The UK held its national election yesterday, in which each Member of Parliament had to run again for their office, including Prime Minister Theresa May. Her competition was a character named Lord Buckethead, whose face is never seen- because he has a bucket on it.

Serving as the sole representative of the Gremloid Party—which, like the intergalactic overlord himself, is apparently a reference to a 1984 B-movie called Hyperspace—Buckethead ran against May for her seat in the southern England district of Maidenhead, billing themselves as “the most powerful protest vote in the galaxy.” Assuming it’s the same person—because, again, they never take off that bucket—it’s actually the third time the black-cloaked satirist has run against the sitting Conservative PM; someone operating under the name also challenged Margaret Thatcher in 1987, and John Major in 1992.

As is tradition, the candidates for the office stood together as the results came in.

Lord Buckethead is exactly the hero this world needs right now pic.twitter.com/O6rSYHdiWa

— Chris Hatfield (@chrisghatfield) June 9, 2017

You can read Lord Buckethead's political manifesto here. He garnered 249 votes in the district of Maidenhead, while May ran off with 37,718, although whether she will remain prime pinister remains to be seen. You can see more of Lord Buckethead on his YouTube channel.

(Image source: Lord Buckethead)

You might consider beauty pageants to be trifling entertainment that objectifies woman, but competing in them trains a contestant in dealing with Hollywood, which is also trifling entertainment that objectifies women, but can pay off well in both money and fame for a lucky few. When you think of beauty pageant winners, you remember the ones who went on to later fame: Vanessa Williams, Anita Bryant, Michelle Pfeiffer, Lee Meriwether. You might be surprised to know that the current crop of Hollywood actresses has quite a few with beauty pageant backgrounds, including two who portrayed Woman Woman. Meet them in a list at TVOM.

We know that jobs are being eliminated by automation. That's been happening for centuries, and especially since the Industrial Revolution. After some fear about job loss, we've always managed to build new ways to work and earn money. But this time is different, and Kurzgesagt is here to explain how.

(YouTube link)

So what happens when machines do all the jobs? We'll need to find things for people to do, and a way for people to survive without a paycheck. As it is now, the people profiting from automation are those who own the machines. Yes, it would be great if everyone could just work part-time, but only if they could make a living doing it. -via Laughing Squid

George Hunzinger was a 19th-century furniture designer who believed in technology, so much that he filed 21 patents for convertible furniture, including the iconic folding chair we all know and love. He also pioneered furniture that used fabric-covered wire mesh that made pieces much lighter and cooler than regular upholstery. He even created tables that held an extra leaf inside them. But his chairs were still products of their time, which means fancy to our eyes. Barry R. Harwood of the Brooklyn Museum tells us about Hunzinger's innovations.    

In the 1860s, Hunzinger launched his own business, focusing on urban middle-class buyers who wanted novel, fashionable, and versatile items to decorate their homes. Most of Hunzinger’s pieces fell squarely into the emerging field of “patent furniture,” which adopted mechanical improvements to make adjustable, multi-purpose furniture for saving space and improving comfort. “By 1861, he started patenting folding chairs, which became a sort of obsession,” Harwood says. Much like today, convertible furniture—including folding chairs, sofa beds, and card tables—was very appealing to urban residents with limited space.

A Hunzinger patent from 1861 shows why his work was popular with apartment dwellers. It described a folding chair based on the common X-frame shape along with a small attached writing desk. Like this model, many of Hunzinger’s designs were known as “fancy chairs,” or what we’d call accent chairs or conversation pieces today. “In the early 19th century, it usually referred to chairs that had a great deal of hand-painted polychromatic decoration on them,” Harwood says. “For the 19th-century consumer, it meant a singular, unusual chair that you had in the parlor.”

Read more about Hunzinger's furniture, and see plenty of pictures, at Collectors Weekly.

(Image credit: the Brooklyn Museum)
 

Cats are weird. Some cats are weird often enough that you get a good picture, or maybe several, of them doing their weird thing. Shown above, redditor fastandfurry shared a picture of a friend's cat just chilling out in the bathroom. Below, Jimbokoln has a cat who likes to admire himself in the mirror -or maybe he's just practicing his villain face.

Bored Panda has 475 submitted pictures of cats acting odd, enough to keep you busy through half the weekend. -via Metafilter

This is neat, and even though you've never heard about it, it's become quite popular among yarn crafters. Sharon McDermott crocheted a row on an afghan every day. The color of yarn each day was determined by the day's high temperature. After a year, she has a full blanket with an archive of the local weather conditions!

(YouTube link)

You can get instructions from knitting or crocheting blogs, or at YouTube. While the colors are up to the creator, and the blankets will vary widely by latitude, I wonder how a blanket made now will vary from a blanket made in the same home ten years from now. -via Boing Boing

NASA has announced the 2017 astronaut candidates who will undergo training for space flight. They are Zena Cardman, Jasmin Moghbeli, Robb Kulin, Jessica Watkins, Loral O'Hara, Jonny Kim, Frank Rubio, Matthew Dominick, Warren Hoburg, Kayla Barron, Bob Hines, and Raja Chari. These five women and seven men were selected from over 18,000 applicants. All twelve candidates have at least a Masters degree, several have military training, a few have PhDs and there are a couple of medical doctors. If you want to feel really inadequate, you can check out their individual biographies.   

Dr. Jonny Kim has been selected by NASA to join the 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class. He will report for duty in August 2017. The California native trained and operated as a Navy SEAL, completing more than 100 combat operations and earning a Silver Star and Bronze Star with Combat “V”. Afterward, he went on to complete a degree in Mathematics at the University of San Diego and a Doctorate of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

We've come a long way from the days when all you had to do to qualify was to be one of the best test pilots in the Air Force. That still helps, but now you also have to have documented expertise in science or engineering in order to make NASA's missions. -via reddit

(Image credit: NASA)

The following is an article from the book Uncle John's Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader.

(Image credit: Kim Traynor)

Back in the 1950s, the BRI's future food historian, Jeff Cheek, took a trip to Scotland while on one of his clandestine missions with the CIA. (He won't tell us why he was there.) But he did write this story of haggis for us- the origin, the tradition, and the elusive hunt for a wee, wee beastie.

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT

Scotland has given the world many gifts: plaid, golf, the poetry of Robert Burns, and Scotch whisky. They have also offered us their national dish -haggis- but there are few takers… once they find out what haggis is made of. It is the offal (the waste parts) of a slaughtered sheep, minced and then boiled in a sheep's stomach. The dish and name most likely came from the Vikings- the Swedes have a similar dish, hagga, but they use choice cuts of meat to make it. The frugal Scottish farmers, however, wasted nothing, so instead of discarding the lungs, heart, and liver, they used these along with homegrown oats to make haggis. And the Scots have revered it for centuries.

In his "Address to Haggis," 18th-century poet Robert Burns called the dish "the Great Chieftain of the Pudding Race." And it has become a Scottish tradition to serve haggis on Burns Night, January 25th, to celebrate the poet's birthday. Loyal Scotsmen are also supposed to eat haggis on November 30, St. Andrew's Day, to honor Scotland's patron saint.

Gav and Dan, the Slow Mo Guys, constantly have to reach further and further to find new things to show us on their high-speed cameras. They may have gone a little too far this time.

(YouTube link)

They've done water balloons a few times before. They've even done giant water balloons. This time, they put a giant water balloon on top of Dan, just to see what happens. -via Tastefully Offensive

The TV show Monty Python's Flying Circus aired on the BBC from 1969 to 1974. By 1974, some PBS stations in the U.S. were rebroadcasting the show, where it gathered a small but dedicated fan base. Eventually, ABC saw the value in the show. The network acquired the right to six episodes (which they were to present in two 90-minute specials) from Time-Life, which had gotten the rights from the BBC, which had an agreement with Monty Python that no episodes would ever be re-edited. You might see where this is going. ABC, as an American broadcast network, felt the need to heavily edit the British humor for American viewing -and to squeeze plenty of ads in.

When the special aired at 11:30 p.m. on October 3, 1975, 22 minutes had been clipped from the original material. Gone was a cat used as a doorbell; a mention of “colonic irrigation” had also disappeared. ABC’s censors had snipped several “Good Lords,” “damns,” and other near-profanities. Any mentions of pooping were also trimmed. For Python fans, it was something akin to comedy castration.

The group didn’t learn the full extent of ABC’s meddling until late November, when they were shown a tape of the edited broadcast. Outraged, they demanded that ABC not re-air it.

The network had planned something worse: A second special was due in December, with the remaining three episodes due to be spliced in a similar manner.

With just days before that second program was scheduled to air, the Pythons filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction against ABC. They wanted their work removed from American broadcast television.

And that's where the story really begins. Read about the ensuring legal battle and its results at Mental Floss.

For almost forty years now, there has been the persistent rumor that Star Wars was a mess of a movie that was "saved in editing." The evidence is the raw footage that has surfaced since then, although I think the trailer may have contributed as well. The Solomon Society looks at where this idea arose and whether it holds any water.

(YouTube link)

Turns out there's a story that gives the idea a kernel of truth, but it was blown way out of proportion in the years since. Once again, I am in awe of how filmmakers can take a grand vision, cut it into useable parts in order to get it done, and then assemble it into a masterpiece. Meanwhile, we have an excuse to watch some behind-the-scenes footage of Star Wars. -via Digg

If you love buildings from a time where craftsmanship and beauty went into every inch, in which form was as important as function, then you will appreciate seeing the most beautiful ceilings in the world. Each gives us a reason to look up and to marvel at the work that went into them. For example, shown above is the Castello di Sammezzano in Leccio, Italy.  

The mesmerising ceiling, vaults and decor of the Peacock Room in this abandoned Italian palazzo near Florence speak for themselves. Peacocks, and other exotica, were the source of the inspired decoration to be found throughout the seemingly endless empty rooms of this daydream building. The Moorish-style makeover of what was a much older palace was the life work of Ferdinando Panciatichi Ximenes d’Aragona. Although the aristocratic Italian architect, engineer, botanist, philosopher and politician never visited the Levant or the Orient, he imagined a world of exquisite and highly exotic forms and colours that he brought to life in Leccio between 1843 and 1889. A hotel in the 20th Century, the palazzo and its polychromatic Peacock Room are in limbo today.

See nine more gorgeous ceilings in a list from the BBC. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user Antonio Cinotti)

Hollywood has to take shortcuts to tell an epic war story, or we'd never get films into the theaters. Complex stories are simplified, timeframes are shortened, and (at least before CGI) sets are as small as they could get away with. The vast majority of Americans who've never been in a battle easily get the wrong idea about what war is like if what they know comes from watching movies. For example, the trenches of World War I are shown to illustrate the horrors of that war: tiny, muddy, crowded hideaways where soldiers are constantly under fire. As they were in use for years, those trenches were actually much more sophisticated.     

In fact, the complexity of the trenches was designed to counter another favored stereotype of the First World War -- that soldiers were seen as easily replaceable machine-gun fodder. The trenches were cut as zig-zags so that, should an enemy force breach the lines, all the troops weren't just standing in a straight headshot-able line from the North Sea to the Alps. Also, the walls were paneled with wood and the parapets reinforced with a ceaseless line of sandbags, and there were large medical stations installed throughout, because even these generals took care not to just let entire regiments die from gangrene and patience.

That's just the beginning of the complexity of World War I trenches. They were sometimes even connected underground to larger staging areas. Read about them and four other parts of war that aren't exactly as Hollywood portrays them at Cracked.

In the real world, people often have trouble discerning whether a demonstration is a march, a protest, or a riot. The terms used used often depend on which side you sympathize with more. In the movies, there's no reason not to go all out, with crowds, violence on both sides, guns and explosions, and even deaths. A movie riot is rarely the case of "less is more." The most affecting riot scenes are quite over-the-top, even when they are about real events. Check out some of the most memorable riot scenes from movies you may remember (or should see) at TVOM. With video evidence.

This morning, the 2017 Race to Alaska begins. Dozens of boats will take off from Port Townsend, Washington, headed for Ketchikan, Alaska, a distance of about 750 miles. Boats can be wind-powered or human-powered, but no engines are allowed. The website explains,

It’s like the Iditarod, on a boat, with a chance of drowning, being run down by a freighter, or eaten by a grizzly bear. There are squalls, killer whales, tidal currents that run upwards of 20 miles an hour, and some of the most beautiful scenery on earth.

The winning team will receive $10,000, and the second-place finishers will receive a set of steak knives.The FAQs are fairly entertaining, as are the names of the participating teams and boats. Since the party was last night, some of the crew members will be hungover and/or sporting new tattoos. You can follow the race as it happens with this tracker. Watch an explainer from CBS Sunday Morning. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Race To Alaska by Northwest Maritime Center)