To be honest, when I saw this headline, I tried to think of teachers on TV and came up blank. Mr Kotter! Well, there’s one, but apparently I haven’t been watching enough TV. But maybe you have, and you might want to argue about how your favorites were ranked among the 25 TV teachers in this list from Warming Glow. Yeah, I watched Walter White, but how much time did he spend in the classroom over the course of Breaking Bad? Just enough to know a student named Jesse Pinkman.
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During the first year of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Army lost more troops from smallpox than from battle. The disease swept through communities every few years, causing illness, death, and dread panic that made it difficult to organize Americans for war. Bringing soldiers together from far-flung villages was a dangerous prospect under those circumstances. General George Washington was immune to the disease, having survived it as a teenager, and he wrestled with the notion of conferring such immunity on his men. The procedure in those days was frightening, and few trusted it.
While Washington was acquainted with a technique for protecting people against smallpox, he would not then use it, partly because it was deemed illegal by the Continental Congress and colonial legislatures, and partly because many physicians believed the technique did more to spread the disease than to halt its progress.
The technique, called “variolation,” was a form of inoculation in which pus from an infected person was inserted under the skin of an uninfected one; that gave the inoculee a mild case of the disease and, after the passing of a period of high communicability, lifetime immunity. But although championed by such scientific heroes as Benjamin Franklin, and undergone willingly by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and other leaders, variolation was castigated as unsafe for the community because the patient had to be isolated for a week prior to the inoculation and two weeks or more after it. Congress had forbidden military doctors to administer it and forbidden army officers to take variolation or have their subordinates do it, on pain of being cashiered.
Washington lobbied to change the law, but got nowhere. As the winter of 1776-77 dragged on, the general realized that the only way to protect his men would be to take matters into his own hands. How like him. Read the story of what happened at The Daily Beast, in an excerpt from Tom Shachtman’s book Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries: The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment.
(Image credit: Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast)
How do you make a parkour video when you can’t actually do those stunts? Make it a live action stop-motion video! These guys battle it out in a different dimension, one that works with gravity instead of against it. I bet they hauled around a big ladder to do this. -via Boing Boing
In this video, we see professors from the University of Alabama read their reviews on the website Rate My Professors. It takes a thick skin to even peek at anonymous reviews from students. College teachers are human, too, so it’s pretty awkward to see them reading negative reviews. However, if you can’t construct a proper sentence or you admit to cheating in class, they’re not going to put much stock in your opinion of anything. But they like the chili peppers, which signify that a teacher is “hot.” -via Viral Viral Videos
Here’s a dance battle with a difference! The Lindy hoppers on the left show off their street dance moves, and the street dancers on the right give their best shot at swing dance. You have to give both teams credit for stepping out of their normal genre, although both have a tendency to revert to familiar steps at times. Overall, I’d give more style points to the street dancers in the crossover. Then about halfway through the video, both teams go back to the music and dance style they do best, which is not as funny, but is much more impressive. A good time was had by all. This happened at the Montreal Swing Riot 2014 competition in July. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Geraldine “Jerrie” Mock died last Tuesday at her home in Quincy, Florida. If the name doesn’t sound familiar to you, it’s because she did not receive the lasting fame she should have for the stunt she pulled in 1964. Mock undertook the goal that eluded Amelia Earhart in 1937: she was the first woman to fly around the world solo.
When she took off on March 19, 1964, from Columbus, Ohio, Ms. Mock was a 38-year-old homemaker and recreational pilot who had logged a meager 750 hours of flight time. She returned there on April 17 — 29 days, 11 hours and 59 minutes later — after a 23,000-mile journey over the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea and the Pacific, with stops in the Azores, Casablanca, Cairo, Karachi, Calcutta, Bangkok and Honolulu, among other places.
She was stalled by high winds in Bermuda and battled rough weather between Casablanca and Bone, Algeria. She navigated 1,300 miles over the Pacific from Guam to tiny Wake Island, three miles in diameter, without the benefit of ground signals. Between Bangkok and Manila, she flew over embattled Vietnam.
“Somewhere not far away a war was being fought,” she wrote later, “but from the sky above, all looked peaceful.”
Ms. Mock was given the Gold Medal Award from the FAA, which she received from President Lyndon Johnson in a White House ceremony. She was not excited about making speeches or personal appearances. However, she made the public speaking rounds to repay her sponsors, which included appearances on TV.
“You left your husband alone for 29 days,” the actor Orson Bean, a panelist on the quiz show “To Tell the Truth,” said to her when she appeared as a guest. “What did he do? I mean, who cleaned the house and all?”
You can read more about Jerrie Mock at the New York Times. Ms. Mock was 88.
(Image credit: National Air and Space Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution)
Did you hear about the planet that’s entirely populated by robots? Of course you have, you’ve read about them right here at Neatorama. It would be nice to go visit them sometime. And they have, indeed, done a very good job. This comic is from Tree Lobsters. -via Bad Astronomy
The medical drama Grey’s Anatomy is into its 11th season now, and for much of that run it's been a ratings hit, especially among the 18-49 year old demographic. In ten years, a show will pick up a lot of fans, and a lot of backstage trivia. This mega-list of trivia covers everything from how the characters were cast to what’s in the fake blood and guts. Here’s a sample:
1. Shonda Rhimes was obsessed with watching surgical shows on the Discovery Channel.
2. But her idea for Grey’s Anatomy really started to develop after a doctor told her how hard it is to shave her legs in a hospital shower.
29. Pompeo got pregnant while filming Season 6, but instead of making Meredith pregnant as well, the writers had the character give part of her liver to her estranged father, Thatcher (Jeff Perry), so that Pompeo could be confined to bed rest to hide her pregnant belly under sheets.
39. All the medical storylines are found in medical journals that the writers read or from stories that viewers send in that they find interesting.
Read the rest of the 51 things about Grey’s Anatomy at Buzzfeed.
Saul Goodman, Walter White’s lawyer in the AMC TV show Breaking Bad, is getting his own spinoff series. Better Call Saul, starring Bob Odenkirk, premieres in February, but the theme song is already here. Junior Brown, known for the songs “The Highway Patrol” and “My Wife Thinks You’re Dead,” delivers a ballad that’s perfect for the criminal attorney’s TV ads. The lyrics are by the show’s creators, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould (see them here). -via Digg
The following article is republished from Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader.
Any list of the greatest movie comedians has to include Buster Keaton. Never heard of him? You don’t know what you’re missing. Here’s the story of one of Hollywood’s comic treasures.
THE GREAT STONE FACE
Today’s filmmakers have nearly a century of histories to build on. But that wasn’t always the case -in thee early days of Hollywood, directors had to invent their craft as they went along. How do you film a romantic scene? A car chase? An Old West shootout? An invasion from Mars? Somebody had to do it first -and they had to figure it out for themselves.
WHAT MADE HIM DIFFERENT
* Before Keaton, the standard practice for filming a comedian was to set up a camera in a fixed position and then have them perform in front of it, just as they had performed before live audiences in vaudeville. Keaton made the camera his partner in the action of storytelling, instead of just a passive, immobile recorder of events.
* In his silent short film The Playhouse (1921), for example, Keaton figured out how to film a dream sequence where he plays every role in a vaudeville theater- the orchestra members, the performers onstage, and all the men and women in the audience. Nine characters on screen at the same time, and all of them played by Buster Keaton himself.
* In his 1924 film Sherlock, Jr., Keaton plays a movie theater projectionist who -literally- walks into the movie screen and becomes a participant in the film being shown there.
* Audiences were thrilled with Keaton’s work -and so were filmmakers. They went to see his movies over and over again, just to try to figure out how he filmed his scenes.
* Like Chaplin and Lloyd, Keaton routinely risked his life performing virtually all his own stunts. He nearly drowned while filming a river scene in Our Hospitality (1923) when a safety line broke, and he actually broke his neck filming a scene in Sherlock, Jr. (1924), when he fell onto a railroad track while dangling from a water tower. Both of these scenes were used in the final films. (Keaton didn’t even realized he’d broken his neck until 11 years later, when he finally got around to having it X-rayed.)
* Keaton had a very distinctive onscreen persona- he never smiled on camera. His legendary “Great Stone Face” was something that dated back to his childhood in vaudeville. “If I laughed at what I did, the audience didn’t,” he told an interviewer in the 1960s. “The more serious I turned the bigger laugh I could get. So at the time I went into pictures, that was automatic. I didn’t even know I was doing it.”
IN THE BEGINNING
Keaton spent nearly his entire life in show business, first in vaudeville, then in film and television. He was born Joseph Frank Keaton, Jr. in Piqua, Kansas, on October 4, 1895, while his parents were performing in a traveling medicine show with magician Harry Houdini. His father, Joe Keaton, Sr. was a dance and acrobatic comic; his mother Myra played the saxophone.
Joe Jr. got his nickname from Houdini, following an accident in a hotel when he was only six months old. “I fell down a flight of stairs,” Keaton told an interviewer in 1963. “They picked me up… no bruises, didn’t seem to hurt myself, and Houdini said, ‘That’s sure a Buster.’” (In vaudeville, pratfalls were known as “busters.”)
Redditor YesImAtWork posted a picture of his nephew’s birthday cake, which recreates the periodic table of the elements. His nephew is six years old. How much does a six-year-old boy know about the elements? You might be surprised:
Yes, this child has a series of YouTube videos telling us about the elements, 32 of them so far. He understands more chemistry than most adults. And he’s got an awesome cake to share!
Someone once told me, “If you think you have a problem, you probably do.” I would add a corollary to that: If you obsess about a problem long enough, you’ll cause yourself one. In the latest comic from Sarah Andersen, her obsession has been confirmed. On the upside, at least she’s been proven to be right about something.
In 2008, Gunther Wahl set the world record for milking a cow at two liters in two minutes. in 2012, Maurizio Paschetta smashed that record by getting four and a half liters. At the 2014 World Cow-milking Championship in Lenna, Italy, last week, Gianmario Ghirardi milked an astounding 8.7 liters in two minutes to win the title. The championship was not without controversy. The previous title holder, Paschetta, refused to participate this year. Why?
“For a competition at this level I would have expected strong anti-doping checks on the cows and milkers to protect the animals and guarantee transparency of the top positions,” he was quoted as saying.
“The event could be a showcase for the agricultural world and its traditions, but this has been neglected in the organization,” Paschetta said.
Hints of a doping scandal in the world of competitive milking? What has the world come to? -via Modern Farmer
(Image credit: La Zanzara - Radio 24)
The premise of this stunt is intriguing. Photographer Simon Roberts and pilot Jonathan Nicol took photographs of the sunset in every time zone for a project called Chasing Horizons. The purpose was to create an interesting ad for Citizen watches.
Over the course of 8 hours they literally chased the sun around the globe, staying in ‘the same moment in time’ and letting the Earth spin under them while Roberts captured all 24 sunsets along the way… or rather captured the sun trying to set on them while they fought back with technology and sheer force of will.
The ad turned out okay, and the photographs, well, they aren’t the greatest sunset photographs, but they were in 24 different time zones. The question is, how did they chase the sun around the globe through every time zone in only eight hours? If you think about it, you can figure out the answer before you read the article that explains it at PetaPixel. -via mental_floss
(Image credit: Simon Roberts)
Cats don’t think the way people do, but anyone who has a cat can see how their internal thinking is consistent within a house cat framework. There are some universal ways that cats think, without ever having learned from other cats or YouTube videos. Here, Cole & Marmalade (previously) demonstrate 14 examples of cat logic. Since it's a sponsored video, the last 30 seconds or so is an ad. -via Tastefully Offensive
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