It's that moment you don't see coming. You may have even scanned the landscape, but you didn't see it, or him, or her, until BAM! There they are. That's what camouflage is supposed to do, if it worked perfectly. It only works perfectly up close in movies, usually with some special effects magic. But it shocks us and gets our adrenaline going when we watch. Relive some of the best camouflage surprises in movie history at TVOM.
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The process of childbirth moved from homes to hospitals in the early 20th century. New standards and practices meant that nurses took care of babies while the mother rested for days. The babies became concentrated in nurseries to make things easier for the nurses, but family members still wanted to see the babies, which created a dilemma for hospital staff wanting to isolate the newborns from the horde of germs carried in by visitors.
The stated purpose for the viewing window was twofold: first, the window allows relatives to “see the infants,” and second, the window serves as a barrier to prevent contact between relatives and the newborns they have come to see. But while hospitals justified the construction of these windows as sanitary barriers between newborns and the general hospital community, it’s unlikely that infection prevention was a primary motivator. If windows served mainly as antibacterial barriers, the hospitals would have had no reason to install them in the first place; standard windowless walls surrounding nurseries would have been less trouble to build, and would have eliminated the potential for compromising the barrier between the nursery and the corridor via cracks between the window and the wall. Thus, the ubiquitous nursery window served a primarily social function.
Hospital viewing windows became a popular spot for not just relatives, but anyone who wanted to take a look. Today, the pendulum has moved the other way. Babies are normally kept in the mother's room, where family visits take place, and they are sent home the next day (or even the same day). But the public still wants to see new babies through a window. Read about the rise and fall of the nursery viewing window at Smithsonian.
Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum immigrated from Prussia to New York City in 1827 with her husband. She had four children, and worked her way up the ladder from a street peddler to a powerful position as New York's "Queen of Fences." She moved so much stolen goods that she needed an entire building as a warehouse. Mandelbaum spread the wealth around, by paying thieves for their loot, keeping her lawyers on retainer, and bribing city officials.
With friends on all sides of the aisle, she was well known at the Eighth Ward Thieves’ Exchange, a New York black market. She often networked at her synagogue, local beer and oyster halls, and had politicians eating out of the palm of her hand. Many officials who recognised her influence would make it a point to stop by her dry goods store to say hello hoping that her favour could win them the Jewish vote.
She had judges and police alike in her pocket and often walked away clean handed even after being brought in. Newspapers described her as the woman who “first put crime in America on a syndicated basis.” But like any good crime boss, she never forgot to give back to her community.
Mandelbaum's way of giving back was to to teach young New Yorkers the art of thievery, and even eventually hiring teachers to do it for her. Read about Mandelbaum's crime empire and her school for crooks at Messy Messy Chic.
A car is moving down the street when it is struck by lightning. It seems like forever before the vehicle stops and people get out. It looks like everyone's okay. The car is still smoking, and so is the spot where the strike hit. Then a huge mob of zombies dressed in black appears out of nowhere and approaches the car to consume the lightly-fried occupants.
Or maybe it was just people coming to see what happened, but where did they all come from? It sure looks creepy. -via Boing Boing
Wars always produce heroes, and World War II was no exception. WWII heroes vary from the well-known (Audie Murphy) to the lesser known (Oskar Schindler) to the near-completely unknown. Ian Kenneth (Johnny) Hopper was a British citizen living in France at the time of the German Occupation in 1940. Before the war, he had run a small electronics business, and after the war, he became a mushroom farmer. However, he took the German Occupation personally, and unlike so many others, he decided to do something about it.
Between his two uneventful law-abiding careers in radios and in mushrooms lay the years which began in June of 1940 when the German armies overran France and ended in April of 1945 when the surviving prisoners took over the concentration camp of Dachau from their guards. During those years Hopper discovered that he had another calling: he was a killer. For two years before he was caught he roamed the roads of German-occupied Normandy and the streets of German-occupied Paris, committing acts of armed robbery, arson, forgery and murder. He derailed trains, he blew up oil and ammunition depots, he assassinated French policemen and German Army officers, he shot his way out of ambushes laid for him by the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst and the French Gendarmerie.
The war he fought was his own war. He wore no uniform. He reported to no Commanding Officer. He planned and executed his own actions. There is little documentation of his time underground. He kept no records, for records in the wrong hands could kill you. You will not find his name in the official history of British secret operations in France, his photograph does not hang on the walls of the Special Forces Club in London.
Like his fictional counterpart portrayed by Sylvester Stallone, Johnny Hopper, was, essentially, a one-man army. Read the incredible story of this real-life Rambo here.
Thanks to Neatoramanaut WTM, who wrote this item.
In an epic showcase of strength, skills, balance, and bravery, Jose Angeles demonstrates what happens when you combine parkour and skateboarding. There are stunts where he defies the laws of physics, but to head off any accusations of shenanigans, there's a sequence in the middle showing some falls. You don't get this good without making a lot of mistakes along the way.
This video was produced by Devin Supertramp, with an obvious sponsor. The music is "Queens and Kings" by MALAKAI (Featuring Fingazz). -via Geeks Are Sexy
Redditor chesterpoops posted a picture of a pigeon that his girlfriend spotted in London. What could have caused it to display such beautiful pastel colors? Commenters speculated that it had been caught up in a color run. There was one in London on June 11, and others around the UK since then. Other people thought it might be an escaped Spanish racing pigeon, which are painted bright colors. And we learned about some naturally-colored pigeons.
This is the Pink-necked Green Pigeon, photographed by Flickr user Linda vant Hoff.
Above is a Nicobar pigeon at the Chester zoo, photographed by Flickr user Steve Wilson.
And the Victoria Crowned pigeon. This one, photographed by Jörg Hempel, is at the Gondwanaland Zoo in Leipzig, Germany. If common urban pigeons looked like these, we wouldn't mind them so much.
Harvard magazine has a personals section. You probably did not know that. Mallory Ortberg occasionally has access to a copy, and is quite amused at how every personal ad wants to emphasize how rich and how thin the person is …without saying it that blatantly.
One actual person wrote “ENJOYS BUSINESS-CLASS TRAVEL” as a descriptor, which I think is one of the purest things I have ever read. And the further you get into the weeds of the personals, the more frenzied the synonyms get, because everyone is concerned with making ABSOLUTELY SURE that you are picking up what they are putting down, but they are also (belatedly and barely) concerned about seeming judgmental or close-minded, so they try to speak in the world’s most breakable code.
What follows is a list of examples (that we suspect are enhanced composites) at The Toast. Yes, a year after the site ceased publication, The Toast is back, sadly, for one day only.
We know you have a few burning questions about chickens you've always wanted to ask. Here are the answers!
1. Where do chickens come from?
The post office, of course! Every year, hatcheries send millions of newborn chicks through the mail. The only caveat is that you usually have to order at least 25 at a time so that the babies can keep each other warm in their perforated shipping boxes. Once they’re in transit, chicks can survive for three days without food or water, thanks to the egg yolk they eat before they hatch. That’s just enough time for the U.S. Postal Service to deliver them from hatcheries in the Midwest to places as far away as Hawaii and Alaska.
(Image credit: Flickr user Thaddeus Quintin)
2. Is there really a pecking order?
Eclectic Method has a new song for us, made from sound effects found in all eight Star Wars films. Nothing else was used, no instruments, rhythm tracks, or any kind of added music. Best of all, we can see where the sounds came from.
You can guess that the rhythm is a lot of fighting, various tuneful beeps come from the droids, and there's plenty of vroom and pew pew pew! -via Laughing Squid
In 1989, Mauro Morandi's catamaran drifted onto Budelli Island in the Mediterranean Sea. He met the island's caretaker, who was retiring. Morandi took his place on the otherwise-uninhabited island and never looked back. He's been the sole resident there for 28 years now.
Maddalena Archipelago National Park is comprised of seven islands, and Budelli is considered the most beautiful among them for its Spiaggia Rosa, or Pink Beach. The rose-colored sand derives its unusual hue from microscopic fragments of corals and shells, which have been slowly reduced to powder by the relentless shifting of the waves.
In the early nineties, Spiaggia Rosa was dubbed a place of “high natural value” by the Italian government. The beach was closed off to protect its fragile ecosystem, and only certain areas remain accesible to visitors. The island rapidly went from hosting thousands of tourists per day to a single heartbeat.
The national park does not pay Morandi to watch over the island, greet visitors, and pick up the beach trash. In fact, they tried to evict him last year, but a citizen's petition persuaded the government to leave him alone. Read about the 78-year-old Morandi and his solitary life on Budelli island at National Geographic.
(Image credit: Michele Ardu/National Geographic)
Yeah, yeah, most movies are full of plot holes, because they're supposed to be entertaining, and therefore different from everyday life. But you'd think that someone, somewhere would be in charge of making film franchises internally consistent from one movie to the next. That apparently isn't always so. The character of Mr. Myagi changed considerably in the two short years between The Karate Kid and The Karate Kid Part II.
The first Karate Kid strongly implies that Miyagi was born to Japanese parents in America. We're told he attended UCLA, was forced into an internment camp during World War II, and then fought in the 442nd Division -- a unit almost entirely made out of Japanese-American soldiers. Miyagi in particular crane-kicked so many Nazis that he was awarded a Medal of Honor.
In the second film, however, the entire plot revolves around a completely different backstory: It turns out Miyagi is actually a native-born Japanese man who was forced to leave when he let his boner do the talking instead of his fists. He had upset his hometown by proposing marriage to an already-betrothed girl, and had to flee to America.
There are several reasons the two stories don't jive at all, which you can read about at Cracked, along with plot holes introduced in later movies from the Star Wars, the Matrix, and other movie series.
Horror films make us imagine what it would be like to live in that scary cinematic world, but in most cases we can go home and tell ourselves it will never happen, because there are no such things as ghosts, vampires, demons, or ancient curses. Stalkers are different, because obsession and stalking happens in real life, and we all know that some people are deranged and hide it well. In fact, we might know people who resemble these seemingly-normal movie characters who turn out to be truly dangerous. Relive five horrifyingly creepy movies featuring stalker characters in video clips at TVOM.
Have you ever been to a place that had a marker denoting a geographic wonder, such as the equator, the Continental Divide, or the geographic center of some land mass? The chances are good that it's not quite accurate. Sometimes markers were put in a convenient location somewhat near the actual spot. Sometimes they are monuments to the difficulty of geographic mapping, and turns out to be a mistake. And some were pretty accurate in their time, but the world has a way of changing. All these reasons are represented in this list. Europos Park in Lithuania is an example.
In the early 1990s the people of Lithuania got very excited when calculations identified a spot outside the capital city, Vilnius, as the dead center of Europe. A big sculpture park dubbed Europos Park was erected at the spot. But French scientists who had proposed the spot for the center in the first place sent news that they accidentally missed the exact target by 8 miles (14 kilometers). The correct center, which is still contested, is now marked with a square and a small museum.
And then there are those that are inaccurate and we really don't know why. Read about eleven such markers at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Atlas Obscura user Ahvenas)
Would you allow your employer to implant a microchip in your hand? Three Square Market in Wisconsin is rolling out a program to do just that. So far, 50 of the company's 80 employees have agreed to have a chip embedded between their thumb and forefinger, which will enable them to open doors, pay for food in the cafeteria, and other tasks that can use RFID technology.
“It was pretty much 100 percent yes right from the get-go for me,” said Sam Bengtson, a software engineer. “In the next five to 10 years, this is going to be something that isn’t scoffed at so much, or is more normal. So I like to jump on the bandwagon with these kind of things early, just to say that I have it.”
Jon Krusell, another software engineer, and Melissa Timmins, the company’s sales director, were more hesitant. Mr. Krusell, who said he was excited about the technology but leery of an implanted device, might get a ring with a chip instead.
“Because it’s new, I don’t know enough about it yet,” Ms. Timmins said. “I’m a little nervous about implanting something into my body.”
What could possibly go wrong? Right off the bat, I can imagine the 30 employees who aren't so enthusiastic about it may be pressured into having the procedure sooner or later. It could become possible for the company to track your whereabouts 24 hours a day. It may eventually become mandatory for employment, there or at other companies. The chips could be hacked. The list goes on and on. There have been books and movies predicting such tech and how it could go wrong in so many ways. Read more on the story at the New York Times. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Amal Graafstra)
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