We’ve seen a T. rex training in the gym and shoveling snow, but have you ever seen a dinosaur riding a horse? No? Then watch this T. rex put a well-trained horse through its paces.
The horse is a Paso Fino from Gascon Horsemanship. This beautiful animal aims to please, but it would behoove him to remember that a T. rex is an apex predator, which could lead to a bad end. -via Digg
Monopoly is heartbreaking as it is, but even more so when you suspect some cutthroat capitalist is cheating. It’s possible that the only fun some people find in the game is cheating. But a new edition of Monopoly has no monopoly money in it. Instead, it uses digital credit card transactions to make your rent payments. The “Ultimate Banking” edition comes with a small battery-powered ATM in which you can swipe your player cards, deeds, and even chance cards. No more hiding cash, overcharging your loved ones, or stealing while they go get a drink. Read more about the new cashless Monopoly at Gizmodo. -via Ars Technica
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Bob Hope was, without much argument, the most popular and beloved comedian of the 20th century. His career as a comedian is entirely unparalleled and unrivaled.
Hope was a hit in every possible entertainment medium. He was a star in Vaudeville, a hit on the Broadway stage, and had long-running #1 radio shows. Hope starred in almost 70 movies and shorts, including the classic and beloved seven "road pictures" he made with Bing Crosby over a 22-year span from 1940 to 1962.
His television specials began in 1950 and ran for over 40 years on NBC. In their heyday, these shows garnered some of the highest ratings in television history.
Hope hosted the Academy Awards a record 18 times and is still generally acknowledged as the best-ever Oscar host by all who remember his hilarious hosing chores.
But perhaps most important and significant was Hope's ever-present willingness to entertain the American troops in four different wars.
Hope was a self-confessed ham, always needing and craving the applause and the spotlight. But after an incredibly successful career, unlike other comedy notables, including Lucille Ball and Johnny Carson, Hope just didn't know when to "get off the stage.” His health had been deteriorating and by the early 1990's, his once hilarious, sharp monologues had become ordeals, lessened by Bob's slower reflexes and delivery, and his slightly slurred speech. Nonetheless, he kept booking gigs and making appearances.
What is the most hipster vehicle you could possibly own? How about an original Volkwagen from the 1950s or ‘60s modified to run on electricity? That marries the urge to return to the simpler past with modern eco-consciousness. The California company Zelectric Motors is refurbishing old Beetles, Microbuses, and other Volkswagens to run on all-electric motors.
Zelectric has found a particularly happy niche, though, tapping into an environmentally conscious thread of the latent nostalgia for old VWs. Benardo says Zelectric can currently convert and restore about 10 vehicles a year. Prices range from $68,000 for a Beetle sedan to $88,000 for a convertible, and include the price of the original car, which Zelectric will send out to a local firm to restore. "The sweet spot is between ‘58 and ’66," he says.
The hefty price is partly because of the intense work needed to safely install the electric powertrain, but also because the prices of well-maintained vintage VWs has exploded. Zelectric will even locate and convert that most quintessential of California vehicles, the Microbus — but prices for the iconic van are crazy these days, so a Zelectric starts around $130,000.
Alrighty then. Read about Zelectric’s vintage vehicles at the Verge.
(Image credit: Zelectric Motors)
You won’t be able to contain a giggle as you watch this kid at an amusement park obstacle course. See, the idea is that you’re supposed to avoid being hit. He doesn’t do that. Over and over.
Don’t feel bad about laughing. The kid knew what he was doing. Of course, he didn’t see every hit coming, but he did nothing at all to avoid them. This video has an appropriate soundtrack here. See, it doesn’t matter how many times life knocks you down. What matters is how many times you get back up. -via reddit
Any parent who has dealt with the teen years will tell you it’s maddening at times. They can change from goofy to infuriating to sweet to comatose in a matter of seconds. It doesn’t make sense until you see what’s going on inside.
Teenage brains and bodies undergo huge changes in the process of turning into adults. Even after their bodies mature, the brain structure and chemistry continue to change. That makes teenagers unique among age groups. Maybe a little understanding can lead to greater patience in the struggle between not-quite-adults and their parents. Also, the comments under this video are a hoot.
"Teens are very phisycally healthy" Me, a 15 year old female: reaches for another bag of doritos
8 moody teens have already disliked this
I'm a teenager, and this video isn't accurate at all. You suck, I hate everyone. Grr.
Why are teens so moody? Because we're put under incredible stress every single day and forced to make impossible choices that will affect the rest of our lives. Also, hormones.
-via Geeks Are Sexy
Leonardo DiCaprio has never won an Oscar, although he’s been nominated five times (and won Golden Globes, BAFTA awards, and other honors). Will this be his year to be named Best Actor at the Academy Awards? There have been speculation, memes, and jokes, but the best so far is the game Leo’s Red Carpet Rampage. Can you guide Leo to the Oscar he so deserves? Along the way, he’ll pick up numerous other awards, but there are other competitors you must race against. And there are levels in which you have to keep pressing buttons to give him more acting power! Good luck. -via Metafilter
We will always be fascinated with the idea of time travel, because who would ever pass up the opportunity to go back and correct the mistakes of the past? Who wouldn’t want to get a glimpse of what’s coming in the future? But there are always questions about temporal distortion that fuel a good plot. Can you really change the past? Will knowing the future help you avoid the bad stuff, or does “knowing” change the future by itself? Can anyone be happy outside their own time? What happens when you change a timeline that’s already been changed by time travel? But right now, we’re only asking one question: what’s your favorite time-travel film? It may be on the list of the ten (actually eleven) best time travel movies at TVOM. Or you might find some intriguing films you still haven’t seen. There are video clips for all of them.
Organized protests get results if you get enough people to participate. Mrs. Paul West complained to her grocer about rapidly rising food prices in 1966. His response? “…stick to your cooking and let us decide prices.” Oh, it was on. West organized a group called Housewives for Lower Food Prices and boycotted five grocery chains.
Like her predecessors, West garnered sneers. The New York Times called the protest a “ladycott”. One grocery executive (who seemed to have forgotten who buttered his bread) told LIFE, “The housewives are emotional. The logic of our balance sheet does not interest them.” Another sniped that “Maybe they need a recipe instead of a picket line.”
Those housewives of 1966 may have received little respect at first, but protests are particularly effective when money is involved. The “ladycott” of 1966 was only one of many times that women banded together to protest high food prices, several of which you can read about at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Cornell University Library)
Get ready for a movie we’ve waited over thirty years for! I don’t know if Pee-wee Herman is having a midlife crisis or what, but in this film, he decides to shake up his life with a holiday road trip. Which turns into a comedy of errors.
Pee-wee's Big Holiday, Herman’s comeback movie, and the sequel to his 1985 movie Pee-wee's Big Adventure, will premiere at SXSW in Austin and will be available at Netflix starting March 18. -Thanks, Rusty Blazenhoff!
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
by Mike Dubik, MD, and Mark Burnett, MD
Gaithersburg, Maryland
We set out to determine if natural light held benefits for radiology, particularly for the reading of
ordinary radiographs (x-rays).
The Known Benefits of Natural Light
Natural light has uses in many branches of medicine. Dermatologists know that many skin conditions are best viewed under natural light. Psychiatrists are familiar with the anti-depressive effect of natural sunlight. There are countless other examples. Radiologists, however, traditionally use fluorescent lighting in rooms that have no windows.
Our Experiment
As an experiment, we brought an armful of randomly selected x-my films to the beach on a sunny day.
The benefits of this environment were immediately obvious to both of us. The films looked better, and so did we. Indeed, we felt better.
Conclusion
We are convinced that our x-ray reading skills were augmented by the bright natural light (see figure above, and also the figure on the Front Cover). And although we had to use sunscreen, and occasionally had to don sunglasses (making for a single-shaded study), we are now committed to doing all of our radiological work at the beach.
_____________________
This article is republished with permission from the May-June 1998 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can purchase back issues of the magazine or subscribe to receive future issues, in printed or in ebook form. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Would you notice if an “N” were upside down? You might if it had a serif, which is supposed to be on the upper left only in a capital N. It’s something that most of us wouldn’t even think about, and a lot of sign makers don’t realize it, either. But Niels ‘Shoe’ Meulman did. He saw so many that he started the website Upside Down N – A Collection of Unruly ‘N’s.
From an early age on, I’ve noticed signs where the letter N with serif is accidentally placed upside down. In fact, this awareness was the first thing that triggered me to become a graphic artist. Many years later, in 2004, I started to photograph this phenomenon all over the world.
Now that you’ve seen a few, you will start to notice them anywhere they appear. Take a snapshot, and send it in for archiving at the site. -via Improbable Research
She buys an NES for her guy because he loves video games. But he gets trapped inside one! She has to go rescue him. No matter how many lives she goes through, no matter how many times she must start over, she must power up and surmount multiple levels to find him. Then she must lead him back out before the digital world disintegrates.
The video by Guy Collins is full of references that dedicated gamers will enjoy. There’s no dialogue at all, so if the music is not your taste, just down it down and enjoy the ride. -via Geeks Are Sexy
But it’s more than a video story- it’s a game, or a puzzle for hardcore geeks. Turn on the annotations for clues as to how to get it going. And read the manual. There’s an entire subreddit dedicated to this video and how to “solve” it and get to the end. And I’ve been assured that there is an end. Here’s a good place to start.
No Name Road can be found in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Noname Avenue is in Hackensack, Minnesota, and No Name Boulevard is in Longmont, Colorado. In fact, there are streets named like that all over the country. How did these street names com about? There are several reasons, and each place has its own story, but they usually boil down to inertia.
Located off of I-70, Colorado Department of Transportation officials decided that there needed to be an exit at mile marker 119. Unfortunately, they didn't have a name at the ready, so a placeholder was created. Eventually, the "name" went up the chain of command and stuck, with "No Name" getting printed on exit signs. By then, the residents of what eventually became a resort town came to actually like "No Name" as a name, and here were are, talking about it here.
Read the stories of other roads with no name at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: DimiTalen)
A 20-foot-long triceratops blocked traffic on High Street in Godshill on the Isle of Wight Friday night. The beast, named Godshilla, was supposed to be home at Island Gems, but was taken on an unapproved outing.
It belongs to Martin Simpson of Island Gems, who said: "It must have taken five hefty lads to move it.
"It's great people are talking about it, but I wouldn't want to encourage anybody to cause a hazard for traffic."
Many believe alcohol may have been involved. The dinosaur has been returned to its home. -via Mashable
(Image credit: Chris Hollingshead)
