Watching a horror movie during Halloween season, especially all by yourself, can set your nerves on edge. Every little sound in the house is an omen. Add to that a cat who is always up to mischief, and you may turn into a scarcely cat! Here’s a Halloween special from Simon Tofield, the animator behind Simon’s Cat. -via Tastefully Offensive
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This beautiful animation produced by Blackmeal is barely over a minute long and contains no dialogue, but it recaps the first four seasons of the HBO series Game of Thrones for those familiar with the story. For those who are not familiar with the story, don’t worry about spoilers: this is art! You’ll want to watch it in fullscreen mode to appreciate the subtle beauty of each scene. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Seventeen-year-old Claire Wineland has cystic fibrosis, so she’s pretty familiar with hospitals. While you may dread a hospital stay, Wineland chooses to look at the bright side, and enjoy all the benefits she can while there. Her attitude will make you smile! This video is part of The Clairity Project, in which Wineland seeks to make living with CF less mysterious to those who don’t understand it.
The Clairity Project is about sharing my world with you through videos, photos, and writing as I answer your questions, tell humorous stories, and talk about everyday stuff.
My goal is to break down the barriers that we tend to have with people who are living with an illness by discovering what you're curious about and opening up my life to you.
Wineland has plenty of other videos at her YouTube channel. She's worked for years to educate folks about CF. Read more of her story at Claire’s Place Foundation. -via Laughing Squid
Zombies would love these candy skulls, because they’ve still got their brains! Spanish designers Ruth and Sira Garcia made these chocolate skulls with plenty of sugar, and an assortment of brains: sculpted chocolate, walnuts, or nonpareils.
See more pictures of these ghoulish delights at the project’s Behance page. -via Boing Boing
This week’s mental_floss video for The List Show appears to use up amazing facts that pile up when you do trivia for a living. Normally, they get sorted into categories for the video show, but that means there are plenty that don’t fit neatly into a category. John Green has to go pretty fast to get all 100 in!
A spider built a web in a spot where there wasn’t an easy third point to reach. So he used a rock. The weight of the rock, suspended by a strand of spider silk, provides an adequate third anchor point, at least until some human comes along and ruins it. But redditor reverseloop took pictures instead.
How did the spider get this rock where it is now? It could have happened the way these spiders haul shells up off the ground:
Such clever ideas they have in those tiny little heads! All they’d have to do is grow a little bigger and they’ll take over the world. -via Daily of the Day
Neatorama welcomes an article from J. Tithonus Pednaud of The Human Marvels. This is an excerpt from Pednaud’s new book After Life: True Tales of the Restless Dead, which is on sale now.
After Life: True Tales of the Restless Dead unearths and recounts fantastic post-mortem adventures undertaken by cadavers and also chronicles numerous misfortunes that have befallen the dead.
AHEAD OF THE GAME
Born Margarethe Geertruide Zelle in the Netherlands, Mata Hari was an exotic dancer and a courtesan to rich and powerful men. She is also one of the more intriguing women of the twentieth century, who consistently captured imaginations due to the fact that she was also a spy. But truthfully, she wasn't a very good spy.
During WWI, the French asked Mata Hari to use her charms and contacts to get information. She proved to be unsuccessful and the French suspected she was a double agent for the Germans. In February of 1917 she was arrested and put on trial for spying for the Germans. Despite no concrete evidence, Mata Hari was convicted and promptly executed by firing squad on October 15, 1917.
Following the execution, no family member stepped forward to claim Mata Hari’s body. Her corpse was given to the Museum of Anatomy in Paris where she was dissected. Mata Hari’s head was eventually severed and preserved in wax, then placed in the museum’s display of notorious criminals. The museum already contained head casts of criminals executed during the 19th century, as well as a vast collection of skulls from asylums for the mentally ill, and so Mata Hari was a welcome addition.
But when the French Minister of Education threatened to close the failing Museum of Anatomy in 2000, the museum director decided it would be best to present the Minister with a catalogued list of the museum’s most impressive treasures. In researching that catalogue, it was discovered that the head of Mata Hari was missing. What happened to it is a mystery, but it is suspected that it was stolen by a morbid admirer.
While it was Mata Mari's fame that compelled authorities to collect her head, it was Fritz Haarmann’s notoriety that earned his head a spot on a shelf.
Redditor pbmax542 said his daughter has been sleeping on the floor to be with her kitten. The kitten Gandalf (seen in this video) cannot climb the ladder into the elevated bed like he used to because of an injury to his rear leg. So pbmax542 made the bedroom ADA compliant by building a kitten ramp! Isn’t that sweet? The discussion at reddit gives some hope that the limp may be temporary due to inflammation after Gandalf’s neutering. We wish him a speedy recovery.
See also: Cat Ladders
Dorkly has a new "choose your own adventure" type comic that addresses a sticky question. You're on a date with a fan of whatever nerd interest you have, but they aren't nearly as well-versed on that universe as you are. Do you correct a mistaken detail? Do you let it go? How would you finesse this situation without ruining your budding relationship? You can answer the questions as you see fit, or you can skip through each possible page like I did at Dorkly.
The only thing worse than getting away with murder is getting away with lots of murders. It’s happened throughout history, especially before we had security cameras and DNA evidence. And those cases were horrific, like the Kingsbury Run murders, which ran from 1934 to 1938 in Cleveland, Ohio. That’s where 13 bodies were found, in pieces.
Not all of the victims were ever identified; with 1930s forensic technology, it’s difficult to identify someone when all law enforcement has is a few parts. The first body – later dubbed Victim 0, as she originally wasn’t thought to be one of the serial killer’s victims – was nothing more than part of a torso and legs. That was in September of 1934, and the first official victim was found a year later. The 28-year old victim had been decapitated, but he was identified as Edward Andrassy; the same chemical that had been used to preserve the body of Victim 0 had been used for him. A second body was nearby, and the third…. the third was part of a female body, packed neatly in several baskets that were then left at the side of the road.
Over the next few years, 13 bodies were found, although the heads of victims were frequently missing. They were often drained of blood completely. The 11th and 12th victims were recovered from a dump site outside the window of Eliot Ness. The murders left police scrambling, and the National Guard was called in to try to keep order.
Eventually, a local brick-layer was arrested for the murders after it was found he had connections to three of the victims. Retrospective examination shows that his confession was bizarre and pretty obviously coached; before Frank Dolezal could be put on trial, he was found hanged in his cell, with a number of questionable injuries.
No one was ever tried for the murders, and to this day no one has definitively been identified as the perpetrator. This is just one example from a list of ten still-unidentified serial killers at Urban Ghosts.
(Image credit: gargantuen)
It’s been announced that the TV series Twin Peaks will go back into production for a miniseries on Showtime on 2016. It will be written and directed by David Lynch, which is a good sign. However, the track record for bringing back beloved TV series twenty or thirty years later is not great, as we’ve seen in the recent cancellation of Dallas after a three-year run. The success of both the original Dallas and the recent series was tied too closely to star Larry Hagman, who died during the second season of the revival.
There have been many other attempts to recreate the magic of earlier series, and they mostly fail, because while producers can use the same gimmicks and plots, it can never be the same as the original. Even if they use the same actors, which is rare, that still changes everything because the world is now different. These sequels, revivals, and reboots sometimes come and go so fast you never even noticed them, which is why Warming Glow made a list of some notable failures. They include 21st-century versions of Kojak, The Monkees, Knight Rider, Melrose Place, and more. Never heard of them? There is video evidence.
This little Bichon Frisé is a dancing fool! A YouTube comment mentioned that he’s dancing to the hit song “You Are My Flower” by Wu Bai & China Blue. That led me down the internet rabbit hole…
Taiwanese musician Wu Bai is a superstar in Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. His 2007 song “You Are My Flower” lent its name to his Flower Tour and started a dance craze in Asia. Wu Bai demonstrates how to do the Flower Dance. You can see a dance team do it in this video. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Cinefix gives us the 8-bit version of the Disney movie Frozen. I'm a little intrigued by the idea of being able to change the plot with just the push of a button, but alas, this exists only in a video. For fans of the film, it’s an adorable excuse to watch the story again and hear the stripped-down, simplest versions of your favorite tunes. For 8-bit video game fans, it’s downright cute. If there is anyone in the world who hasn’t seen Frozen but plans to in the future, it contains spoilers. -via Tastefully Offensive
See more episodes of 8-bit Cinema.
Although there are awards and prizes in almost every scientific discipline, as well as art, tech, and other fields, the Nobel Prize is the most well-known. In fact, other awards are constantly compared to the Nobel. Wired has the story of how the Nobel Prize became so big, which begins with its strange origin.
It all began with a journalistic error. In 1888, a French newspaper mistakenly wrote that Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, had died. It was actually his brother, Ludvig, who had passed. But, in addition to lackluster fact checking, the paper commemorated the event with defamatory prose: “Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday,” it wrote. Nobel, it is said, was crushed by the idea that he’d be remembered as a “merchant of death.” In order to regain control of his legacy, he willed his fortune to create an award that would recognize people who had made positive contributions to mankind.
Imagine finding out what would be said about on your death: would it cause you to change the rest of your life? But that’s just the beginning of the story. There are several reasons the Nobel Prize stands head and shoulders above other awards, spelled out at Wired. The Nobel Prizes for 2014 are being announced each day this week.
The “Blood Moon” lunar eclipse is October 8th. This total eclipse will be visible across the Americas and the Pacific, as well as Australia and most of Asia. But how easy will it be for you to see? In the Pacific time zone, the entire process of the eclipse will occur before the moon sets, but you’ll have to stay up through the middle of the night to see it. In the Eastern time zone, you can just get up early in the morning, but the moon will set before the entire eclipse is done. You should also check your local weather forecast to see if you should expect clouds. A lunar eclipse has several phases, as outlined at Sky and Telescope Magazine. They also have schedules for the different time zones. The graphic above is for Eastern Daylight Time, but you can get other time zone versions at the magazine. -via Bad Astronomy
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