The cat sneezed for 15 minutes straight, according to redditor withagecomesnerdines. Then he finally found a clue as to her troubles. A tiny patch of green in her nose. It was a blade of grass! So he pulled it out.
My goodness. That had to be a relief for the poor cat. The joke, of course, is that you're not supposed to snort grass, you're supposed to smoke it. Others have speculated that the cat was probably eating the grass, but instead of going down to her stomach, the blade went up into her nasal cavity. She's all better now. If your cat won't stop sneezing, you might want to look in its nose.
Summer camp is a great place to set a movie: you're away from your parents, you meet all kinds of new kids (and weird camp counselers), and anything can happen. What happened to us when we went to camp as children was usually fun but not outrageous, yet the possibility of something really outrageous was always there. So of course, those awesome ideas go into movies about summer camp. Relive the most outrageous moments from summer camp movies in a list at TVOM. With video evidence.
Ancient people (and not-so-ancient people) thought the end of the world was coming when the sun went dark. Today, we know the celestial cycles that produce a solar eclipse and the earth's shadow that produces a lunar eclipse. But when the world did not end, those ancient people looked for meaning in the events. Many myths grew out of their experiences, which are quite different in various parts of the world.
When something dreadful happens in Norse mythology, you can safely assume Loki had something to do with it. The trickster god managed to father the ultimate world-consuming serpent, the queen of the underworld and a god-slaying giant wolf. That wolf, Fenrir, spawned the eventual doom of both sun and moon in the lupine duo Sköll and Hati. Yes, everything Loki touches turns to Ragnarök.
Sköll doesn’t get to gobble up the sun ‘til the end times arrive—and when he finally sinks his teeth in, the light of the world extinguishes in his grim belly. Meanwhile, Hati eats the moon. Stephen Hawking described the wolves as eclipse monsters in The Grand Design and many other publications follow suit, but not everyone’s convinced. Some commentators, such as skeptic Eve Siebert, argue that the often-cited Old Norse poem Grímnismál merely points to a dark eventuality and not recurrent events. Still, it’s possible the Norse saw these tales of doom reflected in eclipses, or even considered them near misses in an eternal race between light and all-consuming dark.
If you leave a pile of rocks in place for over a hundred years, it becomes an island with its own ownership papers, history, designation, and controversy. That's what happened to U Thant Island in New York City's East River.
Even the smallest places can be interesting when you look into what happened to them over time. When we finally saw contemporary footage of the island in this video, all I could see was the survival of plenty of double-crested cormorants. -via Digg
The utterly prolific Stephen King has produced so many ways to scare us that's its difficult to keep up with them all. Some of his stories feature something supernatural, which gives us eerie freakouts, but then we can calm down by telling ourselves it's not real. Then there are the human villains, which are even scarier because they could very well be real. We know the human condition allows for hidden depravity that might someday affect us in horrifying ways. Den of Geek takes a deep look at the people who terrorize Stephen King novels and the movies made of them. You might argue about their rank, but you'll relive a moment of dread for every one of them.
Vitaly says he loves science, but he really, really loves cotton candy! In this video, he wordlessly shows us how to make it at home without a cotton candy machine. You'll need a cardboard box (let's hope it's clean), a jar lid, a soda can, and some tools. And sugar.
If this looks like too much effort, he will also show you how to repurpose a blender to make cotton candy, or the power drill you already used. And how to build your own cotton candy machine. Just be prepared to clean sugar off every surface of the kitchen before you get the hang of it. -Thanks, Tracey!
Brian McKinney and Sam Vonderheide were hiking up California's Mount Whitney. On the way, they spotted what they thought was a cougar. The mountain lion was between them and their campsite, so they continued on the trail. As they rounded the corner, they wondered where the cat was.
The cougar knew where the men were every second. Predators are like that. McKinney and Vonderheide ended up backing away, and stayed at a different campsite. Good move. This cat is not only pointy on five ends, but he's 135 pounds of ripped muscle. Read the full story of the encounter at National Geographic.
The Plaza Hotel in New York has a staff of 11 experienced butlers to treat their guests like royalty. Brandon Presser managed to join them for two days (after an express training session) to see what the job was like. What do hotel butlers do? Whatever it takes, from unpacking luggage to delivering ice, to making sure laundry is delivered on time.
Another common request for the butler team is to draw baths with a signature blend of salt, oil, and roses—especially during the colder months of the year. But the butler’s duties aren’t necessarily complete once the tub is full. Bal, the Plaza’s resident bath-time specialist, said that 95 percent of the time, he’s asked to remain within arm’s reach as bathers suds-up. Most of them, he said, want more hot water or scented oil, and are happy to keep him on hand while they relax in the nude. He is often left to pull the plug from the drain, elbow-deep in leftover water.
Neatorama is proud to bring you a guest post from Ernie Smith, the editor of Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail. In another life, he ran ShortFormBlog.
The tale of the McBarge, the former McDonald’s location created for Expo ’86 in Vancouver. Shockingly, it wasn’t the only fast food joint designed to float.
The other night, I took a bit of a swipe at McDonald’s for its poor track record in the Icelandic market. Ray Kroc and company, I apologize and admit that your sausage biscuits give me modest joy. After I write this piece, I may be forced to apologize again.
That’s because I’m about to bring up a bad memory for the fast-food giant.
In the late ’80s, the World’s Fair was still a fairly Big Deal in North America, and Vancouver played host to one of the most notable World Expo galas, Expo ’86. (If you’re a millennial and don’t remember this, I’ll point out that Death Cab for Cutie wrote a song about it. I hope you’re not too young to remember who they are.)
Like the Olympics, World’s Fairs have a tendency to roll over a city and change its character for a short period of time, but eventually leave lingering signs of decay after the fact.
Screen Junkies is doing it again, with a movie that did it again. Alien: Covenant came out this past May and was pretty much immediately forgotten. It did extend the Alien franchise to five movies over almost forty years.
The first movie was a horror film. The second was an action movie. Then there were three more that rehashed all that without coming up with anything new or interesting. It's enough to make you feel sorry for the xenomorph. -Thanks, Lacey!
Some would argue that humans' ability to make and harness fire is what sets us apart from animals. Others would say that's just one of many things in our history that led to what humans are now. In any case, the way we learned to control fire has come a long way. We once kept fires going round-the-clock because it was so much easier than starting a new one. But we learned, and the history of personal fire leaves us with collectible objects, documented in Ian Spellerberg’s book Match Holders: First-hand Accounts of Tinderboxes, Matches, Spills, Vesta Cases, Match Strikers, and Permanent Matches.
Match Holders begins with a chapter on tinderboxes, which were a popular form of portable fire-making prior to the invention of the friction match by an English pharmacist named John Walker. Tinderboxes consisted of three basic ingredients—a piece of steel, often called “fire steel”; a stone flint; and tinder, usually some dried fungi or charred linen. “With practice and patience,” McLean writes, “sparks could indeed be produced by striking the steel against the stone flint. If a spark landed in the dry tinder, care was needed to coax the spark into a smouldering piece of tinder then a flame.” As McLean recounts, the clink, clink, clink of steel coming in contact with stone was once a common early morning sound, as must also have been the curses that bounced off the rafters when cold, numb hands caused a hard chunk of steel to miss its mark. Little wonder, McLean writes, “that some domestic fires were kept permanently alight.”
In 1954, Toho Studios turned Haruo Nakajima into a monster. Nakajima was the first actor to portray Gojira, or Godzilla, in a movie. He made the role his own, appearing as the giant reptile in 12 films. That wasn't his only role in monster movies.
In addition to Godzilla, Nakajima also portrayed monsters in Rodan, Mothra, The H-Man, and Frankenstein Conquers the World, and The War of the Gargantuas, as well as the Tsuburaya-produced series Ultraman: A Special Effects Fantasy Series. Simply, if you’ve seen a kaiju movie made before 1973, you’ve seen phenomenal and iconic work of Haruo Nakajima. He’s a legend.
As an actor and stuntman, Nakajima was also seen in movies such as Seven Samurai, Eagle of the Pacific, and Sword for Hire. We posted an interview with Nakajima just a few months ago. Toho studios announced that Nakajima died on Monday. He was 88.
The African Grove Theater was an attempt to bring culture and entertainment to black audiences in Manhattan. It flourished for only a few years beginning in 1821, while slavery was still being phased out in New York state. But during those few years, a teenager named Ira Eldridge caught the acting bug. He learned the basics of his craft at the African Grove, and when it folded, he saw there was no other outlet for his passion in the United States. So he boarded a boat for Europe at the age of 17, and never looked back.
Aldridge’s career as an actor was exceptional, and not just for a black actor at that time. He traveled farther, was seen by audiences in more countries, and won more medals, decorations, and awards than any other actor of his century. But, somehow, this 19th-century great slips under the radar. He seems to be too American to make it into British or European theatrical histories, and, because he performed almost exclusively in Europe, tends not to appear in American ones. For most of his career, Aldridge traveled from place to place, on short-term engagements that made it hard for him to build a reputation in any one spot. “As a luminary,” writes scholar Bernth Lindfors in the introduction to Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius, “he was more a comet than a fixed star—here today, gone tomorrow—and as a consequence, he shines less brightly now.”
Berkeley Breathed's revival of his Bloom County comic strip is on Facebook. A recent story contains a couple of beautiful paintings like the one above. The story pertains to a young child who is in the hospital for cancer treatment. A big storm comes up, scaring the little boy so much he is unable to sleep. But Frank the hospital custodian is there (click it, you need to see the large version). You can read the story at Facebook, although it's in reverse order. To read them in order, you can follow the links at Metafilter.
Lisette Pylant was set up on a date with a guy she'd never met. They met at a bar in Washington, DC, to get to know each other. Luckily, Pylant has a lot of friends, and even knew some people who work at the bar. When she and her date decided their relationship wasn't in the cards, she surreptitiously stayed at the bar and observed him meeting five other women, one after another, on that same night!
JK ITS NOT OVER! The bartender just texted us to tell us homeboy is on another date so I sent my friend over to retrieve his 8pm date
He had apparently arranged a speed-dating session, unbeknownst to the women who met him there. Pylant found a way to speak to each of the subsequent dates, and the women ended up bonding as friends. And she live-Tweeted the experience! Read the whole story in Tweets at Mashable.
