A good pirate character has some recognizable pop culture pirate features, plus fighting skills, menace, charisma, and at least a slight sense of humor. Within these parameters, they vary greatly. A list of the most memorable movie pirates at io9 include the classics, but also animated pirates, women pirates, and one character played by several actors. Who's your favorite movie pirate? No matter, you'll want to watch all of the ten pirates in this unranked list, especially the movies you haven't already seen.

John Capes was a passenger on the HMS Perseus, a British submarine that sunk in the Mediteranean Sea in 1941. He was either the luckiest man alive, or the unluckiest, depending on your point of view. Capes managed to escape the submarine, survived a dangerous rise from the depths, and swam five miles, only to find dry land which was occupied by the enemy. He suffered even more after the war, as many people doubted his story. Despite the video length, the story is only eight minutes long. -via Digg

Seven-year-old Maria Ridulph of Sycamore, Illinois, was offered a piggyback ride by a man she didn't know, and wasn't seen again until her body was found the next year, 100 miles away. The only witness was another child named Kathy. That was in 1957. John Tessier, a neighbor, was an early suspect, but passed a lie detector test. The case went unsolved for more than a half-century, but was reopened in 2008.

State Police reviewed the evidence and found testimony from neighbours of John’s seemingly erratic and strange behaviour around young girls (which included giving another young girl a piggyback and refusing to put the girl back down); which probably did not sit well next to the previous conviction and rape charges. John is just one of the many “outsiders” targeted by law enforcement as a perfect suspect. That being said; there were definite factors that could have had John fingered.

Everything seemed to go against John upon the re-opening of the case when Kathy personally picked out John from a picture line up and stated: “that’s the man”.

Read how the Maria Ridulph case went from unsolved to solved and then back to unsolved again at Mystery Confidential. -via Strange Company

New Technologies and Face Mask Innovations is the title of a project by artist Kit Layfield. Hey, if we're going to wear face masks, they may as well do double duty by providing carbon dioxide to a personal terrarium, right? Not all the designs make quite as much sense, though.



There are quite a few more of these fantastical face masks at Layfield's Instagram page. -via Laughing Squid

Women have worked in lighthouses for as long as there have been lighthouses, usually toiling alongside her husband the lighthouse keeper, who was the one who got paid for it. But there have been quite a few women who were totally in charge of lighthouses, like Harriet Colfax, who worked her lighthouse for more than 40 years, Mary Ryan, who kept a diary of her work and misery, and Ida Lewis, who saved numerous lives.

But most of her counterparts lived and died in obscurity. Lighthousekeeping was one of few jobs available to women in the 18th and 19th centuries, provided they inherited the post from a husband, father, or other male family member. “The lighthouse service thought the easiest thing to do would be to let the widows take over, because they were so familiar with the operation,” says DeWire. The actual job remained the same. “What really struck me was that they immediately took a reduction in pay, because they were women,” she says. They were also not permitted to wear the brass-buttoned lighthouse keeper uniforms, introduced in the 1880s. “That’s why I always called them ‘keepers in skirts.’”

Today, there is only one lighthouse keeper who is a woman. That would be Sally Snowman, who cannot wait to get back to her duties at Boston Light. Read about her life and those of other women lighthouse keepers at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: US Coast Guard)

V1 Analytics gives us a map visualization of the top trending Google searches, state-by-state, for every day from the beginning of 2010 to a couple of weeks ago. It's mesmerizing to see what everyone suddenly wanted to find out more about, or else what song or TV show they wanted to pull up and enjoy when nothing else was happening. It also appears that our curiosity gets satisfied pretty quickly, which just tells us that the Google machine has all the answers. -via Metafilter

Decameron Row is a quarantine art project that invited 100 artists from all over the world to contribute a one-minute video of what they've been doing during lockdown. At the site, you'll see a building. Click on one of the lighted windows to launch a video. Then another, and another. From the about page:

In Boccaccio’s 14th-century Decameron, a group of friends avert the loneliness of quarantine during the Black Death by squatting together in an abandoned villa outside of Florence and telling each other stories — 10 people, 10 days, 100 tales. Their stories gave them solace. Since in this moment, global community cannot meet under one roof for comfort and insight, we wondered, how could we gather people from all over the world into one neighborhood, onto one street, where they could share their disparate responses? In this idiosyncratic, virtual place, the curious could click on a window and peek into each others’ lives, much like we had already been doing with one another.

Decameron Row is an experiment in community. We’ve been deliberate about diversity and geographic variety, but we’ve chosen to be guided more by intuition, the generosity of others, and happy accidents than by curatorial intention. The result is a quirky and incomplete record of this strange time. We hope you find it diverting. New videos will be added weekly through the summer until all the windows are occupied.

So far, 27 windows are illuminated, so that's 27 bite-sized videos for all of us to enjoy. Check it out here. -via Boing Boing

A classical musician created a harmony specifically to match this cat's wailings from r/funny

You might recall the yelling cat video that went viral nine years ago. We posted the version that was dubbed in French by Faireset. Now we have the musical. Irish classical pianist Conor Broderick analyzed the cat's tune and made a harmonic arrangement around it. 

“Today I harmonised a deranged yelling cat,” the musician writes, describing the edit as his “magnum opus”.

“I have too much free time,” Broderick writes at the end of the video. “What is wrong with me?” Absolutely nothing, Conor, you are doing the Lord’s work.

You may have to click the image twice to start the video. -via reddit

The 2005 movie Wedding Crashers was a comedy, but there really are people who make a game out of going to weddings where they don't know anyone, eating the food, sipping cocktails, and bringing no gift. It's not common, but it happens. Orly Minazad went to many strangers' weddings in Iran, where the crowds are big and no one minded. Fred Karger is the “World’s Greatest Party Crasher,” although he doesn't do weddings. And then there's Sean, who exemplifies the dudes from the movie.    

Sean, a miner stationed in Juneau, Alaska, is one such man. Though he’s pushing 50 now, he was a prolific crasher back in the day, cutting his teeth at the fancy weddings that took place in the airy ballrooms of Anchorage’s finest hotels. He fell into crashing somewhat naturally after he and his buddies — who worked as bellmen — started noticing that the extravagant weddings that took place inside their hotel were often full of “free booze” and “babes,” both of which were often bragged about by the drunk men who stumbled down the carpeted hallways in undone ties.

Sean and his friends knew they couldn’t get away with crashing weddings at their hotel, so they developed a habit of inserting themselves into weddings at some of the fancier ones around town. Their bellmen background came in handy; as hospitality professionals, they had the “gift of gab,” and were accustomed to dressing up, striking up chipper conversations and moving around hotels like they knew where they were going.

Read about real-life wedding crashers and how they do it at Mel magazine.

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.