Hollywood doesn't make Westerns the way they used to. In fact, they don't make many Westerns at all in the 21st century. They are expensive, unfamiliar to younger audiences, and require a certain suspension of disbelief about history. Yet we have hundreds, if not thousands, of old Westerns we can select to watch in our leisure time. Which ones are worth the effort? You might want to check out a list of 25 movies at The Art of Manliness called The Best Western Movies Ever Made, with a description of each one. I bet you haven't seen them all! -Thanks, Tim!
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
An animal rescue group feeding stray cats in South Korea noticed one who was a little different. She eagerly took cat food that was packaged, but tended to leave loose food alone. When presented with a choice of wrapped or unwrapped food, she selected the wrapped food and took off. You can probably guess that she was sharing it.
There's a moment of real tension in this short story, but it has a happy ending. -via reddit
While spending their 91 days in Hanoi, Mike Powell and Jürgen Horn visited the Sunday market in Tam Sơn, Vietnam. They took a ton of pictures and some video, and told us a little about the experience. So I am going to do what I've been told not to.
Don’t quote us on this, but we figured there must have been well over a dozen ethnic minorities represented at the market, just based on the different outfits we saw. Members of a particular group seemed to stick together, whether sitting down for lunch or joining forces for haggling. Our guide, Chu Chu, pointed out the guys asking for rice wine samples. We saw them go from stand to stand, asking for a taste at each. Later in the day, we saw these same guys stumbling around, blissfully drunk.
When someone says, "Don’t quote us on this," it's less of a challenge and more of "I'm not exactly sure." But you can judge for yourself as you take part in the Sunday market at Tam Sơn by visiting Hanoi For 91 Days.
The rich are different from you and I. They know a hint of turquoise, no matter how subtle, adds a immeasurable value to an object, even an object that the rest of us just toss out with the garbage. In case you happen to have more money than sense, you can now buy a tin can from Tiffany's. For a thousand dollars. The description of this can goes:
The Everyday Objects collection transforms utilitarian items into handcrafted works of art. A classic tin can is upgraded in sterling silver and shining vermeil.
Sterling silver and vermeil with Tiffany Blue® enamel accent
4.5" high
Instantly recognizable, the signature Tiffany Blue® hue of this design’s enamel accent has been as iconic as the brand itself since its founding in 1837
if you're not planning on getting me this tin can from tiffany's for christmas, please don't get me anything at all. pic.twitter.com/NIPBQvjQcT
— Gabrielle (@gbabyslims) November 3, 2017
However, if you already have a tin can, the other items in their Everyday Objects collection include a $9,000 ball of yarn, a $175 golf tee, and a $350 crazy straw, among other items. -via Uproxx
This scene grabs you right here, and then it yanks you quickly in another direction. Yeah, it would be traumatic to encounter someone who honestly doesn't believe in death -so traumatic that you might not even know it's all BS for a minute. This comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal was written by Zach Weinersmith and illustrated by Abby Howard of Junior Scientist Power Hour.
The title of this video wouldn't make sense if it were about any other subject. But the question really is: who first wrote about time travel? The idea could have existed before it was written about, but we would never know. This video looks at what we know about the evolution of time travel as an concept from the writings we have.
Evan Puschak from The Nerdwriter explains that science fiction isn't that old. Literary time travel existed beforehand, even before the technology we associate with time travel, but it was different from what we are used to now. -via Laughing Squid
Crows are pretty smart. They even understand the concept of trade, so we may as well harness their intelligence to improve our world. A Dutch company called Crowded Cities aims to train crows to pick up cigarette butts along roadways. They would be able to drop the butts into a vending machine and receive food in return. In other words, they'll work for peanuts. But some ornithologists are skeptical of the plan.
John Marzluff, a wildlife science professor at the University of Washington who has conducted important research on corvids, pointed out that if you want to convince crows to work for you, you might have to offer them something better than peanuts.
“The challenge is making sure the food rewards are ... always there and they’re very high quality,” Marzluff said. Crows “can find lots of other things in their environment. And they routinely shift between things.”
There is, after all, a reason that crows live among humans: Our cities are full of things that they like to eat, from fallen Cheetos outside the corner store to discarded leftovers in the trash. Any Skinnerian training system would have to regularly offer them a reward that is better and more readily available than the options they can easily locate on their own. As Marzluff puts it, “The reward of a peanut is not very high. If they can go to a dumpster and get a pork chop bone with some fat or meat on it, they’re going to take the pork chop over the peanuts.” McGowan takes a similar approach: “It’s just not worth it to go around looking for cigarette butts to find a peanut.”
So maybe crows are too smart to be roped into doing our dirty work. Read more about the research that went into the idea at Slate. -via The Daily Dot
(Image credit: Ian Kirk)
Back in 1977, Smokey and the Bandit harnessed trucker culture to become a huge hit. It was the second biggest film of that year -try to guess what movie was #1. The comedy was full of stars, led by Burt Reynolds and Sally Field. It wasn't Oscar material, but it was funny. Let's have some trivia about Smokey and the Bandit.
9. Burt Reynolds was promised a Trans-Am if the film was a hit.
Obviously the film was a hit, but Reynolds didn’t get his car. He didn’t want to rock the boat but when he went to check on the car he found out that the executive that promised him the car had retired, and the new senior executive wouldn’t honor the promise.
8. Coors actually wasn’t allowed east of Mississippi at the time this film was made.
Coors wasn’t allowed in certain states due to the fact that it wasn’t pasteurized and needed to be kept cold at all times. That’s what spawned the idea for the movie.
That last fact explains how I was able to get rides to college and back home for holidays, since we were crossing the Mississippi anyway. Find out more about Smokey and the Bandit at TVOM.
Andrew Wilcox knows he's not going to get a lot of work done on rainy days, but when you're in charge, you've got to go do as much as you can, because it's Seattle, and there's going to be rain. Considering that, a little song and dance isn't a half bad way to make the day go by.
As a framer in Seattle Washington, rain is one of our largest misfortunes. All our tools get wet, sawdust sticks to everything. Water shorts our electric cords. Everything is slippery. Mud tracks into your vehicles. But it can also be enjoyable. Singing in the rain, dancing in the rain. It isn't so bad.
That's the way to look on the bright side! -via Tastefully Offensive
How many times do you find yourself watching something awful on TV? You don't stop watching when you realize it's not a quality program. See, it doesn't have to be a work of art for us to enjoy watching. It could be an indulgence in hate-watching, or pure escapism, or just an excuse to zone out and be still up close to someone you love. This comic is another everyday piece of insight from Lunarbaboon.
A party boat pulls over to unload people in Utrecht, Netherlands. Taken from the full video here, this gif focuses on the important ten seconds or so. You may have to watch it a few times to catch all the details.
The guy who steps off the boat should have waited until someone secured the craft to the shore. The force he exerts causes the boat to move back, dooming both women.
The woman in white gets helped out of the water, but then falls back in all by herself. Alcohol might have been involved.
Two beers make it to the dock, the woman's beer falling over immediately. The guy puts his down to help them, but it falls over, too.
When the guy pulls on the woman in purple, he injures her shoulder. She has trouble convincing him that she's hurt.
So it was a disaster all around. Did I miss anything? -via reddit
What in the world do lava lamps have to do with internet security? It about random numbers, because unpredictable sequences of numbers is crucial for proper encrypting. Machines aren't good at generating random numbers, because we design our technology to be as predictable as possible, lest we trigger a robot uprising. However, flowing liquid is about as random as you get. An entire wall of lava lamps moving colored liquid around is is unpredictable enough to generate random numbers.
Learn how it's done with Tom Scott, who is still in California finding us interesting things to learn about. This report is from Cloudflare in San Francisco.
The following is an article from The Annals of Improbable Research, now in all-pdf form. Get a subscription now for only $25 a year!
Selected studies that are colorful in some sense.
Compiled by Dirk Manley, Improbable Research staff
Choose Red, Then Fail
“Color and Psychological Functioning: The Effect of Red on Performance Attainment,” Andrew J. Elliot, Markus A. Maier, Arlen C. Moller, Ron Friedman and Jorg Meinhardt, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 136, no. 1, 2007, pp. 154–68. The authors, who are variously at the University of Rochester and the University of Munich, report:
This research focuses on the relation between color and psychological functioning, specifically, that between red and performance attainment. Red is hypothesized to impair performance on achievement tasks, because red is associated with the danger of failure in achievement contexts and evokes avoidance motivation. Four experiments demonstrate that the brief perception of red prior to an important test (e.g., an IQ test) impairs performance, and this effect appears to take place outside of participants’ conscious awareness. Two further experiments establish the link between red and avoidance motivation as indicated by behavioral (i.e., task choice) and psychophysiological (i.e., cortical activation) measures. The findings suggest that care must be taken in how red is used in achievement contexts and illustrate how color can act as a subtle environmental cue that has important influences on behavior.
The 22-Minute Rust-Coloured Blouse
“Effect of Colour Coordination of Attire with Poster Presentation on Poster Popularity,” David A. Keegan and Susan L. Bannister, Canadian Medical Association Journal, vol. 169, no. 12, December 9, 2003, pp. 1291–2. The authors devised an unusual experimental protocol. Here is a partial description:
We spent October admiring the changing colors, and now that it's November, it's time to clean up the mess those lovely trees leave behind. It's a given that jumping into a great pile of leaves is the reward for all that raking, but if you can make it even better with a fantasy about succumbing to the wrath of the demon Arboth, have at it. This is the latest comic from Alex Culang and Raynato Castro at Buttersafe.
A basset hound named Lady has proven to be quite a sheepdog, to the surprise of her owner. It's not that Lady puts her best efforts to the task -she doesn't even realize her talents. The sheep just like her, and will follow her anywhere.
Michael Jobson, 29, adopted three-year-old Lady three years ago before discovering by accident that the sheep at his Gamlingay, Cambs, farm have an inexplicable urge to follow her. Hilarious footage shows the oblivious dog wandering around in a field on multiple occasions, as dozens of sheep traipse after her, hanging on her every movement. Lady has proved to have such an innate but unusual rapport with the sheep that Michael and his partner Fiona Morton, 37, are planning to use her talents to assist their full-time sheepdog Tom.
-via Tastefully Offensive
Email This Post to a Friend