Remember Bryan Wilson, the Texas Law Hawk? He's back with an over-the-top ad featuring fireworks safety tips. Now, considering who this is, you expect to see anything but safety.
And Wilson delivers. I hope they didn't have to do too many takes for this, or he'd have to approve the final cut from a hospital bed. -via Tastefully Offensive
Sure, you'd like to watch a dozen police cars spend an hour chasing a truck through two states, but who has an hour? How about a sped-up version with "Yakety Sax" in the background? Thats' the way to watch it! The Louisville Metro Police Department chased the suspect out of town, and then through two counties in Indiana. From a news report at WLKY,
"It could have been a lot worse, there could have been wrecks. What I seen there was five cop cars tore up and down that had bumpers ripped off and everything else," said Mark Renn, who owns the property where the chase ended.
The chase ends with some violence on the part of the police. The improved video of the chase is at Deadspin. -via Fark
This child's ball is printed with letters of the alphabet and pictures of things that start with the letter. English Language & Usage Stack Exchange member gmauch asked what word could the image with the Y represent. It looks like an axe. Dozens of people are speculating on the answer, which leads down a rabbit hole of toy manufacturers, foreign languages, and counterfeiters. The Swedish word for axe is yxa, but connecting the ball to Sweden leads to a dead end. There are archaic terms that might work, but that makes no sense -but then, neither does using a submarine for the letter U, as in U-boat. One contributor wrote a "Who's on First"-style sequence about a Chinese knockoff company trying to design the ball. Maybe you can contribute, too. See the whole discussion here. Be aware that it is still growing.
-via Metafilter, where one commenter summed it up as "This is what the internet is for."
The number of animals who use tools keeps expanding. Another thing we once thought was for humans only is music. Sure, birds sing songs, but now we know they can play the drums, too. The male palm cockatoo (Probosciger aterrimus) carefully selects a "drumstick" (a stick or seedpod or some other object), and beats out a rhythm to impress females during mating season. Australian researchers spent seven years collecting data and ended up with recordings of 131 drum sessions.
"Each of 18 male palm cockatoos, known for their shyness and elusiveness, was shown to have its own style or drumming signature," lead author Rob Heinsohn of Australian National University said in a statement.
"Some males were consistently fast, some were slow, while others loved a little flourish at the beginning."
Heinsohn said the unique rhythms could act like a signature or a call sign, identifying each bird as its beats ring through the forest.
Read more about the research at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Christina Zdenek)
A handshake is a simple gesture 99% of the time, but in movies where every second counts, they can be used for many purposes: to come to an understanding, establish dominance, plead for help, get a laugh, or show off some cool moves. A skilled actor can take that simple gesture and give it a world of meaning. If you didn't catch that meaning the first time around, TVOM has selected five scenes (with videos) that tell an entire story in a handshake.
See, the earth is a round disc, supported on the back of a four elephants, who are standing on a giant turtle. These guys got too close to the edge, and this may be the last photo we ever see of them.
Twin_Keel took this picture and blamed the result on a camera malfunction. The digital camera apparently changed orientation from landscape to portrait in the middle of scanning the image. Standing on a pier can totally disorient a person, so it may be the same for a camera. The result gives us an M.C. Escher or Inception vibe. This is a slightly altered version of the picture, repaired by VallleyNL. You can see the original at reddit.
In the Bible, siblings Mary, Martha, and Lazarus were good friends of Jesus. A legend in the region of Provence tells that they were exiled from the Holy Land along with many other early Christians, and Martha wound up in the south of France. Her potential new converts in the town of Nerluc asked for a miracle. Maybe Martha could save them from the Tarasque?
At that time, on the banks of the Rhone River, between Avignon and Arles, there was a fearsome monster terrorizing the region. It was called a Tarasque, and it was a horrendous creature. It had the face of a lion and razor-sharp teeth. Its body was similar to a dragon, and it had six legs ending in claws so sharp that one swipe could slice a boat in half. On its back was an armored shell, like that of a turtle, with spikes running along it, and to finish off, it had a tail that it used like a whip.
This monster killed every living creature that crossed its path: man or beast, on land or in the river. It could shoot fire from his eyes and its mouth, even its breath would burn whatever it touched. Legions of soldiers were sent out to fight it, but because of its impenetrable shell, their spears and weapons were useless.
Martha indeed conquered the Tarasque, but not by killing it. The result was that the villagers converted to Christianity, Martha eventually became a saint, and the town of Nerluc changed its name to Tarascon in honor of the beast. The Festival of the Tarasque was established in 1469, and now it is held every summer, with parades featuring a mockup of the terrifying creature. You can read the full story of Saint Martha and the Tarasque at The Curious Rambler. -Thanks, Newton!
Some men who do mundane things for fun came together and formed the Dull Men's Club. Great Big Story thought they were interesting enough to make a video about. That in itself negates the very idea of the club.
However, when dull people get together, they can turn out to be pretty extraordinary. They represent such a variety of odd hobbies that you might discover one you're interested in. Beyond that, these men (and a few women) embody the idea that taking pride and joy in simple things pays off in the long run. -via Laughing Squid
The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Weird, Weird World: EPIC.
Here’s a recipe for an Internet phenomenon: Begin with a major disaster, create an improbable image that cuts to the core of the disaster, and then distribute the image to a stunned and gullible public.
INBOX HORROR
Were you one of the millions of people who was e-mailed an eerie photograph in the weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? A young man wearing a black ski coat and knit cap is standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Center with Manhattan in the background. Behind him, a jet airliner is flying straight for the building, just seconds away from crashing into the floors below. The date stamp on the bottom right corner: “9-11-01.”
By telling two conflicting stories—the blissfully ignorant tourist, and the hijacked plane that was about to take his life—the image perfectly captured the sense of security and complacency that Americans felt before the terrorists shattered it and “changed everything.” The caption on the photo drove home the point even more:
Chief meteorologist Ted Pretty of Fox5 in Las Vegas was sent out to do a human interest story on fireworks for the Fourth of July. They did it live from a fireworks stand. It did not go as planned... or did it? Select text ahead to see spoiler: the kid is his son. (via reddit)
Either you relate to this comic from Zach at Extra Fabulous Comics, or you're the kind of person who never reads the instructions anyway, and thus deserve whatever results from your cooking. I can relate. Oh, not to Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, which this is obviously referring to, but for any cake or other dessert mix, I fish the box out of the trash a few times. It's just automatic to throw empty boxes in the trash, while forgetting that's where the instructions are. Cans, too, since the recipe for pumpkin pie is on the can of pumpkin. There are bonus panels to this story if you scroll down at Extra Fabulous Comics.
Be careful what kind of antiques you get hooked on collecting. Jeffrey Conner got his first bicycle headbadge in college, and then became obsessed with collecting them. They are neat little objects, artful, often brightly-colored, curved metal badges that were put on bikes to indicate the maker, but Conner found out that many of them are extremely difficult to research. Still, he's managed to amass of collection over a thousand, which he's documented in his book A Cycling Lexicon. He tells us about his efforts to know the history of each headbadge.
As a lifelong cyclist, Conner is also curious about the bicycle manufacturers behind these badges, though he’s found it is usually impossible to determine what happened to them. “Part of the problem is if I just have a brand name, sometimes they were used by multiple manufacturers—so there might have been somebody in upstate New York and someone in Cleveland naming their bikes the same thing,” Conner says. “College names like Harvard, Yale, or Princeton were very popular for badges, as were names referencing strength, so it’s hard to trace them. I don’t even know what country some of them are from.”
Even headbadges with detailed information can lead to dead ends, which sometimes have their own mysterious appeal. “I live near Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I have a badge from Kalamazoo that has an address on it,” Conner explains. “So I went to the address and there’s nothing there now—it’s an empty lot. But the city’s new bike path goes right by it.”
You'll learn something about the history of bicycle manufacturing as well as headbadge collecting at Collectors Weekly.
The Vienna Chamber Orchestra was performing Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony No. 4 in Izmir, Turkey, when a wandering music fan decided to join them onstage at the amphitheater.
He's a good boy, and so deserves first chair in the violin section, although he'd rather listen than play. He knows his limitations. The conductor was amused. You can imagine what the musicians who couldn't see what was happening thought when the audience started laughing and applauding at an inappropriate time in the music. -via reddit
Bill Schindler is an anthropology professor at Washington College in Maryland. In his class Experimental Archaeology and Primitive Technology, students learn the way things were done when you didn't have someone else specializing in doing it for others. Things like butchering animals, making their own clothing and dishes, and cooking -using tools they make themselves.
The skills prehistoric peoples depended on seem exotic to today’s college students, who Schindler says arrive on campus each year with less and less of the sort of practical experience that he emphasizes in his class. He tells of the time he asked some students to crack eggs and separate the yolks from the whites. He returned to the kitchen 10 minutes later to find that not a single egg had been cracked. “I asked them if the problem was that nobody had ever told them how to separate the yolk from the whites, and received blank stares in return,” he recalled. “After a minute of silence, one of them said, ‘I’ve never cracked an egg.’ I was floored—how do you even make it to 19 without cracking an egg?”
Schindler wants us to know that "primitive" people were not less intelligent than we are, they were just focused on different things. In fact, they may have even been smarter. After all, they did not have weapons that could destroy millions, nor did they have factories that polluted the planet. And Schindler lives his life using the ancient skills he teaches in class. Read about Schindler and his views on ancient societies at the Atlantic. -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: John Cuneo)
Christopher Stracuzza went to a seafood market in Connecticut and bought a bunch of lobsters, including a 20-pound monster he named "Dinnah," as in "what's for Dinnah?" He put the 40 pounds of lobsters in a cooler, with Dinnah on the bottom, and checked it as baggage for his flight home to Savannah, Georgia, where he planned a cookout. The cooler was labeled "live lobsters," but TSA agents had to have a look to make sure. And then they had to take a picture of Dinnah. And then share it on social media.
.@TSA officers are skilled at screening all sorts of items in checked baggage...including this 20+ pound lobster at @BostonLogan pic.twitter.com/euhyyO6F7V
— Michael McCarthy (@TSAmedia_MikeM) June 26, 2017
By the time Mr. Stracuzza got home on Sunday afternoon, Dinnah was a celebrity and Mr. Stracuzza was just confused why his cooler was wrapped in tape labeled T.S.A. His confusion became anger when he discovered Dinnah had been removed and placed back on top of the other lobsters.
Later, a friend notified him that his lobster had gone viral on the internet. And Lisa Feinman, the owner of the seafood store, was livid, too.
I packed this checked cooler with care and concern for the lobsters and my customers personal property. In addition to this lobster, my customer also purchased several other lobsters all of which were
purposefully packed on top of this guy. This agent,(after seeing the contents on an x ray machine, no doubt) had to dump out 12 other
lobsters to get to this guy. Seriously, nothing better to do? And who would be to blame when these lobsters show up with a
claw broken off because the TSA agent doesn't know how to properly handle a lobster? Do your job and leave our personal
property alone.
Stracuzza cooked $700 worth of seafood for his party, and had plenty of leftovers. Read the entire story at The New York Times. -via Gizmodo
(Image credit: Christopher Stracuzza)
