A safari into cheetah country got more than they bargained for when a curious cheetah climbed into a tourist-filled vehicle. This cat apparently had some contact with people before, probably in previous safaris, but he still wanted to check them all out. This video is a compilation of several such encounters, with different cheetahs.
If you were in that position, you' be stuck between the impulse to pet the kitty and terror at confronting an apex predator who could chew your face off if he so desired. -via Laughing Squid
Yeah, you can tell this is a big chicken. When he finally squeezes his whole body through the door of the coop, you'll see he's even bigger than you thought! Wait, how big is he really? We can only tell when a hen shows up in the background.
It's like Big Bird crossed with Foghorn Leghorn! This is a Brahma rooster. They are bred to be big, but the sight of one emerging from a regular-sized chicken house is just too funny to resist. -via Metafilter
The sport of curling involves sliding a stone across a field of ice to score points and knock the opposing teams stone out of points. Curling stones are very expensive, so a group of Russians came up with a better idea: use old Yugos to slide across the ice!
The first ever Russian Carl Curling Tournament was held in Yekaterinburg Saturday. Four teams hurled small cars across the ice at each other. The cars were devoid of any heavy parts, such as motors. A good time was had by all. -via reddit
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!
A philosophical inquiry by Chris McManus University College London 2002 Ig Nobel Biology Prize winner (for his study “Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and Ancient Sculpture”)
The death of the author has been a fundamental constant of post-modern literary criticism ever since Roland Barthes’ essay of 1967. Now an economist, Professor Philip M. Parker, has turned the entire question on its head. The really interesting question about someone who has been described as “the most prolific author in history” now concerns the trickier question of whether, in any meaningful sense, this author—or what Barthes would call a “scriptor”— has ever actually been alive.
Books used to be simple things. An author writes, a printer prints, a bookseller sells and a reader then reads what the author wrote, the printer printed and the bookseller sold. Such a description is worlds away from the 142,152* titles which Parker and his ICON Publishing Group have published. Even if the 47-year-old Professor Parker had written solidly, 12 hours a day, 365 days a year, for the past 20 years, he would have had to produce a new title every 37 minutes to create such an oeuvre. Such productivity is over two orders of magnitude greater than that of the Guinness Book of Records’ most prolific author, the South African writer Mary Faulkner (1903-1973), whose 904 titles hardly begin to compete with Parker.
Wilmer Souder was a farm boy from southern Indiana who earned a PhD in physics in 1916 and went to work in the materials lab at the the National Bureau of Standards (later renamed the National Institute of Standards and Technology). His specialty was precise measurements. By day, this mild-mannered scientist made a name for himself for his studies of dental fillings. But he was also an anonymous crimefighter known by the mysterious named Detective X. Recently-uncovered notebooks revealed his alter-ego and the many cases he worked on.
Indeed, it seems that sometime early in Souder's career, someone called on the bureau to come up with a systematic way to do handwriting and typewriter analysis, probably to detect fraud. Souder, whose specialty was taking exacting measurements and making precise comparisons, was a perfect fit.
The notebooks show that over the years, Souder worked on all kinds of cases brought to the bureau by the Post Office, the Department of the Treasury, and various other government bodies. In addition to appearing in court as an expert witness, he helped pioneer some of the techniques used in modern forensics in America.
He used a recently invented microscope for comparing bullets to see if they might have come from the same gun. He advised the founder of the FBI's forensic lab. For the Lindbergh case, he analyzed the handwriting on the ransom notes and compared them to suspects' writing, finding a match with Bruno Hauptmann, who was eventually convicted and executed.
How much do you know about the Angelenos of the Pleistocene? Yeah, us either. Read on.
FANCY TAR?
Hancock Park, an affluent area of Los Angeles, is well known for its celebrity sightings, million-dollar homes, and the famous Hollywood sign in the distance. But some of the neighborhood’s “residents” are even cooler. World-famous fossils—like the extinct dire wolf, saber-toothed tiger, and Columbia mammoth—are among the millions of specimens that have been excavated from the La Brea tar pits. Located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, the tar pits contain one of the richest deposits of late Pleistocene era (the last ice age) fossils in North America. The fossils date from 10,000 to 40,000 years ago, and more than three million of them—including plants, mammals, birds, lizards, and insects—have been excavated since paleontologists first began digging there in the early 1900s.
The tar pits on display today were once excavation sites where workers dug for asphalt or scientists dug for fossils. Over the years, humans dug more than 100 pits throughout Hancock Park, but most of them have been refilled with dirt, debris, asphalt, and water. About 13 tar pits remain—the largest, called the Lake Pit, measures 28 square feet and is approximately 14 feet deep.
A young woman is murdered, her body mutilated and dumped next to an L.A. sidewalk. Sensationalized newspaper reports call her everything from a manipulative tease to a naive young girl. But who was she, and who killed her? Here’s a murder mystery, L.A.’s most notorious cold case, ripped from the headlines …of 1947.
A GRISLY FIND
On the chilly, foggy morning of January 15, 1947, an L.A. housewife out for a walk with her young daughter stumbled upon a gruesome crime scene. Amid the weeds and grass of a vacant lot, a few feet from the sidewalk, lay the body of a woman. To add to the horror, the body had been cut in two at the midsection, the intestines removed and stuffed underneath the bottom half. The woman’s face had also been disfigured, her mouth cut into a wide, Joker-like grin.
The shocked housewife grabbed her daughter and ran to a neighbor’s house to call the police. By the time investigators arrived, however, reporters and curious residents were already there…and had trampled all over the scene, destroying a lot of evidence. Still, the LAPD made some interesting discoveries:
• The woman was about 5'6" tall, had black hair and green eyes, but no identification.
• There wasn’t any blood at the scene—not in, on, or around the body. In fact, the medical examiner would later say that the body appeared to have been drained of blood and scrubbed clean. So the police knew the woman had been killed elsewhere.
• Besides the cuts to the woman’s face, she had rope burns on her wrists and ankles, indicating that she’d been restrained.
The International Butler Academy in Simpelveld, Netherlands, is where professional butlers learn everything they need to know to assist their employers in genteel living. Every aspect of service is done just so, and they need to look good doing it, too.
Who knows? Graduates might end up running a household for a reclusive billionaire who fights crime in his off hours. Or an eccentric old lady with spoiled cats. Or a judge with a houseful of teenagers in California. Someone like that has no time to run a household themselves. Great Big Story takes us through the 10-week course that prepares new butlers for a career. -via Nag on the Lake
District 7 in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) is a newer, wealthier part of town that Jürgen Horn and Mike Powell found to be copycat of western cities, chain stores and all. But it has a pedestrian bridge with a fountain that stands out, particularly at night. That's when it puts on a light show!
What makes a continent? There's no simple definition, but Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out has some observations about why our geography ended up being labeled the way it is.
I never really thought about comparing Australia and Greenland, but both places are pretty much outliers in any category. Greenland is closest to North America, but considers itself part of the European continent, mainly because it's a part of the Danish realm. How the people of a place consider that place has more lasting meaning than some definition that someone elsewhere came up with. -via Laughing Squid
From 1955 to 1958, Mr. Berry knocked out classic after classic. Although he was in his late 20s and early 30s, he came up with high school chronicles and plugs for the newfangled music called rock ’n’ roll.
No matter how calculated songs like “School Day” or “Rock and Roll Music” may have been, they reached the Top 10, caught the early rock ’n’ roll spirit and detailed its mythology. “Johnny B. Goode,” a Top 10 hit in 1958, told the archetypal story of a rocker who could “play the guitar just like ringin’ a bell.”
Mr. Berry toured with rock revues and performed in three movies with Mr. Freed: “Rock, Rock, Rock,” “Mr. Rock and Roll” and “Go, Johnny, Go.” On film and in concert, he dazzled audiences with his duck walk, a guitar-thrusting strut that involved kicking one leg forward and hopping on the other.
It's pretty well known that military service members have a problem with war movies, in that every little mistake stands out for them, such as the way a uniform is worn or a weapon is handled. Scientists are used to seeing science mistakes in film that the rest of us would never catch -so much that they've developed a consulting system. Most experts are excited to see their specialty in a movie, then are disappointed in the actual portrayal. And then there's chess. Filmmakers seem to always get chess wrong on one way or another, often in many ways, and that's bothersome to those who love the game.
Chess errors come in a few different flavors, these experts say. The most common is what we’ll call the Bad Setup. When you set up a chessboard, you’re supposed to orient it so that the square nearest to each player’s right side is light-colored. (There’s even a mnemonic for this—“right is light.”) Next, when you array the pieces, the white queen goes on white, and the black queen goes on black. “When I teach six-year-old girls, I say ‘the queen’s shoes have to match her dress!’” says Klein.
Six-year-olds may get this, but filmmakers often do not. Along with The Seventh Seal, movies that suffer from Bad Setups include Blade Runner, Austin Powers, From Russia with Love, The Shawshank Redemption, and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Shaft and What’s New Pussycat may not have much in common, but they do both feature backwards chessboards.
Saturday morning cartoons were around when I was a kid in the 1960s, but in the 1980s, they were ramped up to define a generation. Every cartoon was designed to sell toys and cereal, and children who watched them learned how to immerse themselves in a "franchise."
But things got better in the '90s, so those same kids kept watching them. Now those kids of the '80s and '90s are the perfect age to market nostalgia to, as you can tell by the flood of movie remakes and whole forums dedicated to bygone shows. But their own children will never know what it was like to set aside one whole morning for week's worth of cartoons. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Josh and Hannah Brown of Frankfort, Kentucky, are serious Disney fans. They remodeled their basement to be a replica of the Haunted Mansion attractions at Disney's Magic Kingdom! The walls are all hand-painted, there's a projection effect in Leota's crystal ball, and the Master Gracey portrait is a video monitor, so it changes just like the original.
Good news- she likes cats! In another month or so, we'll get the next chapter. Will there be a disaster? Knowing Simon Tofield and his animated cat, the odds are good.
