A photo taken 15 years ago became a viral meme three years ago, and is passed around almost as much today as it was then. The dorky tween in the photo bears no resemblance to the real Maggie Goldenberger, now 26. She was taken by surprise when her old picture was captioned and went viral. In fact, she was traveling in Europe and only had intermittent internet time when it became a sensation.
“I had no idea at this point how widespread it was,” said Goldenberger, speaking recently with exactly the kind of composure and articulacy not associated with “Berks,” as the girl in the meme was popularly known.
…
Goldenberger’s friends delight in revealing her online identity to strangers at every opportunity. “Then there’ll be a 30-minute session of them looking at every single version of it. I have to fake-laugh as if I haven’t seen them all before,” said Goldenberger. “I just can't believe this is my 15 minutes of fame—I was hoping it would come in another form. But I guess you have to take what you can get.”
You’d think that Goldenberger might be hurt at people all over the world making fun of her awkward adolescent self, but she’s mostly okay with it. The reason why lies in the story behind the original picture, which she tells at Vanity Fair, in an article that also follows the history of the meme and even the reaction of R.L. Stine, the creator of Goosebumps. -via Digg
Halloween mania has entered the operating room. Let’s hope this surgical sequence is a horror film instead of supposedly mirroring real life. This is only the beginning of the longer comic you can read at Buttersafe. You may or may not be able to see the punch line coming “a mile away.” Either way, it’s both satisfying and groan-producing.
There have been times when I decorated a birthday cake and it ended up a drippy mess. For this cake, that’s exactly what you want! What looks like melting wax is really frosting, so it’s all edible -except for the actual candles.
This video made me think. My career since 1982 has been based on how many people pay attention to me, and I’ve always had a layer of anonymity built into my public persona, beginning in radio. When the internet came along, it was simple for me to jump in with both feet. It must be very different for the average person who casually uses a social network that requires a “real name” and then one day posts something that goes viral. It has to be quite unsettling. -via Geeks Are Sexy
What’s holding you back from accomplishing things? The couch. The nice warm throw wrapped around you. A remote control and 367 channels. And a bag of chips. Why would you ever want to do anything else? The penal system could probably take a lesson on what works so well for the rest of us. If it weren’t for having to earn a living or get the kids to school, that’s where we’d all be, until further notice. This is from John McNamee at Pie Comic.
On this week’s mental_floss List Show, we learn a bunch of trivia about brains. BRAINS. Braaaaains. Ahem. A lot of it is refuting misconceptions you’ve always heard about the brain, like dinosaurs having an extra one and that zombies eat brains. BRAINS. Braaaains. Some people are missing their brains, although the ones addressed here are already deceased. -via mental_floss
If you drove a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe car when you were a kid, you can relive that joy every day with an adult-sized version! It has all the features of a car (except windows) and the look of a plastic kid’s toy.
It was built a few years ago by British restoration and custom car outfit Attitude Autos, and has been a media sensation ever since. The two-seat, red and yellow runabout is based on an actual car -- a 2000 Daewoo Matiz that had its roof removed and its chassis shortened by half. It’s powered by a 51 hp 3-cylinder engine, has a top speed of 70 mph, and is road legal in the U.K., where it's racked up 5,000 miles going to car shows and promotional events. Attitude Autos says it cost about $60,000 to build over the course of four months.
You can see a video of the vehicle we posted last year. And now the coupe is up for sale on eBay. They’re asking $33,000 (£21,500), or you can make an offer. Be mindful the steering wheel is on the right. -via Buzzfeed
There was only one photograph of outlaw William Bonney, also known as Billy the Kid, in existence -until now. A vintage photo collector bought a tintype at a Fresno junk shop in 2010 which has been verified by a team of experts at Kagin’s as depicting Bonney playing croquet during a wedding reception.
The latest photo, a 4 x 5 inch tintype, captures Billy the Kid surrounded by several members of his gang after a wedding, according to Kagin’s. The outlaws are surrounded by friends and family in Chaves County, N.M., in the summer of 1878. The company said a team spent a year dissecting the photo and determining the location, which required investigators to travel to the supposed site where it was taken.
“We found the old lumber underneath,” Jeff Aiello, who directed a National Geographic Channel documentary about the photo, told ABC affiliate KFSN. “We found those exact rock piers are still there.”
It’s not only precious because of the scarcity of pictures of Bonney, but also because it shows him with his gang, the Regulators. Kagin’s has already fielded some offers for the picture, and expect it to sell in the neighborhood of $5 million. See the full picture and read more about it at The Washington Post. -via Metafilter
A black bear wandered into Bozeman High School in Bozeman, Montana, Wednesday morning. It came in through an open garage door, ambled down a hallway, and left by another door. Students were ushered into classrooms during the incident, although some people were able to take pictures and video. Bozeman Police and officials from the Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department responded to calls from the school, and met the bear outside. They were able to shoo it into an adjacent field, then it left the area. The bear hasn’t been seen since. No one got close to the bear during the incident.
Meanwhile, In Russia
A bear wandered into a shopping mall in Khabarovsk, Russia, near the Chinese border. The bear entered the mall Tuesday night while the stores were closed. It was captured on security cameras, frantically trying to escape, and finally bursting through double doors to get out. Police chased the bear through a courtyard and shot it. Authorities received numerous inquiries from animal rights activists asking why the bear was killed, and have announced in investigation into the matter.
The breeders at Garden State Tortoise noticed a Western Hermann's tortoise (Testudo hermanni hermanni) egg that was showing some difficulty in hatching. There were two tortoises inside! That is pretty rare, and even rarer that they were alive.
The tortoises were not conjoined twins, but were still attached to each other through their common yolk sac. The video goes through the process of helping the twins to separate so they can go about their business. Warning: varying sound levels. -via reddit
“I don’t know the song, but if you hum a few bars, I’ll fake it.” That’s the classic response to a request, but how hard is it to do? Video artist Anton Hecht of Canvas tried it out with a three-piece band in downtown Newcastle.
Sometimes it worked pretty well; other times it fell flat. That probably had more to do with the abilities of the hummer than the perception of the band. It’s particularly difficult when they ask for a hum and get a beatbox response instead. I only recognize one of the songs they hummed, and you can no doubt guess which one. Did you recognize any others? -Thanks, Anton!
That’s a lot of sheep! How many are there? Don’t start counting, you’ll be asleep in no time. There’s also quite a few dogs, some goats, and a couple of horses in the back, along with the poor guy with the shovel.
This parade took place somewhere in Poland. It was great for spectators, not so great for drivers behind them who were late for work. You might want to bookmark this video and refer back to it in case you ever suffer from insomnia. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
As many movies as Steven Spielberg has made, there are even more that he didn’t. Over his 40-year career, there have been great plans and projects that fell by the wayside, or even got close to production, but for one reason or another did not result in a movie. And that’s even discounting movies that were eventually made without Spielberg. Unrealized Spielberg projects began back in the early 1970s.
“Flushed With Pride: The Story Of Thomas Crapper” Spielberg’s big-screen career came reasonably close to getting off to a very different start, one that risked making him a filmmaker taken much, much less seriously. Under credit to Universal at the beginning of the 1970s, but still working mostly in TV, the filmmaker pitched three projects to the movie-wing of the studio. One was a re-telling of “Snow White” set in a Chinese food factory in San Francisco. Another was a movie about a stunt pilot in the 1920s, eventually called “Ace Eli And Rodger Of The Skies” — the studio passed, but Fox bought the pitch for $50,000 and wouldn’t let Spielberg write or direct. The movie was released in 1973 starring Cliff Robertson, without making much impact. And finally, Spielberg optioned a recently-published book called “Flushed With Pride: The Story Of Thomas Crapper,” a semi-satirical biography that suggested (possibly incorrectly) that Crapper was the inventor of the flushing toilet. The director approached future “American Graffiti” writers Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck about writing a screenplay. As Huyck says in Joseph McBride’s Spielberg biography, “We came up with the great idea of doing it as ‘Young Tom Edison.’ But like ‘Little Big Man. We wrote a treatment, and we gave it to our [mutual] agent, Guy McElwaine, who said ‘Steve, if this is the kind of movie you want to do, I don’t want to be your agent.” Cooler heads prevailed, and the director moved into features with “Sugarland Express” instead.
The world may be better off without that one, but others, such as Frank Darabont’s Indiana Jones script, or Robopocalypse, make us wonder what might have been. Read about 15 unmade Steven Spielberg projects at The Playlist. -via Digg
This chemistry professor knows how to get your attention. To make students sit up and pay attention, a clever cultural reference always comes in handy. College professors can get away with a lot more than high school teachers, as you’ll see from a collection of photographs, notes, Tweets, and stunts in a list at Buzzfeed.
On August 29, 1952, at a rustic outdoor chamber music hall tucked on a wooded dirt road in Woodstock, New York, the piano virtuoso David Tudor prepared to perform the most jarring piece of music ever written. Or not written, depending how you look at it.
Tudor sat at the piano, propped up six pages of blank sheet music, and closed the keyboard lid. He then clicked a stopwatch and rested his hands on his lap. The audience waited for something to happen as a breeze stirred the nearby trees. After 30 seconds of stillness, Tudor opened the lid, paused, closed it again, and went back to doing nothing. He turned one of the blank pages. Raindrops began to patter. After two minutes and 23 seconds, Tudor again opened and closed the lid. At this point, exasperated people in the crowd walked out. Their footsteps echoed down the aisles. After another minute and 40 seconds, Tudor opened the piano lid one last time, stood up, and bowed. What was left of the audience politely applauded.
It was nearly two decades before the infamous summer of ’69, but what had transpired was arguably the wildest, most controversial musical event ever to rock Woodstock. The piece was called 4'33"—for the three silent movements totaling four minutes and 33 seconds—and it was composed by John Cage. It seemed like a joke. In fact, it would redefine music.
TALL AND SOFT-SPOKEN, John Cage had once been described as “pleasantly reminiscent of Frankenstein.” The resemblance wasn’t just physical. His compositions were of a similar mold: experimental, a bit ugly, and misunderstood. Cage was an irreverent experimenter. In his 60-year career, he composed nearly 300 pieces for everything imaginable, from conventional piano and orchestra to bathtubs and amplified cacti.
Born in Los Angeles to a journalist and an inventor, Cage learned early how powerful new ideas could be. After dropping out of college, he jetted to Europe, where he fell in love with abstract art. At 19, he returned home and started giving lectures on modern art to housewives in his living room. One week, when Cage wanted to teach the ladies about the music of Arnold Schoenberg—the father of a dissonant music called serialism—he audaciously rang one of the country’s best pianists, Richard Buhlig, and asked him to play for them. Buhlig declined, but he did agree to give Cage composing lessons. It was the start of a storied career. (Image credit: Bogaerts, Rob / Anefo)
Cage cut his teeth making music for UCLA’s synchronized swimming squad and established himself writing percussion music for dance companies. In 1940, when he was tasked with writing primitive African music for a dance concert in Seattle, Cage tinkered with the piano, wedging screws, coins, bolts, and rubber erasers between the piano strings, turning the keyboard into a one-person percussion orchestra. The sounds were otherworldly, and the innovation, called the prepared piano, catapulted Cage to the forefront of the avant-garde.
