When the communist government of Bulgaria collapsed in 1990, businesses sprouted everywhere. In cities, there wasn't enough room for all of them, so the "klek-shop" was born. These stores display their wares on city streets, but if you want to buy something, you must squat down, as the actual stores are in the basements of the buildings! The goods are sold through low windows. DeviantART member sograph photographed the klek-shops of Sofia, the Bulgarian capital city. See the entire gallery here. -via Everlasting Blort
Check out this 1947 map called Map of the United States as Californians See It. The proportions are a little bit off. The state boasts the world's finest harbor in four locations, movie stars everywhere, and claims a few landmarks that aren't actually in California. The rest of the country is pretty bleak: people are cold, even in Florida, and death awaits them. No wonder everyone is headed to the West Coast! If you like this, you're going to love the book that it's from.
Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps, a new book by geographer Stephen Hornsby, collects 158 of these charming visuals, largely drawing on the Library of Congress’s extensive collection. “Because contemporary curators and librarians generally did not consider pictorial maps ‘geographic’ or ‘scientific,’ most libraries did not collect them and they are quite rare today,” as Ralph Ehrenberg, who heads the Library of Congress’s Geography and Map Division, writes in the book’s introduction. Though the first real pictorial map depicted the London Underground, artists and cartographers across the pond embraced the style wholeheartedly, forming what Ehrenberg calls “a uniquely American art form.”
Norwegian musician Leo Moracchioli (previously at Neatorama) performs a metal version of Abba's 1976 disco song "Dancing Queen." He plays all the instruments and sings, while the Easter bunny dances with his young daughter. Is that weird enough for you?
The geysers and hot springs of Yellowstone National Park are a wonder of the natural world. They serve as vents for the geothermal energy below ground. And they are a delicate treasure that people have tried to ruin at every turn by throwing things into. This can alter the environment, sometimes permanently. And it started even before Yellowstone was a national park.
Yes, one of the most famous tales from that era is that an early expedition party used Old Faithful as a washing machine. According to an account shared by Frank D. Carpenter in his record of a trip to Yellowstone in 1877, The Wonders of Geyser Land, he and his traveling companions came upon Old Faithful and decided to experiment with “boiling” their clothes clean. The group put their soiled clothes in a pillowcase and threw it into the geyser’s cone. When it erupted, the clothes were sent flying over a hundred feet into the air. When they collected them, the churning, heated water had indeed cleaned them.
Emboldened by the results of their laundry experiment, they then clogged the geyser with “at least a thousand pounds of stones, trees, and stumps.” The geyser expelled all the rubbish and debris they’d choked the feature with, and they seemed pretty happy. As Carpenter says, “[Old Faithful] furnishes entertainment of unusual magnitude and duration.”
Even today, although it's illegal, people throw stuff into the geysers and springs. Sometimes specialists try to clean them out, but the process of doing so can cause damage to the delicate natural treasures. Read about the custom of throwing things into the geysers of Yellowstone at Atlas Obscura.
Sometimes actors go off-script while filming a movie, either intentionally or accidentally. It could be a last-minute idea, a joke, a way to cover up flubbing your lines, or just plain clumsiness. What's rare are those times that these moments are so good they ended up in the film.
This year, The Washington Post discontinued its annual Peeps diorama contest, citing low participation, so the alternative weekly paper Washington City News stepped in and held a contest. They've announced a winner, and it's "The Peeple v. O.J. Simpson," by Larisa Baste. She said she worked on it 66+ hours, not counting the time she spent watching the O.J. docudrama series and documentaries to get the details right.
The movie is still eight months away, but we're all excited to see the next episode in the Star Wars saga. The trailer for The Last Jedi premiere today at Star Wars Celebration in Orlando. And now we can all see it.
Cali the cockatoo and Jackson the Maine Coon cat act out a scenario that may be familiar to you. Cali desperately wants some attention, and Jackson wants none of her shenanigans.
Think a machine can't do your job? Don't say that out loud, or someone will immediately invent one that can. Think that there's other things in life besides a job? Don't say that out loud, either, because the machines will replace that, too. But look ahead: the ones who own the machines can only soak up so much of the profit until there's no one left able to buy anything. This depressing story is brought to you by Alex Culang and Raynato Castro at Buttersafe.
Two guys who don't like each other at all show up at the same party, and they have to adhere to social norms of speaking and feigning a thin veneer of etiquette. That geniality only lasts a nanosecond as they launch into a game of one-upmanship over who can be more passive-egressive. Contains some NSFW language.
You probably know someone in real life who is like this, but I hope if you know two of them, that they don't show up together. Still, in real life this would be longer and more drawn-out, because most people aren't this adept at public vitriol. -via Metafilter
Every one of us, even the most famous and glamorous celebrities, was once a little child. When these folks grew up to portray comic book superheroes on the silver screen, we got to know their looks well. In this gallery of childhood pictures of movie superheroes, some look pretty dorky, all look adorable, and you can see a glimpse of what they would one day grow up to be.
This weird old postcard from Germany is undated, but seems to be about a hundred years old. Weird Vintage has some information about the joke.
Apparently this is some fancy wordplay which makes a whole lot more sense when you’re in on the joke. User laurentbelkacem explained “About La Fanfare d'Écublens postcard - Écublens is a little town in Canton Vaud, Switzerland. The name of this town is pronounced in a way that in French sounds exactly, in this sentence, like “La Fanfare des culs blancs”, literaly “White butts brass band”.
What do you do when you crave a cheeseburger, but your parents are asleep? An eight-year-old boy in East Palestine, Ohio, figured it out. He looked up how to drive on YouTube, watched a video about it, and then drove his parents' van to McDonald's! Oh yeah, he also took his four-year-old sister with him.
Witnesses told police that he expertly drove to the fast food joint, following traffic laws and staying under the speed limit.
“He didn’t hit a single thing on the way there. It was unreal,” Koehler said.
McDonald’s workers said they thought they were being pranked when he drove up to order a cheeseburger with money from his piggy bank.
“The workers thought that the parents were in the back, but obviously they weren’t,” Koehler said.
Police said the 8-year-old burst into tears when he learned that he did something wrong. He told officers that it was his first time behind the wheel.
The children got cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets, and fries before they were taken to the police station, where their parents picked them up. No charges were filed in the incident. -via Boing Boing
A woman is found dead...a well-known celebrity is charged with murder...the whole world follows the trial. O. J. Simpson? Nope—Fatty Arbuckle. In the early 1920s, the Arbuckle trial was as big as the Simpson trial. Here’s the story.
A KNOCK AT THE DOOR
On the morning of Saturday, September 10, 1921, two men from the San Francisco sheriff’s office paid a visit to Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, then Hollywood’s most famous comedian, at his home in Los Angeles. One of the men read from an official court summons: “You are hereby summoned to return immediately to San Francisco for questioning...you are charged with murder in the first degree.” Arbuckle, thinking the men were pulling a practical joke, let out a laugh. “And who do you suppose I killed?”
“Virginia Rappé.”
Arbuckle instantly knew that this was no joke. He’d just returned from a trip to San Francisco, where he’d thrown a party over the Labor Day weekend to celebrate his new $3 million movie contract—then the largest in Hollywood history—with Paramount Pictures. A 26-year-old bit actress named Virginia Rappé had fallen ill at the party, presumably from drinking too much bootleg booze. Arbuckle had seen to it that the woman received medical attention before he returned to L.A., but now Rappé was dead—and Arbuckle had somehow been implicated in her death. Whatever doubts he may still have had about the summons vanished the following morning as he read the three-inch headlines in the Los Angeles Examiner:
ARBUCKLE HELD FOR MURDER!
The autopsy report showed that Rappé died from acute peritonitis, an inflammation of the abdominal lining brought on by a ruptured bladder. Why was Arbuckle a suspect in the death? Because Maude “Bambina” Delmont, another woman at the party, had filed a statement with San Francisco police claiming that she had seen Arbuckle drag Rappé into his bedroom against her will and assault her. As she later explained to newspaper reporters,
I could hear Virginia kicking and screaming violently and I had to kick and batter the door before Mr. Arbuckle would let me in. I looked at the bed. There was Virginia, helpless and ravaged. When Virginia kept screaming in agony at what Mr. Arbuckle had done, he turned to me and said, ‘Shut her up or I’ll throw her out a window.’ He then went back to his drunken party and danced while poor Virginia lay dying.
The 265-pound comedian had supposedly burst Rappés’ bladder with his weight during the assault. And because the injury had gone untreated, it developed into a massive abdominal infection, killing Rappé.
We've seen amazing canine freestyle routines before, but this is a delight. Sara Carson and her dog Hero come up with more amazing moves for every section of the song. Do not miss the grand finale.
That's a good dog! The song is "Faith" by Stevie Wonder and Ariana Grand. You can also see a video of Hero when he appeared on David Letterman's Stupid Pet Tricks sketch. -via Boing Boing
