Once upon a time I dated a guy who had no chin to speak of. I did not know that for several months after I met him because he had a luxuriant beard. After that, I assumed that any man with a beard was either hiding a weak chin or a double chin underneath, which isn't always so. Still, you love someone for who they are, not what they look like. You'll get used to it in the time it takes for the next beard to grow out. The kids, however, may be traumatized. This is the latest from Lunarbaboon.
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If you went to an ATM to get some cash, and instead of a receipt, you got a note asking for help, you'd probably look around trying to find the hidden camera. That's exactly the kind of thing Candid Camera used to do. But for bank customers in Corpus Christi, Texas, on Wednesday, it was a real plea for help. The note came from a contractor stuck in the room behind the ATM. He was changing out the electronic lock and something went wrong, leaving him stranded inside. Corpus Christi Police Senior Officer Richard Olden told the story.
Officer Olden says," he leaves his phone in his truck, he's installing a new lock on the door, and he gets locked inside the building where the ATM is."
Since the ATM still works, people were stopping by to get cash, and the contractor decided to slip out notes through the receipt slot stating,"Please Help. I'm stuck in here, and I don't have my phone. Please call my boss."
Officer Olden said people thought it was a joke, but someone took it seriously and called the police.
"We come out here, and sure enough we can hear a little voice coming from the machine. So we are thinking this is a joke. It's got to be a joke," Olden said.
His employer arrived, but police still had to kick down the door to free the man. -via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2017/07/13/man-stuck-behind-atm-slips-h.html
The ability to look up things on the internet with your phone anytime, anywhere is a modern marvel. At the same time, that marvel led to this particular meta joke. Cards Against Humanity is to blame when redditor Lozzipop's friend found himself looking to find the meaning of a slang term he didn't know. Well played, Cards Against Humanity. This one's still pulling them in four years later.
Who knew a piece of heavy equipment -in this case, a 37,000 pound Foton Lovol Wheel Loader- could balance on its two front wheels, bounce, and shake its rear end?
This performance of the rig dancing with a chorus line happened at a trade show in China. While prospective buyers probably didn't want one to dance, they were surely impressed with its abilities. -via Sploid
Every year, we are astonished at the number of people who enjoy San Diego Comic Con. This year's convention will be held July 20-23 at the San Diego Convention Center. If you've decided this is the year you're finally going, you may as well be prepared. And there's no one better to prepare you than Neatorama author and annual SDCC attendee Jill Harness. Learn how to negotiate long lines, what to buy, who to see, where to eat, and how to plan your days at the con to get the most enjoyment and memories out of them. For example,
Hall H is the biggest waste of time and one of the most awful experiences in all of Comic Con. As I mentioned, you have to wait FOREVER to get into the panel, then even if you make it before the cutoff, you’ll still likely be in the back of the room where you’ll just be watching everything on a giant TV screen anyway because the hall is so big you can’t even see the people in front of the room from the back.
Some people will still justify it by pointing out that they got to learn all the amazing stuff about their favorite show or movie before anyone else, but the difference is literally the length of the panel itself because as soon as the panel is over, everything that just happened will be put up on the internet -so you just gave up AT LEAST half of your day at Comic Con just so you could see stuff on a screen happen an hour before the general public.
That makes sense. A first-time attendee would do better to get an overall feel for everything that is Comic Con than to use a whole day for one activity. There's a lot to do, so spend your time well. Check out the rest of the Comic Con tips at Rue the Day.
And whether you're going to SDCC or not, we'll have pictures of the cosplayers from Jill and Zeon the next week, as we do every year.
(Image credit: Flickr user Kevin Dooley)
Once upon a time, babies just came with marriage, as a natural effect of sexual relations. Today, we know how to prevent that, so that becoming a parent can be a deliberate choice instead of just something that happens. But no one should feel pressured into having a baby before they feel ready for the responsibility (or at all). Women do have to deal with the biological fertility window, but that window isn't as small as some would have you believe.
In this clip from Adam Ruins Everything at College Humor, we get the lowdown on the research that started that fear of infertility by 35. -via Tastefully Offensive
(Image credit: Dallas Museum of Art via Facebook)
July 6th would have been artist Frida Kahlo's 110th birthday. In honor of the occasion (and to promote their current exhibition of Kahlo's works), the Dallas Museum of Art held the Frida Fest. Part of the festival was an attempt to gather the most Frida Kahlo impersonators ever in one place. More than 1000 people participated.
The museum had a makeup artist on hand to give people complimentary Frida makeovers, in service to the museum's semi-strict rules for what exactly constitutes "dressing like Frida." Impersonators were required to have a unibrow, either drawn in makeup or made with fake (or, presumably, real) hair. They had to wear no less than three artificial flowers in their hair, wear a below-the-knee floral dress (no slits!), and don a red or pink shawl.
(Image credit: Ashley Gongora and Kathy Tran via Facebook)
The museum has sent the evidence to Guinness, and expects to hear back within a few months. See more pictures from Frida Fest at Mental Floss.
When I was a youngster in Kentucky, I occasionally heard references to Newport as a "bad place," but didn't learn the details because the town was pretty far away. As an adult I visited the aquarium in Newport, and found it's a perfectly normal town. But it once held the title of "Sin City." It started with the Civil War and a lucrative prostitution trade. During Prohibition, it became a mecca for bootleg liquor, controlled by organized crime. Afterward, Newport was known for its casinos, strip clubs, and brothels. As the 1960s dawned, a citizens group, the Committee of 500, formed to find ways to clean up the town, and they stumbled into a spectacular scandal that did just that. Their plan was to elect a new sheriff, and they chose a clean-cut, all-American former NFL player from nearby Cincinnati named George Ratterman.
As a footballer, Ratterman cut an almost cartoonish figure of the handsome, corn-fed American hero, so he made a perfect law-and-order candidate for Newport sheriff. According to a 1999 article in the now defunct Cincinnati Post, by 1961, Ratterman was the married father of eight children, working both as a part-time sports commentator and in financial planning. He announced his campaign for sheriff of Newport in April of 1961, saying, “I am told that if I run for sheriff, I will be the victim of all sorts of personal slanderous attacks. But I say to our opponents, let the attacks start now, if they must. Let the battle be joined now.”
Just over a month later, he woke up in bed next to a stripper.
The investigation that followed made national news, prompted Robert Kennedy to send in federal investigators, and revealed Newport's organized criminal masterminds to be working on a Three Stooges level. Read the rest of the story at Atlas Obscura.
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 reason that the United States has control of so many random islands has much to do with an odd law passed just a few years before the Civil War.
No surprise to anyone, but large countries have this way of splaying out all over the world, with lots of their territories in unexpected areas.
The United States is no exception, with its array of minor outlying islands, mostly in the Pacific Ocean. But there’s something weird about how many of these islands, mostly uninhabited today or used as minor scientific or military outposts, came under ownership of the United States.
Sometimes it only takes one simple change to make a big difference. The real key is thinking outside the box, and keeping records. For example, it's counterintuitive to think that it would be easier to get out of a building by a blocked exit than by a clear exit, but both experiments and records of actual disasters show that it's true. And some things sound stupid until you know how they work in the real world.
In Britain, after the government mandated that Tylenol must be sold in blister packs, the number of Tylenol-induced suicides dropped by a staggering 43 percent. That drop in suicide attempts also caused liver transplants to drop by 30 percent right away (because paracetamol overdosing can cause major liver damage), and ultimately by 61 percent -- just because taking pills now took as much effort as it takes to get to a piece of gum.
The crux of the matter lies with ease of access. Not to further the harmful stereotype that suicide is for quitters, but lives can indeed be saved by assuming that a lot of depressed people tend to give up easily. Deciding to end your life is usually an impulsive and temporary feeling, so if wanting swallow two fistfuls of painkillers requires you to pop out each one out of its wrapper for 15 minutes, a lot of people will decide it's not worth the trouble. All we have to do is make sure that committing suicide is more annoying than staying alive.
That makes sense, but you probably never thought of suicide by Tylenol. Here in the US, it might make sense to mandate heroin and bullets be sold in blister packs -not that it would ever happen. Read about five weird but simple things that could save lives if we were willing to try them at Cracked.
(Image credit: Flickr user Michael Dales)
A few years ago, a new pizza parlor opened in my hometown and called itself Kentucky Pizza. We laughed, because Kentucky is not particularly known for pizza. Naples, New York, Chicago, maybe, but Kentucky? We are known for fried chicken. The pizza shop went out of business in just a few months. So imagine my surprise when I found that there's a chain in Argentina called Pizzeria Kentucky.
2. PIZZERIA KENTUCKY // ARGENTINA
In Argentina, Kentucky is the name of the country’s biggest pizza chain. In 1942, a group of former soccer players in Buenos Aires had a lucky day at the horse track. They used their winnings to open a pizza place, and named it Kentucky, after the Kentucky Derby. Since then, they’ve opened nearly 50 additional locations, fed Diego Maradona, and confused countless American tourists.
But is that any weirder than Alaska Milk in the Philippines? Or the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark? Or the Yugo Florida? Read about ten things outside of the U.S. that took the names of one of our states for one reason or another, at Mental Floss.
(Image credit: Flickr user Dan DeLuca)
We've read how plants communicate with each other by chemicals, and we've read about parasites that change the behavior of other animals, but this takes the cake. Tomato plants have shown the ability to protect themselves from caterpillars by inducing them to eat each other instead! University of Wisconsin in Madison treated tomato plants with methyl jasmonate (MeJA), a chemical known to communicate a pest warning between plants. The tomatoes then geared up for an attack by changing their own chemistry.
The researchers then allowed caterpillars of a common pest, the small mottled willow moth (Spodoptera exigua), to attack the crop. Eight days later, they observed that plants more strongly cued with MeJA had lost less biomass compared with control plants or with ones that had received a weaker induction. This showed that the reaction was somehow effective at protecting the plants.
Cannibalism trigger
Next, the team wanted to test whether the plants’ response was triggering cannibalistic behaviour in the caterpillars. So they cued tomato plants with MeJA and then fed leaves from cued plants and non-cued control plants to single caterpillars in containers that also contained a set number of dead caterpillars. Two days later, the team observed that caterpillars fed with leaves from the treated plants had turned onto the dead larvae earlier, and had eaten more of them, than those fed with leaves from control plants.
The scientists noted that caterpillars will eventually eat their dead comrades, but inducing them to turn to cannibalism earlier is a good way for a plant to protect itself. Read more about this research at Nature. -via reddit
(Image credit: PLoS Biol)
The Portuguese TV network SIC celebrated their 25th anniversary by staging an epic opening for their July 7 newscast. Newscaster Bento Rodrigues is in the water and the streets of Aveiro with multiple cameras going for this live shot. Yet he never hesitates, never stops talking as he makes his way to the outdoor news set.
Maybe someone who knows Portuguese could let us know what he's saying. The YouTube auto-translate feature is really no help. -via Digg
Michelle Arendas and Josh Avsec are both students at Kent State University and were matched on Tinder. He sent her a message. She responded two months later with a lame excuse that her phone was dead. Two months later, he responded with the excuse that he was in the shower. A month later, she continued the joke. What's funny is that the conversation started in 2014 and they still haven't met each other!
Hahahaha one day I'm going to meet this girl and it's going to be epic. Look at the dates of our tinder texts. pic.twitter.com/DASQK4c5cX
— Josh Avsec (@Wes_03) July 8, 2017
Last week, Avsec shared the story on Twitter, and it went viral. People started following them, hoping the two would get together before they graduate, as they are both seniors now. Tinder stepped in to move things along.
It’s time you got together IRL. You have 24 hrs to decide the city you want to have your first date in and we’ll send you there! @mch_rnd https://t.co/7r2JQtcxKC
— Tinder (@Tinder) July 10, 2017
This time, Arendas and Avsec didn't put off the response. Despite living on the same campus already, they will meet each other in Maui. The city is ready to welcome them.
This is gonna be awesome! Count us in to help make this especially memorable. We're in talks with @tinder now. @wes_03 @mch_rnd @BuzzFeed pic.twitter.com/NgPapHASAd
— Maui Hawaii (@Maui) July 12, 2017
It's wonderful how amateur science experiments are recorded on video these days, so we all can enjoy the mayhem when things go wrong. This video is a compilation of science experiments that did not go exactly as planned from Fail Army. The one that made me laugh the hardest is at 4:20, and did not involve a failed experiment, just a failed experimenter.
That said, many of these experiments worked exactly as expected, but only went wrong because of inadequate precautions. When you're dealing with potentially explosive materials, stand back and wear your safety goggles. Remember, propulsion does not automatically include aim. Protect your groin area. And don't try this at home, like many of these people did. -via Tastefully Offensive
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