Deadpool made his presence known in the halls of Comic Con this past weekend. Watch as he flirts, photobombs, and performs various shenanigans among the cosplayers and fans. He gets away with it because he is Deadpool! -via Geeks Are Sexy

If you're looking for the traditional dishes of Iceland without going to Iceland, you might consider a trip to New Iceland, an area on the shores of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba. New Iceland is sparsely populated (as is Iceland), but that's where you'll find rúllupylsa in both grocery stores and restaurants, and Brennivin to drink, with vínarterta for dessert. Tourists from Iceland love to stop by for a taste of home on their North American trips. The founding of New Iceland might remind you of stories of other, more familiar settlements.

The origins of this delicious diaspora are explosive. Following a volcanic eruption in 1875 that starved livestock, crippled the economy, and punctuated an ongoing series of hardships, Sigtryggur Jonasson, who had recently arrived in Canada, traveled home with a booklet titled Nýja Ísland I Kanada, or New Iceland In Canada, which Canadian officials wanted to distribute as part of an effort to attract immigrants to the lightly populated area. Over the next few decades, some 20% of Iceland’s population emigrated to North America, mainly to Canada. Jonasson became known as the Father of New Iceland, and Icelanders eventually settled, by being towed on flat boats, on Lake Winnipeg, where they hoped to fish and govern themselves in the remote territory. They named the capital of New Iceland Gimli, Icelandic for “paradise.”

But it wasn’t quite. Even hardened Icelanders weren’t prepared for the cold winters, and many died from scurvy and a smallpox epidemic during the first years. According to Stefan Jonasson, a Winnipeg-based New Iceland historian and editor of the community newspaper Lögberg-Heimskringla, at least one setter stored bodies in cold sheds until spring thaw when they could be buried. The newcomers survived in large part thanks to First Nations people, who taught these ocean-fishing immigrants how to set a net four feet under the frozen lake’s ice. The bond formed between First Nations and Icelanders persists today—intermarriage was common, as well as culinary exchanges. Many nearby First Nations families still make Icelandic dishes.

In some ways, New Iceland is more traditionally Icelandic than Iceland itself. Read about New Iceland and its cuisine at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image credit: Micah Grubert Van Iderstine)

Animator Tibo Charroppin has a muse: his cat, Lizzy. Not only is Lizzy a good cat, she can step in for any movie star in any movie, or just improve a film with her presence. Lizzy has become a famous internet star known as OwlKitty.   

Aside from being “just really stinking cute,” Lizzy is a seamless star in these blockbusters thanks to Charroppin’s animation and video manipulation skills. With the help of a green screen and a knack for impeccable timing, Lizzy swats, pounces, and scratches her way into the center of everything. The videos are meant to make you laugh, which is why Charroppin began creating them in the first place. “We [he and Olivia, Lizzy’s mom] started this account,” he says, “wanting to make stupid videos for our friends and it really blew out of proportion.” But, there is a heartwarming, earnest point to all the fun. “We’re trying to show that shelter cats, adopted cats, foster cats,” Olivia explains, “that they all have this star power.”

Charroppin gives us a look behind the scenes of making these movies here. See a collection of the best OwlKitty movies, including Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, Rogue One, John Wick, The Matrix, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, at My Modern Met. Keep up with all the Owlkitty videos, pics, and magazine covers at Instagram.  -via Everlasting Blort

Mandarin Chinese : 脱了裤子放屁

English Translation: To do things the hard way.

Literal Translation: “Remove one’s trousers in order to fart”

— Ciaran Fitzpatrick (@CCFitzpatrick95) July 19, 2019

Twitter user @jazz_inmypants has only recently discovered the phrase "not my circus, not my monkey,” but in Polish. His Tweet about it drew people from all over to contribute idioms in various languages that you may want to adopt yourself. There are some 2,600 responses so far.  



There are more in the discussion at Metafilter. From jklaiho:

A couple of Finnish ones I didn’t see there:

”Ei ole kaikki Muumit laaksossa”
Approximately: to not be all there
Literally: to not have all of their Moomins in the valley

”Aina ei mene nallekarkit tasan”
Approx.: life’s not fair
Lit.: the gummi bears are not always divided evenly

And there's this one from Mefite alchemist that paints a picture:

“Der er ingen ko på isen"

Language: Danish

Literal: “there is no cow on the ice”

English Equivalent: “we have no problem/everything is OK”

Another favourite: "Cocodrilo que se durmió, es cartera"
Language: Spanish
English equivalent: It's a jungle out there
Literally: "The Crocodile that fell asleep is now a purse"

— Joe Shed (@redactednerd) July 21, 2019

You can browse all the responses at Twitter.  -via Metafilter

Large swaths of the US have been suffering under extreme heat the past few days. police in Braintree, Massachusetts went so far as to plead with the public on Facebook to keep a lid on things until cooler weather returns, because it's just too hot to fight crime. CNN had to confirm the story.

Yes, a police department really used the phrase "hot as soccer balls."

The department confirmed to CNN Saturday that the post is, indeed, legit.

Although we hate to say "cooler," as it might get people's hopes up, we can say less drastic temperatures are expected in the coming week. You have to wonder if the Braintree Police will end up busier than ever when that happens. -via Fark

Bootleggers are people who sell illegal alcohol, often meaning untaxed alcohol, although the term has widened to mean the selling of any illegal or unofficial goods. Simon Whistler explains the origin of the term, but there's a lot more here than just etymology. We also learn a lot of trivia about Prohibition.

Xafi and Auri are Russian blue cats with mesmerizing green eyes. Those eyes are ringed in yellow, and become more blue toward the center of the iris, so the overall look changes depending on how dilated their eyes are at the moment.    



Xafi and Auri are sisters, but not litter mates, and live in Reading, UK. Their relatively new housemate is a Somali cat named Errol.



Find out more about Xafi and Auri at their website, and keep up with their photographs at Instagram. -via Nag on the Lake  

David Warren was only eight years old when his missionary father died in a plane crash in 1934. His father's last gift had been a crystal radio set, which sparked David's interest in science and technology.

By his mid-twenties, David Warren had studied his way to a science degree from the University of Sydney, a diploma in education from Melbourne University and a PhD in chemistry from Imperial College, London.

His specialty was rocket science, and he went to work as a researcher for the Aeronautical Research Laboratories (ARL), a part of Australia's Defence Department that focused on planes.

In 1953, the department loaned him to an expert panel trying to solve a costly and distressing mystery: why did the British de Havilland Comet, the world's first commercial jet airliner and the great hope of the new Jet Age, keep crashing?

The problem was the lack of evidence. Warren thought about devising a way to record what happened in a plane during a flight, just in case something went wrong. His boss didn't want him to work on it. Pilots hated the idea. But Warren knew it was a useful idea. Read the story of how David Warren invented the "black box" flight recorder (which was never black) at BBC News.  -Thanks, WTM!
 
(Image credit: the Warren Family)

San Diego Comic Con is a traditional venue for big pop culture announcements, and Marvel is continuing its rollout of announcements at the convention. Yes, there will be a Thor 4, specifically titled Thor: Love And Thunder, in which the superhero god is played by ...Natalie Portman.

Notably, Chris Hemsworth will also star in Thor: Love And Thunder, so he’s still Thor (?), but Portman’s Foster will be The Mighty Thor. Well, in addition to this development providing fodder for so many fan theories to come over the next two years (this movie is currently scheduled for November 5, 2021) there’s the matters of confusion to address: (1) Portman’s height is 5’3″ according to Google, so the idea of her as Mighty Thor is, well, something that folks will have to digest; (2) Portman was, according to Hollywood Reporter, reportedly dissatisfied while working on Thor: The Dark World (in part due to Patty Jenkins’ departure) and told Vanity Fair in 2016 that she was done with the MCU.

Read more of the MCU Phase Four news at Uproxx. 

I honestly don't recall any scene even close to this, and I've seen lot of old movies. But still, he makes us laugh at the melodrama, a feature film's worth squeezed into a minute and a half. Joel Haver plays both parts. -via Digg

Human beings first walked on the moon 50 years ago, and the very last manned moon mission was only three years later. What's changed in that time? A lot of things here on earth, but what about on the moon?

Buzz Aldrin, seeing the moon from the surface for the first time, described it as “magnificent desolation.”

It was not so desolate when they departed. The Apollo 11 astronauts discarded gadgets, tools, and the clothesline contraption that moved boxes of lunar samples, one by one, from the surface into the module. They left behind commemorative objects—that resplendent American flag, mission patches and medals honoring fallen astronauts and cosmonauts, a coin-size silicon disk bearing goodwill messages from the world leaders of planet Earth. And they dumped things that weren’t really advertised to the public, for understandable reasons, such as defecation-collection devices. (Some scientists, curious to examine how gut microbes fare in low gravity, even proposed going back for these.)

But are those things still there? There have been photographs taken of the Apollo 11 landing site in the years since, from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. What those photos don't show us, scientists can extrapolate from other sources. Read about the historical Apollo 11 landing site at the Atlantic.

(Image credit: Ruby Aitken)

Thread: everyone knows that medieval art is filled with snails fighting knights, but there's actually a whole medieval snail ecology and society, from snail-birds to snail-monks. And, ofc, snail-cats.

WARNING: this thread gets very very silly.

Erik Wade presents us with a bestiary of sorts, a collection of medieval snail art that shows how medieval monks combined snails with people, cats, dogs, deer, unicorns, birds, chickens, rabbits, monkeys, pigs, and other creatures.



Maybe there's some symbolism here, but I believe that snails are just an easy doodle that you can turn into something else. If you make half the animal a snail, then you don't have to draw legs or whatever- just a spiral. See the entire post at Threadreader or the nested thread with responses at Twitter. -via Metafilter

To be fair, this script is only presented as artificial intelligence; it makes way too much sense for that to truly be the case. But it is a completely goofy oversimplification of the plot of The Lion King with an extreme overcomplication of the story's underlying meaning, coupled with the kind of misunderstandings that an alien from another planet might make.  -via Geeks Are Sexy

A stone tower sits on the Rhine River in Germany. First built by Romans in antiquity, it has been destroyed and rebuilt several times. They call it Mäuseturm, or the Mouse Tower. The story behind that name holds that there was a dire famine in the area in the year 970, during which many people starved to death. But the archbishop of Mainz, Hatto II, ignored their distress and continued to enrich himself at the people's expense.

Hatto II had his barn full, but he did not spare a single grain for the starving poor, instead tried to sell them at such inflated prices that most could not afford it. The peasants became angry and were planning to rebel, so Hatto II devised a cruel trick. He promised to feed the hungry people and told them to assemble at an empty barn and wait for him to come with food. The peasants were overjoyed and made their way to the barn to await his coming. Once the barn was full, Hatto II ordered the barn's doors shut and locked, and then set the barn on fire.

When Hatto II returned to his castle, he was immediately besieged by an army of mice. To escape the rodents, the bishop fled his castle and sought refuge in the tower that stands on an island on the Rhine, hoping that the mice could not swim. But the mice followed him, pouring into the river by the thousands, and while many drowned even more reached the island. The swarm ate through the tower’s doors and crawled up to the top floor, where they found Hatto II and ate him alive.

That's the legend, and there's no evidence that it's true. However, like most legends, there are pieces of history, language, and culture that came together over time to create the tale. Read what's behind the legend of the Mouse Tower at Amusing Planet. -via Strange Company

(Image credit: Marion Halft)

Japanese illustrator Kiyomaro (@sobomiyako98) presents a manga tale about her uncle. The elderly man slipped on some ice and his legs were paralyzed. But he wanted to visit his favorite place, Hawaii, again, and worked hard to regain enough mobility for the trip. When he got to Waikiki, he was approached by two surfer dudes. He was frightened at first, but the two guys asked the older man if he wanted to go for a swim. The encounter ended up changing the uncle's life. 

 

The original is in Japanese, but you can get the entire story in English at Sora News. Bring a hankie.  -via Metafilter