Three-year-old Ruby went to the zoo in Tulsa with her toy Beast (from Beauty and the Beast) and set it down in the viewing area of the tiger enclosure. The tiger was instantly attentive!
Did the tiger want to play? Or eat it? Or possibly adopt the Beast? The zoo staff should get that tiger a plush Beast and find out. -via Digg
This is the truth of raising children. You may recall doing plenty of chores for your parents in your own childhood, but they remember it differently. For them, it was a matter of either teaching you how to do them or getting you to do them, and they always ended up expending the lion's share of the effort. That's because it is a parent's job to teach you the things you need to know to deal with life. That's one reason being a grandparent is so great. You reap that sweet, sweet karma when your kids find out how hard they made it for you. This comic is from Zach Weinersmith at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
A wholesome meme these days means one that doesn't involve politics or death threats between participants. So how about a meme that involves death threats from nature? This game has sparked a lot of interesting yet non-earth-shattering conversation about the animals around us. Here's the premise. Which is most dangerous: 50 eagles, ten crocodiles, three grizzly bears, seven bulls, one armed hunter, 15 wolves, 10,000 rats, five silverback gorillas, or four lions. You can pick two sets of creatures to be your allies in order to defend against the rest of them. The whole idea is to hear your reasons for your picks, but as far as I'm concerned, you are doomed. That's a lot to defend against, no matter what is helping you. -via Metafilter
Forty-two years ago, the U.S. government was just starting to use computers. Few Americans at the time understood computers at all, and couldn't wrap their heads around what they did. Honestly, they didn't do much, compared with how we all use computers today, but it was a big step forward in replacing large banks of file cabinets. When the Domestic Council implemented computer use, people complained. George Humphreys, the Domestic Council’s Associate Director for Environment, sent this letter to Domestic Council Executive Director Jim Cannon encouraging the use of the new technology.
“The basis of the complaints, valid or invalid, was with the implementation of the concept… Many people think of ‘computers’ as a dark, mysterious force that somehow pulsates ominously in an unknown recess, ready to bite if not properly respected.”
Read more about the Domestic Council and how they used their computer at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum. In other news, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum has a Tumblr blog. -via John Overholt
The 2010 film Eat Pray Love is based on a true story of Elizabeth Gilbert, a woman who traveled the world to find out what's important in life. It starred Julia Roberts, Javier Bardem, James Franco, and a whole slew of actors who we didn't know at the time, but who have become big names since then. The movie was panned by critics, but was a box office success. And there are things about Eat Pray Love that you don't yet know.
8. Many fans didn’t agree with Bardem’s casting as a Brazilian.
Bardem is Spanish, and many Brazilians had a big issue with his Portuguese accent since it wasn’t as accurate as it should have been.
7. Julia Roberts says she gained 10 pounds during the Rome scenes.
If she was eating the entire time it would make sense. Being overseas usually makes people want to try the local cuisine as much as possible.
There's more trivia about Eat Pray Love at TVOM.
What in the world is this thing? The formations found in the 19th century in Nebraska resembled huge corkscrews, and locals called them the Devil's Corkscrews. Yeah, scientists knew they were fossils of some sort, but what made them: a vine, a tree root, or a worm from an ancient sea bed? Maybe a monster? These things could have been the inspiration for the movie Tremors! But if you looked at the picture and thought "spiral staircase," you'd be on the right track.
With all the different theories, it took decades for scientists to come to an agreement about what made these "Daemonelix." The final bit of evidence that confirmed the theory wasn't discovered until 1977! -via Mental Floss
This is a throwback to the kind of goofy video the internet was built on- four guys in bathrobes imitating water fountains. While the production is quite low-tech, the idea is genius and they do it well. Stay with it for the grand finale.
This reminded me of something else, and a quick search told me I was right. They are doing the dancing water routine of the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas. The song is "Time to Say Goodbye" by Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman. -via The Adora Project
(Image credit: Flickr user Pablo Necochea)
Four must-see locations for those in search of some local color.
1) CHILE’S MOST VIBRANT CITY
Hugging the Pacific coast, Valparaíso (shown above) was South America’s greatest international waterway until the Panama Canal stole the spotlight. The city is home to Latin America’s first stock exchange, Chile’s first public library, and the world’s oldest continuously running Spanish-language newspaper. Colorful homes dominate, mostly perched on hillsides in a maze of cobblestone alleys. In 2003, its historic quarter was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
2) WYOMING’S PSYCHEDELIC HOT SPRING
People, especially women, have often put their lives at risk to be attractive. Some fads and fashions are more dangerous than others, and throughout history, it took more than few deaths to change what we considered beautiful. Jennifer Wright is the author of the book Killer Fashion: Poisonous Petticoats, Strangulating Scarves and Other Deadly Garments Throughout History, which chronicles 26 deadly fashions, one for each letter of the alphabet. They cover a range of dangerous fashions from Chinese foot-binding to flammable crinolines.
Many women have heard the old adage, “One must suffer for beauty”—“Il faut souffrir pour etre belle” in French—so like the pain of an uncomfortable push-up bra worn to achieve a curvier silhouette, death by fashion might seem like a grim comeuppance for feminine vanity. But the most troubling stories in Killer Fashion aren’t even about the style mavens who wore the toxic looks, but the poor souls tasked with making the clothes.
While fashionable flappers adopted the questionable habit of applying glow-in-the-dark radium on their lips and teeth to shimmer on the dance floor, the women who suffered most from exposure to radioactivity were the “Radium Girls” who worked in factories in the 1920s carefully painting the small numbers on the faces of swanky Undark watches and licking their glowing paint brushes to make a finer point. In a particularly gruesome Killer Fashion passage, Wright explains, “The radium painters’ teeth began to rot. When they went to the dentist to have their teeth pulled, some of their jawbones crumbled under the pressure.” In fact, the radium weakened all their bones and gave them tumors. In a few short years, the radium-factory death toll had reached 50.
Read more about the various ways that fashions have killed at Collectors Weekly.
Kayla Barham's cockatiel doesn't like cluttered surfaces. It all goes on the floor! It doesn't matter whether the object is heavy, or valuable, or important in its place, off it goes! Maybe she thinks she's a cat.
Well, she did put the scissors away in their proper place, and looked pretty proud about it, too. This is great to watch, but it would be exhausting in real life. My cat annoys me by knocking things off my desk, but I'll put her out and close the office door when she gets too rowdy. If I were Barham, this bird would be in a cage until she learns some manners. -via Laughing Squid
Did you manage to see the lunar eclipse this morning? I was in a position to see only a small part of it before moonset (which is variable in a mountain area), and it was cloudy anyway. Peter Katkov woke up at 3AM this morning in California to see the super blue blood moon and take some photographs. This one is stacked, showing the progression of the moon and how it changed color as it dipped under the shadow of the earth. He was so proud, he posted it at reddit. He gives some technical information on how he took it, too. There are a couple of other pictures of the moon at his Instagram gallery.
(Image credit: Peter Katkov)
John Green is back, but things are different. The Mental Floss List Show is now called Scatterbrained, and will tackle the same kinds of subjects you've always been interested in, even those that that don't easily fit into a list of facts. Join Green, Becca Scott, Amanda Suk, Dani Fernandez, Mike Rugnetta, and Elliott Morgan, the hosts of Scatterbrained.
The first episode is online today, and it's about the Olympics.
Scatterbrained will have a new episode every other Wednesday. -via Mental Floss
Hollywood movies are remade for distribution in nations around the world, which requires subtitles or dubbing the dialogue for non-English countries. But often there are other changes, too, like the title. American movie titles are often shortcuts that are well understood here, but may not have any meaning somewhere else. What the movies you know and love end up being called elsewhere can surprise you. It's not only slang terms or politics at work. Some titles are made more descriptive to draw an audience in, although this one may have given too much away.
One movie title was changed to distance itself from a porn star of the same name. How does a porn star become so famous that people might mistake an animated Disney film for one of hers? See 19 of these changed titles at Cracked.
We normally don't post nudes here, but hey, this actress is wearing shoes and a wig. Can you guess who she is? Hint: she is not obscure, not at all, but she is young in this picture. In fact, it's from her very first feature film, in 1933. When you've given up, learn the answer and the details surrounding the picture at Eddie Deezen's Facebook post.
In 1852, Laurel Cemetery opened on the outskirts of Baltimore as an African-American cemetery that offered "an undisturbed resting place for all time to come,” in an early advertisement. It became a fashionable place to be buried. The most prominent black Baltimore residents were interred there, along with thousands of others, including 240 Civil War veterans. But over time, the cemetery company couldn't maintain the graveyard's upkeep and eventually went bankrupt. Neighbors used it to dump trash. Baltimore grew, and the land became more valuable due to its location. A couple of local politicians maneuvered their way into buying the land for $100 and then sold it to commercial developers in the 1960s at a tremendous profit.
Soon after the relatives of Laurel Cemetery’s occupants learned of the sale, bulldozers were knocking over gravestones. The graves, families were told, had been moved to a cemetery in Carroll County, miles away from the city and inaccessible to most of the families whose relatives were buried at Laurel. Families filed lawsuits to stop the development and the local NAACP took on the case. The city started an investigation into the officials involved in the sale. Ultimately, though, there was nothing in the law to protect the cemetery or the families of the people buried there. The development went forward, and soon the beautiful, tree-filled cemetery was replaced by a parking lot surrounded by discount stores.
The new cemetery held around 500 graves, but thousands of people were buried in Laurel Cemetery. An archeologist investigated the shopping center site and, along with his students, began digging in an unpaved portion in 2015. They found human bones and casket hardware indicating that most of the bodies had been left on site. Read the story of Laurel Cemetery at Atlas Obscura.
