Houseplants are far from static. Oh sure, they grow, and you might notice how a plant wilts and then perks back up when it's watered. But you can't sit around and watch those things happen, because they are very slow. Still, you might be surprised how much a healthy plant moves around in its daily life! The only way we can really see them do it is in a time-lapse video. This example is one of six such videos that will give you a new perspective on your plants at Moss and Fog. -via Nag on the Lake
You don’t see Christmas carolers much anymore, except maybe in shopping malls or preplanned shows, although many of us have fond memories of going caroling as children. Some houses expected us, and had treats ready when the music ended. But in the Victorian era, carolers were regarded as merely beggars, or even extortionists, who were often drunk and could get violent if they weren’t tipped well enough.
Many people dreaded the oncoming Christmas carol season, taking to the papers many weeks before-hand to air their trepidation at the youths who, as this reader writes in October 1861, will be getting… “their various mouths to every hinge, key-hole, letter-box, and opening of the doors and roar out in miserable discord (often two opposing companies together) names and events which all should hold sacred, the next moment running away with ribald jests, or cursing, swearing and quarrelling over the coppers they have received, as a tax to the nuisance”.
Jobriath was a glam rock star of the '70s you've probably never heard of. He had the looks, the talent, and the work ethic required, plus the luck to have been "discovered" by impresario Jerry Brandt, who managed Carly Simon. That led to an unbelievably lucrative record contract for its time, and a pathway to stardom.
He was the first openly gay rock musician to be signed to a major record label, declaring himself “glam rock’s truest fairy” to slack-jawed media critics and listeners alike. Touted as America’s successor to David Bowie, he was signed to Elektra Records for $500K and for a brief New York minute in the early 1970s, became the most visible homosexual figure in popular music. Everything about Jobriath screamed glam rock: the outfits, the theatrics, the vocal range, but in the end, he was destined to be the greatest glam rock star that never was. In celebration of his lost legacy, we’re revisiting his story – and finding some choice holiday tribute looks along the way…
An artist who goes by the name Ukiyo Memes illustrates classic internet memes in the style of traditional Japanese woodblock prints. He calls the series Memes of the Floating World. Above you see his version of the Woman Yelling at Cat meme. He's also done Doge, Longcat, This is Fine, and quite a few others you may enjoy, which you can see at Bored Panda.
Throughout the early history the United States, Thanksgiving was a popular holiday, but a really disjointed one. A holiday set aside to feast and express gratitude would be proclaimed for a bountiful harvest, victory in battle, or even to celebrate the government. The growing number of states celebrated on different days, sometimes more than once a year. Thanksgiving was the favorite holiday of writer Sarah Josepha Hale, who fervently wished it would be a consistent celebration across the country.
For Hale, the holiday wasn’t simply about giving thanks to God; it was also about fostering national unity. The country had grown from 13 colonies to around 30 states by the mid-1800s, and Hale saw Thanksgiving as a way to collapse the physical distance between families.
“[Though] the members of the same family might be too far separated to meet around one festive board, they would have the gratification of knowing that all were enjoying the feast. From the St. Johns to the Rio Grande, from the Atlantic to the Pacific border, the telegraph of human happiness would move every heart to gladness simultaneously … ” Hale wrote in an 1851 editorial.
There are 1,983 vertebrate species considered "critically endangered" on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's famous Red List, and 235 species that are down to 50 or fewer individuals left. Many of those may be already extinct, as they have not been spotted for years. Anna Funk whittled that list down to 32 that may be still around, but are losing ground fast. You may have heard the Javan rhinoceros or the red wolf, but there are quite a few you may only ever see through this list, like the imperial Amazon parrot.
This 18-inch-tall parrot (Amazona imperialis) was once found on the mountains of Dominica, a small island nation in the Caribbean. Their population was doing all right (if 300 birds is all right) until 2017, when Hurricane Maria knocked down a third of the trees on the island and stripped the rest of their leaves and fruits. This reduced the parrot’s numbers to an all-time low. It evidently forced the birds to move outside their usual mountainy range and into the lowlands. About six months after Maria, 11 birds were spotted, but experts think there are fewer than 50 out there.
November is Adopt a Senior Pet Month! To promote their wonderful older older dogs who need a home, the Flagler Humane Society in Palm Coast, Florida, did a photoshoot in which they dressed the dogs as senior citizens. With hats, wigs, glasses, and sweaters, the good dogs posed for photographer and adoption specialist Magdalena Grzona.
Some folks think that viral images of bologna sporting a clown face is a Photoshopped joke. No, it’s very real, and if you grew up in the British Isles, you might have fond memories of eating Billy Roll.
“As I remember, the eyes popped out, leaving perfect circles, and the mouth could come out with a bit more dexterity,” says freelance writer Donna Bloss, who grew up in Cork, Ireland. “It’s like perforated paper — easily tearable.”
“Once the eyes and mouth were removed and graciously eaten, came the spectacle: Billy Roll is now my face,” Bloss continues. And after putting the meat clown’s gaping eye and mouth holes over her own, she’d eat whatever remained of the buttery deli meat “with utmost pleasure.” “It was my favorite school lunch. If my mom came home and there were Billy Rolls in the shopping, I was very excited,” she tells me. “I remember opening my sandwich at lunch, bread having become stuck to the meat with the butter, and wanting to pick at the face.”
If you were caught showing up drunk or stoned at most workplaces, you'd be sent home, probably forever. Some bosses never detect it, and some will overlook it, especially if you're a movie star and losing a day of work means everyone loses a day of work and the shooting schedule suffers. Some people are pretty good at maintaining under such circumstances, or even putting in a great performance.
12. Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford partied all night with the Rolling Stones and then showed up to film The Empire Strikes Back flying high.
Episode 5 was filming in England when, the day before an early call time, Monty Python's Eric Idle invited Fisher over to hang out with the Rolling Stones. As she told the Daily Beast, “I called Harrison and said, ‘Get over here! This is ridiculous!’ I wonder how he remembers it. I remember that we never went to sleep, so we weren’t hungover — we were still drunk when we arrived in Cloud City the next day. We don’t really smile a lot in the movie, but there we’re smiling.”
While there have been quite a few different human species, scientists believed for a long time that Homo sapiens originated in Africa around 200,000 years ago. Our oldest known fossil was a 160,000-year-old skull found in Ethiopia in 2003. So as far as we knew, the species arose in eastern Africa. But in 2017, paleontologist Jean-Jacques Hublin uncovered a skull in Morocco.
Since the 1980s, Hublin had studied peculiar fossils found in a cave in a desolate, mountainous region of Morocco in far-north Africa. The remains showed flat faces that looked remarkably like us — more so than our Neanderthal cousins. Their enlarged lower jaws and teeth along with elongated brain cases suggested they were of a primitive species that lived some 150,000 – 200,000 years ago. This age did not fit the pattern of previous discoveries, or the prevailing visions of how our story began.
As the oldest find at Omo-Kibosh was in Eastern Africa, where modern humans were believed to have began, it did not make sense for another human from the same time period to be dug up on another side of the continent.
So, when tests in 2017 dated Hublin’s discoveries in Morocco to 300,000 years ago, the paleontologist was left stunned. “It was a big wow,” he says. “I expected something older than 200,000, or I had hoped for something older, but not that old. It led us to completely reconsider the [story] of the evolution of our species.”
If a much older Homo sapiens skull came from northwest Africa, does that mean that modern humans did not originate in Ethiopia? Not necessarily. To complicate things further, a mitochondrial DNA study found the oldest human lineage in Namibia and South Africa, on the southernmost end of the continent. Read how both a wealth and dearth of evidence adds to the confusion, and what scientists think may have happened to produce modern humans at Discover magazine. -via Strange Company
Alfred Hitchcock loosely adapted a 1952 short story into his 1963 film The Birds, but it was also inspired by a real life event in 1961. That’s when thousands of sooty shearwaters invaded North Monterey Bay, crashing into buildings and dying on the streets. It took quite some time to figure out what caused the birds’ behavior, which is explained in this video from Popular Science. -via Digg
Back in March, thousands of offices shuttered and set up their employees to work from home, often with no notice. We saw jokes in the summer about people returning to their offices and finding their plants dead. Months later, some of those offices are closed for good, either because they went out of business or because working from home became permanent, and that real estate is no longer needed. Emilie Goldman is one of the people tasked with subleasing those office spaces.
She’s been reentering deserted offices and showing them to potential subtenants, and encountering some nasty vestiges of office life past. There’s the rotten milk in office fridges, half-eaten and now rotting snacks on desks, and moldy coffee cups, as well as sad tableaux of dead plants, disheveled desks, and paperwork abandoned mid-completion.
“No one really tidied up their office, like, ‘Oh, let me clean up my office because I might not be back here for a year, or there might be people coming around to take our office.’ That thought didn’t cross anyone’s mind,” Goldman says. “And the responsibility is slightly on me to tidy that up, because it’s my job to sublease the space for my client.”
However, office space is going for a fraction of its previous price, so potential tenants might be willing to put up with a smell or two. Read about the business of unlocking those offices at Fast Company. -via Digg
From 1963 until 2016, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico had the largest single-aperture telescope in the world, at 1,000 feet in diameter. You saw it in the movie Contact or maybe Goldeneye or on the X-Files. But the telescope is at the end of its life. Hurricane damage led to a cable break in August, and another in November. That left the dish in a precarious position, and after an engineering assessment, the National Science Foundation has decided to decommission the telescope and develop a plan to demolish it.
The problem started on August 10, when an auxiliary cable slipped from its socket, falling onto the dish below and causing considerable damage. Then on November 6, a main cable snapped, and it too fell onto the structure. With those two support cables gone, concerns emerged about the overall stability of the structure.
Independent engineering assessments grimly concluded that the observatory is at imminent risk of catastrophic failure, as the remaining cables are no longer capable of carrying the loads they were initially designed for. These cables are currently holding a 900-ton platform that’s dangling 450 feet (137 meters) above the dish. Three towers hold these cables in place, and they too are at risk of collapsing and falling into the dish, Gaume explained. What’s more, repairs to these cables would put work construction workers in serious danger.
The management of the beloved telescope made it clear that the Arecibo Observatory will remain, with the telescope demolition planned to spare the facility's other buildings. Read more at Gizmodo.
The easiest and most lasting way to make yourself happy is to help someone else, especially someone who really needs a hand. Simon's Cat learns that in this Thanksgiving cartoon from Simon Tofield.
