Can you figure out what these equations are trying to say? I must admit there were a couple I couldn’t- not because I couldn’t do the math, but because I was unfamiliar with the saying it translates to. The more modern the saying, the more liable I am to slap my head when the answer is revealed. The answers are at Doghouse Diaries.
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During the original run of the MTV animated series Beavis and Butt-head from 1993 to 1997, I laughed uproariously because they reminded me of so many of the young guys I worked with at various radio stations. Many of the internet generation had to sneak to watch the show, or only know it in reruns, so you might not know much about Beavis and Butt-head’s groundbreaking series.
2. MTV PULLED THE SHOW SOON AFTER IT BEGAN.
Not due to any controversies, but because Mike Judge and the animation staff couldn’t keep up with the demand for new material, forcing MTV to stop airing the show entirely two weeks after it premiered. It made its return over six weeks later on May 17th with “Scientific Stuff” and “Good Credit.”
5. ALL REFERENCES TO FIRE WERE REMOVED PERMANENTLY AFTER THE SHOW WAS BLAMED FOR A DEATH.
In October 1993, a 5-year-old boy set fire to his Ohio home which killed his 2-year-old sister. Their mother claimed Beavis’ fire-making and blatant spoken love of arson was responsible. MTV’s quick response was to only air the show after 10:30pm and to wipe all fire references from all of the previous episodes—only fans who taped the offending episodes on their VCRs have proof that the word was ever uttered. “Fire” was banned for the rest of the series’ original run, but it was allowed again in 2011.
11. BEAVIS ALMOST SAID SOMETHING TOO CLEVER.
Judge told The New York Times in 1993 that one of the big challenges of the show was to keep the two in character and, therefore, dumb. An original line had Beavis telling his classmates that they had “Beavis envy” because he received a school pass. It was cut because it almost made the 14-year-old with the underbite too smart. In 2011, Judge admitted to “cheating” and probably making them smarter than they are during the music video commentaries.
There’s plenty more stories about Beavis and Butt-head in a trivia list at mental_floss.
We hear occasional stories about people who have themselves delivered by the postal service, but Reg Spiers took it to the limit by shipping himself as cargo from England back home to Australia! An Olympic hopeful in the javelin throw, Spiers was stranded in England with no money and wanted to get home in time for his daughter’s birthday in 1964. Shipping a heavy package cost more than flying in a seat, but for a seat you have to buy a ticket, while cargo could be shipped COD. So he had a friend build him a box and he addressed himself to a fictional shoe company. And it wasn’t a non-stop flight.
"I got out of the box between London and Paris, dying for a leak," says Spiers. "I peed in a can and put it on top of the box. I was stretching my legs and all of a sudden, because it's a short distance, the plane began to descend. A little panicky I jumped back in the box, and the can full of pee was still sitting on top."
The French baggage handlers in Paris thought the can's unsavoury contents had been left for them as an unkind joke by their counterparts in London.
"They were saying some terrible things about the English," says Spiers. "But they didn't even think of the box. So I kept on going."
The next stop on the long journey back to Australia was in Bombay, where baggage handlers parked Spiers - upside down - in the sun's glare for four hours.
"It was hot as hell in Bombay so I took off all my clothes," he says. "Wouldn't it have been funny if I'd got pinched then?"
Spiers made it home, and avoided paying for the shipment. Read how he did it, and don’t skip what happened to the athlete in later years, at BBC magazine. -via reddit
(Image credit: John McSorley)
A boy at school called her ugly, and she gave him what for. This 4-year-old girl has the right attitude, and her comeback -whether it really happened that way or not- is priceless. And she happens to be very pretty, too. However, the pause she takes before the word “ugly” is heartbreaking, because words like that hurt no matter how confident you are. -via Buzzfeed
Why do people remember and even testify to things that didn’t happen? We know that some confessions are coerced, and some “recovered memories” are actually implanted, but recent research shows that the power of suggestion can lead most people to truly believe false events, to the point that they fill in the details, whether those details make sense or not. In one experiment, over 70% of students participating in the study (none of whom had a criminal record) began to believe they’d committed a crime that was suggested to them.
These are troubling findings. They mimic, in the gentlest way, what can happen during police questioning: a small lie, told to shake loose the truth, rattles around in a suspect’s imagination and takes root. The psychologist Saul Kassin has studied interrogation and false confession for decades. He told me that Shaw and Porter’s experiment illustrates perfectly how social pressure can make innocent people admit to wrongdoing. “Think about the dilemma the suspect now faces: ‘I don’t have a memory for this, but the person who took care of me does. Therefore it must be true and I have to find a way to remember it.’ ”
There have been cases of people serving long sentences or even execution based on the power of suggestion. Read more about false confessions and research about it at The New Yorker. -via Digg
(Image credit: Flickr user Yumi Kimura)
Every time the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus comes to our town in the past few years, my youngest daughter, who dearly loves elephants, has to go. She doesn’t buy a ticket; she goes to hold a sign in protest against the circus’s use of animals. She and others like her can now celebrate a victory. The Greatest Show on Earth has announced that they will phase out elephant acts by the year 2018.
“This decision was not easy, but it is in the best interest of our company, our elephants and our customers,” CEO Kenneth Feld said in a press statement. Feld’s 43 elephants, which form the largest herd in North America, will retire to a 200-acre sanctuary in central Florida.
"There's been somewhat of a mood shift among our consumers," Executive Vice President Alana Feld told the AP.
That’s putting it mildly. Feld Entertainment, the circus’s parent company, has spent years fighting lawsuits and paying fines and settlements over the alleged mistreatment of animals. Animal rights groups are celebrating the decision.
(Image credit: Amy n Rob)
We’ve seen pictures of cat ladders and cat elevators that people use to give their cat access to upper floors in apartment buildings. This Russian cat uses the physical method: he climbs a rope made of braided towels! That’s kinda cool, but what’s really cool is the close-up of the cat’s determined expression. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Beyond the border of an ordinary parking lot lies the most cutting-edge graveyard in the world … and a hands-on lab for cops and forensic anthropologists.
It was Valentine's Day when the gravediggers finished. The crew stood there waiting, their long-sleeved shirts drenched from a mixture of cold rain and sweat. At their feet were the holes—four of them—dug deep into the heavy clay. Nearby, young women and men in rubber gloves and medical gowns prepared to haul the cadavers down the hill.
Picking their way through the barren woodland, they carried 10 bodies to the burial site. Into the first ditch, the widest, they placed six corpses. In the second, they arranged three more. Just one body went into the third grave. The last was left empty. Then the gravediggers picked up their shovels and filled the holes.
Nicknamed “the body farm,” the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Center is the oldest and most established of only four such facilities in the country. Since its inception in the early ’80s, its three wooded acres have been rife with corpses: bodies stuffed inside cars, enshrouded in plastic, rotting in shallow graves. Among them, grad students dutifully clock hours combing corpses for insects, while law enforcement agents undergo crime-scene training exercises.
It’s here, using donated cadavers, that scientists have pioneered some of the most innovative techniques in forensic science, particularly practices that help investigators pinpoint time of death—that linchpin of criminal cases that so often determines whether a killer is charged or set free. “The research we do at the facility is predominantly based on decomposition,” says center director Dawnie Steadman, “but we’re expanding that tremendously.” Now, as the bodies rest in those four anonymous graves, the center is primed to undertake a cutting-edge three-year experiment that may help scientists uncover clandestine burial sites in the world’s most dangerous conflict zones. With the help of laser technology, the reach of the body farm is about to grow exponentially, and the findings will shed light on some of history’s most heinous unsolved crimes.
They may not be super powers like in the comic books, but we all have powers. Let’s just hope that we use them for good instead of evil. But seriously, if you saw a super hero punching a flying creature from the Black Lagoon in the air, wouldn’t you say something a little more than “Cool”? This is the latest from Lunarbaboon.
It’s hard enough to understand why Obi-Wan Kenobi just gave up the ghost, so to speak, and just let Darth Vader kill him off. Sure, he was able to return and give advice to Luke, but he could have taken better advantage of the situation even after death. The folks from Dorkly show us what might have been -what should have been- in glorious pixelated animation.
Domino artist Flippycat (previously at Neatorama) built a giant Etch-A-Sketch toy out of dominos! Then with a little stop-motion video magic, he illustrates the way you’d draw on a giant domino Etch-a-Sketch. The finished masterpiece is made of dominos, so you know what he did next. Yes, he knocked them all down, and then some. -via Tastefully Offensive
This is proof-of-concept short by Dan Eckman for a possible feature film adaptation of the 2010 book The Boy Who Couldn't Sleep And Never Had To by DC Pierson. It’s about “the typical high school experience: the homework, the awkwardness, and the mutant creatures from another galaxy.” Do you think it could be a good movie? Contains NSFW language. -via Digg
We’ve heard of the German terms sitzpinkler and stehpinkler, and now we learn that wildpinkler means someone who pees outside. The city of Hamburg, Germany, has a problem with wildpinklers in its St. Pauli district. Around 20 million people travel to the area’s beer halls every year, and many of the male visitors stop by the nearest wall to relieve themselves. But the city found a way to fight back.
While researching ways to discourage “Wildpinkler” – “free pee-ers” – annoyed members of IG St Pauli came across a hydrophobic paint which literally makes water droplets bounce off.
That means that anyone hoping to relieve themselves in unorthodox locations around the neighbourhood must reckon with the risk of a soaking for their shoes and trousers.
Now there are signs reading “Don't pee here! We'll pee back,” on specially-treated walls around the area.
A video at The Local shows some surprised wildpinklers. -via Arbroath
Another Prince-related clip from the Strib archives, looking back at his hooping days at Bryant Junior High. pic.twitter.com/LrIQZ3LhSg
— Libor Jany (@StribJany) March 3, 2015From the Strib archives: Chappelle was right. pic.twitter.com/icXBFGWkij
— Libor Jany (@StribJany) March 3, 2015Charlie Murphy once told the story of how he met Prince in a bar and ended up playing a basketball game against the Revolution. Dave Chappelle portrayed Prince in a classic skit about it. Prince later confirmed the story, but said the part about playing in their stage clothes was an embellishment. Now we have evidence that Prince was a basketball standout even in junior high, which may be news to anyone under 50 who lives outside Minneapolis. Libor Jany pulled these clippings from the archives of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. -via Uproxx
The Make-A-Wish Foundation wants to fulfill a wish for 6-year-old Ella Schultz. Ella more than anything wants to beat cancer. Besides that, she wants her own playhouse in her backyard. The foundation lined up a construction crew to build it. The neighbors were all for it. But the family’s Home Owners Association said no. "The proposed plan they've given us is a violation of our covenants."
When the story hit the local news, backlash was immediate. Neighbors decorated their mailboxes in green to show their support for Ella. People took to Twitter and other social media sites to spread the word. At least one person has offered to pay any fines incurred if the playhouse is built. The HOA removed its board members names and email addresses from its website. Wednesday night, the HOA board issued a statement.
The board has met for the better half of the day and at this time we would like to release the following statement.
Our hearts are with Ella Schultz and her family as they battle this terrible illness. Our homeowners' association board is committed to working with Make-A-Wish Foundation and J.E. Dunn to see if we can figure out a way to make Ella's wish come true. The initial request from Make-A-Wish to place a barn-style shed was not accepted because the board did not have enough information to grant an exception to the subdivision's covenants. In hopes of getting enough information, we are requesting an immediate meeting with Make-A-Wish and J.E. Dunn Construction to work out a solution in the most expeditious manner possible.
Meanwhile, Ella was taken to a hospital hospital with a fever and infection. Read the rest of the story at KCTV 5. -via Uproxx
Update: The HOA has reversed their decision.
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