There's something strangely rhythmic about pig calling. Andre Antunes noticed it, too, and put his guitar skills to work turning a pig calling competition into a heavy metal song. -via Kottke

It was a decisive moment in French history when the notorious prison known as the Bastille was stormed in 1789. The Bastille was destroyed, but the site in central Paris remained important to the people of France. What kind of monument should be in that place? For 32 years, it was a huge elephant.  

When the Bastille fell in July 1789 and subsequently demolished, there was some debate as to what should replace the former prison. It was decided that the area would become a square celebrating liberty, and a column would be erected there. A foundation stone was laid but the column never materialized. Instead, a fountain was built in 1793, depicting the Egyptian God Isis with water flowing from her breasts. But Napoleon had more grandiose plans. In 1810, the emperor decreed that a new fountain was to be erected, in the shape of an elephant, one that would be heroic and delightful to all who beheld it.

Napoleon's vision was that the elephant should be made of bronze, incorporating the cannons he had seized from enemies. But Napoleon would only be in power a few more years, and that spelled doom for the elephant monument, although it outlived him for some time. Read about Napoleon's elephant at Amusing Planet.

(Image credit: Aquarelle de Jean-Antoine Alavoine)

The fjords of Norway are beautiful, but with varying widths, depths, and complicated geography, they aren't easy to navigate. The ocean around them isn't all that easy, either. To make traveling by water faster and simpler, the country has greenlit a massive project to build the world's first full-scale ship tunnel. The Stad Ship Tunnel through the Stadhavet peninsula, expected to be completed in 2026, will be a mile long and large enough to accommodate a cruise ship! This video explains why it's needed and how it will be done. -via Nag on the Lake

Norma Shearer was the supremely confident early Hollywood star whose career survived both the advent of "talkies" and the censorship of the Hayes Code. Between those two cinematic milestones, she turned the popular concept of womanhood in movies on its ear by playing woman with real personalities and sex drives. Shearer never let an opportunity slip by, and she  went from being rejected by the Zeigfeld Follies to a contract with Louis B. Mayer and marriage to Irving Thalberg.

The role that eventually won her an Oscar almost wasn’t given to her. Shearer’s own husband initially did not want to cast her in The Divorcee because he didn’t believe she had the sex appeal. She took it upon her self to organise a boudoir photo shoot to convince him that she could be cast as the sensual lead in The Divorcee.

Her character in the film was that of a wife who discovers her husband’s affair and seeks to settle the score with an adulterous tryst of her own, challenging the double standards of marriage. In the pivotal pre-code film, Shearer played Jerry to be a sympathetic character, someone strong and rather than a bitter and vindictive woman.

She was “the exemplar of sophisticated 1930s womanhood,” wrote film historian Mick LaSale, “exploring love and sex with an honesty that would be considered frank by modern standards.” Norma was able to help change the way women were viewed on screen and with The Divorcee, among other films, she helped pave the way for the likes of Mae West and Jean Harlow.

Shearer showed Hollywood that style and daring (and acting skills) mattered more than a perfect face. Read about Norma Shearer's life and her effect on cinema at Messy Messy Chic.

(Image credit: MGM)

A poll of 1,211 US adults was conducted by YouGov. The participants were instructed to choose which of two states is the better state, with seven matchups per participant. The results were ranked by which states were selected the highest percentage of the time. Whether the results reflect experience or reputation is up in the air, as we don't know whether the participants travel extensively or not. Read more about the survey at YouGov. -via Fark

Back in the day when newspapers were just about the only form of daily entertainment, New York papers printed stories that may or may not be true to fill pages, and no one complained as long as they were entertaining. The 1895 hijinks of a goat and his cat friend were just more fodder for the morning edition. A goat, "who had been living on tomato cans, nails, and broken glass for months," smelled the papier-mâché icicles that were being installed above the new ice skating rink. The goat could not reach them, and set out to enlist the help of Dolph, a cat who was renowned for doing tricks on stage.

The goat ran down Lexington Avenue and stopped in front of Mr. Falk’s house, where he bleated a special signal to summon his feline friend. Dolph saw his goat friend through the window and exited the basement door to join him. “There was consultation and then off the two started, and a few moments later halted in front of the ice palace.”

The goat gave Dolph a few instructions, and the cat took off, scrambling up the felt-covered walls toward the ceiling. He then dodged into a hole that marked the uncompleted part of the sub-ceiling. According to The Sun reporter–who noted that details of the story were not all necessarily true–Dolph bit off a few icicles for his goat friend.

After satisfying his friend’s hunger, Dolph decided to satisfy his curiosity by prowling around between the two ceilings. Meanwhile, workmen continued building the icicle sub-ceiling, eventually sealing the hole through which Dolph had entered.

This unlikely explanation led to Dolph being trapped in the ceiling for eight days, which may be true enough. Less likely was the epilogue about the goat and cat no longer speaking after the incident. Read the story and how it turned out at The Hatching Cat.  -via Strange Company

I just had to contribute pic.twitter.com/Sqv9rBaC18

— Tom (@ThomasCDix) July 10, 2019

Lisa Stinson found a scientific paper with a title that made her laugh. Is it the funniest ever? Maybe so, maybe not, but posting it to Twitter made other people run and look up memorable science paper titles that made them laugh, too. It appears that scientists know all the puns related to their research, and when the opportunity arises to incorporate them into a paper title, they just can't help themselves. There are a lot more of these in the Twitter thread, or you can see the best 30 of them ranked at Bored Panda.

The security camera caught a couple in Burgaw, North Carolina, leaving home when an animal attacked the woman. Her husband bravely grabbed the cat and held it up before realizing it's a bobcat, at which point he yeets it across the yard. This video was originally uploaded to TikTok, where it was deleted by their algorithm for advocating violence as the man vowed to kill the cat. He did indeed kill the bobcat, and later tests found it was infected with rabies. The couple are undergoing a series of rabies shots to stave off infection. This video contains NSFW language. -via Digg

Get your pets vaccinated.

The above photograph by Mads Nissen, titled The First Embrace, was named Photo of the Year by the World Press Photo Foundation. From Nissen's Instagram page:

THE FIRST EMBRACE. 85-year-old Rosa Luzia Lunardi is embraced by nurse Adriana Silva da Costa Souza, the first hug she receives in five months. In March, care homes across the country closed their doors to all visitors, preventing millions of concerned Brazilians from visiting their elderly relatives, while the caretakers were ordered to limit all physical contact with the vulnerable to an absolute minimum. But at Viva Bem, an old age home outside Sao Paulo, a simple new invention ‘The Hug Curtain' has once again allowed people to see and hug each other without risking their lives. And for those who do not have visitors, volunteers and staff are ready to step in – because, as they say at Viva Bem : "Everyone deserves a good hug".

The effect of a hug through the curtain looks like angel wings. The Foundation also named the World Press Photo Story of the Year, Photo Interactive of the Year, and Online Video of the Year. See those and read the stories behind them at the contest site. -via Nag on the Lake

Sure, I'll have a gin and tonic -it's medicine, right? Or it was at one time. You don't want to risk suffering from malaria, scurvy, or the plague! Alton Brown explains the history of this particular cocktail, and how to make one. The original footage is from 2013, recently unearthed and finished, which explains why the text gives us corrections every once in a while. -via reddit

Movie star, fashion icon, and dancer Audrey Hepburn was a young teenager during World War II, when her family lived under Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. We know that deprivation during the war helped led to Hepburn's lifelong thin frame, but she told the press almost nothing about what she did for the war effort.

In stories of doomed World War II gallantry, little is as romanticized as Operation Market Garden. A technical failure by the Allied Powers to defeat the Nazis in 1944, this invasion of the Netherlands left British paratroopers stranded around a bridge in Arnhem, far too removed from their tanks to hold the line. Nevertheless, the bravery of those Airborne “Red Devils” has lived on in pop culture, as have the Dutch resistance fighters who sheltered them. What has been largely forgotten is that among those courageous souls was… a teenaged Audrey Hepburn? For about a week, in fact, the future movie star kept a Red Devil hidden in the cellar.

Yes, before she became a Hollywood actress, Audrey Hepburn worked with the Dutch resistance. She was an assistant to a local doctor who ran resistance operations, and was able to hide her activities from the Germans because she was so young. But she never talked about those things, according to Robert Matzen, author of the book Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II. 

Says Matzen, “Her mother and father were pro-German, pro-Nazi supporters up to and through the invasion of the Netherlands. Audrey could never reconcile herself to what her parents represented. It was her darkest secret, really, one that could contaminate the press about her. It could contaminate her career and kill it.”

That knowledge—as well as a lifelong modesty bred into her about never boasting or complaining—caused her to omit those sordid details, as well as stories of her dancing later in private gatherings to raise funds to hide and feed Jewish neighbors as the Holocaust marched on. Both aspects of her youth, her parents’ mistakes and her family’s later resistance, have thus become greatly diminished.

Read about the horrific event that led Hepburn's family to see things differently, and get an overview of what young Audrey did during the war at Den of Geek.

(Image credit: Hmarskiy II) 

Wherever you go in the United States, you'll recognize the official signs of the National Forest Service. The slightly rounded trapezoid shapes, the sturdy base, and the unobtrusive colors are consistent across the country. It wasn't always that way. At one time, Forest Service signs varied from place to place, and many sites didn't have signs at all. The iconic signs debuted 1963, the work of Virgil “Bus” Carrell, a lifelong forest ranger who had no graphic design experience, but really cared about the Forest Service. Carrell teamed up with artist Rudy Wendelin, who designed Smokey Bear.  

Carrell, Wendelin, and two landscape architects began their work with a tour of Forest Service-managed areas. They found some entrances marked with the agency’s official shield, others with hand-drawn placards or metallic eyesores. Some signs merely had the property’s name. Others featured entire histories. What they didn’t see anywhere was consistency.

Based on his observations, Carrell developed a philosophy summed up in his essay “Signs to Complement Natural Beauty.” It reads like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War for forest signs: “A sign does not have to be the gaudiest, the biggest, and the most colorful to be the best one,” and “The text should develop no more than one topic and have a warm tone.”

Read about Carrell and his dedication to the Forest Service, and the signs that are his legacy, at Atlas Obscura.

(Image credit: U.S. Forest Service- Pacific Northwest Region)

Werner Herzog has never used a skateboard, but he agreed to an interview with Ian Michna of the skateboarding magazine Jenkem. Herzog's thoughts on skateboarding delved into philosophy: failure vs. achievement, the sport as an art, and how it should be filmed. This brief but fascinating exchange shows how all worlds intersect when you take a look at what's really going on. -via Metafilter

Pterosaurs have always seemed like an anomaly among ancient reptiles. They were huge- the azhdarchid pterosaur had a wingspan of up to eight meters (26 feet), plus it had a long neck and long beak. How does such a big animal fly and carry prey large enough to feed on?

To learn more about their bones, researchers examined the internal structure of a well-preserved azhdarchid pterosaur vertebra; it was nearly 100 million years old, and had been found in the Kem Kem beds, a fossil-rich region near the border of Morocco and Algeria. Using x-ray computed tomography and 3D modeling, the scientists found the vertebra was filled with dozens of 1-millimeter-thick spikes, called trabeculae, crossing each other like the spokes of a bicycle wheel in cross section, and forming a helix along the bone. The spokes surrounded a central tube where the animal’s spinal cord would have been. “We just could not believe it,” says Cariad Williams, a paleontologist at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who first looked at the scans. “We have never seen anything like it before. … It was really impressive.”

To test whether the spokes provided extra support to the bones, the researchers did some mathematical modeling. They found that as few as 50 trabeculae almost doubled the vertebra’s ability to carry weight, they report today in iScience. The researchers also calculated that the neck of their specimen could lift prey weighing between 9 and 11 kilograms, roughly the size of a large turkey. “It’s a real feat of biological engineering,” Ibrahim says.

Read more about the research at Science magazine. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Mark Witton and Darren Naish)

From a human perspective, trap jaw ants are just plain weird. Ze Frank presents them by following an ant named Mildred, a mentally-ill daughter of a dysfunctional family. Of course, that lifestyle is just normal for her species of ant. Her jaws snap so hard that it throws her body backwards, a side effect that these ants have harnessed for survival purposes. We also get a look at other trap jaw ant species and how they differ in strange ways.