The weekend is only wonderful for those who have a life. It's not so bad if you crave solitude, but even if you enjoy time alone, it's a bit frustrating to realize that you don't have a choice in the matter. Jake Like Onions has an antidote for all the celebratory "It's Friday!" posts you'll see today.
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Traffic in rural Vietnam stopped because some ducks were crossing the road. How many ducks? All of them!
Lê Tấn Tài started recording them after noticing how many there were. We'll never know how many ducks had already crossed by that time. I don't know what that guy was thinking, honking his horn. They aren't going to go any faster. And you can't make them stop following each other. -via Digg
A narrow gorge in Staffordshire, England, looks like something out of a fairy tale. But Lud's Church is a real place that could have inspired fairy tales. The chasm penetrates 60 feet down into the bedrock, and the humidity encourages growth, even as the limited sunlight struggles to penetrate its depth. The result is a lush, green, moss-covered chapel of rock. The various tales told of Lud's Church associate it with Arthurian legends, the Celtic god Llud, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Robin Hood, and Walter de Lud-Auk, leader of the Lollards. His daughter is said to haunt the gorge.
Local legend tells of Alice’s ghost haunting Lud’s Church, along with “a headless figure echoing the beheading ritual of Gawain and the Green Knight.” Whatever your personal beliefs, the Arthurian reference is notable for the chasm’s connection to the Green Chapel, where in the chivalric romance Sir Gawain of the Round Table faced the Green Knight one last time. Based on the anonymous author’s description, the Green Chapel is thought to be either Lud’s Church or nearby Nan Tor.
Read deeper into the mythology of Lud's Church, and see more beautiful pictures at Urban Ghosts.
(Image credit: August Schwerdfeger)
Oh yeah, you better believe this one contains spoilers for The Last Jedi. In fact, it tells the entire story (more or less; Leia and Poe are skipped) in fast-forward style, narrated by a young fan who can't be bothered to remember all the character's names. Bonus: the original trilogy is covered in the first 12 seconds.
Yes, I know it's CGI instead of stop-motion. This is from Disney, after all. Sure, you probably can't follow the plot this quickly if you haven't seen the movie, but if you haven't seen the movie, you wouldn't want to watch this video anyway. -via Star Wars
As we power through the Sweet Sixteen round of the NCAA basketball tournament, we may want to take a minute to contemplate how we got here. Basketball is a relatively recent sport, invented in 1891 by PE teacher James Naismith as a safer alternative to football. Within just a few years, it had spread to YMCA teams, the military, high schools, colleges, and even spawned professional teams. An end of the year tournament first occurred between Indiana high schools in 1908. The idea went to college when the NAIA held a tournament in 1937, and the NIT followed in 1938.
Ohio State coach Harold Olsen, who was the president of the National Association of Basketball Coaches at the time, knew his association, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), had to devise a tournament to keep pace with their rivals. On March 17, 1939, the NCAA tournament was born with eight teams vying for the top spot. It ended with a championship game at Patten Gymnasium on Northwestern’s Evanston campus between the Oregon Webfoots and Olsen’s Ohio State Buckeyes. In front of an almost sold out crowd of 5,500, plus James Naismith himself, the Webfoots beat the Buckeyes, 46 to 33. The whole tournament actually left the NCAA in the hole financially about $2500 (or about $35,000 today), but no matter. They did it again the next year, 1940, and it turned a profit. The NCAA tournament has been turning March mad ever since.
But where did the term March Madness come from? That's even more complex, as it was used for things other than basketball long before it became associated with the NCAA tournament. Read the origins of the phrase along with the tournament history at Today I Found Out.
A bachelor lives with the memories of all his former lovers. It's a haunting fantasy, but he likes it. It's comforting when everyone gets along and all are focused solely on him. But then he meets a real woman. The former lovers sleep while he interacts with her, but will they stay that way?
This short film from Oren Lavie (previously at Neatorama) is a music video from his album Bedroom Crimes. He not only did the music, he wrote and produced the video. And starred in it, too. -via reddit
The issues addressed here are timely, but even when you get outside the realm of internet security, you can see that this is a universal problem. You have a supervisor (or maybe client) who is convinced he is smarter than you because he is your supervisor (or client). He wants what he wants, and does not want to hear your reasons for saying no. And because he is your supervisor, he has a built-in target for blame when it all goes downhill. This is the latest comic from CommitStrip.
You've probably seen this picture somewhere. It gets posted at reddit every few months, and it is shared on social media quite a bit. The cat's name is Suki, and she has 800,000 Instagram followers. Suki the Bengal cat was adopted by Marti Gutfreund, who trained her from kittenhood to walk on a leash and to enjoy traveling to new places, such as the beautiful parks of Alberta, where they live, and the deserts of the Southwest. Suki has a great time, and takes awesome pictures because she always looks like she is posing.
Though Suki usually appears without a leash on Instagram, she’s always wearing one when outdoors — Gutfreund simply removes it in Photoshop to achieve a cleaner image.
Canada’s provincial and national parks require animals to be leashed, and Gutfreund is committed to Suki’s safety. She encourages other owners of aspiring adventure cats to properly leash-train their pets before taking them outdoors. Once a cat is comfortable outside, owners should ensure their pets stay hydrated even on shorter adventures, Gutfreund advises.
Suki herself is gearing up for the adventure of her lifetime: In August, Gutfreund is whisking her to Europe for six months. They’ll visit Gutfreund’s family in Germany and tour the rest of the continent too, snapping as many pictures as possible along the way.
Read about Suki at Adventure Cats and see more pictures at Instagram.
Mary is a 17-year-old in Australia. Secret is her dog, a border collie/Australian shepherd mix. With a pedigree like that, you know this is an intelligent dog. Mary has been training Secret all her life, beginning with clicker training. They even exercise together!
Secret is learning new stunts during their exercise routines.
Secret also dances, does housework, and creates art. And she finds time for some fun, too! See more of Secret at her Instagram page. That's a good dog. -via reddit
Thor seems a bit shocked. Never underestimate the power of a cat responding to the basic feline instinct of knocking things to the floor. And you can grant them all the power in the world, but that won't motivate a cat to come to your rescue, unless he happens to be in the mood to do it. This is the latest comic from Jon Baker at Alarmingly Bad Comics. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Admiral Richard E. Byrd loved milk and missed it during his expeditions to Antartica, so he dreamed up a scheme to bring dairy cows to the South Pole. Milk wasn't the only reason, though. Byrd surmised that a boring scientific expedition would get few headlines, especially since actual outposts had been established on Antartica by the 1930s. Shipping in cows would give the rest of the world something to talk about. And he was right.
And so—for all these reasons, and perhaps more—in the fall of 1933, the team loaded a trio of Guernsey cows into the SS Jacob Ruppert. There was “Foremost Southern Girl,” from New York, “Deerfoot Guernsey Maid,” from Massachusetts, and “Klondike Gay Nira,” from North Carolina, who was pregnant. All were the same breed, thanks to a deal Byrd had struck up with the American Guernsey Cattle Club. The crew’s carpenter, Edward Cox, shouldered the caretaking responsibilities. A bevy of other sponsors provided the cows with some necessary accoutrements: 10 tons of feed, various farm equipment, and a Surge Milking Machine.
The cows took the three-month journey alongside their human companions, living first in a knocked-together stall on the deck, and later, after it was completed, in a larger barn below. There was hope that Klondike would give birth within the Antarctic Circle, giving her calf “a unique claim to immortality,” as Byrd put it in his memoir of the expedition. Instead, it happened about 250 miles too far north. Still, this proved more thrilling than the frozen surrounds: “Almost to a man the crew waited with breathless expectancy for an event which has been common in Nature since the world began,” Byrd recalled wryly. They named the calf Iceberg—only fair, given baby icebergs are called calves—and the birth announcement made the New York Times.
So that was three cows and a young bull that landed in Antarctica in January 1934. Their year on ice didn't show them much of nature, but they were pampered by the men around them. They returned as heroes, but the experiment was never repeated. Read about the world's southernmost dairy at Atlas Obscura.
The Sony World Photography competition received 319,561 entries from all over the world. Images were sorted into four categories: Professional, Open, Youth, and Student Focus (for those studying photography). National awards were bestowed to the best photos from each participating country. Now the winners have been announced. The picture above was taken by Martin Stranka, and won the Czech Republic National Award. The cat below was photographed by Brendon Cremer, who won the South Africa National Award.
See more national winners in this gallery. You can also see a ranked list of the winning photographs from all categories at Bored Panda. -via Metafilter
Japanese comedian Akira 100% shows us how he can dance naked without exposing his genitals to us, because he's got a pie plate and is behind a strategically-placed Newton's Cradle. Not that we wanted to see 100% of Akira, but the skill and timing required by this weird routine is, let's say, fascinating.
Don't try this at home! Or, if you do, just keep it at home. You can see version 2, where the dancing is a bit bawdier, at Boing Boing.
After the massive success of the 2016 movie Deadpool, despite its R rating, there was never any question of a sequel. And we finally get a glimpse of it in the first full trailer for Deadpool 2. Contains NSFW language.
The YouTube description says,
After surviving a near fatal bovine attack, a disfigured cafeteria chef (Wade Wilson) struggles to fulfill his dream of becoming Mayberry’s hottest bartender while also learning to cope with his lost sense of taste. Searching to regain his spice for life, as well as a flux capacitor, Wade must battle ninjas, the yakuza, and a pack of sexually aggressive canines, as he journeys around the world to discover the importance of family, friendship, and flavor – finding a new taste for adventure and earning the coveted coffee mug title of World’s Best Lover.
Which is complete nonsense. From the looks of the trailer, DP2 is more goofily irreverent than the first movie. In theaters May 18. -via Tastefully Offensive
A collaboration between Gallup and Sharecare led to the 2017 Well-Being Index, which they've done annually since 2008. The news is not good. While a few states improved over the previous year, none of the improvement scores were statistically significant. Most states had lower scores, some drastically lower.
Despite the national downturn, the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index found improvement in several traditional measures of physical health in 2017, such as the proportion of Americans reporting participation in regular exercise, abstention from smoking and being overweight. Community well-being – defined as liking where you live, feeling safe and having pride in your community – also improved for Americans between 2016 and 2017.
Although improvements in certain physical health categories and community well-being signal progress, the sharp declines in overall well-being were driven by drops in purpose and social well-being metrics, as well as the mental health aspects of physical well-being. Out of a possible score of 100, the national Well-Being Index score dropped from 62.1 in 2016 to 61.5 in 2017, marking the largest year-over-year decline since the index began in 2008.
South Dakota improved its ranking, coming in at #1. Vermont, North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Idaho had improved scores, while all other states' well-being declined in 2017. You can read the full report here, or the short version at Digg.
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