Even though we never thought about it before, we all already know in our hearts how to recognize the soon-to-be-victim in a movie. It's when Alasdair Beckett-King (previously) puts all the clues together that we realize how easy that determination really is. That said, you may have to watch this short sequence twice to connect the first character with the last character. -via Laughing Squid

The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for 2021 has drawn to a close. Since 1982, the contest has been run by now-retired Professor Scott Rice of San Jose State University, in order to challenge writers and would-be writers to come up with the opening sentence to the world's worst novel. It's a tribute to author Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, once a widely-read author, now mostly known for the contest that bears his name. The winners have been announced. The Grand Prize goes to Stu Duval of Auckland, New Zealand.

A lecherous sunrise flaunted itself over a flatulent sea, ripping the obsidian bodice of night asunder with its rapacious fingers of gold, thus exposing her dusky bosom to the dawn’s ogling stare.

David Hynes of Bromma, Sweden, won the Grand Panjamdrum's Special Award.  

Victor Frankenstein admired his masterpiece stretched out on the lab slab; it was almost human, OK, no conscience or social awareness, and not too bright, but a little plastic surgery to hide the scars and bolts, maybe a spray tan and a hairdo, and this guy could run for President!

Read the winners in the categories of Adventure, Children's & Young Adult Literature, Crime & Detective, Dark & Stormy, Fantasy & Horror, Historical Fiction, Purple Prose, Romance, Science Fiction, Vile Puns, Western, and Odious Outliers, plus dishonorable mentions in each, at the contest site.

After hearing the requests for years, Disney is launching the first official Star Wars anime series. Star Wars: Visions is not canon, however. It's an experimental anthology series in which seven Japanese animation studios have free rein to tell nine stories. They range in the Star Wars timeline from before The Phantom Menace to after The Rise of Skywalker.

While purists say you should watch anime in Japanese to catch the inflections of the original voice artists (subtitles are fine), you will also have the option to see the English dub (featuring many well-known Western actors), so here's that trailer.



Star Wars: Visions will begin streaming on Disney+ on September 22. Read a description of each episode at Inverse.

If you're in high school, classes start really early. Redditor 1ew put this map together to show the average start time for high schools in each of the American states. View it full-size here. As you can see, they are going at it awfully early, despite research showing teenagers do not get enough sleep and benefit from later start times at school.

Some of these early start times are because schools share buses, and once the high school students are delivered, they go back and pick up elementary students. Starting earlier also gets high school students out of class earlier for extracurricular activities, jobs, and supervising younger siblings. Whether those are good reasons is up for debate.

My school, back in the day, started at 8:30, and the doors weren't even unlocked until 8:15. We still thought that was too early.

-via Digg

The 2009 movie Coraline is an "animated dark fantasy horror film," while still being cute and whimsical enough for parents to take their children to see it. While some kids were traumatized, those who've read the Neil Gaiman book the movie was based on say it was much darker and more terrifying than the film. I'm not sure where this was originally posted, but Just Sock Thoughts collected the discussion thread for a Facebook post. I have neither read Coraline nor seen the movie, but one part of the discussion jumped out at me.



Now that's what you call a cool literary tidbit! You can read the entire discussion about the difference between the book and the movie at Geeks Are Sexy.

We love to see pictures of cute cats and cute dogs, and when these worlds collide, they are even more adorable. Some dogs hang out with cats, some were raised by cats, and some might even think they are cats. What else would you think, when a dog climbs a cat tree, squeezes into a box, or leaps to feline heights?

See 50 dogs who are expressing their inner cat at Bored Panda.

(Upper image credit: MySoleM8isACat)  

Paul Taylor is crossing Britain on a moped in a quest to raise funds for the Institute of Cancer Research in honor of his friend Alexis Leventis, who died of cancer. What is extraordinary about his tour are the places he is going. To draw attention, Taylor is stopping in as many places with rude names as he can manage.

The expedition will take place in August 2021 and starts in Shitterton in Dorset on the 18th  and winds its way through salubriously named places such as Happy Bottom Nature Reserve, Ass Hill, Crazies Hill, Pishill, The Knob, Titty-Ho, Willey, Butthole Lane, Pensitone, Netherthong, Slack Bottom Road, Bedlam, Crackpot (I think I may have lived there in a past life) , Booze (there too), Pity Me (by this point you really should), Cocksburnspath, Wallyford, Brawl (and many others) before we arrive at the charmingly titled Twatt in the Orkney Isles.

The return journey includes delights such as Dull, Cockermouth and Cow Ark before our final destination , the aptly named Bell End.

Taylor calls the stunt the Moronic Moped Marathon, and hes already raised more than twelve thousand pounds! Read more about it at BBC news. Then check in at Metafilter for a catalog of links to rude place names, in Britain and elsewhere.

Niall Reid (@reidyr560) shows us how a truck can brew a proper cuppa tea. Pretty impressive, huh? Okay Niall, try doing that from the left side! -via Everlasting Blort

At the turn of the 20th century, steamships had fairly well replaced sailing ships. Copper baron Thomas W. Lawson was still a fan of sailing ships, and have one commissioned for the purpose of showing how magnificent and useful they could still be. It was certainly large, the largest ever, magnificent, too, and it was dubbed the Thomas W. Lawson.

Launched on July 10, 1902, Thomas W. Lawson was 475 feet long and contained seven masts of nearly two hundred feet tall each, carrying 25 sails with a cumulative canvas area of 43,000 square feet. She measured 5,218 gross register tons, boasted a carrying capacity of 11,000 tons, and was operated by a crew of only 18, when a similar-sized steamer would have required anything up to fifty. This was possible because the work of the sailors was facilitated by various mechanisms. The schooner, while it did not have an engine, was equipped with a steam steering engine, steam winches, an electrical system and even a telephone network.

When fully loaded, the Thomas W. Lawson's draft was 9 meters. Curiously, at that time there was only one port in the United States capable of receiving such deep-seated vessels—the Newport News, in Virginia. As a result, her capacity was reduced to 7,400 tons in order to accommodate her into more ports. Even with reduced cargo, Thomas W. Lawson was so large that she was difficult to maneuver and sluggish. She tended to yaw and needed a strong wind to be held on course. Sailors likened her to a bath tub or a beached whale.  

So what happened to the Thomas W. Lawson? You guessed it- it sank. Read the story of the world's largest sailing ship at Amusing Planet.

In April of 1897, after being shipped across the continent, 16 seas lions arrived at their new home, Starin’s Glen Island summer resort on the Long Island Sound. By the end of the day, three of the sea lions had escaped, crossing a metal rail and going over, or perhaps under, a six-foot fence. But it wasn't long before the seals were seen again. Just the next day, 13-year-old Willie Grogan went for a sunset swim in the sound.  

According to The New York Times, Willie had just surfaced from a dive when he heard what sounded like a human cough. It was dusk, so he couldn’t see that well. He wasn’t supposed to be swimming there at that time, so he feared that a police officer had spotted him from the pier.

At first, Willie thought the cough was coming from a bald man with a long, droopy mustache. Thinking it was perhaps a local German saloon keeper taking a night swim, the boy yelled out, “Hello Dutchy!” The response was another cough.

Forgetting all of his fears of getting caught by the police, the young boy started to scream as he swam back toward the pier. All he could think of were sea serpents, sharks, and Jonah the whale.

The sighting set off a flurry of sea lion hunting, as the park had offered a reward for the escaped animals. Read the story of the great sea lion escape at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company 

The blog Abecedarian has a section dedicated to rhetorical questions, which the author kindly answers for us.

Q: Tired of totin' coffee pots from home?
A: Yes!  We can hardly get through our front door, what with all the coffee pots.

Some of the answers even have quotes or links for research purposes. You'll find page after page of answers to questions that no one ever expected to be answered. Don't get too hung up on the dates listed for the posts, because no one is going to explain it. There's also a section called Rhetorical Answers, Questioned. It's a little different but just as entertaining. -via Nag on the Lake

One the one hand, charging people to answer nature's call seems cruel. On the other hand, building and maintaining public restrooms isn't cheap. And so came the concept of the pay toilet, which goes back at least to the Roman Empire. But the number of pay toilets reached its peak in the mid-20th century.

There was a perceived safety aspect to toilet locks, as the barrier of payment was thought to discourage drug use, sexual activity, thefts, or “hippies” from loitering, though it’s not clear why any persons using the toilet for nefarious purposes couldn’t just pay their dime and get on with it.

But there was a larger, more glaring issue: While toilets were subject to a fee, urinals were not. That meant men had the freedom to empty their bladders without being charged, while women looking to use a stall had to pay.

It was a subtle form of gender discrimination, but it didn’t go unnoticed. In 1969, California State Assemblywoman March Fong Eu took to the steps of the California State Capitol building and smashed a porcelain toilet with a sledgehammer to protest the inequality promoted by the locked stalls. It was the beginning of a revolution.

Read what it took to turn the tide on pay toilets, even though they aren't completely gone even today, at Mental Floss.

Animaniacs, a beloved kids' show that aired on TV from 1993 to '98, was revived for streaming in 2020. In a zany yet metaphysical moment of self-awareness, the characters sing a song to explain their own return as a part of the general trend in Hollywood for the 21st century. The second season of Animaniacs will premiere on Hulu on November 5. -via Geeks Are Sexy

Every once in a while, you have to get through Google's CAPTCHA system to access something on the internet. It can get annoying, especially on those days you run into several of them. Identifying traffic lights, buses, or signs can be a chore, especially if you don't see perfectly. But beyond the resentment of having to prove your humanity, you sooner or later realize that the images are just plain bad.

CAPTCHA pictures are often shot from extremely awkward angles — angles that we humans would never pick.

When you or I take a picture, we typically shoot from the view from our eyes. We’re usually holding the camera; our body is inherently involved in framing the view. But CAPTCHA photos were taken to train self-driving cars, so they were shot from the vantage-point of cameras mounted on Google’s Waymo experimental vehicles. That’s why the angles are just so oddly off.

Clive Thompson identified six ways that the images are unsettling to the human eye, which altogether show us how artificial intelligence sees the world. It must be depressing to be a robot. But by contrast, these reasons give us insight into what a real human sees instead, and how the human point of view is so much better. Read what he found at OneZero. It could make the chore of proving you're human a little more interesting. -via Digg

True crime stories are the result of meticulous research, but they are enhanced if the author is tied to the story, as in the book Helter Skelter, which was written by the prosecutor in the Manson case, or The Stranger Beside Me, Anne Rule's first true crime book about a fellow she knew named Ted Bundy. Another such story was the account written by Abraham Lincoln, about a murder case in which he defended two suspects.

For a few short weeks during June 1841, residents of Springfield, Illinois, were caught up in the mass hysteria of a sensational murder case that had all the elements of an Edgar Allan Poe murder mystery. Three strangers from out of town arrive in Springfield, but one of them soon goes missing. Wild rumors abound and soon two of the men and their local brother are accused of murder. The motive, $1,500 in gold coins stolen from the dead man who is yet to be found. One brother turns against the other two and agrees to testify as a witness for the prosecution. More sensation-loving witnesses come forward to testify against the two brothers who can already feel the noose around their neck.

Their defense attorney was a thirty-two year-old future president of the United States who flips the script with a Perry Mason plot twist so outrageous, everybody just wanted to go home and forget it ever happened.

Lincoln wrote his account of the trial soon afterward in a letter, and then in 1846 expanded the story for a newspaper. You can read the article in Lincoln's words at Historical Crime Detective. -via Strange Company