Webcomic artist Liz Climo always has a great time dressing up her animal characters for Halloween. I think the whale's idea is pretty clever, even if he does have to explain it. I love the banana porpoise and Superotter, too. Then there's Batman and his psychic, and the witch and her cat. Be sure to check back for more critters getting ready for Halloween at Hi, I'm Liz.
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
The Salem Witch Trials get all the publicity, but it was far from the only witch panic that invaded colonial America. In Hartford, Connecticut, witch hysteria gripped the community in 1662 and 1663, so much that it came to be known as "The Year of the Witch." It all started with the death of eight-year-old Elizabeth Kelly, who died of an unknown ailment. Suspicion instantly led to Judith Ayres, who nobody liked anyway. She was arrested for witchcraft, and for good measure, they arrested her husband, too.
Judith and William were subjected to that indispensable part of any good witch trial: the "water test." The couple were bound hand to foot and tossed into a pond. If they floated, that was proof positive they were witches. If they sank, well, at least Judith and William would have the satisfaction of knowing that they would die vindicated.
To no one's real surprise, the pair floated like a pair of corks. A ghastly death at the gallows awaited them.
Luckily for the Ayerses, there were a few people in town who had not come down with the prevailing hysteria. These supporters managed to arrange a jailbreak, and the couple fled to Rhode Island, leaving behind their two sons, ages five and eight. One wonders what sort of lives those boys went on to have.
Unfortunately, the departure of Judith and William did not signal the end of the Hartford witch panic. In truth, it was just getting started.
The young girls of Hartford started talking about witchcraft, and accusing others of the practice. One suspect named an entire coven, including her own husband. Read the account of the Year of the Witch at Strange Company.
Markus Klemelä just wanted to brush his teeth. His cat wants some lovin'. The cat, like all house cats, doesn't recognize boundaries when he wants something, so Markus could only do one thing -grab his phone to record this interlude.
The cat is pretty insistent, and has a world-class purr machine. -via Digg
Does the 1986 film Labyrinth make you think of David Bowie or Jim Henson first? Henson directed the cast of humans and puppets, and Bowie played Jareth, the Goblin King who kidnaps the baby Toby while his sister Sarah is babysitting. The film was a financial flop when it was first released, but became a cult hit as further generations of children saw it on home video. Let's have some trivia from the making of Labyrinth.
7. The only way that Toby could sit on Jareth’s lap was to have a sock puppet off screen for him to look at.
The kid just wouldn’t stop screaming when he was sitting on Bowie’s lap, but once Bowie had the puppet in his other hand he couldn’t look away.
6. There were a few different stars that wanted to play Jareth.
Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger were a couple, and Jim Henson was going to try to get sting before his kids convinced him to ask David Bowie.
Read more about Labyrinth at TVOM.
Burger King released a video about bullying. They staged a scene of high school students bullying a kid in the dining area, and the also "bullied" their Whopper Jr. burgers. That's the goofy part. They compare how many people complained about the burger to how many people stood up for the kid. As you can guess, more people were concerned about the burger. After all, they paid for that.
It's the later part of the video that gets you, when people are shown intervening in the teenager's abuse. That might trigger you. You can say that sticking your nose into the situation won't help, and might even make the bullying worse at a different location. But a lot of folks in the reddit comments recalled being bullied as a child, and their clearest memories were of that one time someone stood up for them and let them know they weren't alone. The ad directs you to the No Bully site.
The Hamburger Helper mascot is a disembodied hand, wearing a glove, with a face in its palm. It's ridiculous already, but trying to envision what kind of bone structure it has inside is even weirder. That's the question michael SCAREa posed on Twitter. He got over 500 replies, including plenty of illustrations of the inside of a fictional advertising character.
I can see why you'd think it was one of those, but as an actual skeletologist I can confirm it's actually this: pic.twitter.com/OBwASgeuhd
— Sinderula™ (@Sindershift) October 15, 2017
well that's enough internet for today pic.twitter.com/ft1V7lm6wE
— Cates Holderness (@catesish) October 16, 2017
You can see quite a few of the silliest ideas collected at Nerdist. -via Metafilter
The latest comic from Randall Munroe at xkcd is a graph, a scatter plot indicating the danger of research subjects. If you think hard enough, you can come up with a movie or some kind of story for each one. I thought of Frankenstein and The Andromeda Strain for the upper right, Sharktopus and The Birds for the lower right, Doctor Octopus and various Bond villains for the upper left, and Darth Vader at the top. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes would be close to the middle. The further you go to the right, the more 1960s B-movies you'll find. Molasses storage? Well, there was that flood, but I don't know if they've ever made a movie about it. Too unbelievable.
The National History Museum in London announced the winners of their annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. The winner in the youth competition, the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year, is Daniël Nelson of the Netherlands. The 16-year-old, who is a professional wildlife photographer, entered this portrait of nine-year old Caco the gorilla. Lewis Blackwell, Chair of the jury, said,
‘This is a lovely moment, combining careful and protracted observation of an animal in its habitat with an eye for compelling composition. Our eyes move through the image, from the face to the hand on the breadfruit and back again. The photo takes us right into the life of the young gorilla called Caco and makes us curious to understand his day. Images this good can help inspire and educate, and may perhaps help save this critically endangered species.’
The overall winner of the adult division is too graphic to show here. Brent Stirton of South Africa won for his photograph of a rhino that was a victim of poachers who took its horn. You can see it here. On a more lighthearted note, check out Marcio Cabral's photo of a Brazilian giant anteater. It won first place in the "Animals in their Environment" category.
There are winners in several categories and age groups. You can see them all at the contest website, in the gallery of adult winners and youth winners. -via Digg
(Image credit: Miss Cellania)
Roy G. Biv is a mnemonic used to remember the colors of the visible spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Let's learn something about all the colors.
THE TRUE RED BARON
How the Danish protest pig got its stripe.
(Image credit: Axel Krampe)
In the 19th century, Denmark and Germany went to war over a slice of the southern Jutland Peninsula (today called Schleswig-Holstein). Denmark claimed the land in 1848, but 16 years later, Germany regained the territory and promptly barred any Danes who lived there from raising their country’s flag. So, crafty Danish farmers started raising pigs. Through crossbreeding, they created a pig that resembled the Danish flag, featuring red fur and a prominent white belt. By the 20th century, the Protestschwein, or “protest pigs,” had become a snorting symbol of Danish cultural independence.
WHAT CAME FIRST: ORANGE THE FRUIT OR ORANGE THE COLOR?
The fruit! Medieval English speakers rarely encountered the color orange in nature- so they simply called the shade geoluhread (yellow-red). The fruit, imported from northern India to Europe in the 11th century, changed that. Called orenge by medieval Latin speakers, the fruit took over geoluhread’s place in English in the 1530s.
THE YELLOW INDEX
These facts are bizarre -John Green said so- because royalty is weird. These folks spend their lives surrounded by fabulous wealth and have people taking care of their every need. Then some of them have to be a leader of a country, without understanding anything about the common people who make up the vast majority of the population. There are no job qualifications for royalty other than being born into it, but there are some weird rules for living your life that have nothing to do with governing. Learn a lot of obscure and strange facts about European royalty in the latest episode of the Mental Floss List Show.
We've read about how San Francisco city officials had all the city's dead moved to Colma in 1914 in order to reclaim the valuable land taken up by cemeteries. As methodical as they were, the project was massive, and mistakes were bound to be made. One was unearthed in May of 2016, when a construction crew dug up a small coffin under Ericka Karner's garage. The sealed coffin had two windows showing the corpse in good condition. There was no identifying information attached. The nonprofit Garden of Innocence organization built a new coffin and provided a burial for the child. But who was she? Her gravestone called her Miranda Eve.
That name was meant to be temporary, given to the dead girl by Karner’s own two young daughters, to be replaced when Miranda’s identity was finally discovered. See, before her second burial, researchers extracted DNA from the corpse, first to make sure that there was no foul play, then for clues.
The samples suggested Miranda had been weaned from breast milk a year before her death, putting her age between two and three-and-a-half years old when she died. They also hinted at a diet change that took place a few months before death, which suggested she died from a longer illness, not trauma. An analysis of her hair concluded she died of marasmus, or severe malnutrition, likely due to an infection.
Other information from the DNA, plus a painstaking search of city records finally yielded results. Read her story at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Garden of Innocence)
While they may have given up certain earthly pleasures, like hair, these monks aren't above a bit of shenanigans when they need a bag to carry their stuff. Wouldn't you do the same in their position? Since the band Nirvana and the accompanying symbol were around before these monks were born, there's little chance that they aren't familiar with it. After all, Buddhists seek Nirvana. -via reddit
Christy Keane's daughter Charly was born deaf. She's still an infant, but recently got hearing aids. We've seen older children and adults get emotional when they hear sound for the first time, but Charly is so young, she doesn't understand what's happening or how to react. Her facial expressions are precious.
She's instantly delighted, then confused, then a little scared, then delighted again. She never takes her eyes off her Mommy, though, so you know she's going be alright. You can see more of Charly at Instagram. -via Digg
The 1981 movie Time Bandits was written, produced, and directed by Monty Python's Terry Gilliam. Unlike his later fantasies Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, this film was aimed at children, and those who were kids in the 1980s remember the utterly wacky Time Bandits fondly.
10. The script somehow ended up in Sean Connery’s hands and he was interested.
Connery wasn’t even thought of for the script aside from the fact that the part of Agammemnon need to be played by ‘someone looking like Sean Connery’. It was kind of a happy accident that he said yes.
9. The director accidentally jumped off a scaffolding and landed on Shelly Duvall.
To be fair he was trying to show his actors what not to do while hitting their mark, he just wasn’t entirely successful in his direction.
If the movie was a part of your childhood, and even if it wasn't, you'll want to learn more about the making of Time Bandits at TVOM.
The Wikipedia Markov Masher is a generator that will mix two Wikipedia articles together into a paragraph that almost, but not quite, makes sense in an artificial intelligence manner. I entered Crystal Head Vodka and Memento mori and got this.
Memento mori rings were formerly an accurate historical records advice for the famous danse macabre is quadruple-distilled and artist John Alexander first conceived of the time after morning, the most likely related to 40% alcohol by volume. Unlike Crystal Head launched in 2008 and founded by the impermanence of memento mori Sic transit gloria mundi Ubi sunt You Only Live Once (disambiguation) Tempus fugit Memento mori are typical of the phrase is the bottle is "about nothing else but written as a sealed chamber and Momijigari, the Crystal Skull Vodka". Neatorama.com. Retrieved February 20, 2014.
That's right, you only live once. Combining pop culture genres can be fun.
Gandalf hid Luke and uses the 100 Videogames Villains". In Ukraine, was accomplished both turned to write, as leader of the River Anduin—and a more than Gandalf impressed on exploring the name and gives him a diagnosis. He appears as a Jedi, the Bridge of Middle-earth, "set against Sauron's forces of their Order, was already set Gandalf is trademarked in the fire that Vader asks about the production The Lord of his own birth name is said that Luke escapes with the same name "Gandolf" occurs as Anakin's scarred face. Ahsoka's presence was not require the Academy Award for borderline personality disorder to voice of Sauron, however, had the Ring, Gandalf was substantially increased in winter, they take the 1940s and that underlies the peak of Aragorn.
See more funny examples at Metafilter.
(Image credit: Flickr user cookiespi)
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