Auralnauts are back with a new Star Wars song, addressing the relationship between Kylo Ren and Rey during the movie The Last Jedi... and it only took them two years. The jam called "Reylo" is a love song with a catchy dance beat and silly rhymes delivered in Kylo's voice as if he were wearing that Darth Vaderish mask. The lyrics are available at the YouTube page. It's a good production about old news, but it makes you wonder what's going to happen in episode nine, which is only three months away now. -via Geeks Are Sexy

An artist who goes by tragopandemonium spent three weeks making a turtle costume for her friend, and it turned out to be amazing. She admits she can't sew, but the costume came together anyway. The shell is made from floor mat material, the flippers are fabric-covered foam core, and the eyes incorporate iridescent Christmas ornaments and sequins. A friend airbrushed the shell to a perfect finish.

You can see the entire process in pictures and text at imgur. -via Boing Boing

More than two years ago, we told you about Grandpa Mason, an elderly feral cat taken in by the TinyKittens TNR team. Mason was diagnosed with terminal kidney disease. He adjusted to living in a home, although he never became friendly with people. However, Grandpa Mason loved kittens, and has fostered countless litters, cuddling and grooming them and showing them how to be a cat.  

When brought in, the original estimate for Mason's survival was around four months. Instead, Mason has done very well in TK's care for nearly three years... but miracles, sadly, do not last forever. It was announced this morning that Mason's kidneys have failed, and that his trip over the Rainbow Bridge is imminent. He will spend this evening (barring immediate complications) in the company of his beloved kittens and then cross over in the morning under veterinary care.

If you can handle it, Shelly's announcement is here. You can read Mason's story at Metafilter, including links to plenty of videos.

(Image credit: TinyKittens)

YouTuber Half-Asleep Chris was worried when his cat Ralph stayed out all night. Ralph wouldn't disclose where he went, so Chris outfitted Ralph (and his brother Tom) with a GPS tracker to find out. What resulted is a combination of cute cat video, investigation, and comedy, as Chris wryly tells the story of two very normal cats and their wacky shenanigans. There are even original songs!  -via Digg

Let's be clear: the semen is not manufactured at the facility; the bulls do that. This is where bull semen is cryogenically preserved until it is needed. A fire early Wednesday morning at Yarram Herd Services in Gippsland, Victoria, Australia, included an explosion of frozen semen supplies.  

Country Fire Authority Gippsland commander Chris Loeschenkohl said the crew had to be wary of "projectiles" coming at them while they tackled the blaze.

"The liquid inside the cylinders was rapidly expanding and essentially the lids of the cryogenic cylinders were just popping off the top and projectiles were being thrown from the building," he told ABC.

Ten fire crews responded to the fire and extinguished the fire in about two hours. The facility lost around 100 cylinders of semen worth hundreds of dollars each, and some equipment. This will be a blow to local farmers who are approaching spring insemination season. However, it was a gift to the internet, as the jokes just wrote themselves. The Daily Dot has a rundown of them, which contains plenty of NSFW text.  

Two boys have discovered something extremely fun- a pedal-activated trash can! I first saw this at reddit, where the comment thread has countless stories of dumb and/or dangerous things little boys did for fun, fondly remembered by the survivors. -via Bored Panda

The neck opening of a garment has always sported signifiers of status, due to its proximity to the face, always visible in a meeting or a portrait. Those signifiers include neckties, frilly lace collars, jewelry, plunging necklines, and more. But nothing says "artsy" like a black turtleneck shirt. It can also say "cool" or "avant-garde" or "pretentious," depending on who is wearing it.

There’s an obvious question here: How did a basic item of clothing come to accumulate such lofty signifiers? The answer lies in its very simplicity. The turtleneck’s appeal rests largely on what it is not: It makes the classic shirt-and-tie combination look priggish and the T-shirt appear formless and slobbish, hitting that otherwise inaccessible sweet spot between formality and insouciance. It is sufficiently smart to be worn under a suit jacket, yet casual and comfortable enough for repeated everyday wear. Developed in the late 19th century as a practical garment for polo players (hence the British name for it: the “polo neck”), it was originally a utilitarian design largely worn by sportsmen, laborers, sailors, and soldiers. But by the dawn of the 20th century, European proto-bohemians were already seeing possibilities in the garment’s elegant functionality, which chimed harmoniously with embryonic modernist design ideals.

Appropriately, the website Artsy has a history of the rise and fall and resurrection of the turtleneck collar, who wore them, and what it means.  -via Metafilter

KFC is testing out another wacky idea, putting an extra-crispy chicken fillet between two glazed donuts and calling it a sandwich. It's called, oddly enough, the Chicken and Donuts sandwich.   

The sandwich is part of the chain’s testing of new “Chicken and Donuts” menu items, which also include a basket option with either chicken on the bone or tenders with either one ($5.50) or two donuts ($7.50). Chicken fans in those areas can also choose to add a hot donut to any order for $1.

Pardon me, but the math doesn't seem to work out here. Wouldn't someone just order the $5.50 combo and then add another donut for a dollar? Be that as it may, you can't get the donuts just anywhere. The testing is going on at 40 KFC outlets in Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In other news, there are forty KFC outlets in just three cities. It may be worth a road trip if you are the kind who loves the Luther burger. -via Mashable

A peculiar facet of tipping culture is that restaurant servers depend on compensation from customers with no agreed-upon contract, so some diners calculate the worth of the labor on how pretty, friendly, or servile a waitress is. It's no wonder that the overwhelming majority of servers have been sexually harassed on the job. But it was always so. Going back hundreds of years, the combination of low wages and the task of serving a customer's needs led some women to supplement their restaurant income with sexual favors. Those who didn't still suffered from that reputation.  

Since the days of colonial taverns, women who serve have often been considered—by government officials, customers, and even courts—sexually available. For some servers, unwanted sexual attention was an unfortunate reality of the workplace. For others, like the waitresses who offered both liquor and sexual services in Gilded Age saloons, sex work was part of the job description. From steamy dance halls to staid lunch counters, sexual harassment and sex work are deeply entrenched in the history of America’s restaurants.

Alice Thomas would have known. A tavern-keeper in colonial Boston, Thomas was convicted of harboring “Lewd Lascivious & notorious persons of both Sexes, giving them opportunity to commit carnal wickedness.” She was one of many female tavern keepers in colonial America whose drink-heavy establishments catered to weary travelers and thirsty locals. As Alison Owens writes in her history of waitressing, their association with drinking sometimes led their communities and the government to label them women of “lascivious” morals.

But a job is a job, and many working class women had no other choice but to serve customers in restaurants or taverns. Read the history of institutional assumptions about servers at Atlas Obscura.

The job of a Hollywood prop master is creative, ever-changing, and challenging. It's also show business! But the world of props is like housework- people only notice when you don't do it right. Prop masters spend countless hours finding or crafting just the right things for films, which can be challenging for period films. People will notice if The Social Network had Mark Zuckerberg using a laptop that wasn't developed until after the events of the film. And some directors are very picky about their props. Robin L. Miller gives us an example.  

I did Grand Budapest Hotel, which is one of the most creative things you can ever do. To work with Wes Anderson is just insane — the level of his interest in everything visual. Every single prop in that was a design or fabrication.

The box that has the pastry in it, the beautiful pink box — it took so much work to create that. Oh my God. Because everything you do with Wes, he starts out with an image, or maybe four images. And he’ll tell you what he’s getting closer to. And then you take it from there and you refine it a little more. Then he’ll say, “Yeah, I like this, but maybe here for a shape.” And then you just keep going until you’ve got the shape. Color-wise, palette-wise, he knows color like crazy.

[For] the graphics, he has a wonderful woman who works with him [Annie Atkins]. She’s been with him on a number of shows. What he had her do [is] come up with concepts for that box. The ribbon. I had samples from, I don’t know, four or five European cities. I was getting every sample imaginable of this blue ribbon. Just to see what was perfect for the lighting and the texture and the shade. The box was this kind of blush pink. Not to mention, it had to be rigged. Then a version of it had to be made that all came open at once into different pieces and reassemble itself. I had a brilliant crew in Berlin who could figure that one out.

It’s unbelievable what went into that. And we ended up with that wonderful, perfect box.

Read stories from other prop masters about their greatest struggles at Vulture, such as The Addams Family dinner, the fish bones on Airplane! and Castaway's Wilson.  -via Boing Boing

A team from Science and Global Security put together a scenario of what could happen if a nuclear war broke out between the Russians and the US, starting with an attack on the NATO countries of Europe. The beginning is scary enough, but when the Americans get involved, we find out what a nuclear arsenal really is.

This four-minute audio-visual piece is based on independent assessments of current U.S. and Russian force postures, nuclear war plans, and nuclear weapons targets. It uses extensive data sets of the nuclear weapons currently deployed, weapon yields, and possible targets for particular weapons, as well as the order of battle estimating which weapons go to which targets in which order in which phase of the war to show the evolution of the nuclear conflict from tactical, to strategic to city-targeting phases.

The casualty count, estimated to be 90 million within just a few hours, does not include victims of radioactive fallout or lack of resources after the destruction. Read more about the simulation at the Science and Global Security website.  -via Digg

The iconic comic book superhero creator Stan Lee appears in all the Marvel movies, even posthumously in Avengers: Endgame. A reader asked how the tradition of Stan Lee cameos came about, and the answer grew to encompass an entire biography of Lee, which has many fascinating parts, like how he met his wife Joan.    

There are conflicting accounts on whether one of Lee’s friends dared him to ask out some red headed model or his cousin set him up on a blind date with said model. Either way, Lee went to her office to see about that date. However, when he arrived and knocked at the door of the modeling agency, the woman who answered was someone completely different- a hat model from England by the name of Joan Boocock. Joan had come to America after marrying one Sanford Dorf, who had been serving in the UK during the war.

Stunned when he saw her, rather than play it cool, instead Lee apparently almost immediately professed his undying love for her, and then followed this awkward exchange up by telling her he’d had her face in his mind and been drawing it since he was a kid… (According to Lee, this wasn’t any sort of cheesy line, but the absolute truth.)

Rather than finding any of this weird or creepy, despite being married at the time, Joan agreed to go out on a date with Lee.  As to why, despite by her own admission being in a happy marriage, she found it completely boring.  (I guess as you’d expect from marrying someone named Sanford Dorf.)

But Stan Lee, she states, “He wore a marvelous floppy hat and scarf and spouted Omar Khayyam [an 11th/12th century Persian poet] when he took me for a hamburger at Prexy’s. He reminded me of that beautiful man, [British actor] Leslie Howard.”

As for Lee, he said he knew right on his first date he wanted to marry Joan. Two weeks later, not caring in the slightest that she was already married, he proposed and she said yes.

Actually getting to the alter was kind of complicated, but they were married for 69 years until Joan's death. As for the cameos, those were in place before there were any Marvel movies. Read that story and more about Stan Lee at Today I Found Out. 

(Image credit: Alan Light)

The image above shows us the entire contents of a firetruck in Geneva, Switzerland, sorted and categorized, including the crew. This is an example of a very popular Instagram meme called knolling.   

So knolling is a type of flat-lay photography, where different objects are arranged at 90-degree angles from each other, then photographed from above. The look is symmetrical and pleasing to the eye and allows people to see a variety of objects in a single picture; perfect for demonstrating equipment or an inventory, for example. The process has been further popularized through LEGO, where builders carefully arranged their bricks by shape, style and color before getting to work on construction.

Knolling of emergency service vehicles is also known as the Tetris Challenge. Here is a Boxer MRAV of the Royal Netherlands Army.



Considering how well-equipped modern emergency services are, a glimpse of what they have is intriguing, even if we don't understand most of what we are seeing. Once a few crews did this, everyone wanted to get involved. Below is a police van in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. We assume that they enlisted someone innocent to play the part of an arrestee.  



You can see 30 ranked images of emergency service knolling at Bored Panda. You can also explore more through the hashtag #tetrischallenge at Instagram.

-via Metafilter

Film critic Jeremy Smith admits he doesn't know as much as he should about Bollywood films, but otherwise, he's got an encyclopedic knowledge of movies made around the world, and movies made about places around the world. In this list, he selected the movie that most embodies the culture and feel of major cities. Some are recent, some are very old, and with each entry, he offers several alternatives for your viewing pleasure. For example:

Johannesburg - "District 9"

Neill Blomkamp’s surprise sci-fi hit of 2009 posits an alternate South African history in which extraterrestrial “prawns” become oppressed refugees during the apartheid era. When one of the weapons manufacturers charged with relocating the prawns comes into contact with a liquid with transformative properties, he finds himself subject to the same prejudice — and worse — inflicted on the aliens. One day, there will be a definitive film on apartheid. Honorable mention: Hood’s “Tsotsi," Korda’s “Cry, the Beloved Country” and Menges’ “A World Apart."

Check out the list and see if your opinions agree with his. You might want to guess which film will be listed for your city before you read it. 

Forensic investigators in Australia ran a grisly experiment for more than a year and came up with some fairly weird conclusions. They observed (and photographed) a corpse as it decomposed at a body farm for 17 months. A picture was taken every half-hour during daylight for that entire time. They discovered that a dead body can move for a long time after death- more than a year.

"What we found was that the arms were significantly moving, so that arms that started off down beside the body ended up out to the side of the body," Alyson Wilson a medical scientist at Central Queensland University told the ABC.

Some movement after death is expected, but the fact that it continued for such a long time was a complete surprise, Wilson said.

The results of the study could have implications for forensic investigations. We can no longer assume that the position in which a long-dead body is found is the same position the deceased was in at death. Read the story at Interesting Engineering. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Flickr user projectexploration)