Chris Poole is playing with his cat Marmalade. Marmalade knows his human's hand very well, but he's letting his imagination go wild. Maybe he's pretending the hand is a monster, or a large predator, or just something supernatural that's out to get him. Whoever says cats faces aren't expressive doesn't know Marmalade.
See more of Marmalade's adventures with his buddy Cole from our previous posts. -via Tastefully Offensive
The new country known as the United States of America went through quite a few mascots before settling on Uncle Sam. There was Yankee Doodle, Columbia, Lady Liberty, and Brother Jonathan. Who? Jonathan was sometimes used as a term of disrespect, but like Yankee Doodle, Americans took a stereotype and shook it back at those who would belittle us.
While Yankee Doodle was primarily a comedic figure, Brother Jonathan was a more sinister one. Winifred Morgan, author of An American Icon: Brother Jonathan and American Identity sees Brother Jonathan during this period as a trickster in the tradition of Native-American and African-American folklore. “Tricksters are phenomenally powerful characters,” says Morgan. “They’re tough, they’re resilient, and Brother Jonathan has those qualities. But tricksters are also sly and self-interested.” And Brother Jonathan had to be. After all, he represented ordinary Americans who were trying to make their way in the harsh new world.
Americans liked to think that their wit and tenacity had won them their independence. They continued to see themselves as scrappy underdogs and turned their noses up at any whiff of pretension. This attitude played out in the political cartoons of the day which pitted Brother Jonathan against John Bull is a battle of old-world pomposity against new-world smarts.
The problem with Brother Jonathan was that he was long known to be a Yankee from the North, which didn't sit well with a large part of the country after the Civil War. Uncle Sam, while stern and harsh, was from all of America. Read about Brother Jonathan and how he once personified America at Atlas Obscura.
A family goes on vacation, with their bikes strapped to the back of the van. But the youngest daughter's beloved tricycle falls off and is lost. The girl is upset, but the tricycle has its own weird adventures trying to find its way back to the family.
A few scenes will make you fall in love with a simple tricycle. This delightful story by Michel Gondry was entirely shot on an iPhone, in French with English subtitles. Pay attention, because you don't want to miss the singing fish. Or the ending. -via Laughing Squid
A man snuck into the panda house at the Nanchang Zoo in Jiangxi province, China. He wanted to impress his female companions by teasing the sleeping giant panda. The animal woke up and proceeded to attack the intruder.
You know how your dog can lean up against you when he wants to be hugged? Imagine that behavior in a bear-sized bear, if you will. If the man had commenced with the hugs and back scratches as directed, he might have been spared the panda rolling over on top of him. As it was, he managed to escape the pen after about five minutes. Both the man and the panda were unharmed. -via Boing Boing
Disney has unveiled a mini-series of animated episodes called Star Wars: Forces of Destiny to be shown on the Disney Channel and on YouTube. The short vignettes are designed to give us a little insight into the characters we already know. According to Wookieepedia,
Star Wars: Forces of Destiny is an upcoming canon animated miniseries that will take place around all eras of the Star Wars universe. Consisting of sixteen episodes, it will air online and on television,[1] beginning in July 3, 2017.[3] It will be accompanied by its own toy line and a series of tie-in books.[5]
The first episode, Sands of Jakku, is narrated by Lupita Nyong’o (Maz Kanata), in a sequence just after Rey meets BB-8. It shows how Rey is Force-sensitive even before she falls in with the Skywalker gang. -via Uproxx
Americans have a worldwide, and totally deserved, reputation for wearing their patriotism on their sleeves. Some movies reflect this with scenes of reverence to the American flag, often accompanied by a stirring speech about freedom -in some cases supplemented with truth, justice, and the American way. If you are an American and feel the need to pump up your patriotic spirit ahead of our Independence Day holiday, or if you just want to relive some heartfelt moments from classic films, you'll want to check out five great movie clips centered around the American flag at TVOM.
The year 1947 ushered in the age of the flying saucer, as that was when the termed was coined, followed shortly by the Roswell incident. Since then, sightings have been frequent. But UFOs have been observed -and recorded- from antiquity. In 1541, an artist was among witnesses to one such event, and left us the above illustration.
This famous alleged UFO sighting is documented not only in words, but in a woodcut by Hans Glaser. The piece shows the sky full of strange objects and “immense” smoke rising from the earth. Glaser and many others reportedly claimed to have witnessed the occurrence in Nuremberg on April 14, 1561.
The artist included a description with his work as well as a message to skeptics. He wrote: "Although we have seen, shortly one after another, many kinds of signs on the heaven, which are sent to us by the almighty God, to bring us to repentance, we still are, unfortunately, so ungrateful that we despise such high signs and miracles of God. Or we speak of them with ridicule and discard them to the wind, in order that God may send us a frightening punishment on account of our ungratefulness."
There are three accounts that are even older, in a list of UFO sightings from history at Mental Floss.
Kevin Parry demonstrates different ways to walk. You'll recognize the moves right off, even when they seem to come from the Ministry of Silly Walks.
The subtitle of the video is "animation reference," but we don't really know if he made the video for his own stop-motion animation, or to make the rest of us laugh. Either way, he's got the moves down to a tee. -via A Cup of Jo
It's a mistake anyone could have made, but why call the police? Turn the oven off, see what happens. Redditor teddarific found this in his local newspaper's police blotter.
We love movie villains (they're often the most interesting character, even if they're completely unlikeable), and we love charts and graphs. Put them together, and we find out a lot about how Hollywood tends to choose a villain for films. Vulture put together data from the ten highest-grossing films of each of the past thirty years to give us all kinds of charts about villains. For example, the chart here shows gender representation among villains by decade, in which we see the rise of machines. You'll also see charts on how many villains survive a movie, how they survive, a racial breakdown, where villains come from, what their day job is, and more in a post at Vulture. -via Digg
The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Weird, Weird World: EPIC.
Most histories of the Wild West focus on men—cowboys, gunfighters, sheriffs—glossing over the fact that a lot of the era’s women were just as powerful, influential, and hell-raising as their male counterparts.
CALAMITY JANE (1852–1903)
Claim to Fame: Soldier, caregiver, hell-raiser
Her Story: Born Martha Jane Cannery in Missouri, she was one of the most famous American women of the 19th century. Yet it’s difficult to know for sure exactly what she actually did. Why? Because much of her legend comes from pulp-fiction writers, as well her own trumped-up autobiography. And then there were her days of touring with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where Jane told many more tall tales about her rugged life. Here’s some of what she claimed:
• She was married to Wild Bill Hickok and had his child.
• She was a scout for General Custer.
• She was a Pony Express rider.
• The name “Calamity Jane” was given to her by an army captain whom she rescued single-handedly in an Indian fight. Historians doubt these claims. But what makes Jane so interesting is that she could have told the truth and would still have been considered an amazing woman. Here’s what is known:
Have you ever been in a conversation with someone, and you have no idea what they're talking about? You think maybe you just missed something, but as you go along, it becomes clear that the other person is operating on a complete misunderstanding. It happens, but most of those misunderstandings are not quite as bizarre as the one held by this guy in the latest comic from Alex Culang and Raynato Castro at Buttersafe.
The old postcard shows a roadside attraction with a giant cobra looming overhead, enough to pique anyone's curiosity. This is the Miami Serpentarium, founded by Bill Haast, who not only handled snakes, but deliberately dosed himself with snake venom in order to build up an immunity.
Certainly the most uh, unique roadside attraction ever to have existed on the South Dixie Highway in Florida, the Serpentarium was half tourist attraction and half mad scientist’s lair; Bill Haast being the mad scientist. Attracting up to 50,000 visitors a year, Haast’s serpent spectacle extracted venom in front of paying customers 70 to 100 times a day, grabbing the snakes barehanded once released on a table in front of him and forcing them to eject venom into glass vials.
For years, Haast tried to prove that venom could treat multiple sclerosis, lupus, arthritis and Parkinson’s disease. He injected himself weekly with a cocktail from five snakes — cobras, cottonmouths, kraits, mambas and rattlers —homeopathy the Food and Drug Administration would never endorse.
Haast eventually suffered for his science. The roadside attraction was open from 1946 to 1984, but Haast continued his snake research for decades afterward. Read about Haast's life with snakes and his Serpentarium (and what happened to that giant cobra statue) at Messy Messy Chic.
Wartime means brainstorming new ideas for technology to defeat the enemy. Some ideas caught on; others didn't, and both types of innovations could appear rather silly in retrospect. But hey, if something looks stupid and works, then it isn't stupid. Like the tandem bike with no wheels the Germans used through two world wars.
During World War I, the German army outfitted its troops with "pedal-operated" generators, i.e. bicycles with a bigger dynamo instead of tires. On these tandem bicycles, two German soldiers would sit together intimately, pedaling for power and going nowhere -- like the least romantic French holiday ever. When stumbling upon these bicycle frames, British soldiers marveled at them like it was some weird alien tech. As one officer's letter read: "It is exactly like a tandem bicycle without its wheels. I am not sure if it ever was a bicycle." Leave it to the Germans to create military equipment that can also induce philosophical crises.
The bicycle was a generator that produced enough electricity to run radio communications, so therefore not as dumb as it looked. Other wartime technical experiments in this list were not so successful, like the flaming wheel of death known as the Great Panjandrum. See a video of the formerly classified Great Panjandrum tests and more in a list at Cracked.
(Image credit: Imperial War Museums © IWM (Q 79569))
Poor Superman. He's the perfect target for trolling and pranks from all the other superheroes because …because he's so perfect. He's invulnerable, can do anything with his super powers, and he's not even allowed to have a consistent personality. That kind of thing may have gone over well in 1938, but nowadays it just makes him the butt of jokes. Meanwhile, Batman has a dark side that shows up quite often. This comic is from Chris Hallbeck at Maximumble.
