A burned goose was brought to the wildlife rehab organization Back to the Wild in Castalia, Ohio. She had been spotted sitting on her nest full of eggs while it burned during a suspicious fire.

“It’s just her instinct to protect the babies, it doesn’t matter what’s going on around her,” Sammie Villa, Back to the Wild staff supervisor, told The Huffington Post. “All she’s thinking is, ‘I need to keep my babies safe.’”

Because the fire is the subject of a police investigation, Villa was unable to provide more detail about what started the blaze.

The caller put the fire out with a bucket of water, but it was too late for the eggs to survive, Villa said. The mother managed to escape without any internal injuries, but nearly all of her feathers had burned off. Back to the Wild staff took in the bird to nurse her back to health.

But the poor goose got a second chance when the wildlife center took in six goslings with no mother. Mother goose immediately took the brood under her wing, keeping them in line and protecting them from perceived threats. When the goose has recovered all her feathers, the family will be released into the wild together. See more pictures at the Huffington Post.  

(Image credit: Back To The Wild, Castalia, Ohio)

Philippa Langley stood in a parking lot near the site of the old Greyfriars Church in Leicester, England. She’d been working on a screenplay about Richard III and was curious to see where the maligned king had been buried nearly 500 years earlier. It was 2004, and what she found was the city’s Social Services Department: The church had long since been dismantled, and everyone simply accepted that Richard’s grave had been lost with it. There was little incentive to look for it, since the most popular theory about Richard’s remains held that they’d at some point been tossed into the River Soar by an angry mob.

But Langley wasn’t convinced. She knew that a fellow Richard III enthusiast, John Ashdown-Hill, had recently published research suggesting the king’s body could still be in the ground. Exploring the area that day, the then 43-year-old, who is slim and blonde, wandered into the smaller of the Social Service Department’s two parking lots, the unassuming oil-stained stretch of asphalt farthest from the old city walls. And that’s when it happened.

“I had goosebumps,” she says. “I just knew I was walking on his grave.”

Langley still doesn’t know how to explain it. Call it a psychic vision, lucky intuition, or a step through a hole in the space-time continuum: Whatever it was, it was enough to convince her that the remains of Richard III lay in the ground beneath her. If she could unearth them, science could shed new light on a period of history long masked in myth. But to start digging, Langley needed more than a hunch.

It was fate—in the form of an illness—that brought Langley to Richard in the first place. In the 1990s, after health issues caused her to give up a career in advertising, she became a voracious reader. One of the books that captivated her most was Paul Murray Kendall’s 1955 biography of Richard III, which argues that many of the murders attributed to Richard were actually committed by other people. “It absolutely intrigued me, because I couldn’t understand how Murray Kendall described Richard as loyal, brave, pious, and just. I needed to understand how this Richard could fit with Shakespeare’s Richard,” she says.

Shakespeare’s Richard is one of the most compelling and evil characters in literature, a “poisonous bunchback’d toad” with a withered arm who killed the king, his brother, his wife, his nephews, and his friends to gain the throne, only to die at the hands of the righteous avenger, Henry VII. “Since I cannot prove a lover, to entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain,” Richard proclaims in his opening soliloquy.

Shakespeare, of course, was a storyteller.

The Truman Show hit theaters on June 5, 1998. Truman, played by Jim Carrey, unknowingly starred in a TV show about himself, and every facet of his life was controlled and manipulated by the show’s producers. Meanwhile, we were all watching a movie about such a TV show, and looking over our shoulders to see if anyone were filming us! But wait, it gets even more meta than that, when you know a little more about the story behind (as well as in) The Truman Show.

2. THE PLOT IS SIMILAR TO A MOVIE AND TWO EPISODES OF THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

Critics compared The Truman Show to Paul Bartel’s 1968 short film The Secret Cinema, which starred Amy Vane as a secretary who doesn’t know that her life is being filmed and shown to her duplicitous friends and family in private screenings. The Secret Cinema was played before showings of Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run in 1969 and remade into a 1986 episode of Amazing Stories. Niccol said he had never heard of the film or the episode in question when he wrote The Truman Show. Niccol’s screenplay was also compared to two episodes of The Twilight Zone: “A World of Difference” and “Special Service.”

8. A DOCUMENTARY WAS PRODUCED WITH THE SEAHAVEN ACTORS ABOUT THE TV SHOW.

Weir found that he had so much good material asking the actors to come up with answers to his questions as their onscreen personas that he put together a documentary unit to capture everything. Some parts made it to the movie, and the rest were turned into a half-hour documentary about the show that ran on Nick at Nite, presented as an episode of Tru Talk, hosted by Harry Shearer’s Mike Michaelson character.

9. ED HARRIS WAS A LAST-MINUTE REPLACEMENT FOR DENNIS HOPPER.

Hopper was supposed to play Christof, but he was either fired or left due to “creative differences” two months into filming (different versions of the story abound). Harris met Weir on set on a Thursday, worked on another project in New York for four days, then started work as Christof on a Tuesday. He would end up winning the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor and scoring one of the film's three Oscar nods.

There’s plenty more behind-the-scenes stories and trivia about The Truman Show at mental_floss. Plus the documentary mentioned in #8.

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Every group of children has that one kid that’s smaller or a bit less agile than the others. In a litter, you would call him the runt. Here, a long-tailed weasel leads her offspring over a wall. They aren’t all that great at climbing, but they eventually get it. Except for that one, who needs a little more time and encouragement. However, once he’s at the top, the other side looks so far down! What will he do? Mama comes back, but she’s a little exasperated by then. You’ll laugh when you see how the episode ends. -via reddit

Twenty-six years ago today, as communism was being dismantled in Europe, the massive political protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing were ended by government forces. To do that, they killed at least 241 people, but we will probably never know how exactly many. The Chinese government has kept any discussion of the Tiananmen Square Massacre underground. It is just not spoken of.

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China is again taking extraordinary measures to ensure that no anniversary commemorations occur, such as monitoring the victim’s mothers and censoring the very mention of even tangentially related search terms. However, in Hong Kong, where protests are going on this year, crowds have gathered to remember. -via reddit

Hollywood movies work under different rules than the rest of the world. We know the terms “cartoon physics” and “Hollywood physics” to refer to actions that would never happen so conveniently or photogenically in the real world. There are certain everyday objects that the movies go to again and again, but they don’t work the same for us as they do for movie characters. Take a pillow. In the movies, killers use pillows to silence gunshots. Don’t try this in real life. It may work just a little, but never so much that you can disguise the fact that you’re shooting a gun.

That's why real (movie) pros skip the gun part entirely and use the pillows themselves as weapons -- by putting them over their victims' faces and suffocating them with comfort. It works remarkably fast: about 60 seconds in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, 25 seconds in Revenge, and a zippy 10 seconds in Vampire Diaries.

Now, it's true that, when held tightly over a person's face, pillows really can restrict air flow. And you could maybe restrict all of their air as long as you have a victim who can't, you know, turn their head (remember, you're trying to get a perfect seal over both their mouth and nose) -- so at least Jack Nicholson had the excuse of being lobotomized in his scene.

Then, there is the length of time it takes for the victim to expire. While unconsciousness can set in sooner, "often the fatal period is three to five minutes" because of course it is. Try holding your breath for a half-minute. Are you still alive? There you go.

Movies don’t have three to five minutes to wait for someone to die! So we suspend our disbelief once again. But a pillow is only one of the 5 Everyday Products That Hollywood Thinks Have Magical Power that you can read about at Cracked. As always, expect NSFW text. 

Every once in a while, you come across an article about someone who works as a taste tester for a dog food or cat food company. It’s probably a nasty job, but someone’s got to do it. Or do they? The latest research indicates that human taste buds and cat taste buds may be so far apart that human tasters completely miss the mark.

The researchers (from pet food flavor companies) used cell cultures to test the cellular response of two taste receptors, the cells found on taste buds, that respond to bitterness in humans. Overall, the receptors in cats barely responded when exposed to natural and artificial compounds that taste bitter to people, such as the sweetener saccharin that has a bitter aftertaste. The receptors responded less to aloin, a compound found in aloe, and more to denatonium, which is added to chemicals like antifreeze to deter children from drinking them, suggesting that cat tastes diverge from people more than the researchers thought.

So maybe the cat food that is advertised as delicious could actually taste better to you than to your cat. Let’s hope that this research leads to the employment of hordes of hungry rescue cats as pet food company taste testers (and not just research subjects). That’s probably their dream job, after all. -via Uproxx

(Image credit: Flickr user Robert W. Howington)

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Here’s a fellow talking to a Canada goose in his own language. What they’re talking about, I don’t know, but he seems awfully friendly for a goose. If this seems like an anomaly, let me tell you a story. There is a flock of Canada geese that live on the river behind my house. They were once typical Canada geese with nasty tempers that would menace and chase people and pets randomly. Then the city installed a duck chow dispenser, allowing passersby to feed the ducks and geese for a quarter, and suddenly the geese are just as nice and friendly as this one. -via Tastefully Offensive

LaGuardia airport in New York was crowded. Flights were delayed for hours by weather -lots of flights. Among those stuck for a while were the casts of TWO Broadway musicals: Aladdin and The Lion King.

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To pass the time, the two contingents staged a musical show for the other stranded passengers. The costumes were missing, but the tickets were free. This is a rare chance for any airport entertainment at all, since buskers can't get past security. Warning: vertical orientation, but not through the entire video.  -via Viral Viral Videos

The cassette tape: smaller than an 8-track, more portable than vinyl, and most importantly, you could record your own mix tapes. What’s not to love? Well, they did hang up occasionally and the sound quality deteriorated with use. But cassettes were special because affordable recording machines made everyone a recording artist.

The global cassette-trading network flourished in the early ’80s—with musicians like Australian experimentalist Warren Burt and the Northern Californian industrial group Psyclones, featuring Julie Frith and Brian Ladd, at the forefront. Hal McGee and his then-girlfriend Deborah Jaffe had been recording experimental music in their apartment since 1981, he says, “but at that time, we weren’t aware that there were hundreds and perhaps thousands of other people worldwide who were doing the same thing.”

Fortunately, the technology for home-recording music arrived around the same time as the widespread use of the copy machine, which allowed regular people to also publish their own zines, as well as the paper covers that wrap cassettes known as “J-cards.” Around 1982, McGee’s friend and fellow home-taper Rick Karcasheff introduced him to “OP” magazine, an Olympia, Washington-based zine, which was filled with 50- to 100-word reviews of homemade tape cassettes. Each review would include a postal address so tapers could write to each other to buy or trade cassettes.

“When I discovered the cassette network, it was a revelation,” McGee says. “Instead of corporate music, you had very unique viewpoints of not just music, but reality. Every cassette is a one-of-a-kind artifact because they’re not like digital media. Sure, an artist can make several copies of a cassette, but every copy is slightly different than another. ‘OP’ had little reviews for cassettes that people were trading, and I’d mail my own tape to ‘em. And those people sent their tapes back to us, so there was a give-and-take of creative ideas. It was really exciting.”

Believe it or not, cassettes are making a comeback! Buying and recording cassettes has become a hip thing for Millennials. The reasons why are part of the comprehensive history of cassettes you can read at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: Don Campau)

Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.

Steven Spielberg makes a cameo appearance in The Blues Brothers. Look for him near the end of the film as a clerk in an office.

Sharon Stone makes a quick cameo as Woody Allen's sexy fantasy girl in Stardust Memories. She gives him a big, open-mouthed kiss through the windows of a train carriage and then she's gone.

Sigourney Weaver was in a Woody Allen film too- Annie Hall. “Unless you know my raincoat,” Sigourney says, “You'll miss me."

One of Paul Newman's finest screen performances is in 1981's The Verdict. Look closely at the final courtroom scene in the film, if you look carefully, you'll spot Bruce Willis as an extra.

Look closely in The Graduate for Richard Dreyfuss. He has two lines: “Shall I get the cops? I’ll get the cops.”

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In the months since Stephen Colbert left Comedy Central, he managed to grow a strangely white beard. He’s become quite attached to it, but CBS doesn’t think it will work well for their new late night host. So Colbert had to make some modifications to his “Colbeard,” in a video that he made to remind us he’s still around. The Late Show with Stephen Colbert premieres September 8. -via Stephen Colbert

The Mercado Central in Valencia, Spain, is one of the biggest food markets in Europe. Vendors have every kind of fresh fruit and vegetable you can think of, and some you’ve never heard of. There’s also meat butchered on site, imported foods of all kinds, liquor, and an entire wing for fresh seafood.

The market dates from 1918, and while climbing the stairs to its main entrance, it’s nearly impossible not to stop and admire the facade. Ceramic tiles are set above the arches, framing a massive circular window which bears Valencia’s coat of arms. And after entering the market, you’re likely to once again stop in admiration. Brightly lit, deafening and chaotic, with thousands of veggies and fruits creating an intoxicating blend of smell and color, the first impression of Mercado Central is paralyzing. But don’t stand still for too long, or an army of irritated old ladies will plow you down with push-carts employed like battering rams.

Juergen Horn and Mike Powell shop there as often as they can while staying in Valencia. Let them take you on a tour of the Mercado Central in words, videos, and a mouth-watering gallery of photographs, at For 91 Days.  

Keri Houchin turned an old Samsonite suitcase from a thrift store into a one-of-a-kind gift for her nephew by making it into a Star Wars suitcase! From her description, it seems like a fairly simple way to “nerd up” a possession that people will see -and will be easy to spot on the luggage carousel at the airport. You’ll need some Star Wars fabric, a hot glue gun, and oh yeah, an old suitcase. Read the DIY process and see pictures at One Mama’s Daily Drama. -via The Mary Sue

Here’s your daily dose of squee: When it’s cold, the kids at Sunflower Farm Creamery get to wear their stylish pajamas to stay warm!

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Believe it or not, their pajamas were store bought ready-made from Hoegger Supply. It’s enough to make you want a pet goat to dress. And to mow the lawn. -via Tastefully Offensive