St. Guinefort does not appear in the official canon of the Catholic Church. Or at least, not the Guinefort we're talking about here (St. Cucuphas is sometimes referred to as Guinefort). That's because Guinefort was a 13th-century dog, thought to be a greyhound. According to tradition, he belonged to St. Roch, but after his master's death went to live with a noble family near Neuville, France. And that's where he earned his sainthood.

While both the parents and the nurse were absent, a large serpent entered the house and approached the cradle.  Guinefort, however, remained on guard.   When Guinefort saw the serpent he attacked it and upset the cradle.  The dog and serpent exchanged many bites but in the end Guinefort prevailed and tore the serpent to pieces leaving behind considerable blood and gore.  Although injured, the dog remained on guard duty until the family returned.

The family panicked when they saw the gory scene.  First the nurse came in and began screaming that the dog had devoured the child.  The mother then ran in also thinking Guinefort had killed her child.  The child’s father now quickly took action.  He drew his sword and killed the dog.  Only then did the family see the infant sleeping peacefully off to the side.

Having realized they unjustly had accused and killed Guinefort, the lord took the dog’s body and placed it in a well which he covered with stones.  He also planted trees beside it to memorialize the dog’s deeds.

That's a good dog. Villagers started bringing their children to the shrine to pray to Guinefort for their protection, and the dog became locally known as a saint. The Catholic Church was not happy about that. There was even talk that such veneration was a downright pagan activity. The story of Guinefort may remind you of similar tales from all over, which are parables cautioning one against being too quick to judge others. Read the story of Guinefort and why he was made into a saint at the Ultimate History Project. -via Metafilter 

There's a long list of prohibited objects and actions at Walt Disney World. Some of them seem so strange that you know there's a precedent behind each restriction, a story of someone ruining the fun for everyone. Before you go, you might want to check out some of the "no-nos" at Disney parks. Like running.

This is prohibited to avoid any lawsuits from bumps, bruises, sprains, broken bones, etc. The park doesn’t want to be liable for any injuries that occur on its grounds and thus if you are caught running from place to place then you might be warned or asked to leave. Granted, there’s a lot to see. But plan ahead of time and make sure you have enough days to see what you want. Or prioritize.

See what else you can't bring or do at Disney World at TVOM.

The life of an IT professional is never easy, having to deal with all those other employees who don't understand computers. What makes you think it would be any easier in the future? People will always be just people. Clueless people.

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Tech support in the Star Trek universe wouldn't be any easier than it is in the real world, as imagined by Bitter IT Guy. He says, yeah, he knows the uniform should be gold, but all he had was a Picard uniform from last Halloween. It makes the face palm look great, though, doesn't it? -via Digg 

Richard Halliburton lived the kind of life many only dream of. He was from a wealthy family, and as soon as he graduated from Princeton in 1921, he hit the road to travel the world. No adventure was too far, too dangerous, or too illegal. Halliburton wrote numerous books, newspaper dispatches, and magazine articles about his experiences in exotic places. While some criticized his writing as overly florid and others thought he made many of his stories up out of whole cloth, quite a few were inspired to follow in his footsteps.

Halliburton’s romantic notions of travel seem to have had an especially enchanting effect on the youth of his day. Among his young fans: Lady Bird Johnson, Lenny Bruce, and Vince Lombardi. Walter Cronkite caught one of Halliburton’s lectures as a young college student and credited it with convincing him that that journalism could be a glamorous career. “He was a daring adventurer-journalist and best-selling author, as devilishly handsome as a movie star,” Cronkite recalled, and he “commanded his audience with superb theatricality.”

The literary critic Susan Sontag discovered Halliburton at age 7 and claimed his works were “surely among the most important books of my life” in her 2001 essay collection, Where the Stress Falls. Halliburton, she wrote, “had devised for himself a life of being forever young and on the move… my first vision of what I thought had to be the most privileged of lives, that of a writer.”

Halliburton's career was cut short by a publicity stunt for the 1939 San Francisco World's Fair. His thirst for adventure and his reputation as a fake combined to ensure that he was never seen again. Read the story of Richard Halliburton at Smithsonian. -Thanks, Tim!

It's caused by a prefrontal imbalance of the auxiliary nerve on the eye retina created by the spheroid object being stared it. It confuses the obsidian prenatal synapses in the brain.

If you'll notice on your peripheral vision you can see the prenatal synapse snapping on the right of your field of view before it turns red.

As your prefrontal cortex adjust you can see the neuropathic synapse being repaired in your eye and the circle centre returns to its normal colour.

Well, that makes perfect sense.

How one man formalized his gibberish and fooled Europe’s scholars.

Nobody knew what to make of George Psalmanazar. From the day he arrived in London in 1703, his pale features, shabby dress, and raw meat diet raised eyebrows. Stranger still was the way he worshiped the sun and moon, his unusual patter, and the odd symbols he scribbled.

Psalmanazar was accompanied by Alexander Innes, a Scottish priest eager to introduce the boy to London’s scholars. The two had met in Holland, where Innes was serving as an army chaplain. Psalmanazar was an oddball local who claimed to hail from the island of Formosa- what Europeans called Taiwan at the time. As he told it, he’d been kidnapped and brought to Europe by a Jesuit missionary. Now, Innes planned to take credit for converting the heathen, knowing it would do wonders for his career.

Psalmanazar was full of fascinating tales, but his most unusual quality was his dialect. His Formosan used 20 characters, some of which resembled Greek and Hebrew letters, intriguing scholars interested in the migration of language. He spoke Latin as well, but it was blurry in comparison with his flawless “native tongue.” Psalmanazar would credit the rote memorization he’d been drilled in as a schoolboy for his rise as Europe’s most famous Formosan. Which he undoubtedly was- though he’d never set foot in Formosa.

YLLW is an animation, Illustration, and motion Studio in London. Their first project to be made public is an exercise in designing robots to be silly, yet fun to watch.  

We wanted each ‘Silly Robot’ to be different from one another, either in movement or conceptually so we created a set or rules; a strict colour palette, one texture and no more than 4 hours to create each one from start to finish (which we broke only a few times).

Each robot started as a sketch, we then worked directly wthin After Effects where we used shape layers and a few plugins to help speed up the design and animation process. We didn’t want to be too precious over every little movement and whatever we had at the end of a few hours usually went up to social media and we moved onto the next robot.

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You can see each of the 50 individual robots as gifs in this gallery. -via The Kid Should See This

Divers looking for fossil megalodon teeth found a strange skull in the Wando River near Charleston, South Carolina. At the College of Charleston’s Mace Brown Museum of Natural History, paleontologist Robert Boessenecker began studying it, and came to the conclusion that it's a new type of prehistoric cetacean, one that had no teeth! That's pretty weird, as cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises) descended from land mammals that returned to the sea. This one lost its teeth along the way.

As Boessenecker and his colleagues measured the partial skull, they realized it is related to modern odontocetes, also known as toothed whales—a name that’s obviously a bit misleading. “It’s definitely a weird, weird toothed whale.” says John Gatesy, who studies cetaceans at the American Museum of Natural History and was not involved in the study. The team studying the South Carolina skull named it Inermorostrum xenops.

There actually are modern odontocetes that don’t really use their teeth either. Male beaked whales, for example, usually have one pair of teeth that is only used to fight for females, whose teeth stay completely hidden in their gums. Beaked whales, along with pilot whales and sperm whales, also catch squid by sucking them into their mouths. But all of these whales evolved recently. Inermorostrum xenops seems to have evolved its toothless suction-feeding independently and much, much earlier than modern suction-feeding whales. “It’s a highly specialized species but it’s essentially a dead end,” says Boessenecker. Evolution, far from being some linear progression, often works this way, hitting dead ends and retrying failed experiments from millions of years earlier.

In other words, this 30-million-year-old creature was an evolutionary experiment that failed. Read about Inermorostrum xenops at the Atlantic.

It looks like one side is right and the other is wrong, but if you told them that, they'd turn on you for sure. And they've got pitchforks! Anyone want to argue with me on that one? This is the latest comic from Sarah Andersen at Sarah's Scribbles.

From Japan, here's a four-minute marble run that incorporates ping pong, magnets, dominos, and a whole lot of nonsense that shouldn't work. But it does, at least this one time.

(YouTube link)

Who knows how many tests went into each component, and how many times they failed before making the entire thing work together. Rube Goldberg would have been proud. -via reddit

Trevor Mahlmann was among the many people who wanted to record the solar eclipse on camera. But that's not all -he wanted to catch the International Space Station flying across the sun at the same time as the moon was crossing between the sun and the earth. Mahlmann did that, out in Wyoming. It took months of planning, and it worked!

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The guys from Smarter Every Day were there to help set the project up, pull some strings, and explain what's happening. If you just want to see the ISS transit, skip ahead to 3:20, but the whole show is worth a watch. There's a second video, in which they recap the experience.  -via Digg

A wedding celebration got a little out of hand Saturday when the bridal party went to a bar in Edmonton, Alberta. Matt Machado and Ryan Bychkowski were not part of the wedding party, but witnessed the fight. Bychkowski took pictures and Machado talked to CBC News.

He said it was like a scene from the Wild Wild West.

"They're getting drinks. They're just really, really super banged up," he said.

"And then all of a sudden we see the smoke pit doors just, like, blow open. Like, you know, in the old Western movies, when a big fight happens and the doors just explode open and everybody piles out? Then security's got this one guy in a headlock and they tumble down the stairs.

"The bride is just like following behind, just swinging."

Security got the brawl settled outside while about 100 people in the bar looked on. With the bride pinned against the wall by bouncers, the groom was led away in another direction, Machado said.

Edmonton police charge the 36-year-old bride with assault, and the 37-year-old groom with mischief. Machado also gave a radio interview about the situation that is quite amusing. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Ryan Bychkowski)

You know how kids get so excited when a parent comes home after being gone all day at work? It's enough to make the stay-at-home parent feel jealous. That only lasts until they enter school, because kids don't seem all that happy to see their parents after a day with their friends. Omni the umbrella cockatoo knows what time to expect his human to come home, and seems quite happy to welcome him into the house.

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There's plenty of evidence that Omni is quite attached to his "mom," Rebecca Stout, too, and the entire family, as you can see in their videos. You can also follow Omni at his Instagram feed. -via Laughing Squid

Mike the Bum posted this chart that explains the five stages of grief, illustrated by margarine products named for butter. The ch00f responded with an alignment chart explaining the different brands of not-butter.



It turns out there is an entire subreddit for butter substitutes with names defining what it is not instead of what it is. -via Boing Boing

Rheta Wynekoop lived an unhappy life with her unemployed, unfaithful husband in her physician mother-in-law's home. On November 21, 1933, she was found dead on a table in her mother-in-law's operating room in the basement, shot in the back. Who did it?

Was it her husband, who drank and ran around on his wife? He was out of town at the time.

Was it Dr. Alice Wynekoop, her mother-in-law? She was a well-respected doctor in the community. She confessed under duress, than retracted her confession.

Was it Enid Hennessey, who also lived in the home? She had no motive, but provided valuable testimony.

Or was it someone else entirely?

The entire case was odd, and the evidence was inconclusive all around. Although there was a conviction, to this day we don't know exactly what happened to Rheta Wynekoop, or who did it. Read the story of this weird murder case at Strange Company.