The idea of high school students needing to carry ID only came about when schools grew too large for every student to be known, for safety reasons. My old high school is still too small to need them. North Farmington High School in Michigan has over 1200 students, but they are still pretty easygoing about student IDs. It's an annual tradition there for seniors (who the staff know pretty well by then) to dress up and pose as pop culture characters for their ID photos!
Remember the creepy clown scare of 2016? Even before that, there was a viral clown that you may have missed. In 2014, a surveillance video of a clown hiding under a child's bed caused a stir. As strange as that was, the truth is even stranger: the parents hired Wrinkles the Clown to pull off the stunt and scare their daughter into behaving. Wrinkles is a retired Florida man who will appear as a creepy clown for any reason you want to pay for, and became national news after the bedroom video went viral.
Now Wrinkles is the subject of a horror film, set to hit theaters on October fourth. This one should give Pennywise a run for his money in the creep competition, because this movie is a documentary. -via Mental Floss
Before the Panama Canal was built, ships traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific went around the tip of South America, through the Drake Passage. During the Age of Exploration, they only went through during the Southern Hemisphere's summer months, because the cold storms during the rest of the year gave the rocky passage the nickname the sailor's graveyard. In 1741, the British navy sent the HMS Wager on a mission that was delayed so long that the ship found itself in the midst of the Drake Passage in April.
Aboard Wager, veteran ship’s gunner John Bulkeley was the officer of the watch, overseeing the ship’s navigation in the midst of a violent storm. The sky was a wet, howling tempest, the sea undulated with mountainous swells. Wager’s timbers creaked and her sails thrashed as the air and ocean conspired to smash the ship to pieces. Bulkeley had seen a lot of storms in his day, but nothing like this. One ocean swell—the largest he had ever witnessed—swept over the ship and briefly submerged Wager and her 160 crew in frigid water, washing Bulkeley across the quarter-deck.
Wager had entered the Drake Passage about a month earlier. She had been accompanied by seven other Royal Navy ships, all part of a secret squadron on a wartime mission heading for Patagonia on the west coast of South America. A principle hazard in sailing westward in the Drake Passage is that the winds and currents are powerful, relentless, and moving in exactly the wrong direction. Temperatures are frosty in autumn at such a southern latitude, and precipitation is nearly constant. In the era of sailing ships, the Drake Passage was a perilous venture even for a robust vessel manned by an intrepid crew in the calm season—a collection of characteristics that utterly failed to describe HMS Wager.
Wager’s speed and maneuverability were compromised due to the loss of a mast in the storm. Her captain was dead, her acting captain was bedridden, and many of the men were deathly ill. Wager had lost contact with the other ships of the squadron, having fallen hopelessly far behind. And her crew’s troubles had only just begun.
Everything that could have possibly gone wrong with the mission did go wrong, both before and after the ship wrecked. Yet some survivors made it back to England to tell the story. Read the saga of the HMS Wager in a thrilling account by Alan Bellows at Damn Interesting.
KFC is no stranger to bizarre promotions- remember the prom corsage that included a piece of chicken? Their newest venture is a collaboration with game developer Psyop called I Love You, Colonel Sanders! It includes an anime version of the Colonel as a young man, nevertheless sporting his signature white hair and goatee. The actual young Harland Sanders looked like this. The game involves a lot of chicken, too. A description from Steam includes the game trailer.
I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator follows you, a promising culinary student, as you try to date your classmate, Colonel Sanders. Throughout your journey, you’ll be faced with life-changing decisions that will affect your chances of friendship and love. But be careful! Your choices have real consequences with real animated characters’ feelings at stake.
Do you have what it takes to survive culinary school? Will Colonel Sanders choose you to be his business partner? Or maybe even so much more? Find out in the most finger lickin’ good dating simulator ever created—a game that KFC actually made.
Photographer Laurenda Marie Bennett accompanied Megan and Luke to the great outdoors to take pictures after their wedding. The bride was carrying a lovely bouquet of roses that apparently smelled good. It drew the attention of a young deer, who was so tempted that he came right up to the happy couple and joined the photo session! Bennet kept shooting, and talked to Bored Panda about the incident.
“The bride wanted photos over in a field on the same grounds as her ceremony and reception, so we headed that way after dinner for their golden hour photos. Well, it was very overcast that day and we didn’t have a true golden hour, but what happened instead trumped that pretty light we were hoping for.”
The ROV (remotely operated vehicle) Hercules caught wonderful video of an octopus, possibly Cirrothauma magna, putting on a defensive display of puffing itself up to warn off threats. It stretches out, wiggles its "ears," turns into an umbrella, then a tent, then a balloon, then a parachute, all to the delight of the crew watching aboard the E/V Nautilus. This octopus was spotted 1600 meters (one mile) below the surface of the Pacific, near Southwest Baker Island, just north of the equator. -via Laughing Squid
During World War II, the Steinway & Sons company switched from producing pianos to glider parts for the military. But then the US government asked the company to design a piano that could be used by the troops serving overseas. It would have to be tough enough to drop from an airplane and still play. And there were other restrictions, according to Jonathan Piper of the Museum of Making Music. The company came up with a model called the Victory Vertical.
The company was famous for its pianos, but those finely tuned models weren’t well-suited to where soldiers were stationed, including in the tropics. “While preserving a high level of craftsmanship, Steinway designed a piano that was rugged and durable,” says Piper, and they had to be economical in their use of materials. That started from the ground up: The Victory Verticals didn’t have legs like most upright pianos, Piper says, because they wouldn’t have withstood an airdrop. Other special features included water-resistant glue and anti-insect treatments, keys covered with celluloid instead of ivory, and bass strings wound in soft iron instead of the traditional copper. They were designed to contain only a tenth as much metal as a normal piano. There were also handles placed under the keybed and the back, so that four soldiers could carry the 455-pound instruments. “And beyond all that, the instrument is visually interesting,” Piper says. “Because of its purpose-built design, the Victory Vertical has an elegant simplicity. Then there’s the colors: Unlike the vast majority of pianos that come in a black or dark wood finish, the Victory Vertical was painted in olive green [like the example at the museum], blue, and gray.”
Television writer Jenny Jaffe declared that the 12th verse of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" was an eggplant recipe. Her Twitter followers took that as a challenge, and some of their lyrics are delicious!
You salt the slices til they drain Their bitterness, like tears of pain, You dredge with flour, then dip in egg then bread crumbs Arrange in pan and bake till brown Then spread the sauce on every round And sprinkle with the parmesan reggiano Reggiano Reggiano Reggiano Reggiano
Disney made a live-action version of Aladdin, which has already come and gone from theaters. There was a lot of hype before it opened, but then you didn't hear a thing afterward. Sure, it made a lot of money, but reviews were mixed. Screen Junkies holds nothing back in their opinions in this Honest Trailer.
A miles-wide asteroid struck the earth 66 million years ago and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs and countless other species. The impact left behind the 90-mile-wide Chicxulub crater buried miles beneath the Yucatán Peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico. In 2016, a core sample hundreds of feet long was extracted from the peak inner ring of the crater. A team of scientists led by University of Texas at Austin geologist Sean Gulick spent years analyzing the sample to tell the story of what happened on the day of the impact, which ended the Cretaceous and began the Cenozoic period.
Within minutes of the asteroid strike, Gulick and colleagues found, the underlying rock at the site collapsed and formed a crater with a peak ring. The ring was soon covered by over 70 feet of additional rock that had melted in the heat of the blast.
The sea battered against the new hole in the planet, and in the minutes and hours that followed, surges of water rushing back into the crater carried laid down more than 260 additional feet of melted stone atop the already accumulated rock. Then a tsunami hit. The wave, reflected back toward the crater after the initial impact, added another distinct layer of rock—sediments of gravel, sand and charcoal—all within the first 24 hours of the strike.
The planetary collision triggered wildfires inland, burning forests that were later doused by devastating waves. Debris from the charred woods washed out to sea, and some accumulated in the crater.
Is anyone surprised? If Michael Lang couldn't pull off a 50th anniversary recreation of Woodstock, what were the chances for a three-day music festival in the middle of nowhere that suddenly grew out of an internet meme? Alienstock in Rachel, Nevada, was to be the musical accompaniment of the Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us event on September 20.
A notice on the Alienstock website said that due to various hurdles that included “the lack of infrastructure, poor planning, risk management and blatant disregard” for the safety of potential attendees, the event that was supposed to take place in Rachel, Nevada from September 19- 22 has been canceled and a new, 21-and-over event is scheduled for September 19 in Downtown Las Vegas.
Matty Roberts, the creator of the event, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal this week that the cancellation was a “fantastic relief,” adding that he’d “had a lot of concerns leading up to Alienstock.” The notice on the event’s website pointed the finger at Connie West, owner of the Little A’Le’Inn in Rachel—a community with a population of around 50 people—and permit holder for the event as failing to provide adequate proof of contracts and other documentation related to the event.
Patent lawyer Jeff Steck keeps an eye on new patents. This one he spotted, issued on September 3, is quite intriguing. It's a decoy keyboard, with warmth, light, sound, and vibrations that are activated by the pressure of a cat on top.
Pet owners, and owners of cats in particular, know that upon sitting down at a computer their pet frequently desires to lay directly on the computer keyboard. While pet owners frequently attribute this behavior to a desire for affection, or conversely to a desire to annoy the pet owner, more likely the draw of the keyboard has more to do with warmth and proximity to interesting activity.
Since people with pets sitting at a computer keyboard typically need to use the keyboard, there is a need for a device that simulates a keyboard but provides for greater warmth and for interesting sound, light and tactile effects to divert their pet. When positioned close to an actual computer keyboard, such a needed device would draw the pet away therefrom and would provide for many hours of warmth, comfort and entertainment of the pet away from the owner's actual computer activities. Such a device would be relatively simple to manufacture and use, and would be safe for use around both pets and children. The present invention accomplishes these objectives.
I know what you're thinking: why didn't I think of that? There's a second version that resembles a laptop included in the patent. -via Boing Boing
When you need to unload a piano on the second floor, you do what you gotta do. But seriously, folks, this image posted at reddit brought out speculation that the truck crashed down from an unseen overpass, or even fell from a plane. The accident occurred in Alban, Ontario, Monday evening. After you've decided how it happened, watch the video.
A hundred shortlisted entries in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition are being prepared for exhibit at the Natural History Museum in London. The museum gives us a preview of some of the more stunning images they selected. The image above is titled "Lucky Break," taken by Jason Bantle.
A raccoon pokes her face out of a 1970s Ford Pinto on a deserted farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. In the back seat, her five playful kits trill with excitement. It was a sentiment shared by Jason, waiting silently in a nearby hide, who had been hoping for this chance every summer for several years.
The only access into the car was through the small hole in the cracked safety glass of the windscreen. The gap was blunt‑edged but too narrow a fit for a coyote (the primary predator of raccoons in the area), making this an ideal place for a mother raccoon to raise a family.
Another of the "Highly Commended 2019" images is this battle between a cheetah and a pack of dogs by Peter Haygarth.
Peter had been following the dogs by vehicle as they hunted in Zimanga Private Game Reserve, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. A warthog had just escaped the pack when the leading dogs came across the big cat. At first, the dogs were wary, but as the rest of the 12-strong pack arrived, their confidence grew, and they began to encircle the cat, chirping with excitement.
The elderly cheetah hissed and lunged back at the mob, his left ear tattered, the right one pinned back in the ruckus. As dust flew in the morning light, Peter kept his focus on the cat's face. In a few minutes the spat was over as the cheetah fled.
The 1960 film Psycho is a classic, but nearly 60 years later, we've become so familiar with the movie that we've forgotten how surprised the original audience was with the twist: the identity of the murderer. The modern audience already knows, so we tend more to deconstruct the building of suspense, the artful shower scene, and trivia like the toilet flushing. Back in 1960, Alfred Hitchcock went to great lengths to hide not only the twist, but many other details from the theater audience. Hitch came up with some pretty imaginative tactics, as Simon Whistler explains.
