A real estate listing for a 20-acre farm in Vulcan, Michigan, highlights the features of the property, like all such listings do. Or should. This spread has a lovely two-story home with all wood interior, a lake view, outbuildings, and oh, yeah! Plenty of wildlife, too. It would be too cool to find out that the deer came over to visit while the realtor was having pictures made, but my guess is that this photo was taken by the current owners. -Thanks, Jeneen Martin!
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A hot summer afternoon and a backyard pool. That’s nice, but when you take too much time to clown around for the camera, something unexpected might happen. The laughter from behind the camera only egged him on.
Like they say, pride goeth before a fall. -via Viral Viral Videos
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Around the turn of the 20th century, in much less PC times, there was an excellent baseball player named William Ellsworth Hoy. Because of the social agreements of the times back then, William was nicknamed “Dummy.” Why? Dummy Hoy was a deaf mute.
In those less enlightened times, many deaf mutes were nicknamed Dummy. And, for the record, William Hoy never minded his nickname, instead embracing it. If anyone ever called him “William,” he would always correct them, asking that they call him “Dummy" instead.
William Ellsworth Hoy was born in Houcktown, Ohio, in 1862. At the age of three, he went deaf from meningitis. He graduated from the Ohio State School for the Deaf and was the class valedictorian.
Hoy opened a shoe repair shop in his hometown and started playing baseball on the weekends. His natural talent was spotted almost immediately and in 1888, Dummy broke into the big leagues with the Washington Nationals. He was to play 14 seasons in the major leagues, playing with several different teams in Washington, Cincinnati, Buffalo, St. Louis, Louisville and Chicago.
Dummy Hoy was a superior baseball player, with a .288 lifetime batting average, while stealing 596 bases (some sources credit him with over 600 stolen bases). Besides being a very good hitter, with over 2,000 hits, Dummy was a superb center fielder. At the time of his retirement in 1902, he had set and held several fielding records for outfielders.
Released in August of 1987, the movie Dirty Dancing became a surprise hit, and then a surprise classic. What made it so memorable for so many people? Was it watching Patrick Swayze dance? Was it memories of coming-of-age summers we’ve all had? For me, it was that song, which I played on air for weeks before I saw the film.
4. RIGHTEOUS BROTHER BILL MEDLEY THOUGHT HE WAS BEING HIRED TO RECORD A SONG FOR A “BAD PORNO.”
Medley and Jennifer Warnes sang the vocals to the Oscar-winning song “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.” Medley told Songfacts that Dirty Dancing music supervisor Jimmy Ienner called him and mentioned he was gathering music for the movie. “It sounds like a bad porno movie,” he told Ienner. Medley’s wife was expecting a baby, so he turned the song down. A few months later Ienner convinced him to do the song, even though Medley didn’t think the movie would be popular. “We [Jennifer Warnes] just went in to work together, to sing together, and little did we know it was going to be the biggest movie of the year. Just unbelievable,” Medley said. The song ended up selling more than 500,000 copies, and Medley ended up titling his own memoir The Time of My Life. (Note: The film was actually the 11th highest grossing film of the year; Three Men and a Baby took the top spot for 1987.)
9. ACCORDING TO BERGSTEIN, EASTERN EUROPE WATCHES A LOT OF DIRTY DANCING.
In a 2006 interview with The Guardian, Bergstein talked about the movie’s popularity with people in the former Eastern Bloc. “And in Russia, it’s policy in the battered women’s shelters, when a woman comes in for help. First, they wash and dress her wounds, then they give her soup. Then they sit her down and show her Dirty Dancing. When the Berlin Wall came down, there were all these pictures of kids wearing Dirty Dancing T-shirts; they were saying, ‘We want to have what they have in the West! We want Dirty Dancing!'”
Read the rest of the tidbits about Dirty Dancing at mental_floss.
The crew at Glove and Boots needed somewhere to dump all their Thor puns, so they gave him a DIY show about crafts. This episode is about origami.
Thrill to the excitement as the mighty Thor, god of thunder, goes up against a little piece of paper. Try to guess who wins, and who conveniently gets the blame. -via Geeks Are Sexy
This French #Scrabble champion doesn’t speak the language. Wait, what?! http://t.co/JJ4eoIwcBG pic.twitter.com/nbG03WmZXV
— CNN International (@cnni) July 22, 2015
Nigel Richards of New Zealand entered the French-language Scrabble tournament in Louvain, Belgium, and took first place. But he doesn’t speak a word of French. Instead, he memorized a French dictionary.
"He can say 'Bonjour' and count from one to ten, so he can give the score to his opponents" said Liz Fagerlund, a friend, Scrabble aficionado, and longtime supporter. "I believe it took him about nine weeks to memorize all the French words for the tournament."
The trick to his success is learning the words without taking up the brain-space to remember their definitions.
"For Scrabble, there is a dictionary of words without their meanings," says Fagerlund. "It's most likely that he's wired differently; he doesn't even study the pages word by word. He can look at a page full of words and absorb them all."
Richards knows his Scrabble, though, and how to win. He’s held several English-language U.S. and world championships.
The crew of the show Jimmy Kimmel Live went out to pollute little kids' minds by asking them to explain adultery. It turns out that they have no clue, but are smart enough to extrapolate that it means something about an adult, like the opposite of childhood. That makes plenty of sense linguistically. So the interviewer switched to asking them to explain cheating. Kids know what cheating is, because they are warned against doing it in school. By the time they’re through, it’s apparent that no young minds were polluted after all. However, some parents may be confronted by confounding questions later. -via Viral Viral Videos
Yep, it’s togetherness all down the line, um, unless we’re different in any way. When that’s the case, we can take pride in our own superiority. This is the latest from Doghouse Diaries.
This video demonstrates how long it takes a loaded train to stop once the brakes are applied. Yeah, about a mile, and the train wasn’t even going fast. Some accidents can’t be avoided, but you never mess with a train. It also highlights what a dumb design a stretch really is, even though local people say the crossing is badly in need of repair.
The accident occurred last week in Ellkhart County, Indiana. A bunch of teenagers were in a limousine to celebrate a birthday. They all got out as soon as the vehicle became stuck on the tracks, and no one was injured in the crash. You can see the aftermath in a short video by the local sheriff’s department. The limo came out better than I would have expected, but like I said, the train wasn’t going all that fast. -via Metafilter
Ant Man is in theaters now, featuring a superhero that ’s been shrunk to a tiny size. That’s an idea that’s been used a few times before. It’s an opportunity to show off some special effects skills, and give audiences a different point of view. Remember Attack of the Puppet People? Of course you don’t.
Sally Reynolds (June Kenney) takes a job as secretary for the kindly-seeming dollmaker Mr. Franz (John Hoyt), unaware that her new boss is so afraid of being alone that he shrinks certain people down to one-sixth their size and keeps them around as “friends.” Filmmaker Bert I. Gordon went from one extreme (The Amazing Colossal Man) to the other with this C-lister, which -- like a lot of Gordon’s movies -- has its entertainment value even at its silliest.
Den of Geek has a list of twelve memorable films where less is more. You’ve probably seen more of them than you realize.
Harrisen Howes let a friend operate a drone while drunk, the friend crashed the drone on a neighbor’s roof. A couple of months later, Howes had a bigger drone, which he rigged with some hooks made from coat hangers in order to rescue the original drone. Let’s see how that worked.
Success! Made even sweeter by the addition of majestic music to the footage. -via Tastefully Offensive
From corporate offices to Internet dating sites, Americans lean on personality tests to make their toughest decisions. But do the results really mean anything?
(Image credit: Jake Beech)
Have you ever been told that you're an extrovert? An introvert? Those terms come from the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator Test. Psychologists, therapists, personnel directors, guidance counselors, and dating services all use variations of the Myers-Briggs Test.
Big-name companies rely on it, as well. Wachovia Bank, Hewlett-Packard, AstraZeneca pharmaceuticals, and the U.S. Department of Defense all license the personality exam for in-house use. And those quizzes on Facebook—Which type of vampire are you? What color is your personality?—also owe a debt to the legendary exam.
But how exactly did one personality test come to dominate the American cultural landscape? And why do so many psychologists and psychiatrists question the test's validity? Both answers may lie in the fact that Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs weren't trained scientists.
This is Just a Test
Here is yet another excuse for us to enjoy the amazing visuals of the film Mad Max: Fury Road again with a remix video. As Alex would say (and he probably will), “So shiny and chrome!”
The chase scenes lend themselves well to a heavy metal version of "Yakety Sax." The music is by Eric Calderone. -via Uproxx
However, if you prefer the old school Junior Walker version used as the theme to The Benny Hill Show, here’s the Mad Max video for you.
University of Portsmouth professor David Martill discovered a new species of extinct snake -in a museum. It was labeled “unknown fossil” at the Bürgermeister Müller Museum in Solnhofen, Germany. He recognized it as a snake, but what about those four legs? The fossil was collected from Brazil and dated to the early Cretaceous period, where snakes haven’t been found before.
Martill called the creature Tetrapodophis: four-legged snake. “This little animal is the Archaeopteryx of the squamate world,” he says. (Squamates are the snakes and lizards.) Archaeopteryx is the feathered fossil whose mish-mash of features hinted at the evolutionary transition from dinosaurs to birds. In the same way, Martill says, the new snake hints at how these legless, slithering serpents evolved from four-legged, striding lizards.
There are two competing and fiercely contested ideas about this transition. The first says that snakes evolved in the ocean, and only later recolonised the land. This hypothesis hinges on the close relationship between snakes and extinct marine reptiles called mosasaurs (yes, the big swimming one from Jurassic World). The second hypothesis says that snakes evolved from burrowing lizards, which stretched their bodies and lost their limbs to better wheedle their way through the ground. In this version, snakes and mosasaurs both independently evolved from a land-lubbing ancestor—probably something like a monitor lizard.
The Tetrapodophis fossil would lend credence to the latter theory. But no fossil is perfect, and scientists do not agree on how the four-legged snake fits into the evolutionary line or even whether it is really a snake. Read what we know -and don’t know- about Tetrapodophis at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
(Image credit: James Brown, University of Portsmouth)
These tiny tomatoes, their size measured in millimeters, are one of the ancient ancestors of the huge variety of tomatoes we eat today. Native to Peru, Solanum pimpinellifolium tomatoes are commonly called “pimps.”
Although you’d never know it from the colorful cornucopia on display at any farmers’ market on a summer Saturday, all modern domestic tomatoes (known botanically as Solanum lycopersicum) are remarkably similar. Taken together, they possess no more than 5 percent of the total genetic variation present within the wild species and primitive varieties. The domestic tomato’s progenitor has the other 95 or more percent. Modern tomatoes may taste good and offer eye appeal, but they lack many genes that allow them to fight disease and survive drought.
By contrast, the pimps and about a dozen other tomato relatives that grow wild in western South America are a tough crew, adapted to survive without the help of farmers in dramatically different climates: from some of the driest, harshest desert landscapes in the world to humid, rain forest lowlands to chilly alpine slopes. As far as we know, the inhabitants of the region never domesticated them. But a thousand miles to the north, the pre-Columbian residents of what is now southern Mexico set about planting and cultivating them, saving the seeds of those that bore the biggest, tastiest fruits and crossing desirable plants with one another. Distance prevented these early farmers from crossbreeding their new varieties with the original populations.
Scientists would like to crossbreed pimps with modern tomatoes to develop hardier breeds that can deal with climate change and monoculture challenges. But there are challenges. Pimps are dying out due to loss of habitat and commercial herbicides. And there are political problems with exporting seeds from Peru. And Peru itself is not interested in saving the pimps. Read about all these factors and author Barry Estabrook’s quest to taste a wild pimp, at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Scott Peacock, C.M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center)
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