Miss Cellania's Blog Posts

A Bad Lip Reading of The NFL 2019

The folks at Bad Lip Reading do this every year. We don't know what the NFL players, coaches, and refs are really saying, so random guesses will do, as long as they fit the lips. Don't watch this while drinking liquid!


Ranking Super Bowl Snacks by How (Un)Healthy They Are

Americans treat Super Bowl Sunday like a holiday, even if it is one centered around watching TV. There are even traditional foods now associated with the Super Bowl, designed to serve many people who are watching TV. We know that most of these dishes aren't good for us, but which ones are the worst for our blood pressure, metabolism, and waistline? Mel magazine ranks 11 of the most common treats that will be served for Super Bowl parties. Some of them are surprisingly okay.


The Sound A Caracal Makes



The caracal is a wild cat native to Africa that is described as "medium-sized." It's certainly not a "big cat," as in lion and tiger, but they weigh 18-40 pounds, so you don't want one stalking you in the dark. Remember, cats are sharp and pointy on five out of six ends. Big Cat Rescue does an overdramatic buildup on this video, but let me spoil it for you: the caracal's call sounds like a meow with extra vibrato. They call it a trill.


Why Can’t We Have Decent Toilet Stalls?

Many places in Europe have public restrooms in which the stalls are complete rooms unto themselves, offering enough privacy that they don't even need to be separated by sex. In contrast, restroom stalls in the US are designed to discourage people from using them.  

In America, our toilet stalls are awful. The flimsy partitions start at least a foot off the ground, don’t go anywhere near the ceiling, and fail to block the reality that we’re pooping and peeing right next to each other. Sometimes, these stalls are so shoddily constructed that there is a gap at the edge of the door through which a toilet sitter and someone outside the stall can make eye contact.

Why is that? Because in America, public toilets are designed for the people who own them, not the people who use them. That could be an analogy for many differences between America and the European Union, but that's an argument for another day. The various reasons for user-unfriendly American restrooms are detailed at Slate. -via Digg

(Image credit: Natalie Matthews-Ramo)


Indomation



Inspired by the Jurassic Park movies, Mason Drumm made a stop-motion animated short film in which a dinosaur invades a guy's house. When I say "guy," I mean an articulated artist's mannequin. The attention to detail here is amazing, and the story is pretty good, too. Clever girl! There's a making-of video here.  -via Laughing Squid


The Case for Vitamin-Enriched Alcohol

On the surface, vitamin-enriched alcohol sounds like a crazy marketing stunt, but that's not the case here at all. A deficiency of vitamin B1, or thiamine, can cause Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome (WKS), a form of beriberi that causes permanent amnesia nd brain damage, and relegates suffers to nursing home care. WKS victims are historically those who are starving from poverty, famine, or imprisonment. Now common foods like bread are fortified with thiamine and other vitamins. In modern America, almost every victim of WKS is severely alcoholic. Those are the ones who would benefit from thiamine-enriched alcohol.  

More than 40 years ago, Brandon Centerwall and Michael Criqui published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine arguing for the fortification of alcoholic beverages with thiamine. According to Centerwall and Criqui, every dollar invested in thiamine fortification saved approximately $7 in nursing home costs. Centerwall later reported that trials by Seagram & Sons, Anheuser-Busch, and the California Wine Institute during the 1930s found thiamine to be stable in whiskey, wine, and beer. And at the levels needed to prevent WKS, thiamine would have no impact on the safety of alcoholic beverages.

So what is stopping thiamine-enriched alcohol? Optics. Some fear that enriched alcohol may be marketed as a health food. Others argue that mitigating the damage of alcoholism might encourage drinking. There are other problem with adding thiamine to alcohol that you can read about at Real Clear Science.

(Image credit: theopie)


Evil Packaging Designs

(Image credit: 3cuas)

This collection of tea came in four jars. We don't know how big the jars are, but judging from the view from above, they are apparently more than was needed for the amount of tea contained within.

(Image credit: Icecreep109)

Notice these two bottles. The one on the left, presumably the newer one, says "bigger size better value." Not that you could tell a difference in the bottle sizes by looking, just a slightly different shape. At the bottom, however, you notice the "bigger size" bottle has only 15 ounces, whereas the older bottle has 18! This kind of disappointing packaging happens with all kinds of products. You'll see a huge gallery of such anger-provoking packaging at Bored Panda.


How Popcorn Saved the Movies



When theaters began showing movies more than 100 years ago, popcorn (and all food) was forbidden. Over time, it became a case of "If you can't beat them, join them." Cheddar explains the big turnaround in movie theater popcorn. -via Laughing Squid


Porg, the Glass Kitten



A suburban Chicago resident found a box of abandoned kittens left on the porch. One was injured, so it was taken to an animal hospital. One of the veterinarians there, Elise Hall, took the kitten in after treatment. He had enormous eyes, so she named him Porg, after the Star Wars critters.

At first, they thought Porg was just unusual in appearance, but soon discovered his genetic condition - things such as grooming or scratching his ears or neck would lead to large recurrent tears in his skin.

After a skin biopsy, they confirmed that Porg suffered from a hereditary collagen defect, which is known to people as Ehlers Danlos Syndrome.

"By this time it was clear - Porg was a permanent member of our family."

Ehlers Danlos Syndrome affects the connective tissues and can cause a range of symptoms. In Porg's case, it makes his skin very fragile and affects his eyes. Port wears sweaters to protect his skin and gets daily eye drops. Finding a home with a veterinarian is just what Porg needed. Read his story at Love Meow. You can follow Porg's progress at Instagram.


Living in the World's Coldest Town



We are familiar with the Siberian towns of Yakutsk, Oymayakon, and Norilsk, only because they are very cold and inhospitable. But the town with the coldest recorded temperature on earth is also in Siberia. Verkoyansk has recorded a temperature of 90 degrees below zero! That's -67.8 centigrade. Verkoyansk is also notably hot in the summer (go figure), so it has a second world record for the largest temperature differential. Half as Interesting gives us a short lesson in temperature and meteorology that explains Verkoyansk, and also some trivia about what living in such a town is like.  


Day of the Dolphin: How Vintage Florida Kitsch Masked a Grim Reality

Vacation souvenirs are the ultimate in kitsch, and nothing says "Florida vacation" more than knick-knacks featuring dolphins. Collectors who amass vintage Florida dolphin souvenirs know they can evoke fond memories of good times long ago, but they also capture a time that wasn't so great for the dolphins involved. The first Florida aquarium featuring dolphins opened in 1938 to enthusiastic crowds. A decade later, such attractions began training dolphins to perform tricks for paying audiences. The craze for dolphins peaked in the 1960s when the TV show Flipper became a hit. While the tourists kept coming to watch the intelligent marine mammals perform impressive stunts, research on dolphin intelligence plus the proliferation of smaller, cheaper attractions caused a shift in public consciousness about the ethics of keeping captive dolphins.   

In fact, evidence was piling up that the experiences of captive marine mammals were pretty grim. Even though marine biologists continued to refine their abilities to keep dolphins alive, animal activists argued it was cruel to keep intelligent mammals in a tank, no matter what the size. Dolphins in the wild swim hundreds of miles a day and interact with an underwater world of other creatures. Dolphins in captivity often engage in repetitive behaviors, self-injure, and become aggressive to trainers or other animals.

Above all, it was clear that captivity shortened dolphins’ life span: Bottlenose dolphins can live for an average of 40 years in the wild. But captive dolphins only make it an average of 5.

Just capturing the dolphins was extraordinarily stressful and terrifying for the animals, to say nothing of imprisoning them, sometimes in solitary confinement, in bare tanks only large enough to swim circles in. Training them and displaying them posed additional dangers.

Still, it took decades for the marine mammal shows to die out. Read about the rise and fall of dolphin parks at Collectors Weekly.


The Super Bowl Isn't About Football



The Super Bowl is this Sunday! That's, like, a national holiday in the US, in which we play the ultimate game of American football to find out which is the best NFL team of the season. However, other holiday traditions have come to supersede the game. For example, the high cost of ads make the Super Bowl a showcase for the best TV commercials of the year. That's the part College Humor focuses on in this video. There are other Super Bowl Sunday traditions that overshadow the game, like the halftime show and whatever controversy comes from it, and the food (because there's nothing more American than extreme food). Come to think of it, we could skip the game entirely and still have a great Super Bowl Sunday.


Murder in the Red Barn

Ann Marten of Polstead, England, had a recurring dream about her stepdaughter, Maria. Maria had gone to Ipswich with her lover William Corder several months earlier. Thomas and Ann Marten hadn't heard from her since, although Corder returned to his hometown of Polstead occasionally, and gave various excuses for Maria's silence. Ann finally told Thomas about the dream.

“I have very frequently dreamed about Maria,” Ann said, “and twice before Christmas, I dreamed that Maria was murdered, and buried in the Red Barn.” She would have told him sooner, Ann explained, but was afraid he’d think she was superstitious.

The Red Barn was a prominent landmark in Polstead, a quaint corner of England’s Suffolk County countryside. Named for a unique red brick roof, the building on Barnfield Hill was the last known meeting place between Maria Marten and her lover, William Corder. The pair had used the barn as a rendezvous point before apparently eloping to Ipswich on May 18, 1827.

Ann asked Thomas to go check out the barn. You can guess what happened when he did. What followed was a sensational trial that drew thousands of people to Polstead. Read about Maria Marten, Corder's trial, and the aftermath at Mental Floss.


The Egret Inception Continues

Remember the egret painting posted to reddit a couple of weeks ago that everyone then painted in recursion style? Artists were churning out new versions so fast that you couldn't keep up with them, and multiple artworks branched off from the main iteration. So of course, a subreddit community was created to archive them all. Redditor nublargh made a diagram of the paintings, arranged so that you can see the relationship between each one. That's 24 paintings over nine generations, as of now, but it may be updated.



You can double click on each thumbnail to bring up the full-size painting at its reddit post. If you prefer, you can see a lot of the photos quickly in this Twitter thread. -via Metafilter

(Top image credit: SaintSundown)


Cat Gets Existential

This is Tingeling, a cat in Oslo who looks an awful lot like a young Toothless from the movie How to Train Your Dragon. Or perhaps an owl.

There are more videos featuring Tingeling in the Instagram gallery she shares with her brother Tussetroll, some silly and some just cute. -Thanks, Gothgrrl!


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