We all know that the earth is a disc carried on the back of a turtle. There are supposed to be four elephants in there, too, but maybe they are just covered with mud. This real-life turtle is carrying his share of earth, that's for sure! There's even a poem about it.

"See the TURTLE of Enormous Girth"
"On his shell he holds the Earth."
"His thought is slow, but always kind."
"He holds us all within his mind."

You might try to guess how this turtle ended up with the earth on its back, so redditor assa7iq did some digging.

Right? Everyone's just making jokes and I want to learn how this happens. I'm asking my herpetologist friend.

Edit - answers! I asked how this happens-

"Some turtles can hibernate for a year. Not all, but some. Probably long term hibernation. He probably had a little cavern of some sort. And due to the soil moisture it collapsed on him as he was getting out."

Then I asked if there's any good reason to leave all that on him-

"No good reason, no. He probably just woke up and has a tortoise bedhead. (If anything it's bad, because it lowers the amount of surface area is hit by sunlight for basking)"

Tortoise bedhead is more reasonable than the flat earth theory. -via reddit

We've all been there: Deliver a joke, some little bit of unexpected humor… or so you think. But it falls flat (hey, at least it rhymes). That's bad enough even without the diss that follows. I had to laugh, even though I also felt sorry for Gary. The caption under this comic from Jake Likes Onions is "Gary just wants to be liked."

I don't name my houseplants because I have a bazillion of them. But we had shrubs named Bob and Steve. Bob died last year, so I think his replacement will be named Gary.

Grant Wood's American Gothic is more than a famous painting. Sure, it's a great piece of art, but there's more to it than that. When it was first unveiled, the painting wasn't recognized as anything special. But the subject matter made it something worth talking about.   

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In this video from Vox, we see that it was the people who saw the painting that made it special. They saw what they wanted to see in American Gothic. -via Digg

See also: The Story Behind American Gothic.

Christian Gudebrod ran the The Gudebrod Brothers Silk Company, Inc. at the building now called Bleecker Tower in New York City. The business had a shop cat named Snooperkatz that Gudebrod was particularly fond of. When Snooperkatz went missing in May of 1894, Gudebrod posted flyers offering a one dollar reward for the return of his lost cat.

Unfortunately, nobody returned Snooperkatz. However, every man, woman, and child who saw the flyer brought Christian Gudebrod multiple street cats in hopes of getting the dollar reward.

As The Sun reported on May 11, 1894, within just a few days, the large building was overrun with cats, “raising their voices in a stream of profanity that is dark, deep and strong.” There were “black cats, white cats, gray cats, yellow cats, mottled cats, tomcats, pussy cats, tailless cats, earless cats, whiskerless cats, cats of high caste, and cats of absolutely no caste at all!”

Apparently the people who brought the cats were not too keen on taking them back where they found them. Anyway, the story made the newspapers, and The Sun sent a reporter to interview Gudebrod about the incident. Gudebrod told many tales about the mischievous and often downright devilish Snooperkatz, which you can read at The Hatching Cat. -via Strange Company

Disney's Donald Duck has been around for more than 80 years, and has appeared in more movies than any other Disney character. Donald and his extensive family have always been ahead of their time. How else would we have so many great things that were first seen in cartoons and comics featuring Donald, his Uncle Scrooge, or his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie? For example, you might recall the 2010 movie Inception. It was considered groundbreaking, but we'd already seen it in the comics.    

In a 2002 comic book, eight years before Christopher Nolan's little dream exploration film, Scrooge got his mind hijacked by the Beagle Boys. The Boys were trying out new careers as dream-thieves and went into Scrooge's mind to steal the secret combination of his vault. If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because that's exactly how Inception opens up, except you have to replace DiCaprio with talking dogs. Which, incidentally, would probably improve every single one of his movies.

After they're inside Scrooge's mind, the Beagle Boys have trouble differentiating dreams from reality -- again, exactly like the characters from Inception, who need special items, or "totems" in order to tell dream from reality.

When Donald Duck enters Scrooge's dream to help, he has to figure out a way to pry the Beagle Boys out of there. In Inception they use "kicks" to make controlled exits, like how the feeling of falling usually snaps you out of the dream. In McDuck's head, they do, well, the exact same thing.

There's more to the story about Inception, plus several other ways that the Ducks were either prescient or else they inspired something that came after. Read about five of them at Cracked. -Thanks, Tim!

In the newest episode of Simon's Cat Logic, Simon Tofield and Nicky Treverrow talks about how cats play, and the best ways for us to play with them. It starts with how to train kittens in recognizing the proper toys.

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Even after a lifetime of playing with cats, even I learned some new tips in this video. It has a Simon's Cat cartoon tagged onto the end, in which we see the cat having a ball with that elusive red dot.

The Catholic Church ruled both the spiritual and physical lives of Europeans during the period of the Holy Roman Empire. Then Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation, leading to formation of the Lutheran Church. Other breakaway groups founded other denominations with theologies that wandered further from Catholic doctrine. In some places, that led to war, because one's salvation was not to be trusted to free will, and neither was political power. In the city of Münster, a gruesome artifact reminds citizens of those dark days.

Visitors to St. Lambert’s church in Münster, Germany may notice something odd about the building’s facade. Three gleaming iron cages, 7 feet tall and a yard wide and deep, hang empty from the church spire. Once home to the mutilated bodies of three revolutionaries who shaped one of the strangest chapters in the Protestant Reformation, the cages have hung there for nearly 500 years. They remain on the spire as a testament to their former occupants’ experiment in religious utopia—and the tremors they sent through German religious and political life for years after their occupants' deaths.

The citizens of Münster held relatively liberal religious views in 1530. To the local bishop, their tolerance of Protestants was radical and even heretical and, worst of all, threatened his power. The Lutherans moved in, and then the Anabaptists, and neither takeover was peaceful. Over the next six years, the city was a battleground between the sects. The war took odd turns with forced baptisms, polygamy, famine, torture, prophesy, and violent battles. Read an account of the bizarre war in Münster that ended with the public cages that still hang there, at Mental Floss.

(Image credit: Flixckr user ptwo)

Insane inventor Colin Furze (previously) has built such a reputation that now he's being paid to bring ridiculous tech to life. In his latest stunt, he covered a BMW with a lawn (artificial turf), sealed it up and filled it with water, and installed a barbecue grill on the back. Silly? Yes, and a lot of fun. The car is an ad for Google, so they provide Furze with the raw materials for the hot tub car.

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Watch Furze drive around, splashing his bathwater all over the road. Oh yeah, the interior also has water jets, to which he adds bubble bath soap! Now try to imagine what happens when they grill burgers behind a bubble bath. This is the "fun" video. In case you are wondering exactly how he sealed the car so well that it could be driven filled with water, this video shows the process, and this video covers the other accessories. -via Laughing Squid

Chronic homelessness is terrifying, and temporary homelessness is something that more and more Americans experience at least once in their life. It's a humbling experience. The older you get, the more likely you are to know someone who had to sleep outside, in their car, in a shelter, or with friends or family members for a time. With the rise of homelessness in the 1980s, Hollywood recognized the phenomenon and set about making movies that show how normal or even extraordinary people are among the homeless. Check out clips from movies built around homeless people at TVOM. I haven't seen all the movies, but if I know anything about Hollywood, I would bet that they all have homes by the end of the film.

Hermit crabs live inside armor built by other species, usually a seashell after the death of a mollusk, or in any found object it will fit into. As the crab grows, it needs to find a larger shell to accommodate its body. A newly-discovered species, though, has found a workaround. Diogenes heteropsammicola takes up residence inside a living coral. As the crab grows, the dome of coral grows, too, so they can stay together for life.

But although they may be new to us, these hermit crabs have been living symbiotically with coral for a very long time. The crab’s long, thin tail and spindly arms are well suited to fitting into the coral’s cavity, which is usually inhabited by a marine worm that also shares a symbiotic relationship with the coral. Hermit crab hind ends usually spiral to fit shells, but these crabs are more symmetrical, to fit well in the coral. There are advantages for the coral, too. In the journal article, published in PLOS ONE, researchers describe how the crab “carries the host coral and prevents the coral from being buried.”

This symbiotic relationship is called obligate mutualism, as both species benefit from the arrangement. Read the original research report at PLOS-One.

(Image credit: Momoko Igawa, Makoto Kato)

Yeah, you can save money by bringing your lunch to work instead of buying it from a restaurant or fast food outlet. But after you buy the groceries, then you'll need something to carry your lunch in. You'll probably need some Tupperware containers, too, and some chill-packs to keep your food freshly cold. Or maybe a Thermos, if you don't have a microwave at the office. Or you could do like I did when I actually went to work: keep a box of crackers and a jar of peanut butter in your desk (because the kids were using my Thermos and all my Tupperware in their lunches). Better yet, get a job working from home! This is the latest comic from Dami Lee at As Per Usual. Now, if you'll excuse me, I suddenly feel the need for a midnight snack.

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The Warp Zone performs a a cappella medley of the themes from all five Star Trek TV series, for serious Star Trek fans. They'll have to tag this with a theme song from the new series, Star Trek: Discovery, as soon as they learn it. -via Tastefully Offensive    

(Image credit: Flickr user Sir Mildred Pierce)

How a video game broke all the rules and made art out of physics

In 2005, seven students at DigiPen Institute of Technology —a for-profit university that teaches video game design— dutifully showed up at their school’s annual career expo to show off their senior project. Their expectations were reasonably low.

Sure, they knew a few big-shot game designers would attend. DigiPen, after all, was located in Redmond, Washington, home to Microsoft and Nintendo, and representatives would likely be there. But the students certainly didn’t expect folks from Valve —the company behind Half-Life— to stop by their booth, play their game, Narbacular Drop, then leave business cards.

When the students called Valve hoping to get feedback from experts, they were shocked by the response. A few weeks later, they found themselves in a corporate meeting room. “We took the game there and we were thinking, ‘Oh, we’re going to show it to two or three people,’ ” Kim Swift, one of the DigiPen seven, told Forbes. But people kept piling into the room: 20 to 30 of Valve’s top programmers, artists, and executives— including Gabe Newell, Valve’s legendary co-founder. It was like having Steven Spielberg show up to a screening of your student film.

Less than 15 minutes into the Narbacular Drop demonstration, Newell stopped the proceedings. He had a question for the twenty-somethings. “So, what're you doing after graduation?”

One of the perks of owning a boat is getting to name it with the most ridiculous pun you can think of. In this case, a punny name is quite appropriate, considering the passengers. The top comment was quite clever, too:

They're all good buoys!

Of course they are.

There a remake of the Tomb Raider movie coming out in 2018, starring Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft. You can see the trailer here, and in it you can tell that Alicia Vikander is a real woman -unlike the image in the movie's poster, which was released this week. What's going on with her neck? Where does it connected to her skull? The over-editing of the picture is a consequence of trying to get her into that pose, the one where a woman who is the star of a movie must show face, boobs, and butt all in the same picture. This time they've gone too far. Bodies just don't work like that. -via The Daily Dot