Yeah, it's easy to mess up a word or two when you're live on air, but it's hard to just correct and go on when the entire studio is laughing at you. This is a long video, but you don't have to watch it all at once. Unless you want to spend 15 minutes giggling.  -via Digg

In 1912, the body of a murder victim was found in Georgetown, Connecticut. She had been tied with wire and had holes in her head. The eventual discovery of a burned crate nearby led police to look for the killer in New York City.

Two weeks after the body of an unidentified woman was discovered in a Connecticut mill pond, a cat helped police find the murder weapon in the East 40th Street apartment where the woman had been killed.

The story had everything a news editor could want for writing eye-catching headlines: murder, sex, mystery, gore, and some very colorful characters, including an Italian laborer called Monkeyface Suciciada, a prostitute named Grace Carbone, and a beautiful teenage girl named Turiddi.

Oh yes, there was also a cat named Tipsy involved in the drama. The cat had a reputation as an expert mouser. The man she helped nab was called Salvatore “the mouse” Geracci.

Read the story of the murder investigation, and how Tipsy the cat factored into it at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

This lonely hearts ad looks like a joke, but it is a real story about a real duck. Chris Morris of Blue Hill, Maine, had three ducks, but two of them were taken by a bobcat. Yellow Duck fell into a funk, mourning the loss of Brown Duck and Gray Duck, one of which was her mate. She stopped hanging around the chickens and quacked at unusual times.

So the 31-year-old special education teacher crafted a singles ad for her and hung it on the community bulletin board at the Blue Hill Co-op.

“Duck seeking duck,” Morris wrote. “Lonesome runner duck seeks companion. Partner recently deceased. Serious replies only.”

“We wanted to post about this to try to find a duck, and that just seemed like the best fit,” Morris said.

The ad worked! Yellow Duck will have her pick of new mates. Read the details of the story at the Bangor Daily News.  -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Brook Ewing Minner)
 

Private Wojtek served proudly with the Polish Army during World War II, although he never set foot in Poland his entire life. He was a diligent worker, loading ammunition before and during battles, and retired as a hero. Also, Private Wojtek was a bear. In 1942, a unit of Polish soldiers adopted a baby bear in Iran after its mother had been shot by a hunter. The bear, named Wojtek, ended up with the 22nd Artillery Supply Company.  

Sergeant Peter Prendys was appointed as Wojtek’s principal guardian. The quiet 46-year-old sergeant, soon dubbed “Mother Bear” by his soldiers, truly became the cub’s surrogate mother, wrapping the bear in his army coat on chilly evenings and cuddling him to sleep in their shared tent. Soon, Wojtek graduated from condensed milk to fruit, marmalade, honey, and syrup. But his favorite treat was cigarettes, which he preferred to eat rather than smoke.

As Anders’ Army headed toward Palestine to meet up with British forces, Wojtek grew up playing with Prendys and his other human friends, who taught him to wrestle and salute. He enjoyed lingering in the camp’s kitchen area, where he would happily eat or drink anything the cooks offered him. When he had been a very good bear, the men would give him a bottle of beer or wine, which he would gulp down before staring mournfully into the empty bottle until one of the soldiers took the hint and tossed him another.

By 1944, Wojtek was full-grown and the unit was ordered to Italy. In order to take the bear, Wojtek was drafted into the army as Private Wojciech “Wojtek” Perski. It was in Italy that Wojtek showed his bravery, utility, and heroism in battle. Read the full story Wojtek the war hero bear, or listen to it, at Damn Interesting.

It's nice to see something focused on the good things that happened this year. That's an inspiring video, but to find out what people really searched for in 2019, check out the Google Trend report for 2019. Spoiler: the number one search term was Disney Plus. You can see by this graph that interest peaked during the week the service launched, and not when Baby Yoda first appeared.

Archaeologists worked from 2011 to 2016 at a site called Beta Samati in Ethiopia. They uncovered a Christian church, a basilica to be exact, from the fourth century CE, which is when Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity. That makes it the oldest Christian church in sub-Saharan Africa. The site is only 30 miles from the ancient city of Aksum, the capital of the Aksumite kingdom, which controlled trade between most of Africa and the rest of the world.  

The excavators’ biggest discovery was a massive building 60 feet long and 40 feet wide resembling the ancient Roman style of a basilica. Developed by the Romans for administrative purposes, the basilica was adopted by Christians at the time of Constantine for their places of worship. Within and near the Aksumite ruins, the archaeologists also found a diverse array of goods, from a delicate gold and carnelian ring with the image of a bull’s head to nearly 50 cattle figurines—clearly evidence of pre-Christian beliefs.

They also uncovered a stone pendant carved with a cross and incised with the ancient Ethiopic word “venerable,” as well as incense burners. Near the eastern basilica wall, the team came across an inscription asking “for Christ [to be] favorable to us.”

Read more about the dig and what has been discovered there at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Ioana Dumitru)

A Tesla valve has no moving parts, yet restricts the flow of gas in one direction, but not the other. Nikola Tesla was granted a patent for it in 1920.  NightHawkInLight demonstrates how the valve works in the most dangerous way he could think of. -via Boing Boing

this video of cats reacting to cat face filter has me crying. pic.twitter.com/pNDmF8JQ8t

— M (@miaaselaa) December 9, 2019

My, how things have changed since we adopted flat screens. Now dogs and cats see and follow what's going on. When they see themselves on a monitor, it's like looking into a mirror. Yes, cats pass the mirror test, often even in the wild. Pet cats learn it early, since they know what their human looks like, and humans love to pick up cats and look in the mirror. But when something odd happens, like applying a cat face filter, they freak out just a little. Look at me, kitty, I'm still the same old can opener you know and love! -via reddit

British athlete and adventurer Kenneth Cecil Gandar-Dower imported a dozen cheetahs in 1936. He planned to stage races featuring both greyhounds and cheetahs and entice people to attend by challenging the dogs' reputation as the world's fastest animal. That would take time, as the cheetahs had to endure quarantine and then training. The idea was controversial, as various journalists and politicians were concerned about the treatment of the dogs, the cheetahs, and their prey. There were also concerns about the danger to the public, although Gandar-Dower assured everyone that cheetahs were both trainable and docile. This, despite a few attacks that led to two of cheetahs being put down.   

But the assertions of domesticity did hold mostly true, and onlookers generally described the behavior of the cheetahs as indifference with a crafty streak. The rabbit attached to the electric hare was always killed in advance, as Gandar-Dower had promised, but had to be extremely fresh to entice the cheetahs. If another cheetah looked likely to win, they gave up quickly, but if the bait went past a turn without a pursuer, the cheetahs were clever enough to cut across the middle of the track. In December of that year, the cheetahs raced for the first time against greyhounds in front of a packed crowd at Romford Stadium, and seemed completely unperturbed by dogs, humans, and even large camera flashbulbs, save for a few domineering swats at a greyhound who got too feisty. Pongo, the tamest of the cheetahs, even allowed children to reach down from the stands and pet him, though another named Helen reportedly spat at a race announcer who tried the same.

We know now that cheetahs are faster than greyhounds, although they have little endurance over long distances. The cheetahs continued racing for several years, while changing owners, trainers, and venues, up to the the beginning of World War II. Read about Gandar-Dower's racing cheetahs at Damn Interesting.

With eight movies down and one to go in the Skywalker saga, Reuters did some serious number crunching to bring us the stats on all the lightsaber duels so far. Keep scrolling down bring up charts on each film, such as who fights who, how many minutes they battled, how many times their lightsabers made contact, and who won. In Revenge of the Sith, Anakin Skywalker appears as a winner on both the light side and the dark side. There are also charts for each trilogy, and for the series as a whole. Who won the most duels? Who has the highest win percentage? Which is the longest fight? How many duels were a draw? After all that, we get an explanation of how the filmmakers made the lightsabers and gave them their distinctive sounds. -via Digg

An "Honest Teaser" means that Screen Junkies couldn't wait for the movie, and decided to go ahead and critique the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker. Since they don't have a lot to go on, this is an excuse to throw out all the Star Wars jokes they can think of.

The Word of the Year for 2019, announced by dictionary editors at Merriam-Webster, is the singular pronoun "they." Sure, it has been in use for a long time as a plural pronoun, so it's not an unfamiliar word. For quite a few years now, new words have been offered as non-gendered pronouns, and so far, "they" is winning out over newly-coined words. In fact, most people already use the singular "they" to refer to someone of an unknown gender, even if they don't realize it. Using "they" for a singular but known person is not a large step, and often preferred by people who don't wish to be referred to as specifically male or female.

English famously lacks a gender-neutral singular pronoun to correspond neatly with singular pronouns like everyone or someone, and as a consequence they has been used for this purpose for over 600 years.

More recently, though, they has also been used to refer to one person whose gender identity is nonbinary, a sense that is increasingly common in published, edited text, as well as social media and in daily personal interactions between English speakers. There's no doubt that its use is established in the English language, which is why it was added to the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary this past September.

One does not need to identify as non-binary to benefit from a non-gendered pronoun- think of job applications, school applications, product pitches, or writing submissions. While those things would begin with "I," they will eventually be discussed by others. If the singular "they" is adopted by the general public, it follows that the singular "themself" would become a real word, instead of a demerit in your English class. Other notable words of the year are quid pro quo, impeach, crawdad, egregious, clemency, the, snitty, tergiversation, camp, and exculpate. Read the stories behind all these words at Merriam-Webster. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: AWang (WMF) )

The Nikon Small World in Motion competition celebrates the art of microvideography, that is, bringing us the world of tiny unseen things as they move along, doing their everyday tiny things. The first place winner, shown above, was recorded by Dr. Philippe P. Laissue of the University of Essex School of Life Sciences. It shows an emerging staghorn coral polyp (Acropora muricata). The coral is green and the magenta stuff is algae. It appears to be a time-lapse video, although that isn't specified. I was also really impressed with the third-place winner, by Tommy Gunn and Jesse Gunn.



It shows the carnivorous stylonychia creating a water vortex with its cilia, presumably to draw in even smaller creatures to eat. See, even microscopic animals have fascinating ways to get what they need. You can see the top five videos and honorable mentions here.

Every December, tuba players get together to present concerts of Christmas music in cities throughout the US. They call it TubaChristmas. What does a tuba have to do with Christmas? Well, William J. Bell was born on Christmas Day in 1902. He played tuba with the John Philip Sousa band and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. He was also a tuba teacher. In 1974, Harvey Phillips staged a tuba concert in New York's Rockfeller Center, right on the ice rink, on December 22 in honor of Bell, who was his teacher. Ever since then, tuba players have co-ordinated TubaChristmas concerts through the Harvey Phillips Foundation. Those who play the sousaphone, euphonium, or baritone horn are welcome to participate as well. You might be surprised to find a TubaChristmas concert near you. If not, you can see a video of this year's TubaChristmas concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.



(Image credit: Christopher B Hamlin)

These cheap recreations, or "Sweded" movie trailers are getting better all the time. Sure, these folks had no special effects budget, but they have easy access to things like lightsabers and editing software. Everything else is a workaround, made with painted cardboard, and it's really  cute. Here you can see it side-by-side, or actually top-and-bottom, with the original. See if you can tell which is which.



-Thanks, Bryan & Roque!