Each Monarch butterfly is beautiful, but when they swarm by the millions, it's an amazing sight! Learn some facts about these amazing butterflies, and see wonderful photographs at Environmental Graffiti. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user John Carrel)
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It's not easy being second banana. Here, Luigi sings a song to Princess Peach about his feelings of unrequited love in the shadow of his more popular brother. This almost made me tear up until I remembered it's about a video game. -via Geekosystem
DC comics writer Karl Kesel is selling his personal collection of comic books going back to his childhood. Some of the early editions of those comics are pretty valuable, and sentimental, too. But the 53-year-old Kesel has a good reason for selling: he and his wife Myrna have adopted a baby boy who was born addicted to heroin. The sale proceeds will help defray adoption and medical expenses.
Karl bought many of those comics at The Sweet Shop in Victor, N.Y. The stories frame his childhood and brought him to the drawing board.
“It’s so touching to me that he’s willing to sacrifice something he loves so much to help us have a family,” Myrna says. “It’s a big deal, to let all those comics go.”
It’s a fair trade, Karl thinks. An investment in the miracle that continues to unfold, and the baby who screeches with delight each time his father sings to him.
The comics are being sold through the Blastoff Comics site. More comics will be added as they are sold. Link -via The Daily What Geek
(Image credit: Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian)
Dr. Catherine Baucom was on her way to the Elliot Mastology Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where a patient was waiting for her to perform surgery on Wednesday morning. But an accident on I-10 created a huge traffic jam in which hundreds of cars were stopped. That's when Baucom took matters into her own hands, creating a scene right out of a Hollywood movie. She recognized the neighborhood, and knew a colleague that lived nearby.
"Catherine called, she was outside my house. She said 'Hey do you have a bike?' I walked outside and said yea, its a kids bike," said Dr. Brian Barnett. After a quick test run, Dr. Baucom decided the bike was her only choice to get to the hospital. "I got the air pump out and aired the tires up as much as I could."
He gladly loaned her his seven year old daughter's bike and helmet and the nearly six foot tall surgeon resumed her journey to the surgery center.
"It was hot pink and small," Dr. Baucom said, describing the bike. "The helmet was pink with princesses." He added he was laughing so much he couldn't get video of her before she peddled away. "But she did utilize the plastic basket on front, to put her cell phone in. Showed her experience with the bike."
She says she traveled down Tara Boulevard, onto Fairway Drive, crossed Jefferson Highway and over to Essen Lane. When she reached I10, she was stopped by police. After explaining the circumstances and where she was headed, she was escorted through to meet her patient.
The police couldn't resist taking some video of the doctor. Link -via Fark
(Image credit: BRASS Surgery Center)
In 2011, the U.S. government spent $76 billion on military research and development. As history has shown, sometimes that investment pays off. And sometimes you end up running from a flaming pig.
1. Roast Pork
War elephants were the tanks of their time. Their tough hides were nearly impervious to arrows, and their giant size made them perfect for trampling through enemy lines. In 331 BCE, Alexander the Great was so nervous about the Persian army’s pachyderms that he made a sacrifice to the God of Fear the night before battle. The mighty elephants’ reputation only grew when, in 218 BCE, Hannibal set out to storm Rome with an armada of ferocious beasts. The “elephantry” seemed invincible.
If elephants were the world’s first tanks, flaming pigs—slathered in tar, lit on fire, and set loose to wreak havoc—were the world’s first anti-tank missiles. According to Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, the weapon worked because “elephants are scared by the smallest squeal of the hog.”
When flaming pigs succeeded, they were brilliant. In 266 BCE, the Greek city of Megara fended off the Macedonian conqueror Antigonus II Gonatas using pigs doused in resin. Antigonus’s elephants fled in terror from the bacon brigade. Most battles, however, highlighted the serious drawbacks of tactical barbecue. Since the lifespan of flaming pigs is short, their range was well under 400 feet. That meant the enemy pretty much had to be on top of you before the hogs would have any effect. The porcine missiles also lacked a guidance system, which made them woefully inaccurate. Even when directed toward enemy lines, they often ran wherever they pleased, starting fires on their own side.
2. The Iceberg Navy
During World War II, aircraft carriers were in short supply. So were steel and aluminum, the main materials needed to build the gargantuan ships. As the Allies scrounged to build vessels, they were also hunting for fresh ideas. So when Geoffrey Pyke, a plucky British inventor, proposed a scheme to build carriers out of ice, the British government jumped on board.
Pyke’s concept was to construct the vessels using pykrete—a stronger-than-ice mixture of 86 percent water and 14 percent wood pulp. But it wasn’t until construction began on a 1,000-ton model in Canada that engineers encountered the problem of “plastic flow.” In layman’s terms, the ship started to melt, which caused it to sag under its own weight unless kept at a crisp 3°F. The designers attempted to sidestep the issue by rigging the boat with a complex refrigeration system and reinforcements consisting of 10,000 tons of steel—the very resource they’d been trying to avoid using in the first place.
After almost a year of working and reworking the concept, Britain’s Royal Navy finally learned the same hard lesson most of us learned with our first popsicles and they ditched the project. The boat was allowed to sink to the bottom of Patricia Lake and do what ice does best: melt.
3. The $40 Million Sunburn
The Pageant of Letters was a Greek comedy about the alphabet from about 400 BCE. The premise of the play was that four new letters (eta, xi, psi, and omega) were being added to the Greek alphabet, and some folks were resistant to the change, others embraced it with varying degrees of success, and some were just totally confused. In other words, it was a slapstick comedy of errors.
One particular gag from the comedy survives and seems to come from the rapid-fire episodes ( similar to our “black-out sketches”) that came near the end of these comedies. A woman (character name unknown) is pregnant and about to deliver. She is using the new letters in her words and is trying to convey to a second figure (name and occupation unknown) that she is in labor. The second figure is failing to understand what she is saying because they haven’t mastered the new letters yet. ( Obviously the situation is just a wild exaggeration for comic effect) The second figure eventually thinks the woman is trying to convey the information that she is about to express flatulence instead and immediately flees the scene. Ah, fart jokes! No matter what the time period they appeal to the ten year old child in all of us!
Read more about this ancient comedy at Balladeer's Blog. Link
Kids in Cameroon made a steerable toy car with stuff they had. Give them all an "A" in elementary engineering! -via Arbroath
This clip is from the 1929 film Tarzan the Tiger. It was not the first Tarzan film, but the first with sound. Frank Merrill did his best to illustrate vocally what Edgar Rice Burroughs had written about. The final product sounds totally lame to our ears, after decades of hearing Johnny Weissmuller's iconic yodel. But was the yell we know so well really Weissmuller's? Mental_floss looks at the history of that yodel in a post called The Disputed History of the Tarzan Yell. Link
The folks at Oxford have added some new, modern words. Not to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) itself, but to the Oxford Dictionary Online, which is what most of us use, anyway.
Let’s set the scene. Your OH has decided it’s date night, and although
he isn’t exactly ripped he has great emotional intelligence and made
an effort with his new soul patch, so as a treat you decided to get
vajazzled. Think that sounds ridic, or even douchey? Research from the
Oxford Dictionaries team shows that these terms have made their way
into common usage, hence their inclusion in the quarterly update of
new words and meanings. Other additions inspired by contemporary
culture include micropig, hosepipe ban, and e-cigarette.
Are you confused enough now? Continue reading for the definitions of those new words as they appear in the ODO.
Fishermen are hauling in a bumper crop of lobsters this year. The harvest started early and remains big. Wholesale prices are way down right now.
It’s clear that if you walk into a fish store that the price of live lobsters has indeed fallen sharply. But at the restaurants and seafood shacks that dot the coast, prices have fallen only modestly. Instead, the lobstermen’s pain is leading to windfall profits for restaurant owners, fueling dark talk of price fixing in some quarters.
***
The market-price scheme does work in reverse: When lobster prices rise, the market price does rise with them. If the price of lobster spikes, there’s no sense in a restaurant selling one at a loss even if you have empty tables. But the ratchet really only goes in one direction. When upward price swings squeeze margins enough, restaurants raise prices. But falling retail lobster prices generate big restaurant profits, angry lobstermen, and vaguely disappointed tourists.
Read more about how market forces shape the price of restaurant food at Slate. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user tup wanders)
A family in Arlington, Virginia, had their chimney capped, unaware that a raccoon and her babies had a nest inside. The United States Humane Society came and removed the raccoon and two babies and set them free outside. But there were actually four in the litter, which wasn't evident until the next day. The last two babies were removed and placed in a "reunion box" and left for the mother to find. The best part of this story is the camera trap footage of what happened when the reunion box was left out overnight. Link -via Arbroath
The Paralympics begin in London with the Opening Ceremony on August 29th, and will run through September 9th. If you're not familiar with the Paralympics, prepare yourself by reading an article by coach Danny West at Kuriositas, and browse plenty of photographs from the 2008 Paralympics.
Link | Paralympics schedule -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Flickr user Jonas in China)
Is it confetti? Is it snow? No, Pixel Rain is a beautiful cloud of LEDs falling from the sky at at a Black Keys performance. The stunt was a collaboration between the Moment Factory and Air France, recorded at the closing concert of Osheaga 2012 music festival in Montreal. -via The Daily What
These diet tips have been vetted by scholarly journals and the scientific community at one time or another. Still, your mileage may vary. -via The Daily What Geek
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
In 1967, the Beatles filmed their only made-for-TV movie. It was called Magical Mystery Tour. The film itself is an interesting, checkered, odd little movie directed and edited by the Beatles themselves. It was, basically, the boys riding around in the country on a Magical Mystery Tour bus with an eclectic group of characters. They just rode around and filmed whatever random adventures they got into.
It also features a few sketches written by the Beatles themselves. It is a crazy quilt pastiche, but it does feature some excellent pre-MTV Beatles videos, including John singing "I am the Walrus" and George singing "Blue Jay Way." The film was a huge flop when it was first shown on TV -the Beatles first unqualified failure.
Five days before the showing of Magical Mystery Tour on December 21, 1967, the Beatles had their annual holiday party. The Beatles always had a Christmas party, but in 1967, it was John Lennon who suggested a Magical Mystery Tour party instead. The Beatles readily agreed.
The Beatles, their wives (and Paul's current girlfriend, Jane Asher), the staff of their Apple organization, various friends and family members attended. The invitation read "Magical Mystery Tour Fancy Dress Party." In other words, it was a costume party.
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