The name of this comic from Liz Climo is “They Do, for the Record.” Yes, penguins do have knees, which they use to help propel themselves while swimming. You can see them in x-rays here. We just don’t see them because their skin, fat, and feathers cover them up. So I suppose you could say that they already have knee pads! In that case, wearing protection on their heads while skateboarding is a good idea.
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Now that the hottest baby names for 2014 have been revealed, it’s time to have some fun with them. Time built a generator that calculates what your name would be if you were born today. For example, if the name you have is the third most popular girl’s name in the year you were born, you’d get the third most popular name now. It also shows you the name of that rank in decades past.
These are the results of one of my many names. -via Metafilter
Here’s another feline lip dub masterpiece from Faireset (previously at Neatorama)! A cat named Amaron is trying to seduce a lovely lady cat by reciting Shakespeare’s prose from Romeo and Juliet en Francaise -as well as he can recall it. He does a pretty good job, too, until he starts to feel a nap coming on. -via Tastefully Offensive
Weld County (Colorado) Sheriff’s Deputy Sam Brownlee was killed in the line of duty in 2010. His son Tanner was 15 years old at the time. In 2015, Brownlee’s Dodge Charger squad car, which was retired after his death, was put up for auction by the sheriff’s department. At the auction on Wednesday, Tanner kept bidding, but was outbid by a stranger. The book value on the car was $12,500, but it eventually sold for $60,000 to Steve Wells, a local rancher. Proceeds went to Concerns of Police Survivors (C.O.P.S.), a fund that helps dependents of officers killed in the line of duty.
Tanner was disappointed that he couldn’t buy his dad’s car. But when the auctioneer handed the keys to Mr. Wells, Wells turned around and gave them to Tanner. The car was a gift. 7News Denver has a video of the auction that you have to see. -via reddit
(Image credit: Tanner Brownlee at Facebook)
Aaron Rouse of Adelaide, Australia, was feeding his python Winston a rat held with a pair of salad tongs. The snake decided he wanted all of it- including the tongs. Rouse tried to pull the tongs out, but Winston would not let go. Before you know it, the tongs were completely inside! Rouse took Winston to the veterinary department at Adelaide University where Dr. Oliver Funnell decided to perform surgery.
"With reptiles you have to make an incision between the scales and we just made it over the big end [of the tongs] because that was further away from some of the vital organs like the heart and the lungs," he explained.
"The clip was at the other end so these tongs would have been trying to expand the whole time, which would have been quite uncomfortable.
The surgery was a success and Winston is expected to recover completely. -via Buzzfeed
(Image credit: Adelaide University)
Eating and sleeping is pretty much what giant pandas do, and this guy takes his duties seriously. He cannot be distracted even when a crow comes and pulls his fur out! The crow is soon joined by another, and together they pluck fur to line their nests. The panda don’t care! Watching this, it occurred to me how convenient it is that birds build their nests in the spring, just as mammals shed their winter coats. This was recorded last spring at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
What, the X-ray wasn’t enough to convince you? It took me a minute to get this, but then I groaned. Then I remembered that we still have about four turkey wishbones hanging on a hook that we’ve never gotten around to breaking. This comic is from Buttersafe.
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Perpetually Pleasing Bathroom Reader.
Modern medicine makes it easy to determine if someone who looks dead really is dead— not in a coma or otherwise still alive. In the old days, it wasn’t so easy. Here’s a look at some of the methods doctors devised, along with a look at what prompted their creation in the first place.
BOXED IN
In 1905, a British social reformer named William Tebb wrote a book titled Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented. Tebb was a bit of a crank— before taking up this cause he’d spent decades campaigning against the smallpox vaccine, arguing that sanitation, not inoculation, was the only cure for the deadly disease. But there’s no question that in his day, the public’s fear of premature burial was very real. People repeated anecdotal tales of “dead” people reviving at the morgue or at their own funerals, and wondered how many hadn’t revived in time, and had instead died a slow, suffocating death in the claustrophobic blackness of a coffin buried six feet underground.
Tebb’s book was full of such stories, and was well-known among people obsessed with being buried alive. In the United States, a group called the Society for Prevention of Premature Encoffinment, Burial, or Cremation donated copies to public libraries, “hoping that they may be carefully and universally read.” However unlikely premature burial might have been, in an age when physicians had little more than primitive stethoscopes to help distinguish the living from the dead, mistakes were certainly possible. Given that the fear of premature burial was so widespread, doctors were at great pains to find more effective techniques for diagnosing death. Tebb described a number of the methods they came up with in his book. Few were very effective, but they did show a lot of imagination. Here are seven of the weirdest ones.
Kristie and Tavis are in their twenties and about to get married. With the help of a special-defects makeup crew, they were transformed into 50-year-olds, and then into a couple in their 70s, and even 90s. The reactions to each other’s appearance is sweet, and the reactions to their own is thought-provoking.
Too bad they just focused on their looks and didn’t add the presbyopia, cataracts, ED, middle-age spread, hot flashes, high blood pressure, hearing loss, and all those other little treats that come with age. -via Buzzfeed
Redditor bakesnorlax posted this picture of a school staircase with new “lanes” for designated students. It might make things go easier for a while, at least, but wait- what about the students coming down the stairs? Several commenters said that some schools had designated staircases for going up and others for coming down. Is that true? I’ve never heard of such a thing, but then I went to a very small school a long time ago.
The big question... pic.twitter.com/t5ln2nNJzi
— Telegraph Letters (@LettersDesk) May 14, 2015
Lidl is a supermarket. It’s an understandable autocorrect, one that David Lavelle and his daughter will always remember after it provoked an important discussion. He sent the story in a letter to the editor that was printed today in The Daily Telegraph.
On a different note, does the social media editor at the newspaper have to wait until the paper is printed and then photograph a clipping before it can Tweet something from the paper, or did they do this for stylistic reasons? A quick look at their account points to the latter. -via Buzzfeed
Oh, help me, I’ve found another simple but addictive game that I will have to practice until I’m good at it. In Twenty, you stack tiles that have the same value until they get to twenty. It’s not as simple as stacking two 10s, because they don’t add, they just go to the next number when stacked. Meanwhile, you’re working against the slow scroll and a time limit. You cannot ignore the little numbers, because they’ll soon get in your way. And somewhere along the line, tiles begin to be linked to each other, so you can’t move them. Guaranteed to steal your time away. There’s an alternate mode where you’re playing by turns instead of by the clock, but it has it’s own frustrations when new tiles drop on top of your work. -via Metafilter
This is exactly why you have to put a little time between finding out what your kid did and confronting him about it. Parenting experts will tell you it’s because you need to cool off in order to deliver calm, rational discipline instead of venting in anger. We’ll just let the kids think that. What we really need is a little time to put on our adult hat. No one illustrates this better than Lunarbaboon.
Are you tall? Left-handed? Can you make a great peanut butter sandwich? Is your last name Zolp? Then you might want to consider some of the ways these odd attributes can get you a scholarship! That’s the subject of this week’s mental_floss List Show. When you’re looking for money for college, it doesn’t matter how strange a scholarship is, if you’re qualified, you apply anyway. In my house, we’re getting to the point of applying for scholarships my daughter doesn’t qualify for, just in case. Some of these are school-specific or major-specific, but for enough money, you might be tempted to change your plans.
Biggs Darklighter was a rebel fighter in the movie Star Wars. He was Luke Skywalker’s friend from Tatooine and his wingman during the attack on the Death Star, who came to an unfortunate end. He had little screen time, but still ended up with a fan following. What you might not know is that Darklighter originally had a bigger role that was ultimately cut from the final film.
Jamie Benning tells that story in his new documentary Blast it Biggs! Where are you?!, with deleted scenes from Star Wars: A New Hope and an interview with actor Garrick Hagon, who played the role of Darklighter. Along the way, we learn more tidbits about the filming of Star Wars, like the forbidden horseback rides and a glimpse of the rebel pilots wearing flip flops to beat the heat. -via The Daily Dot
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