Who could have predicted that the United States would ever win an Olympic gold medal in curling? Sure, it's a sport that doesn't require physical fitness, but few Americans even knew what it was until the Vancouver Olympics, while Canada and the Scandinavian countries traditionally rule. The answer is: The Simpsons. In an episode from 2010, Homer and Marge beat Sweden for the gold.
It's the first gold medal the USA has ever won in curling. The Simpsons has a record of predicting events that eventually become true, which is because the show has been on the air a million years and specializes in outrageously improbable storylines. But did they ever predict the ending of this women's cross country skiing event? -via Uproxx
A lot of things look like magic until you learn to do them. There's a lot going on in this short story: imagination, creativity, giving, and friendship. The imagination is to make the lesson fun, the creativity will grow with practice, and the giving and friendship are skills that will pay off throughout a child's life. This is the latest comic from Lunarbaboon.
Story time! Thor, along with Þjálfi and Loki, went on a journey to the land of giants. The king of the giants gave them challenges, several of them for Thor, which they failed. Thor isn't used to defeat. What can he do?
The end of the tale shows how everything in the story is an analogy, and the effects of the challenges are the reasons the story was told in the first place. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Dericrw and his wife built a Star Wars bedroom for their son, in the hopes that he will sleep in his own room. Who could resist? The sleeping pod of the Millennium Falcon is the size of a twin bed and is bolted to the ceiling joists. The rest of the ship is painted on the wall behind it. Check out the inside! It has a fan for air circulation and LED lights.
On the opposite wall, there's a TV that the child can see from the bed. Under the screen is a weapons cache with his Nerf guns and lightsabers. The LED lights on the side glow in different colors.
Personal security professionals, or bodyguards, may seem to live a glamorous life as they walk around with movie stars, world leaders, and rich people. But they are doing a job, one that requires training and a particular set of skills. Mental Floss talked to several bodyguards about what they do.
2. GUNS (AND FISTS) ARE PRETTY MUCH USELESS.
Depending on the environment—protecting a musician at a concert is different from transporting the reviled CEO of a pharmaceutical company—bodyguards may or may not come armed. According to Kent Moyer, president and CEO of World Protection Group and a former bodyguard for Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, resorting to gunplay means the security expert has pretty much already failed. “People don’t understand this is not a business where we fight or draw guns,” Moyer says. “We’re trained to cover and evacuate and get out of harm’s way. The goal is no use of force.” If a guard needs to draw a gun to respond to a gun, Moyer says he’s already behind. “If I fight, I failed. If I draw a gun, I failed.”
3. SOMETIMES THEY’RE HIRED TO PROTECT EMPLOYERS FROM EMPLOYEES.
Workplace violence has raised red flags for companies who fear retribution during layoffs. Alan Schissel, a former New York City police sergeant and founder of Integrated Security, says he dispatches guards for what he calls “hostile work termination” appointments. “We get a lot of requests to provide armed security in a discreet manner while somebody is being fired,” he says. “They want to be sure the individual doesn’t come back and retaliate.”
Once upon a time, a terrible disease called kakke ravaged the aristocracy in Japan. A patient could recover, or could die of the disease. No one could figure out what caused it, or why it was mostly restricted to the upper class. They tried herbal medicines and other traditional cures, and doctors even recommended that suffers get out of Edo (Tokyo) because the city was killing them. And that actually helped in a lot of cases. But what was killing people was their expensive diet of mainly white polished rice. It turned out that kakke was not a communicable disease, but a nutritional deficiency.
Gleaming white rice was a status symbol—it was expensive and laborious to husk, hull, polish, and wash. In Japan, the poor ate brown rice, or other carbohydrates such as sweet potatoes or barley. The rich ate polished white rice, often to the exclusion of other foods.
This was a problem. Removing the outer layers of a grain of rice also removes one vital nutrient: thiamine, or vitamin B-1. Without thiamine, animals and humans develop kakke, now known in English as beriberi. But for too long, the cause of the condition remained unknown.
Things got worse. In the late 19th century, machines were developed to hull and polish rice, and the Japanese navy began serving it to sailors, since it had less weight and could be stored longer than brown rice. Dr. Takaki Kanehiro stepped in to find out what was causing the illness, and what could be done about it. Read the story of his efforts at Atlas Obscura.
In 1945, the American Feline Society bestowed the title of "King of All Cats" to a Persian cat belonging to Arthur Newman. Puffy had a peculiar talent for hypnotizing people, always for benign purposes, after which they felt relaxed and even relieved of headaches. By then, Puffy was credited with hypnotizing over 300 people. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer:
It was one night last fall that Puffy, then a kitten, first demonstrated his powers. "He was sitting on the end of a night club bar," Newman recalls, his voice becoming hushed, "and a couple of girls came up to pet him. I didn't pay much attention until one of the girls nudged me and whispered, "Look at my friend!'
"Well, sir, that girl was simply out on her feet. It wasn't from drinking, either. I'm something of a hypnotist myself and I quickly realized that she was in a real hypnotic trance, brought on by Puffy's staring into her eyes."
Newman, who had bought Puffy in a pet shop for purposes of demonstrating that people should relax like cats, immediately started training him to stare even more fixedly, with such success that Puffy now can stare Newman down any time.
No one these days is astonished that staring into a cat's eyes can bring relaxation, but Puffy was a sensation. Puffy was honored with articles in several newspapers of the time, and may have been the original therapy cat. Read more about Puffy at Strange Company.
Let Greig Johnson introduce you to the "ancient, elegant instrument" known as the shenanigan. It's a pretty intricate musical instrument, so you'll have to pay close attention. Okay, you won't actually learn how to play it from this video, but you can watch him give it a go and enjoy the music.
This video has subtitles, but don't focus on them. You can probably understand what he's saying ...somewhat. On second thought, you should listen and watch the subtitles at the same time. Trust me. And don't miss the details of the shenanigan. You may have to watch more than once. -via Tastefully Offensive
Gin is becoming popular in Britain -again. It first happened in the 17th century, when the juniper-flavored liquor made its way to England from the Netherlands. The populace loved it so much that unscrupulous manufacturers turned to spiking it with dangerous additives to keep the price down, which eventually led to the Gin Act of 1751, restricting the manufacture and sale of gin to licensed businesses. That hampered, but didn't stop, the illegal trade in gin.
A conman/adventurer named Dudley Bradstreet took advantage of the 1751 crackdown to start his own bootlegging business, with help from a giant cat-shaped vending machine:
“I then caused a leaden pipe, the small end out about an inch, to be placed under the paw of the cat, the end that was within had a funnel to it … When the liquor was properly disposed, I got a person to inform a few of the mob that gin would be sold by the cat at my window next day, provided they put money in his mouth … at last I heard the chink of money and a comfortable voice say, ‘Puss, give me two pennyworth of gin!’ I instantly put my mouth to the tube and bid them receive it from the pipe under her paw.”
Old Tom Gin Dispenser - During the 18th century London gin craze, you put money in the cat's mouth to get a shot of gin. pic.twitter.com/nMO1AinTGk
Gin's reputation turned around with the British Empire encountered malaria, and the gin and tonic was born. Read more about the peculiar history of gin at Quartzy. -via Strange Company
Here's the story: Back in 2009, Deadmau5 did a song called "Strobe." In late 2017, the one-man band Sparkee did a remix of the song (called Sparkee NuDisco Remix) and sent it to Deadmau5 to critique. Deadmau5 was impressed, but insisted that the song, particularly the bass solo, was played on midi because it would be technically impossible to play it on an instrument. He forgot that bass players have more fingers than strings, and dedicated musicians do amazing things with them. Bass player Davie504 (previously at Neatorama) took that as a challenge, and posted this video Thursday.
And to top it all off, kazoodac mixed the previous two videos together to create an artificial band via internet. Cool! Never underestimate those who put their time and talent into their art, for they will find a way to rise to the top of what gets shared on the internet. -via reddit
The Tudor dynasty that ruled England from 1485 to 1603 had plenty of drama, but the peculiar institution of slavery was not one of them. And neither was the population totally white, as depicted in historical dramas. People from Africa and their descendants were a small minority, but during that period, they lived among various social classes in England: servant, tradesman, craftsman, farmer, and even part of the royal staff.
At the College of Arms in London on a 60-foot-long vellum manuscript sits an image of a man atop a horse, with a trumpet in hand and a turban around his head. This is John Blanke, a black African trumpeter who lived under the Tudors. The manuscript was originally used to announce the Westminster Tournament in celebration of the 1511 birth of Henry, Duke of Cornwall, Henry VIII’s son. Blanke was hired for the court by Henry VII. The job came with high wages, room and board, clothing, and was considered the highest possible position a musician could obtain in Tudor England.
Blanke was no anomaly, but was one of hundreds of West and Northern Africans living freely and working in England during the Tudor dynasty. Many came via Portuguese trading vessels that had enslaved Africans onboard, others came with merchants or from captured Spanish vessels. However once in England, Africans worked and lived like other English citizens, were able to testify in court, and climbed the social hierarchy of their time. A few of their stories are now captured in the book, Black Tudors by author and historian Miranda Kaufmann.
So what changed? The age of exploration and the lucrative new colonies that relied on slave labor to enrich those who claimed them. Read about the changing status of black people in England at Atlas Obscura.
Kotzebue, Alaska, has around 3,500 residents, most of whom fish and hunt for food in the traditional way. But the small town above the Arctic Circle is listed by the EPA as the most toxic community in America. In 2016, Kotzebue released 756 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the environment. Those chemicals find their way into the air, the sea, the seals and caribou that people eat, and into the water supply. It comes from the Red Dog Mine, one of the world's largest lead and zinc operations. The company that runs the mine complies with state and industry regulations, yet the National Park Service, which monitors the Cape Krusenstern National Monument, report high levels of lead and cadmium in the area that the mine's trucks travel through.
...in the Native village of Kivalina, about 90 miles up the coast from Kotzebue—and located closer to Red Dog—there is growing concern about the mine. The village is located near the mouth of the Wulik River, a source of fish and water for villagers. One of the creeks that flows into the Wulik is the Red Dog, which begins near the Red Dog Mine. Treated mine wastewater is discharged into the Middle Fork of Red Dog Creek under an Alaska Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit.
“We started hearing and seeing the people getting sick, especially the newborns, with issues we have never seen before,” said Millie Hawley, the tribal transportation coordinator.
She described newborns being born with heart issues, including one infant that had to travel hundreds of miles for heart surgery, and said kidney problems were an issue for teenagers. “We believe it is from drinking the Red Dog Mine over the last 25 years,” she said, “but there is no proof of that.”
The Harlem Globetrotters basketball team collaborated with Georgia Tech to produce a Rube Goldberg contraption that makes basketball trick shots! Georgia Tech's School of Industrial Design built the machine, and their School of Music created the soundtrack.
The finished video is an ad for the Globetrotters, and full of cuts and edits, so we will never know if the whole thing worked in one continuous sequence. -via Digg
The first Europeans in Papua New Guinea settled on the coastline, and thought that the mountainous interior was uninhabitable, until the 1930s, when Michael, James, and Daniel Leahy went there to mine gold. They found hundreds of tribes living there, people who had never seen white men, or guns, or metal tools.
In the highlands the Leahys found wide, fertile valleys, groomed with garden plots that were later estimated to feed a million inhabitants sorted into hundreds of tribes and clans. The highlanders lived in huts of timber and kunai grass, used stone tools and fought with wooden spears and arrows. Just as white settlers had been unaware of their existence, the highlanders had no idea that anyone lived beyond the mountains.
At first, they suspected the white men were spirits, or maybe lightning come to earth. More curious than afraid, they traded with the white men, sweet potatoes and pigs and women in exchange for steel axes and shells (plentiful on the coast, but rare and highly prized in the highlands). When the expedition encountered new tribes, Michael “Mick” Leahy, the oldest brother and acknowledged leader, would shoot a pig to demonstrate his superior firepower. If a tribal “big man” tried to rally his warriors into a raiding party, Mick and his gun bois would shoot a few of them, too.
The Leahy brothers settled in and put the natives to work mining gold and building an airstrip to open up the highlands to outsiders. Fifty years later, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson went to Papua New Guinea to make a historical documentary and used actual film that Mick Leahy had shot back in the 1930s, plus interviews with natives who were there and remembered what happened. That documentary, First Contact, became a classic. Connolly and Anderson went back and made two more documentaries about Mick Leahy's son Joe. Joe bought land from Guniga leaders to start coffee plantations -twice. The tribesmen never considered land something that could be bought or sold, but agreed to the deal because Joe promised that the Guniga people who worked the plantation would become rich. While that never happened, Connolly and Anderson kept filming until tribal warfare ran them off for good. Or until now. Connolly returned to Papua New Guinea to visit his friends, including Joe Leahy, 25 years later, to see what has changed in that time. Read about that trip, and all that led up to it, at Smithsonian magazine.
You've probably heard about how Robert Johnson met the devil at the crossroads in Mississippi and sold his soul for the ability to play guitar better than anyone before. Johnson let folks believe that if they wanted, and even capitalized on the tale in his songs. Whatever happened to take him from beginner to virtuoso, he was far from the first musician to make that bargain, if the legends are to be believed.
These stories abound because some performers are so good that no one could believe they achieved that level of virtuosity on their own. Talent and hard work were dismissed in favor of a supernatural explanation. Polyphonic brings us a chronological account of the many tales of incredible talent attributed to a Faustian deal. -via Laughing Squid
