A guy and his camera-wielding girlfriend were driving around Raleigh, North Carolina, yesterday after the storm left a layer of ice and snow. They saw a guy skiing behind a car! Of course, they had to follow. After all, he's liable to crash spectacularly and wouldn't that make a great viral video? Contains NSFW language.
But the skier did not oblige by crashing. In fact, he's pretty good at it. The comment thread at reddit explained that skiing in North Carolina makes you an expert at handling not just a snow surface, but ice, mud and rock, too. Then we heard from the guy who was skiing. Michael Stewart was equipped with a camera, too. He's a good skier, but he held the camera vertically and the music is NSFW.
Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt wrote about a strange Venezuelan hunt in 1800. Villagers drove horses into a pond and watched them be shocked by electric eels until the current was exhausted, then they collected the eels (actually knifefish) to eat. His account was dismissed as a fish story by other scientists because they did not believe the description of eels reaching far out of the water to shock horses. I found it hard to believe that gathering eels was worth losing a couple of horses, but what do I know? Vanderbilt University professor Kenneth Catania doesn't know how true the story is, but he has done the research and indeed, eels will launch themselves high out of the water to attack in order to increase the shock value, as in the above video.
He has found that the eels can deliver a more concentrated shock by projecting out of the water and pressing their chins against animals. "The eels may not be very good at shocking something that's not fully in the water so this behavior is the solution,” he says. "The higher [the eel] gets, the more of that power goes through what it's touching and the less goes back through the water from its tail. These eels have evolved to have remarkable output, and it turns out they have evolved pretty remarkable behavior to go along with that."
About a month ago, we read about the way professional wrestling switched from legitimate competition to entertainment. That was in the 1920s, and for decades afterward nothing official was said about how "real" wrestling was. Audiences argued about it, because it takes longer for some people to catch on than others. Eventually, the WWF (now WWE) dropped all pretense, but Jack Hammer didn't read the memo. Oh, but this is only the beginning of Jack Hammer's story -it gets better. Read the rest of his saga at It's the Tie comics. -via Geeks Are Sexy
If you were to visit France, you'd certainly want to see the hot spots, but you might also want to take in lesser-known but fascinating abandoned places. These are buildings no longer in use, a combination of beautiful and sad, where nature and entropy is reclaiming what man built. They all hint at an intriguing history, like Fort D’Arches.
Fort D’Arches (also known as Boulanger Fort Berwick) is a military base in Pouxeux, northeastern France. It was built between 1875 and 1877, and was a part of a chain of forts known as The Curtain of Upper Moselle, which protected the area between Epinal and Belfort. These days, it’s cloaked in plants, trees and (of course) spray paint. Inside, it’s a long, winding network of eerie tunnels, whilst the exterior, enveloped in greenery, is proof of the power of nature over that which is man-made. A fort is the toughest of structures, but this one is no match for curling branches and fast-spreading moss.
The Easter bunny came early for the residents of the German island of Langeoog. Residents woke up Wednesday to find the beach full of colorful eggs! They were Kinder Surprise Eggs, or to be more precise, the inner plastic egg that holds the surprise toy. A Danish cargo ship carrying the eggs from China lost five shipping containers in a storm, and thousands of the colorful plastic eggs found their way to the beach of Langeoog. The children of the island had plenty of surprises.
Atlanta's Stone Mountain Park has an attraction called Snow Mountain in the winter. It gives Georgia residents, who often go all winter without seeing snow, a chance to play in snow and ride an inner tube down a snow-covered hill, all on artificially-made snow.
The park, which features man-made snow, is located just outside Atlanta in Stone Mountain Park. The winter wonderland exists thanks to a snow-making machine that generates roughly 360 tons of snow daily.
But the park was closed on Saturday, due to a snowstorm. Colorado is still laughing at that. The park will be open Sunday. -via Fark
Debbie Barber's horse Kruzah is a comedian. Here he is, out in the pasture, practicing his routine for his next standup gig. He has a rubber chicken, and he knows how to use it!
The United States bought 828,000 square miles in 1803 when Thomas Jefferson agreed to the Louisiana Purchase. The U.S. had only sought to buy New Orleans, but was offered a bargain on the whole thing. Still, New Orleans was a very important part of the deal. The mouth of the Mississippi River would become the country's busiest trading port. When Americans started to move into New Orleans, they found the small town to be very foreign. The few thousand French creole residents were very different from the folks back home.
There were two main areas in which the entrenched French creoles made the incoming Americans crazy. The first was infrastructure: when the U.S. bought the Louisiana territory, New Orleans had no paved roads, no street signs, and no colleges. Much of the population was illiterate, and justice was dispensed according to the French legal code: Tregle calls the place “a colonial backwash of French and Spanish imperialism.”
The second was the permissive culture: Sunday in New Orleans means sitting at a café and going out dancing or perhaps to a horse race. In this city, black and white people mingled more freely than elsewhere in America, and even slaves had more leeway to move freely than in other cities.
All this shocked the Protestant, Puritan-minded American settlers, many of whom came from places in the South where the movement of black people was highly restricted and regulated. (Meanwhile, the native creole population was appalled by the crude Americans, who they called Kaintucks and vulgar Yankees.) The Anglo-American settlers tried to change everything from the city’s laws to the looser culture, but even as they gained power of New Orleans’ commercial life, they did not have enough political power to mold the city as they would have liked.
That changed in 1836 when the "Yankees" finally had the political power to persuade the state legislature to split New Orleans into three separate municipalities: one American and two French. Read how that worked at Atlas Obscura.
Sometimes I think the world's problems all boil down to the struggle between "the right thing to do" and "what works." While the righteous may get their reward in the afterlife, the bullies, trolls, and strongmen get theirs immediately. This is the latest comic from Alex Culang and Raynato Castro at Buttersafe.
Sanrio made bank with Hello Kitty, the ubiquitous Japanese princess of adorableness. But now they've got a character who's just as cute, but has more in common with real people. Aggretsuko is a cute red panda. But she commutes to her Tokyo accounting job every day, where she must deal with stupid co-workers and an obnoxious boss. In her off hours, she relieves her work frustration with heavy metal karaoke and alcohol.
An elite crew of tacticians have an hour to free their comrade Sarah before certain death. Like any such group you see in the movies, they each have a particular talent they bring to the group. But one of the members is struggling with a sense of inadequacy.
Married archaeologists Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker wanted to explore the grounds in Pylos, Greece, near the site of the palace of King Nestor, a Mycenaean king described in the Iliad. Denied their first choice of site, they started digging in an olive grove. What they found was astonishing: a grave dating to around 1500 BC, containing a warrior who was very wealthy, or at least very respected, considering the treasure he was buried with.
Over the next six months, the archaeologists uncovered bronze basins, weapons and armor, but also a tumble of even more precious items, including gold and silver cups; hundreds of beads made of carnelian, amethyst, amber and gold; more than 50 stone seals intricately carved with goddesses, lions and bulls; and four stunning gold rings. This was indeed an ancient grave, among the most spectacular archaeological discoveries in Greece in more than half a century—and the researchers were the first to open it since the day it was filled in.
“It’s incredible luck,” says John Bennet, director of the British School at Athens. “The fact that it hadn’t been discovered before now is astonishing.” The spectacular find of priceless treasures made headlines around the globe, but what really intrigues scholars, says Stocker, is the “bigger world picture.” The very first organized Greek society belonged to the Mycenaeans, whose kingdoms exploded out of nowhere on the Greek mainland around 1600 B.C. Although they disappeared equally dramatically a few hundred years later, giving way to several centuries known as the Greek Dark Ages, before the rise of “classical” Greece, the Mycenaeans sowed the seeds of our common traditions, including art and architecture, language, philosophy and literature, even democracy and religion. “This was a crucial time in the development of what would become Western civilization,” Stocker says.
Dated to the time when Minoan culture was giving way to Mycenaean culture, the grave gives us new clues as to how that happened, which may change the way we look at the development of Greek civilization. Read about the dig, the warrior, and the Mycenaean culture at Smithsonian magazine. -via Digg
A Brazilian grandmother has an icon in her home that she prays to every day. Gabriela Brandao noticed and asked about it. The elderly woman said she was praying to St. Anthony. Brandao took a close look at the figure and thought it looked familiar. St. Anthony isn't supposed to have pointy ears, is he? She checked on the internet to confirm what she thought, and found an exact duplicate of the figure for sale -a figure of Elrond, Lord of Rivendell, a character from The Lord of the Rings. Brandao's relative had been praying to an elf! Since Brandao posted the pictures, the grandmother has received a new figurine -one depicting St. Anthony.
Working with flowers sounds like a lovely way to make a living, but it's not all lollipops and roses. Or, at least not all lollipops. Making beautiful arrangements is the fun part, but running a business based on fragile, short-lived, emotionally-charged products can be quite stressful. But those who stick with it love the work. Here are some of the everyday facts about the floral business.
4. TIMING IS EVERYTHING.
Because flowers only last so long before they wilt and die, florists are in a perpetual race against the clock. They must properly time purchases and deliveries, making sure that buds have bloomed by the time they arrive at a client’s door. To speed up or slow down the blooming process, florists use a variety of tricks. They may condition flowers (get them ready for display) by cutting or splitting the stems (trimming them at a 45-degree angle increases the surface area for water absorption) or dunking the blooms in cold water. Storing the blooms away from direct sunlight is also key. To ensure that flowers for weddings look fresh and open, Ghani keeps them in a refrigerated environment and makes the centerpieces the day before the event.
13. THEY GET TO PARTAKE IN YOUR EMOTIONAL MILESTONES.
Whether they arrange and deliver flowers for weddings, funerals, births, anniversaries, or proms, florists often work with clients who are emotional about recent (or imminent) life changes. And florists aren't immune to the impact—conscious or subconscious—of the heightened emotions surrounding weddings and funerals. One florist writes about how creating floral arrangements for a funeral sparked a recurring dream: “In the dream, I woke up the woman that died to ask her if she liked the flowers. Her answer was no. She informed me that she had always hated flowers … I remember feeling silly and spooked at the same time.”
If you recall the Disney movie Mulan, you'll love this recreation of the "preparing for the matchmaker" scene from a Chinese TV production, shared by the Disney Power Facebook page. The young actresses are excellent, and the scene looks just like the Disney film. But the real show-stopper is when Grandma comes in.
