You can study a language in school for years, but if you don't practice it in the real world, how fluent are you, really? In this scenario from Foil Arms and Hog, a detective needs someone who knows Gaelic, fast. The skit is only two minutes long, despite the video length. -via Laughing Squid

The Disney parks around the world have a lot in common, but there have been other Disney projects that went nowhere. One of them was Disney’s America, a theme park announced in 1993 that would be built near Haymarket, Virginia.

The park would be arranged into nine sections, loosely focusing on significant periods of U.S. history. One land would focus on the founding fathers while others would feature a 20th century farm, world war battlefields, factories of the industrial revolution. The park would also cover some potentially controversial topics too, like turn-of-the-century immigration, Native Americans, and slavery.

Disney’s new park would be state-of-the-art amusement while mixing in education and sensitivity towards the “painful, disturbing, and agonizing” aspects of American history. Attendees could expect VR technology, innovative motion-simulators, next generation animatronics, and a nightly ironclad ship battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia.

For various reasons, the project was canceled less than a year after it was announced. But what they had planned is quite intriguing, including the development of technologies that were later used elsewhere in the Disney universe. Read a description of the attractions planned for Disney's America at Popular Mechanics. -via Digg

(Image credit: Mliu92)

ZeFrank tells us all about a spider named Margaret, who is an ogre-faced spider. You might guess from the name that the imagery in this True Facts video might be hard to take for people suffering from arachnophobia. Also, there's a bit of rude language. That said, the ogre-faced spider has a unique type of web and a unique method of hunting prey. -via Geeks Are Sexy 

Heritage Hall in Vancouver is a historic building with a grand ballroom, and a famous urinal that startles men. You've seen rather public urinals that have little separation. You probably recall seeing trough urinals that can serve many men at once. But a trough still allows men to stand side-by-side and not look at each other. That's what is startling about this one.

A double-sided, or twin, urinal, to be precise, separated by what can barely be described as a divider.

The unsuspecting men who are blindsided by its design must stand upright, a hair's distance from each other, and count down the seconds while nature takes its course.

"You're out there next to somebody who you've never met before and have to basically look them in the eyes," said Straw, a 36-year-old lawyer.

"In my long and storied bathroom career, I have never seen anything like that before."

The urinal is as old as the building, which was built in 1916 as a post office. Read the story of the "twin tinker" at CBC. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user Cosmo Spacely)

Those of us who live in the USA can be completely unaware that people in other countries do things differently. In fact, there are many things we do that people around the world see as peculiarly American while we are oblivious as to how it's done elsewhere.

 
Check out 15 of these "Americanisms," illustrated in pictofacts at Cracked.

Dunno why I’m laughing this the cutest thing I’ve seen on the internet. pic.twitter.com/jixWBbEb53

— MISTAHMASALATI ™️ (@MisterMasalati) September 19, 2019

By the time they are three, they'll be running through the grass barefoot with joy, but infants apparently do not want to come in contact with the earth's surface. Enjoy this compilation of clips showing babies doing whatever they have to, to avoid touching the grass (or water, or sand). -via Buzzfeed

Wally Conron bred the first labradoodle, which is a cross between a Labrador and a poodle, in 1989. He had an innocent reason- it was a special request that resulted in a bespoke dog.

Conron, who was a breeding manager, received the request from a blind woman in Hawaii. “She wanted to know if we could come up with a dog that she could use as a guide dog and her husband wouldn’t be allergic to,” Conron told Australia’s ABC News podcast.

At first, he thought a standard poodle would the answer to her quandary, but none of the poodles he trialed had the temperament necessary to be a guide dog. After three years of trying to help the woman, he finally came up with the idea to crossbreed “a dog with the working ability of the Labrador and the coat of the poodle,” he told ABC.

Conron's creation got out of hand because there were three puppies, and he went all out to find homes for the two that weren't needed. Now he says he feels like he's released Frankenstein's monster. Read about the birth of the labradoodle at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Flickr user mat79)

There was a time when all the undertakers of Paris associated together in a cartel of sorts, and shared space at a huge building that became an even bigger complex. This was at 104 rue d’Aubervilliers, also called simply Le 104. The building, originally built as a slaughterhouse in 1849, was bought by the funerary syndicate in 1873. It comprised 35,000 square meters, and offered every service one could possibly need for a spectacular funeral. At the height of business, a thousand employees produced 150 funeral processions each day.

The subterranean level was accessed by two huge ramps, and was home to some 300 horses in over two-dozen stables. It’s the first thing you see when you step through the doors of Le 104 today, along with little reminders of its equestrian past.

The ground floor contained 100 funeral chariots, 80 hearses, and 6,000 coffins. On the periphery of the ground floor there were also public workshops and stores that specialised in funeral painting, ornament making, tapestry, and other crafts.

It was a veritable Parisian micro city powered by the business of death.

Le 104 is now an arts center that has plenty to offer to visitors. Read about the magnificent funeral home that served an entire city at Messy Nessy Chic.   

The latest song project from Playing for Change (previously at Neatorama) is the song "The Weight," originally recorded by The Band. For the song's 50th anniversary, musicians from five different continents collaborated, led by Robbie Robertson and Ringo Starr, to recreate the sound. -via Laughing Squid

Renowned and prolific classical artists have a recognizable style to their paintings, but with so many artists to study, who can recognize them all? Redditor DontTacoBoutIt has some simple rules for that. For example, a painting with dappled light will be a Manet if the people look depressed, a Renoir if the people are happy, and if there are no people at all, it's Monet.

The Redditor’s explanations about how well-known artists can be recognized at a single glance are as informative as they are blunt and funny. For example, you can know almost for sure that a painting was done by Peter Paul Rubens if everyone’s naked and they all have very large derrières (‘butts’, the word means ‘butts’). And if everyone in a painting looks a bit like Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin, then you can bet your hat that it’s probably Jan van Eyck’s work.

See a roundup of these rules with examples that show how true they are at Bored Panda. The paintings above, obviously, are by Jan van Eyck.

The girl in the box: the mysterious crime that shocked Germany https://t.co/uYL7wt1Dxq

— The Guardian (@guardian) September 24, 2019

On a Tuesday night in September of 1981, 10-year-old Ursula Herrmann of Eching, Germany, left her aunt's house on her bike. She should've made it to her home in ten minutes, but she never did. Within an hour, police and villagers were combing the woods. Ursula's parents received a demand from kidnappers to pay two million deutschmarks in ransom. The Hermanns were not rich, but neighbors and the local government agreed to raise the money. But they never had a chance to deliver it. After negotiations with the kidnappers faded, a new search began in the forest.   

By the fourth day of searching, a gloomy Sunday, they had covered most of the forest. Ursula had been missing for 19 days. At 9.30am, there was a loud shout. In a tiny glade about 800m away from the lake path, one of the officers had struck something solid when probing the soil. Another policeman rushed over and, after wiping away the leaves and scraping through a layer of clay, discovered a brown blanket covering a wooden board. He removed it only to find second board, which appeared to be the lid of a box. It was 72cm by 60cm – the size of a small coffee table – painted green and locked from the top with seven sliding bolts. Using a spade, he forced the lid open, and peered in. There was Ursula. Her body was cold, lifeless. The officer wept when lifting her out.

Two detectives were sent to break the news to Ursula’s parents at their home, a short walk away. While her mother was too distraught to ask any questions, her father asked repeatedly: had his daughter been hurt before her death? The truthful answer was no. An autopsy concluded that Ursula died within 30 minutes to five hours of being buried. Since there was no sign of struggle, or even movement, inside the box, the doctors assumed she had been drugged beforehand, possibly with nitrous oxide.

It appeared that the kidnappers had planned to keep Ursula alive. The box, 1.40m deep, was fitted with a shelf and a seat that doubled as a toilet. It was stocked with three bottles of water, 12 cans of Fanta, six large chocolate bars, four packets of biscuits and two packs of chewing gum. It also contained a small, bizarre library of 21 books, from Donald Duck comics to westerns, romance novels and thrillers with titles such as The Horror Lurks Everywhere. There was a light and a portable radio tuned to Bayern 3, the same station that broadcast the traffic jingle. To enable Ursula to breathe, the box had a ventilation system made from plastic plumbing pipes, which extended to ground level. But whoever designed it had failed to realise that without a machine to circulate the air, the oxygen would quickly run out.

Police investigated the crime for years, but without evidence linking any particular suspect, it was closed in the late '80s. More than 20 years later, it was reopened bcause of new DNA technology that might point to he perpetrator. However, what investigators found leaves doubts. Has the crime been solved or not? Read the case of the girl in the box at the Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

It's common knowledge that dogs are more affectionate with their humans than cats are, but does that mean that dogs like us more than cats do? Not necessarily. There have been plenty of studies on dogs and their relationships with people, but not so much about cats. Cats seem aloof, and lack both the enthusiasm and the facial expressions of dogs, which leads to the assumption that they don't feel attachment. Few studies have looked at actual cat behavior without expecting it to resemble that of dogs or humans. A new experiment by an Oregon State University research team led by Kristyn Vitale shows that cats bond with their owners just as much as dogs do!

“The majority of cats are securely attached to their owner and use them as a source of security,” said Vitale.

For those wondering just how to tell if their specific cat does indeed like them, Vitale said, there are probably some strong signals to look out for, though they won’t be the same between any two cats.

“Individual cats may show they ‘like’ their owner in various ways. More social cats will show affection by rubbing on their owners or sitting on their lap while more independent cats may show their affection by just being in the same room with their owner. There is a lot of variation in how cats display social behavior toward people,” she said.

I've always thought that you cannot judge a cat's feelings, or even behavior, unless you know that particular cat well. Read about the experiment and its conclusions at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Flickr user Simon_sees)

That donut forced me to eat it! A likely story, indeed, but that's what happens in this very short French animation by MegaComputeur. Stay past the credits for the best scene. -via Laughing Squid

Matthew Turner was a ship's captain, ship designer, gold miner, shipping magnate, and ship builder -in that order- during the California Gold Rush. A hundred years later, Alan Olson is building a wooden sailing ship named the Matthew Turner, an educational ship that combines Turner's skill at shipbuilding with modern technologies to power it.

The most cutting edge of the Matthew Turner’s 21st-century technologies is its regenerative electric propulsion system, which stores the energy generated by the natural rotation of the ship’s propellers as they move through the water in a bank of batteries, enabling the Matthew Turner to stay on course even if it finds itself in the doldrums.

Ironically, if Matthew Turner had wanted to be as cutting edge back in the 19th century as Alan Olson is in 21st, he would have focused his energies on coal-fired steamships, which were the vessels of choice for shipbuilders on the Great Lakes, along the Eastern Seaboard, and throughout the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, Turner Shipyards built scores of wind-powered sailing ships, all those aforementioned schooners, sloops, and brigs. That’s because coal-fired steamships weren’t conducive to covering the enormous distances between ports on the Pacific—you might be able to carry enough coal to get yourself from San Francisco to Hawaii, but not enough to get back. Besides, unlike his counterparts to the east, Turner and his customers in California were far from steady supplies of cheap coal, so coal-fired steam technology was then an expensive alternative to free wind.

How expensive? Well, by 1870, as Turner Shipyards was beginning to ramp up production, the handful of small coal mines that had tried to make a go of it just east of San Francisco had already gone out of business, managing to produce only a few thousand tons of sub-bituminous coal, the type of the mineral most suitable for generating steam. Steadier supplies of coal could be shipped from the Pacific Northwest, where it sold for $11 a ton, but by the time that coal reached San Francisco, the price almost tripled to $28 a ton.

Turner’s customers weren’t anxious to pay premiums like that, so instead of pushing coal-fired steam technology, Turner pushed wind, narrowing the bows of his schooners so they’d slice through ocean waves, but also rigging the square and gaff sails on his brigantines so that a captain could respond quickly to a sudden gale or make the most of a dying breeze. By pushing wind, Turner not only helped the new oceangoing sugar and cargo industries that sailed his ships achieve profitability, he set a high standard for sailing vessels at a time when they were actually going out of style.

While the Matthew Turner project is pretty cool, both ship builders have pretty interesting life stories. Read about them, as well as the new ship, at Collectors Weekly.

Most coffee brands are named after someone or something, like Folgers or Maxwell House. Then there's Chock full o’Nuts. There's a name that really paints a picture, but who wants to drink a coffee made of nuts?

“Chock full o’Nuts” is a weird name for a coffee brand, and no, I’m not talking about the odd choice to have a lowercase “f” or to totally omit the second “f” and instead replace it with an apostrophe. It’s a weird name for a coffee because while nutty coffees like a hazelnut blend may be good on occasion, that’s probably not what you want to lead with.

But more to the point, it’s a weird name because Chock full o’Nuts isn’t chock full of nuts at all. If anything, the opposite is true. There are no nuts — none! — in Chock full o’Nuts.  

What the coffee does have is an interesting story behind it, which goes back to 1926. Read how Chock full o’Nuts coffee ended up with such a strange name at Considerable.

(Image credit: Smash the Iron Cage)