Dark Roasted Blend takes a look at the history of the Wall of Death, a staple of amusement parks in the age before television.
Roll Up, Roll Up, It's Thrills, It's Spills - It's the Amazing "Wall of Death"!
Derived from normal wood board motordromes the America's Original Extreme Motorcycle Thrill Show became one of the most daring acts at fairgrounds and carnivals in the early 1910s, achieving peak popularity during motorcycle-crazed 1930s....
In 2003, Leonardo Notarbartolo and his associates broke through ten layers of security and helped themselves to a stash of diamonds in a vault below the Antwerp Diamond Center. The estimated value of the diamonds taken ranges from 12 million to over 100 million dollars. The loot has never been found, but Notarbartolo served a prison sentence in Belgium. He tells how he pulled off the heist, in an exclusive article that reads like a Hollywood film.
The guys took turns yanking the contents out. Since they had memorized the layout of the vault in the replica, they worked in the dark, turning on their flashlights only for split seconds—enough to position the drill over the next box.
But in those muffled flashes, they could glimpse their duffel bags overflowing with gold bars, millions in Israeli, Swiss, American, European, and British currencies, and leather satchels that contained the mother lode: rough and polished diamonds. They resisted the urge to examine their haul; they were running out of time.
Edith Zimmerman has a blog featuring whimsical things she's created from food. I particularly like this radish red ant. http://www.edithzimmerman.com/blog/ -via Buzzfeed
Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss is another music quiz to promote the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame giveaway, where you could win a trip for two to the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in Cleveland. The RIAA certifies an album as "diamond" when 10 million copies are sold in the US. 104 albums by 69 artists have been certified as diamond. Can you name those 69 artists in 5 minutes? I don't think so. I got 22 and I felt like kicking myself when I saw the answers! http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/23510
The Hanshin Tigers baseball club won the Japan Series for the first and (so far) only time in 1985. Fans in Dotonbori celebrated by jumping into the local river. The story goes that the crowd called out the names of the players, and a fan who most resembled each player jumped in. However, no one looked like star player and Oklahoma native Randy Bass {wiki}. So the crowd tossed in a life-size statue of Colonel Sanders taken from a KFC outlet. The statue was lost in the river, and the Hanshin Tigers sunk into a slump. Urban lore says the Tigers performance is due to the lost statue.
Fast forward to 2009. Divers looking for unexploded bombs found the Colonel Tuesday night.
The upper body of the statue was discovered at around 4 p.m. about 200 meters away from where it plunged into the water in 1985. When the figure was being pulled up by the crane on a salvage barge, construction workers could be heard to say, "It looks like a corpse." However, when Tigers fans such as the riverside project foreman saw the statue, they exclaimed, "It's the Colonel!" Passersby also stopped in their tracks to take in the scene.
With the media and locals looking on, divers began their search for the lower body at around 8:50 Wednesday morning, and discovered the right hand some minutes later. About 10 minutes after that, the diver's voice burst from a speaker on the salvage barge, saying, "It's the lower body. There's no mistake about it," bringing on a cheer from reporters and workers alike.
Is the "Curse of the Colonel" over for the Tigers? Link -via Fark
This extensive collection of photographs of New York City starts at around 120 years ago and includes aerial mapping shots, news photos, and work by many acclaimed photographers. This picture shows Times Square as it was in 1922. Link -via the Presurfer
The 1978 brainstorming sessions among George Lucas, Lawrence Kasdan, and Steven Spielberg that led to Raiders of the Lost Ark are now available for your reading pleasure. 45 hours of discussion are transcribed in a 125-page .pdf, but you can see the highlights before downloading the whole thing. Here's Spielberg (S) and Lucas (G) discussing the backstory of Indy and Marion:
G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
L — And he was forty-two.
G — He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship.
S — She had better be older than twenty-two.
G — He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve. It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.
S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.
G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he...
Fashion photographer Greg Kessler takes pictures of runway models before and after makeup. The Moment, the New York Times fashion blog, posts these together so you can slide back and forth from one image to the other. Scroll down at the site to see models from various fashion shows. Am I the only one who thinks they look better without makeup? Link -via Everlasting Blort
Placebos are medicines or procedures that don't have any active medical ingredients. Their effects are all in your mind, but the brain has wonderful ways of making us feel better. eMedExpert Blog looks at the latest research on the placebo effect. Did you know there's such a thing as placebo surgery?
In the 1950s, many physicians treated angina with ligation of the internal mammary artery. Despite claims of up to a 91% success rate, in the late 1950s, two skeptics conducted separate double-blind tests in which half the patients received skin incision, but not artery ligation12-13. In both studies, the placebo surgery proved equally effective as the ligation. And the overall rate of improvement with the placebo was 37%.
A 2002 study of arthroscopic knee surgery found that the outcomes for a placebo procedure were as good as those of the “real” surgery14.
Do you know what a pluot is? It's a hybrid cross between a plum and an apricot. Sounds yummy! The pluot pictured is just one of seven hybrid or genetically modified food items detailed at WebEcoist. Link -via the Presurfer
A recently identified portrait of William Shakespeare, if genuine, would be the only true likeness we have of The Bard. The popular face of Shakespeare that we know was taken from a woodcut by Martin Droeshout that was published after the playwright's death. The newly-identified portrait was painted around 1610, when Shakespeare was 46 years old. The painting has been in the hands of the Cobbe family for centuries. Current owner Alec Cobbe saw another portrait that supposedly depicted Shakespeare and saw a resemblance. He then asked Stanley Wells of Birmingham University to help authenticate it.
The two men arranged to have the Cobbe painting subjected to a battery of scientific tests — tree-ring-dating to determine the age of the wood panel, X-ray examination at the Hamilton-Kerr Institute at Cambridge University and infrared reflectography. The tests produced convincing evidence that the panel dated from around 1610 and was the source for the Folger painting, among others. Wells is now sure of it. "I don't think anyone who sees [the Cobbe painting] would doubt this is the original," he says. "It's a much livelier painting, a much more alert face, a more intelligent and sympathetic face."
Just the other day, I thought about how neato my basement would look with a laboratory set up like Dr. Frankenstein, with beakers and burners and electrical gadgets. Now Wired has a how-to video on just that!
They don't make chemistry sets like they used to -- no more uranium or explosives. What's an aspiring mad scientist to do? Go DIY. In your own smoking, bubbling lair, you can make everything from bouncy balls to rocket motors. Here's a catalyst to get you started.
The first quiz about fictional bands was so popular, part two is up today as the Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. How well do you know bands that weren't really bands from movies and TV? I scored 33% despite not knowing any of the answers. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/23435
You thought a boy named Sue would have to grow up strong and tough? Try overcoming life's obstacles as a girl named Marijuana Pepsi Jackson! Ms. Sawyer (her married name) is a schoolteacher who had parents with a sense of humor.
Sawyer's aunt, Mayetta Jackson of Chicago, clearly remembers when the name was picked in 1972. The newborn's mother and father were products of the post-Woodstock era when reefer was rampant.
"And they would cool off with a Pepsi," she said, which makes you think it's lucky for Sawyer that it wasn't Coke instead. "I thought it was crazy," her aunt said about the name, "but they were such fun-loving people that it suited them."
Ms. Sawyer's story does have some elements of the Johnny Cash song.
She gives a surprising amount of credit to her mother for making her resilient and resourceful. "She instilled in me that fighting attitude - never take no, you can do anything," Sawyer said.
By high school, her name was cool to many. "They were like, 'Oh yeah. Man, I wish I had your name. I love that. I'm going to name my kid after you.' I hear that so much and I go, Lord, please don't do that to that child."
http://www.jsonline.com/news/milwaukee/40874017.html -via Fark