Have you ever wondered what a beaver's tail looks like inside? Or a toucan's beak? The Oregon Zoo posted several x-rays taken during veterinary checkups to show us how strange and different these creatures are.
Only 20% pf purchases at IKEA are planned ahead of time, the rest are impulse buys. The secret is the layout, which is a maze. You have to look at everything in the store to get to the meatballs. I've never been to IKEA, but can imagine that if you see something you like, you might consider putting off that purchase until later, but then you think about having to negotiate that maze again on another day, and so you go ahead and buy it now. My desire to shop at IKEA has dropped considerably after watching this video. Maybe I can sneak in the out door and get some meatballs someday. -via Tastefully Offensive
We are used to stories of alien abduction, which all seem to have some elements in common: short grayish men with large eyes take the abductee into a spaceship, where they are given a physical examination. It's a familiar story to us, but it wasn't common 60 years ago. In fact, it was unheard of before the 1961 incident involving Barney and Betty Hill of New Hampshire.
The point is that "alien abduction" just wasn't a thing that could happen to a person in 1961. All of those abduction tropes, the stuff you saw in X-Files, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Independence Day and parodied in shows like South Park, none of that existed at the time. This is where it all started.
The guy, Barney Hill, was a 39-year-old mailman with chronic ulcers. His wife Betty was a 41-year-old social worker. They lived in New Hampshire. On the night of September 19, they were on a long drive back home from a road trip in Canada, and at 10:30 p.m. they saw a light in the sky. Typical UFO stuff so far -- they described the object as bright, round, and silent, moving erratically. Thinking this looked more interesting than the moose rodeo or whatever they'd gone to see in Canada, they followed the object, stopping at various points to get a closer look through binoculars.
At some point, the object noticed them.
The Hills arrived home hours later than they expected, and they noticed some things that were not quite right, but they didn't recall what happened during that missing time. It took nightmares, hypnosis, and five years before the story leaked to the public of how Betty and Barney had been taken and examined by aliens. What would have been considered a hallucination or delusion in one person was more convincing when it came from two people. Read the story of Betty and Barney Hill and some possible explanations at Cracked.
We know in our heads that suspension bridges are flexible, but we don't normally see them put under so much stress that they have a visible bend. The weight limit on the one-lane Beaver Bridge in Beaver, Arkansas, is ten tons. The bus could easily be twice that, possibly several times that. You have to wonder what it feels like to ride that bus, and then you have to wonder what damage it's doing to the bridge over time. -via Digg
Sometimes the best puns arise by accident or error. English contains a multitude of idioms, and it's hard to keep up with them all, so we end up with mixed metaphors, malaprops, malaphors, and malaproverbs. You might even include malamanteaus. They are all mangled combinations of familiar idioms.
He knows where all the skeletons are buried.
Until the cows freeze over.
Give them an inch, then they take a foot, and soon you don't have a leg to stand on.
Once bitten, twice shy, three times a lady.
We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.
Don’t count your chickens until the barn door is closed.
On Wednesday, Canadians were able to legally buy marijuana for recreational use. Each province has the authority to set limits on when and where cannabis is sold. There were long lines in many locations, and the biggest glitch so far is demand outstripping supply. The above picture is from Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, where marijuana is being sold through the state-controlled liquor stores. The main joke is how the sales at the nearby McDonald's is going to soar.
Norwegian history re-enactor Ola Onsrud demonstrates how 14th-century knights battled while wearing full armor, or harness, as he calls it. It's nothing like the movies. A slashing motion will get you nowhere, so it doesn't even make sense to defend yourself like the sword fights we see in film. You can see more videos of armored hand-to-hand combat at Laughing Squid.
The Communist regime of the Soviet Union used art and architecture as propaganda. Both buildings and monuments were massive, efficient, and futuristic, an homage to the glorious future of an egalitarian industrial society. To outsiders, the architecture looked grim and menacing, and the style came to be known as Brutalist. The new book Brutal Bloc Postcards is full of, well, postcards of those buildings and monuments, because the Soviets wanted all citizens to be inspired by their grandeur.
Perhaps the most influential architect of the era was a Swiss Modernist named Le Corbusier. Though his romance with the Soviet regime was brief—Le Corbusier only worked with the Russians from 1928 to 1932—the architect left a lasting impact on Soviet Constructivists like Moisei Ginzburg (the author of Style and Epoch) and made poured concrete the material du jour for Russian Modernists. Interestingly, libertarian icon Ayn Rand, for all her open hatred of the Soviets, seemed to love the austere, functional, and material-focused architecture of Le Corbusier and the Constructivists. In her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, architect Howard Roark and his affection for concrete bears even more similarities to Le Corbusier than his supposed inspiration, American designer Frank Lloyd Wright.
Strangely, the Brutalist style was abandoned during the Stalin era and brought back with Kruschchev. Now many of the Soviet monuments are falling into ruin, but you can read about them and see a gallery of images at Collectors Weekly.
On December 10, this year's Nobel Prize winners will gather with royalty and dignitaries at City Hall in Stockholm for the Nobel banquet. Some think the highlight of the evening is the awarding of the prizes, but those who know say it's really the dessert parade, a grand entrance featuring a light show of sparklers as an army of servers bring in the dessert.
Nobel banquets have been held since 1901, and each year, the menu is exquisite. That’s to be expected: Some of the world’s most lauded people, not to mention Swedish royalty and dignitaries, are in attendance. In the first few years, the food was mostly French-style, the cuisine of the elite. Only later in the century did Swedish dishes and ingredients take center stage, with filet of sole being replaced by filet of reindeer. But until recently, there was one constant: For dessert, dozens of waiters descended the grand staircase with trays of Nobel ice cream and sparklers, a fitting accompaniment to the Nobel Prize’s explosive origins.
Things change, and even the ice cream is optional these days. However the dessert parade will continue, upstaging the scientists and peacemakers once again. Read about the Nobel banquet and its ice cream parades at Atlas Obscura.
The five major human senses are sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Our brains integrate stimuli coming from each, and combine that data to make sense out of our environment. Input from one sense can alter our perception of input from another sense, as the Rabbit Illusions from CalTech shows. The first illusion is called the Illusory Rabbit, shown in this video, and the second is the Invisible Rabbit, which you can see attached to the research paper abstract. CalTech also gives us a simple explanation of each illusion. Honestly, I only saw two flashes, but since both my eyesight and my hearing are not what they used to be, I second guessed myself and assumed I must have missed a flash. However, the research addresses the idea that our perception can change due to information added later. I haven't yet seen an explanation of why they called it the Rabbit Illusion. -via Boing Boing
From the perspective of 2018, the TV series Dallas is a relic of the 1980s. The outrageous dealings of the obscenely wealthy Ewing family was termed a "primetime soap opera," but it pioneered so many TV tropes we take for granted today: an unethical protagonist, a continuing story arc, and end-of-season cliffhangers. As the show turns 40, we have a chance to learn how that all came about. The show's creators wanted an "epic saga," but they didn't know a thing about Dallas, the city.
Jim Schutze was a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald from 1978 to 1991: Of course, Dallas hated Dallas at first. It was everything that Dallas felt that it was not. The boots, the hats, the ranching, the oil. That was all Houston.
Bob Miller was the show’s on-set men’s costumer: [When we shot scenes in downtown Dallas,] we had a whole stock of cowboy hats to give to the background actors, just to make sure Larry didn’t look odd. He didn’t want to be the only person walking around in a hat.
The people of Dallas didn't think much of the show at first, but at least it shifted the world's view of the city as the place where Kennedy was shot. As Dallas grew to be a global phenomena over 14 seasons, Dallas residents managed to embrace it. The cover story of this month's Texas Monthly magazine is an extensive oral history of Dallas. -via Metafilter
We've seen Boston Dynamics' quadruped robot Spot do some amazing things, but nothing so amazing as dancing to "Uptown Funk." Well, maybe "amazing" is the wrong word. How about "funny"? -via Digg
Walden Grove High School in Sahuarita, Arizona went all out for their Homecoming Assembly this year, with an elaborate dance modeled on the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The PAC Dance Team and the Advanced Dance club came together for an entertaining recap of the Harry Potter stories, as Harry and his friends battle Voldemort and his evil forces. Well done! -via Geeks Are Sexy
Charles Phoenix (previously at Neatorama) invented the cherpumple in 2011. That's three pies (apple, cherry, and pumpkin) baked inside three layers of different kinds of cake, stacked and frosted. His famous recipe is now going to be celebrated as a float in the Anaheim Halloween Parade on October 27th.
The float is being designed and built by artists Kevin Kidney and Jody Daily. You can see in the construction photos that the float contains an "invisible door," which would better be called a "pie hole."
Yes, Phoenix will ride on the float. Pictures of the finished float are sure to follow at Instagram as the parade date draws near. -via Boing Boing
In 1980, French filmmaker Michel Parbot made an hour-long TV documentary on the filming of the second Star Wars movie. The Making of 'The Empire Strikes Back' was lost for many years (although short clips were passed around), but apparently Adywan, a French Star Wars fan, found a film copy somewhere, and it is now available for the first time in its entirety on YouTube. Enjoy behind-the-scenes footage of fight choreography, an extended look at the struggles of filming on Hoth (Norway), learn how special effects were done before CGI, and hear stories from the professionals involved in the production.
