Silence between married folks can be good or bad. The bad kind of silence days, “I don’t have anything to say to you.” The good kind says, “We’ve said it all, and I’m happy just to be with you.” The important thing is that you’re both on the same page. That’s the message of the latest comic from Lunarbaboon.
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Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
* John Adams started smoking when he was 8 years old.
* Harry S Truman would get up at 5AM so he could practice the piano for two hours.
* Dwight D. Eisenhower hated cats. In retirement in Gettysberg, Pennsylvania, he enjoyed shooting at any cat that came near his house.
* George Washington had his helpers brush his horses' teeth.
* The song “Hail to the Chief" was written specifically for James Madison. Because he was so small, no one ever noticed him when entered the room.
* While he was president, Calvin Coolidge loved having his head rubbed with Vaseline while he ate his breakfast in bed.
Italian-American artist Arturo Di Modica created the 7,100-pound sculpture named Charging Bull that greets anyone walking down Wall Street in New York City. It has become an iconic emblem of the financial district. Modica’s aim was to encourage the financial sector after the stock market crash of 1987. What you probably don’t know about the bull is that is was donated to Wall Street with no permit, and no one was expecting it when it appeared on December 15, 1989. It was “guerrilla art.” So the city paid to have it hauled away!
There are lots of examples of guerilla art that’s both easy to install and easy to remove; graffiti comes to mind. But sculpture, especially bronze sculpture, is not. “Bronzes are not easy to haul around,” says Dianne Durante, author of Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide. “There's a Municipal Art Commission that's in charge of all sculptures on city property, and they have a process for approval before they allow a sculpture to be installed.”
Charging Bull was eventually brought back to Wall Street, although its ownership status is still a bit confusing. Read all about it at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Flickr user htmvalerio)
The Grateful Dead will perform three final concerts this summer at Soldier Field in Chicago before retiring. Those shows are sold out, but there’s another way you can take part in the band’s farewell: an auction on April 11 and 12 to disperse many years of accumulated Grateful Dead artworks, memorabilia, furniture, and more. As the end of an era draws near, Ben Marks of Collectors Weekly reminisces about growing up during the Grateful Dead’s heyday in San Rafael, and he talked to the band’s publicist and historian Dennis McNally about the task of archiving its history.
One of the band’s earliest attempts to chronicle its storied history is among the auction items. “As part of the process of becoming the Dead’s biographer,” McNally writes in the auction catalog, “I told [band manager] Rock Scully that I wanted to put together a list of all Dead concerts. He said sure, and gave me something that had been assembled by an office staff member, Janet Soto, which came from the contracts file. But it only went back to 1970, because Lenny Hart [drummer Mickey Hart’s father], who had departed with the treasury early that year, also took files with him. It also lacked the Bill Graham shows—they didn’t do regular contracts with him. So I set to work adding in earlier known shows and the Bill Graham stuff, and that’s the illiterate scribbles on the list Janet gave me—and which I returned when I started typing up a clean copy. This list marks the seed of what would later blossom into the stunning complexity of Deadbase.”
There's more to the story of how Deadbase came to be. McNally also tells us about the upcoming auction, and about the house at 1016 Lincoln Avenue in San Rafael where the band worked their magic.
In 1910, a gray tabby cat named Kiddo was the first to fly above the Atlantic Ocean. Walter Wellman and five companion set out from Atlantic City, New Jersey, on the airship America in an attempt to cross the Atlantic.
It was just at the last minute that Kiddo was thrown up into the lifeboat under the airship, where radio operator Jack Irwin had his post, and the cat spent much of his time cuddled up in the 'wireless corner'. A motorboat, occupied by journalists, towed the airship away from land until deep water was reached, and then cast it off when the sea became too rough for the small boat. The airship immediately disappeared from view into a dense fog bank. While that was going on Kiddo really did not seem to enjoy his first experience of flying, mewing, howling and rushing around 'like a squirrel in a cage', according to the log, and generally getting on the nerves of the first engineer, Melvin Vaniman. The America was the first aircraft to be equipped with radio, and apparently the historic first, in-flight radio message — to a secretary back on land — read:
Roy, come and get this goddamn cat!
It was a historic journey, although ultimately unsuccessful. Oh, the cat survived, as well as the crew, but the airship didn’t. The men and the cat were rescued by the British steamship RMS Trent, which took them to New York City. Kiddo was renamed Trent in honor of the ship, and was regarded as a celebrity as he lived in luxurious display at Gimbal’s department store following his adventure. Read the story of the ill-fated Atlantic crossing and its famous cat at Purr ’n’ Furr. -via Nag on the Lake
You’ve seen those huge human hamster balls, in which you roll around cushioned by a plastic pillow of air. Now imagine combining those with the initial scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, or maybe the annual running got the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Yeah, these folks are chasing each other around with huge rolling inflated hamster balls. We may be seeing the birth of a new sport! Remember this when you’re trying to come up with a birthday or bachelor party idea.
This rollicking action video is brought to you by Devin Supertramp. See the making-of video here. It explains a little about the "sport." -via Digg
The Avengers will be back in the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron premiering on April 13, then going nationwide May first. To get you ready, Cinefix brings us some trivia about the group of superheroes and the movie franchise they inhabit.
You’ll look at certain scenes differently from now on once you know the secrets behind them. -via Tastefully Offensive
(Image source: Joel Burger at Facebook)
His name is Joel Burger. Her name is Ashley King. They have been an item since they were in fifth grade, and recently announced their upcoming nuptials. The Burger-King wedding is scheduled for July. But then the fast food company Burger King heard about it.
Mr. Burger and Ms. King? Is this real life? Please help us find this amazing couple. #BurgerKingWedding pic.twitter.com/gwhFhCMmmR
— Burger King (@BurgerKing) April 3, 2015Burger King got hold of Joel and Ashley and presented them with a surprise: BK is going to pay for the wedding. There will no doubt be chicken fries galore at the reception. If you were just telling this story without evidence to back it up, they’d think you were telling a Whopper. -via Buzzfeed
This is a promotional film from Dodge produced in the 1920s. Getting around in the mud at an oil field doesn’t look all that pleasant, but the point is that you could actually get there in these conditions, which was a great selling point before we had all these paved roads everywhere. Note that you could roll the whole thing and the windows wouldn’t even break. However, this is a promotional video, and there had to be outtakes. You don’t show off your failures.
According to Classic Lantern, who uploaded this video, Dodge installed electric starters, generators, and lights on their cars beginning in 1914. I don’t imagine there was anything like a suspension or shock absorbers. -via the Presurfer
If you are lucky to live long enough, the conventional wisdom you were taught in school will be reversed, and sometimes those reversals might surprise you. When I was in school, there were two Germanys, two taxonomic kingdoms, nine planets, and a place called Yugoslavia. You may have been taught that the dinosaur species called Brontosaurus was a mistake in fossil taxonomy, and only existed in movies and old gas station signs.
In 1903, only a couple decades after it was discovered, Brontosaurus was demoted. Leading scientists at the time decided that the fossils found in the western U.S. were merely a species within the genus Apatosaurus. Museum specimens were renamed, textbooks were rewritten, and Brontosaurus was relegated to history’s dust heap. Today the iconic dinos don’t even have a Wikipedia page.
Now, it appears that Brontosaurus was real all along. A new study from Emanuel Tschopp at the Unversidade Nova de Lisboa and his team takes into account recent fossil finds and in-depth study to conclude that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus both existed in the distant past.
“The differences we found between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were at least as numerous as the ones between closely related genera, and much more than what you normally find between species,” explained Dr. Roger Benson, a co-author of the study from the University of Oxford.
A more detailed look at the research can be found at The Guardian. -via Metafilter
What exactly killed the crows? A series of images at imgur tells the story of an avian investigation. It’s a fine example of how science works, and how researchers must learn to shift gears when evidence leads off in another direction. I apologize for the presentation of captioned pictures instead of text, but there is no single news link that gives all the facets to the story. -via reddit
The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences is presenting a series of videos called Academy Originals with some Hollywood stories.
In this video, Special Effects Supervisor George Gibbs tells the story of that bridge scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. They could only do it once, so it had to be perfect. Well, I guess they could have redone it if they had to, but that would add days and dollars to the film shoot. Oh, and in case you're wondering, a Bailey bridge is a temporary bridge. I knew that, because when the bridge in my hometown collapsed around 1970, a Bailey bridge was the only way through for a good ten years. -via the A.V. Club
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
(Image credit: Flickr user Bernd Ploderer)
A quick look at Hollingsworth’s looks at certain effects of chewing
compiled by Katherine Lee, Improbable Research staff
Harry L. Hollingworth wrote the book that can be considered the bible of psychological research about people who chew chewing gum. Called Psycho-Dynamics of Chewing, it was published in 1939 as an entire issue of the scholarly journal Archives of Psychology. (Thanks to Jean Berko Gleason for assistance in chewing on this matter.)
The research was sponsored by the Beech-Nut company, makers of chewing gum. The publisher explained:
This book offers a series of experiments that study the psychodynamics of chewing in various contexts. Chewing is such a satisfying activity, in itself, that random masticatories such as straws, toothpicks, rubber bands, are utilized in order to support it.... The familiarity and convenience of the confectioned masticatory provides a useful technique for the experimental variation of such a motor automatism as chewing. Its widespread use in daily life makes it a conspicuous social institution, or at least a custom, and it is a problem of some scientific interest to inquire into the intrinsic factors which presumably perpetuate and extend such a conventionalized practise. With all these interests in mind we have instituted an extended series of experimental investigations on the role of sustained mastication in the psycho-physical economy of human activity.
Metabolism Costs of Chewing
“Metabolism Costs of Chewing,” Harry L. Hollingworth, Archives of Psychology, vol. 239, 1939, pp. 14–26. Hollingworth explains:
Ai Pioppi is what happens when a man building playground equipment gets carried away in his creativity. The restaurant’s playground has thrill rides for people willing to push, pedal, or otherwise put in their own power to make them run. It doesn’t look at all safe, and indeed, Tom Scott (previously at Neatorama) ended up with seven stitches in a fall, but Ai Pioppi isn’t in the litigious United States. It’s in Treviso, Italy. Watch as Tom and a friend pedal their way around the “bicycle of death." He says,
Thank you so much to everyone at Ai Pioppi: I'm sorry for bleeding on your ride, and for pronouncing your restaurant's name terribly. Thanks to Paul, who drove me to the hospital; thanks to the doctors and nurses at Treviso Hospital, too. And Europeans: remember to take an EHIC card on holiday around Europe, so your healthcare travels with you. I didn't have to pay a penny or deal with travel insurance!
And more than that: if you do go, and I recommend you do if you're ever anywhere near it: TAKE CARE. Even when you're on an adrenaline high and you think you're invincible. I wasn't. You won't be either. Hospital visits in a foreign language aren't fun!
You may experience some vertigo, but it won’t be nearly as much as these guys experienced. -via Uproxx
If you ever considered that the battle for the Iron Throne on the TV show Game of Thrones resembled a game of musical chairs, you aren’t the only one. That’s how the folks at Sesame Street interpret it, and that game is what happens in their latest parody video. Grover Bluejoy is tasked with running the game, and a Muppet that resembles Ned Stark with a slight Scottish accent plays the master of ceremonies. Notice the thrones are made of sports equipment, including one made of irons.
Who will survive this cutthroat game? Who will ultimately reign on the Iron Throne? -via Uproxx
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