There are some things that everyone just does, even though we've never been told to, and certainly we've never been told why. I always let people take what fries they want from my plate, because that's a lot of potatoes, and the hamburger will fill me up by itself. But if I order onion rings, suddenly everyone wants one, and there aren't that many in a serving!
Well, of course I'm going to get nervous even though I've done nothing wrong. I'm nervous because a team of strangers is going to put me in a machine to see what my body looks like under my clothes, or else they will grope me. Or like the last time I went through security, both. (My teenage daughter got neither, because that would be "wrong.") However, there are a couple of "unwritten rules" in this list that you WISH people would follow.
See the rest of the 19 unwritten rules that everyone seems to follow in the latest pictofacts list at Cracked.
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Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were immediate friends when they met in 1907. They had plenty to talk about, as they were both groundbreaking psychoanalysts in their time. Their intense relationship was doomed to burn out eventually, the ostensible reason being their divergent philosophies about what influences the mind. Or maybe they were just tired of listening to each other. -via Everlasting Blort
Social class in England during the Victorian era had much less to do with wealth than with your assigned station at birth -upward mobility was as rare as hen's teeth. Sophia Jarvis was a working class orphan who was sent to a workhouse and later an industrial school to learn the skills of a servant. Mrs. Mary Langton Thomas enjoyed a middle class life as the wife of a banker, although when he died she was left with nine children and a lower income. She could only afford one servant, Sophia Jarvis, from the industrial school. Jarvis did all the housework for the family of ten plus a lodger, for which she received the equivalent of £6 a week in modern money, a windowless attic room, and what food she was allowed to eat ...which became less and less over time. Mrs. Thomas accused Jarvis of theft, and punished her by withholding food, beating, and pouring water over her in the cold outdoors. Jarvis escaped to her former school, and later pressed charges against Thomas, which was quite unusual for the time. However, there was evidence backed up by the doctor who treated Jarvis after her escape.
Sophia, brought up since infancy in the care of the parish authorities of St George the Martyr, cut a sorry figure. She had been accused of stealing forty stamps, two sacks of potatoes, cake, a 2lb lump of sugar, port and sherry—although her mistress admitted that she had not been able to smell alcohol on the girl. Strangely, there was no suggestion that any of the Thomas children, or the lodger, might possibly have helped themselves. After Mr Cockerel’s visit she was beaten almost daily with a stick, a rolling pin or a fishing rod, and had not been allowed to leave the house unless accompanying one of the children to church.
Not only had Sophia been physically abused, but Mrs Thomas had only given her a month’s pay in all the time she had worked there. The rest of the money was kept to pay for the clothes she needed for her job.
The description of her physical state is distressing. Dr Broad, the medical attendant to the Industrial School, described her emaciated condition, her sunken face and swollen fingers, her nails black with dried blood, her bruised back and elbows. When he saw her on 20th December, her right eye had been black, and she had a wound on her head. This was backed up by Thomas Evans, the police doctor.
Mrs. Thomas had the backing of prominent character witnesses, while Jarvis was a nobody. Who would the jury believe? Read the story of Sophia Jarvis and her quest for justice at London Overlooked.
-via Strange Company
(Image credit: eldy50)
You're flying home, and you need a ride from the airport. Your family assures you they will be there to pick you up. But you don't know what they're going to do to stand out in a crowd so you will see them.
(Image credit: rhapsodyinpoo)
I have two daughters coming in from different countries in the next couple of weeks. I may have to arrange something really embarrassing for the pickups.
(Image credit: siwangmu)
These are a few from a mega-list at Bored Panda that go beyond greetings and encompass more than 100 weird things photographed at airports.
You loved Gary Larson's comic The Far Side, like we all did, where we learned about Thagomizers, Anatidaephobia, and that tramp Jane Goodall. But do you actually know anything about Larsen, the man? His life outside of The Far Side has been pretty interesting. He plays the banjo, and almost had a career in jazz (go figure). He keeps exotic animals. And there's more, all in this video from Today I Found Out.
Redditor zoggy90 has been drawing on walls and doors, but it's his house, not his parents' home. He's filling the side of the closet with "little spirits." Above is the first one, which he has now expanded upon.
These are pencil drawings, which will totally freak out the next owner of the house, whenever that will be. Meanwhile, there should be some way he can sell these without having to draw on other people's homes. -via reddit
Full-color x-ray images sound too cool to be real, although seeing one can also give you the creeps. This is an ankle. The white is bone, the red is muscles, and the yellow is the cushioning under your heel. That's a real, live person's insides you're seeing! You can also see this ankle from all angles, and even in slices. The new technology from New Zealand company MARS Bioimaging is based on a scanning method developed at CERN.
The MARS scanner uses a family of chips called Medipix, originally developed to track particles at the Large Hadron Collider. Medipix works like your camera — when the electronic shutter is open, each individual particle is detected and counted, creating high-res, accurate, noise-free images.
When used with the Butlers' MARS scanner and its software, the chips help to produce highly accurate, striking, three-dimensional color renderings of the human body that distinguish materials like metal, bone, soft tissue, and fat with different tones.
The x-rays are expected to go into clinical trials in the next few months. Read more about it and see videos at Mashable.
(Image credit: MARS Bioimaging)
The first contribution I ever made to Neatorama was a blurb that mentioned Floyd Collins. Collins was a native of western Kentucky, an area known for its many caves, most notably Mammoth Cave. Long before it became a national park, Collins had walked -and crawled- many miles through Mammoth, Crystal, and Sand Caves, among others. He eventually became known as the greatest cave explorer ever. In 1925, Collins became the subject of a rescue attempt when a cave-in brought down rocks that trapped Floyd Collins' lower body, deep in Sand Cave. He spent more than a day alone underground before his brother Homer was able to reach him. But getting him out would be a particularly difficult task. The passage that led to him was so narrow that men could only crawl headfirst, and then had to wiggle out backward.
Worse yet, Collins blocked his own rescue. Pinched from the chest down, his hands and feet were out of view. Homer called up to have some food brought into the cave and fed his brother by hand, pouring a pint of coffee down his throat and bringing nine sausage sandwiches to his lips. Immediately, he began trying to remove the loose rocks clamped around Collins’s body, but new rocks tumbled to take their place.
Homer emerged hours later shivering violently, skin dangling from his fingers. As he recuperated near the cave's mouth, dozens more men attempted to navigate Sand Cave. All failed. Nobody would reach Collins until Homer re-entered at midnight.
Many others tried, and for more than two weeks experts across the country came up with ideas for rescuing Collins. Newspapers nationwide carried constant updates, and the area around the mouth of Sand Cave became a circus. Read the story of Floyd Collins' life, his time trapped in the cave, and his legacy at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Flickr user Don Sniegowski)
In June of 1892, Ponciano Caraballo found his 6-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter dead, their throats slit, at their home in Argentina. His wife's throat was also slit, but she survived to tell the tale. Or two.
Francisca, who had been married to Ponciano for four years, told the police that she and her children had been attacked by their neighbour, agricultural labourer Ramón Velázquez. He had tried to seduce her and when she’d refused, he had threatened to kill them all. She later changed her testimony and stated that Velázquez had been attempting to take her children away from her, on behalf of her husband, from whom she was estranged. Whatever the reason for the attack, Ramón Velázquez was arrested on suspicion of murder.
As was customary at the time, the police used torture to elicit a confession from the accused. Velázquez was subjected to several brutal beatings, and forced to spend a night locked in with the children’s bodies. It is also alleged that a police officer dressed up as a ghost one night to scare the prisoner into confessing. Despite the violent and intimidating interrogations, Velázquez refused to confess and professed his innocence throughout. Unsure of what to do next, the local police requested help from the force in the provincial capital, La Plata, and Inspector Eduardo Álvarez was sent to Neocochea to investigate.
As you can probably guess from that setup, and having read or watched a few murder mysteries in your time, the eyewitness account is suspicious and Velázquez was innocent. Read how investigators from La Plata, Argentina, solved the crime at Victorian Supersleuth. -via Strange Company
It’s about time we saw a new experimental animation from Cyriak Harris. Follow along as he takes a nightmarish dive into the innards of the human body. From watching this, it becomes obvious where those weird artificial intelligence programs have been getting their ideas. But then again, if Deep Dream saw this, it would probably render something closer to reality in response. -via Metafilter
If you liked that, we’ve got plenty more of Cyriak’s videos for you to enjoy.
Have you ever wondered why Lois Lane couldn't figure out that Clark Kent was Superman? These two ladies in Las Vegas went to Harrah's to see Tape Face perform. Remember Tape Face from America's Got Talent? He was on his way to work, and the women asked him to snap a picture of them as they posed in front of a cardboard cutout of... Tape Face. He was glad to oblige. They did not recognize him without tape on his face; they just saw a guy with tattoos who spoke with a New Zealand accent. Let's hope that he revealed his identity afterward. Redditor createch, who posted this picture, didn't say whether he did or not.
(Image credit: phyllisvanillis)
Update: No, he didn't tell them.
Today as I was walking home after my run I saw a large lemon rolling down the hill. It kept rolling for about a quarter mile. And now you can see it, too. pic.twitter.com/dQoHi4RrXS
— Mike Sakasegawa (@sakeriver) July 11, 2018
What would you do if you saw a lemon rolling down the street? You'd take out your phone and record it, of course! Mike Sakasegawa did just that, and posted the video yesterday. You'd do that, too. But the rolling lemon has become a star. Viewers became invested in its fate, and kept rooting for the lemon to keep going.
I was at the top of the hill when I saw it, and it was already rolling. It rolled across the street and about a quarter of the way down the hill before I thought to catch up with it and take out my phone.
— Mike Sakasegawa (@sakeriver) July 11, 2018
Just to answer a couple questions that have been asked a bunch: the lemon stopped rolling because we got to the bottom of the hill. The lemon is still intact, in my kitchen, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet.
You know what they say, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade! The video has been seen 4.5 million times in less than 24 hours, and there are about 6K comments, some of them hilarious. Sakasegawa has a podcast about art and literature, yet nothing he's done has been this popular, and he's having a hard time dealing with it. The lemon, at last report, is in his backyard hanging out with an immature lemon tree. -via The Daily Dot
Do you have plans to visit a theme park during your vacation this summer? Maybe ride some thrill rides? You can prepare by watching some movies set in theme parks -if you want to scare yourself out of having fun! The danger is real in these parks, although, thank goodness, the theme parks themselves are fictional -even when they are based on real parks.
The story behind Escape From Tomorrow is full of fascinating anecdotes, but perhaps the most surprising thing about the film is that Disney chose to ignore it. After its debut at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, many critics assumed that Disney would never allow a movie depicting Disney World as evil to be released. But Disney, perhaps realizing that blocking its release would just be free publicity for the filmmakers, let Escape From Tomorrow come out in theaters unobstructed. Shot surreptitiously at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland, the film posits that the cheerful facade of smiling princesses and costumed characters Disney presents to the world is just that—a facade. The surrealistic filmmaking ensures that the exact details of how this sinister underbelly operates remain vague, but cyborgs, sex trafficking, hypnotic amulets, alternate identities, an evil corporation, and a mysterious flu that makes unsuspecting visitors cough up bloody hair balls are all wrapped up in the conspiracy.
The odds are rather small that something horrible will happen to you at a real-life theme park -unless you consider endless lines and price gouging as horrible. Read about a dozen movies where theme parks are the danger at the AV Club. See how many films you can guess before you read it.
Emilie and Ryan Matthias have cried oceans of tears over the last nine months as their 5-year-old son Garrett battled cancer. Garrett, though, never lost his sense of humor. So instead of a standard funeral, his parents are carrying out Garrett's wishes in a celebration of his life Saturday that will feature bouncy castles and an appearance by Batman. Here's just a portion of the obituary for Garrett Michael Matthias.
When I die: I am going to be a gorilla and throw poo at Daddy!
Burned or Buried: I want to be burned (like when Thor’s Mommy died) and made into a tree so I can live in it when I’m a gorilla
Big or Small Funeral: Funerals are sad: I want 5 bouncy houses (because I’m 5), Batman, and snow cones
Emilie and Ryan Matthias will honor Garrett’s final wishes by having a Celebration of Life on Saturday, July 14th from 5pm – 11pm at 2377 132nd Ct Van Meter, Iowa
Note: Symbolic Asgardian burial ceremony and fireworks will be held just after sunset
A private burial of Garrett’s ashes will be held at a later time once his parents figure out how the hell to get his ashes made into a tree and locate a nature preserve, so his tree resides in a protected area.
There's a lot more to it, well worth a read. The Matthiases constructed the obituary from things Garrett said. It will be an awesome sendoff for an awesome kid. -via Metafilter
(Image source: GoFundMe)
Remember the Russian cat Pusic? In the latest episode of Pusic being spoiled for the video audience, his humans built a cardboard maze just for him. While this construction will no doubt be a fun playhouse for the cat once he's familiar with it, the first run-through was recorded to see how well he could negotiate the twist and turns. Pusic enters the maze about about 1:10 into the video. He only finds himself in one dead end, as far as I can tell. That's a smart cat. Mine would just plop down in the middle and take a nap. -via Digg