The cable company had to replace the line to our house last month because a squirrel had chewed through the sheathing and let water in, affecting our service. It would have been much worse (but more immediately evident) if the critters had chewed through the electrical supply wire. In fact, squirrels are a bigger threat to the U.S. electrical grid than cyber attacks. It’s as if the squirrels are waging war on us!
That’s the premise of the website Cyber Squirrel 1. The folks who run it keep track of all publicly available record of attacks on the electrical grid of the U.S. and other nations, and the cause, if it can be determined. They have an interactive map that shows attacks from squirrels and other animals for records going back to 1987. Their data shows that squirrels are responsible for way more attacks on our power grid than any other animal, including humans. We have obviously not been successful so far in the battle against this ruthless and stealthy enemy. -via Metafilter
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Young women terrified German units during World War II. Let's learn about them, courtesy of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids.
IT HAPPENED ONE DARK NIGHT…
Imagine you’re a German soldier, fighting your way deep into the Soviet Union during the summer of 1942. During the time you’re not actually on the front lines, you feel pretty safe and get a chance to rest, let down your guard, even sleep a full night without constant vigilance. After all, the Soviet army is retreating fast, and you’re just 19 miles from Moscow.
Still, you can’t relax completely. There have been whispered rumors of nachthexen, “night witches” who fly silently after dark and drop bombs into previously safe areas, destroying military targets and fraying nerves. You don’t completely believe it, but like a lot of rumors, you wonder if there’s likely some grain of a truth.
Then, while on guard duty one night, you hear a rustling sound above, almost like wind through a broomstick. Before you can investigate, the darkness lights up with a blinding flash and a deafening explosion. The Night Witches have struck again!
TOIL AND TROUBLE
By 1942, the Soviet armed forces were reeling. Millions of men had been killed defending their homeland, often with antique rifles and inadequate defenses. Three million more had been taken prisoner. What to do? Well, there were always the women. Already working in fields and factories, some Soviet women were recruited as pilots, mechanics, navigators, and officers of a new all-female unit, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. They were assigned to hit specific German military targets and to scare its forces with unpredictable, random attacks.
The new song by the Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis (previously at Neatorama) is “A Cappella,” which is sung a cappella, of course. They’re pretty good at it. But listen to what they’re singing!
With lovely, lilting voices, they make fun of a cappella groups, specifically Pentatonix. No, they aren’t mentioned by name, but you can recognize them in this parody group anyway. -via Tastefully Offensive
In 2011, Scott Lomu saw the Discovery channel TV show Gold Rush and was perplexed that it was a hit. He and his friend George Wright had gone to Ghana the previous summer to mine gold, and what he was watching on TV was ho-hum compared to the most uneventful day in Ghana. Could their adventures be a reality TV show? It sure could. Lomu learned what he needed to know about reality TV, put together a treatment, and sold the idea to Raw TV, the company that produces Gold Rush. The result was Jungle Gold, which premiered in October 2012. There were a couple of problems going into the production. Although Lomu and Wright had mined in Ghana before, they didn’t make any money. And the story of two white guys exploiting natural resources in Africa wasn’t a popular vision in Ghana. Or in America.
These controversies presented possible PR problems. But Raw believed they could meet the challenges of filming a gold-mining operation in Ghana; in the Season 1 synopsis, they noted that their contributors would be “paragons of responsible mining.” Discovery, which had green-lit the show in March, had insisted Wright and Lomu hire locals, replant cocoa crops on mined land, and abide by the rules of Ghana’s Environmental Protection Agency. “We came to realize this was a perfect opportunity to show how foreigners can do business the right way in Ghana,” Lomu told me. Should they find enough gold, they intended to build a Ghanaian schoolhouse in Macias’s name. (Both Discovery Channel and Raw, which was acquired by Discovery in 2014, declined to comment for this story.)
Ghana challenged their intentions from the start. Months before the shoot, Lomu had paid a village chief $12,500 of his Utah investors’ money to secure a 25-acre plot of land an hour outside the town of Dunkwa, the epicenter of Ghana’s gold rush. When the cast and crew arrived on the first day of filming, however, they found it crawling with Chinese miners. Furious, Wright and Lomu gathered a dozen local chiefs and tribal elders to solve the dispute. A heated argument ensued. When Lomu suggested removing the miners by force, a chief replied: “If you attempt it, they will kill you!” The crew captured everything on film — and loved it. Discovery was so impressed by the clips they upped the season from 10 episodes to 16. “That’s when we realized our tragedy was good for the show,” Lomu said.
Tragedy may be good for the show, but the conflicts were real and had real-world consequences. The first season was both a hit and an outrage. The outrage only grew worse when Jungle Gold was shown in Ghanian TV. Production on the second season was even more chaotic than the first, and ended up with Wright being accused of murder. Read the entire story of Jungle Gold at Buzzfeed.
You may have noticed that Pixar storytellers and animators are movie lovers, and often slip references to classic films into their movies. But you probably haven’t caught how often it happens. Recent film school graduate Jorge Luengo Ruiz of Madrid noticed, and put those references together to show us.
You'll see callbacks to classic movies in Toy Story to Finding Nemo to The Incredibles and more. Ruiz mentioned that he left out A Bug’s Life because the whole movie is “is a tribute to Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.” Besides Kurosawa, Pixar seems to have a undying admiration for Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock. -via Buzzfeed
It’s been almost two years since Timo the Ragdoll Cat received his own cat-sized hammock. He was quite awkward with it at first, but practice make purrfect, and Timo has certainly practiced his napping in the hammock.
In this compilation video, you can see how Timo went from failure to mastery of the hammock over time. See, when the goal is the ultimate in relaxation, even a cat will put in the hours necessary to get it right. -via Arbroath
Is there a statute of limitations on movie spoilers? From the time the world wide web was born, no one bothered to hide the fact that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father. It would surely be important keep plot details under wraps if movies went from town to town like they used to, instead of opening everywhere at once like they do now. And I can understand why discussions were tagged as spoilers in the first couple of weeks of The Force Awakens’ run, since people ran into sold out theaters or had to plan movie-watching around holiday obligations. But by now, you’d think that anyone who really cared about spoilers would have made an effort to see the film. This comic is by John Kovalic at Dork Tower. -via Geeks Are Sexy
In 1984, we all enjoyed the movie Footloose, with its toe-tapping music and awesome dancing and young, good-looking stars. But was it at all believable? It’s 1984! We’ve been through disco! What town doesn’t allow dancing? You might be surprised to learn that the film was based on a true story.
1. IT WAS BASED ON ELMORE CITY, OKLAHOMA.
Elmore City had forbidden public dancing by law since its founding. In January of 1979, the local high schoolers asked that the rules be changed so that they could have a prom, to the anger of the reverend from the United Pentecostal Church. The kids won and got to dance on prom night. Dean Pitchford (lyricist for Fame songs "Red Light", "Fame", and "I Sing The Body Electric") read about all of it and visited the town. Pitchford had his screenplay after 22 drafts.
The production was really hard on Kevin Bacon.
9. BACON WENT UNDERCOVER AS A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT.
Only the principal and guidance counselor at Payson Utah High School knew the true identity of one “Ren McCormack,” a transfer student from Philadelphia. The then 24-year-old Bacon was terrified, and was treated the way his character ended up being treated in the movie. He only lasted two to three hours.
10. BACON DIDN’T REALIZE WHAT HE WAS GETTING HIMSELF INTO.
The script, according to Bacon, “didn’t really indicate anything” and led him to believe he didn’t need a choreographer. He spent three weeks of dance training with Lynne Taylor-Corbett. Bacon also worked on his gymnastics, and “worked the skin off his hands.”
And it only got worse for him, as several other items on the list will show. Read all 18 facts about Footloose at mental_floss.
Instagram member WhyTheLongPlayFace combines pop culture characters with album covers. A lot of them lately have been Star Wars characters, and they’re a hoot! Some achieve visual puns with the choice and placement of characters, while others are a play on names, like Bib Fortuna as Bob Dylan.
Continue to see more.
Transport Quebec’s automated cameras are there to detect speeders, accidents, and other traffic problems. But this one, on Highway 40 in Montreal, captured the image of a snowy owl in mid-flight on January 3. It was probably coming in for a landing on the pole.
According to Barbara Frei, the director of the McGill Bird Observatory, this young female was probably looking for a place to perch.
"I think they are attracted specifically to the highway because it has open, grassy fields nearby which is perfect for hunting their favourite prey, which is small rodents," she said.
"They like to get a good lay of the land and the high lamp posts or other posts that they can perch on while hunting just suits them perfectly."
You can see video footage of the event at CBC news. -via Arbroath
How are you doing with your New Years resolutions? I’m keeping mine just fine, thank you, because I didn’t make any. But if you need some motivation, watch this.
No, it’s not a motivational video. It’s AsapSCIENCE explaining how motivation works, so you can arrange your own motivational strategy. -via Geeks Are Sexy
While it may be an exaggeration to say the The Force Awakens was thirty years in the making, it was a long and involved process, beginning the moment Disney bought Lucasfilm. Mr Sunday Movies tells us about some of the many ideas, concept artworks, and plans that the creators went through and ultimately changed or rejected before the final product was unveiled. Contains spoilers, but if you haven’t seen the movie by now, you probably don’t care about any of this.
In the process of winnowing all this down to what was actually put into the movie, they ended up with the best that was left and would fit into two hours and 16 minutes. It sure didn’t seem that long. -via Geeks Are Sexy
In the early days of the Ku Klux Klan, members didn’t wear any kind of uniform. Instead, they wore disguises of all kinds: fake beards, flour sacks, face paint, masks, even drag costumes to hide their identities. That not only made them anonymous, it allowed local authorities to dismiss their terrorist activities as those of young pranksters. It also fed into the idea of the "invisible empire," as many denied the existence of an organized group, at least publicly.
As Reconstruction ended and Southern white men reclaimed political power, they dropped out of the Klan, no longer limited to secret outlets for their violence. In 1872, the old Klan made a valedictory appearance: in public, in the Memphis Mardi Gras parade, revealing a new kind of pageantry that was no less ceremonial than chilling. Local Klan leaders and representatives from all the Southern states rode their own float, wearing black, conical hats with the skull and crossbones and “K.K.K.” in white. They staged the mock lynching of a man in blackface; they lassoed black spectators. The Klan itself was dying, but only because white supremacy was resurging right out in the open, with the sanction and participation of law enforcement and white society at large. Now they had Jim Crow laws. They had a criminal justice system that disproportionately punished Black people and imprisoned them in prison farms, on former plantations. They had lynch mobs, who no longer concealed their identities.
The adoption of the uniform with the white hood is traced to D.W. Griffith’s 1915 movie Birth of a Nation and to William J. Simmons, who chartered a state Klan organization and sold uniforms. The hoods and a new expansion of the Klan’s focus gave the organization a shot in the arm, so to speak, in the early 20th century. Read an overview of how all that happened at New Republic. -via Digg
(Image credit: Library of Congress)
You know this kid will never ask for his mother’s help with monsters under the bed again. Is she just lying to him? If so, then maybe there’s still a real live monster under the bed! Or if she’s telling the truth -what’s under the bed is even worse. There’s a lot to keep a child from getting any sleep at all in the latest from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. But Mom has achieved her own goal -an end to such questions.