The folks at the Cincinnati Zoo outfitted Savanna the cheetah (previously at Neatorama) with a GoPro camera on her back. She probably wouldn’t have liked one on her head, and you really can’t force a wild cat to do something they don’t want to. Watching her zoom around the compound with this point of view is terrifying, kind of like riding in the car with your 16-year-old driving.
When they go to slow-motion, you really get a sense of how fast they run. I couldn’t even keep up with a cheetah in slow motion! But then again, if a wild predator were chasing me, I might surprise myself. -via Tastefully Offensive
In 1999, a horrified mother took this picture of her daughter just before telling her to come down. The redditor with a NSFW name posted it and explained what kind of childhood she led.
The trick we came up with was to spit on our hands and feet and rub it in so they were kind of sticky (gross, I know). I basically just shimmied up like a bear cub. I remember having to take a pretty long breather about halfway up. Childhood is a hell of a drug.
Haha she had the camera in one hand and the phone in the other, ready to call for help if I fell. She said she didn't want to yell or panic because she thought it would scare me and I would fall. So she acted supportive then asked me nicely to come down and when I did I got a stern talking to about safety.
My mom got many a call from the neighbors saying, "do you know where your daughter is?" and she would say, "probably very high up in a tree. Call me back if she falls."
Yeah, as a girl wanting to be tough like the boys in my neighborhood I wound up getting hurt pretty often. I once climbed onto the cross beam of a playground swing set and thanks to a group of kids chanting "jump jump jump," I did, landed on my butt, kneed myself in the mouth, and broke 4 of my bottom front teeth. Many a bad choice was made.
If the most misspelled words by state wasn’t funny enough for you, here’s another chance to be embarrassed to admit which state you’re from. Estately crunched the data and came up with what questions states disproportionately ask in Google searches. See a larger map at the site.
To be clear, the list below does not represent what each state Googles the most, it simply shows the searches each state Googles more frequently than the other 49 states and the District of Columbia.
While people in paradise (Hawaii) have the leisure to pose philosophical questions, those in Alaska are worried about stocking up for the winter, lest they starve. Arkansas needs a history lesson. People in Montana are apparently reacting to people in Idaho. You have to wonder what is going on in Delaware. And sadly, people in Kentucky learn how to use the internet before they learn the important things in life. -via the A.V. Club
Police in Anchorage, Alaska, were involved in a chase about 3 a.m. Thursday after a front-end loader was seen smashing into the front of a liquor store. Witnesses saw the machinery break the glass at Brown Jug liquor store. The driver went in and took several bottles of liquor. Police pursued the front-end loader, but the driver refused to stop. Once they blocked his path, they arrested 38-year-old Joseph Martin, who failed a sobriety test. He also had liquor bottles in the front-end loader. The next morning, Trina and Gus Gaskov found the fence damaged at their landscaping business and a front-end loader missing.
"He's obviously a good driver, 'cause he was drunk off his butt but he was still driving really good," she said in a phone interview Thursday. "He didn't hit a car or nothing — and making those wide turns — he must have experience driving around the loaders or something."
No one was injured in the chase. Martin was charged with DUI, theft, burglary, criminal mischief, and refusal to submit to a drug test. He is being held until a third party takes responsibility. -via Fark
About half the students reading this will cringe because they can relate to it, while the other half will laugh because finals are over. Finals week is the one thing about school you won’t miss at all when you graduate. This is the latest from Buttersafe.
If you enjoyed the post last week about the erratic way kings are numbered, you’ll love a look at how popes are numbered. The Catholic Church has had a pope in charge of all its members for about two thousand years now, and records from the earliest ones are pretty scant. Also, papal records have been wiped out a few times, and then there’s the custom of yanking a pope’s title long after he’s dead. The results can be confusing.
The numbering of popes named Felix has been amended to omit antipope Felix II; however, most lists still call the last two Felixes Felix III and Felix IV.
So the official list includes nightmarish entries like “St Felix III (Felix II)”, or, to give him his Latin name: “Papa FELIX Tertius (Secundus)”. He ruled for nine years in the late 5th century; 30 years later came “St Felix IV”, who is also known as Felix III.
Additionally, there was an antipope Felix V.
So, for those keeping count, there have been five Pope Felixes, only three of whom were actually Pope. Glad we got that straight.
Then we get started on cases where the church lost count or got someone’s name wrong. All in all, it’s a mess in the historical records. Read all about it right here. -via Metafilter
Dr. Henry Heimlich, the inventor of the Heimlich Maneuver that has saved countless choking victims, is 96 years old and lives at a senior living facility in Cincinnati. The staff are all trained in the Heimlich Maneuver, but on Monday, when 87-year-old Patty Ris got a piece of hamburger stuck in her airway, they deferred to Heimlich. The doctor immediately performed as he had practiced for decades, and the obstruction was dislodged. Ris was okay! The real kicker is that this is the first time Heimlich had ever used his maneuver to save someone's life.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Heimlich recounted what happened. He said Ris had been sitting next to him at his table.
“When I used it, and she recovered quickly,” he said, “it made me appreciate how wonderful it has been to be able to save all those lives.”
His son, Phil Heimlich, said his father regularly meets people who were either saved or saved somebody else.
“Just the fact that a 96-year-old man could perform that, is impressive,” he said.
Heimlich has lived at the facility for six years, but still stays active and in shape. -via Metafilter
Remember the Junk Lady from the film Labyrinth? Jen Yates of Cake Wrecks and Epbot and her husband John built this Junk Lady costume. The whole thing is 37 pounds, and can either be worn or carted around. It was designed for the Labyrinth Ball at Dragoncon, but alas, the tickets to the ball sold out immediately.
See more pictures and a description of the build process with all the little details at Epbot here and here. Look for the Junk Lady at Megacon this weekend, and also at Dragoncon in Atlanta this fall. -via Metafilter
A group of scientists are testing a new kind of sticky trap. To get accurate information on its effectiveness, they sent various types of humans across a 20-foot section of the material. First, a scientist as a baseline, then a sprinter, then a sumo wrestler. I was hoping the sumo wrestler wouldn’t get his loincloth caught in the sticky stuff. He does.
Of course, this is an ad, for a Japanese cockroach trap. For such products, we’d hope they do their testing on actual cockroaches. -via Tastefully Offensive
A hundred years ago, automobiles were a new and fairly untested idea, so why would someone buy a car when they had a perfectly good horse, which was safer? Enter the marketing department.
While the poor horses got slandered, there were definite advantages to driving cars, especially in cities. Car manufacturers didn’t have to be so nasty about it, but even when they’re right, business trumps the common good. The campaign against the horse wasn’t nearly as bad as the battle against pedestrians or the campaign to design American infrastructure around the automobile. -Thanks, Phil Edwards!
The title of this list is really 20 Movies Every Real Estate Agent Should Watch, but that’s too narrow. While they feature real estate professionals, the subject of where to live affects us all. There’s at least one movie in here that relates to the travails of home buyers, homeowners, home sellers, renters, roommates, homeless people, landlords, neighbors, and yes, real estate agents. I’ve lived through the movie The Money Pit. Twice.
This 1980’s comedy focuses on a young couple who moves into a huge and expensive house that appears to be perfect right up until they purchase it, at which point it starts to fall apart in an absurd manner. Real estate agents are probably going to appreciate the number of lessons in real estate that the movie subtly delivers, such as the importance of looking past the surfaces when deciding on a house. The couple partly got into the mess in the first place because they were seduced by the promise of a bargain home and by a seller’s sympathetic sob story, which happens frequently in real life.
Barnaby Dixon shows off his new puppet design, and it’s quite clever. It combines the articulation of a marionette with the direct action of a hand puppet. Of course, the skill of the operator is key to making it move realistically, and he’s pretty good at that, too.
The only drawback I see is that necessarily long loincloth, which could create design problems in making a specific puppet, but I’m sure that can be worked around.
Marvel movies are action films: Good vs. evil, superpowers, and special effects. But each has some kind of romantic pairing going on, for better or worse. maybe it’s part of the formula that all Marvel movies much adhere to. I guess we should consider it a good thing, because otherwise there might not be any women in those movies at all! But while some romance subplots are hot, others seem to be phones in. Den of Geek counts down the ten romances in Marvel movies, ranked from worst to best.
While the artists who make rock concert posters for venues in San Francisco in the 60s became famous, John Moehring was doing the same thing in Seattle with little fanfare. Fifty years later, he is famous among poster collectors, those who really appreciate the psychedelic art of the era. Moehring produced posters for appearances by The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and other monsters of rock. Collectors Weekly has an exclusive interview with Moehring about those days.
“Lots of bands playing at Eagles came to the house to partake of the Alice B. Toklas-inspired chewies and hang out before or after concerts,” Moehring says. “It was a safe environment for rock ’n’ roll road warriors often quite a distance from home.”
Naturally, Moehring had his favorites. “I have special memories of Pink Floyd’s visits,” he says. “They were fun people to spend some time with. And Alice Cooper, in spite of his appearance, was just a down-to-earth guy who liked to play golf. Go figure. People weren’t really stuck-up about their fame back then,” Moehring adds. “Everybody was interested in meeting new people and hearing what they thought and had to say.”
One of Moehring’s fondest memories is of an evening spent with English rocker Marc Bolan of Tyrannosaurus Rex—his second band, T-Rex, and its big hit, “Bang a Gong (Get It On),” were still a few years away. Accompanying Bolan on this particular evening was his then-girlfriend and future wife, June Child.
“Marc wanted to go out and have some real American French fries,” Moehring recalls, “so we piled into whatever ramshackle vehicle I had at the time and drove to a restaurant, where we ate French fries and just talked and talked. Eventually Marc got tired, so I drove him back to where they were staying, but June was still raring to go. We stayed up the entire night driving all over Seattle. I showed her all my favorite little places.” For example, one stop on this after-midnight tour was an old water tower way out on the Magnolia Bluffs overlooking Puget Sound. “The tower had these real cool cross braces all around it,” Moehring says, “and if you shook one of the braces that was down close to the ground, the whole thing would start to vibrate and reverberate. It was just a lovely, lovely evening.”
In a wonderful example of how to reuse Olympic venues, the city of Montreal converted the velodrome from the 1976 Olympics into an indoor zoo, with five distinct ecosystems, plenty of sunlight and vegetation, and animals from all over. Juergen Horn and Mike Powell visited recently to enjoy the environment and take pictures.
Dwarfed by the Olympic Stadium to which it’s adjacent, the Biodôme doesn’t look like much from the outside. But inside, an illusion of immense space has been created, and each of the five ecosystems are surprisingly spacious. After leaving the Biodôme, I looked back on the building in confusion. How did they manage to fit everything into that cycling dome?
The five zones are Tropical Rainforests, Laurentian Maple Forests, Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Labrador Cliffs, and the Antarctic. See more of the Biodôme at For 91 Days.
