Once upon a time, before computers or even photography, young people in France, Germany, and the Netherlands would keep journals called alba amicorum, which translates from Latin to “friend books.” Young men would use them to document their travels and education, and have teachers and experts write -or draw- in them. They could eventually be used as resumes. Girls made their own books, and had their friends add art, poetry, and personal notes to them. They became a document of events and relationships. There’s more to learn and fascinating images at Messy Nessy Chic. -via the Presurfer
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
"Under certain circumstances, liquid water has been found on Mars" - Jim Green, NASA Planetary Science Director https://t.co/MvErxberG3
— NASA (@NASA) September 28, 2015
NASA has been teasing an important discovery all weekend, and apparently people have been guessing correctly. Mars has liquid water “under certain circumstances.” There’s more at Wired.
We’re not talking gushing rivers or oceans here. These scientists have been investigating “recurring slope lineae,” patches of precipitated salt that appear to dribble down Mars’ steep slopes like tears rolling gently down a cheek. Planetary scientists hypothesized that the streaky formations were products of the flow of water, but they didn’t have concrete, mineralogical evidence for that idea until now, says Lujendra Ojha, a scientist at Georgia Tech who first spotted the lineae back in 2010. In a new Nature Geoscience paper, published online today, Ojha and his colleagues present “smoking gun validation” that it was liquid water flowing on Mars’ surface that formed these tear stains.
The discovery may have implications for the search for life on Mars, whether in the past or existing today.
Before Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and How I Met Your Mother, Neil Patrick Harris was a child star, playing a precocious kid with a medical degree on the show Doogie Howser, M.D. It was a silly premise, but the show was quite popular. If you were a fan, or even if you weren’t, you might want to know some trivia from behind the scenes.
1. THE NETWORK DIDN’T LIKE NEIL PATRICK HARRIS. OR THE SHOW.
Doogie Howser, M.D. was brought to ABC by Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law), a producer with an impressive track record. Despite his reputation, the network wasn’t pleased with his choice of Neil Patrick Harris in the title role. But Bochco was undeterred: He went ahead and shot the pilot episode (which was written by series co-creator David E. Kelley) since he had a crucial clause in his contract that paid him a significant penalty if executives chose to bury the project. ABC didn’t like the pilot, either—but test audiences did. "It tests a high number, and it’s put on the air because of how it tested—not because anybody at the network believed in it," Kelley told Vulture. "And the rest is history.”
4. REAL DOCTORS GAVE IT A POOR DIAGNOSIS.
When Doogie premiered in the fall of 1989, it left audiences wondering if a 16-year-old could really operate as a surgical resident. To find out, TV Guide asked Harvard Medical School admissions officer Helen Rakin. "Doogie Howser would have had to graduate from college at nine, start medical school at 10, graduate from medical school at 14, then, after one year of internship and one year of residency, obtain his license to practice at 16," she said. "I don't think so." The Los Angeles Times also chimed in, quoting the then-dean of students at Johns Hopkins as saying he would never admit someone of Howser’s age.
Did it really matter that the show’s gimmick was totally unbelievable? It didn’t stop Mr. Ed or The Walking Dead. And it didn’t stop Doogie Howser, either. Read the rest of the trivia list at mental_floss.
It is illegal in most places to damage, destroy, or remove survey markers, for good reason. But over a couple of hundred years, they tend to sink, disintegrate, or otherwise disappear as progress goes on over them. More than once I’ve had to deal with property markers that were swallowed by growing trees! Imagine what happens to markers in an ever-changing city- but occasionally someone finds a historic surveyor bolt in Manhattan.
The bolt was hammered by John Randel Jr, the surveyor and brains behind the Manhattan Grid. In 1808 he was given the task of planning and commencing the beastly project of transforming the as-of-yet piecemeal-designed New York City into the modern gridded metropolis we know today. For years he surveyed and mapped his vision for the new city. Finally, in 1811 he submitted his designs to the city of New York.
But that was the easy part. For nearly a decade he roamed the city, attempting to put either long metal bolts or monuments (three-foot by nine-foot marble slabs) into nearly 1,000 future intersections. These markers were the necessary precursor to actually building the brand new streets.
That was a big job, and he also had to contend with the existing residents who didn’t think much of his plan that would evict most of them in order to build new roads. Over 200 years later, finding one of the original Randall bolts is a rare and glorious find, but don’t expect to find a map of them so you can go see. Read about the bolt hunters of New York at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: z22)
This guy was gassing up his car in Center Line, Michigan, when he saw a spider. He wanted to kill it. The first weapon he thought of was his lighter. Imagine what happened then.
The gas station clerk immediately hit the pump cutoff button and called the fire department. The guy who started it all (whose name has not been released) grabbed a fire extinguisher and put out the flames. It could have been so much worse. Strangely, the only thing destroyed in the fire was the gas pump. The car was barely touched, and no one was injured. -via Arbroath
It is estimated that two million children have fled from the war in Syria and surrounding countries with or without their families over the past five years. Award-winning photographer Magnus Wennman traveled to various refugee camps and gatherings of refugee groups in many countries to document their plight. A series of his pictures showing where the children sleep is accompanied by their stories at the Swedish site Aftonbladet. Shown above is 5-year-old Lamar, and here’s her story.
Back home in Baghdad, the dolls, the toy train, and the ball are left; Lamar often talks about these items when home is mentioned. The bomb changed everything. The family was on its way to buy food when it was dropped close to their house. It was not possible to live there anymore, says Lamar’s grandmother, Sara. After two attempts to cross the sea from Turkey in a small, rubber boat, they succeeded in coming here to Hungary’s closed border. Now Lamar sleeps on a blanket in the forest, scared, frozen, and sad.
That is only one of 22 such stories in the post. See more of Wennman’s photography at Instagram. Some of it may be disturbing. -via Metafilter
Kathleen Siegle made a batch of cupcakes that resemble a Sarlacc -the horrible, man-eating monster buried in the sands of Tattooine in the movie Return of the Jedi. The sand is really graham cracker crumbs, the tentacles are chocolate, and the teeth are almond slivers. Yum! The recipe and instructions are at Yummy Crumble.
The Sarlacc cupcakes look fairly doable for an ambitious Star Wars fan, but Siegle also has some really artistic creations that are bit more intimidating, like the Sarlacc Bundt Cake, Tusken Raider Cookies, and a Wampa Cake. -Thanks, Kathleen!
John Mogan and Ashley Duboe were arrested last week in connection with a bank robbery in Asheville, Ohio. The bank was robbed on August 24 when a man wearing a hoodie demanded cash from a teller. Just a few days later, Mogan and Duboe began posting a series of photographs on Facebook featuring Mogan posing with wads of cash.
Mogan is a convicted felon who was just released from prison after serving about five years for robbing a bank in Lancaster, a city 20 miles east of Ashville. A female accomplice was also arrested in connection with Mogan's July 2010 robbery of a Fairfield National Bank branch.
Mogan began serving a three-year parole term immediately following his July 19 release from an Ohio state lockup. The heavily tattooed Mogan has the phrases “Loyalty’s Thin” and “Betrayal’s Thick” on opposite cheeks.
Investigators allege that prior to driving Mogan to the Ashville bank, Duboe applied makeup to his face and neck to cover numerous tattoos.
Mogan and Duboe are being held in the Pickaway County jail in lieu of $250,000 bond. You can see a slideshow of the incriminating images at The Smoking Gun. -via reddit
Artist Simon Koay created a super geeky alphabet called Superbet, with each letter modeled after superheroes and super villains who have that letter in their names. Get a better look at each letter at Koay’s website. In case you can’t identify them all, here’s the cheat sheet:
A - Captain America
B - Batman
C - Cyclops
D - Daredevil
E - Elektra
F - Flash
G - Ghost Rider
H - Hulk
I - Iron Man
J - Joker
K - Killer Croc
L - Loki
M - Mystique
N - Nightcrawler
O - Omega Red
P - Poison Ivy
Q - Quicksilver
R- Riddler
S - Spiderman
T - Two-Face
U - Ultron
V - Venom
W - Wolverine
X - Professor X
Y - Yellowjacket
Z - Zatanna
You can get a print of each individual letter, perfect for a child’s room, or a print of the Superbet A to Z at Society 6. -via Geeks Are Sexy
The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader.
(Image credit: Kerem Barut)
Climbing the world’s most famous mountain appears on many lists of things people want to do before they die. But there are some very good reasons not to.
REASON #1: IT’S HARDER THAN YOU THINK
Most people don’t realize how recently it was that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made the first successful climb to the top. That was 1953. Before that, starting in the 1920s, there were many unsuccessful attempts by highly qualified western climbers, and many fatalities. Today, even with expert assistance and canisters of oxygen, a lot of people don’t make it up the mountain… and a lot don’t make it back down again.
(Image credit: Olaf Rieck)
#2: IT’S ABSURDLY EXPENSIVE
Here’s what you can expect to pay before you set foot on the mountain:
The Great Lakes Bat Festival was held on Saturday at the Cranbrook Institute in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. It’s sponsored by the Organization for Bat Conservation. Here you see biologist Rob Mies talking about bats and exhibiting a Malayan Flying Fox. As you can see, the bat is gesturing to a kindred spirit in the audience. -via reddit
If so many people are tuning into the Republican debates only to see Donald Trump in action (which is what he claims), then an all-Trump debate would garner the highest ratings of all!
Ellen Degeneres has the right idea. If there were an all-Trump 24/7 channel, some people would tune in all day -while others would wait for the highlights to hit YouTube. Some would be cheering, and others would be laughing. -via Boing Boing
Who’s the boss? The boss is the one who’s up several times a night to feed the baby, then has to get the other child ready for school, buy the groceries, clean the kitchen, change the diapers, balance the checkbook, remember appointments, help with homework, load the dishwasher, and feed the baby again. A lot of women do this as a breadwinner and/or single parent. Supervision goes by the wayside in such a situation, so jellybeans sounds like a good enough breakfast. This is the latest from Lunarbaboon.
We told you about the Warriors Festival a couple of weeks ago, with the original movie cast reuniting for an appearance. How did that go? The actors from the 1979 film The Warriors arrived by the Q train, of course, recreating the journey in the movie in which they left the city gang wars to return to their home turf on Coney Island. Rolling Stone followed along with cameras. It was a little different this time around.
For one thing, the subway cars are no longer covered in graffiti. There was no turnstile-jumping, of course. And along the way, they met fans of the movie and even modern day gang members! See more videos of the event at Rolling Stone. -via mental_floss
In 1966, Hal Warren made a movie called Manos: The Hands of Fate. He used one cheap camera that couldn’t even record sound. He talked a local theater group into acting for a cut of the profits, but there weren’t any. The premiere audience laughed at it! And then they forgot it for 26 years.
A flimsy horror story centered on a vacationing family who run afoul of a polygamist cult leader and his henchman, Manos played a handful of drive-in theaters before slipping into obscurity. Decades later, Mystery Science Theater 3000, a television show specializing in the mockery of misguided films, unearthed the movie like a fossilized turd. The 1993 episode devoted to Manos became an instant cult classic. Fans marveled at the seemingly endless footage of Warren driving around the desert, the inability of the Filmo 70 to focus and frame shots at the same time and the utterly bizarre performance of John Reynolds as the character Torgo, portrayed as a twitchy, knobby-kneed groundskeeper while Reynolds himself was often baked out of his face on LSD.
“It seemed like it was maybe a crime against humanity, but you couldn’t be sure,” says MST3K writer Frank Conniff, who had pulled Manos from a stack of tapes at the show’s offices. “It has an atmosphere, a vibe. Why did people latch on to it? I don’t know. It’s like the Supreme Court’s definition of porn: You’ll know it when you see it.”
MST3K gave the movie what it needed: jokes to fill the voids. But the film the show used was a poor copy of a copy. Then in 2011, a film buff discovered an original print. He immediately set about raising money to restore it to its “original glory.” The question arose: who has the rights to the movie? It was thought to be in the public domain, but Hal Warren’s son disputes that. And then a mysterious third party, a man who once tried to film a sequel to Manos, emerged to get involved in the copyright saga. You can read the whole sordid story of Manos: The Hands of Fate at Playboy. The article is SFW. -via Metafilter
The restored version of Manos: The Hands of Fate will be released on Blu-ray October 13th. You can see the MST3K version now at YouTube.
Email This Post to a Friend