We all know the United States is strange, but there are some geographic oddities in this video that you might not have already known. RealLifeLore picked out some interesting facts that just don't seem like they make any sense, unless you live in the area they're talking about. Or if you learned geography from a globe instead of a Mercator map -which is the way geography should be learned, but it doesn't happen much. -via Digg
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The question at reddit's AskMen forum was "Alrighty, what's the most depressing, single man meal you've made?" The answers are sad, very sad, so sad that you can't help but laugh. The questioner admitted his was peanut butter toast with cheddar cheese with fries. Others were worse.
One man recounts stuffing his face with cereal and washing it down with milk because he was too lazy to do the dishes and fashion a clean bowl.
Another’s meal: “Sliced cheddar cheese and Lays potato chips substituted as crackers.”
Some insane doofus made a Bloody Mary with vodka and SpaghettiOs.
“Spaghetti but with ramen noodles, ketchup and chopped hot dogs.”
Let's hope these guys have learned something about stocking a kitchen since then. You can read the highlights at Mel magazine, or peruse the entire thread at reddit.
(Image credit: Charles Brooking)
Who ever heard of a ferret with a job? That's exactly what's happening here. James Mckay runs the National Ferret School in Chesterfield, England, where they train ferrets to lay cable. If you've ever seen a pet ferret run through a piece of flexipipe for fun, you know they'd be good at this. -via Tastefully Offensive
Zanzibar, a group of islands off the coast of Tanzania, was home to a particularly unique women's clothing style in the 19th century. While Muslim women were expected to be completely covered, the Zanzibar pantsuit allowed for greater freedom of movement than dresses, with trousers underneath a shorter dress. The distinctive ruffles at the hem set them apart from other styles.
As far back as the 8th century, Persian, Indian, and Arab traders used Zanzibar as a base for voyages between the Middle East, India, and Africa. Swahili people became intermediaries and facilitators to local, Arab, Persian, Indonesian, Malaysian, Indian, and Chinese merchants.
It does look like these outfits could be a result of mixing all these cultures together to create a unique style for the Swahilis of Zanzibar. The flares and ruffles may have had a practical purpose for the locals.
Fascinated by the look, spotted at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, Messy Messy Chic assembled a collection of images of the Swahili women's fashions of yore.
Warning: infectious laughter. These guys were trying to find their way around what I think might be the city of Fortaleza in Brazil. Commenters believe the trouble may be because they didn't switch the language of their app to Portuguese. They have stories of using map apps in languages that don't work well in the location they are driving through. At any rate, what came out was not only the road they should turn on, but all the other roads and shopping plazas it leads to. InappropriateSurname jotted them all down.
Turn left onto Avenida Almirante Barroso / Avenida Antonio Justa / Avenida da Abolição / Avenida Desembargador Moreira / Rua Frei Mansueto / Avenida Pessoa Anta / Rua Ana Bilhar / Rua Barbalha / Rua Barbosa de Freitas / Rua José Napoleão / Rua Juazeiro do Norte / Rua Júlio Ibiapina / Av. Senador Virgílio Távora
Then turn right onto Rua José Napoleão
The video was uploaded yesterday. You have to wonder if they're still driving around, trying to find their destination. -via reddit
For too long, city design centered on buildings and roads, which makes sense until you think about what a city should really be designed around: the people who live and work there. And visitors, too. Buildings can be beautiful, density and efficiency look good on paper, but what good are those things if living there isn't filling the needs of the residents? Ingrid Gehl is a behavioral scientist who married Danish architect Jan Gehl.
“Why are you architects not interested in people?” Ingrid Gehl asked her new husband, Jan. “What do you think about the fact that your architecture professors take their photos at four o’clock in the morning . . . without the distraction of people in the photos?”
In the early 1960s, and in many cases still today, these were forbidden questions, particularly among those we think of as designers–architects, city planners, and engineers. Then and now, designers consider human needs for health, survival, safety, and comfort through building codes and best practices. Psychological needs are only an afterthought–at best.
When professionals in different fields marry each other, the result can be magic for more than just those two people. The Gehls collaborated with each other on ideas for making cities more than just buildings and roads, by making them workable for the people who inhabited them. Read about their influence on city planning at Co. Design. -via Metafilter, where you'll find more links on the subject.
(Image credit: Flickr user Miguel Bernas)
The team from Senegal has been charming World Cup crowds and spectators around the world with their dancing skills. Their joyful dance is part of their training, and no doubt is a great team building exercise. Although the video above was taken in an empty stadium, the Senegalese got the crowd involved when they danced to celebrate their win over Poland last week.
With this music many can now understand the dance performed by Senegal team after their win against Poland. #worldcup,#Russia2018. Congratulations #Senegal . pic.twitter.com/RTOP96UPic
— Lamoussa Gama (@LGama) June 20, 2018
Their next game will be against Colombia on Thursday. -via Mashable
The annual World's Ugliest Dog contest was held yesterday at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, California. The winner was a bulldog named Zsa Zsa, who came with her owner Megan Brainard all the way from Anoka, Minnesota, to enter the competition.
Zsa Zsa won a $1,500 cash prize. Judging was based not just on appearance, but personality, too, which Zsa Zsa clearly has in spades. That being said, crazy eyes, crooked tails, weird walks and tongues that kind of hang there were all important to judges.
See more of Zsa Zsa and pictures of the runners-up here. -via Fark
There's a big difference between being alone and being lonely. If you are alone because you truly enjoy solitude, that shouldn't be a problem. But if you feel all alone and don't want to be, that is real loneliness. The stress of loneliness and social isolation can do serious damage, but that doesn't mean you are doomed. For many people, feelings of loneliness come and go as life progresses, and smart folks learn how to change their life situation to meet their need for social connections. AsapSCIENCE lets us in on the science of loneliness and its effects. -via Laughing Squid
How would you handle this disaster? Redditor nerdy_J said a friend's kid did this to all the cans in the pantry. They were lucky that the labels were still there at all. Do you know what's in your cabinets well enough to figure out what's in the cans? Tomato paste, tomato sauce, corned beef, and tuna are pretty easy. I hope you store the cat food in a different place. Some folks at the post shared what they did back when they got unlabeled canned food free.
When I was a kid we were really poor and would volunteer to take food from local grocery stores to the local food pantry. Legally, the food pantry could not accept cans without labels, so rather than throwing them out we would take them home. We all got pretty good at guessing what was in a can by how it sounded when you shook it. We would also make “mystery can soup”. Basically get a cheap chunk of roast and then start opening cans: vegetables went in the soup, fruit went into a bowl for fruit salad and cat/dog food/mystery meat would go to the cats.
That plan gets a wrench thrown in when you open a can of tamales or chow mein, but those can be refrigerated for a while. I am reminded of a Girl Scout camp out where we all brought a can of our favorite soup and threw them all in a pot together. The real problem with your canned goods shelf is that you keep too much stuff around that you really don't want to eat. I once bought one can of French onion soup because I like it, but the hassle of preparing a couple of slices of French bread and melted cheese meant I never prepared it. Yesterday I checked and found the can expired four years ago!
James from Casually Explained (previously at Neatorama) gives young people a honest and detailed rundown on what it's like to move out of their parents' home. You'll only want to share this with your kids if they've already moved out, because it's pretty discouraging. When Baby Boomers moved out on their own, it was for the purpose of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, which kids these days don't do so much of. Also, we could find a place to live where the rent was only a week's income or less, if you weren't picky. Now the rental units are owned by Baby Boomers, and they demand exorbitant security deposits because they fear young tenants will act like they did at that age. -via Tastefully Offensive
Fans love it when a TV series throws in a line or an action that is only understood by faithful viewers, those who have been watching since season one. They are callbacks, running gags, internal references, brick jokes, slow burns, in-jokes, or Chekhov's gags. You could look all those up at TV Tropes, but then you can kiss your evening goodbye. In the above case, a subject comes up 43 years later, and the internal reference is just dialogue for most viewers, but pure gold for those who remember the earlier episode. Below, the gun going off for no reason is just a random fact, and the reason it was mentioned at all only becomes evident years later.
Maybe these things are in-jokes for the writers, or maybe they are put in just to see if anyone notices. Even if just a few fans do, you can bet they'll share the cleverness on social media tomorrow. See 13 such references in a pictofacts article at Cracked.
During both of the Battles of Bull Run in 1861 and '62, the Union Army suffered defeat and lost a lot of men. The battlefield near Manassas, Virginia, is now a memorial protected by the National Park Service. They do not normally allow the ground to be dug up, but a utility project in 2015 unearthed some curious human bones. Physical anthropologist Doug Owsley and forensic anthropologist Kari Bruwelheide investigated.
One bone in particular, an incomplete distal left femur found in more than ten separate pieces, leapt out at them. Cleanly sawn, the find piqued the pair’s curiosity. “Knowing this is a Civil War battlefield,” Bruwelheide says, “the first thing we think about is an amputation.”
Owsley and Bruwelheide soon had much more to go on—additional scouting in the area of the first find turned up a human-excavated pit, dug a single foot deep, containing seven additional limbs and two virtually complete skeletons (one was missing its skull, likely due to farming activity during the years before the site became a National Park). Owsley and Bruwelheide set about doing what they do best: piecing together the story behind the bones.
“First, we had to determine whether this was First or Second Manassas,” Owsley says. “There were two battles fought on this property.” To help them assess the evidence, Owsley and Bruwelheide corresponded with park superintendent Brandon Bies. The location of the pit suggested the second battle, but it was two subtle aspects of the bones within that led Bies and his fellow park historians to reach an ironclad conclusion.
The team found subtle clues to determine which battle the bones were from, who did the amputations, and why the full skeletons were buried in the medical pit. Read the fascinating research that yielded the answers at Smithsonian. -via Strange Company
(Image credit: Kate D. Sherwood)
Think you're going to outsmart a hungry raccoon with your silly "technology"? Watch this trash panda foil a critter-proof bird feeder! You get the idea that it's not the first time he's seen this kind of setup. While the folks inside admit defeat, they are impressed with both the raccoon's intelligence and his dexterity. -via Tastefully Offensive
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom opened nationwide yesterday, and it inspired Keith Phipps to look at the 100-year history of dinosaur movies, including the original Jurassic Park from 1993.
Jurassic Park succeeds in part by breaking with the two approaches that have dominated dinosaur movies from the start: portraying them as bloodthirsty monsters or as cuddly anthropomorphized creatures. And the history of dinosaur movies is a long one, one almost as old as movies themselves. In fact, the medium developed alongside our understanding of what dinosaurs were — even if dinosaur movies didn’t always reflect this growing understanding.
He starts with the live-action Primitive Man and the animation Gertie the Dinosaur, both from 1914. Then there are the monsters-fighting-monsters films from the mid-20th century, many of them with dinos by Ray Harryhausen. Then the kids' films of the 1980s made dinosaurs cuddly again. Jurassic Park had both, but gave us some real, if implausible, science about dinosaurs and the ethical questions surrounding it. The best part of the article at Vulture is the many videos of trailers, clips, and complete films that illustrate the evolution of dinosaurs in film. -via Digg
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