A young man just wants to finish his drawing, but something isn’t quite coming together. It’s the boobs.
You can see the ending coming a mile away; that doesn’t make it any less satisfying. Dylan Simpson made this short film for a local animation festival. Don't fret, it's SFW. -via reddit
It was a dark and stormy night... pic.twitter.com/f5G0lmZTrt
— PEANUTS (@Snoopy) July 30, 2013
For the 33rd year in a row, the English Department at San Jose State University has rewarded aspiring or otherwise writers for the worst opening line in a (non-existent) novel. The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is named for Victorian novelist Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton who once began a book with the phrase “It was a dark and stormy night…” and cemented those words as a writing cliche. Congratulations to Dr. Joel Phillips of West Trenton, New Jersey, who won the top honor with this gem:
Seeing how the victim's body, or what remained of it, was wedged between the grill of the Peterbilt 389 and the bumper of the 2008 Cadillac Escalade EXT, officer "Dirk" Dirksen wondered why reporters always used the phrase "sandwiched" to describe such a scene since there was nothing appetizing about it, but still, he thought, they might have a point because some of this would probably end up on the front of his shirt.
There were also runners-up recognized and winners in various categories such as horror, fantasy, romance, and children’s literature. Many “dishonorable mentions” are included on the winners’ page as well. A special categories recognizes “vile puns,” won by John Holmes of St. Petersburg, Florida.
Locals know it as Pinocchio Rock, because it's shaped like a proboscis, and lies at the edge of the cliff.
And more than one from the winner’s page paid tribute to Bulwer-Lytton’s famous line, like this dishonorable mention in the “Purple Prose” category:
The night was dark; which is a bit redundant, since night is by definition dark, unless it's a stormy night when lightning causes moments of brilliant light, or except in places like Norway or Alaska where summer nights can be pretty light, but still, most of the time when you say “night,” people are going to think “dark.” — Joseph E. Fountain, Fredericksburg, VA
Read many more horrible sentences at the winners’ page. -via Metafilter
See also: previous years’ winners.
In the Jim Crow era of the 20th century, landowners would not sell beachfront property on the Gulf coast to black investors or even families. Blacks were restricted from visiting any beach- except one. In 1923, Bishop Robert E. Jones of the Methodist Church established Gulfside Chatauqua and Camp Meeting Ground, later named Gulfside Assembly, on 316 acres on the coast near Waveland, Mississippi. It was a haven for local blacks and vacationing families from all over. Summer camps, church retreats, and seminars were held there for decades. The land was, in a stroke of cosmic karma, from the estate of President Andrew Jackson that came onto the market in 1922.
Luckily for Jones, however, his light skin and his position as a Methodist bishop took the question of race off the table. When he bought the property from John DeBlieux, a wealthy lumber mill owner who had once used the property as his family’s summer home, nobody thought to question whether he was black. Jones also secured the rights to a long-term lease of an adjacent 316-acre property from the state, but he ultimately didn’t develop the property, and it is now the site of the present-day Buccaneer State Park.
Yet the relative ease with which he secured the land for Gulfside didn’t mean that Jones was freed from having to make difficult — and controversial — compromises with the local white community as he began to develop it. “In order for them to remain viable … they had to accommodate white supremacy,” explains Andrew Kahrl, a University of Virginia history professor who wrote The Land Was Ours, a history of black beaches in America. That meant tightly controlling the movements of people visiting Gulfside by forbidding them from leaving the grounds; ensuring that people at the retreat, many of whom came from the North, obeyed the “racial etiquette” of the Deep South; and avoiding any provocation of Waveland’s white population. Alcohol and popular music were forbidden, as was sex, and activities were kept innocuous: Adolescents were taught to swim during the summers, and outdoor Bible study classes for families were held.
Gulfside was a respite and a place to socialize for victims of Jim Crow, and later became a meeting place for civil rights activists. The popularity of Gulfside suffered when blacks were finally able to enjoy beaches alongside whites, so the focus of the resort shifted to community development and elder care. Plans were made to open a retirement community at Gulfside, and a huge hotel was built to cater to the nearby state park and bring in some income. But mere days after the grand opening celebration, hurricane Katrina struck. Then the recession hit. Then there was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Yet there are those who recall Gulfside’s heyday and are committed to saving the resort for future generations. Read the story of Gulfside Assembly's unique history at Buzzfeed.
Have you seen the governor’s mansion in your state? Redditor coreyisthename put together an imgur album of images of all 50 state mansions, listed alphabetically. Many of them look pretty close to the same: nice big colonial houses. But some are surprisingly modest, and others are grand but of quite different styles. Which do you like the best? Which one would you most like to live in? And keep in mind, those are two different questions. -via reddit
The Chicago Zoological Society proudly announced two new arrivals at the Brookfield Zoo yesterday: snow leopard cubs! Well, the announcement was yesterday; the cubs were born on June 16th. Since then, they have been living in seclusion with their mother, 4-year-old Sarani. Their father is 5-year-old Sabu. Both cubs are female, and have no names yet (which sounds like a crowdsourcing project may be coming). Snow leopards are one of earth’s seven "big cats," and are an endangered species. There are only a few thousand left in the wild.
The new cubs will remain in their own private living quarters until October, when they will be introduced to the public. Meanwhile, you can read more about them at the zoo’s website, and keep up with their progress through Facebook. -via Buzzfeed
(Image credit: Chicago Zoological Society)
See also: the cubs’ older brother, born in 2013 and now named Everest.
LSD is a very minimalist physics game. There’s a box. You can draw lines. And a dot falls. Your goal is to get the dot in the box. Simple, huh? All you have to do is draw lines in the right place to bounce the ball into the box. It’s doable, but maddening at times. Inertia is not your friend here- if you get your lines placed just right, that ball will bounce forever. As soon as you think you’re pretty good at it, you’ll be put in your place. -via Metafilter
Instead of Moore’s law, the latest comic from CommitStrip appears to be an example of Wirth’s law, named for Niklaus Wirth, who recognized the phenomena back in 1995. It tells us that as hardware becomes faster, software even more rapidly becomes slower.
I’m no technical genius, but even I can tell that what we use computers for becomes more complicated all the time, which means we will never have the speed we want. Twenty years ago, I couldn’t load a video. Ten years ago, I had to buy a new computer just to start a blog. Now we stream full-length movies and live events. What's next? And how frustrating will it be?
Want to dress your dog up as a werewolf and possibly draw the attention of authorities? Check out this muzzle you can order from Russian retailer Zveryatam. It comes in five sizes and costs 2 10000 р, whatever that means -plus shipping.
Russian guitarist Alexey Kurulyov shared a picture of his dog wearing one. I’m sure he’s a bundle of love most of the time, but wearing this muzzle, he’s a hellhound straight out of your nightmares. -via Geeks Are Sexy
(Image credit: Alexey Kurulyov)
Harrison Ford stars in a Ridley Scott film based on a novel by Philip K. Dick. You can’t beat a pedigree like that. The 1982 film Blade Runner couldn’t help but become a classic of the sci-fi genre. Surely you’ll want to know some of the important facts behind the movie. For example:
4. RIDLEY SCOTT DIDN’T READ THE BOOK ON WHICH IT’S BASED.
Blade Runner is (loosely) based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by legendary sci-fi author Philip K. Dick. (It’s one of over a dozen movies based on his works.) But Scott didn’t read the book before making the movie: “I actually couldn’t get into it. I met Philip K. Dick later, and he said, ‘I understand you couldn’t read the book.’ And I said, ‘You know you’re so dense, mate, by page 32, there’s about 17 storylines.’”
5. PHILIP K. DICK HATED THE SCRIPT (AT FIRST).
Dick passed away before the film was completed, but he kept up with the script as it went through various permutations. He loathed Hampton Fancher’s original draft, saying he was “angry and disgusted” at the way it “cleaned my book up of all the subtleties and of the meaning … It had become a fight between androids and a bounty hunter.” A revised screenplay by David Webb Peoples brought Dick around: “I couldn’t believe what I was reading! ... The whole thing had simply been rejuvenated in a very fundamental way ... [The screenplay and the novel] reinforce each other, so that someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel. I was amazed that Peoples could get some of those scenes to work. It taught me things about writing that I didn’t know.”
Other bits of trivia address the question of whether Rick Deckard is a replicant himself or not. And there’s more about Blade Runner you’ll want to know at mental_floss.
There have been a few news stories out of the UK that have Americans scratching their heads. This is news? We are used to British newspaper websites being full of stories that would never make the papers here, but lately stories are published that are silly even by British standards. It’s the Silly Season, in which Parliament is on vacation, so there are fewer government news stories to fill space.
07:50 cow with garden chair stuck on head, Mounts & Wellingborough crew attended, cow self released #Boughton pic.twitter.com/b4vh57SBOd
— NorthantsFire (@northantsfire) August 28, 2015
The above story made the BBC. A rogue lawn chair attacked a cow at a farm near Boughton, Northamptonshire. You can clearly see the chair has the cow subdued in a headlock. By the time the Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Service arrived, the cow had freed itself from the chair. Thank goodness! -via Metafilter
Then there was the case of two wheelbarrow planters that had been tipped over in Henley on Thames.
Caroline Langler, a member of the Henley in Bloom committee, who had planted up the two barrows, said: “Obviously it’s annoying someone has knocked it over because I had enormous pleasure doing them both.
“When I was doing them people were stopping to ask about them and telling me how wonderful they were. People really appreciate them.” Mrs Langler, of Queen Street, said she was just thankful the barrow wasn’t pushed into the road.
The story has a happy ending, as Langler picked up the wheelbarrows and replanted them. Whew, that was a close one. -via Arbroath
Can you find a story out of the UK that beats these two?
Grumpy Cat is slated to be enshrined in Madame Tussauds wax museum in San Francisco. That means she had to travel to their studio to be studied, measured, molded, and photographed by the artists who will create her wax doppelgänger. Did Grumpy Cat enjoy the session? Duh. -via Tastefully Offensive
I always imagined a marmot would sound something like this. So I was as surprised as you will be to hear one actually vocalizing.
This was recorded on Blackcomb Mountain in British Columbia by the folks at Lone Goat Soap Co. Naturally, YouTubers had to edit this video to “improve” the roar, and to insert the marmot into an opera and a Taylor Swift concert. You can see those at Tastefully Offensive. -via Arbroath
Photographer Larry Chen noticed that honeybees were living in a wall of his house. They weren’t coming inside, but who wants bees living in the wall? Instead of calling an exterminator, he contacted a beekeeper named Mike.
Mike managed to remove an established hive and contain almost all the bees without harm. There was some wall repair to do, but it was a nice squared-off hole, so it shouldn’t have been too difficult. Highlights of the 5-hour process were recorded for your edification and amusement. In other words, this is fascinating. -via reddit
Belle Boyd, teenager, “fast woman,” and Confederate spy.
Karen Abbott grew up in Philadelphia and then moved to Atlanta. She experienced culture shock when suddenly confronted with people who seem to still be fighting the Civil War. It piqued her interest in the conflict, and she wondered how women were involved. There are always women involved in war, even if they don’t make it into textbooks. Abbot became intrigued with the stories of Elizabeth Van Lew, Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmondson, and Maria Isabella “Belle” Boyd. The stories of these spies and soldiers intersected with each other, and involved plenty of other women who left fewer accounts behind. They used the misogyny of the time to their own advantage.
In this climate, women made great spies precisely because of the way 19th-century society underestimated them. During the Civil War, they “were able to take society’s ideas about the weakness of womanhood and brilliantly exploit them,” Abbott says. “Women were always supposed to be the victims of war, not the perpetrators. One of my favorite quotes in the book is from a Lincoln official, who was completely flummoxed when he said, ‘What are we going to do with these fashionable women spies?’ The idea that women are not only capable of treasonous activity, but they are also capable of executing it more deftly than men was something that had never occurred to these men. The women were either above suspicion, in the case of somebody like Elizabeth Van Lew, or below suspicion, in the case of somebody like Mary Jane Bowser. Nobody even knew she could read, and of course, she was probably the smartest one of them all.”
If they were caught, or on the verge of being caught, female spies could play dumb, helpless, or indignant, declaring “How dare you accuse me? I am a defenseless lady!” Abbott says men didn’t know how to handle it. “Another one of my favorite scenes in the book is the hearing where Rose O’Neal Greenhow is being charged with treason against the United States,” she says. “The prosecution is questioning and badgering her, and she’s turning the tables on them and putting them on the defensive brilliantly. Then one of her interrogators says ‘I don’t think you are bent so much on treason as mischief.’ And it’s like, ‘Mischief? I basically won the battle of Manassas for the South, and I’m up to mischief?’ Even when the evidence was clearly laid out right in front of the men, she was just guilty of ‘mischief,’ because what more could a woman be guilty of?”
Abbot’s research resulted in a book titled Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War. The book will be available next week, but you can read an overview of those stories at Collectors Weekly.
From ancient mud bricks to salty beet juice, roads have a long, winding history—and a glowing future.
(Image credit: Brent Moore)
Long-wandering human tribes finally hunker down in 9000 BCE and form villages. To hop between settlements, they convert game trails—like the 440-mile Natchez Trace trail between Mississippi and Tennessee—into walking paths.
Around 5000 BCE, oxen become the preferred draft animal and the travois—a V-shaped frame that shoulders heavy weights—becomes the world’s first vehicle. Trackways widen to accommodate bigger loads.
Sumerians invent the best thing to come before sliced bread—the wheel—around 4000 BCE. Roads made of mud brick appear in the Indus Valley, while Mesopotamians build stone streets near Ur, Iraq.