
His eyes wander past the ice and over the roiling open waters of Davis Strait. He is alone, and with each minute that passes he will drift farther from the spot where the helicopter went down, lessening the chance he will ever be found.
Those who were tracking Ananov’s flight knew he went down, but finding someone in the Arctic waters would not be easy, especially at night. He was found almost immediately -by a polar bear. The story of Sergey Ananov’s survival is supposed to be a “long read,” but once you start, you won’t be able to stop and it won’t seem long at all. Read the entire account at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg
(Image credit: Alexander Gronsky)
During the Civil War, some Mississippi soldiers decided they didn’t want to fight for the Confederacy. The anti-Confederate rebellion in Jones County was led by Newton Knight, who opposed slavery and secession.
In the spring of 1864, the Knight Company overthrew the Confederate authorities in Jones County and raised the United States flag over the county courthouse in Ellisville. The county was known as the Free State of Jones, and some say it actually seceded from the Confederacy. This little-known, counterintuitive episode in American history has now been brought to the screen in Free State of Jones, directed by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games) and starring a grimy, scruffed-up Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight.
That sounds like a fascinating slice of history. An article at Smithsonian looks at what really happened in Ellisville during the Civil war, and Knight’s life after the war, when he separated from his wife Serena, married a former slave, and left an entire community of mixed-race descendants. The article also looks at the making of the film, and the divided reception of the movie project in Mississippi, where some consider Newt Knight a hero and many still hate him. You can also see a trailer for the upcoming film Free State of Jones.
A style that's been around a long time is called "classic." Even if it's much older than you think!
The buttons on most blazer sleeves are functionally useless, but some jackets still sport a “surgeon’s cuff”—a relic from the 19th century. Back then, a proper gentleman never removed his coat, not even to perform the 1800s version of emergency open-heart surgery. So men tailored suits to their needs, allowing for the possibility that they may need to do an off-the-cuff operation. The buttons allowed men to curl back their sleeves and get their hands dirty while retaining dashing decency.
Growing bellies actually account for a lot of fashion trends. King Edward VII, for instance, was a legendary eater. With an expanding 48-inch waist, he often kept his bottom jacket button undone. Soon, the style became a trend and the “sometimes, always, never” rule (for the top, middle, and lower buttons) became a hard and fast fashion commandment. In fact, many jackets today are designed to leave the bottom button undone.
Imagine, a prequel to the Back to the Future franchise that explores Doc Brown and his ties to the Libyan terrorists that provided the stolen plutonium necessary for his time travel machine. It’s not a comedy.
Tyler Hopkins made a trailer for such a film using clips from the movies Back to the Future, My Favorite Martian, Camp Nowhere, Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, Dennis the Menace, Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, The Sum of All Fears, Syriana, Iron Man, Dazed and Confused, and Munich. While he wasn't in all of these, Christopher Lloyd has been in many more movies than you realized. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: NyPhotoNy)
Remember when a woman’s picture was Photoshopped by graphic artists around the world to conform to various nations’ beauty standards? The website Online Doctors Superdrug has done it again, this time with a male model. They contacted a photographer to provide a model, and he bravely took a selfie.
Then the image was sent to graphic artists in 19 countries (11 women and 8 men) to be Photoshopped into their version of the ideal man. As you can see, the main takeaway is that Photoshop has its limits.
However, few nations turned the model into a bodybuilder. Most just made him slightly slimmer. Serbia added tattoos. Nigeria made him smile more. And the United States gelled his hair. Australia thought he was close to perfect as is. No one shaved his face. Explore all 19 images here. -via Buzzfeed
Experimental artificial insemination was attempted as early as 1855, when J. Marion Sims tried it out on slaves without their consent. Of the six women involved, only one got pregnant, and she miscarried. Then in 1884, Philadelphia physician William Pancoast treated a couple for infertility. He determined that the husband had no sperm, but he let the couple think he was going to cure that little problem.
Instead of disclosing any of this information to the couple, though, Pancoast scheduled another “examination” for his patient. Here’s how the first successful artificial insemination took place: In front of six medical students, Pancoast knocked out his patient using chloroform, inseminated her with a rubber syringe, and then packed her cervix with gauze. The source of the semen was one of the medical students in the room, determined to be the most attractive of the bunch.
The medical students were sworn to secrecy, and a healthy baby boy was born. Read the story of those secrets and how they finally came out in the open, at the Atlantic. -via Science Chamber of Horrors
Have you been told you’re weird all your life? If that’s the case, you probably already know that you are weird. But everyone is different from the majority in some way, even if it’s something small that makes you differ from other people. The List Show from mental_floss tells you quite a few ways you might be an outlier. Or in other words, weird. What makes you weird? I don’t regularly watch sports on TV, but I make an exception for the Olympics, so that doesn’t count. However, I do wash my hands properly -many times a day, because I cook a lot. And I don’t take any prescription medicine. I am an early bird and a night owl. I know who is on Mount Rushmore. So I’m weird. Just like everyone else.
Screen Junkies did an Honest Trailer for The Walking Dead back in 2013, but the show has a completely different set of flaws now, so it’s time to revisit the series.
They’ve got a point. Those people do an awful lot of walking through the woods. And driving through the woods. And sitting in the woods. But we’ll keep watching it, hoping that someday they really will kill off a major character. Contains spoilers for those not current on the show. -via Uproxx
Even if you exclude the 15-part 1943 serial, Batman movies still go back 50 years! Most of the eight movies since then are very different from each other- different actors in the title role, different directors, different visions, and some fared better than others. Now you can compare and contrast your favorites with the others, with a timeline of each movie, illustrated and analyzed through their trailers, at TVOM. You know my favorite: Michael Keaton in the 1989 Tim Burton version. Which do you prefer?
