Wikipedia is a crowdsourced font of information about everything, usually with sources cited. But Wikipedia exists in many languages, and since the editors and admins are all volunteers, who is safeguarding all those various versions? Redditor Ultach tells us that one user has been posting Wikipedia articles on the Scots language version since 2013 -around 20,000 of them, or a third of the entire inventory. This one person began at age 12 and is now an administrator of the Scots language Wikipedia. But they are no true Scotsman.

The problem is that this person cannot speak Scots. I don’t mean this in a mean spirited or gatekeeping way where they’re trying their best but are making a few mistakes, I mean they don’t seem to have any knowledge of the language at all. They misuse common elements of Scots that are even regularly found in Scots English like “syne” and “an aw”, they invent words which look like phonetically written English words spoken in a Scottish accent like “knaw” (an actual Middle Scots word to be fair, thanks u/lauchteuch9) instead of “ken”, “saive” instead of “hain” and “moost” instead of “maun”, sometimes they just sometimes leave entire English phrases and sentences in the articles without even making an attempt at Scottifying them, nevermind using the appropriate Scots words. Scots words that aren’t also found in an alternate form in English are barely ever used, and never used correctly. Scots grammar is simply not used, there are only Scots words inserted at random into English sentences.

When doing research for an article on Scots I did think the Scots Wikipedia felt more like parody or humour than a real project, & ended up deciding not to cite anything from it. Still staggered by this.

— Reply Guy #BPD #anxiety #fml (@no_frankly) August 25, 2020

Some consider the unnamed teenager to be well intended but misguided, akin to Cecilia Gimenez' restoration of the artwork called Ecce Homo. Others consider them a troll or vandal. At the minimum, it's language appropriation. Metafilter has quite an informative discussion about it. Another Scots Wikipedia admin has an AMA discussing what should be done. And a Facebook group has sprung up, inviting native Scots speakers to help clean up Scots Wikipedia.

(Image credit: Wikipedia)

Tina Fey read the nonfiction book Queen Bees and Wannabees, about the toxic culture of teen girls, and wrote a fictional treatment which became a big hit in 2004. Mean Girls was a fetch comedy that struck close to home for a generation and then some. This Honest Trailer is pretty straightforward, because Mean Girls was everything it aimed to be.

Thammapa Supamas lives in Thailand and has a white cat named Ka-Pwong. Or, to be more precise, she used to be white. The poor cat suffered from ringworm.

Supamas was worried about her cat’s infection so she asked her mother for advice. She suggested applying turmeric—an Indian spice and medicinal herb used to treat infections. “My cat Ka-Pwong had ringworm, we did everything to cure it, but nothing worked. That was when my mother had the idea of using turmeric. At first, she painted it on the ringworm but as there was a lot left, she decided to paint the whole body to prevent future mycoses,” said Supamas to Bored Panda.

As anyone who cooks with turmeric knows, it can stain your skin yellow. The spice turned the entire cat bright yellow, which did not wash out. The good news is that the ringworm has cleared up! And Ka-Pwong now has her own Facebook page, in case you want to follow along and find out how quickly the cat replaces her dyed yellow hair with new white fur. Read the whole story with lots of pictures, including some with Photoshopped Pickachu features, at Bored Panda.

(Image credit: ตุ้มเม้งแมวแพนด้า&คาพ้วงแมวเชื้อรา)

The Great Emu War happened in 1932, but there's a new one raging on the internet over how you pronounce the bird's name. Americans tend to pronounce it ee-moo, and National Public Radio declared it an acceptable pronunciation. However, Australians did not take kindly to the action, as they pronounce it ee-mew. It's the difference in the pronunciation of the words moot and mute. The Guardian stepped into the middle to declare both wrong.

The Portuguese word “ema” was originally used to refer to a cassowary, and may be based on an Arabic word meaning “big bird”. The word was likely brought to Australasia by early colonial explorers.

“This is pretty typical of English which is just absolutely chock-full of words that are borrowed from languages from all over the world,” Enfield said.

“We mangle it to a more comfortable pronunciation for our own language and, you know, then just takes off.”

So it seems both the Aussies and Yanks are guilty of brutalising the bird’s name to suit their lazy anglo accents.

Well, I guess that settles it. Or maybe not. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Calistemon)

The temperature hit 130°F (54.4C) in Death Valley last week. Just knowing that can make you sweat, but there are people actually living and working in Death Valley. How do they cope with such heat not only this year, but year after year as the desert warms up? Park ranger Brandi Stewart of the Death Valley National Park taels us about her life in the heat.

“Overall, we spend a lot of time indoors,” she says. “On our days off, many rangers go hiking or camping in the mountains to spend some time outdoors without the heat. For those who have a water heater with a tank, many rangers will turn off the water heater, so that water becomes the ‘cold’ water, and the water running through the pipes becomes the ‘hot’ water. Unfortunately, my house has a tankless water heater, so while it saves energy, my home only has hot and hotter water in the summer.”

Lastly, Stewart mentions that she and many other park rangers have misters lining their porches to help them stay cool. “But really, anything above 120 is too hot, even with the misters,” she says.

Good advice for humans, but other species survive and even thrive at higher temperatures. Learn how they do it at Mel magazine.

During the lockdown, the sidewalks in my neighborhood turned into a colorful gallery of encouraging slogans and artwork by kids organized online by the local library. Sidewalk chalk is great for trying your hand at public art, political slogans, graffiti, or hopscotch, since it will wash off as soon as the rain comes, or even sooner with a garden hose if you mess up. But your tools may also tend to get lost or crushed. You'll have no such problems when your sidewalk chalk is as big as a Pringle's can! And you can make these chalk sticks yourself with some plaster, tempera paint, water, and Pringle's cans (yeah, I said they were that big). Find the recipe for homemade giant chalk at Instructables.  -via Nag on the Lake

The Fyre Festival made news in 2017 for being so horrible that the founder got a six-year prison sentence for fraud, and several lawsuits are pending. But there have been many festivals that were overhyped and underproduced, or just ended up being terrible for one reason or another. Take the third TomorrowWorld electronic music festival, hosted on a rural farm in Georgia in 2015. Things were going well until it started to rain.

We're not kidding about the "post-apocalyptic hellscape" part either -- you can actually put "and then the crows came" after every sentence for the rest of this entry and it won't seem out of place at all. The rain turned the site into a muddy bog, which would have been manageable, but then the organizers suddenly announced that they would no longer be able to provide the shuttle service that was supposed to take non-campers back into Atlanta on Saturday, stranding everyone in the middle of nowhere as night arrived. Thousands of drunk EDM fans ended up stumbling for miles through dark and muddy woods, desperately seeking a way out. Some people collapsed and had to be carried, while others gave up and slept in the forest without shelter.

Witnesses described seeing "Walking Dead hordes" of increasingly hungover and dehydrated David Guetta fans moving listlessly through the trees. Others described it as "like the Hunger Games," which is hopefully an exaggeration, unless surviving staff from the face-painting tent disguised themselves as rocks to hide from bands of spear-wielding feral teens. Once the march hit a road, people banged on bus windows and lay down in the road to stop vehicles from driving away without them. Desperate marchers pooled cash and formed competing alliances trying to bribe drivers to take them out. Ubers and cabs flocked to the area, charging a small fortune to ferry the wealthier revelers to safety. Which might actually be a fun glimpse of the real Tomorrow World, if the worst predictions about climate change are on the money.

There's more to that story, and those of other massively-oversold festivals centered around food, Christmas, and music, which you can read about at Cracked.

Any time you hear the word "buttload" as an amount, you know it mean a lot. But it turns out that it really does mean a specific amount, and that amount is... a lot.

After immediately falling down a Google hole about it, I discovered that this is, indeed, true! A butt, also known as a pipe, is a unit of measure for English Brewery Cask Units and English Wine Cask Units. It's the second-largest barrel size, equal to half a tun, which was typically 252 Imperial Gallons (although that exact quantity has changed throughout history; current standards place an English Tun at 259 US gallons or 216 Imperial Gallons).

You have to admit that 129 gallons is a substantial amount of beer or wine. That's enough for the kind of party the police would want to speak to you about. Read more about beer and wine measurements with plenty of links to follow at Boing Boing.

(Image credit: Grolltech)

Do sounds have shapes? Or do shapes have sounds? Does it depend on which language you know? The answers require a deep dive into linguistics, a discipline which really doesn't have enough research into questions like these. Tom Scott gives us an overview of what we know and what we don't.

Before there was Amazon, there was ACME, the company where you could order anything and everything, from hot air balloons to unicycles to anvils to toothpicks to vitamins to bombs. Those diverse products would be delivered at the speed of light, even if you lived out in the middle of the desert. Where else could you select a Strait-Jacket Ejecting Bazooka and receive it within a moment or two? Check out the Complete Illustrated Catalog of ACME Products and marvel at what they once offered.

For the first time ever, information and pictures of all ACME products, specialty divisions, and services (from 1935 to 1964) are gathered here, in one convenient catalog. For more information about any ACME product, simply click on the thumbnail picture. Thanks to Warner Bros. studios and their fine animation department for advertising ACME products in their cartoons!!

However, it may be argued that the line of products may have been much larger than this archive suggests. All that are listed here are the products we have actually seen in Looney Tunes stories. Who know what else they had? -via Metafilter 

Have you ever read a one-line movie description before you read the title and assumed it was another movie? A recent Ask Reddit thread posed the question: “Which two unrelated movies can be summed up with the same sentence?” Summing up a film in only one sentence makes it overly simple, and only highlights that we have very few types of stories, and they are told over and over. The pair above can use the line, "A Bitter Old Man Loses His Wife, Befriends His Young Asian Neighbour Who Helps Him Overcome His Bitterness And Cyncism." That's pretty detailed. However, it's not only a similar plot that can be used this way- sometimes it's a joke. The line for the movies below is "A Bunch Of Dinosaurs Kill A Lot Of People."

See 47 pairs of films that have nothing in common except the one-liner that describes them at Bored Panda, and read the original reddit thread here.

Matt Shirley polled his Instagram followers and then constructed this map. It's not just his opinions. I've been to a few of these (Disney World, Stone Mountain, Graceland, Times Square, Mall of America, the Corn Palace, the 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar, and Hollywood), and I wouldn't argue about them. How many have you been to?

At the turn of the 20th century, the New York Post Office employed dozens of cats, which had the duty to control the rodent population, and in return received one meal a day from George Cook. Cook, who had brought the first cat to the post office, was allocated $5 a month in federal funds -from taxpayers- to provide for the cats. He thought the compensation was a bit stingy, but a well-fed cat doesn't hunt rats as well as a hungry cat.

The basement offered numerous patrol and napping posts for the cats, including 700 closets where the employees stored their street clothes and a large storage area for all the U.S. mail bags not in use. Each patrol cat had a favorite spot to sit for hours and wait for a rat to pass by.

Hard-working cats that went above and beyond the call of duty could be promoted to the Registry Division on the top floor of the building. Registered mail required extra care to safeguard it, and all persons handling this mail had to account for it as it passed through their hands along its route. The postal cats had to be extra diligent in their rat-catching efforts to protect this valuable class of mail.

George said he used what he called “a two-platoon system” in order to ensure there were always enough cats on duty at one time to catch the rats and mice. He said he set up this system one day when he didn’t have enough cats on reserve to handle a massive rat attack. Apparently a cheese house had mailed samples of its most powerful Limburger cheese, and the mail bags were attacked by the rats. A riot ensued, and there were not enough cats on duty to arrest all of the perpetrators.

The population of postal cats waxed as they attracted other cats and had kittens. It waned as the SPCA conducted occasional raids to carry excess cats off for euthanasia. By 1910, there were around 200 cats on the USPS payroll. Read about the postal cats and their various shenanigans at The Hatching Cat.

In every life there's a point where the road forks, and you must choose which way to go, which affects everything that comes after. In the movie The Matrix, the protagonist Neo takes the red pill and goes down the rabbit hole. But what if he didn't? What if he had chosen the blue pill instead (in this case, it's not Viagra)? VFX creator Chris Ume takes the road not traveled, and the story become an entirely different movie, with the help of deep fake technology. Still, one thing revealed is that it takes more than just a face alone to make Keanu Reeves. -via Digg

Though Previte hadn’t talked to Ienner in two years, the former head of Millenium Records was suddenly in his ear with a way back into the industry. “He goes, I’ve got this little movie, I want you to think about writing a song for it,” Previte recalls. Though he thought the offer was a dead end, Ienner insisted. “Make time, this is going to change your life.” When Previte heard the movie’s title, Ienner reassured him of the movie’s credentials, gave him a general description of the plot, and explained the parameters: The song needed to fill seven minutes and be ready in two weeks. “I’m like, Oh my god, I’ve got to write ‘MacArthur Park,’” Previte says.

But with just $100 in his bank account, Previte had nothing to lose. He called John DeNicola, a musician he’d written with before, and asked him to compose a backtrack. Previte explained the movie (“Baby meets Johnny in the Catskills”) and offered some structural notes: The chorus would begin at half-speed, he told DeNicola, and the verses would switch to double-time to become an upbeat dance tune. With those details, DeNicola called up Donald Markowitz for assistance. The two had collaborated before, and Markowitz was one of the few people he knew who had an eight-track sequencing machine. Inside his one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment, Markowitz took DeNicola’s notes and “wrote the music to it in 20 minutes,” Markowitz says. The next day, theybegan to tweak and record. “We went in there with a drum machine and bass guitar and a couple of keyboards [and] pounded out some music,” DeNicola says.