Scotland is now dealing with their deepest snow since 2011, up to ten inches in places. To clear the roads, the nation has an armada of snowplows they call gritters. Traffic Scotland has a Gritter Tracker where you can follow the activities of the snowplows across the country. Many of them have fabulous names, often bestowed by local schoolchildren. See if you can find
Gritallica
Gritty Gritty Bang Bang
Gritty Gonzales
Gritty McVittie
Sir Salter Scott
Sir Andy Flurry
Ready Spready Go
Ice Queen
Luke Snowalker
Sir Grits a Lot
Mr. Ploughie
Gritsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Anti-Slip Machiney
David Plowie
Fred
Brad Grit
Gritney Spears
The Subzero Hero
Usain Salt
-via Metafilter
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Bill Wurtz (previously at Neatorama) has done so many nonsense songs that it surprises us to hear one that makes perfect sense. Still, his quirky way of constructing a song lends it a real charm.
Warning: earworm. -via reddit
They were looking for gold. Prospectors were all over Montana in the mid-19th century, finding both minerals and gemstones, but since they were solely focused on gold, they overlooked the best sapphires in the U.S. They threw away the blue stones that showed up in their pans at Yogo Gulch, not realizing that they were worth more than the gold they were searching for. That changed in 1895, when a prospector sent a box of blue stones to Dr. George F. Kunz, a gemologist at Tiffany's. Sapphires of various colors from Montana were common, but those from the Yogo Gulch were special.
In 1897, Kunz wrote for the American Journal of Science, and detailed the specific and ultimate coloration of sapphires from the Yogo Gulch region. He wrote that the deviation in color of the stones were “varying from light blue to quite dark blue, including some of the true ‘cornflower’ blue tint so much prized in the sapphires of the Ceylon… Some of them are ‘peacock blue’ and some dichroic, showing a deeper tint in one direction than in another; and some of the ‘cornflower’ gems are equal to any of the Ceylonese, which they strongly resemble,—more than they do those of the Cashmere.”
Yogo Sapphires made a splash -and a lot of money. The Yogo Gulch area is still mined for sapphires today. Read about them at The Daily Beast. -via Digg
(Image credit: Montanabw)
The movie It based on the novel by Stephen King was a big hit in 2017, so it's about time for Screen Junkies to give it the Honest Trailer treatment. Watching this, it became clear that the producers just assumed everyone knew what It was about. I saw no trailers or any other marketing that ever explained what happens in the film. I just knew there was a killer clown from a Stephen King novel that was scarier than Tim Curry's TV version.
But in the Honest Trailer, we get a breakdown of all the other movies and TV shows that are just like It. And now I know all I need to know about It.
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website or at Facebook.
Rodney Dangerfield was one of the funniest stand-up comedians in the history of the field. Rodney's wonderful movies, plus his always hilarious TV appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, The Dean Martin Show, Saturday Night Live, and so many others, kept us all in stitches. His put upon, constantly harassed character who "got no respect" struck a chord with all of us.
Sadly, the hilarious comic suffered a lifelong struggle battling depression (he kept his depression a secret until the 1990's, then he was actually quite open about it). We thank Rodney for the countless laughs he gave us. Now let's take a look at the brilliantly talented and quite fascinating man.
1. Rodney was born Jacob Cohen on November 22, 1921, in Long Island, New York. As a teenager, he helped support his family by selling newspapers and ice cream on the beach, he also delivered groceries.
2. He was writing jokes by age 15. At 19, he decided to try being a stand-up comic. He took on the stage name of "Jack Roy" and performed under this name for ten years. Although he was to later become world famous as Rodney Dangerfield, Jack Roy remained his legal name for the rest of his life.
3. He performed as a stand-up comic until the 1950s. He was heavily in debt when he quit. Before he officially left show business, he worked as a singing waiter (he was fired) and a performed as an acrobatic diver.
4. Rodney spent the '50's as an aluminum siding salesman in New Jersey. He also worked as a truck driver.
When you don't have a million LEGO bricks, and you can't afford the official Millennium Falcon kit, you do with what you have. The_Librarian_NULL did quite a great job with limited resources, just like Han Solo would! If you don't even have that many LEGO bricks, you can get a tiny kit.
It resembles a small ship from Jay’s Brick Blog Star Wars Advent Calendar, but it's not the same, just a coincidence.
While the tiny ship is cute, it's not the only make-do. Redditor funkblast had plenty of LEGO bricks, but not the cash needed for the kit, so he made the multicolored Millennium Falcon above some time ago. You can see more of it in an album here.
But if you're into the tiny Star Wars ships, you might be able to squeeze out enough bricks for a minimal Imperial Battle Cruiser and a TIE fighter, by deu5ex.
Saturday morning, residents of Hawaii received an alert of incoming missiles, with a tag that "this is not a drill." Panic ensued, and it was 38 minutes before the news followed that it was a false alarm. How did it happen? The explanation was that an employee pushed the wrong button. There is speculation that it was an option in a drop-down menu. The video above is an easy explanation, because it's happened to all of us. -via reddit
There are blue animals, but the species are small in number compared to the other colors among living things, such as red, orange, yellow, and brown. Sure, when we look up to the sky, we see blue. When we look at the Earth from space, we see a blue marble. But the few animal species that look blue don't use pigments -they use physics. And those physics are complicated. It turns out that animals are better at engineering than they are at chemistry.
Okay, there's one exception to the pigment thing, which we learn about in the video. Our friends at It's Okay To Be Smart explain why it's so hard for nature to create the color blue. -via Boing Boing
Action star Liam Neeson has a new movie in theaters now called The Commuter. The very premise of the movie reminds us of the many films where Neeson travels, and people die. He is the world's worst commuter.
Liam Neeson is very bad at being on a plane. He’s the worst at it, maybe. He was on a plane in 2011’s The Grey, and the plane crashed and people died. (The ones who didn’t die in the crash were eaten by wolves, which I’m not sure is worse than dying in a plane crash or better than dying in a plane crash.) (Probably worse.) (It just seems like you’d die faster in a plane crash than you would by wolves chewing on you.) He was on a plane in 2014’s Non-Stop, and it was taken over by terrorists and people died. (His one job in that movie was to make sure it did not get taken over by terrorists and that nobody died, FYI.)
There actually aren’t many modes of transportation that Liam Neeson isn’t bad at using, turns out. His new movie, The Commuter, is out now, and in that movie he’s on a train, and guess what happens: Without spoiling anything, I can tell you that people die on the train.
The list goes on until it sounds like Green Eggs and Ham. You do not want him on a plane, you do not want him on a train, you don't want him in a car, 'cause you won't travel very far. You do not want him on a ship, or or any way you take a trip. And there are a few movies like Leap of Faith in which Neeson does not travel, and everyone survives the movie. Read about the many cinematic troubles Liam Neeson has with transportation at The Ringer.
Hollywood movie titles are often changed for other nations, to more accurately reflect the understanding of the film in a different culture. But when you re-translate those titles back into English, the changes often leave English speakers scratching our heads. There's a reason behind each one, but your guess about that is as good as mine. Some are better than the originals, like the many films of the Fast and Furious movie series as they are titled in Japan, which are more descriptive of the movies.
The Fast & The Furious in Japan is Wild Speed
2 Fast 2 Furious in Japan is Wild Speed X2
The Fast & The Furious: Tokyo Drift in Japan is Wild Speed X3: Tokyo Drift
Fast & Furious in Japan is Wild Speed MAX
Fast Five in Japan is Wild Speed Mega Max
Fast & Furious 6 in Japan is Wild Speed Euro Mission
Furious 7 in Japan is Wild Speed Sky Mission
The Fate of the Furious in Japan is Wild Speed Ice Break
The YouTube channel Abroad in Japan and the Twitter account Bomb Arrow have plenty of these title translations.
Bad Japanese Movie Title #45: "Vacation" is "Oh! Idiot Vacation Family" #japanesemovietitles pic.twitter.com/yrPGEhXsl8
— Bomb Arrow (@Bomb_Arrow) June 27, 2017
See the funniest of American movie retitled for Japan at Uproxx.
One of the greatest chase scenes ever was filmed in the 1968 movie Bullitt. Steve McQueen, as police Lieutenant Frank Bullitt, is pursued by, and then pursues, organized crime figures bent on killing him in a 1968 Mustang GT. Two cars were used for the movie: one was so damaged that it was sent to be scrapped, the other was sold to a private owner. But Steve McQueen wanted the car for himself, and traced it from owner to owner, trying to buy it back. In 1977, the car's owner indicated he would never sell the unique vehicle to anyone, and McQueen gave up. Almost forty years later, Sean Kiernan revealed to a friend that he had inherited the car from his father, and maybe they could use it to finance a movie project. They brought in Kevin Marti to authenticate the vehicle.
“I walked in to see the car,” he said, “and thought, ‘Here’s another car that looks like the Bullitt.’ I went over, looked at the VIN on the tag, and immediately, my emotions flipped from skepticism to ‘Oh, my god, it’s real.’ ”
Marti marveled at the modifications made for the movie. Underneath the rockers, three metal tubes were clumsily welded perpendicular to the car’s center line for camera mounts. There were holes cut in the trunk for the cords that ran from a generator to power the cameras and lights. Even tape residue remained—on the tachometer to mark the redline, and on the floor, presumably to secure the seatbelts and wires. “Ninety-eight percent of the original car is there,” he said. “It’s an incredible artifact.”
Meanwhile, Chad McQueen, the movie star's son, was also looking for the Bullitt car. Read the incredible story of one Mustang over its 50-year life at Hagerty. -via Metafilter
PS: Ford is reissuing the model in 2019.
Epic NPC Man (previously at Neatorama) takes a cockeyed look at the nuts and bolts of gaming, using real people instead of computer graphics. In this video, he explores the moment after the player has fulfilled his quest to rescue the damsel in distress. She's been the prisoner of the villain for ten years. Our hero escorts the fair maiden to her home, but now what? Will he marry her and live happily ever after? Will he gallantly consider her freedom and happiness as his only reward? Will he at least get a kiss? Let's find out.
Remember, this is a video game, in which the player controls the action. The player is a gamer, so his priorities might be different from whatever you, the viewer, would like to see. -via Geeks Are Sexy
We find a high-speed chase scene thrilling, especially when it goes off the rails. The moment when a car goes airborne is often the most memorable part of the entire film. That how generations of Evel Knievel fans and Dukes of Hazard viewers were created. Some movies went the extra mile to give us that thrill, whether it was a dangerous and complicated stunt or enhanced in post-production. Some are exciting, some are tragic, and some are just plain funny. Remember when Jake and Elwood drove off a bridge in The Blues Brothers?
It’s one of the more ridiculous car chase scenes out there but it’s insanely funny for that same reason. Not only are they able to stop the car before going off the unfinished bridge, but then Elwood manages to back up, somehow send the car into a backflip, and then go sailing over the Neo-Nazi-carrying car that’s hot on their tail. And then of course the insanity transfers to the Nazi car when it goes off the bridge at full speed and then proceeds to fly over the city while it’s somehow still falling from a much greater height than it started at. Ah yes, the insanity of comedy is great.
Relive five of the most memorable airborne car scenes in movies, with video evidence, at TVOM.
Cats have a firm sense of private property, but it only pertains to themselves. A cat sees something, it will take something. "I found it, it's mine now!" You know, like the seagulls in Finding Nemo, just quieter. Enjoy this compilation of all kinds of cats taking all kinds of things for themselves. -via Tastefully Offensive
Any time there is a lot of snow on a hillside, there's a possibility of snow rollers. This is a natural phenomenon that looks like how you start a snowman by rolling up a bunch of snow. They can sometime form into big wheels, like the snow roller above. They can also look like carpet rolls, or big boulders, or small balls.
Whether or not nature can be anthropomorphized is a matter for debate. However, one’s first reaction is, inevitably that it must have been a person or persons unknown who took the time to gather a handful of snow and then slowly and carefully roll it until it became too large to push anymore. Yet a brief inspection of the snow around reveals no footprints. So how were they created? There is science behind this magical and mysterious apparition.
When the top layer of a thick blanket of snow begins to melt and become heavy on the side of a hill, it might begin to roll o itself. As the glob of snow rolls down the hill, it gathers up the snow beneath it like in the game Katamari Damacy. The effect is quite eerie when you consider it all happening without human intervention. It's not real common, because conditions have to be just right, but there is plenty of photographic evidence at Kuriositas.
(Image credit: Flickr user Washington State Dept of Transportation)
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