Channel 4 and Nexus teamed up to produce this awesome animated short with a twist ending. This action sequence is about a working community that panics over a mysterious and deadly invasion. Telling you any more might spoil the payoff, but after you watch it, you can read more about it at Agency Spy. And if you hate watching something with such a mysterious description, hey, it's just two minutes. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Oh My Disney redid the opening theme to the TV show DuckTales, scene by scene, with real ducks! I’ve never seen the show, and even I find this absolutely adorable, so I can imagine that it would be awesome to those who grew up watching it. If you want to refresh your memory, the original is here. -via Viral Viral Videos
Let’s be honest -these things are so common, they aren’t really weird at all. But they don’t matter nearly as much as we make them out to.
I solved the problem about what to eat by getting groceries and letting everyone deal with their own hunger. If I found the toilet paper installed the wrong way, that would be a treat, because it meant someone did it! The same principle applies to loading the dishwasher. I don’t ask my husband to fold clothes, and he doesn’t ask me to vacuum the carpets. Squeezing toothpaste from the bottom only mattered back when it came in a metal tube. And the internet can solve any movie casting question in seconds. -via Buzzfeed
The liquor laws in Albany, Indiana, state that an establishment that sells liquor by the drink must also serve food. The “minimum food service” is described as “hot soups, hot sandwiches, coffee, milk, and soft drinks.” Now, any bar should have coffee, milk, and soft drinks because they are mixers. But the Bank Street Brewhouse doesn’t really want to be a restaurant, and doesn’t really want to serve food. But in keeping with the letter of the law, they now offer this menu.
If it's hard to read, you can see a slightly larger version at imgur. Of course, this will backfire on them, as soon as someone has a few too many drinks and decides that they really, really want a plain microwave hotdog and a can of random soup.
Why wouldn’t a bar want to serve hot food? For one thing, it takes up room and staff time. Another plausible explanation comes from redditor j0llyllama, who points out that food delivery services are on the opposite page of the menu. Often bars have deals with nearby restaurants to provide food to their patrons without making them leave the bar. -via Uproxx
Who Framed Roger Rabbit hit theaters in 1988, but it was in development for a long time. Disney bought the right to the novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit? by Gary K. Wolf in 1981, and set to work on the film from 1981 to 1983. Then in 1984, Michael Eisner took over as head of Disney, and reworked the entire project, bringing in Steven Spielberg and his company Amblin Entertainment. In this Disney promo film, we see the earlier work that was done on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with Paul Reubens doing the voice of Roger Rabbit. It would have been quite different from what we know. -via Digg
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
by L.X. Finegold
Physics Department, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
This issue of AIR, on British Eccentrics, is fundamentally wrong in its premise. To most Brits, "eccentrics" may be a little different from the average (in statistical terms, one sigma), but that small difference is perfectly acceptable and normal. I was born in England, and grew up there. Am I an "eccentric"? Let me first declare and aver on the basis of incontrovertible, dispassionate, unbiased and objective evidence - that I am not [Finegold 2000].
Nutters and England
If you're way out (in statistical terms, a huge three sigmas) in Limeyland [Cook 1779], then you're not an acceptable eccentric but are a dangerous "nutter," to be carefully avoided by the rest of us sensible folk.
An example of a nutter would be the Canadian Prime Minister who, though married, consulted every night with his mother for practical political advice (yes, he really existed). There's nothing wrong with that, but for the small point that she was long dead [Macdonald 1867].
Indeed, it's pointed out that in mechanical engineering, cranks and eccentrics are essential to automobiles, so that without cranks and eccentrics, our modern civilization would crash.
Some of us would regard it perfectly natural to wear bow ties, for their ends do not dip into our breakfast eggs. Similarly, we know a normal Limey who found that an elastic band would automatically close his open trouser zipper [Finegold 1999]. Another Limey uses the number on his "Donation of body to medicine upon death card" as an identification number for cashing cheques etc.; he chose 3.14159265 (which is π) - and it works beautifully with officialdom.
Even the most talented fiction writers start with a kernel of truth. What? You thought novelists just made up stories? Well, yes, mostly, but even the most outlandish tales are born of elements the author knows. Sometimes they are true stories that hit close to home, like the inspiration for Anna Karenina.
In January 1872, the death of a 35-year-old woman was reported in the Russian press: smartly dressed and carrying a bag containing a change of clothes, the girl had thrown herself under a freight train at Yasenki Station outside Moscow. The woman was identified as Anna Pirogova, a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy's wife and the mistress of his good friend and neighbour, Alexander Bibikov. It soon transpired that Alexander had told Anna that he planned to leave her and marry his son's new governess, and, unable to cope, she had left him a brief note -- "You are my murderer; be happy, if an assassin can be happy" -- and fled. Tolstoy himself attended Anna's post-mortem the following day, and by all accounts the sight of the unrecognisable body of a woman he had known so well stayed with him long afterwards, so that when he came to begin a new novel more than a year later he already had its tragic conclusion in mind.
You have to wonder how Bibkov liked his friend's resulting novel. From Frankenstein to Catch 22, find 14 more stories of how classic novels were inspired at HuffPo.
Fun thing to do today: try to notice how many times the word “force” is used in news stories. Randall Munroe of xkcd does this text replacement thing every once in a while. This one just happens to have funnier results than most. Remember to go to the webcomic to see the hidden hover text.
The OSU marching band (“The Best Damn Band in the Land”) opened their season with an impressive show featuring your favorite TV shows from way back when and today during halftime at the Virginia Tech game Saturday. Just wait ’til you see them drive the Batmobile across the field! But then, after watching the rest of the show, I’m not sure what part I’m most impressed with. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
The following is an article from Uncle John's Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader.
Shh! This story details one of he most incredible examples of nutty spy technology. Ever. (But don’t tell anyone.)
LOST AT SEA
On March 8, 1968, the submarine USS Barb was on a mission, secretly monitoring shipping activity near Vladivostok, home of the Soviet Union’s largest naval base on the Pacific Ocean. Suddenly five Soviet submarines came racing out of the port at full speed. Subs were supposed to be stealthy and silent- these were anything but. They were noisily “pinging” the ocean floor with active sonar, and repeatedly diving and surfacing. It was clear that they were looking for something, and a dozen surface warships sooner joined in the hunt. Radio communications between the ships was frantic and unencrypted, another indication of the urgency of the search. What were they looking for?
CHECKING THE RECORDS
The U.S. Navy’s Office of Undersea Warfare, responsible for intercepting the radio traffic of enemy submarines, quickly started poring over the logs of recent radio traffic, looking for clues to what was going on. Sure enough, K-129, a diesel submarine carrying nuclear torpedoes and ballistic missiles with four-megaton nuclear warheads, had failed to report in, as scheduled, the day before. More than 24 hours had passed since then and there was still no word from the sub. It was missing and now presumed sunk. And judging from the haphazard nature of the search, the Soviets didn’t have a clue where it had gone down.
Did the Americans? The Navy operates a large network of “hydrophones” -underwater microphones- in strategic locations all over the Pacific. The Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) can distinguish between sounds made by military ships and submarines, and those given off by ordinary maritime traffic. It also records background noise. Analysts went over the recordings, looking for any sound that might have been K-129 exploding or being crushed by tremendous pressure as it sank to the ocean floor.
TAKING PICTURES
They found what they were looking for: a single unexplained loud popping sound that they traced to the same area of the Pacific where they believed the K-129 was likely to have gone down. The USS Halibut, a submarine capable of dropping a camera to the ocean floor at the end of long cable, was dispatched to the area to search for the missing sub.
Analysts narrowed the search to a five-square-mile section of the ocean floor about 1,700 miles northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. That’s still a lot of ocean- it took two trips to the site and more than 13 weeks of methodically inching across the ocean floor before Halibut finally found the wreck of the K-129, three miles below the surface.
The camera showed that a 10-foot-wide hole had been blown in the sub’s hull right behind the conning tower. That led the analysts to speculate that the sub had suffered a catastrophic explosion while charging its batteries. The batteries give off explosive hydrogen gas while they’re charging, and a spark from the engines could have ignited the gas.
The Navy had found the Soviet sub. Now what?
Archeologoists on the island of Zealand in Denmark was unearthed a circular fortress that has been dated to about the tenth century, which might put it under the reign of Harald Bluetooth, the first Christian king of Denmark and Norway.
However, some historians contend the fortresses were constructed by his son Sweyn Forkbeard, the first Danish King of England, as a military training camp or barracks from which to launch his invasions of England. Sweyn Forkbeard seized London in 1013 and was declared King of England on Christmas Day of that year.
The newly discovered fortress has a diameter of 475 feet, making it the third-largest of its type, and consists of a 35-foot wide circular rampart surrounded by a palisade of wooden spikes.
The excavation is far from complete. These ring fortresses are called Trelleborgs in Denmark, after the town near where the first was discovered. There have been four such fortresses found in western Zealand. Read more about them at the Telegraph. -via Digg
(Image credit: Danskebjerge)
Like many of my generation, I read about Thor Heyerdahl and his raft the Kon-Tiki as a child. The voyage in 1947 was a sensation, spawning books and a movie, which seemed to prove the possibility that the Polynesian islands were settled by sailors from South America drifting on ocean currents. It was a theory that has been discussed ever since Captain Cook landed in Hawaii in 1778 and found that the language of Tahiti was understood in Hawaii. That raised the question of where the Polynesians came from and how they interconnected. Prominent European historians and navigators believed the Pacific islands must have been settled from the east, possibly even from Europe, while a Maori scholar gathered and presented evidence for the idea that the islands were settled by travelers from Asia sailing by traditional navigation techniques.
But skeptics remained, the most famous—but by no means the only—was Thor Heyerdahl. Not only did he reject the voyaging tradition, but he rejected the West-to-East migration as well. Heyerdahl argued that the Pacific had been settled by accidental drift voyaging from the Americas. His argument was based largely on the wind and current patterns in the Pacific, which flow predominantly from East to West. Where the oral tradition posed Polynesians voyaging against the wind, Heyerdahl argued it was far more likely that American Indians drifted with the wind. He made his bias particularly clear by designing his Kon Tiki raft to be unsteerable.
There is no doubt that the voyage of the Kon Tiki was a great adventure: three months on the open sea on a raft, drifting at the mercy of the winds and currents. That they did eventually reach Polynesia proved that such drift voyaging was possible. But all other evidence pointed to Southeast Asian origins: oral tradition, archaeological data, linguistic structures and the trail of human-introduced plants. Today we have strong evidence that Polynesians actually reached the Americas, not vice-versa. Nonetheless, Heyerdahl remains famous. His notion of “drift voyaging” was taken up by Andrew Sharp, whose 1963 book discredited step-by-step the possible means by which Pacific Islanders might have navigated and fixed their position at sea.
Polynesian historians have maintained that traditional navigation led the way to Pacific exploration. In 1976, master traditional navigator Mau Piailug steered the Hawaiian canoe Hōkūleʻa (pictured) on a three-year voyage to all the Polynesian islands to prove how the ancient navigational techniques worked, and how sailors from Asia discovered and settled the islands. These techniques include intimate knowledge of the sun, stars, wind, weather, wildlife, and even the different types of ocean swells. Read how theories of ancient navigation and settlement have changed at Smithsonian. Also included is a documentary about Mau Piailug.
(Image credit: Flickr user Nemo’s great uncle)
The first football game of the season often starts with a grand entrance, whether you’re in the preschool league or the NFL. However, there are many more Little League and high school teams than pro teams, and they are supported by volunteers, so the odds of mayhem are higher for the younger players. In this compilation by Buzzfeed of clips from America’s Funniest Videos, 24 different teams make their grand entrance and run into unexpected consequences.
If the princes from Disney princess movies were real guys …you probably wouldn’t like them very much. Sure, they look good, and that’s all that matters when you’re six and want to grow up to be a princess. But real life is a different story altogether. This Buzzfeed video lays it all on the line. Disney princes, even the ones who aren’t royalty, can be egotistical, kinky, abusive, or poverty-stricken, but the most common trait they have, which helps to move the plot along in many cases, is that they’re far from intelligent.
Hey! Got a minute for some science? This little animation tells the story of what happens to beans when you eat them. Well, you know what happens when you eat beans, but this video gives the story from the inside. Beans may be the magical fruit, but the process is an everyday chemical reaction. That is, if you eat beans every day. Produced by Giant Ant for Men's Health Magazine. -via Viral Viral Videos
Email This Post to a Friend