In 1899, a young Belgian student named Adrian Carton de Wiart lied about his age and his nationality in order to serve with the British Army in South Africa. He really wanted to be a soldier. And over the next half-century, he worked hard to remain a soldier.
Carton de Wiart served in the Boer War, World War One and World War Two. In the process he was shot in the face, losing his left eye, and was also shot through the skull, hip, leg, ankle and ear.
In WW1 he was severely wounded on eight occasions and mentioned in despatches six times.
Having previously lost an eye and a hand in battle, Carton de Wiart, as commanding officer, was seen by his men pulling the pins of grenades out with his teeth and hurling them with his one good arm during the Battle of the Somme, winning the Victoria Cross.
But that was just the beginning. Carton de Wiart’s plane was shot down in World War II and he spent two years in an Italian POW camp, from which he escaped once, even though he was in his sixties by then. Read the amazing story of the soldier who returned to battle again and again at BBC Magazine. -via Digg
Round about then, we wondered, if it’s not a joke, how should we now refer to Kirby Delauter if we can't use his name (Kirby Delauter)? Could we get away with an entire editorial of nothing but “Kirby Delauter” repeated over and over again -- Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter? OK, imagine we agreed because of temporary madness or something funny in the water that week, how would we reference "Kirby Delauter" and do our job as journalists without running afoul of our lack of authorization?
Blanks? Sure, we sometimes use hyphens in the case of expletives. Perhaps we could do that: "K---- D-------." Or, perhaps, "Councilman [Unauthorized]." We giggled a bit more than we should have when we came up with "the Councilman Formerly Known as Commissioner Kirby Delauter," which doesn't seem as funny written down in black and white and includes his name, which defeats the point. Maybe we should just put his initials, "KD," with an asterisk to a footnote (KD*), or refer to him as GLAT, the acronym for his campaign: "Govern Like A Taxpayer." We could even make it sound a little hip-hop with a well-placed hyphen: G-Lat. Speaking of, could we get away with "K-Del"? Or we could simply go with the Harry Potter-esque "He Who Shall Not be Named." (Cue the lightning strike and peal of thunder.)
Yet we could take the low road down even further and childishly mangle "Kirby Delauter" into references you, the reader, would still understand. "Sherbert Deluder," say. Or "Derby Kelauter." "Shirley Delaughter" (and don't call me Shirley). We found a great automatic online anagrammer that generated all kinds of alternatives and could make it a challenge for our readers to decode each time we have to reference the councilman: "Rebuked artily." That was a good one. "Bakery diluter" is just silly but does have a ring about it. "Keyed rural bit" was another that caught our eye as somewhat telling, because Kirby Delauter's pretty keyed up. We're sure there's a joke in "Brutelike Yard" somewhere.
The full editorial is worth a read, and if you read only the first letter of each paragraph, you'll see even more. Yes, the councilman now has more publicity than he ever imagined, with the story appearing at NPR, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, MSNBC, and even the BBC. And if you are wondering, here's the inevitable fake Kirby Delauter Twitter feed. -via Metafilter
The snowstorm that rolled into Washington, DC, on Tuesday was the first snow Bao Bao the panda cub had ever seen. He took right to it, and gave a delightful show for us. He curled up and rolled around in it, and cavorted with his mother, Mei Xiang. -via HuffPo
As we’ve seen before, anything that exists over a period of time and comes in different shapes, sizes, or colors will eventually become a collector’s item. Yes, there are people who collect Do Not Disturb signs from hotels. After all, they vary greatly from one hotel to another and over time. Some are simple disposable paper signs you can slip over a doorknob, but others are distinctive, cheeky, or even works of art. Edoardo Flores has over 8,700 Do Not Disturb signs from all over the world, and tells us how varied they are.
“The first widespread use was probably in the beginning of the 20th century, mostly in the U.S., in some of the more prestigious hotels where discretion was the better part of valor,” he says. “DND signs have also been known for covering up crimes, or at least, delaying the discovery.”
Do Not Disturb signs are most commonly made out of paper or card stock—they either hang on the door knob or insert into the electric lock. Some are die-cut into shapes like locks, keys, animals, or seashells. In places where the door opens to the outside, the Do Not Disturb sign may be a small sand bag that hangs on the door knob by a rope. While many DND signs have a “make-up room” message on the back, not all do. Signs that have “Do Not Disturb” messaging in multiple languages can have hilarious errors.
Paper signs can feature gorgeous designs or silly comics. In the United Kingdom and the United States, the focus seems to be on wordplay or witty text, using phrases like “My bed is so comfortable that I’m still in it,” “Beauty sleep in progress,” “Leave me alone,” “Taking a post-lobster buffet nap,” “Constructing a pillow fort,” or “Go away.” For example, a door hanger for Clarion Hotels, part of the Choice Hotels group in the U.S., gives a checklist of reasons “Why I Can’t Be Disturbed.” The list includes being tired from food, exercise, and business, but the option that’s already checked is “I’m trying to call myself on the two-line phone while surfing the Internet in my underwear.”
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Okay, I’m a guy, right? So the very term "chick flick" goes right up there with visiting the dentist, getting a colonoscopy, reading Jane Austin or worst of all-time: watching Sex in the City (cruel and unusual punishment).
But let's be fair here, I enjoy a few chick flicks- Splendor in the Grass with Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty is actually a really good, enjoyable film, the best performance of both Natalie and Warren's careers- in my humble opinion. I also liked Bridges of Madison County, Clint Eastwood's chick flick (an oxymoron if there ever was one). But my all-time favorite chick flick would definitely be A League of Their Own (1992).
A woman's sports film, possibly the rarest of all genres in Hollywood, the film tells the story of the All-American Girls Professional Ball League, a professional group of women baseball players. Although the film is the story of the entire women's baseball league (there really was an AAAGPBL in America from 1943 to 1954), it actually is the story of two sisters.
Dottie Hinson and Kit Keller are a pair of ball-playing sisters from the sticks, who get discovered by a scout, obnoxiously but wonderfully played by Jon Lovitz. (Lovitz is a real scene-stealer in his role as the baseball scout and actually was supposed to have a bigger role in the film, but something, unfortunately, came up, and his character was written out after a few great early scenes.)
Dottie (played by Geena Davis) the older, more mature sister, is happily married and although greatly talented as a ball player, the game is just a lark to her. Marriage and her husband are the center of her life and universe. (Interestingly, this film, along with Thelma and Louise, are, far and away, the two finest films of Geena's career, each a popular and well-known movie. However, she won her Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for The Accidental Tourist, a film hardly seen, remembered, or cared about by anyone.)
Younger sister Kit (Lori Petty) is not nearly as gifted as her older sister, but baseball is her life and gives meaning to her existence. This yin/yang battle of priorities, is, as we all know, the eternal battle of modern women: career versus relationship. The film shows both sides fairly and the director (this is Penny Marshall's best film, Big notwithstanding) is fair, not politically correct, and shows each side of the proverbial coin.
Here you see what 294 adults between the ages of 25 and 54 who aren’t holding down a job are doing with their time, according to data from the American Time Use Survey. The chart is interactive at the site. It’s no surprise that women without outside jobs spend a bigger chunk of their time doing housework or caring for others, while men spend more time looking for a job than women do, as it comes down to the different reasons that people are non-employed. Women are likely to do without a job in order to care for young children or elderly relatives, while men are more likely to be either training or looking for another job.
A data visualization article at the New York Times divides the participants by what individuals spend the most of their daytime hours doing, which sometimes points to the reason they aren’t on the time clock; for example, those who spend more time on education than anything else are probably in school. What’s astonishing is the gender imbalance for the number of people who spend their greatest time watching TV or other leisure activities. -via Digg
Being able to eat all you want and then some is a benefit of pregnancy that you pay for in other ways. You can’t just share in the good parts, as some fathers find out the hard way. The concept is illustrated simply in this comic from Lunarbaboon. Has this ever happened to you?
A yellowtail rockfish at the Vancouver Aquarium was being bullied by other fish because he has only one eye. What to do? You can't exactly sit the other fish down and castigate them over their behavior.
So head veterinarian, Martin Haulena, with the help of Lesanna Lahner, staff veterinarian of Seattle Aquarium, sewed a lovely bright yellow prosthetic eye into its eyeless hole. “You probably don’t want one in the nose,” Haulena notes in the video above as they figure out where to position it. Classic Haulena.
“The reason we do this is because we do find that when fish are blind from one eye, and there’s no visible eye, other fish will recognise that and will actually attack them from that side,” Haulena says. “Cosmetic, for sure, but there’s definitely an animal welfare component to putting in the prosthetics.
The details of the procedure are at Scientific American, where you can also read about a penguin’s cancer treatment. -via Ed Yong
The latest comic from Randall Munroe at xkcd is funny, due to the ignorance about how homeowner’s insurance works. But the concept of shining a blacklight on your bathroom is a new one on me. Do we dare try it? Some people clean their toilets on a regular schedule, while others only clean it when it looks dirty. Urine glows under a UV light, which this page recommends for finding pet stains on a carpet. That seems like a good idea. But they also mention using a blacklight to see how clean your hotel room is …and that can be frightening. There are some things it’s just better to not know.
Star Wars fever was raging across the nation in the wait between the first movie in 1977 (now called A New Hope, but then known as just Star Wars) and the sequel The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. Marvel had a comic book series running during that time, but they didn’t know what would happen in Lucas’ sequels -and neither did the audience. That’s the part you have to remember when you read this letter to the editor printed in one of those comics in 1979.
In the second film, we saw that Leia had made her choice of suitors, but it wasn’t until Return of the Jedi in 1983 that we knew Luke never really had a chance. And then we all felt weird about that first spark of romance in the the initial film. Now we are kind of glad that Marvel had them act “more like brother and sister” in the comics. There are more fan letters full of complaints, which is eternal for Star Wars fans, in an article at Uproxx.
British stuntman and freerunner Damien Walters has astonished us before with his skills, but he is always working on new stunts. His latest video is a compilation of clips from his entire career, so you may remember seeing some of them before, but you’ll cringe just the same -and get ready for a lot you haven’t seen, too. Of course, there are no disasters, but the back of your mind expects one any second. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
In 1980, Ted Turner launched a 24-hour cable news channel appropriately called Cable News Network, or CNN. He vowed to keep bringing us news until the end of the world. And CNN made preparations for just such an event. Turner said,
We'll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event. We'll play the National Anthem only one time, on the first of June [the day CNN launched], and when the end of the world comes, we'll play 'Nearer My God To Thee' before we sign off.
Turner no longer owns CNN, but the video is still there, still ready to play, labeled “hold for release” until the end of the world is confirmed …although it’s a little fuzzy as to who would confirm it. Michael Ballaban was an intern at CNN in 2009, and found the video. It’s in a format more appropriate for 1980 TV sets, but you can watch the band play at Jalopnik. -via Uproxx
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
by Kees Moeliker Curator, Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands and winner of the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize for Biology
Photos by Kees Moeliker
Lal Bihari tells the story of how he became a living dead person, and then founded the Association of Dead People.
February 9th 2014 was a memorable day in Ig Nobel Prize history. During the Ig Nobel Conclave at the Quark 2014 Techo Management Fest at the BITS Pilani Goa Campus in Goa, India, Lal Bihari “Mritak,” winner of the 2003 Ig Nobel Peace Prize met four fellow Ig Nobel Prize winners. Lal Bihari “Mritak” won his prize for (1) leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; (2) waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and (3) creating the Association of Dead People.
As a child, I was a Bennett Cerf fan because of the funny books he wrote. As an adult, I became vaguely aware that he was the publisher who founded Random House. But Cerf will be known to history as a man who battled for your right to read. In 1920, the James Joyce novel Ulysses was judged obscene and banned in the U.S. In 1932, Cerf was determined to reverse that decision, and crafted a scenario that would lead to a court ruling on the book. But first, a crime had to be committed, so it was arranged for a smuggled copy to be intercepted at an American port of entry. Things did not go quite as planned.
The smuggler was following very specific instructions. He’d obtained the text, just like he’d been told. He stuffed the book into his suitcase. Then he boarded the luxurious Aquitania in Europe, with orders to disembark at this very port. But as he waited in line eying the customs officials, things weren’t going to plan. In fact, it looked like the officer was just going to wave him through. This was not what the smuggler was being paid to do; he was under strict orders to get caught!
“Get out; get on out,” the customs agent yelled. Instead of checking bags for contraband, the officers were frantically stamping the suitcases in front of them. They didn’t bother to look inside, or halt passengers for random checks. As the official tried to push the smuggler forward, the traveler did something inane: he demanded to be inspected.
"I insist that you open the bag and search it."
"It's too hot," argued the inspector. Indeed, the temperature in the room was well over 100 degrees. The officials were rushing people through so they too could call it a day. But the passenger insisted. “I think there’s something in there that’s contraband, and I insist that it be searched.”
The folks at Photoshop Disasters have compiled their favorite Photoshop failures of 2014. There are 23 images, all with links to the original posts, because there might be more to the picture than you see at first. In the image above, there is so much going on, it’s difficult to list everything wrong with it (although you're invited to try here in the comments). You have to wonder how these pictures were ever unleashed upon the public -probably tired editors asleep at the computer.
