Inspired by an article entitled Why Don't People Return Their Shopping Carts?, Rob Beschizza of Boing Boing created this shopping cart alignment chart. I'm glad each picture is captioned, because they may be hard to see here. I don't know that giving a shopping cart to the poor is a true neutral; you'd think that people would've widely varying opinions on the practice. Maybe the "neutral" comes in when those opinions cancel each other out. I'm at the point now where I just park a shopping cart in the store and carry my one or two bags to the car myself.
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Among the strongmen and strongwomen in traveling shows of the early 20th century, Kate Brumbach stood out as the mighty Sandwina. Her parents were strength performers in circuses, and she took after both of them.
Kate’s natural strength came from her lineage and physical proportions. In adolescence Kate stood just over six feet tall and weighed 187 pounds. She honed her natural abilities through intensive exercise and in her heyday was known for her bulging 17 inch biceps and 26 ½ inch thighs. Kate initially displayed her muscular girth to the paying patrons of the circuses her father contracted with. She was initially a wrestler of men and famously offered 100 marks to any man who could best her. According to legend, she never lost her bet and even gained a husband after soundly thrashing a young man by the name of Max Heymann. Heymann thought tussling with a woman would be a rather delightful way to earn 100 marks. But by his own account he recalled only entering the ring, a blue sky and being carried away from the ring by Kate like a prize. The couple remained married for 52 years.
Heymann is pictured above with Sandwina. Kate took her stage name from Eugene Sandow, who she met when she challenged any man to a weightlifting showdown, and the famous bodybuilder stepped up. Read how that encounter turned out in the biography of Sandwina at The Human Marvels. -Thanks, Tim!
American cities are designed for cars. As traffic chokes the streets they have, cities urge commuters to take mass transit, yet make little effort to help them do it. For those who ride buses to work or school, the worst part of the trip can be the very first part: the bus stop. Some stops have no sidewalks leading to them, no crosswalks, no light, no place to sit, no shelter from the weather, and are sometimes even hard to find. For the third year in a row, StreetsBlog USA is conducting a tournament to determine the country's sorriest bus stop. The bus stop in the picture above is the contender from San Diego. The bus stop sign is attached to the light pole on the left.
This bus stop is on Mission Center Road across from Sevan Court in Mission Valley, San Diego. Specifically the one on the East side (on the left of the picture). [On] this road people drive highway speeds all the time. It already is a joke that there is a bike lane, everyone I know living around here wouldn’t risk it. The bus would block the bike lane and presumably the entire car lane, while the person leaving or entering the bus has almost nowhere to stand and has to cross four lanes of fast cars. And this is in a central part of San Diego, not some rural area.
Other contenders have bonus hazards, like trains, alligators, and "no pedestrian" signs. Here are the current standings in the tournament
You can see all the contenders in this year's tournament, cast your votes, and follow future rounds here. -via Metafilter
Admit it, as soon as you finished this comic, you looked down to see how dirty your keyboard is, right? Unless you are reading this on a phone, of course. I did, and my keyboard sure needs a cleaning. Funny how someone else's dirt always looks so much worse than your own dirt. This is the latest comic from Julia Lepetit at Dorkly.
YouTuber DEOKHEE KIM watched a cat at a busy city intersection in South Korea. The cat patiently waited until the crosswalk light turned green, and then proceeded to cross. What a clever cat!
It must be a born-and-bred urban cat to learn to read a crosswalk sign. However, I have a suspicion that the cat merely waited for all the cars to stop, which is not obvious from the framing of the video. It's still a clever cat, which is the only kind that roams city streets as an adult. What do you think? -via Tastefully Offensive
Häagen-Dazs Ice Cream is not named for Häagen, or Dazs, or any person or thing. Polish immigrants Reuben and Rose Mattus founded the company in New York in 1961. Customers can be forgiven for believing the name is Scandinavian, because it was designed to sound vaguely Danish.
Reuben Mattus told Tablet Magazine in 2012 that the name for his company was inspired by Mattus’s admiration for Denmark’s treatment of Danish Jews during World War II, and that he sat around trying out Danish-sounding names until he hit on one he liked. But the phrase “Häagen-Dazs” not only has no actual meaning in Danish (or any other language), it does not follow Danish language conventions. There is no umlaut in Danish; it is found in some Germanic languages, including semi-archaic uses in English like the word naïve, as well as in French, Dutch, Spanish, Welsh, and a few other languages.
So Häagen-Dazs is a thoroughly nonsense word. You'd have to be a real ice cream fan to learn how to spell it, and there are plenty of Häagen-Dazs fans. But what makes it a nonsense word, and why can't it mean something? Atlas Obscura looks deep into the linguistic puzzle of the Häagen-Dazs name.
(Image credit: Flickr user Edgar Zuniga Jr.)
It's been ten years since we first posted about the mysterious Money Pit at Oak Island in Nova Scotia, and its tales of buried pirate treasure.
This legend dates back to centuries ago when a young boy came upon the location and discovered what seemed like an invisible “X” marked on a spot. Since then, people have been digging and to this day, no treasure is yet to be found.
The lack of findings is attributed to a series of booby traps, which flooded the pit with seawater when treasure hunters get close to the booty. Or is the whole thing just a natural phenomena? In 2014, the History Channel launched a reality TV show about the folks who are investigating what may be buried on Oak Island. Viewers of The Curse of Oak Island have their own opinions on what caused all the hoopla, Read the most plausible theories on the treasure, or lack thereof, at Oak Island.
The Lititz Borough (Pennsylvania) Police Department is looking for pranksters -or possibly PR people intent on viral marketing- who left red balloons tied to city storm drain grates. The prank comes just as the new movie It is set to open nationwide.
A certain movie is coming to theaters in two days, and a local prankster took it upon themselves to promote the movie...............we give points for creativity, however we want the local prankster to know that we were completely terrified as we removed these balloons from the grates and we respectfully request they do not do that again. If you're not sure what we're talking about, search "It" and watch the preview, but we suggest watching the preview with a friend or coworker with all the lights on and the sound down low
The police have a sense of humor about it. They posted a picture of their investigative department dusting the balloons for fingerprints. At least they are more chill about the stunt than the Boston police were about the Aqua Teen Hunger Force stunt ten years ago. It arrives in theaters this weekend. -via Uproxx
Update: The perpetrators have been found. It was a group of five teenage girls.
On January 3, 1961, a nuclear meltdown at Stationary Low-Power Plant Number 1 (SL-1) near Idaho Falls, Idaho, killed all three operators at the site: Jack Byrnes, Dick Legg, and Richard McKinley. They are, to this day, the only nuclear explosion fatalities on U.S. soil. The design of the facility, which provided power to the surrounding area, did not have the redundant fail-safe measures that newer reactors have. There were three control rods that had to be manually lifted, no more than four inches. Lifting only the central rod further would be enough to cause a meltdown -and that's what happened.
At 9:01 p.m., SL-1 exploded. “When the reactor went critical, it released so much heat energy in four milliseconds that it flashed the water surrounding the fuel to steam,” reads Stacy’s book. “[Water] slammed against the lid of the pressure vessel at a velocity of 160 feet per second and 10,000 pounds per square inch exactly as if it were a piston — a water hammer. The entire vessel jumped nine feet into the air, hit the ceiling, and thumped back into place…The violence of the explosion killed all three of the men.”
McKinley was struck in the head by a piece of radioactive shrapnel that tore off half his face. Byrnes was thrown into concrete blocks, breaking ribs that pierced his heart. Legg was skewered in the gut by a flying control rod that launched him thirteen feet in the air and pinned him to the ceiling. (It took a week to get him down, requiring a pole with a hook to push him into a net attached to a crane operated by a man shielded in lead.) The men’s bodies were wrapped in several hundred pounds of lead, placed in steel coffins, and buried under a foot of concrete.
Investigators later tried to recreate the conditions leading to the meltdown. The central rod had been lifted over twenty inches, but no man could cause that to happen in any way that could be construed as accidental. Was it sabotage, suicide, or carelessness caused by anger? We know what happened at SL-1, but we will never know exactly why. However, details of the lives of the men who were there give us some clues, which you can find out about at Longreads. -via Digg
Screen Junkies takes us on a tour of a remote island with a large ape in an Honest Trailer for Kong: Skull Island. They've got plenty to say about the seventh King Kong film, especially about the weird 1970s setting and the analog to the Vietnam War. But then something really weird happens.
Jordan Vogt-Roberts, the director of Kong: Skull Island, steps in to add his own critique! He has a long list of his movie's failings, which he cheerfully shares with us. "Yeah, I bathe in pain."
British student Liam Smyth has a first date story that beats all the others you've heard. Remember the famous Sure Lock ad in which a woman had to retrieve her own poo from a toilet? The toilets in Britain aren't quite as robust as American thrones. Anyway, Smyth's Tinder date found herself in the same situation when she went #2 at his home and it wouldn't flush down. She retrieved the contents of the bowl and threw it out the window. She calmed down and then confessed to Smyth.
“I was understandably concerned, and told her we would go outside, bag up the offending poo in the garden, bin it, and pretend the whole sorry affair had never happened.
“Unfortunately, owing to a design quirk of my house, the toilet window does not in fact open to the garden, but instead into a narrow gap of about a foot and a half, separated from the outside world by another (non-opening) double glazed window. It was into this twilight zone that my date had thrown her poo.
After Smyth notified the other residents of the house, for some reason, the woman decided she could climb into the gap and retrieve it herself. But then she got stuck in the window. That's where the firemen come in. You can read the entire story at the Bristol Post. Isn't it wonderful when your first date horror story makes it into the local paper? -via Metafilter
Peacock spiders perform their mating dance to a disco beat with the Bee Gees' tune "Staying Alive" from the movie Saturday Night Fever. If this doesn't impress those lady spiders, I don't know what will! They not only dance well, but they display an astonishing variety of colors and patterns on their butts.
Jürgen Otto, also known as Peacockspiderman, dipped into his extensive archives of spider videos and put this awesome music video together. There are 51 different spiders spiders here. -via Tastefully Offensive
See more of Otto's peacock spiders.
During the 1930s, unemployment in Appalachia was as high as 40%. Roads were awful or nonexistent, and 31% of the residents of eastern Kentucky were illiterate. The region's needs gave rise to an innovative WPA program to put women who had horses or mules to work improving conditions: The Pack Horse Library Initiative.
Unlike many New Deal projects, the packhorse plan required help from locals. "Libraries" were housed any in facility that would step up, from churches to post offices. Librarians manned these outposts, giving books to carriers who then climbed aboard their mules or horses, panniers loaded with books, and headed into the hills. They took their job as seriously as mail carriers and crossed streams in wintry conditions, feet frozen in the stirrups.
Carriers rode out at least twice a month, with each route covering 100 to 120 miles a week. Nan Milan, who carried books in an eight-mile radius from the Pine Mountain Settlement School, a boarding school for mountain children, joked that the horses she rode had shorter legs on one side than the other so that they wouldn't slide off of the steep mountain paths. Riders used their own horses or mules-—the Pine Mountain group had a horse named Sunny Jim—or leased them from neighbors. They earned $28 a month—around $495 in modern dollars.
The program was extremely popular among the recipients of the books. Demand grew, donations came in, and the librarians even started making their own books. Read about the librarians on horseback at Smithsonian.
A bat got into a home in Ireland. The people there immediately went into their individual action modes. Derry is trying to catch the bat. Maureen hides behind the door to the next room in order to watch. And Tadhg Fleming records it on video while offering encouragement and instruction. And that's the best part of the adventure. There is a good smattering of NSFW language.
Or maybe the best part was the dog peeing on the floor. Anyway, the poor bat did his best to find an open door the entire time, but had to wait until everyone calmed down before he could succumb to the towel and find his freedom. Great job, Derry! -via reddit
Clowns were once associated with the circus, then with children's parties, but now they exist in horror movies more than in real life. You might blame John Wayne Gacy, or the Joker, but clowns are just plain scary, and always have been. And now we have another scary clown to look forward to in the new season of American Horror Story and in the a feature film of Stephen King's It coming up. Those clowns are in competition with quite a few past movies that scared the bejesus out of us. Which is your favorite scary clown movie? See the the list of 13 at Gizmodo.
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