The Hatching Cat's latest post is a reprint of a 1907 newspaper article about the cats of Hell's Kitchen. It paints a depressing picture, but it contains an image of Tommy, the mascot of the Lamb's Club in the 1930s. The Lambs is a social club for theater professionals in New York City, founded in 1874. Their animals mascots have included a parrot named Sir Oliver, a goat named Billy, and Tommy, who was quite a character.

Tommy Casanova Lamb, a husky grey-and-white cat from the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, wandered into The Lambs Club in 1932 when he was just a kitten. There, at 128 West 44th Street, he took up his station at the bar, where he spent most of his waking hours gazing at the celebrity customers, fattening up on beer and free lunches, or kicking out any other cats that tried to create disorder in the club.

Although The New York Times called Tommy the Feline Bar Fly, he did keep good order at the establishment. One time a black tom with green eyes from Sixth Avenue crashed into the bar and tried to steal some bologna from the counter. As the Times reported, Tommy evicted him with a few well-placed lefts.

Tommy was also a very smart feline. Not only did he know when anyone in the dining room ordered fish, he was quite aware that The Lambs Club was his forever home.

Tommy's adventures include various fights, injuries, and romances, an appearance in a vaudeville skit, and a formal dinner given in his honor. Read about Tommy Casanova Lamb at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

(Image: The Lambs Collection)

Actors seem to be taken more seriously when they perform their own stunts. Maybe it's part of throwing themselves into a role, or giving their all for a production. And when they do those stunts bravely and enthusiastically, well, injuries happen. Producers hate it when a shoot has to be delayed because a star is in the hospital, but it happens ...often enough to make an internet list. Harrison Ford has contributed to these stories on more than one occasion.

During the filming of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ford had to take a break from the set and fly back to L.A. for surgery after a rupturing disc in his back. Ford didn’t say exactly what the stunt was that caused the injury, but he told The New York Times in 1984 that he blamed the elephants. Indiana Jones climbing off an elephant and yelling, “Oww! My Back!” isn’t the most exciting story, but hey, that’s Hollywood stunt work.

Ford’s worst on-set stunt, though, would come decades later when reprising his role as Han Solo for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. According to The Guardian, Ford walked under the door of his trusty old spaceship, the Millennium Falcon, when the hydraulic door — which weighed the same as a small car — pinned him to the ground and nearly crushed him to death.

Ford was lucky enough to get out with only two broken bones in his leg — had somebody not quickly hit the door’s emergency stop button, Han Solo could have been down for the count before ever reuniting with Kylo Ren.

Read about stunt injuries involving Charlize Theron, Bruce Willis, Tom Cruise, and others at Mel magazine.

Tom Hanks' new World War II film is called Greyhound, after the ship it's set on. Is it based on a true story? No, Hanks' character, Commander Ernest Krause, is fictional, as is his ship and his story. But the naval campaign at the heart of the movie was real, and it lasted six years. That may be the reason you didn't study the Battle of the Atlantic in school.

Greyhound takes place at a critical moment in the Battle of the Atlantic, which began in September 1939 and only ended with the Germans’ surrender on May 8, 1945. As Blazich explains, the conflict was centered chiefly on supplies: An island nation, the United Kingdom required a steady flow of imported goods and raw materials, many of which originated in the U.S. The Soviet Union, besieged by the Nazis’ Operation Barbarossa, was also in dire need of food, oil and other essential supplies, which arrived via seaports on the Arctic Ocean.

“Had the Atlantic been lost, so too would have Britain,” writes historian James Holland for History Extra. “There would have been no Mediterranean campaign, no D-Day, no VE or VJ Days. The vast, global supply chain upon which the Allies depended … would have been cut, and with it the lifeline.”

The Allies sent supplies by convoy, merchants ships protected by navy destroyers and air cover. This added security made the convoys large and difficult to maneuver, all the easier for German U-boats to find and attack. Read about the Battle of the Atlantic and what it was like for those who participated at Smithsonian.

After its theatrical released was delayed several times, Greyhound moved to streaming television.  Its debut on Apple TV+ has been moved to July 10.  

Do you recall what music you were listening to 31 years ago? The latest mashup from The Hood Internet will bring those memories back, with 50 songs from 1989 mixed into a three-minute video. You can check out their mixes for each year from 1979 to 1989 in this playlist.

We know that soap is a surfactant made by combining fat and and an alkaline substance such as lye. Wouldn't you love to find out who first decided to combine these things, and what they were trying to achieve? But alas, like many products invented before written accounts, we don't know. We do know that ancient Mesopotamians produced soap in this way.

Ancient people used these early soaps to clean wool or cotton fibers before weaving them into cloth, rather than for human hygiene. Not even the Greeks and Romans, who pioneered running water and public baths, used soap to clean their bodies. Instead, men and women immersed themselves in water baths and then smeared their bodies with scented olive oils. They used a metal or reed scraper called a strigil to remove any remaining oil or grime.

While some people later used soap to clean skin sometimes, it was mainly a laundry product until after the Civil War! Read what history professor Judith Ridner knows about the history of soap at The Conversation. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Strobridge Lith. Co., Cin'ti & New York, restoration by Adam Cuerden)

A few species of animals naturally have a bone in their hearts, including cows, sheep, and dogs. This os cordis has not been seen in primates, until recently discovered in chimpanzees in a study by the University of Nottingham’s School of Veterinary Medicine and Science. Not all chimpanzees, but some chimps who have heart problems, specifically idiopathic myocardial fibrosis (IMF). This is the first time a heart bone has been found in great apes.

For the new study, 16 chimpanzees, some with IMF and some without, had their hearts scanned with x-ray microcomputed tomography. No animal needed to be killed, as all chimps died of natural causes in European zoos. The scans generated clear, high-resolution images showing the tiny os cordis, which measures just a few millimeters across.

For anatomy nerds out there, this “hyperdense” bone structure was found inside the right fibrous trigone. Simply described, this meaty part of the heart forms a link between the aortic, mitral, and tricuspid valves.

Some chimp hearts also exhibited cartilago cordis, that is, cartilage formation. This is an important discovery, because the cartilage might have something to do with the growth of the rare bone structure, as cartilage has the potential to turn into bone.

This discovery might open up research into possible ossification of human hearts with IMF. Read more about the discovery at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Bjørn Erik Pedersen)

This public service announcement from New Zealand aims to get parents to drive home the fact that pornography doesn't depict sex, or anything at all, realistically. It's part of their Keep It Real Online campaign, and it's truly funny. -via Boing Boing

This video goes a long way to answer two very important questions: 1. How does gravity work? and 2. How did Albert Einstein become a celebrity? While the second question is more interesting in the moment, this video gives a really simple explanation of the difference between Newton's definition of gravity and Einstein's. And then it take us on an adventure to the Southern Hemisphere (and the cosmos) for proof. -via Digg

Our beautiful "blue marble" with its accents of green and brown didn't always look the way it does now. Back in 2007, Professor Shiladitya DasSarma of the University of Maryland-Baltimore speculated that early life on earth may have been purple. And there is more and more evidence that this could be true.

The hypothesis is that Earth's earliest microbes were phototrophs, capturing photons from sunlight to produce energy for themselves. This isn't too surprising – the plants that dominate Earth today are also phototrophs. However, unlike modern plants, which utilize the pigment chlorophyll to capture light, these ancient microbes might have used a pigment called retinal. Chlorophyll absorbs red and blue light while reflecting green. Retinal does the opposite, meaning microbes making use of it would appear purple.

The San Francisco salt ponds pictured at the top of the article tease what Earth's oceans might have looked like billions of years ago. Back then, the planet was far hotter and bathed in copious ultraviolet light, with much higher concentrations of sulphur and methane. Modern retinal-using microbes call haloarchaea love these sorts of environments, and it could have been their descendants that dominated a purple planet.

So if that's the way it was, what changed along the way? Read how chlorophyll-producing plants took over in this speculative scenario at Real Clear Science. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: dro!d)

Scottish Star Wars fans are circulating a petition to have a statue of "one of Scotland's best" actors, Ewan McGregor, in his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi installed at the peak of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the country. The statue would not only be a tribute to the actor, but would also draw Star Wars fans from all over the world. The petition says, in part,

"A statue of Obi-Wan Kenobi would be rather fitting, given the mountain's nickname, the volcanic past and its the highest ground of Ewan McGregor's home county. He would literally have 'the high ground,' watching over all of Scotland. It's poetic in a way."

When it comes to petitions started by Star Wars fans, this is one whose intentions seem most admirable. McGregor is often praised as an actor and he often shares his love of his home country. Fictional characters have previously earned statues in relevant locations, like the one-ton Captain America statue in his fictional home town of Brooklyn, New York.

Thousands of years from now, archaeologists will unearth statues and not know that some are historical figures, some are fictional characters, and some are fictional characters portrayed by real people. That this proposed statue is more of an homage to McGregor than to Kenobi might never occur to them. Read more about the petition at Comicbook.com. -via Mental Floss

I managed to totally miss The Fifth Element when it came out in 1997. Years later, I finally heard of it and found out it was a French science fiction film with so much sexual innuendo it couldn't help but be a global hit. It looks like somewhat of a comedy, too. As Wikipedia explains, director Luc Besson began with the viewpoint of the target audience and worked on the movie for a long time.

Besson started writing the story that became The Fifth Element when he was 16 years old; he was 38 when the film opened in cinemas.

Now Screen Junkies tells the truth in an Honest Trailer for The Fifth Element.

The city of Manaus, on the Amazon River in Brazil, was once the epicenter of the rubber industry, because it was in that area that rubber trees grew. As the city's population increased, people began to build houses out on the river, connected by wooden planks. This became the Floating City, where eventually 11,000 people lived in 2,000 houses, supported by quite a few floating businesses.

“The poor people who wanted to remain close to downtown began to realize that living in a floating city was much more interesting for them than living in more distant areas,” says Leno Barata, a historian who wrote his doctoral thesis on the Floating City, in Portuguese. “And living on the river also had other advantages, such as not paying rent or city taxes.”

Initially there were only a handful of disconnected floating houses. But the number rapidly increased after World War II, following a temporary return of the Rubber Boom. With the Japanese occupation of Malaysia, the United States and the Allied Forces were cut off from their rubber supply and turned to Brazil for help. As a result, tens of thousands of Brazilians, mostly from the poor Northeast region, were sent to the Amazon region to relaunch the rubber industry. When the war ended, many of these “rubber soldiers,” as they became known, ended up in Manaus.

The Floating City became a tourism draw, offering lower prices for goods and illicit pleasures. Some people found it charming, and compared it to Venice. Others considered it a slum. The people who lived there called it home, and have fond memories of the neighborhood, which was dismantled in the 1960s. Read about the rise and fall of the Floating City of Manaus at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Eduardo Braga/Instituto Durango Duarte)

DJ Cummerbund is back with a mega-mashup featuring the music of Ram Jam, Oingo Boingo, Chumbawamba, Randy "Macho Man" Savage, Lead Belly, The Beatles, Soundgarden, Michael Jackson, and Tom Jones, along with assorted video clips. The result is really weird, but oh-so enjoyable. -via Laughing Squid

June 9 is "Bill & Ted Day" (because it's 6/9, ya know). That's why the first glimpse of the new movie Bill & Ted Face the Music has been released in trailer form. The now-middle-aged slackers confront the fact that they still haven't written the song to unite the world, and come up with a scheme to fulfill their destiny. Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter look every bit their age, but strangely still have that same attitude they embodied in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey three decades ago. Fans don't care, they are just happy to have more of the characters. Bill & Ted Face the Music opens on August 21. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Isa Bredt, an artist from the Netherlands, has charmed people all over by taking pet pictures and turning them into Disney-style illustrations. Click to the right on the images to see the original photograph. But you probably already recognized the picture above as Cole and Marmalade.



Bredt told reddit that she's overwhelmed with the response, and is completely booked up for months. But you can enjoy other people's pet pictures turned into cute cartoons at Instagram, including internet-famous critters.



-via reddit