Seth Meyers, host of Late Night with Seth Meyers, usually begins his monologue with jokes about the news of the day. Monday night was different. He opened the show by announcing that his wife had given birth to his second baby son on Sunday. On the floor of the lobby of their apartment building.
Luckily for Seth, there was no time to panic before it was over, and Alexi and baby Axel were attended after the fact by the NYFD. An event like that in the hands of a professional storyteller is well worth hearing.
Jelly Mario by Stefan Hedman is a surreal browser game that combines Super Mario Bros. with QWOP. Imagine playing a familiar video game while coming out of serious anesthesia or downing a half-dozen martinis. The music is just as distorted as the action, and changes speed as you work the controls. Hint: remember that "up" is whichever direction Mario's head is pointing at the time. Hedman is still working on the game; you can get a preview of level 1-2 here, or see if you can get that far yourself. -via The Verge
This is Vordingborg, Denmark. A concrete silo near the harbor is ready to be demolished. The wedge-shaped holes cut out of the bottom are to ensure that silo will fall to the right when explosives are detonated. They have prepared the area to the right to contain the debris as much as possible. The white building to the left is the town's library, which was closed for the occasion. What could possibly go wrong? While the library was not "destroyed" as the video title insinuates, the silo came awful close to it.
Sakeru gum comes in regular and long. In these TV ads, Chi-chan seems to prefer the long kind. About a dozen ads ran in the series over the past year, and we are lucky to have them all together with subtitles. While technically SFW, it's full of innuendo that wouldn't fly so well on American TV. The story takes some turns as Chi-chan battles her temptation and constantly loses, but it ends with a twist you do not see coming at all. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Last weekend, two goats were discovered to be in a predicament after they had walked out on a beam beneath the Mahoning River Bridge in Pennsylvania. They ran into an obstacle at about 200 feet into their adventure, so the brown goat turned around to go back.
The brown goat managed the trick. "He walked out to a concrete pier and somehow got himself turned around," says Todd Tilson, operations manager in the maintenance department of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
The white goat did not manage to turn around.
That's why, in the photo, you'll see the two goats facing each other.
Tilson reports that the brown goat "kept hitting the white one with its head" to make it walk backward. "It would take one step, two steps back, then stop," he says.
And really, can you blame it? Would you want to walk backward on a beam that is about 8 inches wide and 100 feet above the ground?
Yeah, me neither.
The owner of the goats said they were there 18 hours, resembling the Dr. Seuss tale of the North-Going Zax and the South-Going Zax. The Pennsylvania Turnpike staff borrowed a crane from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation. But could they gets the goats down without spooking them into falling? Read about the dramatic goat rescue at NPR. -via reddit
British ornithologist Jamie Dunning normally studies twites, but for some reason he turned an ultraviolet light on a puffin carcass in January and found that its beak lit up like a Day-Glo stick at a rave. Now, these birds don't have blacklights at their parties, but they do have the ability to see colors we cannot. Humans see colors in a mix of red, blue, and green, while birds have tetrachromatic vision, meaning they have a fourth color available to them. A version of the fluorescent colors of the puffin beak could be not only visible, but important to them.
Birds probably don't see those ridges all lit up like we do, said Dunning.
"It's hard to say what it would look like [to them], we can't comprehend that colour space.
"But almost certainly it's attractive to the birds. They must be able to see it — that's the only reason it would exist."
The next challenge for Dunning is to study the beaks of live puffins under an ultraviolet light. For that step, he has designed sunglasses for the birds. You can see those, and read about the research, at CBC. -via Metafilter
In 2013, we posted a gripping short film from Ben Howling and Yolanda Ramke about a doomed father trying to save his infant daughter during a zombie apocalypse. Cargo was a hit at Tropfest Film Festival and went viral on the internet. Five years later, it has been made into a feature-length film.
From the producer of The Babadook, and starring Martin Freeman, comes Cargo. Based on the viral short film, this is the story of a man and his infant daughter who are stranded in the middle of a zombie apocalypse in rural Australia. And when he becomes infected, the countdown begins for him to find her protection before he changes forever.
Cargo is set to debut on Netflix May 18th. -via Laughing Squid
Tinykittens is a cat rescue project that practices TNR (trap, neuter, release) on feral cats in British Columbia. You can read our previous posts about them. Last year, we told you about their rescue of the elderly feral cat they named Grandpa Mason, who turned out to have a real soft spot for kittens. Tinykittens founder Shelly Roche told Global News that Grandpa Mason was lonely after his latest litter grew up and found homes. They had spayed and neutered 90% of the local feral cat colony, and were looking for kittens that might need a grandpa's love.
It looks like chaos in the park for the Easter egg hunt! I don't know if there are actually any eggs in this picture or not (I see plenty of other discarded food), but you'll have fun trying to find and identify all the Marvel comic book superheroes and villains. Ryan Reynolds posted this picture, so you know Deadpool is in there (hint- he's wearing bunny ears). After you start really looking, you'll realize that the rarest figures are regular citizens who are neither Marvel characters nor cops. -via Uproxx
Co-worker got his lunch stolen and they’ve agreed to let him watch the security camera tape. This is the most excited I’ve ever been at any job ever. Ever.
Someone stole another person's lunch out of the refrigerator at work. The victim watched the security video, and now everyone in the office knows who did it. However, the perpetrator doesn't know she's been identified. How do you act? It's only a matter of time until someone spills the beans, or else she figures it out from the weird ways they've all been acting.
HOLY SHIT. He’s back. He watched the tape. He knows who did it.
An erstwhile German horticultural magazine, Möllers Deutsche Garten-Zeitung (“Möller’s German Garden Newspaper”), was a monthly publication that contained gardening tips and science articles about the plants of the world. They celebrated the first April Fool's Day of the 20th century in style, by peppering their April 1900 issue with fake articles featuring fake plants and fake gardening techniques, most of which were fairly obvious to regular readers.
There was a “tree strawberry,” which towered over would-be snackers. There was a trumpet that could kill all insects in its vicinity with a single blast. And then there was Echinocereus dahliaeflorus, a cactus covered in sharp flowers. According to the text, the cactus was found in Madagascar, and its strange blooms perfectly solved a longstanding argument between members of the German Cactus Society and the German Dahlia Society.
Everyone in the office must have had a good laugh over the tall strawberry and the bug trumpet. But as the months went by, E. dahliaeflorus proved unmemorable even to its perpetrators. As a later cactus compendium explained, “The April Fool joke is so cleverly concealed that the editor deceived himself”—when compiling new discoveries at the end of the year, he “carefully indexed” that particular fake plant among the real ones.
That indexing placed the fictional cactus in the rarified category of April Fool jokes that left a lasting legacy. If you Google Echinocereus dahliaeflorus, you'll find a few references to the plant as an April Fool joke, but The Plant List just flags the name as "unresolved." Read more about Echinocereus dahliaeflorusat Atlas Obscura, and see more in their week-long series of articles on historic April Fool's Day pranks.
Charles Darwin had ten children, and at least three of them were young artists during the time Darwin was writing his 1859 book On the Origin of Species. They saw dad's project as a source of paper for their drawings and paintings! Of Darwin's first manuscript, only 45 out of 600 pages still exist. They are in the process of being digitized for posterity, and they have yielded dozens of the children's artworks. More than just scribbles, they are historic marginalia worthy of preservation.
The drawings, made with pencil, ink, and watercolor, are playful and often humorous, although they reflect Dad’s talent for recording details, whether it be the multicolored wings of a butterfly or the pattern on a highlander’s kilt. Indeed, several of the drawings are more military-concerned and show battles or soldier’s portraits. Others show the children’s fluency with the natural world: bees buzz around flowers and a variety of animals are shown in profile and face-forward. Apparently, Darwin also recruited his kids for basic research including collecting various specimens and encouraged them to make their own observations.
He takes us down a metaphysical wormhole, when all she'd said was "How are you?" People use that phrase as a greeting, so they are really saying, "Hello, please respond!" The normal response is, "I'm fine, how about you?" There are some people who think you're asking "How are you?" sincerely, and tell you about their aches and pains. It could be worse.
This guy instead focused on the word "are," as a form of the verb "to be." The state of being is a deep subject, depending on how deep you want to go. The question was not "How are you possible?" or "What are you?" or "How do you exist?" When you get philosophical over a simple greeting, people will tend to avoid you in the future. This comic is from John McNamee at Pie Comic.
There was an Easter egg decorating contest at the workplace. Redditor Pattmost20 is not artistically inclined, or so he says. But he is clever and a decent writer, so he just went with the minimalist art approach. The egg he entered came in fourth out of 15 entries. Fourth place didn't get a prize, but the person who won the third-place received chocolate. Since they were on a diet, they gave it to Pattmost20. See a larger image here.
You might get away with filling an Easter basket with boiled eggs and Peeps if your children are young, but adults are much more discriminating in their Easter treats. Ranker compiled results from over 13,000 online voters to determine the best Easter candies. Cadbury Eggs took three of the top five slots, but did not make #1. The overall results are:
The list ranks 27 different Easter-themed candies. You can sort results by sex, generation, and region and get somewhat different results, but Reece's Peanut Butter Eggs stays at the top for all of them. -via Uproxx
