A kitten named Dash turns his attention to play-attacking and play-fighting a Frizzle chicken named Mora. The hen isn’t taking this sitting down, and even tries a couple of times to put that tiny predator in its place. Dash doesn’t take the hint. Once upon a time, you had to actually have pets to enjoy this kind of thing, but now we can just share the best moments. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
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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.
George Herman “Babe" Ruth is, without a doubt, the most famous, beloved and mythical baseball player of all-time. Perhaps of all athletes, ever, only Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan have been more influential and as well-known.
The guy hit his legendary 714 home runs in 22 seasons (1914-1935), drove in over 2,200 runs and had a lifetime batting average of .342. Not only that, but he was also a star pitcher in his early days, compiling a lifetime record of 94 wins and 46 losses. Okay, let's take a look at 12 facts you may not have known about “The Sultan of Swat,” the one and only Babe Ruth.
1. He started out as a left-handed catcher.
Young George Ruth started playing baseball at St. Marys Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore. He began his career as a left-handed catcher, the rarest of all position players.
Ruth, top row center, at St. Marys Industrial School for Boys.
The school only had a catcher's mitt for a right-hander, so George would catch the ball with his left hand. If a runner on base tried to steal, he'd toss the glove aside, catch the ball in the air and throw it to second base with his left hand.
2. He became a pitcher because he ridiculed another pitcher.
Even though it’s been 150 years since Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was first published, we are still finding new meaning in it. Lewis Carrol’s tale turns logic inside out, and along the way, gives neurologists insight about how the human brain operates. Characters in the book explore the way we perceive language, time, and our own corporeal bodies. For example, Alice changes her own size several times by the magic of eating or drinking.
In 1955, a psychiatrist called John Todd found that certain patients reported exactly the same feeling of “opening out like a telescope”. The disorder is known as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, and it seems to be most common in children. “I have heard patients saying that things appear upside down, or even though mommy is on other side of the room, she appeared next to her,” says Grant Liu, a neurologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who has studied the phenomenon.
Carroll’s diaries show that he suffered migraines, which often trigger the syndrome – leading some to speculate that he was using his own experiences as inspiration. Liu suspects the syndrome can be pinned to abnormal activity in the parietal lobes, which are responsible for spatial awareness, skewing the sense of perspective and distance. But despite the fact that it can be disturbing, these fleeting illusions are generally harmless. “The majority are unaffected – and we just provide reassurance that the patient is not crazy and that other people also experience these things,” says Liu. Today, neuroscientists are trying to evoke the illusion in healthy subjects – which they think might shed light on the way we create our sense of self in the here and now.
And that’s only one of the five specific findings in neuroscience that relate to the more illogical passages in Alice in Wonderland outlined in an article at BBC Future. -via Digg
Sometimes when you’re reading a book, you run across a word you’ve never heard before, but you can usually figure out what it means by its context. I learned many words that way, and I was sometimes wrong. I should have looked them up, but who wants to break the spell of a good book? Some of those words were just made up by the writer. John Green runs down a whole bunch of examples in this latest video from mental_floss.
Ken Burns’ documentary series The Civil War (as well as his other documentaries) had a certain style that brought out the despair and melancholy of the people who lived through it, emphasized by the sad fiddle music. YouTube member SafetyWhales took the same approach to documenting Boston’s current winter, using Facebook posts by real people who live there. Harry Apinwall, the one who described the apocalypse, provided the perfect finale. -Thanks, Linda Shaw!
Little Ramsey the husky pup obviously lives with both people and dogs -but he sure sounds like he’d rather talk people language than howl like a dog! I had to giggle at this almost as much as the woman holding him. -via Tastefully Offensive
What kind of drinking game requires putting on a helmet? You’ll quickly find out. From the video description:
In a bar in Russia, one man chose to drink a special cocktail, shot the soldier. Before starting this challenge, it must put a military helmet on his head. The servers will launch the starting signal with a whistle, and then hit the glasses of alcohol on the customer's helmet, he must then drink dry-ass. Meanwhile, another server will give him a shovel or fire extinguisher on the helmet to each end of sips. The customer will then drinking alcohol 4 shooters before the big final, a good shot of beer barrel on the helmet. An effective technique!
As they say, in Mother Russia, keg taps you! By the time it's all over, he doesn't feel a thing. Until the next morning, when he has to deal with both concussion and a hangover. -via reddit
Best grant of anonymity by a journalist since Watergate? This, from today's Times, gets my vote. pic.twitter.com/5tqS0h0sf6
— robert p. baird (@bobbybaird) February 25, 2015Yesterday, the New York Times published an article that reviewed the new and improved restrooms at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown Manhattan. That’s only interesting if you live in New York City, but toward the bottom of the article, we learn that someone has fulfilled her lifelong aspirations.
A second person who checked out the women’s restroom — and who asked not to be identified because she has always wanted to be an anonymous source — reported her findings by email: “Black shiny granite-y sink. Arched faucets by Sloan. Tasteful slate gray and powder gray tiles.”
If you know who she is, please don’t tell anyone. We don’t want to crush the dream.
First off, little Silas Philips is fine. He was delivered by Cesarian section three months early at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, still shrouded in his sac of amniotic fluid. Neonatologist William Binder snapped a picture of the unusual sight with his cellphone, then opened the sac so the baby could begin breathing.
The photograph shows the baby just seconds old. Until the bag was broken, the baby was still getting oxygen through the placenta.
“It felt like slow-motion but really realistically probably about 10 seconds that we had to sort of quickly pause and be able to do this, because at the same time, we want to get the baby out of that sac, start helping the baby to begin breathing,” the doctor said.
The photo is a rare opportunity to see what a six-month pregnancy really looks like. And from the baby’s point of view, the trauma of birth didn’t happen until he was outside his mother. Despite his prematurity, Silas is doing well at ten weeks old and is expected to go home within a month. See a video report at CBS Los Angeles. -via Buzzfeed
PS: I found out some other interesting things about Dr. Binder.
(Image credit: Dr. William Binder)
If you liked the 16-minute tribute to YouTube on its 10th anniversary, you’ll like this one better. If you didn’t like the earlier video, you’ll probably like this one. It’s got clips from 198 different viral videos crammed into only three minutes! And best of all, it was edited by Luc Bergeron, known as Zapatou (previously), a master at sorting, categorizing, and editing clips into a work of art. -via Tastefully Offensive
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
A haphazard look at inventions to trap bad guys
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell and Stephen Drew, Improbable Research staff
In AIR 20-1, we presented the first part of this collection of haphazardly selected inventions invented by persons who apparently believed themselves to be on the side of Good and who strove to try to make it easier and more technologically sweet for other Good persons to trap persons engaged in Evil.
1930: Shelby’s Supernaturalistic Bank Confession Apparatus
Helene Adelaide Shelby’s “Apparatus for Obtaining Criminal Confessions and Photographically Recording Them” (U.S. patent 1749090, granted 1930) tried to ensure that criminals, having been caught, would confess—and would do so in a manner that ensured they would be convicted and sent to prison:
The present invention relates to a new and useful apparatus for obtaining confessions from culprits, or those suspected of the commission of crimes, and photographically recording these confessions, in the form of sound waves, in conjunction with their pictures, depicting their every expression and emotion, to be preserved for later reproduction as evidence against them.
The primary object of my invention is the provision of an apparatus for the creation of illusory effects calculated to impress the subject with their being of a supernatural character and to so work upon his imagination as to enable an inquisitor operating in conjunction with the recording system to obtain confessions and graphically record them by light action under the control of electric impulses governed by varying intensities of sound waves....
Figure 1 is a side elevation illustrative of a structure divided into two chambers, one chamber of which is darkened to provide quarters in which the suspect is confined while being subjected to examination, the other chamber being provided for the examiner, the two chambers being separated from each other by a partition which is provided with a panel upon one side of which is mounted a figure in the form of a skeleton, the said skeleton having the rear portion of the skull removed and the recording apparatus inserted therein as shown;
Figure 2 is a front view looking into the enclosure in which the skeleton is mounted and as seen looking from the suspect’s examination quarters.
(Image credit: Flickr user arbyreed)
1931: Thibault’s Through-the-floor Burglar Trap
Alphonse J. Thibault’s “Burglar Trap” (U.S. Patent 1807944, granted 1931) improves on a long tradition of providing trap doors through which burglars could be made to plummet:
A storm last Thursday and Friday left between 20 and 30 centimeters (7-11 inches) of snow over Jerusalem. This video shows a group of Franciscan monks having a snowball fight, which they probably don’t get to do very often. Israel wasn’t the only spot in the Middle East to get snow. See pictures of the snow in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey in this roundup. -via Buzzfeed
Imagine lying in bed under a glass igloo in Finland, watching the Aurora Borealis. That’s the kind of thing you want to put on your bucket list! Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort is only 155 miles from the Arctic Circle, near the Urho Kekkonen National Park in Lapland. Thermal glass keeps each igloo nice and toasty inside, but if you prefer, they also have unheated igloos made of packed snow. I think I’ll take the glass. Read more about this unique resort and see plenty of photographs at Scribol.
(Image credit: Kakslauttanen)
Who’s calling who stupid? Notice the well-placed comma in the bottom panel. Still, proper grammar doesn’t always help you in the real world: you have to take into account who is doing the labor and who is supervising.
Side note: even the grammar nazi in this cartoon makes a grammatical error (“real” instead of “really”) but I needed to use that tense to make the joke work. Sorry, grammar commandants.
This Bizarro comic is from artist Don Piraro’s blog post in which he shares thoughts about several recent comics. I was originally going to post the Planet of the Apes panel, after I saw it here, but the well-digging comic tickled me even more. You don’t want to overlook the elephant down comic, either.
The short film called ...meanwhile... is taken from Italian filmmaker Sandro Bocci’s feature film Porgrave, which will be released later this year. See slow-living corals, starfish, and other sea creatures in time-lapse mode beautifully photographed in their natural habitat. It’s practically psychedelic! Bocci says,
"This is an infinitesimal part of the wonderful world in which we live and of which we should take better care," Bocci wrote in a description of the project. It's "a trip through a different perspective that would encourage reflection on the consequences of our actions on each scale of space and time."
-via Huffpo Green
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