Joel Snow found a stash of unlabeled negatives at a flea market. He photographed them, scanned them, and used Photoshop to convert them to positive images. All that work revealed a treasure trove of historical mysteries. Where and when were all these pictures taken? What’s the story behind them? Were they taken by the same person, or even the same family or company? Snow created a website to share the photographs called Vintage Photo Finds, where you’ll see plenty more. Wherever the site or the pictures are shared, people come forward who recognize the place, if not the people, and Snow updates the information as it comes in.
Amazing shot of Nebraska potato farmers taking a break, or finishing up their day.
No idea where this was taken. However, I would guess it’s sometime in the early ’20s based on the cars in the background. Possibly Texas, based on names.
Joe Kramer's short film Running the Gammatar is a lovely story about a young couple trying to negotiate a relationship while their city is being terrorized by a giant fire-breathing monster. It’s like rom-com meets Japanese monster movie, except this behemoth is uglier than any version of Godzilla, and his name is Gammatar. -via the Presurfer
Texas Tech's new student political organization PoliTech asked man-on-the-street questions of students around the campus. Now, I see these kinds of videos often, and I have to assume that the vast majority of people who know the answers are all edited out. Still, you have to wonder how many students they had to quiz before finding this many who don’t know how the Civil War turned out. Honestly, the vice president changes every few years, and he doesn't make much news, so I can understand young people not coming up with his name. But American students should know who won the Civil War, and who ruled the Colonies before U.S. independence. Watch and weep for our educational system. -via 22 Words
Who is the saddest animated character of all? There are plenty to select from. The full title of the list is The Animated Movie Sadness Index: A Brief History of Dead Parents, Sad Robots, and Devastated Animal Children. Grantland ranked movie characters on their sad lives and backstories, so looking through the list may cause a bit of melancholy, particularly if you have vivid memories of the films. Few would argue with the highest-ranked sad character, but many believe that The Iron Giant rated way more than 23% sad.
A truly tragic character. He’s a Russian warbot who crashes into small-town America. He doesn’t remember who he is or even what he is. He befriends a 9-year-old boy, but is eventually cast out by ignorant people. He’s attacked by the Army after he saves the lives of two children. He tries to fly away, but is shot down by a missile. After he crashes, he thinks his young friend is dead. He blames the Army, so he starts destroying them. The U.S. Navy fires a nuclear missile at the Iron Giant, which will kill everyone in the city if it hits him there.
I left off the last line of the quote, since it tells how the movie ends, so be aware that many of these synopses contain spoilers for mostly old movies. -via Metafilter
To be clear, the treadmill did not cost millions of taxpayer dollars, the goal of the research was not to exercise shrimp, and the government did not pay me—or anyone else—to work out shrimp on treadmills.
Simply put, my colleagues and I were studying how recent changes in the oceans could potentially affect the ability of marine organisms to fight infections—an important question, given that the amount of bacteria a shrimp is able remove from its body is directly related to how much bacteria could potentially end up on seafood-filled plates. And since shrimp are active animals in nature, it was logical to study the immune response of shrimp during activity.
Exactly how much taxpayer money did go into the now-famous shrimp treadmill? The treadmill was, in fact, made from spare parts—an old truck inner tube was used for the tread, the bearings were borrowed from a skateboard, and a used pump motor was salvaged to power the treadmill. The total price for the highly publicized icon of wasteful government research spending? Less than $50. (All of which I paid for out of my own pocket.)
Sholnick still has the treadmill, which he is willing to sell for a million dollars, all of which will go to support marine biology research. But even better than that, it gives me an opportunity to repost the video that caused the controversy in the first place.
A new pangolin at the Taipei Zoo in Taiwan wouldn’t nurse from her mother, so zookeepers had to step in and feed the baby (yes, despite appearances, pangolins are mammals). The pangolin named Gung-wu also got washed and cuddled and photographed. See more pictures (and a video) at Laughing Squid
A squirrel finds a GoPro camera and decides it might be worth keeping. He takes it up a tree, but discovers that its machine-made surfaces aren’t so easy to balance on a tree branch. -via Arbroath
Matthew McConaughey’s monologue from Interstellar about why we go into space is the unifying factor in this supercut of movie scene set in space that you’ve probably seen many times -yet together they are quite inspiring. Now, where’s my NASA application? If there are any you don't recognize, you'll find a list of them at the YouTube link. -via Uproxx
Here’s a story that quite resembles the movie The Parent Trap, except that the parents aren’t really involved. French fashion designer Anais Bordier, who is studying in London, was shown a video of Samantha Futerman, an American actress who resembled her. Then things got weird. Bordier wrote to Futerman at Facebook.
Hey,
My name is Anaïs, I am french and live in London,
About 2 months ago, my friend was watching one of your videos with Kevjumba on youtube, and he saw you and thought that we looked really very similar... like... VERY REALLY SIMILAR...we were making jokes about it etc. (I'm always being violent with people and hitting them too hahaha)
Today, he saw the trailer of 21 & over and told me he saw you again, I then checked your name on the cast, stalked you A BIT, and found out you were born the 19th of november 1987.
I checked more of your videos (which are hilarious) and then came upon how it feels to be adopted'... and discovered you were adopted too.
So..I don't want to be too Linday Lohan, well...but..how to put it..I was wondering where you were born? I was born on the 19th of November 1987, in Busan but my papers were made at the Holt Chuldren's Institute, so "officially" I was born in Seoul. My korean name is Kim Eunwha. I arrived in France the 5th March 1988, so 3 months later.
You can check my facebook if you want to check the pictures and videos. It's more obvious on videos...
Hardly any of us get the recommended amount of fruits and vegetables in our daily diet, but I can tell you from experience that making salad is expensive, time-consuming, and more complicated than a typical lunch. It’s not exactly fast food. Yes, you can get a salad at many fast food outlets, but have you seen the prices? A startup founded by Luke Saunders called the Farmer’s Fridge (previously at Neatorama) aims to change all that, by offering salad from vending machines, for as low as a dollar in selected low-income areas.
Most of Saunders’s machines are installed at private office buildings, food courts, and convenience stores, where the salads cost upwards of $7. Eventually, he wants to drive down the price to the point where anyone can afford them.
The Farmer’s Fridge machine at the East Garfield Community Center is his initial attempt to bring healthy food to a low-income area. The buck is a nominal fee—the salads are actually day-old donations that didn’t sell at the corporate locations. (All of the salads are perfectly good for up to three days.)
It sounds like a good idea, although you can see where the economics could be the project’s undoing. I would imagine there would be a great many salads not sold for $7, leading to plenty of $1 salads, but how could you sustain the project with such massive markdowns? The question in the article at The Atlantic is: would people eat healthier food if it were more convenient? There are some who will never eat fresh vegetables no matter how cheap and convenient they are. And although my family will eat salad, it has to be custom made or offered salad bar-style, as everyone hates some ingredient that the others love.
It was 100 years ago this Christmas that British and German soldiers came out of their World War I foxholes on Christmas Day to greet each other, exchange gifts and play a game of football in what later became known as The Christmas Truce. It only lasted a day, then they had to go back to shooting at each other.
Sainsbury’s, a UK supermarket chain, partnered with The Royal British Legion to produce this video as their official Christmas ad. There’s another video, with more information about the Christmas Truce, and a behind-the-scenes video here. And lest you think there’s no mercenary aspect to the project, the chocolate bar featured in the story is for sale at Sainbury’s, while supplies last.
Ferrets Teun, Yuki, and Spike have it made, with all these toys and each other to play with. But the real fun starts when a remote control car is introduced into the mix at about 2:40. The brave ferrets can hold their own against the mechanical monster, although they seem to be more curious than intimidated. Yeah, they are living the life of Riley, in fast-forward. -via Tastefully Offensive
It’s hard to believe that many of the movies we love the most were considered failures when they were first released. There are plenty of reasons why the box office doesn’t do well, even with a good movie: its initial budget may have made profitability a real risk, it may have been up against stiff competition, or maybe it was just too cerebral for moviegoers who wanted pure escapism when they went to the theater. The first reason was the downfall of The Wizard of Oz.
Believe it or not, The Wizard of Oz was a box office bomb when it was released in 1939. At the time, it was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's most expensive film ever with giant sets and state-of-the-art special effects. MGM had high expectations for the film, however, audiences weren't keen on making the journey to the Wonderful Land of Oz.
In fact, MGM lost $1.1 million on The Wizard of Oz because of its high production and distribution cost. Despite its middling box office numbers, it garnered four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and won two Oscars for Best Score and Best Original Song for "Over the Rainbow."
For decades, the only thing staving off a worldwide Socialist revolution was a grouchy librarian.
(Illustration by Dale Edwin Murray)
There is no clearer sign of Communism’s decline, Russians joke, than its loss of hair. From Karl Marx’s bushy mane to Mikhail Gorbachev’s shiny pate, the movement went bald and bankrupt at the same time. Perhaps this isn’t a theory to take too seriously. But you have to wonder: If Soviet officials had been aware of Charles Goss’s glorious whiskers, would they have picked a fight with him?
The locks on this English librarian were nothing special, but his mustache, oh, his mustache. The elaborate lip mitten slanted downward a full four inches on each side, far beyond his cheeks, obscuring all but a glimpse of his lower lip. It was a marvel of facial topiary that made Stalin’s well-groomed bristles look like unkempt shrubbery.
The mustache, of course, was also an indicator of his quirks. Goss was precise and eccentric—traits that helped him as an administrator at London’s Bishopsgate Institute, an independent cultural center. But it was his decades-long fight with the agents of the Red Revolution, in a battle that would suck in government ministers, journalists, and ambassadors, that truly demonstrated his grit. The source of that fight: a single book Goss took in as an afterthought—a foolscap notebook from the early 1860s full of semi-legible handwriting.
That notebook was “The Minute Book of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association” (IWMA), a foundational document of the global proletarian movement. Its sacred pages detailed discussions between Marx and Socialists throughout Europe. It revealed the first steps the world’s workers took as they stoked the revolution. As years passed, lore of the book’s power grew. Politicians and intellectuals desperately tried to liberate it from the clutches of this whiskered dinosaur. But Charles Goss was no ordinary guardian.
The Bishopsgate Institute was established in London’s East End in 1895 to improve the neighborhood. Less than a decade before, the bleak streets were Jack the Ripper’s stalking ground. Now, a local rector hoped to curb the squalor by providing books and lectures to the poor. Education, he hoped, would civilize them. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong man to do it.
Any Star Wars fan will recognize an imitation of the Jedi Muppet Yoda even in text because of his peculiar syntax. But is it really so peculiar? There are plenty of examples from history -many from Shakespeare- of the same rearrangement of subject, object, verb, and sentence clauses.
When you bring a later part of the sentence to the beginning, it's called fronting. You can front just a noun or prepositional phrase — "Jackets we hang here, ties we pile over there"; "The life of Riley, you live"; "For $5 you came here?" — or you can front a verb with it as well, as long as you keep a conjugated verb (such as an auxiliary do or have or will) at the end — "Likes it hot, he does"; "Park in my spot, will he?" Sometimes we even leave off the verb at the end, when we start with a shortened sentence and then clarify: "Makes a lot of money, your friend?"
Furthermore, Yoda’s syntax varies from movie to movie, because the scriptwriters were different. Read about how Yoda’s distinctive way with words is perfectly understandable to us because it’s not that new or different, at The Week.
