In most professional sports, the role of the team doctor is pretty sweet: besides performing regular checkups and giving health lectures, you get to attend all the games and only go to work when there's an emergency. Things are different for a team dentist in the NHL, as emergencies happen all too often, and you keep a dentist chair on hand to patch up player's mouths. Hockey players don't expect to finish a season, much less their career, with all their teeth intact. Their dentists all have tales to tell, each gorier than the last.

Or consider Game 4 of the 2010 Western Conference finals, when, after getting smashed in the mouth by a shot, Chicago Blackhawks defenseman Duncan Keith spit out seven teeth like sunflower seeds on his way back to the bench. "It sounds gross and bad," Keith says, "but it happens all the time to guys."

During a game, an NHL team dentist's main priorities are triage, improvisation and speed: Stop the bleeding, yank or file down any dangerous edges and numb the pain so the player can return to the ice as quickly as possible. Restorative oral surgery -- things like root canals, crowns, bridges or removable teeth the players call "flippers" -- is saved for the fully equipped dental office. So it was that Keith left a breadcrumb trail of bicuspids all the way to the Blackhawks' training room, where at one point he counted seven needles in his mouth. He missed just six and a half minutes of the game and returned to the ice, mumbling instructions through numb chipmunk cheeks while setting up the game-tying goal. (Two and a half weeks later, Keith was drinking out of the Cup, presumably through a straw.)

"Gotta leaf it all on the eyesh," he gummed to reporters after the Sharks game.

Read more stories about the dentists who care for hockey player's teeth and the pros that suffer for their sport at ESPN.  -via Metafilter

This ad parody from The Kloons is what we used to call a shaggy dog story. Go ahead and laugh at it, when you finally get to the punch line. However, it does illustrate studies that show how acquiring possessions, no matter had coveted they are initially, tend to lose value over time and ultimately contribute little to our overall happiness. The alternative, experiences, bring happiness before, during, and after the actual experience. -via Digg

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was an 18th-century German sculptor in Vienna. In that era, painters may have had free rein to experiment with facial expressions, but carving a statue of rock or even casting one in bronze was a major project that required a pleasant, thoughtful, or determined expression to capture a personality for posterity. halfway through his career, Messerschmidt abandoned those rules and began making "character heads" with extreme grimaces. His contemporaries thought he'd lost his mind. They may have been right.  

Messerschmidt, Nicolai claims, believed himself to be tormented by demons; the wicked spirits were angry that his work as an artist had uncovered divine secrets of human proportion. “He also couldn’t comprehend for a long time why he who lived such an ascetic life of celibacy would have to endure such torture from the spirits, who should have been, according to (romantic) theory, most sympathetic to him,” Nicolai wrote. A collector who visited Messerschmidt reported that his face was ruined from pulling faces all day long, modelling for his own busts. (Did anyone ever tell you, as a kid, that your face would “get stuck like that?” Messerschmidt’s the guy to whom it actually happened.)

But Messerschmidt’s project, of cataloging “the sixty-four different varieties of grimace” (as Nicolai put it), may not have been as unorthodox as it seems.

Read about Messerschmidt's character heads and see a slideshow of them at Jstor Daily. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Flickr user Sam Howzit)

The original plan for the final chapter of the Star Wars triple trilogy was to highlight General Leia as the main character, after focusing on Han Solo in The Force Awakens and on Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi. But those plans had to be changed due to the death of actress Carrie Fisher in December of 2016. Fisher's role in The Rise of Skywalker had to be reconsidered. The film will will still feature Leia, using unused footage from the two previous films. While we don't yet know what will happen, we now have some idea of the original plan, explained by her brother Todd Fisher.  

In the original version of the ninth and final installment, The Rise of Skywalker, his sister, Leia (played by Carrie Fisher), was going to emerge as a full-fledged Jedi warrior, complete with her very own lightsaber. That’s according to no less an authority than Fisher’s real-life brother, Todd Fisher, who filled us in on what the plan was for his sister’s iconic character prior to her sudden death in December 2016. “She was going to be the big payoff in the final film,” Fisher reveals exclusively to Yahoo Entertainment. “She was going to be the last Jedi, so to speak. That’s cool right?” (Watch our video interview above.)

Cool is an understatement: It’s positively wizard. Leia’s Force abilities were teased in a key scene of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, and the Resistance general apparently would have had the chance to get even more physical in The Rise of Skywalker. “People used to say to me, ‘Why is it that Carrie never gets a lightsaber and chops up some bad guys,’” Fisher says, noting that Alec Guinness was roughly the same age when Obi-Wan Kenobi battled Darth Vader in A New Hope. “Obi-Wan was in his prime when he was Carrie’s age!”

Read more of Fisher's discussion of his sister and her role in Star Wars at Yahoo! Entertainment. -via The Daily Dot

Looking back from 30 years on, our opinions of the Disney movie The Little Mermaid are colored by the movies that came afterward, but it was groundbreaking at the time. I was impressed by a Disney Princess that actually had agency, even if her desires and actions were sometimes questionable. The story of The Little Mermaid is the story of Disney's renaissance. After Walt Disney's death in 1966, the company went into decline for almost 20 years. What stopped the slide into obscurity was recruiting Michael Eisner to run the company. He slashed expenses, concentrated on TV, and diminished the importance of animation. The animation department was under threat of elimination in the late 1980s when they went for a Hail Mary feature film project- one that was very different from all the previous animated Disney movies.  

At the suggestion of director Ron Clements, studio chiefs decided to pursue the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Little Mermaid,” except with a happy ending and a central villain. (In the original story, the mermaid does not get the prince. Instead, she faces a variety of antagonists and ends up committing suicide.) Ashman got right to work, transforming the depressing 19th-century yarn into a dynamic Broadway spectacle.

In classic Disney animated features of old, plot was advanced through dialogue, and songs were incidental. For instance, in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the song “Whistle While you Work” does nothing to move the plot forward. Ashman and Menken approached the film’s book as they would a Broadway musical, using songs to impart critical plot points and character development. Music tells the audience everything they need to know about Ariel: The song “Part of Your World,” for instance, is a classic example of the “I Want” trope of American musical theater. “They approached it like a Broadway musical,” recalled Jodi Benson, the voice of Ariel, in the DVD documentary. “It is something totally different. The characters actually run out of words, can’t express themselves anymore, and it has to come out in song.”

But that was just the beginning of what made The Little Mermaid different from the movies that came before. Read how Ashman and others broke the formula for Disney animated films at Smithsonian.

Christine Hunger is a speech-language pathologist. She has been teaching her dog Stella to communicate in English with a custom soundboard since Stella was a puppy. Stella can press buttons to bring up words she knows (29 words so far), and even more important, has been stringing words together to relay a thought. Those thoughts are exactly what you'd expect from a good dog.  

Last night, right before this video was taken, I accidentally said “ball” on Stella’s device while I was actually reaching for a different word. But, Stella took this very seriously! She picked up her ball, dropped it on her device, and said “Good” (Translation: Good idea, Mom!)
•
I started recording right after she said “Good” and caught the rest of her thought: “Happy ball want outside!”

Read about Stella and her skills in an interview at People, or go more in depth and follow
Stella's progress at Hunger's blog Hunger For Words. If you just want to see more of Stella in action, check out YouTube or Instagram.  -via Metafilter

Sesame Street premiered on November 10, 1969, so the show is now celebrating 50 years of teaching preschoolers how to recognize letters and numbers and get along with each other. Back in 1969, it was breakthrough television, something that hadn't been seen before. The Children's Television Workshop was innovating by using research into how children actually learn, and how that could be translated into television, while most children's programming at the time was busy selling breakfast cereal. Viewers loved the short segments, the experimental animation, and most of all, the Muppets.

The CTW team had known they wanted Jim Henson’s Muppets to be part of the action as soon as they met Jim Henson.

In fact, the casting director went so far as to say that if Sesame Street couldn’t have Muppets, it might as well have no puppets at all.

Yet the Sesame Street pilot programs had kept Jim Henson’s muppets separate from humans, on the advice of experts who felt that showing the two together would be confusing to kids.

The experts were wrong. The Muppets were what held the children's attention, so Henson designed new Muppets that could interact with humans, and they have done so ever since. Go behind the scenes and see Henson and his crew working on Sesame Street in a post at Considerable.

Part of Hitler's plan for sustaining Germany during his invasion of Europe involved ways to produce enough food without supplies imported from other nations- particularly nations that would be at war with his Nazi regime. One of those supplies was margarine. The butter substitute, at the time made with animal fat, was very popular in Germany, which consumed 17.5 pounds per capita in 1930.

It was also around this time that manufacturers discovered an even cheaper way to produce margarine: with whale fat. The advent of kerosene created a surplus of whale oil, which was previously used as lighting fuel, leading to a massive buy up at low-cost. In 1929, the two companies that would later merge to form Unilever—Margarine Unie, a Dutch company, and Lever Brothers, a British firm—successfully incorporated their vast stores of whale oil into widely popularized margarine products.

Whale fat was also widely used to wage war. Liquified blubber served as a handy machine lubricant and proved useful in manufacturing the nitroglycerine needed for explosives. In fact, Britain declared it a “national defense” commodity in 1938. Crucial to kitchens and battlefields alike, Germany and Britain that year purchased 83% of the world’s whale harvest between them. Many of those whales came from Norwegian whaling, which led the world in whale harvests by hunting along an unclaimed Antarctic coastline, today called Queen Maud Land.

Hitler's minions launched a plan to stake their own claim to the Antarctic coast in order to ensure a supply of whales. Their first expedition launched in March of 1938. Read how that went at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: Michael George Haddad)

Lasse Scharz is a ship's cook. Here he is aboard the Avontuur preparing a meal for the crew. The camera is rigidly fastened to the boat, but the boat is bobbing along on the ocean. Scharz is quite experienced with such conditions, and tells us he uses big pots and only fills them halfway because otherwise they'd spill. -via Laughing Squid

One day I kept smelling a strange scent all evening. It was musky, feral, and funky. I couldn’t place it.

— Emily Taylor (@snakeymama) October 31, 2019

Biology professor Emily Taylor (@snakeymama) tells us the story of that one night she was alone in the dark and felt the presence of something she was totally unfamiliar with. Now, a woman who tracks rattlesnakes is not someone who panics for no reason, but as the story unfolds, it not only gets scarier, but also becomes more and more believable from the way she tells it as a scientist.

She eventually found out what was stalking her, but the question remains: would she have been less scared if she knew what it was all the time? That's what she says, but she's a fearless field biologist. Your mileage may vary. Read the whole story at Twitter. -via Boing Boing

Illustrator Ed Harrington has some pretty subversive ideas about the fictional characters you grew up with. He draws what you might call outtakes, or maybe behind-the-scenes images that you don't get to see in movies or TV shows. He-Man, the Jetsons, Winnie-the-Pooh, Star Trek, Sesame Street, and the Smurfs all get the Harrington treatment.



Check out a ranked gallery of Harrington's pop culture illustrations at Bored Panda, or all of them at Instagram. Then check out Harrington's designs you can wear yourself in his collection of t-shirt designs in the NeatoShop!

Leafhoppers, treehoppers, and planthoppers are insects that come in all shapes and sizes, some of which are beautiful, while others are pretty funny-looking. Ze Frank introduces them to us in an insect version of a fashion show, with a sidebar explanation of some of their more unsavory features in the middle. Just as you'd expect from Ze Frank.

Thanksgiving Day is only three weeks away, so it's time to look for sales on frozen turkey and plan your menu for the Thanksgiving feast. You'll probably make (or just eat) the same traditional foods your family has always enjoyed, but you can always learn more about those dishes. For example, did you know that sweet potatoes aren't even potatoes? And get this- they aren't yams, either.

True potatoes like russets are members of the nightshade botanical family, while sweet potatoes belong to the morning glory family. But that doesn’t make sweet potatoes yams either; though they aren’t actually potatoes, orange sweet potatoes are their own thing. Yams, which are often white or yellowish on the inside, are related to lilies and grasses and mostly grow in tropical environments.

Whatever you call them, it's the tradition that matters. Learn other new facts about Thanksgiving food at Mental Floss. Then we can all be thankful for a holiday centered around eating.

(Image credit: Flickr user Alexis Lamster)

The photorealistic CGI version of The Lion King did not quite connect with audiences. Screen Junkies explains exactly why in this Honest Trailer, as if you didn't already know. Still, they found plenty of other things to critique about The Lion King remake, except for Beyonce, who is beyond criticism.

The Size of Space is an interactive site by Neal Agarwal that takes us through the relative size of heavenly bodies from an astronaut to the observable universe. Considering some of the objects that fall in between, we can bet that the observable universe is a lot bigger than it was even 50 years ago ("observable" being the growth factor).

While you might not be amazed at the relative size of the planets, you will learn something new. There are moons in our solar system that are larger than some planets in our solar system. We know about at least one star that is smaller than Earth. And how astronomers have mapped out the larger universe is pretty impressive. -via Boing Boing