Carol and Willie Fowler of Atlanta planned to host a large wedding for their daughter, Tamara. But Tamara canceled the wedding with only 40 days to go, and the restaurant was reserved. So they had the feast anyway, and contacted the organization Hosea Feed the Hungry & Homeless to invite 200 homeless people for the meal. And 200 people came to the four-course meal at a fancy restaurant with entertainment. Everyone had such a good time that the Fowlers plan to find sponsors and make it an annual event. Link -Thanks, Bill Badrick!
See pictures of the feast.
(Image source: Hosea Feed the Hungry & Homeless)
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Combine a waterside, a slip-n-slide, and a ski jump, and you get me wanting to do this. It happened at Ohio Dreams Action Sports Camp. All this fun is enhanced by the song "Scrape the Sky" by Can't Stop Won't Stop. I'm not that far from Ohio, and I would consider even going through the misery of purchasing a swimsuit for this. -via The Chive
While Vince Gilligan and the writers of Breaking Bad were getting a crash course in science, University of Oklahoma chemistry professor Dr. Donna Nelson was getting a crash course in television as the science advisor for the show. In an interview at mental_floss, Nelson highlights some of the differences in the two occupations' vantage points.
For example, there was a scene where Walter and Jesse are looking for a gallon container of methylamine and all they find are 30-gallon drums. So they emailed me and asked, “How much meth could be made from 30 gallons of methylamine in pounds using the P2P method?” And I just thought that was hilarious, because in our lab we minimize the volume of everything—take 10 drops of this, add two drops of that, etc.—because we want to minimize the cost, we want to maximize the safety, we want to minimize the disposal costs of anything we produce, because it’s research. I’ve never used 30 gallons of anything! Discussing illicit drug synthesis just isn’t something I do with students. All of our calculations are done in grams, not pounds. So I had to pause and laugh at that for a while.
I asked Vince if he wanted it to be really accurate or just a ballpark figure and he said he wanted it really accurate. In the P2P method, there are two steps: the first step is fixed, but in the second step I could use one of several different reducing agents. He asked me to send him a list of them, which I did, and most of them were difficult to pronounce. But one of them was simply aluminum mercury. And he said, “That’s the one we want to use, because it will be much easier for the actors to say.” I thought that was hilarious, because I selected these agents based on cost, safety, percent yield, and purity, but never on how easy it was to speak the name of the reducing agent. So it’s looking at things from a totally different perspective, which I think made me a more creative person.
She's had to walk a fine line to add scientific accuracy to the show without losing the entertainment value. Read the rest at mental_floss. Link
TrumanPDX sends an open letter to J.J. Abrams in the form of a video explaining what made Star Wars so special in the first place. I agree, follow what was great about the original trilogy without trying to outshine or out-CGI the prequels. But when he asks for fewer cutsie characters, well, good luck with that. After all, Disney is never going to pass up an opportunity for product marketing. -via Ryan Galloway
Inconceivable! there is no end to trivia about The Princess Bride, and there is no end to fans who are interested in it. Did you know that one of the guys who played an R.O.U.S. (Rodents Of Unusual Size) had to be bailed out of jail to film one day?
17. The R.O.U.S.’s were created by putting actors into rat suits. On the day Westley was supposed to wrestle one, the rat actor was pulled over for speeding and had to be bailed out of jail by filmmakers so they could continue filming.
Bonus: the bits of trivia are illustrated by scenes from the movie. Link
Who knew that jaguars were such good swimmers? This guy glides along like a ninja, and the caiman on the shore has no idea until it's too late. Luke Dollar of National Geographic's Big Cats Initiative narrates footage taken in Brazil's Pantanal wetlands. I saw the prey referred to as a crocodile elsewhere, which made me wonder whether caimans were alligators or crocodiles. According to Wikipedia, a caiman is a "alligatorid crocodylian," which means yeah, it's one of them. -via Viral Viral Videos
Wojtek was a Persian bear cub who was adopted by a unit of Polish soldiers training under the British Army in the Middle East during World War II. The 22nd Transport Company, Artillery Division, raised him the best they could to be a good soldier. Wojtek fit in quite well, as his favorite activities included wrestling and drinking beer. When the unit was deployed to Europe, the only way they could take Wojtek with them was to make him an official soldier.
In Naples, it was British Courier Archibald Brown’s job to help process Polish soldiers that had just arrived from Egypt to advance with British soldiers against German and Italian forces. But when he called Wojtek’s name, no one answered.
“We looked at the roster, and there was only one person, Corporal Wojtek, who had not appeared,” Brown said in an interview years later. So he asked the other soldiers why Wojtek didn’t come forward. An amused soldier replied: “Well, he only understands Polish and Persian.” To his great surprise, Brown was led to a cage holding a full-grown bear.
Wojtek soon proved he was more than just a mascot when, during the series of assaults known as the Battle of Monte Cassino, he put his strength to good use after being trained to carry heavy crates filled with mortar shells from the supply trucks, delivering them to the men operating the large guns on the front line.
The army honored Wojtek's service by putting his image, carrying ammo, on the unit's official badge. Read Wojtek' s story at Today I Found Out. Link -via Digg
Poor Jesse Pinkman. Has any character ever gone through so much misery and abuse in the history of television? This supercut contains Breaking Bad spoilers. It also contains of lot of hurt, so viewer discretion is advised. -via Uproxx
The pumpkins are taking over everything, along with their allies, cinnamon, clove, and ginger. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide! You cannot escape Pumpkin Spice!
Remember, kids, pumpkins are for pies and jack-o-lanterns. And besides, it's not even October yet! Seriously, is this pumpkin spice obsession here just to make me feel bad about my pumpkin patch's complete failure this year? -via Viral Viral Videos
The science titan wasn’t used to being outsmarted. But after two years of trying to shut down English counterfeiting, one underworld kingpin was still getting the better of him.
Back in 1695, England’s Royal Mint discovered a serious problem: A massive portion of the circulating currency was phony. As counterfeiting methods grew increasingly clever, the Mint turned to England’s brightest mind for a solution. Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint, a one-man army who waded through London’s underbelly to restore the currency’s integrity. Most counterfeiters were easy prey for Newton, but William Chaloner, a shadowy kingpin, kept eluding his grasp.
Chaloner had trained as a nail maker’s apprentice, but he found a more lucrative application for molten metals: coining 30,000 guineas. The counterfeiter’s self-made wealth enabled him to pose as a gentleman and gave him an ego to match his intellect.
Newton wanted nothing more than to destroy Chaloner, and the feeling was mutual. Chaloner appeared before a parliamentary committee, where he insinuated that Newton was incompetent and blamed Mint employees for the epidemic of phony coins. Enraged, Newton intensified his efforts.
When Chaloner set up a coining facility in Egham, 20 miles outside of London, Newton sensed an opening. He began studying Chaloner’s sophisticated casting method—which involved pouring molten metal into brass molds before filing down the molds’ faces, resulting in much sharper images on the phony coins.
A retired cardiologist tells the story of how a malignant tumor in his brain underwent experimental treatment -with a polio virus! Fritz Anderson was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), a particularly lethal type of brain tumor. Surgery and chemotherapy didn't stop the tumor from growing.
As doctors there examined me, it was obvious that my tumor had already grown again; in fact, it had quadrupled in size since my initial chemo and radiation. I was offered several treatments and experimental protocols, one of which involved implanting a modified polio virus into my brain. (This had been very successful in treating GBMs in mice.) Duke researchers had been working on this for 10 years and had just received permission from the FDA to treat 10 patients, but for only one a month. (A Duke press release last May explained that the treatment was designed to capitalize “on the discovery that cancer cells have an abundance of receptors that work like magnets in drawing the poliovirus, which then infects and kills the cells. The investigational therapy . . . uses an engineered form of the virus that is lethal to cancer cells, while harmless to normal cells. The therapy is infused directly into a patient’s tumor. The virus-based therapy also triggers the body’s immune system to attack the infected tumor cells.”)
To receive the virus, Anderson's skull was exposed and a drip was installed for six hours. The tumor stopped growing, and after two years, only a scar is left. And we wondered for so long if viruses served any purpose. Read more about this strange new treatment at the Washington Post. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: Arthur E. Giron)
Walter White, Jr. (who prefers to be called Flynn now) is often shown in the series Breaking Bad while eating breakfast. What started out as a convenient way to have the family talking to each other developed into a trope about what Flynn had to eat vs. what he wanted to eat. The Whites' fortunes came to be measured by what Flynn had for breakfast. All these breakfast scenes are mapped out in one post at Thrillist.
Breaking Bad ends forever this Sunday, and while the show has repeatedly defied expectations over its five-season run, we do know a few things to be constant and true. Horrible things will always happen to Jesse Pinkman's girlfriends. Marie will always be clothed in some shade of purple. But, most importantly, you will never love anything as much as Walt Jr. loves breakfast. In celebration of the show's purest relationship, we decided to exhaustively catalog everything Flynn eats in the AM from the pilot to present.
I have a few teenagers, and it's safe to say that breakfast time is the one time of the day that you're sure to see your kid. If you have something to say, better do it over breakfast, because they have teenager things to do until bedtime. Still, the way Flynn's food has been analyzed over the series is a hoot. Link -Thanks, Ben!
Meredith Fitzmaurice had never run a full marathon before. She was working her way up to that when she entered the half-marathon at the Run for Heroes Marathon in Amherstburg, Ontario, last Sunday. But the half-marathon and the full marathon were happening at the same time, and she missed a turn on the half-marathon course. Fitzmaurice just kept going with the other runners.
"I just run with my watch, so I was watching my time since I planned to do my half in under 1:28," she said. "I was doing the race as training for my first full marathon in Detroit. But I'm looking at the time and wondering where the finish line is."
Fitzmaurice, 34, asked one of the bike officials on the course where the turn was for the half-marathon, although she admits by that point she had her suspicions.
"Once I realized what I had done, I figured, well I'll just run 20 miles and use it as a long run and call it a day," she said.
But as she headed from the turnaround she started to count people ahead of her.
There were only a few men ahead, and no women, so Fitzmaurice kept running, and was the first woman across the finish line, and the tenth overall with a time of 3:11:48. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Dax Melmer/Postmedia News)
A couple of months ago, we showed you a video of firefighter Cory Kalanick rescuing an unconscious kitten from a house fire. Some said they liked the story, but did not care for the video. Now the footage has been made into a GoPro ad with more to see and less text. At the risk of repeating a story, I think it's worth watching. -via Viral Viral Videos
Robin, the middle of three brothers, got married. His two brothers, Baddy Paris and Rufus Starlight, reacted in a hilariously childish way: they begged him not to -as a wedding toast!
Our brother asked us to be his best men for his wedding. We knew the hardest thing would be doing a traditional best man’s speech, because we would cry too much. So instead, we made a music video - a plea not to leave us! Which he did, regardless.
They wish Robin and Helen the best anyway. Link -via Tastefully Offensive
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