Sam Griner's mother took a picture of him at the beach when he was a baby. She posted it, and found out what can happen when you post family photos on the internet. Luckily, the viral photo did not ruin Sam's life, as so many other viral memes do. Now a teenager, Sam is a budding artist. -via the A.V. Club

The 1950 Disney film Cinderella was produced at a time when Disney was struggling financially after World War II, so they cut corners every way they could. They had used reference films for earlier movies, but every scene in Cinderella was filmed with actors in costume for reference, which the animators copied and were told not to stray from. You can see some footage in this video, starting at 1:45. Still images from the original production are more numerous.  

Learn some of the behind-the-scenes trivia about the production of Cinderella in a pictofacts list at Cracked.

If you know a little about genetics, you might be baffled by DNA tests that purport to tell us where our ancestors come from. For one thing, you don't get an equal number of genes from each ancestor, outside of our two parents. For another thing, what makes genes from, say, France, different from genes from Spain? This TED-Ed lesson from Prosanta Chakrabarty explains the limitations of genetic tests. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Oxford University is getting close to being a thousand years old. Here's a post that drives home how old the school is. So it stands to reason that some wild drinking was going on from time to time during that long history, as college students are prone to do. One such memorable occasion was a pub brawl that got completely out of hand.   

On 10 February 1355, the entire town was celebrating the feast day of Saint Scholastica. Some students were drinking at Swindlestock Tavern, when two of them complained about the quality of the wine served. The landlord and the tavern’s owner, who also happened to be Mayor of Oxford at the time, allegedly responded to their complaint with “stubborn and saucy language”; whereupon a student threw his drink on the owner’s face, followed by the empty wine jug that landed straight on the tavern owner’s head.

A fight erupted and other customers present in the tavern, both locals and students, joined in and soon the fight spilled out of the tavern and onto the streets. Somebody rang the bell at the town's church to summon assistance, and the students rang the bells of the University Church in response. When the Chancellor of the University tried to intervene, arrows were fired at him and he had to retreat.

The trouble continued the next day, as townspeople sought revenge on the students. Before the fight was over several days later, 90 people were dead. Read about the St. Scholastica Day Riot and a few other deadly university incidents at Amusing Planet.

A man in a hazmat suit carries spraying equipment into a London Underground train. He appears to be disinfecting the cars, but looks can be deceiving! This is Banksy in disguise, or else someone who works for Banksy, stenciling rats and masks with a message about not spreading disease. The BBC adds,

Transport for London (TfL) said the art was removed "some days ago" in line with its "strict anti-graffiti policy".

The work, called If You Don't Mask, You Don't Get, features a number of rats in pandemic-inspired poses and wearing face masks.

I guess it's a good thing there's a video. -via Boing Boing

Recent fave. She yawns like the monster she is. pic.twitter.com/FhV6avwj4B

— Hannah Bernstein (@hannahbern2) July 8, 2020

Your cat or dog or hamster might be the cutest thing ever, but we all take a bad picture occasionally. And since we take a lot of pictures of our wonderful pets, they all have at least one that's embarrassingly bad. Gina Zwicky challenged Twitter users to submit ugly pictures of otherwise wonderful pets, and got a ton of responses. See all the replies in the Twitter thread, or a ranked list of the funniest at Bored Panda.

Cattle farts (and burps) put methane into the atmosphere. And since there are more than 900 millions cows on earth right now, that’s a significant contributor to climate change. Burger King is all for the beef industry, but they are taking baby steps, so to speak, to reduce cows’ methane production by giving them a new diet incorporating lemongrass. You can read more about the research here. Burger King is offering burgers made from cows fed the new diet in select cities now. The rest of us can just enjoy the cow fart song. -via The Takeout

Theodore Roosevelt began his presidency in 1901 promising to follow business-friendly policies. However, it was the Gilded Age, where monopolies grew to dominate industry, particularly coal and the railroads that delivered it. Roosevelt soon turned toward regulating those monopolies and their predatory practices. Then in May of 1902, the United Mine Workers of America went on strike in the Pennsylvania anthracite fields. That strike lasted 162 days and threatened to deprive a big part of the US of heating fuel for the winter. Advisors cautioned Roosevelt stay out of it.     

By early September, the Washington Monument had run out of coal to operate its new electric elevator for the thousands of tourists who visited every month. Unscrupulous businessmen in cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest were buying most of the remaining supply and charging four times the normal price. The Post Office threatened to shut down, and public schools warned they might not be able to remain open past Thanksgiving.

Roosevelt was restless, fretful. He knew he would be blamed for remaining idle while Americans suffered. “Of course we have nothing whatever to do with this coal strike and no earthly responsibility for it. But the public at large will tend to visit on our heads responsibility for the shortage,” he wrote a friend.

Prices increased at laundries, bakeries, cafés, restaurants. Landlords raised the rent on apartments. Hotels charged more for rooms. Landowners sold their timber. In Chicago, residents tore out wooden paving from their streets to use as fuel. Railroads gave their employees old crossties to burn. Trolley lines limited service. Some manufacturers had to get by with sawdust in their furnaces. Pennsylvania steel mill owners said they might be forced to impose mass layoffs.

Eventually, Roosevelt did intervene. Read how that worked, and how he became the first president to settle a labor strike at Smithsonian.

Swan Lake Bath Ballet - 27 elite ballet dancers from companies across the globe perform a modern-day Swan Lake from their own home (filled) baths. Remotely directed by @CoreyBakerDance from his UK bathroom.
#FilmedInLockdown #CultureInQuarantine @ace_national @thespacearts pic.twitter.com/uzXReJtbRD

— BBC Arts (@bbcarts) July 8, 2020

Corey Baker choreographed a version of Swan Lake that dancers can do in their own bathtubs! He taught the dance to 27 professional dancers, who then filmed themselves at home in their own tubs. Edited together, it’s a quarantine project you have to see to believe. On another note, a-list dancers have really nice bathtubs. -via Metafilter

If a kid encountered a thrill ride called Rough Riders today, she'd probably think it was ride on a rough track. That wasn't why the roller coaster that debuted at Coney Island in 1907 was named that. It was a tribute to the current president, Theodore Roosevelt, who led the unit called the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War.

Beyond the creative theme, the ride also offered guests an exciting format. Unlike most other Coney Island coasters, which were propelled by gravity, this one ran on an electric third rail—much like a subway car. “Conductors” were assigned to each train, and they had control over how fast the cars moved over inclines and around curves.

As it turned out, technology invented to safely transport the public wasn’t the best fit for an amusement park. Because the cars had to be operated manually by park employees, there was no way to regulate how fast they went. Many operators pushed the ride vehicles to their limits; instead of slowing down on drops and sharp turns, they often went ahead at full speed.

That sounds dangerous. Strangely, the ride survived for years, even after the first fatalities. Learn exactly how dangerous it was at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Brooklyn Museum)

A roller coaster ride is usually about two minutes long. ChuggersRCT designed this one with Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 around the song "Bohemian Rhapsody," so it's six minutes of hills, dives, loops, wobbles, twists, and turns! It starts out slowly, but really switches into high gear as the song does. This would probably be fatal if it existed in the real world. -via Geekologie

We know Jules Verne, who gave us science fiction and, a century later, steampunk. But he wasn't the first to write about how technology would affect the future. Another was Albert Robida, who wrote in French, but just as wondrously, also drew his visions of the future.

In the late 1800s, the French illustrator and novelist wrote an acclaimed trilogy of futuristic novels, most notably, The Twentieth Century, an important work of early science fiction often overshadowed by the work of Jules Verne, who is generally viewed as one of the creators of the genre of Science Fiction.

Falling somewhere between The Jetsons and Charles Dickens, some of his fanciful predictions recall the overzealous futurism of the 1950s and 60s in response to the Space Age. Robida was of course living through his own “Space Age” of sorts at the end of the 19th century when the first aeronautical expeditions were just taking flight in France.

Robida not only envisioned flying machines, tall skyscrapers, and video phones, but also a world of gender and racial equality. While his works are available online, they are in French. So you might want to read about Robida and see a collection of his futuristic illustrations at Messy Nessy Chic. 

Believe it or not, everything in this koi pond sculpture is edible. Well, the cattail stems are bamboo, but those are technically edible if you chew them enough. Cake artist petrichoro used agar jelly for the water, three types of cake underneath, and sculpted the fish and lilies by hand! See more of her creations at Instagram. -via Laughing Squid

The film The Rock was a big hit in summer of 1996. Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery (plus a whole crew of other 90s stars, but not The Rock) do something important at Alcatraz, and there's a lot of action. Screen Junkies gives us the lowdown on whether we should watch The Rock after missing it all those years ago. It's part of their Blockbuster Summer series, which is all they have this summer, so reaching into the vault for a good movie from back when is something we all can do.

We love cats, but we must remember they are pointy on five ends. The term "murder mittens" refers to a cat's claws, and they can be as cute as they are dangerous. A subreddit collects images of murder mittens, and Bored Panda has a ranked gallery of 40 of them. It's rather heavy on black kittens, who are apparently quite proud of their teeny murder mittens.

(Image credit: Islandcoda)