After ten years of sharing his ennui and nihilism, Henri is retiring from making videos. He says he's retiring, but his farewell video makes it clear that he has given up on sharing his existential philosophy because no one one listened anyway. From Facebook:
Well, the time has come. My final video with the annoying thieving filmmaker is here. Now, I will finally be able to officially retire in peace and work on my philosophy without interruptions. I plan on writing the great feline-american novel. I thank all of you for your support and adulation.
Even if you don't know what a "blep" is, you've probably seen it. That's when a cat, particularly one that normally carries himself like royalty, lets his mouth go slack and his tongue hang out. The cat, not paying a bit of attention, can stay like that for quite some time, giving cat photographers an opportunity to preserve them at their silliest. Dogs do it, too, but we don't consider it odd when dogs blep. What causes a cat to do that? It turns out there are quite a few reasons, and possibly more we don't understand yet. Mental Floss goes over those reasons from veterinarians and cat experts for why your cat bleps, and none of them involve communicating rudeness.
This is a very "attractive" video. Let's see what happens when a large magnet meets a group of smaller magnets -in slow motion. It's fascinating to see the different reactions depending on the size and configurations of the magnets. And the slow motion is crucial, because in real time it happens in the blink of an eye, which is no fun. We get a glimpse of that at the end. -via Laughing Squid
My brother had the brilliant idea to toss my sister in the air during the family photos thinking it would make a funny pic, but didn't tell me he was actually going to do it and then dropped her. #WeddingFail He was right about it being a funny picture though. pic.twitter.com/bdY955retd
It's a rare wedding where something doesn't go wrong, but the size of the failure is the difference between a slight bump and a lifetime memory. Earlier this week, Jimmy Fallon asked people to tell what went wrong at their wedding on Twitter. I don't know if he's done a segment about them on The Tonight Show yet, but people are still contributing with the hashtag #weddingfail.
Phone went off in the middle of a ceremony. The middle-aged Priest was unamused, paused the ceremony and started lecturing on the etiquette of church service. Turns out it was his phone ringing. #WeddingFail
The busy minds at How It Should Have Ended found some of the plot holes in Black Panther and applied real-world logic to them. That kind of thing can make a superhero movie dangerously short. It's a good thing they threw in some other superheroes to make things interesting: Captain America (at least I think that's him -he wears a star) and a couple others you wouldn't expect in a Marvel movie. -via Tastefully Offensive
During World War II, more than 40,000 nurses served in the US military. Only about 500 of them over the entire course of the war were black nurses, and they had to fight to be admitted. Elinor Powell was one of them, an officer in the US Army Nurse Corps. Powell's father had served in World War I and an ancestor had fought with the Union in the Civil War. Yet even in uniform, she was subject to Jim Crow laws.
Elinor’s cohort of newly trained Army nurses soon received shocking news: There had been too much fraternization between white nurses and German POWs at Camp Florence. So the Army was bringing in black nurses as replacements.
POW camps would become an ongoing assignment for the majority of African-American nurses. The remainder were stationed at segregated bases with black soldiers, who mostly performed maintenance and menial jobs during the war, and understood what it meant to wear a U.S. military uniform and still be treated like a second-class citizen.
Life for a black army nurse at a POW camp could be lonely and isolated. The camps in the South and Southwest, in particular, strictly enforced Jim Crow. The list of complaints from black nurses included being routinely left out of officer meetings and social functions, and being forced to eat in segregated dining halls. The trips to nearby towns were also degrading because of establishments that either relegated blacks to subpar seating and service or barred them from entering altogether.
Interactions between the German POWs and the nurses was problematic, too, since the enemy soldiers had not only been shipped in from a culture that lauded Aryan purity, but also were treated as superior to the black nurses in America. Meanwhile, there was a shortage of nurses to care for wounded American veterans. Read the story of black nurses in World War II at Smithsonian.
In the original Star Wars trilogy, aliens were puppets and animatronics instead of CGI. Dave Barclay was a puppeteer in those movies, starting with assisting Frank Oz with Yoda. He was also inside Jabba the Hutt. Here he talks about bringing the aliens to life, including the touching story of copping a feel on Princess Leia. -via Laughing Squid
Many little girls have a fantasy of growing up to be a princess just like in the Disney movies they watch. A few make their dreams come true by becoming a princess character at one of the Disney parks. The job isn't easy, or lucrative. It can be fun, but just getting your foot in the door is a lot hard work.
1. When auditioning, you don't audition for a certain character.
2. And you have a better chance of being hired if you look like the other actors, rather than the character herself.
So if you want to be a Disneyland Cinderella, you're better off if you look like the women already hired to play her, rather than the actual Cinderella we know and love.
3. Not everyone gets hired the first time around.
Some girls have to audition four or five times before getting accepted. This is because Disneyland is looking for different princesses at different times. You might be a perfect Pocahontas, but your first audition might be when they're casting only Alice or Belle.
Once you get the job, you go through training and learn to be a fictional princess, with all that entails. And there are strict rules for maintaining the fantasy. Read some of the secrets of the women who portry Disney Princesses at Buzzfeed.
When Ze Frank took several years off from his True Facts series, he was apparently stockpiling scripts for his return. This is his third video in the past month! And it's quite interesting, even past the snarky comedy. Leafcutter ants are farmers. They use plants to grow fungus to feed animals. This benefits both the ants and the fungus (but maybe not the tree so much) in an example of mutualism. Other ants use various insects in other mutualism schemes, some of which can be pretty gross.
Trying to appeal to a young core audience, Stephen Colbert brainstormed with a bunch of children to come up with the perfect new TV show. The brainstorming session combines things you know they fed to the kids, like the Beatles and Brooke Shields, plus their own ideas, like the penguin curse. I'd watch it. Strangest Things: The Golden Mysteries stars Brooke Shields, Jason Segel, Kathryn Hahn, Michael Shannon, Hugh Laurie, John Oliver, David Tennant, Willem Dafoe, and Whoopi Goldberg.
If you were to travel the countryside around Geneva, Switzerland, say, between the city and the airport, you might be surprised to see a herd of buffalo. American buffalo. There are quite a few herds around Geneva, high in the Alps, and they are all descended from the initial imports of one Swiss farmer.
Years ago, a young man from a Swiss farming family, Laurent Girardet, ventured to Alberta, Canada. He went to participate in an exchange program, work on a farm, and learn English. During his time there, he unexpectedly fell in love with the bison (the term “buffalo” is often used interchangeably, but in Switzerland they are known as bison, as their scientific name is Bison bison). “I always liked big spaces and everything related to bison,” Girardet says.
He also liked the idea of raising animals naturally—that is, on pasturelands rather than in enclosures, and on a grass diet rather than one bolstered by antibiotic supplements. Compared to Switzerland’s domesticated cows, bison were robust and healthy, too. So he resolved to raise them instead. “We decided to walk away from traditional dairy cattle, to turn ourselves to something more natural and extensive,” he adds.
Bison adapted well to life in the Alps, but getting them there was a real challenge. Swiss farmers and officials thought Girardet was crazy. Read the story of how American bison made their home in the Alps at Atlas Obscura.
Cephalopods are weird. Squids get less publicity than octopuses, but they are really weird as well. The sea creatures have developed so many strategies for evading predators in the sea that we must marvel at how undersea life is totally different from the way land animals go through life. Ink! Jet propulsion! Chromatophores! Disconnected sensory systems! And squids have even more "superpowers" in this TED-Ed video. -via Digg
Dressing as the Queen of England isn't easy- one is expected to look perfect at all times. But it's even harder being a member of the royal family under the rule of the queen. Queen Elizabeth II sets the rules and enforces them in the family, whether by example or by a stern talking-to. Most of the royal dress code is unwritten, so new members like American Meghan Markle are expected to learn the hard way after a few faux pas. No bare legs, no bright nails, wear a hat, and keep your coat on. Other rules depend on the occasion, and some cover men and even little children. Read about the dos and don'ts of dressing as a royal at Mental Floss.
What kills more living things than anything else? A bacteriophage is not a bacteria; it's a virus that kills bacteria. As a virus, it walks the line between living and non-living. It kills trillions of bacteria every day. However, we are now looking at bacteriophages as something we can use for our own ends. Kurzgesagt explains bacteriophages to us.
Phage therapy to fight superbugs is not FDA approved, so very few patients in the US have the treatment, and they must get a compassionate waiver to even try it. Read about one such patient -who happened to be married to an infectious-disease epidemiologist, in an article at Mother Jones.
When Otto Frank read his daughter Anne's diary after World War II, he removed some pages he considered too personal before he submitted the diary for publishing. That wasn't the only part that was censored. There were two pages that had been covered with brown tape, probably by Anne herself. Using new imaging techniques, researchers have been able to see through the paper tape to find out what was written. The pages contained dirty jokes and musings on sex that the 13-year-old Anne had written in 1942. For example,
“A man had a very ugly wife and he didn't want to have relations with her. One evening he came home and then he saw his friend in bed with his wife, then the man said: `He gets to and I have to!!!"'
Frank van Vree, director of the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said: “Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile.”
“The `dirty' jokes are classics among growing children. They make it clear that Anne, with all her gifts, was above all also an ordinary girl."
