Dean Norris plays Hank, the DEA agent in the TV series Breaking Bad. To be honest, this video contains no spoilers. But it would, if the powers that be had accepted Norris' script for the final episode. -via Uproxx
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Its name is 1996 Pinnacle Foil No. 289, and it has a picture of baseball player Bob Hamelin of the Kansas City Royals. This is the baseball card version of a bad example. The design breaks all the rules, without reason or payoff.
The experts agree: 1996 Pinnacle Foil No. 289 is a very bad baseball card. “It's so jarring and awful, a collision of unpleasant forms and surfaces,” says Josh Wilker, the author of the memoir Cardboard Gods. “I fear for anyone dwelling too long on this card. There should be contests to see who can last the longest staring at it before screaming into the night.” Beau and Bryan Abbott, proprietors of the site Baseball Card Vandals, give 1996 Pinnacle Hamelin their highest praise, calling it “awesomely terrible.” Dave Jamieson, author of Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession, wonders if someone at Pinnacle really hated Bob Hamelin and wanted to make him look bad on purpose. (The blog Royals Review agrees with this theory.)
Slate looks at all the ways 1996 Pinnacle Foil No. 289 is a baseball card failure, with plenty of input from experts. But some disagree that it's the worst, because they can cite other candidates. It turns out there are many ways in which a baseball card can fail. Even Bob Hamelin thinks another of his own cards is worse. Link -via mental_floss
Smithsonian has several articles on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, including an oral history and a play-by-play account of the event. Their Food and Think blog is covering another facet of the original march: what they ate that day. Early estimates of 100,00 to 150,000 people were overly conservative. How do you feed that many people? Organizers encouraged marchers to bring their own food and water, but they were ready for more.
In New York, volunteers showed up at the Riverside Church at 3:00 AM to make bagged lunches The bagged meal, comprised of a cheese sandwich, mustard, marble cake and an apple, could be purchased by marchers for 50 cents. Working in shifts until 4 in the afternoon, the assembly line crew paused once for a few words from Dr. Robert Spike, director of the Commission on Religion and Race of the National Council of Churches: ”As an act of love, we now dedicate these lunches for the nourishment of thousands who will be coming long distances, at great sacrifice to say with their bodies and souls that we shall overcome.” In all, 5 tons of American cheese went into the 80,000 lunches that were loaded onto refrigerated trucks and shipped down to Washington.
Other plans were made to feed the many policeman at the event, but liquor sales were suspended in Washington -except for the Congressional cafeteria. Read more at Smithsonian. Link
(Image: The National Archives)
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research.
by Stephen Drew, AIR staff
The book Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has awakened an interest in bezoars. Two years ago bezoars nudged briefly into the public consciousness, but they somehow lacked staying power. This was not due to any lack of bizarreness, for this was a case of doll’s head bezoars. And they were real, not fictional.
Bezoars are tough, literally indigestible masses that, one way or another, got into the stomachs or intestines of an animal. A hairball is a bezoar. The bezoars in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince are of a different sort -- stones taken from the stomachs of goats.
The doll’s head bezoars were, simply, dolls’ heads. These plastic crania made their first public appearance in a set of x-rays taken at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Washington. Two Harborview radiologists celebrated the bezoars in print, publishing an illustrated report in the American Journal of Roentgenology.1
Drs. Ken Linnau and Frederick Mann played the role of J.K. Rowling, using clear prose to describe a curious interplay of childhood themes and dark adult doings.
They tell a strangely gripping tale. It begins with a 35-year-old man who suffers from
abdominal pain and distention. The doctors (who, in addition to being authors, play vital roles in the story) take an abdominal radiograph. As the x-rays develop, so does the plot.
The image is most curious. It “showed multiple rounded objects, some of which projected in the shape of a head with a pointed nose.” The hospital staff are intrigued.
Of course dog loves babies -who doesn't? To be fair, cats love babies, too; they are just less rambunctious and entertaining about it. My cats are surprisingly patient with puppies, kittens, and humans under five years old. Humans older than that may get a lesson in respecting personal boundaries. The dog, however -she just loves everybody! -via Tastefully Offensive
Typing a random word into the Google search field and looking at all the autocomplete suggestions is always an adventure. Randall Munroe obviously entered "why" and received an embarrassment of comedy riches, which he took the time to write out for us. It looks as if modern parents got tired of their young children's incessant "whys" and told them to try Google. See a larger version at xkcd. Link
Extreme science sometimes calls for extreme conditions. For example, SNOLAB in Sudbury, Ontario, is buried two kilometers underground in a nickel mine to explore things you can only do away from the earth's surface.
Research at SNOLAB focuses on astroparticle physics, including cosmic dark matter searches, low-energy solar neutrinos and supernova neutrino searches. However, scientists from various other fields, including geophysics and seismology, have also expressed interest in working at the facility, which could also be useful to underground biology researchers.
Take a look at the coldest, the hottest, the highest, the lowest, the deepest, and the biggest science laboratories on earth at Tech Graffiti. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: SNOLAB)
Friday night, voice teacher Sarah Horn went to see Kristin Chenoweth and the L.A. Philharmonic perform at the Hollywood Bowl. Part of Chenoweth's show is a duet of "For Good," a song from the Broadway musical Wicked, and an audience member is selected to sing it. When they asked who knew the song, Horn volunteered, and was brought on stage. Here is an alternate video with a better view, but more audience noise. From the reaction backstage afterward, Horn may be destined for bigger things.
Paul Geller, Production Director at both the Hollywood Bowl and the Walt Disney Concert Hall pulled me aside afterward. He said that the production staff is very picky about the quality of performers that they allow on their stage and that what was produced in that song was better than anything they could have planned. He took down my contact information because at some point during the last three songs, he got a phone call from the LA Times wanting to know if I was an audience plant and asked my permission to pass on my contact information for them to speak to me directly, if needed.
Horn tells the story of that night at Broadway World. Link -via Metafilter
If only evolving to adapt to changing conditions were this easy… Well, things would still go wrong. From Pie Comic by John McNamee. Link
You don't have to know anything about video games to enjoy this insane video of the most ridiculous horse race ever. I learned nothing about the way the game works, or even what the point is, but I was riveted. A narrator shows his buddy what the game is about, and he reacts about the way you would if you had no language filter. In other words, NSFW language.
I'm going to go to Japan one day, and if the actual horse races aren't like that I'm going to be disappointed.
This image of a fictional saloon was created by illustrator Harry Grant Dart and appeared in the magazine Puck in 1908. It was intended to show how awful life would be if women were granted the right to vote.
Alas, Mrs. P.J. Gilligan's never had a "real" existence outside the paranoid imagination of her hostile creator. Suffragists back then were routinely attacked as "unsexed" or "mannish" in a way that is very similar to how feminists are attacked today as "lesbian" or "manhating" (some things never change). Why, if you let the ladies have the franchise, before you know it, they'll be boozing and brawling just like the gents. And then who will bake the pies and mind the babies, hmm?
Regardless of the intention, this place looks like it would be a lot of fun. Link -via Metafilter
Brooklyn artist Jonathan Lopes has filled his entire living room (400 square feet) with a LEGO recreation of …Brooklyn!
The obsession started with a Star Wars LEGO model purchased a decade ago, leading to the design of his own creations. By 2011, Lopes had used a half-million bricks to mimic the Apollo Theater, trolleys in Red Hook, Firehouse Engine 226 and a gardening shop on Hoyt Street.
See more pictures at Web Urbanist. Link -via Everlasting Blort
Four-year-old Kyla Wolffe and a tiny gorilla mimic each other through the glass at the Atlanta Zoo. So, who is really on display and who is observing a strange and different creature? -via Viral Viral Videos
Harry the Headhunter from Beetljuice by Sideserf Cake Studio.
Cakenweenie is a project to celebrate the 55th birthday of filmmaker Tim Burton by baking 100 cakes in the likeness of characters from Tim Burton movies. A hundred "Burtonesque Bakers" were assembled, and cakes were baked. You can browse through the gallery to see how characters from your favorite Burton film were baked by professional bakeries, hobby bakers, and Tim Burton fans. Continue reading to see more of them.
The following is an article from Uncle John's Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader.
For many cities -San Francisco and Chicago, especially- it took a disaster to finally improve building codes and safety regulations. Boston was no exception.
CALM BEFORE THE STORM
November 9, 1872, was a quiet Saturday night in Boston's downtown business district. Everything was closed, and only a handful of people were on the street. Then, at about 7PM, a fire broke out in the Klous Building, at the corner of Summer and Kingston streets. The three businesses housed in the three-story building sold dry goods, neckties, and and hoopskirts, with boxes full of back stock stuffed into every empty room. In effect, the Klous Building was a giant pile of kindling, just waiting for a spark to set it on fire.
And that's what happened. The fire started in the basement, when a spark from the coal-building steam boiler that powered the elevator ignited a box of hoopskirts. The elevator shaft sucked the flames up, fueled by the shaft's wood lining, and they spread quickly to other floors. Five minutes later, the entire building was a raging inferno.
LAZY PEOPLE AND SICK HORSES
The fire could be seen from blocks away, and a crowd gathered to watch the blaze. After standing around for 15 minutes, many wondered aloud why they couldn't hear a fire alarm. Surely someone had alerted the fire department. No, nobody had, they all assumed someone else had done it. The fire department was finally summoned at 7:25 PM by a policeman half a block away who saw smoke in the air.
By that time, the smoke was already visible five miles away across Boston Harbor in East Boston. Without waiting for an alarm, a pumper engine from the East Boston Fire Department boarded a ferry and was at the fire within minutes. But once the firefighters got there, tragically they couldn't do anything: Their fire hoses weren't compatible with Boston's fire hydrants. All they could do was watch the building burn and the fire spread. The Klous Building was gone by 7:30. Metal shutters had slid down the building in molten streams; shingles and roof tiles had fallen to the ground and struck onlookers.
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