The first day back to school can be quite dramatic or comedic, especially if it's on a TV series! Flavorwire compiled this supercut to help you celebrate the beginning of the school year. There's a list of the shows that gave us the clips at the website. Link -via Laughing Squid
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Toby created a website with detailed information on making your own angel or bird wings that fold and expand. These wings look like they are growing out of your body for extra realism! Whether you want to try this yourself or just admire the art of the craft, you'll want to check out the step-by-step instructions. Link -via Everlasting Blort
You've seen coupons like this before, I'm sure, but this is a particularly egegious example. The large print says "everything," while the small print makes it clear that "everything" means something completely different to retail advertisers. -via Arbroath
Legend of Dora is a mashup of Legend of Korra and Dora the Explorer. She can kick butt and teach Spanish at the same time! -via The Daily What Geek
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
Playboy magazine named Marilyn Monroe the "#1 Sex Star" of the 20th century in 1999. People magazine named her "Sexiest Woman of the Century" the same year. She is the most written-about (over 600 books at last count) movie actress in history.
Her movies, including Some Like It Hot, The Seven Year Itch, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Bus Stop are now considered classic and continue to be shown routinely on television and sell big time on video and DVD.
We see her everywhere: on magazine covers, posters, t-shirts, coffee mugs, dolls in her image, perfume bottles, porcelain statues, and on and on. Sure, Meryl Streep is the more acclaimed actress, but when was the last time you saw someone buy a Meryl Streep poster?
Okay, let's take a look at 14 things you may not have known about the movies' greatest-ever sex symbol -Marilyn Monroe.
1. Marilyn spent much of her childhood in various foster homes and the Los Angeles Orphans Home (later renamed Hollygrove), although she was never an orphan. A tomboy, Norma Jean was the top player on the Hollygrove softball team.
2. It took her a few years to develop her world-famous figure. At Van Nuys High School, her nickname was "Norma Jean, the Human Stringbean."
3. She was voted "Miss Artichoke" in 1947 in a beauty contest in Castroville, California, "the Artichoke Capital of the World."
4. According to her first husband, James Dougherty, she had a great love for animals. Once, she tried to bring a cow inside their home to get it out of the rain.
5. Fearing blemishes, she washed her face 15 times a day.
Could anything be more ironically hip than taking 9,000 photographs over five days to construct an animation of a painting that explains how people waste too much time on social media? The Parisian artist Above left a statement at the vimeo page:
People look at me like I’m from another planet when I tell them I don’t have social media like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. In the eyes of social media I’m severely outdated, lost and not ‘connected’.
Not partaking in the aforementioned social media makes me an outsider looking in on how hyper frequent society uses its sacred social media. I can’t help but observe the people around me who appear to be consumed and addicted to trying to keep up to speed on their social media pages.
You check your Facebook page while driving. Tweet a message that you ‘just took a shower’. Instagram a photo of your double soy macchiato with extra foam and so it continues ad infinitum.
You can read the rest. Link
The symbol, @, that most younger people know only from email addresses and Twitter, has a long history. Its medieval origin is a little fuzzy, but there are several possible explanations of its birth. When I was young, it was shorthand for "at," which always seemed silly to me, because why abbreviate such a short word?
The symbol later took on a historic role in commerce. Merchants have long used it to signify “at the rate of”—as in “12 widgets @ $1.” (That the total is $12, not $1, speaks to the symbol’s pivotal importance.) Still, the machine age was not so kind to @. The first typewriters, built in the mid-1800s, didn’t include @. Likewise, @ was not among the symbolic array of the earliest punch-card tabulating systems (first used in collecting and processing the 1890 U.S. census), which were precursors to computer programming.
The symbol’s modern obscurity ended in 1971, when a computer scientist named Ray Tomlinson was facing a vexing problem: how to connect people who programmed computers with one another.
The rest is history, and if you want to read that history, you'll find it at Smithsonian. Link
(Image credit: Erik Marinovich)
(Image credit: Flickr user michelle@TNS)
by Stephen Drew, Improbable Research
A new medical study recommends a method called “nasal packing with strips of cured pork” as an effective way to treat “uncontrollable” nosebleeds:
“Nasal Packing With Strips of Cured Pork as Treatment for Uncontrollable Epistaxis in a Patient with Glanzmann Thrombasthenia,” Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin, Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, vol. 120, no. 11, November 2011, pp. 732-36. (Thanks to James H. Morrissey for bringing this to our attention.)
The authors, at Detroit Medical Center in Michigan, treated a girl who has a rare hereditary disorder that brings prolonged bleeding. They pack the essential details into two sentences:
Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively, and without sequelae…. To our knowledge, this represents the first description of nasal packing with strips of cured pork for treatment of life-threatening hemorrhage in a patient with Glanzmann thrombasthenia.
They acknowledge a long, occasional tradition of using pork to treat general epitaxis. Epitaxis is the dignified term for nosebleed. The technique fell into disuse, they speculate, because:
packing with salt pork was fraught with bacterial and parasitic complications. Accordingly, as newer synthetic hemostatic agents and surgical techniques evolved, the use of packing with salt pork diminished.
The tweet started out all sciencey and ended up personal, but boy, can I relate! This Twaggie was illustrated by Auke de Vries from a tweet by @carbosly. See a new tweet illustrated every day at Twaggies! Link
A newly-discovered bee doesn't build hives. It sneaks into existing hives and lays eggs in order to take over! Dr. Jakub Straka of Charles University in Prague and Dr. Michael S. Engel of the University of Kansas observed five species of cuckoo bees in the Republic of Cape Verde off the coast of Africa.
According to Straka and Engel’s report, the Cuckoo Bee infiltrates a nest, lays its eggs, and leaves. Cuckoo Bee eggs incubate and hatch more quickly than other species: When they hatch, newborn Cuckoo Bees immediately kill all of the host species’ young. Eventually, the invading force gains control of the hive and lives off its resources.
The name comes from the cuckoo bird, which leaves eggs in other birds' nests. While cuckoo birds are the deadbeat parents of the avian world, cuckoo bees are the bums of the bees. Link
(Image credit: Dr. Jakub Straka & Dr. Michael S. Engel)
Wouldn't you stop and stay at the Trojan Guest House? After all, they offer positive vibration! And you might need that, because the hotel is on one of the most dangerous roads in the world.
India's most dangerous road is arguably the 137 km stretch from Kaza to Gramphoo (Lahual and Spiti), though it can hardly be called a "road" (80% of the route has no pavement). You will have to forge streams, perhaps even small rivers, negotiate melting glaciers and drive over piles of sand, rocks and snow. Most of the road is above 11000 feet and only accessible between May and October.
The post is the seventh installment in the series of The World's Most Dangerous Roads at Dark Roasted Blend. Link -via Ralph Roberts
(Image credit: Flickr user anuradhac)
Look what Shrek was originally conceived to look like -before he was altered to more resemble Mike Myers. How different would the movies have been! Screen Crush looked up the early concept art for many of the film characters we know and love, so we can see what might have been. Yoda originally looked like a cross between Santa's elves and a garden gnome, the Mad Hatter looked nothing like Johnny Depp, and Azazel resembled Tim Curry playing Satan. However, Hagrid changed not at all from the first sketches. Link -via reddit
(Image credit: DreamWorks/Barry Jackson for DreamWorks)
This looks like an ultra-modern playground, but it's actually an astronomical observatory in Jaipur, India. It was built on orders from Maharajah Jai Singh II in the early 1700s. Jantar Mantar, which means calculation instrument, is the largest of five observatories the Maharajah had built to explore and measure the heavens. Read more about it and see plenty of pictures at Kuriositas. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user ComradeCosmobot)
Look out for that big patch of Poison Ivy! Photographer Bill Watters is at Dragon*Con in Atlanta, bringing back images of the best cosplayers showing their stuff. Geeks Are Sexy has two galleries up already, with photographs from day three to be posted sometime today.
Link to gallery one.
Link to gallery two.
(Image credit: Bill Watters)
What better way to celebrate the holiday of the working person than to watch a movie about "the basic labor relations between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie"? There are 23 of them in this list: dramas, biopics, documentaries, and comedies that address labor in an entertaining way -and an educational way for young folks who don't learn these things in history class. Number three is about my birthplace:
It’s been over 35 years since Harlan County U.S.A., Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning documentary about a miners’ strike in Kentucky coal country, was first released, but the persistence of cave-ins, health concerns, and deplorable working conditions has kept it in the public conscience. Kopple and her crew arrived in the area in 1972, intending to cover the contentious election of a new union president, but they stumbled onto the site of the one of the bloodiest union-busting operations in American history and discovered that little had changed. As the miners’ strike against the Duke Power Company drags on, Kopple’s cameras are there to catch some hired gun thugs sent to intimidate the workers (and Kopple’s crew) and the tensions that develop within the ranks as the weeks and months drag on.
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