One Minute Galactica made this using the audio from the 1949 educational film You're Driving 90 Horses and creatively-edited video from the 1971 made-for-TV movie Duel, starring Dennis Weaver and directed by 24-year-old Steven Spielberg. -Thanks, Nick!
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Woe unto the man who comes between Korra and her ice cream cone! That man is Mike Reeves, who finally just gave up. Good move. Korra like potato chips, too. I see a weight problem in the future. -via Laughing Squid
Australian magician and comedian Nicholas Johnson invites you to a games party in which he cheats his way through every game. It won't take you long to figure out how it's done, but even afterward there's some weird stuff that will make you scratch your head. Not that scratching your head helps you think better. The title of this video is Can you name all the games and beat the cheat? but I think that is to distract you from the shenanigans going on. The Tetris song is by the group Flap! -via the Presurfer
Luo Gang was five years old when he was kidnapped from his home in Sichuan province, China, and taken to Fujian province. He was adopted by a family 1500 miles away.
“Everyday before I went to bed, I forced myself to re-live the life spent in my old home,” he said. “So I wouldn’t forget.”
But the only memory Luo had of his hometown was of two bridges.
He drew a rough map of his hometown from memory, before posting it on “Bring Lost Babies Home”, a Chinese website devoted to locating missing children through the help of volunteers.
Soon afterwards, a volunteer wrote back with valuable information - a couple from a small town in Sichuan’s Guangan city had lost a son 23 years ago. The time matched Luo’s abduction perfectly.
Luo searched for pictures of the Sichuan town and found they looked familiar to him. To confirm his suspicions, he turned to the satellite version Google Maps. The minute he zoomed in on an area called “Yaojiaba” near the Sichuan town, Luo recognised the two bridges.
“That’s it! That’s my home,” shouted Luo, in tears.
Luo was reunited with his parents soon after. Link -via Fark
Previously: Lost Boy Used Google Earth to Find His Mother
We already know that cats will steal anything that's not tied down. But what about the rest of the animal kingdom? The tendency to steal food is a beneficial adaptation for a species, and taking what another critter has is not really rare. For example: Flowers produce nectar to attract bees for pollination purposes, but bumblebees take nectar from flowers without pollinating the plants in exchange.
Bees who’ve evolved with short tongues and thus can’t reach for the sweet nectar have learned to carve holes into the side of a flower in order to reach their reward. This phenomenon, first observed by Charles Darwin, gets a bee nectar without the bee pollinating the plant. More cannily, there’s evidence suggesting that bees aren’t born behaving this way—they learn how to thieve from other bees, a sad sign that bee society is being overrun by hoodlums.
Read about seven thieving species at mental_floss. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Joe Penniston)
An unnamed man in Cork, Ireland, stopped by a McDonalds outlet early Tuesday morning. For some reason, he sat in a high chair designed for infants and toddlers. When he couldn't get out, police were called. They managed to free the man from the high chair, and no charges were filed. However, witnesses, who say alcohol was involved, managed to snap a picture that went viral. A spokesman for McDonalds remarked that anyone using a high chair in their shops should always have adult supervision. Link -via Gawker
(Image credit: Maverickkat)
Star Wars: Episiode VII is too important to mess up. J.J. Abrams went on Jimmy Kimmel Live and took suggestions from the audience. Which he would do well to ignore. -via Tastefully Offensive
If you could arrange a race between famous science fiction spaceships, who would win? Would it be the Milliennium Falcon, the Jupiter 2, Serenity, the Enterprise, or some other ship? Find out in an online race to destinations light years away at Slate. They also explain the results, according to the canon of each science fiction universe as we know it. Link -via mental_floss
(Photo credit: Wolfgang Sauber)
1. Diego Rivera’s “Man at the Crossroads”
The Moral: Never hire a communist to do a capitalist’s job.
During the Great Depression, Mexican artist Diego Rivera was on a roll. In 1931, he painted a massive mural for San Francisco’s Pacific Stock Exchange. And by 1933, he’d completed two more enormous murals of Ford’s assembly line for the Detroit Institute of Arts. But there was a disconnect in Rivera’s work. Although the artist was a vocal and committed communist, his art was decidedly capitalist. After a few friends pointed out the hypocrisy, Rivera decided to put his paintbrush where his mouth was.
Opportunity knocked in 1932, when the Rockefeller family hired Rivera to create one of his signature paintings in the lobby of the new RCA Building in Rockefeller Center. Their suggested theme for the work was “Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future”—an allusion to the crossroads between industry and technology. Rivera’s final product depicted a crossroads, but hardly in the way the Rockefellers had intended. Instead, the sprawling 63-foot masterpiece illustrated two alternate futures: a communist heaven and a capitalist hell.
Rivera might have gotten away with his political statement if it hadn’t been for one detail—he painted his personal hero, Vladimir Lenin, into the piece. When building managers realized Rivera was filling their lobby with Red propaganda, they ordered him to cease and desist.
John Cheese at Cracked is 39, and starting to recognize the signs of aging. I can relate to several of these. I don't mind slang terms yet, but I find that it now takes a lot to impress me.
Eventually, you reach a point where you have heard virtually every debate point for every topic ever conceived by man. Nothing anyone says is new. Nothing anyone says is convincing the other side to "convert" to their line of thinking. Consider how long debates have been around between atheists and Christians, legalization and anti-drug groups, pro-lifers and pro-choicers, Democrats and Republicans, and on and on. So many of the talking points and debate styles overlap from topic to topic that you can damn near lip sync to them as they're being said. All debates have turned into a Nickelback album.
Maybe it says something about how much older I am that I don't even know what Nickelback sounds like. But he's got some good points in this list, in plenty of NSFW language. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Aislinn Ritchie)
Fried S'mores is an easy recipe that goes something like this:
1. Make s'mores.
2. Dip in pancake batter.
3. Fry.
4. Stuff your face.
If you'd like the complete recipe, Carleyy has it for you at Instructables. Link -via Daily of the Day
The pygmy marmoset (Cebuella pygmaea) is the smallest monkey in the world. They are about five to six inches tall, not including the tail. This one is eating a piece of macaroni, which looks huge in its hands! -via Daily Picks and Flicks
The map above is based on information from the World Values Survey, which does ongoing research. The data from a single question was used to gauge racist attitudes around the world. Two Swedish economists used the data for a study to determine if there was any correlation between economic freedom and racism in different countries.
Among the dozens of questions that World Values asks, the Swedish economists found one that, they believe, could be a pretty good indicator of tolerance for other races. The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. Some respondents, picking from a list, chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society. (The study concluded that economic freedom had no correlation with racial tolerance, but it does appear to correlate with tolerance toward homosexuals.)
Max Fisher used the raw data from the study to create the map. It has been pointed out that the survey results may be affected by cultural differences in answering survey questions honestly. At the Washington Post, you can enlarge the map and read more about the project. Link -via Digg
They say to never look at a solar eclipse, because you'll hurt your eyes as badly as looking into the sun …because you are looking into the sun. But you don't have to, because Colin Legg took this awesome time-lapse video of the sunrise annular solar eclipse over Pilbara in Western Australia last Friday. Cameras were recording from three different locations. Undoubtedly the strangest sunrise I've ever seen. -via Laughing Squid
Disney has quietly reversed its decision to give Merida from the movie Brave a new look as she joins the group known as the Disney Princesses. The official Princess website has replaced the newer artwork with images of Merida as seen in the Pixar film.
The new design made her thinner, bustier, older, and hotter, and put her in a slinkier, lower-cut version of the dress she loathed from the film. The new look may have been designed to bring Merida in line with the other princesses on Disney's princess site, all of whom are canonically older and, well, hot. But it was also a move that undid everything the character fought against in her own movie.
After Chapman herself wrote an angry open letter on May 11 addressing the sexualization of the character and the message it sent to teenage girls everywhere, the floodgates opened on an Internet backlash. A Change.org petition started by the media watch website A Mighty Girl received over 200,000 signatures in a couple of days.
Earlier today, just as quietly as it had unveiled Merida's new look, Disney substituted an image of Merida from the film on its princess website, and removed all of the images of the new doll from the website.
Disney might not always make the right decisions, but they can tell which way the wind is blowing. Link
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