Cats know what they want, and if you don't give it to them, they'll find someone who will! This snarky newspaper item was published in The Des Moines Register in 1908. It comes to us courtesy of a Tweet from @HorribleSanity, who runs a history blog called Strange Company that I will have to keep an eye on. -via Nag on the Lake
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It's a picture just about everyone on the internet has seen at one time or another: several gamers on their computers at tables and desks, and another hanging from the ceiling, supported by duct tape while he plays Counter-Strike. Hundreds of people have claimed that they were there, but Drew Purvis and his friends know different. Purvis was the guy taped to the ceiling at a LAN party in Mason, Michigan.
“I don’t want to say it’s a closely guarded secret,” said Brian Schaeffer, one of the LAN goers. “But half the fun of seeing that picture pop up on the internet is all the stories where people say, ‘Oh yeah I know the people there.’ No you don’t! It was a small town, a random group of friends, and we literally just got goofy one day.”
The group told me they would hang out together in various houses and, sometimes, even a tire warehouse, lugging computer rigs to locations to play a variety of games. It was the summer of 2002, and at the time, Counter-Strike was the game to play. Others recount games like Command & Conquer, both Renegade and Red Alert 2, as well as Battlefield 1942 (for those with the 512 MB RAM to run it) and StarCraft custom games. Counter-Strike was the great equalizer. It could run on just about anything, and everyone had it.
For the Mason alumni, the night they taped Drew Purvis to the ceiling was just an average day, another LAN party with friends.
Schaeffer and the other friends who recall that party tell the story of why and how they taped Purvis to the ceiling and how the image went viral, at Kotaku. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Brian Schaeffer)
Yeti is in bed, all alone with his thoughts and feelings, yet he still must deal with both Heart and Brain. They usually have conflicting messages, but in this case they've ganged up on him for a night of no sleep. You can blame Brain for that, since he's in charge of both logic and caution. We've all been there. This is the latest from Nick Seluk at The Awkward Yeti.
Barcelona artist Mari Axel makes all kinds of crocheted amigurumi figures, but has a special affinity for Cthulhu. The elder god is seen in many incarnations at her Etsy shop Kutuleras.
How about a mashup of Cthulhu and Pokemon? Cthulhu and the Minions? Cthulhu and Deadpool? Cthulhu and Totoro? Or even Cthulhu cosplaying as Totoro? Plus, she makes amigurumi figures you won't find anywhere else, like Nosferatu, a plague doctor, and Maneki Neko. Or if you can think of a different one, she does custom crocheting, too. Check them all out at her store. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Disney designers are pretty imaginative, but many of the beautiful locations in their animated movies are inspired by real places. That includes landscapes, fairy tale castles, and urban architecture.
They get changed a bit to fit the needs of the production, but if you were to visit these places, you'd probably be reminded of the movie they appeared in. -via Tastefully Offensive
We sometimes think of environmental pollution as a modern scourge, but recent research shows that man-made pollutants have been with us much longer. The plague known as Black Death ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, when it killed around 20 million people. In those five short years, the population took an enormous hit. According to information gleaned from ice cores, in which layers have formed over thousands of years, those dates coincide with a sudden drop in lead in the air.
Lead pollution is typically considered a hallmark of industrial society, but a growing body of research suggests human activity has been fouling the air with harmful heavy metals for millennia. Results of a new ice core analysis, published last week in the journal GeoHealth, support the idea that in Western Europe at least, mining and smelting activity has tainted the air with lead for at least 2,000 years. In fact, the only sliver of time during which the scientists’ instruments sniffed lead-free air was from 1349 to 1353, when folks were presumably too busy dying in droves to work the mines.
“With the closing of the mines, you can see the levels of lead dropping to zero,” Alexander More, a historian of science at Harvard University and lead author on the new study, told Gizmodo. “We can go down to the month of the arrival of the plague, and you can see the immediate drop, right along mining activity.”
Read more about this research at Gizmodo.
(Image credit: Flickr user er madx)
(Image credit: AverageSexGod)
The animals you live with are just waiting for an opportunity to take your stuff, jump on the bed, climb the curtains, or eat the couch …just anything that they aren't allowed to do, and they know it, whether they care or not.
As a general rule, the dogs seem to regret their actions, or at least they regret being caught, while cats act as if you are in the wrong for confronting them. They only regret that you've stopped their fun. See over 200 images, many of them gifs, of dogs, cats, and a few other animals who were caught in the act at Bored Panda.
Nathan Marshall banned bottle-flipping in his 6th grade class, because after all, that kind of thing is distracting. But what his students didn't know was that Marshall was determined to master the sport. At the end of the school year, he showed this video to his students.
He certainly got the bottle-tossing skills down! However, his Photoshop skills could use some work. As an aside to the students -Marshall did all this in his spare time, not during class. -via reddit
Architectural critic and curator John Margolies (1940-2016) traveled the United States and took pictures of roadside amenities, attractions, and architecture from 1969 to 2008, compiling a unique archive of 20th-century Americana. These include buildings made in the shapes of the things they sold, strange tourist attractions, themed restaurants and hotels, and other oddities offered to travelers. The National Archives has made this collection available to the public for the first time.
Vernacular roadside and commercial structures spread with the boom of suburbanization and the expansion of paved roads across the United States in the prosperous decades after World War II. Yet, in many instances, the only remaining record of these buildings is on Margolies’ film, as tourist architecture was endangered by the expansion of the interstate system and changing travel desires. Small town main streets were bypassed for the speedier travel of the freeway.
For Margolies, the shift to freeway travel took the joy out of the road trip and the architecture it dreamt up. Rather than stopping to enjoy sights passed along the drive, the point became to travel as far and as fast as possible. Yet even he came to recognize the amusement of architecture associated with chain and franchise businesses when designs evolved and iconic examples began to fade away.
The collection has been digitized from 11,710 of Margolies' color slides. Read about Margolies' work and browse through the images here. -via Metafilter
The 7th Regiment small brass ensemble played at the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Connecticut on Wednesday. They performed "Shut Up and Dance" for a curious and seemingly appreciative beluga whale.
Watch the sequence from a different angle at Facebook, where you can see the beluga posing for a picture with the ensemble. Another song can be found here. -via Tastefully Offensive
The 1815 Tambora eruption led to the worldwide "Year without a Summer" in 1816. We have plenty of evidence of the cause and effect for that one. But there are records of a similar event, with even larger consequences, from the year 1465. October 10, 1465, to be exact, when a sudden darkness in the sky was recorded during the wedding of King Alfonso II of Naples.
This was just the beginning. In the months that followed, European weather went haywire. In Germany, it rained so heavily that corpses surfaced in cemeteries. In the town of Thorn, Poland, the inhabitants took to travelling the streets by boat. In the unrelenting rain, the castle cellars of Teutonic knights were flooded and whole villages were swept away.
Four years later, Europe was hit by a mini ice age. Fish froze in their ponds. Trees failed to blossom and grass didn’t grow. In Bologna, Italy, heavy snow forced locals to travel with their horses and carriages along the frozen waterways.
From all the evidence, these things were caused by a volcanic eruption. But so far, scientists have been unable to pinpoint where it was! Oh, there are clues, many clues, in fact, that lead to conflicting locations, years, and events so that there is still no consensus of what happened. Read more about that research at BBC Future. -via Digg
(Image credit: Kevin.Sebold)
Dr. Shannon Moore of Hocking Hills Animal Clinic in Logan, Ohio, tells how she ran into a former patient while hiking in the woods. Since she's a veterinarian, there wasn't much conversation, but she did stop to examine how her work was holding up, and take a couple pictures.
Several years ago, a client brought me a box turtle that had been hit by a car. I used fiberglass to repair his broken shell and then released him in my woods. Recently, while walking on my hillside, I spotted an odd pattern in the leaves. To my amazement, there was my old patient with the fiberglass still on... years later! Sometimes, being a vet is the best thing there is.
I can imagine that the turtle has spent his time explaining to his buddies that mesh-and-Bondo is a turtle's best friend. And the vet, too, of course. -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Hocking Hills Animal Clinic)
In this dog show, in which the winner is decided by audience applause, you'll see talented dogs doing amazing things, like singing, playing piano, lifting weights, and even (I am not making this up) creating sculptures with dog poo. But one audience member is waiting for Choupette ("Sweetheart"), knowing that he is the most amazing dog of all.
This stop-motion animation is the work of French animator Chloé Alliez of the Atelier de production de la Cambre (Cambre Production Workshop) of Brussels. -via Laughing Squid
It's rare that a real-life trial draws the interest of strangers (cough*OJ*cough), because a court of law is about the law and legal procedure and proper decorum. That's not exciting enough for the movies, so what we get are scenes that would not be tolerated in real life. Judges will bring the hammer down for shenanigans, as we see in a list at TVOM that contrasts movie court scenes with the way the scene would play out in real life. I am pleased that there is no criticism at all here for the implausibility of my favorite courtroom drama, Miracle on 34th Street.
When we first saw the video of a bus in China that would actually drive over top of other traffic over a year ago, we all thought, "What a terrible idea!" But since what we saw of the Transit Elevated Bus (TEB) was a miniature concept illustration, we just assumed it would never actually go into service. Strangely, a bus was built and tested, but was abandoned on its tracks in the city of Qinhuangdao. It sat there for months, snarling traffic around it. Now it turns out that the whole thing appears to be a scheme to fleece money from investors.
On Sunday, Beijing's Dongcheng district police bureau announced on Weibo that it had started an investigation into the company behind the TEB project—Huaying Kailai, an online investing platform not unlike Crowdcube. The police say they are holding more than 30 people, including Bai Zhiming who runs both Huaying Kailai and the TEB project.
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