Good choices come from experience, and experience comes from bad choices. And no matter what you think, there are things your parents tried to teach you that went in one ear and out the other. You had to learn that lesson the hard way.
Everyone's got a story like that to tell, although the exact stories vary from person to person. The upside, after the pain subsided, was that you never forgot it.
Read 39 such lessons learned at Cracked, and add yours in the comments here.
Judy was an English pointer born in Shanghai in 1936. She was purchased to be a mascot for a British gunboat, and lived quite an adventurous life from that point on. Not only did she become a prisoner of war during World War II, she was smuggled around the Pacific theater, escaped a torpedoed ship, gave birth to puppies, and managed to attack Japanese prison guards and live to bark the tale. Simon Whistler of Today I Found Out tells the story of Judy, the heroic war dog.
The dairy industry wants to restrict the word "milk" to the products of mammal lactation, in response to the growing use of almond milk, soy milk, cashew milk, and other drinks used as a milk substitute. It's more a matter of business than semantics, as the dairy industry still has no problem with the words "peanut butter." Nor are they worried about milk of magnesia or milkweed. In response, Know Ideas Media visited a third-generation almond milk producer, played by Tyler Duffy, to find out exactly where almond milk comes from. Warning: unless you have the world's cleanest mind, you'll find this video full of double entendres. -via Tastefully Offensive
Zoos aren't what they used to be, and that's a good thing. The philosophy behind keeping animals in captivity was once simply that of education and entertainment for people. The educational part is still there, but zoos now justify their existence with serious conservation efforts and scientific research. That involves keeping animals in the healthiest, most natural, and least restrictive environments possible. How can we do that and still allow visitors too see them? Archstorming held a competition for zoo design to be used at the Zoo of Barcelona. First place went to a team from Bangkok for a design called Re-Habitat. See all the finalists of the Coexist: Rethinking Zoos architecture competition at Archstorming, and see some enlargeable pictures of the top three entries at Web Urbanist. -via Nag on the Lake
Sir Patrick Stewart made a surprise appearance at a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas earlier today, and mentioned that he will once again play the role of Jean-Luc Picard in a new Star Trek series to be shown on CBS All Access, the streaming service that already hosts the show Star Trek: Discovery. Stewart also released a statement on Twitter.
It is an unexpected but delightful surprise to find myself excited and invigorated to be returning to Jean-Luc Picard and to explore new dimensions within him. Read my full statement in the photo. #StarTrek @cbsallaccess Photo: @shervinfoto pic.twitter.com/8Ynuj3RBNm
— Patrick Stewart (@SirPatStew) August 4, 2018
Stewart hasn't played Picard on a Star Trek TV series since The Next Generation ended in 2002, but he has appeared in four Star Trek feature films. We don't know anything else about the new series, or when it will air. -via Uproxx
Make it so!
Thursday night was the annual Algonquin Cat Fashion Show at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. It's a fundraiser for the Mayor's Alliance for NYC Animals. It also marked the society debut of the hotel's newest resident cat, Hamlet VIII. The theme of the gala this year was "Purring 20's," so the cats were costumed in replicas of 1920s fashions. Gothamist took photographer David "Dee" Delgado to capture the event's best-dressed felines, which you can see in a gallery at Gothamist, along with a video. -via Nag on the Lake
(Image credit: David "Dee" Delgado/Gothamist)
You see some weird stuff on New York trains, but last Monday, some riders got to share a car with this guy relaxing on a leather couch. What's the deal? Turns out he's moving the couch to a different house the cheapest way possible.
We don't know how he got it through the turnstiles, but here's how he got it into the car.
Commenters at reddit say he probably took the couch through a wheelchair opening in the turnstiles. There are probably a dozen more videos of this stunt, including the turnstile phase. A good time was had by all. -via Laughing Squid
#Breaking - About 100 goats are on the loose right now in a #Boise neighborhood. They are going house to house eating everything in sight. Nobody has a clue where they came from...updates to follow pic.twitter.com/K0ghUwQEfk
— Joe Parris (@KTVBJoe) August 3, 2018
A neighborhood in Boise, Idaho, was overrun by a herd of 118 goats on Friday morning. The goats belonged to the company We Rent Goats, which had dispatched the herd to clear out vegetation around a storm retention pond. The goats either discovered or made an opening in the fence and moseyed down the street to a neighborhood off Five Mile Road. The neighbors were surprised -and delighted.
The hungry herd moved from lawn to lawn, chewing down grass, munching on rosebushes and stripping low-hanging branches bare.
"Half the neighborhood's lawn has been cut - I mean, mowing for free!" Dunn said. "It's kind of funny to see them in the road a ton, like not even caring about the cars."
The goats quickly attracted a crowd, as neighbors emerged to snap photos and pet the friendly animals. Animal Control officers responded with a single truck, but quickly realized that would not be enough.
See videos of the goats on the loose at KTVB. -via Metafilter
We've posted an awful lot of zoetropes over the years, and here is another, but this one uses real people. While it looks like a stop-motion video, you have to remember that while you watch "a man" moving, it's really six guys appearing in successive frames. Cool idea, and the producers deserve some credit for that, but the real stars are the performers. Imagine trying to stay upright on a playground carousel using just your feet while you follow a plan and coordinate your moves with five other guys! You can see a making-of video here. -via Digg
Like many branding logos, the familiar Ghostbusters icon went through a lot of changes before the filmmakers settled on a final design. But it wasn't designed for marketing purposes- this one was part of the prop department. The ghost with a red line was going to be a logo used in the movie for our heroes' ghost extermination business. It turned out pretty good considering how little time was spent on it.
But again, this was going to be a relatively small logo you'd only see on the costumes, outside the fire station, and on the side of the Ecto-1. So the art department "didn't think twice about it," because they had a buttload of other stuff to design. But when it came time to release the movie's first teaser poster, there was a problem. The studio, Columbia, hadn't obtained the rights to the title Ghostbusters, which was still owned by a short-lived 1970s children's show, nowadays best remembered for ruining the Saturday mornings of every 1980s kid who didn't read their TV Guide closely enough. (Younger readers: TV Guide was a tiny magazine you had to buy so you knew what was playing on TV. The past was awful.)
Because of this legal snafu, Columbia desperately needed a way to advertise a movie without using its title. The solution ended up being slapping Gross' final logo on the poster.
It was a brilliant marketing move, even if they didn't realize it at the time. Just a workaround to avoid a lawsuit. However, they got a lawsuit anyway that didn't have anything to do with the Ghostbusters name. Read the rest of that story plus the evolution and stories behind three other movie logos at Cracked.
Pusic, Russia's most spoiled cat (previously at Neatorama), is fascinated with the new treadmill. He learns how to use it in only six days! It's an accomplishment, alright, but since he's conquered the learning process, he can go on to other things. The hooman can practice every day until he gets it right.
They say there are no stupid questions, only questions that are weird enough to provide entertainment. On the forum Physics Stack Exchange, Billy-bodega posed the question, "Supposing that the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries, what would happen from the perspective of a person on the surface?" That brings up an entertaining picture, but Anders Sandburg of Oxford University kept thinking about it, and ended up writing a paper on the subject, released just a few days ago. There's a lot of factors to consider when building an imaginary planet.
This process of imagining blueberry earth begins with fat, thick-skinned highbush blueberries (the kind you find in grocery stores, not in the blueberry barrens of Maine). Given the estimated density of blueberries, the mass of an Earth made of berries would be a fraction of its current mass, with weaker gravity. Blueberries, Sandberg points out, are not particularly strong, able to resist the weight of a sugar cube but not a milk carton. Within a few yards of the surface of whole blueberries, the force of gravity would pulp the blueberries into mash, releasing the air that had separated each berry from its neighbors and shrinking the planet to a smaller radius. If no other forces were involved, the blueberry planet would collapse under its own weight in an estimated 42 minutes.
But there are other factors at play. The air released by the pulping of berries would create a thick, dense atmosphere, which Sandberg compares to Titan’s. Little light would filter through to the surface, so the dramatic events that followed would happen in almost total darkness.
The pressure of the weight of the fruit would soon cause other reactions. You can read Sandburg's science paper for all the details or a summary of the project at Atlas Obscura.
Now, these are some freaky-looking pies! Doesn't matter. If they've got berries in them, I'll eat it. I believe these pies were made by Ashley Newman of Folsom, Louisiana. Her Etsy store is here. Newman posted a tutorial a few years ago on how to make these pies. -via reddit
On September 20, 1919, a group of black sharecroppers who had joined the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America met with a lawyer at a church near Elaine, Arkansas, to discuss pressing their employers for a more equitable share of crops. The customary portion demanded from landowners at the time kept the workers constantly in debt, and they weren't allowed to quit while in debt. Fearing an insurrection, landowners and other white men surrounded the church and began shooting. The men inside the church shot back. Three days of rioting followed, in which the governor called in military troops and at least 200 African-Americans, including women and children, were killed. Five white men also were killed. Dozens of black men were arrested for their murder, and twelve were quickly convicted and sentenced to death.
Jury deliberations lasted just moments. The verdicts were a foregone conclusion – it was clear that had they not been slated for execution by the court, they mob would have done so even sooner.
“You had 12 black men who were clearly charged with murder in a system that was absolutely corrupt at the time – you had mob influence, you had witness tampering, you had a jury that was all-white, you had almost certainly judicial bias, you had the pressure of knowing that if you were a juror in this case that you would almost certainly not be able to live in that town...if you decided anything other than a conviction,” says Michael Curry, an attorney and chair of the NAACP Advocacy and Policy Committee. No white residents were tried for any crime.
The convictions were appealed, and six of them were thrown out on technicalities. The other six men saw their case appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court in 1923. Read the saga of the Elaine Massacre and the subsequent Moore v. Dempsey ruling at Smithsonian.
(Image source: Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Bobby L. Roberts Library of Arkansas History and Art, Central Arkansas Library System)
In the ancient world, the color purple was a sign of royalty. Anything dyed the color of Tyrian purple was instantly precious, because the dye was so labor-intensive and the source of the color was so tiny. The expense itself made purple a status symbol. Wearing it was an example of conspicuous consumption, in that it was a signal to others of what one could afford. And that was about all that Tyrian purple had going for it, because wearing it wasn't all that pleasant.
Purple is a paradox, a contradiction of a colour. Associated since antiquity with regality, luxuriance, and the loftiness of intellectual and spiritual ideals, purple was, for many millennia, chiefly distilled from a dehydrated mucous gland of molluscs that lies just behind the rectum: the bottom of the bottom-feeders. That insalubrious process, undertaken since at least the 16th Century BC (and perhaps first in Phoenicia, a name that means, literally, ‘purple land’), was notoriously malodorous and required an impervious sniffer and a strong stomach. Though purple may have symbolised a higher order, it reeked of a lower ordure.
It took tens of thousands of desiccated hypobranchial glands, wrenched from the calcified coils of spiny murex sea snails before being dried and boiled, to colour even a single small swatch of fabric, whose fibres, long after staining, retained the stench of the invertebrate’s marine excretions. Unlike other textile colours, whose lustre faded rapidly, Tyrian purple (so-called after the Phoenician city that honed its harvesting) only intensified with weathering and wear – a miraculous quality that commanded an exorbitant price, exceeding the pigment’s weight in precious metals.
Read the history of Tyrian purple dye at BBC Culture. -via Metafilter
