A family in New Jersey watched from the second floor as a mama bear and five cubs played in their pool for about an hour. Dad is worried about the pool being ruined, the kids are upset that their toys are in peril, and Mom just wanted to enjoy the unique opportunity to watch bears having fun. I wonder if baby bears whine as much as human kids do?
The bear family enjoys the swing set, the slides, the floats, and the pool. Things get a little scary when Mama Bear starts playing with the pool pump, but a second video shows them all leaving, unharmed and much cleaner for their adventure. -via Metafilter
She asked him to cut the cake; he goes to the shop and designs and builds a new kind of knife, complete with a fancy handle. I was sure that by the time he got back, the cake would be completely consumed. After all, this is Matthias Wandel, the man who made the Perpetual Slinky Escalator and other wooden marvels. He gets lost in his projects.
But maybe she made another cake. Of course, to justify a new knife, many cakes would have to be baked and consumed, and I can’t argue with that. -via reddit
Bubba belongs to Amber Marienthal and her family, but he spends his days at school. He’s the campus cat at Leland High School in San Jose and Bret Harte Middle School next door. He roams the halls freely and stays from the time the first bell rings to the end of the latest sports practice.
The family initially tried to make Bubba an indoor cat, but he let them know loudly and often that he was unhappy in his confinement. Their home sits behind both Leland and Bret Harte Middle School, and Bubba became a frequent visitor to both campuses. Marienthal says she still gets calls from staff and students who see him on campus and think he's lost.
Bubba is known and loved by many at both schools, as his 600-plus Facebook followers attest. Marienthal, the administrator of her cat's Facebook page, says Bubba's fans want him to branch out into other social media.
Now, cats will let you know when they’ve had enough of your shenanigans. Most will struggle, claw, and even bite. This one will flat out tell you in words you can understand. -via Arbroath
Walt Disney World was Walt’s opportunity to improve upon the design and logistics of Disneyland, using his experience and the much greater land area in Florida. One of those improvements was building tunnels under the Magic Kingdom to facilitate the backstage activities that park guests don’t need to see.
When construction began on the Magic Kingdom in Orlando, the first layer of the park that was built was 392,040 square feet of “underground” tunnels, known as utilidors. Fun fact: They’re not actually underground. The “basement” level of the park is actually at ground level, and the part of the park visitors experience is the second floor. Cast members access the utilidors via staircases positioned at key areas in the park.
The Apollo 11 moon landing happened when I was ten years old. My school friends and I all felt sorry for poor Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, who didn’t get to step on the moon, despite being so very close. It was only later that we realized he flew higher than the rest of us billions of people ever will, and his name is remembered better than many NASA astronauts who later did walk on the moon. This is the latest from John McNamee at Pie Comic.
The constant admonitions to “think positive!” aren’t as useful in achieving your goals as we once thought. Of course, fatalism isn’t much help, either. But tempering one’s optimism with a real-world dose of pessimism may do the trick.
The Science of Us from New York magazine presents the psychological research showing that positive thinking can get in the way of getting where we want to be. -via Digg
Premise: The Gulf Stream, an Atlantic ocean current that helps regulate Earth’s temperature, has become so affected by global warming that it essentially stops. The ocean suddenly rises and massive icy tidal waves flood New York City. Within days, North America is a frozen wasteland.
Bad Science: Global warming can have a detrimental effect on the oceans, but it can’t stop the Gulf Stream that fast. Even if it could, in order for New York City to flood like it did in the movie, the entire continent of Antarctica would have to melt. For that to happen, all of the sunlight that hits Earth would have to be collectively beamed at the South Pole… for three years.
THE MATRIX (1999)
Premise: After the machines take over the world, the human resistance “scorches the sky” to block out the machines’ power supply— sunlight. So the machines use the humans for power, keeping them alive in a vegetative state while subjecting their brains to a life simulation. The machines “liquefy the dead so they can be fed intravenously to the living.”
Stacie Reis doesn’t remember the accident she had when driving home from visiting her grandfather in the hospital. All she knew was that she woke up a half-hour later in her upside-down car at the bottom of a ravine. Her phone had no service. Reis is a nurse, and knew she had to perform first aid as best she could, because it might be some time before she was found.
"I don't remember what happened," said Reis from Vancouver General Hospital, six weeks after the July 4 accident that left her with two broken legs, a broken pelvis, a broken sternum, multiple rib and spine fractures and feet that bore mostly broken bones.
In the minutes after she became conscious, she knew it was bad. Both legs twisted awkwardly to the left at the knee.
"The way they were pinned, it wasn't natural," she said. "The nurse in me was like, 'You need to straighten these out otherwise you're going to cut off your blood supply, you'll lose your legs."
So she did.
A group of Reis’ friends found her at 8 the next morning, 14 hours after the crash. Emergency services soon followed. Reis remembers hearing someone say her legs would have to be amputated, but doctors later said that her actions in straightening out her legs, no matter how painful, likely saved them. Reis has undergone several surgeries and is looking forward to the day she can walk again. -via Buzzfeed
Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum), also known as the Corpse Flower, is the biggest unbranched flower in the world. It also smells like rotting meat, which is where it got its nickname. It takes years to come into bloom. Would you like to see one bloom without having to experience the smell?
This Corpse Flower is named Perry T. Titan, and it lives at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. This time-lapse video was taken over 45 days as the plant grew from a corm to its full flower in the fall of 2013. The accompanying music is, appropriately enough, “Dance of the Flowers” from The Nutcracker Suite. -via Digg
In a follow-up post to 8 Weird Mysteries of the Internet, we find that there are more weird things going on that we realized. Websites and messages come online, and then disappear before anyone can figure out what they really are. Some are still around, but have never been fully explained, like Oct282011.
A website that appeared way back in 2011, Oct282011 had all the markings of a cult recruitment page. There was the fixation on a future date, and the mysterious text. There was talk of ‘mysteries behind the eyelids.’ But when its appointed date came and went, things started to get weird.
The site itself remained active. In curiosity, people began to call the number. What they heard was creepy, to say the least. There would be an unnatural silence followed by a loud beep. Some swore they could hear heavy breathing in the distance. One or two reported awful, muffled voices. At least one person heard something heavy being dragged across the floor.
In a YouTube video one person claimed they called three times, and heard something so disturbing, so disgusting that they can’t even describe what it was. One person who called six times heard a sinister voice whisper “it’s him again.”
Then suddenly, the website went dark. Just as Reddit got involved the whole thing shut down and vanished. You can go see for yourself. All that remains are banner ads, presumably put up by the enterprising new owner. Who was behind the original site, or what those horrible phone messages were, no-one can say.
The name Madame Helena Blavatsky was only familiar to me through Kurt Vonnegut references, and I wasn’t too sure that she was a real person. Now I know. Blavatsky was a real person, but how real any of the things she claimed to be are still in doubt. She said she was born in Russia in 1831, and had many adventures before she became famous for contacting spirits at American seances.
But the usual ghosts weren’t good enough for Blavatsky. In 1875, in a Manhattan drawing room, she launched a group with the grand title of the Theosophical Society. Setting ghosts aside, it would search out a higher class of supernatural beings: the “Mahatmas,” whom Blavatsky had allegedly met in Tibet.
These men, she said, could ship their souls anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice through “astral projection.” They could also ship other things—notably letters. Theosophists marveled at the projectile missives that flew through the windows of moving trains or were delivered by enigmatic turbaned men sneaking into tents at midnight. In the 1870s, instantaneous delivery of a message still felt downright miraculous.
There is, however, such a thing as too many miracles. At some point, the would-be wonderworker has to call on a friend to keep up with demand—and friends are unreliable.
Mass transit doesn’t have to be boring. Since multi-passenger vehicles were first drawn by horses, their owners have tried all kinds of ways to draw paying passengers or get more of them on board at a time. The latest hi-tech buses compete with whimsical designs, and they all are worth a look. Dark Roasted Blend has a roundup of the most unusual and eye-catching busses from history and from around the world.
Cats are compelled to attention by metronomes. Some can’t figure out what makes it move, while others know how to start it themselves. Some cats are startled by the clicking, and some just want to kill the infernal contraption.
SketchShe, the group that brought us Mime Through Time, is back with a lip-synch video featuring beach songs! It’s like a last hurrah for fun on the beach before school.
Watch them playfully mock beach-themed music from the 1960s through modern hit songs, from the vantage point of a sand castle car (the SandCARstle). There are plenty of funny moments; my favorite has to be the Baywatch sequence. -via Tastefully Offensive
