Labor Day is an American holiday to celebrate working people and their contributions. It was born out of the organized labor movement, specifically the Pullman Strike in 1894. The original meaning of the holiday is often overlooked in the 21st century, but it used to be the main focus of Labor Day, as you can see in 16 vintage photos of the celebration at mental_floss. Shown here is a union float from a Labor Day parade in 1909, and a community barbecue from 1940. Link
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World-record distance swimmer Diana Nyad first tried to swim from Cuba to the U.S. in 1978. It was not successful. Just a few minutes ago, at age 64, Nyad reached Key West, Florida, successfully completing the 103-mile swim in her fifth attempt. She swam for 52 hours and set a world record for a distance swim without a shark cage.
Link | Official website
-via Metafilter
(Image credit: Women's Sports Foundation)
A man fishing in the Nile river at Qena, Egypt, spotted a stork that had a suspicious electronic device attached to it. He captured the bird and alerted authorities to a possible case of espionage. Qena security chief Mohammed Kamal explained what happened then.
Puzzled officers examined the bird, fearing the gadget was a bomb or spying equipment, and then called in veterinary experts.
Eventually, they discovered it was a wildlife tracker used by French scientists to follow the movement of migratory birds, said Ayman Abdallah, head of veterinary services in Qena.
He said the device stopped working when the bird crossed the French border, absolving it of being a spy.
But he said it would have to remain in police custody for the time being because officials need permission from state prosecutors to release the bird.
And you thought the stork only brought babies. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: AP)
Volkswagen had a years-long series of counterintuitive ads in the 1960s that played up how different the Beetle and the Microbus (then called simply the VW and the VW Station Wagon) were from every other vehicle. The ads were very different from standard automobile advertising as well, because the headlines were often so strange that you were forced to read the fine print, where the car's apparent drawback was explained to be an asset in disguise. While other companies enticed buyers to upgrade with new designs each year, this ad appealed to thrifty drivers by showing how VW replacement parts work with every model. One ad shows a man pushing his Bug, with the headline "And if you run out of gas, it's easy to push." In the small print, they explained that this year (1962) the company has installed a gas gauge in its new vehicles. Before that, you ran out of gas and then flipped a lever to use the reserve tank to get to a gas station. But that's one reason why a new Beetle cost around $1,500 at the time -about a thousand dollars less than other new cars. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user James Vaughan)
So, you're supposed to bring something to the picnic and you don't want to cook. Mark Rober's recipe for watermelon smoothies requires no cooking, but is sure to impress the relatives -and you'll be remembered as the coolest aunt or uncle ever! Just make sure you get a seedless watermelon, and allow time for it to be thoroughly chilled. -via Viral Viral Videos
Remember that old trope in cartoons where a hypnotist would swing something on a string back and forth and say "You are getting sleepy…sleepy"? It apparently works, or at least it did on these three kittens. -via Daily Picks and Flicks
Not every story of exploration is epic or even successful. The ones we aren't familiar with are quite interesting, but there's a reason we aren't familiar with them -like utter failure. Like the time policeman Robert Burke was sent on a mission to find a route from Victoria, Australia, to the continent's northern coast.
When the expedition set off from Melbourne on August 19, 1860, Burke made sure to load his wagons with everything he figured they would need for a few months in the desert, including a Chinese gong, a heavy wooden table and chair set, 1,500 pounds of sugar, and a stationery cabinet (where else was he going to store his stationery? In his backpack like an asshole?). Equipped more like a traveling circus than an exploring party, the group covered a whopping 4 miles on the first day of their journey, making camp basically within sight of their houses.
In fact, it was two months before they actually reached uncharted territory, which is amusing when you consider that the mailman routinely took the same trip in two weeks, but he didn't have a sweet Chinese gong. The long start meant that they arrived in the desert just as summer was beginning, but Burke didn't let a little thing like daily temperatures of over 100 degrees slow him down, possibly because to travel any slower, he'd have to be going in reverse.
Was Burke's mission successful? No. Was it interesting? Yes, and so are the other four stories of explorers in an article at Cracked. Link
My wife wanted a run-of-the-mill birthday party. I asked her, "So just a generic party?" This is the result.
He admits he got the idea from a previous generic party. There are more pictures of the decorations, and the priceless inside of the card. Link -via Pleated-Jeans
Jonti Picking's badgers are set to the music of Brian May and Brian Blessed in protest over a government-sponsored badger cull in Britain. The reason for the cull is to protect cows from bovine tuberculosis. Team Badger advocates vaccinating cows instead. The song has become a bona fide hit.
It has made the top 40 in the iTunes download chart and is the most popular track in the iTunes store top 10 rock chart.
Blessed, who played Prince Vultan in the 1980 film Flash Gordon, which featured a soundtrack by Queen, said: "Brian May is absolutely inspirational and together we will beat the dark forces and save the badgers."
Around 5,000 of the animals are expected to be killed in controlled shootings over six weeks in Somerset and Gloucestershire.
Supporters say the cull is needed to tackle bovine TB, which can be spread from infected badgers. Those against the cull, including the RSPCA and wildlife organisations, say it is ineffective and inhumane.
Dutch filmmaker Bahram Sadeghi, who is of Iranian heritage, accidentally deleted an important email. What to do? He hit on the ingenious idea of calling the National Security Agency! After all, the NSA has all our mail, don't they? -via The Daily Dot
The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader.
Godzilla is one of the most popular movie monsters in film history. Here's the story behind Japan's largest export.
NUCLEAR AGE
On March 1, 1954, at the Bikini atoll in the South Pacific, the United States tested the world's first hydrogen bomb. It was 1,000 times more powerful than the A-bombs that had been dropped on Japan nine years earlier.
American ships were warned to stay out of the test area …but because the project was top-secret, the U.S. government provided little warning to other countries. U.S. officials were certain that the resulting nuclear fallout would land on an empty expanse of the Pacific Ocean and no one would be in jeopardy.
Unfortunately, they were wrong. The fallout didn't travel in the direction they expected, and a small Japanese fishing boat named the Daigo Fukuryo Maru ("Lucky Dragon") was in the area where the nuclear cloud came to earth. Within hours of the blast, the boat's entire crew became violently ill from radiation poisoning. On September 23, 1954, after more than six months of agony, a radioman named Aikichi Huboyama died.
The fate of the crew of the Daigo Fukuryo Maru made international news. In Japan, headlines like "The Second Atomic Bombing of Mankind" compared the incident to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
ART IMITATES LIFE
While all this was going on, Japanese movie producer Tomoyuki Tanaka arrived in Indonesia to oversee a film called Beyond the Glory. It was scheduled to be the main release for Japan's Toho Studios the following year but it never got off the ground; the Indonesian government refused to issue work visas to the film's two stars.
Suddenly, Tanaka found himself with time, money, and actors- but no film to make. In addition, Toho Studios had a big hole in their release schedule. The producer had to come up with a new movie concept… fast.
On his flight back to Tokyo, Tanaka stared out the window at the ocean below, desperately trying to think of something. His mind wandered to the H-bomb tests in the South Pacific and the crew of the Daigo Fukuryo Maru …and then it hit him: he would combine an American-style monster movie with a serious message about the threat of radiation and nuclear weapons tests.
PROJECT G
Commercially, it made sense. For obvious reasons, the Japanese public was very concerned about nuclear testing. And in theaters, monster movies were hot. The 1933 classic King Kong had been re-released in 1952 and made more than $3 million in international ticket sales -four times what it had earned the first time around. Time magazine even named the great ape "Monster of the Year." Its huge success inspired a "monster-on-the-loose" film craze.
One of the first to cash in on the fad was The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, which featured a dinosaur attacking New York City after nuclear tests awakened him from a million-year sleep. The film cost $400,000 to make and was a critical flop -but with $5 million in box office receipts, it was one of the top-grossing movies of the year.
Tanaka got approval from his studio to do a Japanese version. He hired a prominent Japanese science fiction writer to write a knockoff screenplay tentatively titled Big Monster from 20,000 Miles Beneath the Sea, but he still wasn't sure what kind of monster to use, or what to call it. So to start out, the film was referred to simply as "Project G."
The British Museum has a a 1,600-year-old Roman chalice that becomes a different color depending on which direction the light comes from. No one knew why until scientists got a good look at the way the glass was made.
The glass chalice, known as the Lycurgus Cup because it bears a scene involving King Lycurgus of Thrace, appears jade green when lit from the front but blood-red when lit from behind—a property that puzzled scientists for decades after the museum acquired the cup in the 1950s. The mystery wasn’t solved until 1990, when researchers in England scrutinized broken fragments under a microscope and discovered that the Roman artisans were nanotechnology pioneers: They’d impregnated the glass with particles of silver and gold, ground down until they were as small as 50 nanometers in diameter, less than one-thousandth the size of a grain of table salt. The exact mixture of the precious metals suggests the Romans knew what they were doing—“an amazing feat,” says one of the researchers, archaeologist Ian Freestone of University College London.
Researchers suspected the chalice would appear in different colors depending on what drink it held, but they weren't about to test that theory with the ancient artifact. So they recreated the material it was made of! Even more intriguing are the potential modern applications of the technology. Read more about it at Smithsonian magazine. Link
(Image credit: The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY)
A heavy storm in Keelung, Taiwan, dislodges a rock perched at the top of a hill. It comes to rest on the road, in a spot where the white car could have easily been, if the landslide hadn't nudged it over. Go back to the beginning of the clip to see the rock start to move. The white car did not get away unscathed, but it could have been so much worse. Here's what the boulder looked like in better weather. -via reddit
To further your knowledge of facial hair, Doghouse Diaries has supplemented the earlier Beard Facts with things you should know about mustaches. The only thing I would add is that, if your significant other shaves his mustache off, you really should notice and say something about it, even if it was the same color as his face. Otherwise, there will be hurt feelings. Don't ask me how I know. Link -via Tastefully Offensive
As Los Angeles grew in the 1920s, in large part because of the film industry, city planners built hundreds of outdoor staircases into the hills to connect new homes with public transportation at the bottom. They aren't used much anymore, as residents are more dependent on cars.
The film studios were the first to develop the area, building compact bungalows to house their actors and technicians. Both Chaplin and Disney lived here.
Movie carpenters would build sets during the week and homes at the weekend. Charles said this accounted for the local architectural hotchpotch that is often ridiculed. A Moorish castle next to a Spanish villa, next to a Tudor mansion - the carpenters were inspired by whatever they had been building on the studio backlots that week.
Our second staircase was thankfully unobstructed. Here, in 1932, Laurel and Hardy tried and failed to move a piano to the top in The Music Box. The film won an Academy Award. I'd seen it over and again as a child and remembered it fondly.
There were now buildings either side but it was still quite recognisable. For such a historic landmark it was still remarkably unkempt, its history simply marked by a defaced granite plaque inset into one of the lower steps.
Take a tour of those staircases both then and now with Charles Fleming of the L.A. Times and Zeb Soanes of the BBC. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
(Image source: The Music Box)
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