We've read for years about how overprescribing antibiotics and the use of anti-microbial soaps and cleaners are killing just enough germs to open the door for the strongest and most dangerous to take over, giving us antibiotic-resistant superbugs. But what about alcohol? We go through alcohol-based hand sanitizer like water these days, so will it have the same effect? SciShow explains how alcohol works on germs, but if you substitute "liquor" in your head, it sounds like a plausible explanation for hangovers as well. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Ranveig Bjørklid Levinsen of Gråsten, Denmark, has a fence and two bulldogs. The bulldogs, named Winston and Bogart, love to watch what's going on beyond the fence, so the family fashioned holes the dogs can look through.

“We are living close to a walking path, so many people pass by every day, and the dogs are just so curious,” the owner explained. “To prevent them from skipping the fence, we made the holes, but even if it was funny to see them from the other side, I just thought it would look even [funnier] if we painted something,” she revealed how the paintings appeared on the fence.

“You know, like in amusement parks where you can have your photo taken in these kind of holes,” Levinsen elaborated on where she got the idea from. The woman settled on a crown and a jester hat. Although it was Ranveig who came up with the idea, the actual paintings were done by her daughter.

Pictures of Bogart and his mother Winston (really) have gone viral in Denmark and beyond. Read more about these delightful dogs and their imaginative family -and see more pictures- at Bored Panda.

Ever wondered what the Karaken looks like inside? Since you probably won't ever get close enough to one, you'll be interested in these artworks by French chimérologist Camille Renversade. See anatomical prints of dragons, werewolves, sea serpents, unicorns, and more fantastic creatures beautifully illustrated at Design You Trust. These prints are available at Etsy. -via Nag on the Lake

Movie critics are not like regular moviegoers. Professional critics can spot laziness and artistry in filmmaking, while ticket buyers mainly want a good overall experience. If a movie is exquisitely produced, but has a boring subject, you'll get a divergence of opinions between critics and audience. Conversely, a critic may find a film to be a cheap ripoff with little imagination, but if it's fun to watch, people will flock to it.

With the rise of online review aggregators that feature ratings from both professionals and the general public, it’s become only too easy to see just how giant those discrepancies can be. To discover which films are the most divisive, RAVE Reviews compiled Rotten Tomatoes's "Top 100" lists from 17 different genres into one massive collection of 967 films, and then ranked them in order of how large the difference was between the critic score and the audience score.

You can see the top twenty most divisive movies at Rave Reviews, as well as the most divisive films of each of the past four decades. See the trailer for the top twenty at Mental Floss. You may find something you'll want to seek out and watch!  

What makes an anus "important"? How about one that can eat and breath as well as expel waste. An anus with teeth. One that can cast a net of organs outward for defense, and also clean the ocean floor. The sea cucumber is pretty much a digestive tract with a bit of an animal wrapped around it. Maybe you could describe all animals that way, but this animal is pretty rudimentary, while the digestive tract is a marvel. -via The Kid Should See This

A hundred years ago, the Hume family gave the newspapers in the Scottish town of Dumfries quite a bit to report on. They were a dysfunctional family that went from respect to scandal when the internal workings of various relationships came to light. This story involves drama that begat more drama for years.

1. A selfish father and a wicked stepmother.
2. A musician who went down with the Titanic.
3. A fight over Titanic dependents' benefits.
4. A daughter's revenge plot that got out of hand.
5. A sensational trial.

When you think the story is over, it is just beginning as more and more trouble piled on. Read about the Hume family at Wessyman. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Unknown)

Sifakas are the leaping lemurs you've seen before. They can travel upright on two legs, but they don't really walk, they "pogo," which is jumping to the side. Yeah, it seems easier to walk or run on two legs, but what do I know? I can't leap from tree-to-tree the way they do. -via Laughing Squid

William Golding wrote the novel Lord of the Flies in 1951. In it, a group of middle-school-age boys became stranded on an island without adult supervision, and their community descends into chaos. In 1966, here in the real world, Captain Peter Warner was sailing by a small uninhabited island named ‘Ata. At least it was supposed to be uninhabited.

But Peter noticed something odd. Peering through his binoculars, he saw burned patches on the green cliffs. “In the tropics it’s unusual for fires to start spontaneously,” he told us, a half century later. Then he saw a boy. Naked. Hair down to his shoulders. This wild creature leaped from the cliffside and plunged into the water. Suddenly more boys followed, screaming at the top of their lungs. It didn’t take long for the first boy to reach the boat. “My name is Stephen,” he cried in perfect English. “There are six of us and we reckon we’ve been here 15 months.”

The boys, once aboard, claimed they were students at a boarding school in Nuku‘alofa, the Tongan capital. Sick of school meals, they had decided to take a fishing boat out one day, only to get caught in a storm. Likely story, Peter thought. Using his two-way radio, he called in to Nuku‘alofa. “I’ve got six kids here,” he told the operator. “Stand by,” came the response. Twenty minutes ticked by. (As Peter tells this part of the story, he gets a little misty-eyed.) Finally, a very tearful operator came on the radio, and said: “You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it’s them, this is a miracle!”   

The boys' story was quite different than the one in Lord of the Flies. You can read it at The Guardian. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Miyasige Tosikazu)

While the rest of us congratulate ourselves for walking one mile or climbing a flight of stairs without being winded, there are people who run 100 miles just for fun. Well, that and a sense of accomplishment. The Hellbender 100 is an ultramarathon in North Carolina that not only spans 100 miles, but also incorporates five climbs of 3,000 feet or more. Brendan Leonard takes us along as he runs that race.   

Somewhere around mile 62, around 2:30 in the morning, I realized I hadn’t seen another light in about an hour: no other runners, no houses, no car headlights, nothing besides the little headlamp bubble of light in front of me. I had kept my headlamp dimmed to conserve the battery, just chugging along through the forest, jogging with my trekking poles in my hands. The entire trail had been covered in fallen leaves for miles, and it occurred to me a few times that I could be totally lost, but every time I started to worry, another little orange course-marker flag would pop up. I was totally alone and would continue to be unless I sat down for an hour and waited for another runner to show up. 

It was dead quiet—no wind, no sounds besides my feet shuffling through the wet leaves and my breathing. If an animal had stepped on a stick 80 feet away, I would have heard it. I had been moving for 22 hours, and I felt OK, aside from my soaking-wet feet and the beginnings of the fatigue that sets in when you’ve been going that long. I started thinking about the completely dark, dead-quiet forest and being totally alone. For a half-second, my brain flashed to an idea, completely out of nowhere: this was a horror-movie scene, and a crazed killer with an ax or another implement of destruction would come rushing at me from the dark forest, totally surprising me because my headlamp was so dim.

It won't take you near as long to read about the 100 miles as it took Leonard to run it, at Outside Online. -via Digg

(Image credit: Brendan Leonard)

In the days before mixed martial arts, boxers and wrestlers rarely went at it with each other (a notable exception was pankration in the ancient Olympics). When a match like this happened, it was  publicity stunt, and usually done for a laugh. But Muhammad Ali once found himself up against a wrestler who was dead serious about defeating the Greatest of All Time.  

The genesis of what has come to be known as “one of the most embarrassing moments” of  Muhammad Ali’s storied career began around 1975 when Ali met the president of the Japanese Amateur Wrestling Association, Ichiro Yada, at a party. It’s reported that during a brief conversation with Yada, Ali boastfully exclaimed: “Isn’t there any Oriental fighter who will challenge me? I’ll give him one million dollars if he wins.”

Whether this was a genuine challenge by Ali or simply some of his famous trash-talk isn’t clear, but we know that Yada interpreted it as the former and the quote was reported as such by the Japanese media. This brought it to the attention of Japanese pro wrestler Antonio Inoki, who decided to take the boxer up on his offer. Not only that, but Inoki somehow managed to convince investors to pony up some $6 million to sweeten the deal for Ali, who accepted the offer to fight in March the following year, with the match itself being arranged to take place on June 26th.

From this point on the details leading up to the fight get a little harder to confirm. For starters, although the eventual fight that took place between Inoki and Ali was genuine, it’s contested whether Ali’s camp knew this from the start. You see, at this point Inoki was already pretty famous in Japan for arranging similar fights with other famous fighters, pitting their skills against his own unique brand of wrestling, dubbed “strong style”. These matches were clearly fixed and often ended in a spectacularly theatrical way. For example, in one match against a karate expert, Inoki won by powerbombing his opponent to the ground and knocking them out with a leg drop, a la Hulk Hogan. In another, the match was declared a draw when both combatants inexplicably fell out of the ring at the exact same time.

Ali was surprised and a little concerned when he saw how Inoki was training for the fight. The result was a fight called “15 rounds of pure slapstick” that drew crowds on two continents. Read how that all went down at Today I Found Out. 

Scientists have uncovered a fossil of a mammal that lived in Madagascar 66 million years ago that is unlike any other mammal ever known. It is a gondwanatherian, from the time when all the continents of the Southern Hemisphere were united, and has been named Adalatherium hui, a combination of words in two languages that means "crazy beast." How weird was it?

For instance, Adalatherium had more holes on its face than any known mammal, Krause said in a press call Tuesday. These holes, called foramina, created pathways for blood vessels and nerves, leading to an incredibly sensitive snout that was covered in whiskers. It also had a large hole at the top of the snout that can't be compared to any known mammal that ever lived or is currently living.

Its teeth can't be compared with anything else either. They're structured in a strange way that can't be explained. Krause said its back teeth "are from outer space."

The animal's backbone contained more vertebrae than any known mammal from the Mesozoic era. And it must have walked in a strange way, because the front half of the animal doesn't match the back half. And one of its back legs was bowed.

That's pretty weird. But there's more, which you can read at CNN. -via Strange Company

This video is well-enhanced by the title. Bird Guy lives up to his name as he waits for his Evening Grosbeaks to come visit. Seems like a great life, but that hoodie will need laundering often. Worth it. -via Metafilter

Brian May was admitted to a hospital earlier this week  ...for a torn butt. The guitarist/astrophysicist injured himself while gardening, which is a bit reminiscent of the line from the movie This Is Spinal Tap in which one drummer's death is attributed to a "bizarre gardening accident." May is expected to recover, but it may take some time.  

Writing on Instagram, the Queen guitarist said: “I managed to rip my gluteus maximus to shreds in a moment of overenthusiastic gardening. So suddenly I find myself in a hospital getting scanned to find out exactly how much I’ve actually damaged myself. Turns out I did a thorough job – this is a couple of days ago – and I won’t be able to walk for a while … or sleep, without a lot of assistance, because the pain is relentless.”

May is 72, and had been at his home after Queen was forced to cancel a tour due to the pandemic. Now he is recovering at home, and requests peace and quiet. -via reddit

Movie star Robert Mitchum is best known for his many roles that combined allure and menace, in movies such as Cape Fear and The Night of the Hunter. Oh yeah, and for his rowdiness that included being fired from at least one movie and that memorable arrest for marijuana possession. But his life before Hollywood would make a good movie in itself. When Mitchum was only 14 years old, he was sent to live with his sister, but he didn't stay there long.

Mitchum (1917-97) left his sister’s home in New York. He hopped a freight to who knows where. Life was an adventure to be gained and this was how it would start. He rode flatbeds, freight cars, refrigerated trains, teeth-chattering, knees-kocking, met old timers who knew no other life and gave him advice on what to do, and who to avoid, how to steal food and clothes, hunt squirrel, panhandle, and keep clear of the law.

This was an education. This was the hobo life Mitchum had read about and long-wanted to follow. He felt at home among these outsiders, though some of them thought him no more than a tourist, a “scenery-bum”, just along for the ride. Near train stops and train yards, he’d find hobo hideouts and sit by fire light listening to stories told by world-worn travellers.

It didn't take much time before the young teen was arrested for vagrancy in Savannah, Georgia. He was put on a chain gang doing hard labor, and soon knew that his life was in danger if he didn't escape. Read the exciting story of Robert Mitchum's jailbreak at Flashbak. -via Strange Company

The Hood Internet brought us gloriously nostalgic mashups of the songs of 1979 and 1980. But they kept at it with wonderfully-edited songs from other years, too. Now they've expanded their repertoire and announced that another year will be added every Thursday. You can keep up with them in this playlist. Meanwhile, enjoy their latest mashup, the music of 1985 presented in three minutes. -via Metafilter