Budgie rescued after weeks spent outside in the cold in Winnipeg https://t.co/Ko79aUvj4l pic.twitter.com/JtzxCF0rxD

— CBC News (@CBCNews) January 3, 2016

You don’t often see a budgerigar, or common parakeet, flying free in Manitoba in the winter. They are native to Australia, and aren't made for cold weather. Sylvia Cassie of Winnipeg spotted a green and yellow parakeet as early as November 22, eating out of bird feeders in the company of sparrows, which had apparently taken the bird under their wings, so to speak. Several reports to Avian Welfare Canada got organization president Melanie Shura involved in trying to catch the bird before he succumbed to the cold weather. She set up a cage at Cassie’s home, complete with food, heat, and a trap door. Shura also helped Shelley Corvino and her husband set up a similar cage when they spotted the bird.

On New Year's Day, Corvino's husband saw the bird in the yard. It slowly made its way into the cage.

"He pulled the string, which he'd MacGyver'd to capture the fellow, through the little gate on the setup here … and that was it! He was still feeding!" Corvino said, referring to her husband capturing the bird.

"We high-fived and actually went and drank a toast and then we called Mel and Sylvia [Cassie] right away," she said.

The Corvinos will keep the parakeet, and have already named him MacGyver. -via Arbroath

Did you made a New Year resolution to get into fitness? I did. Maybe you should buy a gym membership. Or maybe not.

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The latest episode of Cracked’s Honest Ads series explains gym membership. The truth is that you will get out of it what you put into it -effort, that is. Just be sure to read the fine print. -via Tastefully Offensive

About a year ago, we told you the story of the Knights Templar. They disappeared into the mists of history, leaving many questions unanswered. Seven hundred years later, we still don’t know what became of them and the loot they supposedly got away with. And there are questions even stranger that remain.

What Was The Head Of The Templars?

According to accusations, the Templars had an idol in their possession, a head. While most Templars denied knowing anything about the worship of a head, William of Arreblay claimed to have seen a ceremony in Paris where a silver head sat on an altar at the center of adoration. It was supposedly the head of Saint Ursula—the saint and her 11,000 virgins were reported to have remained faithful in the face of death and torture and were venerated by the Templars for it.

If that’s not unsettling enough, he also stated that the head had two faces. Other descriptions of the head were interpreted as being the head of Baphomet, while others said it was either wood, black and white, or metal.

There is some evidence to back that one up- a description of a silver skull, and the known tendency of the Templars to keep relics of saints. While some of these unanswered questions are holes in the historical accounts, others involve rumors and ghost stories. Read about them at Listverse, and give some thought to the muddy distinction between incomplete history and complete fantasy.  -via the Presurfer

Remember the guy who bought a pair of bear cubs thinking they were dogs? This picture shows how that can happen. TheRedFoxx posted this picture to reddit with the title Somebody brought this bear into doggie day care. It’s supposed to be a Pomeranian, but someone remarked that it looks more like a cross between a Pomeranian and a Teddy Ruxpin. Yeah, if you want a real, live teddy bear, this is the kind of dog you want. -via Buzzfeed

The great thing about comics is that you can make the characters do all those horrible things that cross your mind, but would never do in real life. This is a totally alien scenario for me, because I’ve never lived with a man who got up and went to work while I remained in bed asleep. But I’ve always been an early riser. This is the latest from Lunarbaboon.

Let's learn something about MAD magazine, courtesy of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Attack of the Factoids.

IT’S A MAD, MAD WORLD

From 1952 until 1955, MAD was a full-color comic book called Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad. But in 1954, an inflammatory book titled Seduction of the Innocent, written by anti-comics crusader Dr. Fredric Wertham, hit stores, and public hysteria that comic books might be causing juvenile delinquency rose to a fevered pitch. The result was a congressional investigation and a “voluntary” set of guidelines that the industry adopted to avoid more onerous government regulations. The Comics Code Authority (CCA) contained prohibitions that would’ve made Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad impossible to continue as a comic book. The CCA prohibited not just sex, drugs, crime, depravity, lust, monsters, and vampires, but also anything that might promote “disrespect for established authority,” something that Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad did regularly.

There was a loophole, however: the CCA covered only “comic books.” So Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad decided on a makeover and MAD “magazine” was born.

MAD FACTS

• In 1961 MAD made copyright history when music publishers— representing all-star songwriters like Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Irving Berlin— sued the magazine. The issue? A songbook of parodies that included words with the instruction that they could be “sung to the tune of” a specific song. The musicians’ claim that only the original authors could legally parody their own songs was dismissed by judges all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the 19th century, a few farming families in Montreal grew a delicious variety of cantaloupe called the Montreal melon. This melon grew quickly to 15-20 pounds, and had a delicious green flesh that became a “snob food” around the turn of the 20th century, on par with caviar and champagne.

As word of the Montreal melon spread, demand grew. By the early 1900s, local farmers were sending regular shipments by train to New England and New York, where upscale restaurants and hotels put them on dessert menus and sold them for up to a dollar a slice — the equivalent of about $24 today. Because the melons were so large and thin-skinned, the flesh bruised easily. A woven-basket industry sprang up to protect them during transport, and they were packed in short, fine-stemmed hay.

The city took pride in its namesake fruit, and Lazar says that one was sent every year as a gift to the British throne. The Canadian Pacific Railway offered the melon in its formal dining cars, instructing staff to serve it “on cracked ice in a bread tray,” accompanied by a finger bowl.

Montreal’s famous crop was so profitable that at least one farmer hired an armed guard to protect his fields at night. By 1907 the melons could earn the farmers a couple thousand dollars per acre each season, around $49,000 in today’s dollars. In a 1908 report, the USDA took note of the “melon of unusual excellence,” its “fancy prices,” and the fact that “even at such prices, the Canadian growers are not able to supply the American demand.”

Sadly, the Montreal melon was a victim of the shift to industrial farming in the mid-20th century. The care it required just wasn’t scalable. But organic farmer Ken Taylor is trying to bring the melon back from the brink of extinction. Read about the fussy Montreal melon and its potential future at Buzzfeed. 

When we see people falling in love on the silver screen, we feel what they’re feeling: giddiness, joy, desire, fear, confusion, heartbreak, satisfaction, loneliness, and all those feelings that we go to the movies for.

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Robert Jones presents his first supercut of 2016, featuring 85 couples in love, the way we want to see it, courtesy of Hollywood. The music is "Perfect" by The Singularity. -Thanks, Robert!

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote his seventh symphony during World War II, inspired by the Siege of Leningrad. In the middle of that siege, Leningrad conductor Karl Eliasberg recalled the remaining musicians of the city to rehearse it. Only 15 showed up, and they were suffering from starvation.

The first rehearsal broke up after just 15 minutes, as the small band of survivors had so little energy.

"That orchestra was consisting of players who were victims of bombings and hunger and starvation and they were barely able to hold their instruments to play," says Soviet-born conductor Semyon Bychkov.

One trumpeter offered Eliasberg a profound apology after failing to produce a single note.

But reinforcements from the military were summoned, and the cobbled-together orchestra practiced six days a week. However, they were so weak that they only managed to play all the way through the entire symphony once before the public performance on August 9, 1942. The story of how that concert came together for the debilitated citizens of the besieged city is told at BBC magazine.     

You can hear a recording of Shostakovich’s Symphony No.7, also known as the Leningrad Symphony, played by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra in 1953.

(Image credit: St Petersburg Academic Philharmonia)

A “Today I Learned” post at reddit tells us about tomato pincushions and the purpose of the attached strawberry. Over a thousand comments fall into three camps: 1. I’ve never heard of a tomato pincushion, b. I’ve seen my grandma use one but I didn’t know what the strawberry was for, and 3. doesn’t everyone know this? I still have the tomato pincushion I used in high school (in the 1970s), although the strawberry detached long ago. Wikipedia says,

One popular design—a tomato with a strawberry attached—was most likely introduced during the Victorian Era.[4] According to folklore, placing a tomato on the mantel of a new house guaranteed prosperity and repelled evil spirits. If tomatoes were out of season, families improvised by using a round ball of red fabric filled with sand or sawdust. The good-luck symbol also served a practical purpose—a place to store pins.[5] Typically, the tomato is filled with wool roving to prevent rust, and the strawberry is filled with an abrasive to clean and sharpen the pins.

You really don’t need the strawberry anymore, as pins are now plated, and sharpening them will ruin the plating. Also, pins are quite cheap these days, so you can throw one away (carefully) if it becomes dull. Please take a minute and let us know if any of this information is new to you.

(Image credit: Dvortygirl)

Jürgen Horn and Mike Powell are in Curaçao for 91 days, and arrived just in time for the holidays.  The New Year celebration in Curaçao means fireworks, including pagaras, which are long strings of firecrackers. How long? This one was two kilometers (although they didn’t stretch it out that far)!  

Pagaras are super-loud, super-long strings of fireworks, which are set off all over the city, all day long on New Year’s Eve. At two-kilometers in length, Pietersmaai has one of the biggest, and we watched the whole thing explode, deafened by the noise and choking on the smoke. It was awesome… though it was probably a good thing that we already had a few drinks in us. My ears were still ringing the next day.

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Everyone in Willemstad turned out to see the spectacle. See more pictures and video from the Curaçao New Year celebration, and Christmas, too, at For 91 Days.

A moose found itself in a sticky position near Bathurst, New Brunswick. It had been crossing a snow-covered bridge made for ATVs when two of its legs slipped into the gap between the boards.

Philippe Doucet told Radio-Canada he happened to be driving by Tuesday to check his rabbit snares and hunt coyote.

Doucet said he was shocked to see the big moose stuck on the bridge in his path.

The animal seemed to have lost hope, he said. There were icicles under its legs, so it had been there quite a while.

Doucet called forest rangers and several of his friends to help the moose. They cut two boards from the bridge and pushed the moose’s legs up from beneath. The female moose took some time to recover the use of its legs, but eventually got up and walked away. The ATV federation will get word out to its members that spacing between the planks of a bridge should be small enough to prevent such accidents. See more pictures at Facebook. -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Club vtt chaleur)

Matt Bucy took the film The Wizard of Oz completely apart and rearranged it in alphabetical order. That sounds nonsensical, and it is, but there’s a lot to be enjoyed here for those of us (all of us, really) who already know the story.

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You get a sense of which words are repeated the most. It starts off with all the screams of “Aaah!” Wordless sequences follow the last word said, and all of Toto’s lines are together because he only says “Arf!” The sequence for “dead,” starting about 19:40, is priceless. Many of the strings of words are quite musical, like “ding” and “ha” and of course, “rainbow.” -via Metafilter

Maribel Valencia’s twins weren’t due to be born for another week; the cesarian was planned for January 6. But on New Year’s Eve, the babies had a different idea.

According to staffers at the San Diego Kaiser Permanente Zion Medical Center, the twins – baby girl, Jaelyn, and baby boy, Luis – were born at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31 and at 12:02 a.m. on Jan. 1, respectively, to mother Maribel Valencia, 22, and her husband, Luis.

It’s not that unusual for twins to have birthdays on consecutive days, but in this case, they will have different birth years as well. If they had been in an earlier era, they might have to begin school in different years. Nowadays, the cutoff is earlier, often in October. As it is, Luis has the honor of being the first New Year baby in San Diego, while Jaelyn has a lifetime ahead of her to remind her brother that she’s the senior twin. -via Buzzfeed

(Image credit: Kaiser Permanente San Diego)

RIP lemmy. Sad day. Good 70 year run dude!!

A photo posted by Mike Dorsey (@mikedorseytattoo) on Dec 28, 2015 at 5:03pm PST

Mike Dorsey is a tattoo artist and painter. He created this watercolor of Lemmy Kilmister as a Japanese woodblock print and posted it on Instagram the day his death was announced.  -via reddit