If you look up Parmesan (cheese) at the Cambridge Dictionaries Online, and click the icon for an audio clip, you’ll find that it is pronounced exactly like the state named after William Penn. In case it gets corrected, turn the audio on in this Vine.
Yes, it’s a simple case of a mixed-up audio file, but it’s caused a lot of glee at reddit. From this day on, a new tradition will be passed down in some internet-active families: “Pass the Pennsylvania, please.” Children will grow up doing that and have no idea why when someone asks them years from now. -via Buzzfeed
(Image credit: personnel)
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Life in prison in the 18th and 19th centuries could be brutal, according to a memoir by convicted counterfeiter William Stuart. His accounts of starvation rations were taken with a grain of salt due to his reputation, but the reality is starting to be unearthed -literally. Old Newgate Prison in Connecticut was America’s first state prison when it opened in the 1770s. It closed in 1827, and was a museum until cracked and dangerous walls forced it to close in 2009. Before construction begins to repair the prison, a team of archaeologists is digging up clues to the institution’s history. What they’ve found so far is not pretty. Zooarchaeologist Sarah Sportman tells us of animal bones that prisoners consumed to supplement their diets.
“We have found more in the little test pits that they did than we have found ever before,” Peterson said. Most of the material comes from a layer of trash that dates back to the period between 1790, when the brick guardhouse was first built, and 1819, when the building was expanded. There are bits of broken pottery and glass, but the animal bones—primarily from beef, pork and sheep—are most interesting Sportman because many of them look like they’ve been smashed open and processed again and again.
“It’s something you tend to see in starvation contexts,” Sportman says. “You eat the meat and then you bash the bones open to get the marrow and then you boil them to get all the grease out. You can just keep going back to try to get every little bit of nutrition that you can.” These so-called signatures of starvation were recently identified on animal bones found at an 1846 campsite of the ill-fated Donner Party and a 1870s Chinese mining camp in western Montana called China Gulch—two places where there’s historical evidence that people were starving.
Read about the prison, the project, and what we know about life inside Old Newgate prison at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Sarah Sportman/AHS)
Some folks are lightning rods for success. Others are just lightning rods.
1. The Civil War’s Charlie Brown
Wilmer McLean just wanted everyone to get off his lawn. In 1861, the Battle of Bull Run—the Civil War’s first major skirmish—started near his farm. (McLean’s house was used as a Confederate headquarters.) One year later, soldiers traipsed back onto McLean’s property, sparking the Second Battle of Bull Run. Combined, the battles resulted in more than 20,000 casualties. By 1863, McLean was tired of having strangers die in his yard and moved to southern Virginia. But the war followed him. In 1865, the armies sparred one last time—near McLean’s new property. General Lee would sign the truce, of all places, in McLean’s parlor. McLean recalled: “The war began in my front yard and ended up in my front parlor.” At least he had a front-row seat to history.
2. Mr. Electricity
Seven is a lucky number to some, but Roy Sullivan would disagree—he’s been struck by lightning seven times. A Virginia park ranger, he had such bad luck that, on one occasion, a bolt struck him inside a ranger station, setting his hair on fire. After that, he carried a can of water wherever he went. But Sullivan’s seventh strike was possibly his strangest. Sullivan was trout fishing, and after Mother Nature lit him up, a bear stole a fish hooked on his line. When Sullivan recovered, he hit the bear with a stick, got into his car, and drove off in a daze—perhaps feeling lucky that the bear didn’t see him as a main course.
3. Alabama’s Biggest Rock Star
A litter of four new clouded leopard cubs were born on May 12, at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, Washington. Their mother, Chai Li, has not been feeding them, so they are monitored and fed round-the-clock by the zoo staff. They don’t yet know how many males and females there are, but they had their portraits taken at one week. See the pictures at Facebook and a bonus video at YouTube.
Clouded leopards, which are not closely related to leopards, range from the Himalayas through Southeast Asia. They are the smallest of the big cats. There are around 10,000 left in the wild, and they are classified as vulnerable. -via Buzzfeed
Rhett and Link decided that they’ve been telling too many lies lately and they should be more honest in their dealings with others. And they made a song about their efforts.
Well, being completely honest can backfire on you pretty quickly. Some lies are egregious, but most of the lies we tell every day are mainly to smooth over social situations or spare someone’s feelings. Those lies make the world go ‘round! -Thanks, Rhett & Link!
Did you know that there was once a possibility of a sequel to E.T.: The Extraterrestrial? In 1982, Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Melissa Mathison (who wrote E.T.) came up with a 9-page treatment for a film called E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears. In it, Eliot would be kidnapped by evil aliens, and E.T. has to return to rescue them.
It is now time for Elliott to be questioned. The aliens show no mercy when he replies with the truth. The questioning process intensifies when they learn from his memory that he has dealt directly with Zrek. The pain is tremendous for Elliott and he breaks down and begins screaming for E.T.'s help. Elliott black out but the echos of his last cry can be heard from a distance. At this point we follow, upward, the echoing cry for E.T. into the cosmos where the painful cry seems to die.
Wisely, Spielberg decided not to continue with the project. He believed that a sequel would detract from the memory of the original. Read the entire treatment at Genius. -via Boing Boing
Now that they’re coming up with completely new ways to terrify us and make us sick, I’m kind of glad that I gave up roller coasters years ago. This is to introduce you to the new Batman: The Ride at Six Flags Fiesta Texas in San Antonio. Sure, it’s a roller coaster, but one of those newfangled ones that can travel both above and below the rails, depending on the angle. Not only that, but each seating unit swivels on its axis! How does it work? Magnets. That's a big nope for me.
See it from all points of view: the riders’ faces, the riders’ POV, and long shots that are the scariest, because you see what’s really happening. Oh, and if you have long hair, you might want to pack an elastic to keep it in place. -via Geekologie
What would the Indiana Jones movies be like with a female Indy? If it were anything like this skit, Dr. Jones would have just as much snark, but she’s be treated a bit differently.
Anna Kendrick stars in a video produced for NBC’s version of Red Nose Day, a charity telethon coming up May 21st. -via Tastefully Offensive
@StaplesSteven Where did you board the train and at what time? ^CR
— Southeastern (@Se_Railway) May 17, 2015
On Sunday, Steven Staples of London was traveling by train and found himself locked in the toilet. No one could hear him, so he sent a Tweet to Southeastern Railway. The company responded immediately and worked to locate him.
@Se_Railway ok thanks. please try and be quick, it's not a great smell!
— Steven Staples (@StaplesSteven) May 17, 2015
Within about 15 minutes, the engineer arrived just after a young girl managed to open the door.
@Se_Railway I'm free!!! Thank you :-)
— Steven Staples (@StaplesSteven) May 17, 2015
No doubt it was a dramatic sequence for his friends and followers. -via Arbroath
During the drawdown of the Vietnam War, I recall feeling surreal about the U.S. not being at war, because, while we weren’t involved in Vietnam all my life, it sure felt like we were. That was an in-your-face war, with film footage dominating the evening news, war protesters, and fear of the draft. Times have changed. Journalist Martha Raddatz included this line in her commencement speech at Kenyon College:
You have spent more than half your lives with this country at war. And yet the huge majority of you, and those your age, the huge majority of all people in this country have not been affected by these conflicts.
The Washington Post, ever on alert for factual errors, checked to see if that was true. Students graduating from college in 2015 were mostly born in the early ‘90s, and have lived between 60 and 70 percent of their lives during the War on Terror. To see how this compares to other age groups, they made a table for all Americans born in the past 100 years. I see that while our country has been at war for 43% of my life, that figure is 83% for my two youngest children, born in 1998. The graph is a bit small in the image above, but you can see it much larger and read how it came about at The Washington Post. -via Digg
M.C. Escher himself would be proud of this photo that redditor zibin caught of a work crew in Singapore. The composition appears to form a Penrose triangle.
These workers are using a Genie lift with an articulating boom. They parked it on the pavement instead of on the grass underneath the spot they are working on. The angle that hides the arm of the lift is what makes it an optical illusion.
The problem with taking your squirrel for a drive is that he might want to drive. And he doesn’t even have a license! This little guy is named Phineas Bean. My husband had a squirrel when he drove a big rig, and said he never had a problem with the squirrel wanting to drive, because he was more interested in sitting on the driver’s shoulder so he could look out the window. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
Discoveries made possible by person-powered wheeled vehicles
Compiled by D.L.N Travasco, AIR staff
Bicycling presents both an opportunity and a source for insights into human anatomy, physiology and, in a variety of ways, psychology. Here are several published reports on what might be called bicycle science.
Biking 1
“Bicyclist’s Vulva: Observational Study,” (link NSFW) Luc Baeyens, British Medical Journal, vol. 325, July 20, 2002, pp. 138-9. The author is at Brugmann University Hospital, Brussels, Belgium.
Biking 2
“Bicyclist’s Nipples,” B. Powell, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 249, 1983, p. 2457.
Biking 3
“Effects of Altering Cycling Technique on Gluteus Medius Syndrome,” B.N. Green, C.D. Johnson, and A. Maloney, Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, vol. 22, no. 2, February 1999, pp. 108-13. The authors, who are at the Palmer College of Chiropractic West, San Jose, California, report that:
A 24-year-old male amateur cyclist had numbness and tingling localized to a small region on the superior portion of the right buttock.... The cyclist had received chiropractic adjustments 2 days before the onset of the symptoms. One week earlier, the patient began riding a new bicycle with different gearing than his previous one.... Repetitive strain of the patient’s gluteus medius muscle as a result of poor cycling technique appeared to be the cause here.
Biking 4
“Familial Idiopathic Priapism in a 48-Year-Old Man: Self-Treatment Through Bicycling,” F. Sommer, S. Nazari, T. Klotz and U. Engelmann, BJU International, vol. 89, 2002, p. 791. (Thanks to Peter Melvoin for bringing this to our attention.) The authors are at University Medical Centre of Cologne, Germany.
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This article is republished with permission from the September-October 2005 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can purchase back issues of the magazine or subscribe to receive future issues, in printed or in ebook form. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift! Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
Believe it or not, this is a cake. The Tattooine background may throw you off, but there’s chocolate inside. Gilles Leblanc of Les Gâteaux de Gilles made this cake in the form of an X-34 Landspeeder from the Star Wars films for a Star Wars Day collaboration with other bakers. It’s chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream, and can go from zero to 250 km/h in one Standard Time Part. Or something like that. Anyway, you can see more pictures of the cake at Leblanc’s Facebook page. -via Laughing Squid
(Image credit: Les Gâteaux de Gilles)
You never ever thought you’d hear this song played on accordion, did you? This was recorded in Seattle during the book release party for Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan’s new book How to Be a Man: (and other illusions). Bassist Krist Novoselic of Nirvana took out his trusty accordion and jammed with McKagan. -via Uproxx
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