Fish aren't known for showing affection. Most fish do not want to be touched by humans at all. But Bon Shaw has a Blood Parrot Cichlid that craves human interaction. That fish really loves being petted!
This little guy just loves to watch me wherever I am in the room, he'll do anything to get my attention. And when I look at him he flares out his gills and dances from side to side just hoping that I'll come over to play. If I drop food in the aquarium he'll ignore it and hope to play. I have to walk away to get him to go find the food which has floated away by then. That said, in another tank I have a second Blood Parrot Cichlid that loves me but doesn't want to be touched. It's like having one dog and one cat. You just have to love the differences.
Bob Dylan is a legend of legends in the music world. He is rock music's greatest poet. He's sold millions of records and albums and his live concerts have been unforgettable events since the sixties. In 2008, Bob was awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation. Now, as if his career hadn't been incredible enough already, he won the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. Okay, let's take a look at a few other interesting facts about Mr. Bob Dylan.
1. Robert Allen Zimmerman briefly used the alias "Elston Gunn" before he adopted the first name of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas to become "Bob Dylan."
2. Dylan was so grief-stricken over the death of Elvis Presley that he didn't speak to anyone for a week.
3. He turned 76 in May, he has 11 grandchildren, and he drives a van with the bumper sticker: "World's Greatest Grandpa."
Josephsen Hardwood Floor Company has a Facebook page on which they post the Employee of the Week every week. The "employee" is always a supervisor. They are the pets of the homes where they install floors. Above, you see Sophie, who made the list in April.
My dad takes pictures of the dogs at the houses he works on and posts them on his business' Facebook page as employee of the week pic.twitter.com/BrkYKdr1lT
The U.S.National Park system is a treasure that everyone should take advantage of, while you have the chance. A summertime road trip to a park you've never been to before can give you a lifetime of memories. Learn something new about national parks from John Green in the latest episode of the Mental Floss List Show, and maybe you'll become interested in visiting a park you've never heard of before.
Mrs. Lunarbaboon is a wise woman. When someone you love doesn't feel good about themselves, the best thing you can do is give them a reason to feel good about themselves. Even if that means manufacturing a way to do it. If that ends up giving you what you wanted in the first place, hey, bonus! Now you can both feel good about being good to each other. This is the latest comic from Lunarbaboon.
What's the difference between prison escapes in the movies and in real life? In the movies, we usually root for the escapee. If the prisoner isn't the main character, the film wouldn't spend time following their prison break attempt, successful or not. In real life, we may admire the escape plot, but we really don't want those guys on the loose.
But in movies the prison breaks are usually made by those that are simply smarter than the people guarding them or are somehow innocent of the charges and were locked away out of convenience rather than to serve justice. The point is that in movies, jail breaks are just awesome to watch and almost too ingenious to believe.
Screen Junkies gives us an Honest Trailer that has the advantage of hindsight, 26 years later. Point Break will never be recreated, but parts of it survive in other films. And it makes you wonder whether Keanu Reeves has an aging portrait up in his attic.
A winner has been crowned in the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (the "Lyttoniad"), held by the the English Department of San Jose State University. The contest seeks to find the very worst possiible opening sentence for a novel, although the novel itself doesn't exist. The winning sentence was submitted by Kat Russo of Loveland, Colorado.
The elven city of Losstii faced towering sea cliffs and abutted rolling hills that in the summer were covered with blankets of flowers and in the winter were covered with blankets, because the elves wanted to keep the flowers warm and didn’t know much at all about gardening.
The contest, running 35 years now, was named in honor of Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who in 1830 began a novel with the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night" which has been parodied endlessly ever since. Read about the contest, and see the entries from runners-up, honorable mentions, and winners in such categories as children's literature, crime/detective, historical fiction, and more. -via Metafilter
The concept of Great American Road Trip flourished during the mid-20th century, when prosperity allowed for vacations, highways crisscrossed the US, and the interstate had yet to bypass towns. The hospitality industry ballooned in small towns, and local Mom and Pop restaurants were everywhere. Each put their best food forward in their own way, while offering non-specialized menus full of familiar recipes everyone knew.
Once upon a time, American roads were dotted with individually owned diners offering a wonderful diversity of eating choices – nearly always proclaiming the food is “baked on premises”. Then two things happened which spelled the end: (1) the arrival of super cheap, super quick fast food franchises and (2) the arrival of interstate highways. The diners lined up along roads actually within the towns and provinces; whereas, the new breed of fast food conglomerated around interstate exits – often not tied to the towns at all.
Although, the friendly roadside diner is largely a thing of the past, we still have the pictures and postcards of their heyday. Here is a look at the tip of the iceberg, just a small sampling (13) of the many great roadside diners of yesteryear. (Note: I didn’t choose the most crazy and outlandish, but rather a sampling of the average, to get you in the zone of what they were really like, not just their extreme examples.) Enjoy.
Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from history buff and Neatoramanaut WTM, who wishes to remain otherwise anonymous.
By September of 1900, the city of Galveston, Texas, was the center of maritime shipping on the Texas Gulf Coast and held a virtual monopoly on commerce of all kinds. One of its main streets, the Strand (Avenue B), was known as the Wall Street of the Southwest. Many millionaires lived in Galveston, having made their fortunes there. Life was good for practically everyone, wealthy or no, but that was about to change.
Pre-1900 Storm, Downtown Galveston, looking East (Image source: Rosenberg Library, Galveston, Texas, Pre-1900 Storm Collection, Accession Number G-25.4, FF 1-8)
The morning of Saturday, September 8, 1900, was little different from any other late summer day in Galveston; it was hot and it was humid. The one significant difference was that the surf was unusually rough. Only a couple of men in the city of 36,000 realized from experience that the large breakers weren’t just waves, they were deep-ocean swells – the harbinger of an approaching hurricane.
One of these men was Dr. Isaac Cline, the Local Forecast Official (LFO) and head of what was then known as the Weather Bureau in Galveston. Though a competent and experienced meteorologist, Cline was convinced that he ‘knew’ natural science better than anyone, and this mindset was soon to have the severest of consequences for Galveston and its residents.
A Time of Hubris
The United States was, in 1900, a young giant of a nation flexing its muscles. It had just won the Spanish-American War and was suppressing the Boxer Rebellion in China. Its technologies and infrastructure were growing at an exponential rate. Since 1876, eight states had been added to the Union, and so rapid and so pronounced were increases in its industrial and military might that many Canadian politicians admitted they “lived in fear and trembling” of the US. Basking in the glory of its having become a world superpower, the federal government felt that even nature itself posed no great obstacle.
As such, Isaac Cline, who relished being a very big frog in a small pond, had in 1891 delivered a public lecture in Galveston, wherein he stated, "It would be impossible for any cyclone to create a storm wave which could materially injure the city." Since Cline worked for the federal government and was also a medical doctor, the people of Galveston accepted his opinions as fact.
Got $39 million? You could be the new owners of Darby Island in the Bahamas. It comes with 554 acres, 14 beaches, an air strip, and a fairly odd backstory. Oh yeah, and a castle.
Before and during WWII, Darby Island was owned by a rumoured Nazi sympathiser and British hotelier, Sir Guy Baxter. King George of England gifted the island to Baxter upon his knighthood and it served as a lucrative plantation for him with livestock, cotton, palm oil, and more.
In 1938, he built an 8,000 square foot “castle” on the highest point of the island. According to some elderly locals, they remember seeing strange flashing lights during the war coming from the rooftop of the castle. Allegedly, it was discovered that Baxter was guiding German submarines prowling the Atlantic Oceans, allowing them to take refuge in Darby Island’s “exotic network of caves.”
There are other rumors, such as ports for submarines and a radio transmitting station, but the historical record is strangely short on any information about Sir Guy Baxter. The castle and the island are real, though, and on the market. See plenty of pictures at Messy Messy Chic.
Ida Wood was thought to be a millionaire socialite from New Orleans who married well after she came to New York as a teenager. She married well, alright, but most of her story was untrue. After her husband died and a business venture failed, she moved into a hotel suite in Herald Square with her two sisters and lived there without going out in public for the next 24 years. Then in 1931, she had to get help for her ailing sister, and her reclusive lifestyle was uncovered.
In the days after first reaching out for help, a parade of lawyers, undertakers, purported relatives and hotel staff filtered through suites 551-552. They discovered that the millionairess, once touted in the papers for her fragile beauty, was now stooped and withered, and sported a wild bramble of gray matted hair. She had been living there with her sisters Mary and Emma in near isolation for more than two decades. The rooms were almost entirely filled with refuse; the doctor who came to examine Mary could barely find a place to stand amid piles of old magazines, boxes, suitcases, strange collections of newspaper clippings and bits of cloth.
The sisters didn’t just hoard objects — hidden among the junk was Ida’s entire fortune. Roughly 1 million dollars in cash and jewelry were found in cardboard boxes, trunks and Cracker Jack boxes, and $500,000 was found in an oilskin bag that Ida hid under her skirt.
Ida Wood died the next year, and it came out that her life was even stranger than that of a hoarding recluse. Wood's story is told at Ozy.
The 1994 film Léon: The Professional, written and directed by French filmmaker Luc Besson, is about a paid assassin who takes in a 12-year-old orphan. The actress playing the orphan Mathilda was 11-year-old Natalie Portman in her first feature film. What happened after the film is interesting, too.
Stand-up comedian Emmett Montgomery talks about his angry, obese cat Walter, who he described as "a stinky, beautiful monster" and "a bloated pillow with emotional problems." Walter was such an awful cat that his previous owner tricked Montgomery into adopting him. He tells us the story of the worst cat you can imagine. It begins with some NSFW language.
Walter helped Montgomery's career by providing a subject to hang jokes on, and gave him stress relief by sleeping on his beard. It's funny how the worst cat can worm its way into your heart. -via Tastefully Offensive
We know exactly what someone means when they say "bubblegum flavor," because we've tried bubblegum. But if you were to describe that flavor in terms of flavors found in nature, you might be stumped. What flavors go into bubblegum to make it taste that way? The best I could decipher from an article at Spoon University is that it's like "tutti-fruiti."
Bubble gum flavor is one of the secrets of the gum industry, with a cocktail of artificial fruity flavors at the center of it. Homemade versions tend to utilize the more easily available strawberry flavor, but true bubble gum flavor is more complex, composed of multiple notes.
