If Jurassic World were made in 1978, it would star Michael Cain, Charleton Heston, and Raquel Welch. It would resemble many of the disaster films of the period. And I would have seen it a couple of times, at least.
A wealth of material from the 1970s (and a few movies from even earlier) were used in this mashup; you can find a list at the YouTube link. ChiefBrodyRules said it took him 17 weeks to put this together. -via Gamma Squad
Luna is a nine-month-old rescue cat in Bucharest, Romania. She likes to converse and collaborate with her roommate, Razvan Alexandru. This is their first recorded duet.
That is, until she gets tired or bored with whatever song he’s playing. Even when it’s a song about her! -via Tastefully Offensive
The European Union brings together speakers of many languages for the purposes of commerce, finance, administration, and defense. The Union drafts, translates, and produces documents using English as its common language. However, when you get so many non-native English speakers together to communicate, weird things happen. They’ve developed their own ways of using English or almost-English words that would baffle a native English speaker. For example:
8. EXPERTISES
Priority should be given to the ORs’ health system, training and education in order to optimise local human resources and expertises as greatest potential drivers of growth in the ORs83.Expertise is normally a mass noun that doesn’t have a plural form: we don’t say expertises but areas of expertise. In EU English, however, it often shows up in the plural. It’s always good to have more expertises than you need.
9. PLANIFICATIONSimplified procedures and better planification should make it possible to even out the caseload under FP6, improving internal control and speeding up processes.Planification shows up a lot in EU English. It assumes the existence of an unusual verb planify, meaning something like plan. Basically, planification is planning, but longer.
Read more examples of both English words which mean something different in the EU and words that were made up from half-familiar roots, at mental_floss.
(Image credit: Xavier Häpe)
A garbage fire south of Liberty, Missouri, turned out to be stranger than it looked. A Clay County deputy saw the smoke, went to investigate, and found a van burning in a field. The van’s owner was nearby.
The deputy learned that the owner had been burning garbage in the field and accidentally let the fire get out of control. In an attempt to put the fire out, he drove his van back and forth over the flames.
This made matters worse, as the tires of the van caught fire. Realizing that the van was loaded with firearms ammunition and a full tank of gas, the driver evacuated the area for safety.
Firefighters responded to make sure the fire didn’t spread. The unnamed van owner was not cited. He declined to file a police report for a possible insurance claim. I don’t think that effort would have yielded any results in this case. -via Arbroath
(Image credit: Clay County Sheriff’s Office)
When the Great Pyramid of Giza was built, food for the workers was commissioned from all parts of the Egyptian realm. Builders consumed tons of wheat and barley bread, mutton, beef, and beer. They didn’t eat pork, and the reason they didn’t sets the stage for the story of the world’s most controversial meat.
One village that provided livestock was Kom el-Hisn, located in the Nile delta about seventy-five miles downriver from the temple complex. Villagers at Kom el-Hisn raised cattle but ate very little beef: only the bones of worn-out breeding cows and sick calves have been uncovered there. Instead, the villagers ate pork: for every four cattle bones archaeologists unearthed at Kom el-Hisn, they found one hundred pig bones. It seems that the residents kept herds of pigs that foraged in the Nile delta marshes and scavenged trash on streets. Although Egypt’s rulers demanded cattle from Kom el-Hisn, along with goats and sheep from other settlements, the villagers’ pigs were spared.
The reasons for this had to do with climate and biology. Animals destined for Giza had to walk hundreds of miles through an arid landscape, feeding on grass and leaves along the way. Well suited for such a journey, cows, goats, and sheep were herded to Giza by the thousands. Pigs, however, would not have found the food or shade they needed along the way. The state couldn’t move pigs around, so it ignored them.
On the one hand, this was a good thing because it left poor isolated villages with food for themselves. On the other hand, it gave pork a reputation as the poor man’s meat. As pigs don’t travel well, and require a more reliable water supply than cattle or sheep, it makes sense that desert nomads had no use for them. In cities, pigs gained a reputation as unclean because they scavenged for food, and in an urban environment they only found waste products. Is it any wonder that several religions considered pork taboo? Meanwhile, cultures outside the deserts of the Middle East embraced pork. Read the story of how pigs became “the world’s most divisive meal” at Longreads. -via Digg
The latest "100 years" video from Mode runs down Halloween costumes over the past century, with one for each decade. The selected costumes certainly do not represent all Halloween costumes of the era, but the ones featured show the influence of pop culture as it progresses.
This is fun to watch, and I’m glad they didn’t use the cheapest store-bought costumes available during those times. Still, I kind of wish that someone would do the same thing with more costumes and less dress-up time.
E. Lee is a Chicago-based artist who often references comic book characters. This painting on a door in a Chicago alley gives the illusion that the door is open, but it’s not. That illusion is helped by the fact that the left door has no knob, but even so, the perspective is amazing. See a photo of the work in progress. And see more of E. Lee’s work at Instagram.
This image was labeled as NSFW at reddit, which is strange as it is based on the cover of a 1973 Wonder Woman comic. Or maybe not so strange, because back then everyone just pretended that the symbolism went over their heads.
Hey, how about a game of What Is It? from our friend at the the What Is It? Blog. If you have any idea what the pictured object is, you are way ahead of me. But whether you do or don't, you have an opportunity to win a T-shirt from the NeatoShop just by commenting!
Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you'd like. You might know the true answer, but we're going to select two winners who come up with the funniest, most outlandish guesses to win a T-shirt from the NeatoShop. However...
Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don't include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? It would help us if you added the artist's name or a URL, since we now have so many shirts to select from. May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?
You can see all kinds of mystery items at the What Is It? Blog. The let your imagination run wild! Good luck!
Update: This items is a true what-is-it, since we still don’t know exactly what it is. We’re still looking for its true use! But meanwhile, y’all have come up with some crazy ideas. Congratulations to John D, who said,
That would be a planchette lock to keep the spirits and demons contained when not being used on the ouija board.
And to Hipshot, who had a story:
This is the one of 17 (don’t ask why) tread/gears fabricated for the Dalek stair climber assembly. Turns out they learned to levitate prior to the prototype being finished, so they ended up taking up space in the corner of a garage somewhere until someone got the idea they could be fashioned into combination retro bottle opener/shoelace irons.
Both win a t-shirt from the NeatoShop! Thanks to everyone who played along, and stay tuned for the next What Is It? game from the What Is It? blog and Neatorama!
Mad Max: Fury Road is basically a feature-length car chase scene (albeit an excellent one). So it only made sense that when Cinefix made it into a retro video game, it would be a side-scrolling chase.
Of course, just like the movie, it has plenty of shoot-em-ups. The game makes Max the central character instead of Furiosa, and I don’t know if I like that or not. -via Boing Boing
Lynn Everett and her husband Tony have 41 dogs. That’s 24 French bulldogs, three Chinese crested, four chihuahuas, and 10 miniature English Bull Terriers. They aren’t even rescue dogs.
Oddity Central describes what the Everetts go through to take care of the dogs.
Walking the dogs is like a military operation, with over 120 poop scoops. They spend two hours a day preparing meals for the dogs, and it costs them about $46,000 a year in dog food, pet accessories, and vet bills. But they love every minute they get to spend with their dogs, and wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Feeding time takes two hours, there are 41 dinners to prepare and 41 bowls to wash after,” Lynn said. “I have to remember who eats what as some have beef and the other have chicken. You have to be there when they’re eating so they don’t argue.”
Veterinary bills are expensive, too. Lyn uses her dogs for stud service to pay the food and vet bills. She’s tempted to keep the puppies, but the local council has forbidden her from adding more to the pack. -via Uproxx
The movie Back to the Future Part Two tried to give us a grim vision of the future -the year 2015. At least that was the goal at the time. Watching the movie now, the movie's future looks quite idealistic.
College Humor updates the scene where Doc and Marty land in the future to make it more true-to-life, but it’s not a pretty picture. It's enough to make one want to go live in the 1880s. Contains NSFW language. -via Tastefully Offensive
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
I’ll bet you didn't know the Marx brothers did a silent movie. Well they did. Humor Risk (also listed as Humorisk by some sources) was the Marx's first ever movie. It was a silent short film.
In 1920-21, the four Marx brothers were one of America's top vaudeville acts, trodding the boards and evoking audience's laughter from New York to San Francisco and all points between. It was during this period that Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo each decided to kick in a thousand dollars to help finance an actual movie. There were two or three other investors and the film's final budget was somewhere around $6,000 (possibly as high as ten grand).
Details of the film are sketchy and nebulous at best- later opinions, statements and memories from those involved are mainly foggy and somewhat at odds. The film was supposed to be a silent comedy with pathos, in the Charlie Chaplin mold.
The film's title was a satire of a then very popular movie drama called Humoresque based on a novel by Fannie Hurst. Humoresque was a huge hit in 1920.
The four Marx brothers were the stars, with three of the four playing characters nothing like the ones they would make famous a decade later in their classic comedies of the 1930s and '40s.
Before the days of lending libraries, cheap paperbacks, and ebooks, building one’s own personal library was an expensive but fulfilling accomplishment. Those precious books were treated well, and to mark one’s ownership, there were bookplates, ex libris. The first bookplates displayed coats-of-arms of European nobility. Bookplate collector Lew Jaffe, who blogs at Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie, tells us how they became more varied, and even became examples of modern art.
“Americans, for the most part, didn’t have coats of arms, so they would hire an engraver, and the engraver would ask, ‘What design do you want?’ and they’d say, “Well, I have a pretty dog,’ or ‘I like to go fishing,’ or whatever. That’s how the more creative end of bookplate design really started. It was an affectation.” While most artists weren’t known specifically for their bookplates, Jaffe says that a few, like Edwin Davis French, did establish a reputation for their stunning ex libris engravings.
Like a carefully curated home library, the imagery of a custom bookplate spoke to a person’s favorite subjects, hobbies, or values. For creative types, bookplate designs might be executed by beloved illustrators or feature symbols of their chosen art forms, while labels for people of faith could incorporate religious symbols and those for sports fanatics could display their games of choice. Beyond Europe’s ubiquitous crests and coats of arms, other popular themes included ancient castles, ships sailing on the ocean, magnificent trees and landscapes, classical nudes, animals (especially cats), starry night skies, and, unsurprisingly, books.
You didn’t have to have a custom design, as “universal bookplates” were (and still are) sold with popular designs that a book lover could just add their name to. However, custom designed bookplates, particularly those of famous people, are particularly coveted among collectors. Read more about bookplates and see a gallery of beautiful, strange, and funny examples at Collectors Weekly.
(Image: courtesy Lew Jaffe)
How do you draw the moon? Well, first you have to find an elephant. This absurdist tale from Grant Snider at Incidental Comics makes no sense at all, but it’s lovely anyway. An elephant drinking too many strawberry sodas just has to make you smile. You can get a poster of this comic to remind you that not everything has to go by the book.
