Disney launched their Disney+ streaming service on Tuesday, and of course ran into problems as millions of subscribers tried to log on. The corporation, which knew exactly how many people had signed up and has been hyping the channel mercilessly for months, scrambled to handle the traffic as millions more attempted to sign up on Tuesday. The most in-demand show was The Mandalorian, the first live-action TV series set in the Star Wars universe. If you aren't avoiding spoilers, you can read a review at io9. What everyone is talking about is the appearance of a baby Yoda. No, this is not the Yoda we know, but an infant of the same unnamed species. Who he/she will grow up to be is unknown, but the baby is fairly cute, for a big-eared green child. See more reactions to "baby Yoda" at Buzzfeed.
The rising rate of obesity in America has scientists looking in every direction to find ways to combat it, from social expectations to pollution to hormones to advertising to agricultural processes. But just a few decades ago, obesity was a simple problem. It was due to overeating and a lack of exercise, meaning a simple moral failure on the part of the individual.
What started to alter that opinion was a seminal study published in 1971. This was not an experiment that assigned overweight individuals to a weight loss diet, but one that instead challenged normal weight individuals to put on lots of pounds. The subjects were inmates of the Vermont State Prison, granted reduced sentences for volunteering (a practice considered unethical today). For half a year, their diets were meticulously managed, first to ascertain their baseline weights, then to cause them to gain a lot of weight, then to return them to their baseline weights. All the while, the researchers scrutinized what was going on inside the inmates' bodies.
During the weight gain phase, the inmates did indeed bulk up considerably, mostly via an increase in fat. Eating as many as 10,000 calories per day, they ballooned in weight by an average of 20.9%, roughly 35 pounds each!
Remarkably, however, just ten weeks after returning to normal diets, every single subject returned to their previous size.
Between 1961 and 1989, escaping from East Germany was serious business. Almost 300 people died making the attempt, but several thousand actually made it. Many escapes involved sneaking through isolated parts of the Berlin Wall or depending on luck or the unwillingness of the sentries to kill. Others leaned on technology to smuggle people through the checkpoints. Plus baldfaced guts.
In May 1963, Austrian Heinz Meixner drove up to Checkpoint Charlie in a fancy British sports car, a bright red Austin Healey Sprite convertible. The top was down, and Meixner had made one important modification to the car: he removed the windshield. When the border guards ordered him to pull over for inspection, Meixner lay flat and hit the accelerator. Without the windshield, the entire car was low enough to slip under the lowered barrier. Meixner made it across—along with his East German fiancée hiding behind the seat and his prospective mother-in-law in the trunk.
Norbert Konrad pulled off the same trick a few months later in the exact same car, but the East Germans then added steel bars under the barrier arm to prevent a third attempt.
I recall reading that story as a child, particularly the detail of how Meixner stacked bricks around his girlfriend's mother in the trunk, knowing that the car would be shot at from the rear as he drove away. But that's just one story; others involved a homemade helicopter, a homemade balloon, and a homemade submarine, among other ingenious schemes. Read about them at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg
Kathleen Edwards' new song is bound to become a Christmas classic. It's all about tradition, the things that happen every year, like the same relative who gets drunk, gifts with no thought behind them, and the dog that farts after eating rich holiday food. The "meows" are a nice touch. "It's Christmastime (Let’s Just Survive)" is from the forthcoming album A Dualtone Christmas, featuring music from various artists. -via Nag on the Lake
In 1977, a hospital cook named Ali Maow Maalin came down with smallpox in Somalia. It was a rare outbreak after a global vaccination program restricted the disease to the Horn of Africa, but Maalin recuperated, and 50,000 people were vaccinated in the immediate area. Doctors saw no more cases of smallpox, yet wanted to wait two years to declare the disease defeated, just to make sure. But then the next year, it struck again.
The victim was Janet Parker, a 40-year-old medical photographer, who worked in the anatomy department at Birmingham Medical School, in Birmingham, England. On August 11, Parker developed a fever accompanied by headache and pains in her muscles. Within days her body was covered with rashes and ugly red spots. Her doctor told Parker that she had chickenpox and there was nothing to be worried about. But as the days passed, the blistering pustules became larger and her conditions worsened until she could no longer stand unaided. On 20 August she was admitted to Catherine-de-Barnes Isolation Hospital in Solihull where the dreaded diagnosis was made—she had Variola major, the most serious type of smallpox.
When word leaked out panic descended upon the city, and it wasn’t just the public, there was panic in the government and within the WHO as well. Of all places, the United Kingdom was the last anybody expected a smallpox outbreak, especially so late into the inoculation program. But the source of the infection was no mystery.
A month later, Parker was dead, her mother recovered from a mild case of smallpox, and two men were dead- not from smallpox, but their deaths were related to Parker's illness. Read about the last victim of smallpox and the ensuing scandal at Amusing Planet. -via Damn Interesting
The 1984 movie Red Dawn was an action-packed speculative war movie designed to appeal to teenagers. Communist forces from the USSR, Cuba, and Nicaragua parachute into a small town in Colorado and a group of high school students form a band of guerrillas to fight back. It had an all-star cast, high production values, and extreme violence that made it an exhilarating ride, while the character development was nonexistent and the plot was altogether ridiculous. Mel magazine asked three movie buffs who are self-identified communists to share their thoughts on Red Dawn.
Skylar: The movie barely addresses communism. It took communism to mean the authoritarian enforcement of social uniformity, rather than resource distribution and emancipation of the working class, as it had to show communism as irredeemably evil and lacking in any humanity. Communism and Slavic, authoritarian militarism are so linked in peoples’ minds that we don’t actually have a way of thinking about communism without Russian authoritarianism. I certainly can’t speak for all communists — many saw the Soviet Union as going away from the ideals of communism long before it fell — but communism and Soviet authoritarianism is still intertwined in people’s minds, and most Americans remain confused about it.
In fact, what became clear over the course of the Cold War was that it wasn’t an ideological struggle at all. Instead, it was just about these two large countries jockeying for geopolitical power and the ideological stuff was just a veneer. Which is kind of true of this movie, too.
Robinson: Oh, it portrays communism badly, but in a way, it doesn’t really convey it as an ideology at all. There’s that re-education camp, and at one point, I heard someone say, “America is a whorehouse,” but that’s about it. It’s full of anti-communist propaganda, but like most propaganda, it’s devoid of the substance of what they’re actually portraying.
There's a lot more, but it's not all about political ideology. The three agree that Red Dawn, with all its faults, was a memorable experience -possibly because they were all young when it premiered. Read their analysis at Mel magazine.
Quilty is a cat who lives at Friends For Life animal shelter in Houston. He has a wonderful personality and gets along well with both the humans and the animals he lives with. But the shelter has a little problem with him. Quilty is skilled at opening doors, and got into the habit of letting the other cats out of their enclosures at night. While this makes him very popular with the cats, the staff is suffering.
We have since Quilty-proofed the cat room, while he took a brief hiatus in the lobby. His roommates missed him while he was banished to the lobby. They enjoyed their nighttime escapades around the shelter. The staff, however, did not miss the morning cat wrangling, so we’ll just have to agree to disagree there.
Apparently this is not a new skill he learned here at the shelter; he used to let his dog sibling in the house at his old home.
If someone out there is looking for a clever cat that gets along with dogs but does not get along with closed doors, we have someone they really need to come and meet.
Please. Come meet him. And take him home. Please...
Quilty was confined, but his time-out didn't last long. After all, his specialty is opening doors.
Update: Quilty's review with the parole board was denied, so he released himself of his own recognizance today. He felt that confinement had nothing more to offer him.
He has been returned to solitary.
The review board will take up his case again tomorrow.
(Y'all. This cat released himself FROM THE INTEGRATION KENNEL IN THE ROOM...)
The long comment thread updated again and again, as the cat managed to escape using different schemes, including once when he just snuck out behind the person watching him. These shenanigans led to Quilty the escape artist becoming a social media star. Fans launched Quilty his own Instagram account, called Free Quilty. You can even buy Free Quilty merchandise. The good news is that lots of people have now applied to adopt Quilty. They may not know what they are getting into. -via 22 Words
George Lucas proved that no matter how much you make in movies, the real money is in action figures. Kids play with them, fans collect them, and others just want to have a souvenir of a movie franchise they really like. Now we have action figures of politicians, scientists, and historical figures, too. But what about pop culture that doesn't rise to the level of Star Wars? Artist Dano Brown takes a stab at filling the gap with his action figures of lesser characters from memorable movies that you'd never think of as action figure material.
Brown's action figures are on display at the "Pop-Culture Sculptures" exhibit at Gallery1988 in Los Angeles, and most are sold out. See many more of them at Instagram.
On November 7, a group of about a dozen friends went on a leisurely bike ride of four miles, ending at a familiar cafe. Along the way, they broke through white tape strung across a footbridge. And that's when Russ Mantle became the first person from the UK to log a million miles on a bicycle. The 82-year-old Mantle has been cycling since 1951, and kept meticulous accounts of his rides, from his competition days to bike tours of the various continents.
Russ, a former civil servant, said: “I’m completely overwhelmed by the interest in the amount of miles I’ve cycled.
“I haven’t really been going for it, the miles have just naturally piled up because I enjoy cycling so much that’s it’s just natural to be a mile-eater.
“This year is my lowest mileage year at 8,000 miles. Hitting a million miles is just another milestone. On to the next one. Maybe when I’m 100 I’ll make two million!”
This strange animation by cool3Dworld starts out weird with five green guys riding a tandem bike, then gets exciting when they anger a hot dog man, almost turns tragic, but then ends with a dose of friendship and cooperation. It's still pretty weird, though. -via Everlasting Blort
Keena Roberts had gone to school occasionally, but had spent most of her time with her parents researching the social life of baboons in Botswana. Then suddenly, when she was 14, she went to high school in Philadelphia. Does that remind you of a certain 2004 movie?
“So who do you like, Keena?” The girl asking me took a sip of her Diet Snapple and quirked up one side of her mouth. I had no idea what her name actually was, but I had been calling her “Crushy” in my head because that’s all she ever talked about — who had crushes on whom, and who knew about them. The other girls at the lunch table stared at me, and I clenched and unclenched my hands under the table, trying to think of the right thing to say. I looked past Crushy to the “cool” part of the cafeteria, where a bunch of senior girls from the varsity lacrosse team were eating. Truth is, I did have a crush on one of them, a paralyzing crush that made me almost pass out when she gave me a high five after practice one day. But I knew enough not to talk about it.
“Uh … Alex is nice?” I picked a boy from our class with floppy hair who wasn’t (A) an asshole or (B) an idiot. Seemed like a good enough choice for this conversation, right? Crushy burst out laughing.
“You can’t like Alex!” she shouted.
“Shut up,” I hissed, as heads at other tables turned toward us. “I didn’t even say that I did! Just that he was nice.”
“He’s way too cool for you,” Crushy went on. “And too hot. Only Meghan or Sam can like him. They’re both as cool and hot as he is.”
The difference between Roberts' story and Mean Girls is how Roberts used her knowledge of social hierarchies in baboon society to negotiate the world of an American high school. She wrote a book about her experience called Wild Life. Read -or listen to- an excerpt that lays out the scenario of her high school days at Narratively.
Boba Fett was a minor character in the 1980 movie The Empire Strikes Back. He was killed off in Return of the Jedi in 1983. Years later, the world was connected by the internet and suddenly Boba Fett was an "iconic character." What? It turns out that the popularity of the mysterious bounty hunter hinged upon a certain age group of Star Wars fans who thought he looked really cool. It might have flown under your radar, but before The Empire Strikes Back, Fett was a cartoon character who appeared in The Star Wars Holiday Special. And he was already an action figure. Jason Fry tells of his Boba Fett experience.
The only thing he knew about the intergalactic bounty hunter, which made its brief debut in the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, was that he looked incredibly cool. With his identity hidden underneath a Stormtrooper-type mask, Boba Fett wore blue and yellow armor, a red cape, carried a jet pack and handgun, and roamed the galaxy without any affiliation. “He was the only good thing about it,” Fry remembers of the infamous cartoon. Once the 10-year-old had unboxed the mysterious mercenary, a year before the character’s official debut in The Empire Strikes Back, his imagination took over. “I probably thought up a hundred little Boba Fett stories using Kenner figures before I ever got to see Empire,” says Fry, who has since made a career writing dozens of Star Wars extended universe novels. “Everything about that figure was just so exciting.”
Fett's quick death didn't stop him. He got a backstory during the prequel trilogy in Attack of the Clones, plus a resurrection in the Expanded Universe. And now he's the inspiration behind the Disney+ series The Mandalorian. Read a history of Boba Fett, from his original design process to his rise as a fan favorite at the Ringer. -via Digg
YouTuber My Microscopic World modified his microscope to harness polarized light, which illuminates tiny creatures in amazing ways. Larva that wear armor shimmer under polarized light as their segments change angle. In other creatures, you can see their internal organs: muscles, eggs, and even what they have recently eaten. Oh yeah, the footage was shot on an iPhone. -via Metafilter
Despite the fact that zombies are fictional and the "rules" for zombies vary with the writers' whims, there are constant discussions about how to survive when the apocalypse comes and the world is full of corpses trying to eat you. A recent Tumblr discussion had some pretty good ideas.
1. Wear a suit of armor. You may have to make your own.
2. Increase your speed with a bicycle. They are quiet and require no fuel.
This Belgian video is completely wordless, because it doesn't need words. The YouTuber spends a couple of minutes shredding various things, which is pretty interesting. Then he feeds an entire roll of bubble wrap through his industrial-strength shredder. It's cool to watch, but eventually you start thinking about the waste and the garbage produced. In the comments, he tells us, "For the environmentalists: All the plastic was cleaned from the grass with a vacuum cleaner, and disposed at the recycle center." Let's hope that in Belgium, they really do recycle the stuff they receive. -via Geeks Are Sexy
